I paid the babushka for the food and drink, left a generous tip, turned to Saltanat.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Back to the car,” she said, “and then find a hotel.”
Chapter 25
We lay fully clothed on the double bed, having checked into the Roza Park Hotel and demanded a suite. I’d produced my police ID, which got a favorable discount as well as the promise that we had the best room in the place. We’d walked up the stairs, holding hands, locked the door behind us, decided it was time to talk.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” I said. “Not after you killed Sariev and disappeared.”
“No?”
“I thought you’d decided ‘Mission Accomplished’ and gone back to your life.”
“I knew I couldn’t stay in Bishkek, not then. I didn’t know what had happened to you, and murdering a serving police officer wouldn’t have gone down well with your people, would it?”
“I don’t think too many people were upset by Sariev taking the long trip. They probably had a ‘free beer all night’ celebration in every bar in Bishkek,” I said.
“Were you angry with me?” she asked, her eyes never leaving my face, searching for signs of hesitation.
I thought about it for a moment.
“Hurt. Confused,” I said. “Scared you might kill me. Afraid you might leave me. Which you did.”
“But I’m back now,” she said, and kissed the corner of my mouth. Her breath was sweet on my face. I pulled her toward me, but she put her hands on my chest, laughing, fending me off.
“We’ve got work to do,” she said, and walked toward the bathroom. “I need to shower. I might even save you some hot water.”
I emerged from the bathroom to find Saltanat already asleep, fully clothed, on top of the bed. I lay down beside her and drifted off into that aimless half-sleep that you fall into in the middle of the day.
It was still light when Saltanat shook me out of a confused dream about being trapped in a maze of thorn bushes. My mouth was dry, sour, and I regretted the absence of a toothbrush.
“We have to go back to Bishkek,” she said. “I’ll tell you about it on the way.”
I winced. I love my country as much as the next Murder Squad detective, but that doesn’t mean I want to bounce up and down for hundreds of kilometers on twisting mountain roads twice a week.
We took the stairs down to the hotel lobby, handed the key in to reception. Outside, we stopped to savor the sunshine’s warmth, the pale blue sky above us.
“The iPhone is state of the art,” Saltanat said. “The e-mails and contact numbers are all encrypted, impossible to crack, supposedly.”
“So what did you find?” I asked.
“All incoming calls were from a blocked number,” Saltanat answered. “And any attempt to reopen any sent or received e-mails automatically deleted them.”
“So we’ve come all this way for nothing?” I said.
“Not quite,” she replied. “He managed to trace the blocked number.”
I raised an eyebrow, not liking the idea of Uzbek security operating on Kyrgyz soil.
“It’s a Bishkek number, and we’ve located an address.”
“And a name?”
“Not yet. That’s why we have to go back to the city, stake the place out. Once we know the name, you can start kicking down doors.”
I was about to suggest that perhaps with her contacts, she could find a way of getting me on a plane without my name getting flagged and a squad car waiting to arrest me.
But then the shooting started. Again.
Chapter 26
For a second, I thought a nearby car was backfiring, a curious popping sound, like an old man coughing. Then glass shattered behind us, and I pushed Saltanat down to the ground, slamming myself down hard at the same time. The scab in my shoulder split open and began to bleed. Somewhere back in the hotel, a woman screamed.
I rolled left as Saltanat threw herself to the right, snatching at our weapons as we reached the cover of a couple of cars parked nearby. I released the safety on my Yarygin, peered beneath the car in the direction of the shots. I could see feet, but I couldn’t be certain if they belonged to the gunman. No point crippling an innocent passerby, getting myself into even more trouble.
I waited for a couple of moments, finger tense on the trigger. When no further shots came, I raised my head above the hood of the car, watched Saltanat do the same.
I didn’t see any masked gunmen waiting to pick us off, so I levered myself up off the pavement. The sleeve of my jacket was torn, and the material dark where fresh blood had joined the old stain. I felt the nausea of shock rise in my stomach, dread at the knowledge death can tap you on the shoulder with unexpected precision, accurate and inevitable.
“Nice way to treat tourists,” I said.
“See anyone?” Saltanat asked. I shook my head.
“I only heard the shots,” I answered. “And a scream from inside the hotel.”
I holstered my gun, walked back to the hotel. A middle-aged man sprawled on the floor by the reception desk, not moving, while a woman frantically rubbed at one flaccid hand thrown across his chest. No point in going in, nothing we could do to help. And the local menti were sure to be on their way.
“You need to buy me a new shirt, then I can dump the jacket,” I said as we walked back to the car, not running but not loitering either.
“There are some clothes in the car,” she replied, looking straight ahead, her gun hanging unobtrusively by her side. “Let me find a pharmacy so I can clean that slight scratch you’re complaining about.”
Fifteen minutes later, we were on the far side of Jalalabad, parked outside a pharmacy, from which Saltanat emerged with everything she needed to inflict a little torture on me.
The burn of the hydrogen peroxide hurt far worse than the bullet, as Saltanat used swabs to clean away the crusted black blood. After she had finished dressing the wound and getting to work with needle and thread, I felt as if I’d gone through a five-hour interrogation at the hands of one of the Sverdlovsky station’s best, complete with slaps, kicks, and punches. But at least now I didn’t look as if I’d been rolling around on the floor of a butcher’s shop.
I struggled into the oversized shirt Saltanat had produced from the trunk.
“And now back to Bishkek, I suppose?”
She nodded and I sat back, wondering when the painkillers would kick in, if there was any way of getting out of the mess we were in. As we drove down Lenina Street, a middle-aged man with cropped gray hair and a greasy leather jacket stopped to watch our car as we passed. There was something familiar about his face, a memory I tried and failed to tug out of my past and into the daylight. Then we turned a corner and he was gone.
Chapter 27
“You’re sure this is the right address?” I asked as we pulled up down the street from an imposing building a couple of blocks away from Chui Prospekt.
The journey back to Bishkek had been just as tiring as the outbound leg, and I needed a shave, a bath, and a bed, not necessarily in that order. I smelled like an old goat, but at least I didn’t detect any sign of my shoulder turning septic. Saltanat, as always, smelled divine, and looked as if she’d had an uninterrupted eight hours’ sleep in a five-star hotel.
The house was on Frunze, in the elite district of town, where money bought you privacy, CCTV cameras, and very high concrete walls. Sunlight sparkled off the broken glass that ran along the top of the wall, further reinforced by a wire fence that I was certain would be electrified. Solid steel gates kept the world out, brutal spikes mounted at the top to impale intruders.
There was no sign of bodyguards, sentries, no-necked men with bulges under cheap leather jackets. Only the upper part of the house was visible, shuttered windows glaring down at the street. A massive satellite dish squatted on the roof. Whoever lived here would have enough clout to get Saltanat whisked back over the border, and me enjoying ten years no-star bed and boar
d in whichever prison was most remote and unpleasant.
I said as much to Saltanat and she rewarded me with one of those enigmatic stares that lasted until I had to break eye contact.
“You want to drop this, Akyl?” she said, surprise in her voice. “Go back to your apartment and wait for your old colleagues to drag you down to the basement to discuss your crimes? And then life in prison, at least until your fellow inmates discover you were a policeman?”
I knew she was right. But we had to be more careful than going in guns blazing.
“No, I don’t want to drop it,” I said. “Gurminj was my friend as well as yours. There are the seven dead babies who deserve some justice. And the children in those films.”
I paused, swallowed. The saliva in my mouth tasted thick and oily, as if I’d gone for weeks without cleaning my teeth. Pain pressed into my shoulder, its fingers probing underneath the stitches, like a small creature trying to escape.
“Can you pass me the iPhone?” I asked.
Saltanat reached for her bag and handed it to me.
“What are you planning to do?” she asked.
I gave her the mirthless smile that had become my specialty ever since watching Usupov uncover those scraps of bodies in the field near Karakol.
“There’s such a thing as being too subtle, Saltanat. Sometimes you have to piss on the bushes and see what emerges. Like tethering a sheep up in the mountains and then lying in wait until the wolves come down.”
Saltanat raised an eyebrow. Perhaps I was being a bit too philosophical.
“I’m just going to make a quick call,” I said, and hit redial.
I listened to the dialing tone, which matched my heartbeat, rapid and worried.
And then I heard a voice.
“Da?”
A man’s voice, deep, cautious. Speaking in Russian, but not with a Kyrgyz or Russian accent. English or American, at a guess. The Voice. Raw, like skin scraped on gravel.
“A friend of yours lost his cell phone, and I’m sure he’d like it back.”
Silence. I cleared my throat and continued.
“These smartphones, not cheap, are they? So I’m sure there’s a reward for its safe return. With all its contacts, photos, and videos. Particularly the videos.”
More silence. Then the Voice again.
“What did you have in mind?”
“I was thinking maybe twenty-five thousand?”
“Twenty-five thousand som?”
“No,” I said. “Dollars.”
“Pashol na khui.”
“Well, I can certainly fuck off if that’s what you really want, but then you don’t get the smartphone back,” I said, putting a smile into my voice I certainly didn’t feel. “And then who knows whose hands it might fall into? Perhaps I should just hand it in at Sverdlovsky station. The police could probably trace the owner.”
“I’ll call you back,” the Voice said, broke the connection.
Saltanat looked over at me, genuine approval in her eyes.
“A small-time crook gets lucky, decides to try a spot of blackmail. Arranges a meet. Bites a bullet,” she said. “Except he’s not a small-time crook. And he doesn’t.”
I smiled again, the one that never reaches my eyes.
“Devious minds think alike, Saltanat. We’ve put the pot on the stove. Now we let the ingredients simmer. And speaking of which . . .”
“Yes?”
“I’m hungry.”
An hour later, back at the outside bar of the Umai Hotel, I finished off the last of the pelmeni dumplings a taciturn Rustam had brought us, sipped my chai. Saltanat had refused to eat, had instead worked her way through most of a Baltika beer, staring at me with obvious exasperation.
“Now your belly’s full,” she said, “how about we get back to work?”
I winked, knowing it would irritate her further.
“Wolves aren’t stupid, you know. When they see a sheep tethered, they wonder whether it’s a trap. So they hide up by the rocks or the trees, scenting the air to see if any hunters are nearby. Only when they’re satisfied there’s no danger do they race toward the sheep. Then the hunters open fire.”
“Thank you for the natural history lesson,” Saltanat said. “I understand the metaphor. But that’s not an answer.”
“We know where they are, not who they are. They don’t know who or where we are. So we have the advantage. But they know what we have, the danger it means for them. So they have to reach out to us.”
I tapped the iPhone.
“They’ll call, don’t worry.”
So we sat there as the shadows grew longer, smoked cigarette after cigarette, waiting for the call.
“Ten thousand dollars,” the Voice said, no introduction, no greeting, straight to business.
“No,” I said, and broke the connection, switched off the phone.
“Why did you do that?” Saltanat demanded, anger in her eyes.
“I want to show them we’re greedy, that we’ll be careless when it comes to the meet and exchange. And it puts them on the back foot, which isn’t a bad thing.”
I threw the remains of my cigarette out onto the grass.
“I’ll turn it back on in an hour. And I guarantee it will ring a minute later.”
Which was exactly what happened.
“Twenty-five thousand dollars, very well,” the Voice said. I was pretty sure it was an American voice, confident, no sign of hesitation or anger.
“It’s very expensive to keep me waiting,” I said, injecting a note of annoyance into my voice. “The price is now thirty thousand. Dollars.”
Silence on the other end of the line.
“Who are you? Circle of Brothers?”
I smiled. This was a dance only one person could lead. And if the American thought I might be connected to the organized crime gang spread throughout Russia and Central Asia, so much the better for piling on pressure.
“Call me Manas. The local superhero. Top dog. Bratski krug.”
“Very clever, Mr. Whoever-you-are.” Anger in the Voice now, the first hint of carelessness with an undercurrent of worry.
“I’m turning this mobile off in ten seconds,” I said, “and I won’t be switching it back on if we don’t agree now.”
I could sense the man’s hesitation, almost smell his desire to hit and stamp and kill me.
“Ten, nine, eight . . .”
“Okay, we have a deal, but where do we meet?” he asked.
“Instructions in an hour, call me,” I told him and switched off the phone again.
“What do we do until then?” Saltanat asked.
I nodded at the hotel.
“I’m sure Rustam has a room to spare,” I said and walked around the bar to where the cold beer was kept.
“Another Baltika?”
She shook her head, lit another cigarette, stared at the empty sky.
Chapter 28
Like most Murder Squad detectives, I keep a stash of not strictly legal weapons, “just in case,” as I always tell myself, stuff I don’t want to risk keeping at home. Divide and conquer is a pretty good motto when it comes to illegal weapons. I rent a small storage space near the big bazaar on the other side of Bishkek, not in my name. That’s where I hide two passports, one Uzbek and one Russian, also not in my name, a couple of Makarovs and ammo to go with them, a switchblade, lock picks, several changes of clothing, including bulletproof vests, and other useful items. I think of it as an additional insurance policy, in case we have another revolution and someone decides I’m not cheering fervently enough.
Saltanat kept watch while I taped the two Makarovs and ammo to the underside of the car, having made sure they were loaded. If we found ourselves caught in crossfire, I wanted cover to hide behind and enough firepower to shoot our way out. We both stripped to the waist and strapped on the vests before putting our shirts back on.
“Comfortable?” I asked.
“If you enjoy mammograms,” she said, checking her own Makarov
and slamming the clip home.
I slipped the fake passports into the glove compartment, padlocked the storage space, then we were off, back down Chui Prospekt, car headlights already on to combat the dusk, the greater darkness that lay ahead.
I could smell leaves, grass, and the hint of rain in the air. Spring was striding toward Bishkek, the rivers starting to swell with snowmelt. Shepherds would be thinking about moving their flocks back up to the grasslands of the high jailoo, and the city girls would be hunting out their summer dresses packed away months ago. I wondered if I would be alive to see them parade across Ala-Too Square, young, hopeful, an eternal future ahead of them.
“Take a right here, and then a left,” I said, peering out at the familiar streets.
“We’re going to the Kulturny?” Saltanat asked, following my instructions.
“This is my city,” I replied. “I know how it works here. So yes, the Kulturny.”
There was a confidence in my voice I didn’t really feel, but I knew we had to keep moving forward. Losing momentum means losing advantage. And unlike wolves, we didn’t have anywhere to shelter, anywhere to hide.
Right on time, the call came.
“Okay, where?”
“You know the Kulturny?” I said. “The most stylish bar in Bishkek? The French champagne, fine vintage wines, haute cuisine, sophisticated clientele?”
A grunt was the only response.
“When?”
“Forty-five minutes,” I replied. “But don’t be late or they’ll give our table away.”
“How will I know you?” the Voice asked.
“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I’ll know you.”
I ended the call just as Saltanat pulled into an empty space, across from the bar.
The street was pretty much empty; this part of town doesn’t see much action, once the daylight starts to go. The yellow puddles from the few streetlights we have become stepping stones in a dark and dangerous lake. I could see Lubashov leaning by the steel door, his balls presumably recovered from meeting Saltanat.
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