The Adversary

by Michael Walters

  It was tempting. Simply to slip back into oblivion. Just lie there and wait for whatever might happen. Except, of course, that nothing would. He would die of alcohol poisoning before Muunokhoi would do anything to him while he was unconscious. Muunokhoi liked his victims to know precisely what was happening to them and why. Not someone with a great tolerance of ambiguity, Muunokhoi.

  Tunjin shook his head. No, for once, the answer wasn’t to hide himself away in drink. He shuddered at the thought that, sometime over the last day or two, probably while he lay in a drunken stupor, someone had entered the apartment, probably stepped over his comatose body, and placed this file on his bed. That was a fairly powerful incentive to eschewing the booze, at least for a while.

  So how close were they? Were they nearby, just waiting for him to wake up, so they could finish things off?

  He had to be careful. Fortunately, with the brilliance of the sunshine outside, he had had no need to switch on the lights and the curtains were already drawn back. No-one watching from the outside would have seen any movement so far.

  Unless they were listening for the judder of the plumbing as he had turned on the tap to get himself some water.

  No, he was being paranoid. The plumbing in this place was so ancient that there was no way of tracing any noise back to any individual apartment. But the principle could well be right. They could be waiting for some sign of life. Maybe waiting for him to leave the apartment so they could pick him up and take him to some more suitable place. But if that was the case, why hadn’t they just snatched him while he was unconscious? They could have taken him where they liked and then waited for him to wake up.

  Because they were playing with him. That was why they’d left the file here. That was why they were letting him wait. Because they knew what he’d be thinking. They knew what he’d be thinking about. They knew—because it was now here in front of him—that he’d read Muunokhoi’s file.

  And that was it. He knew—and they knew he knew—what Muunokhoi was capable of. He couldn’t just sit here and wait for it.

  He pulled himself to his feet and stumbled over to the window, standing carefully to one side so that he wouldn’t be seen from outside. He blinked at the sunlight, noting from the position of the sun that it really was still morning.

  The bedroom window gave a view of the main street below. It was certainly nothing impressive. Depressing Soviet-style apartment blocks—just like this one—lined both sides of the street, preventing the sun from penetrating except in the very middle of the day. The occasional puttering car went by, mostly clapped out old Ladas, the only kind of vehicle that could be afforded by the people who lived in these endless anonymous blocks. Tunjin peered out, his eyes flicking across the gray-stained concrete.

  There was a figure standing, motionless, a hundred or so meters up the street.

  Tunjin pulled back, hoping that no movement had been visible. The figure had been casually dressed—some sort of sweatshirt and loose pants, a shaved head, cigarette in hand. But watching, definitely watching.

  Tunjin shook his head hard, trying to clear the confusion that was gathering there. He needed to think clearly. He needed to concentrate. He needed—he needed a drink, but, no, that was the last thing he needed.

  What he really needed was to get out of there.

  He looked down at his stained clothes. He couldn’t go far dressed like this. He needed to plan this carefully, as carefully as a severely hung over man could.

  He moved away from the window, and stepped back over to the built-in closet on the adjoining wall. He slid back the door and looked inside, his expectations very low. To his mild surprise, there were a couple of clean T-shirts hanging up, and at least one pair of the large, elastic pants that were the only kind suited to his gut. The presence of these clothes was, he suspected, nothing more than proof that he had actually been wearing his current ones for several days.

  He quickly pulled off his T-shirt and pants and tossed them casually into a corner, where they joined several others. After a pause, he pulled off his enormous Y-fronts and threw them in the same direction. There was a pile of apparently clean underwear on the floor of the closet.

  He pulled on the new Y-fronts, then quickly donned the new black T-shirt and pants. Both were perhaps slightly too small and stretched across his fat body, but—he thought, as he caught sight of himself in the mirror—it was a definite improvement on his previous appearance. He thrust his feet into his only pair of boots, kicking off some of the dried mud, and then grabbed his anorak from behind the bedroom door.

  Right, he thought, ready for action. The only question now was what he ought to do.

  He walked slowly back through into the living room, taking care not to approach the windows. He reached the front door, carefully turned the catch and silently pulled open the door. This was make or break, he thought. If they were watching out in the corridor, this was the end. But he’d bargained on the fact that they wouldn’t have left anyone inside the building. Too conspicuous, he thought. Some of his busybody neighbors would have challenged any intruder within moments.

  The corridor appeared deserted. He glanced back at the clock. Eight-forty now. Most of his neighbors would have gone off to work, other than the older ones who tended not to stir from their apartments till later in the day. He put the door on the latch, and then stepped quietly out into the corridor.

  Nothing.

  He walked, as silently as he could manage—and surprisingly so for one of his bulk—toward the head of the staircase that led down to the lobby. Tunjin’s apartment was on the first floor, so from the top steps he could peer down into the entrance to the apartment block. It was a depressing hallway—a mix of discarded debris from previous tenants, a couple of stacked bicycles, and piles of uncollected mail and newspapers. But it was, at least, apparently unoccupied.

  Tunjin made his way slowly down the stairs, trying to ensure that his movement was not visible to any external observer. The main doors to the apartment block contained large glass panels, but the glass was sufficiently filthy and the interior of the lobby sufficiently gloomy that no movement was likely to be visible from outside.

  Tunjin moved forward slowly, reaching down as he passed to pick up two items from the pile of discarded items that littered the lobby. The first was an old broom, apparently thrown away because the head was worn out. The second was an old pencil stub. Improvisation was always his strong point.

  He stepped slowly across the lobby, still keeping back from the door to ensure that there was no risk of his being seen from outside. Through the grimy glass, he could see the shaven-headed figure he had spotted from the bedroom. There didn’t appear to be any other observers that he could see, although it was possible that there was another at the opposite end of the street, out of Tunjin’s sight. The man was looking bored, pulling on another cigarette and shuffling his feet. Tunjin waited until he had turned his back, sheltering from the breeze to light another cigarette, then he stepped forward swiftly and jammed the broom handle firmly into the pull handles on the doors, preventing them from being opened from the outside. Then, crouching down so that he was still invisible from outside, he locked the doors with his own set of keys and then forced the pencil stub hard into the lock, breaking off the end to ensure that the lock was solidly jammed.

  He felt a little guilty about this. He was undoubtedly going to inconvenience the other residents of the block, and he just hoped that there would be no other, more serious consequences—in common with many of the Soviet-era apartment blocks, this unit had no other escape route in case of fire.

  But given that he was unsure when Muunokhoi might decide that he had exercised enough patience, or even when the boredom of the man outside might precipitate him to take some unsanctioned action, Tunjin thought it was prudent to try to buy himself a little extra time. It would be possible to break the glass in the doors, of course, but the glass would be toughened and the act of breaking it would be conspicuous even in thi
s relatively deserted thoroughfare. And there was no other route into the building, other than that which Tunjin was planning to adopt as his exit route, and this, he hoped, would not be immediately obvious to an outsider.

  He slipped back from the doors, and then began to climb the stairs as rapidly as his considerable bulk would allow. The worst symptoms of his hangover seemed to have receded now, though he couldn’t claim that he felt well, either physically or emotionally.

  He passed his own floor, and carried on climbing past the second and third floors, wheezing heavily by now, his breath coming in short spurts. There were definitely times when he thought that a healthier lifestyle might be recommended.

  Finally, he dragged himself up the last flight of stairs on to the fourth floor. There were no apartments up here, only a couple of storage and utility rooms, mostly filled with junk. His objective lay in the far corner of one of the cluttered rooms—a skylight in the ceiling with a pull down ladder fixed beneath it.

  He forced his way through the clutter, pushing aside a rusting twin tub washing machine and a couple of broken chairs, until he was standing directly underneath the skylight. As he passed, he reached down to pick up an old screwdriver that had been left on top of the washing machine. Pausing to regain some of his breath, he reached up and pulled on the ladder. It was stiff and a little rusty, but, as he tugged, it eventually juddered down.

  Tunjin looked at it carefully, and then looked down at his own bulk. The ladder should be capable of holding his weight, he thought, though he was glad that he wouldn’t have to rely on it for too long. He took a deep breath and then slowly began to climb up the rungs. The metal frame of the ladder creaked ominously, but seemed to be holding.

  He reached the skylight, pulled on the handle and began to force it upward. For a moment, he thought that it would fail to open, but eventually, with a little shaking and pushing, it gave. Tunjin climbed the remainder of the ladder and, gasping for breath, he pulled himself up and on to the roof of the apartment block.

  He lay for some minutes, feeling nauseous, his breath coming in painful gasps. He really wasn’t cut out for this kind of thing. Not anymore, at any rate.

  The bright sunlight and fresh air hit him almost as strongly as his breathlessness and the after-effects of his hangover. He rolled over on to his back and lay, still gasping, his eyes closed, the brilliance of the sun crimson through his closed eyelids. Thankfully, the sun was still relatively low and the air still chilly, the breeze riffling gently through his sweat-soaked T-shirt.

  Finally, he recovered his breath and rolled over to shut the skylight firmly behind him. He looked around to see if there was anything on the apartment roof he could use to jam the skylight, in the hope of buying himself a little more time, but there was nothing.

  He sat up and looked around. The rooftop was little more than an empty stretch of gray asphalt. A line of identical apartment blocks stretched off down the street, with a similar row opposite.

  He had been up here on a couple of previous occasions, with the aim of getting an idea of the layout. The rooftop gave an attractive view of the city. In the distance, he could see the large buildings that dominated the center—the Post Office, the Parliament house, the Palace of Culture. He could see the pink and black monolith of the Chinghis Khaan Hotel, the wide green spaces of Nairamdal Park, and the Naadam Stadium. In the distance, he could make out the haze and black tangle of buildings that denoted the industrial areas, and the long silver sheen of the railway line. And beyond all that, the wide open green of the steppes and the distant mountains.

  He had grown up in this city, known it all his life and—in all honesty—had never thought much of it. But now, just at this moment, it looked genuinely beautiful. But that might, he supposed, have something to do with the fact that he really might not be enjoying the sight of it for very much longer.

  He pulled himself slowly to his feet and walked unsteadily across to the edge of the roof above the main street. He lowered himself and peered cautiously down. The shaven-headed man was still there, but was now talking on a cell phone. There was no obvious sense of urgency in his manner, so Tunjin assumed that his own departure had not yet been noticed.

  He pulled back and began to make his way slowly across the rooftop. His aim ought to be to put as much space between himself and Muunokhoi as possible. Or, perhaps more accurately, to give himself the opportunity to try to get a step or two ahead of Muunokhoi. He could perhaps simply flee the city—head off to another town, maybe down into the Gobi. Surely it must be possible to find somewhere where Muunokhoi couldn’t track him down.

  And it wasn’t as if he had much of a future ahead of him here. He had been deliberately provocative in his meeting with Doripalam, but he assumed that the outcome would be the same—his current suspension would be followed by dismissal. Someone’s head was going to have to roll for what had happened, and Tunjin was the only candidate. If he was lucky, he might get to hold on to part of his pension. But he didn’t have too many grounds for assuming that he would be lucky. He had been on borrowed time anyway, he knew that, given his drinking and the general state of his health, which was why he’d started all this in the first place.

  He’d reached the end of his own apartment block. The rooftop continued on the next block, with a space of about half a meter between them. He peered down—the gap between the two buildings stretched four floors to the ground below. Typical Soviet design, he thought. It would have been too simple and too efficient to have built one large apartment block. Probably building them as separate units created enough additional work to help someone hit their production target.

  There was no option but to jump the gap. It wasn’t far, and for most people it would have presented no problem. Tunjin had a good head for heights, but his general obesity, not to mention his still mildly spinning head, meant that this was likely to be a challenge. He held his breath for a moment, teetering as close to the gap as he dared. Then, trying not to close his eyes, he leapt across.

  He fell flat on his face on the other side, his fingers scraping at the asphalt, his knees and chest stinging from the impact. His feet, he was aware, were still sticking out over the gap. But he seemed to have made it over.

  He looked ahead of him. There were two more similar gaps he would have to cross before reaching the final block. And then he would be faced with the problem of how to get down again. But he hoped he had that one sorted.

  He continued steadily along the rooftop, until he reached the next block. Then—and this time he did close his eyes—he threw himself forward. Again, he landed roughly but safely. Maybe he was fitter than he thought. He rolled over, pausing to recover his breath. At least this exertion meant that, for the moment, he could postpone thinking further about what the future might hold.

  He was dragging himself to his feet again when he heard the sound of some kind of commotion behind and below him. He slowly moved toward the edge of the roof and peered down at the street below, trying to see what was happening without risking being seen himself.

  There was no doubt that the disturbance, whatever it was, was happening outside his own block. There was a shouting and a banging. The shaven-headed man, he noticed, was no longer standing in the same position, but had moved into the middle of the street, apparently looking at what was going on.

  Tunjin moved himself forward, trying to get a better view, but conscious that—with his equilibrium still disturbed—it would not be wise to lean too far forward. But he could see enough. There were a couple of figures standing outside the door of his block, banging on the glass doors and shouting. Tunjin couldn’t recognize them from this distance, but he assumed that they were fellow residents of the block who had discovered that the front door was both locked and firmly jammed.

  Perhaps, on reflection, his attempt to buy himself some extra time had not been a wise one. If Muunokhoi’s people had tried to make a move straight away, it would have certainly given him an additional respite while they force
d their way into the building. As it was, the barring of the door had probably simply highlighted to the shaven-headed man that there might be some sort of problem. Tunjin could see that the man was already drawing closer to the door, and that he was engaged in some sort of dialogue with the locked-out residents.

  Tunjin was contemplating his next action when he saw the man gesture furiously to the residents, waving his arms to signal them to move aside. Then—when they had presumably obeyed his instruction—he raised his arm and the sound of a gunshot echoed down the empty street, followed an instant later by the sound of shattering glass.

  Tunjin needed no more prompting. He rolled over and staggered to his feet, thinking that, perhaps for the first time in years, he really did have an incentive to lose some weight. He began to jog, as fast as his bulk would allow, toward the next rooftop, this time by some miracle managing to stay on his feet as he threw himself over the gap.

  He knew that the end block was identical to his own, and his original plan had been to use the screwdriver to lever open the skylight. In retrospect, he thought, perhaps this whole scheme would have benefited from a little more thinking through. And now time was definitely not on his side.

  He reached the skylight and pulled out the screwdriver, slipping its blade into the gap along the edge of the framework. He pushed it down, but the frame showed no sign of giving. He looked across at the rusted hinges of the window, aware that the screwdriver was already bending under his weight.

  Finally, he pulled it out and slammed the blade down into the center of the glass, which shattered explosively beneath him. He pulled his hand back just in time, avoiding being badly cut. Then he lifted his foot and began to slam down hard on the remaining glass, rapidly clearing the edge of the frame until he felt it would be safe to drop through.

  He looked down into the empty gap. There was a ladder, as in his own block, but this one looked to be badly broken. He reached and tried to lower it, but couldn’t move it at all. Finally, he looked behind him and, clutching hard on the edges of the frame, dropped through the gaping hole.