There was a short silence, which Sam Jennings broke. ‘Sounds good to me,’ he drawled.
‘It sounds bloody fantastic,’ Copley agreed, then noticed the look on Docherty’s face. ‘What’s the matter, Doc?’
‘Nothing.’ It just seemed too good to be true. You’re frightened of hope, he told himself.
‘You don’t look happy,’ Copley insisted. ‘Don’t you think this is kosher?’
They were all looking at him, Docherty realized. Whether he liked it or not he’d been elected guru of this particular bunch of hostages. ‘They’ve no reason to lie to us,’ he said, choosing his words carefully. ‘But the authorities may have reason to lie to them. I think this may be good news, but I don’t think we should let ourselves get too carried away.’
‘You think the authorities are going to attack?’ Javid asked.
‘I don’t know. We don’t know what these people asked for. Maybe it was a price the government didn’t mind paying.’
‘We will know tomorrow,’ Ali Zahid said, making one of his rare pronouncements.
‘Aye, that we will.’
It was a pleasant, well-shaded dead-end street on the northern outskirts of the city. On one side of the road an irrigation channel carried water to the cotton fields stretching out across the plain. On the other, behind a line of cherry trees, sat a row of relatively new houses.
Marat walked up to the door of number eight, and rapped loudly. The uniformed militiaman beside him sucked his teeth and shifted from foot to foot as if he needed a toilet.
An adolescent Indian boy opened the door and looked up at him enquiringly.
‘Please get your father,’ Marat said, stepping forward into the archway that led through to the courtyard.
The boy disappeared through a doorway into the house. Soon several voices could be heard in conversation, and a minute or so later a man appeared through the doorway. He was about thirty-five, with hair thinning on top and gold-rimmed spectacles. He was used to deference, Marat decided.
‘How can I help you?’ he asked confidently.
‘Are you Mahmoud Ali Shahdov?’
‘Yes.’
Marat showed him identification, and asked the man if he knew Nasruddin Salih.
‘He is my cousin. Why do you want to know?’ he asked, suddenly looking worried. ‘Has there been an accident?’
‘No,’ Marat said, thinking furiously. In his haste to interview Shahdov he had forgotten that no public mention could be made of the hijacking. Yet no serious questioning would be possible without revealing at least some notion of what Nasruddin was involved in. He realized that he had no alternative.
‘Mr Shahdov, I must ask you to come with us to police headquarters. There are a number of questions we need to ask about your cousin’s business…’
A little of the man’s self-assurance ebbed visibly away. ‘The tour company. There is nothing wrong there, surely…’
‘If you would come with us…’
‘But can’t…’
The uniformed man moved his hand to the butt of his holstered gun, as if he was following the script of a bad movie.
It worked.
‘Of course. I will happily help you to clear up any misunderstanding. May I tell my wife?…’ He waited for permission.
‘Yes.’
A couple of minutes later the Volga was on its way back into the city, the Indian sitting nervously in the back seat. At the NSS building Marat led him down to the basement, where the cells and interrogation rooms were. Nowadays they were more often empty than not, but on each of his rare visits to this nether region Marat had thought he could smell the legacy of fear. Terrible things had been done in this basement, particularly during Stalin’s reign of terror.
The Indian seemed to sense it too. He had not said a word since entering the Volga, and all his previous confidence seemed to have vanished. Maybe there was something wrong with his business, Marat thought.
‘What business are you in, Mr Shahdov?’ he asked.
‘Import and export,’ the Indian said. ‘Mostly from Pakistan,’ he added as an afterthought.
Marat ushered him into one of the interview rooms. It had no windows, one desk and two chairs. The lighting was provided by one glaring fluorescent tube.
Shahdov took the seat in front of the desk without waiting to be told. Marat sat down opposite him. ‘Your cousin, along with several other men, has hijacked a busload of Western tourists. I would like you to tell me everything there is to know about Nasruddin Salih, starting with the first time you laid eyes on him.’
The rain had cleared away in Bradford, leaving the sun struggling to break through. Dave Medwin’s next port of call was the local comprehensive, which all three Salih children had attended. He searched in vain for a legitimate parking space and settled for leaving the car smack in front of the main entrance.
The headmaster’s secretary wondered out loud whether he had time for an interview, but then discovered a ‘window of opportunity’ five minutes hence. Medwin tried hard not to show too much gratitude. He didn’t expect much out of this visit – from what he had gathered at his son’s school, these days headmasters rarely even knew their pupils by name. Still, the school should at least have academic records.
Despite Medwin’s fears, the headmaster turned out to be one of those ageing teachers of the old school who had somehow refrained from quitting the system in disgust over government mismanagement. He had taught Martin Salih history, both in the boy’s second and fifth years at the school, and remembered him well.
‘Partly of course because of the tragedy,’ he admitted. ‘It had a marked effect on his schoolwork, as you can imagine. Before it happened, he was one of the best pupils in his year. After it, well, he struggled. Not through any lack of intelligence, mind you. He was bright. He even worked. And he passed a couple of A levels, I think. But the will to excel was gone, the sense that it was worth it. I often used to wonder whether he would shake it all off one day, you know, rise like a phoenix from the ashes. I take it he hasn’t, or at least not in one of those ways that society finds acceptable.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Medwin admitted. He found himself liking this man. ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything…’
‘I’ll probably read it in the papers, will I?’
‘Maybe. Can I ask you…’ He paused for a moment. ‘This may sound crude, but when I’m trying to put a personality to a name I’ve often found it useful to differentiate between three types of intelligence. The first one is intellectual – you know, an ability to juggle ideas. Abstract thinking, I suppose you could call it. The second one is practical – knowing how to get something done efficiently. And the third is something like wisdom, which I guess you could define as knowing what’s worth doing. Now when you say Martin Salih was intelligent, which of these did you mean?’
The headmaster smiled at him. ‘He was intellectually bright, or at least as much as an adolescent boy can be. Let’s face it, none of us know very much about anything at that age. But he certainly wasn’t a dreamer – he was very organized as I remember. As for wisdom, well, I think I’m too young for that.’
Medwin thanked him and walked back down to find his car being scrutinized by a caretaker. ‘You can’t park there,’ the man said.
‘I know,’ Medwin said, and climbed back in behind the wheel.
It wasn’t even noon by the dashboard clock, but he was already feeling hungry. After the probation officer, he told himself – there were several nice pubs in Ilkley.
The trip across the moors, along a narrow, madly winding road which seemed to bring out the worst in his fellow-drivers, took a hair-raising half an hour. Finding the probation officer’s house took another fifteen minutes, thanks to some idiot constable giving him the wrong directions. He walked up the path to the door, rang the chimes, and stood admiring the roses in the front garden.
Norma Cummings opened the door. She had to be over sixty, but didn’t look it. He expla
ined why he was there, and she seemed to think about it before inviting him through thè house and out into an equally attractive back garden. ‘Take that one,’ she said, indicating the blue deck-chair, ‘the other one’s not too sturdy.’
He sat down and waited for her to speak, but she seemed more interested in staring into space. ‘Martin Salih,’ he reminded her.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Well, I remember him, of course. I remember most of the younger ones. What exactly do you want to know?’
‘Anything you remember.’
She seemed to find that amusing for a moment. ‘He was a sensible boy,’ she said at last. ‘He knew that breaking windows was no answer to anything. He was simply angry, and with good reason. The police never caught the ones who killed his mother.’ She looked at Medwin, almost as if seeing him for the first time. ‘He did everything that was required of him while he was seeing me. But who knows where an anger like that can take someone?’ she asked.
‘Do you think he could kill someone?’
She made an exasperated noise. ‘I met him when he was thirteen or fourteen. What is he now, about thirty?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
She shrugged. ‘And in any case, I don’t think there are many people on this planet who are incapable of killing someone, provided they think they have a good enough reason. My late husband killed four Germans in the war – four that he knew about, that is. And he had no crisis of conscience about it.’ She looked at him again. ‘I know – I’m not helping. You want to know what Martin Salih is capable of, and I don’t know. I don’t expect he does either. All that distinguished him from other boys his age was his anger. Maybe he got over it. But then I suppose the fact that you’re here asking me about him means that he didn’t.’
‘Will you have dinner with me?’ Kennedy asked, as they waited at the side door of the airport building for the security people to let them in.
He was standing too close to her again. All afternoon he had either been brushing up against her breasts or staring at them.
‘I’m busy this evening,’ Nurhan said curtly, thinking that his mother had a lot to answer for.
‘Tomorrow maybe.’
‘Maybe.’ Tomorrow she’d have two more oversexed Englishmen to deal with.
It had been a frustrating last couple of hours. Extracting the architectural plans of the hunting lodge from State Construction had been like trying to drag blood out of stone. She had finally been given a copy, but only after being given the runaround through several departments, with Kennedy following her around like a sex-mad puppy. She had half expected him to straddle a desk leg and start pumping.
Then Muratov had run her to earth with fresh instructions. There were to be no attempts to penetrate the terrorists’ self-proclaimed security perimeter that night – her unit was simply to stand by, where it was, in case the situation changed.
She had taken another helicopter ride out to the mountains – with Kennedy almost pinning her to the door – and climbed up the steep path to where Sergeant Abalov and two other men were keeping the lodge under observation. The NCO had shared her disappointment at the ban on taking a closer look that night. All fourteen hostages, he told her, had been brought out for exercise shortly before she arrived, the women first, and then the men.
Both she and Kennedy had examined the lodge through the binoculars, but there had been nothing new to see. She had guessed the hostages were being held in the communal sleeping quarters situated at both ends of the building’s rear. Reaching one of these rooms would be difficult enough, let alone reaching both simultaneously. She had decided to work out a plan that evening. It might not be put into practice, but she could ask for the English experts’ opinion of it when they arrived. And once the terrorists had flown away she could examine the lodge, and compare the reality to the plans. It would be an interesting exercise.
All she had to do first was get rid of Mr ‘Call me Simon’ Kennedy.
‘Do you want to be dropped at your hotel?’ she asked, as they walked across to the car.
‘Oh, yes, I suppose so. Sure you won’t change your mind about dinner?’ he asked, with what she supposed was intended as a winning smile.
‘Sorry, no,’ she said, wondering why she found him such a turn-off. He was good-looking, probably clever. She had no reason to think he was unkind.
She felt his gaze on her thighs as she changed gear.
That was it, she thought. The man had no sense of her reality as another person. He had no idea that she noticed his stares, much less that she found them offensive. He probably knew she was a sentient being, but only because he could imagine her writhing in pleasure at his touch. She shuddered.
‘Gets cool in the evenings, doesn’t it?’ he said conversationally.
She spent the next ten minutes concentrating on wending her way through the rush-hour traffic. At the Hotel Samarkand he climbed reluctantly out of the car.
‘Your office at seven-thirty?’ he reiterated.
‘Right.’
‘It would be easier if you stayed the night and drove me,’ he said.
She smiled at him. ‘Try tying an alarm clock to your cock,’ she suggested, and pulled away in the car.
It probably wasn’t what Zhakidov had meant by maximum co-operation, but at least she hadn’t arrested the bastard for sexual harassment.
Back at the NSS offices the Operations Room had no messages from Muratov in Tashkent, but Nurhan found one from Marat on her desk. He was behind his own desk upstairs.
‘What have you done with the Englishman?’ he asked.
‘Less than he deserved.’
‘Uh-huh. Well, I need your say-so on an arrest warrant.’
‘Whose?’
‘One of Nasruddin’s cousins. He’s in a cell downstairs.’
‘What has he done?’
‘Nothing, as far as I can tell. But now he knows about the hijack, so I figure we can’t afford to let him out until it’s all over.’
‘I suppose you had a good reason for telling him?’
‘I had to give information to get some.’
‘And what did you get?’
‘The names of the two other Trumpet of God leaders. Talib Khamidov and Akbar Makhamov. Khamidov is another cousin, by the way.’
She grimaced. ‘Nice family. Where did you get the first cousin’s name from?’
‘Our English friends. Do you fancy a drink?’
‘What about these men – Khamidov and…’
‘Makhamov. I’ve got the uniforms at work trying to find addresses, but with orders only to observe. I assume discretion is still more important than digging for new information, given that the deal is going through tomorrow?’
She agreed, feeling impressed.
‘So how about the drink?’ he asked.
‘A short one.’
They walked downstairs together, and he waited while she countersigned the unfortunate Shahdov in for the night. Out on the pavement the streetlights were glowing against the fast-dimming sky. ‘Where to?’ she asked.
‘I know a café not far from here,’ he said. ‘We can walk.’
He led the way, zig-zagging through several blocks of the old Russian section to the edge of the Uzbek town. Halfway down a small dark side-street the barely lit façade of a small family restaurant suddenly appeared. The front room was empty save for two old men playing draughts, but the terrace at the back, which looked across the stony bed of a stream, was more populated.
Most of the clientele seemed to know Marat. ‘Do you want to eat?’ he asked her.
She suddenly realized she felt hungry. They ordered shashliks, and she asked for a glass of red wine. He settled for Coca-Cola.
‘Have you stopped drinking?’ she asked bluntly.
‘It looks like it,’ he said. ‘Feels like it too.’
‘Any particular reason? For the timing I mean.’
He grimaced. ‘I think I finally realized one life was over, and it didn’t seem like
a very good habit to carry over into the next one.’ He gave her a faint smile. ‘Who knows? Maybe I’m punishing my wife. She spent years complaining about my drinking, so what better way to pay her back than pack it in the moment I’m living somewhere else.’
‘Do you want her back?’ Nurhan asked.
‘No. We’d run our course and a bit more besides. I guess I’d like to have a better feeling about it all. That’s the trouble when it all goes sour – the sourness eats up the past as well as the present.’
‘I know what you mean,’ she said, just as the food arrived. It tasted as good as it looked. ‘How long has this place been here?’ she asked him.
‘Only a couple of months. I found it by accident one night.’
She took another mouthful, thinking that he wasn’t what she had expected. Most men weren’t, but usually it was more of a disappointment than a nice surprise. And he wasn’t that bad looking, she thought. Maybe a bit overweight, but…
She pulled on the mental brakes. The man was a married alcoholic, for God’s sake, and she was hardly the mothering kind. They were two colleagues sharing a meal in the middle of a joint operation. A good meal.
When the owner came to offer coffee she declined. ‘I’ve got things to do,’ she claimed. ‘No, you stay,’ she told Marat, ‘I can find my own way back.’
And she did, occupying her mind with the tactics of a direct assault on the hunting lodge. Some sort of diversion at the front, she thought, while a dozen men abseiled down the sheer slope behind the lodge and mounted simultaneous assaults on the two side doors. They would need sledgehammers.
Back at the office she checked that no message had arrived from Muratov, and then called him. He told her that the printing presses were rolling out The Trumpet of God’s programme, and that the four Islamic extremists were in a holding cell at Tashkent airport. They would be flown down to Samarkand the following morning.
Nurhan then spoke to Sergeant Abalov, who told her there had been no significant developments. The hostages and their takers were still in the lodge. Everything seemed to be going according to plan.
Samarkand Hijack Page 15