“We have to do it,” she said. “You’re right. Nergui wouldn’t want us to hesitate. If we don’t do it, they’re dead anyway. We’re all dead anyway.”
He nodded. There was no question really. The only issue was whether, talking like this, they had now left it too long, missed their opportunity.
And that question was answered almost immediately by the sound of the cellar door opening above them.
*
“I think it is time,” Muunokhoi said, “for you to be reunited with Mrs. Radnaa. It will be very touching.”
Nergui said nothing, and his face gave nothing away. His pale blue eyes were blazing but there was no way of reading his emotions. Doripalam, a step or two behind, tried to emulate the older man’s apparent lack of emotion, but feared that he was far from successful. Perhaps Nergui had some plan up his sleeve, but it was difficult to conceive what it might be. There could be no way out of this. He glanced back at Luvsan who was standing holding his gun, apparently casual, but careful not to catch Doripalam’s gaze. I hope he feels it’s worth whatever he’s getting for this, Doripalam thought.
They were standing outside the door of the cellar. Muunokhoi reached forward and then stopped, looking quizzically around at his henchmen. “Who’s got the key? I left it here.”
There was a moment’s silence. Muunokhoi turned the handle, clearly not expecting the door to open. He stepped back in surprise as it swung back easily. “Who’s been in here?” he said. He looked at each of them in turn. “One of you idiots forgot to lock it.”
Again, there was no response. Doripalam looked around at the group. It wasn’t difficult to gauge what they were thinking. It was Muunokhoi who had come out of that door last. It was Muunokhoi who had failed to lock it behind him. It was Muunokhoi—they were thinking but dared not say—who was losing it.
“She can’t have gotten out, anyway,” Muunokhoi said, as if to reassure himself. “Just be more careful next time, whoever it was.”
He pulled open the door and then stared down the stairway. At the bottom, just visible, Mrs. Radnaa was standing. He could see little more than a silhouette. She stood, apparently calmly, as though awaiting an expected visitor.
Muunokhoi stepped aside and gestured Nergui, Doripalam and Gavaa to step forward on to the top landing. Doripalam hesitated on the threshold, recognizing that there was likely to be no way back from this point, wondering how it might be possible to resist.
There was, it turned out, no opportunity. Seeing Doripalam’s hesitation, Muunokhoi gestured to Luvsan who stepped forward and, raising his gun, slammed it hard against his former chief’s head. Doripalam collapsed forward, staggering onto the top of the steps and then fell halfway down the stone flight, hitting his head against the wall. He lay, sprawled and motionless, halfway down the flight of stairs, his body twisted. There was no way of telling whether he was still alive.
There was a moment’s pause, as if everyone had stopped breathing in sympathy. Then, moving with extraordinary speed, Nergui grabbed Luvsan’s gun arm and twisted it painfully. Somehow managing to remove the gun in the process, he turned and threw Luvsan past Doripalam’s prone body down the stairs. Luvsan hit the concrete floor with a sickening thump and lay still. This time, there seemed little doubt about his mortality.
Nergui turned, grabbed Gavaa and pulled him behind him, trying to keep the boy safe. There was confusion as Muunokhoi’s henchmen struggled to pull out their guns. Nergui shot one before he could move and the man fell back, pumping blood thickly on to Muunokhoi’s thick carpet. The second had his gun out but Nergui was close enough to slam Luvsan’s pistol hard down on the man’s arm. He screamed, dropped the gun, and let out a painful, half-swallowed shout as Nergui thrust the pistol hard against his head. The man reeled back, tripped over his colleague, and fell in a heap on the floor, barely conscious.
For a second, there was no sound. Nergui looked back at Muunokhoi, expecting to find that Muunokhoi’s weapon was pointed firmly at his own head or heart.
But it wasn’t. Instead, Muunokhoi was staring down into the cellar, his gun pointed toward Sarangarel. He began to walk slowly down the steps. “Don’t try anything, Nergui. I’m too quick for you. If you shoot me, Mrs. Radnaa will be dead before I am. You would not want that on your conscience.”
Nergui hesitated, unsure whether Muunokhoi was capable of carrying out this threat. But he knew from bitter experience the risks of underestimating Muunokhoi’s capability in any field.
Muunokhoi moved slowly and smoothly down the steps until he was a meter or so from Sarangarel. “Kill him,” she said, calmly. “It doesn’t matter what he does to me. It’s worth it.”
Nergui raised his gun, but could do nothing, his finger frozen on the trigger. “Nergui,” she called out, “if you don’t, he’ll kill me anyway. He’ll use me as a hostage as long as it suits him. He’ll get away again. So kill him now. It doesn’t matter about me.”
She was right, of course. He knew she was right. But Muunokhoi, one step ahead as always, had judged that this was the one thing that Nergui would not be able to do. The one thing he could not have on his conscience.
Muunokhoi stepped behind Sarangarel, raising the gun-barrel toward her head.
She was right, of course. Of course she was. In any moment, the last chance would have gone and they would be back to playing Muunokhoi’s game.
In the final moment before Muunokhoi raised his gun to Sarangarel’s temple, Nergui finally lifted his own gun. And a shot echoed round the empty cellar.
CHAPTER 24
The prayer wheels were spinning somewhere behind them and they could hear the sonorous chanting of the monks. It was a hypnotic sound, at one with the breath of the wind and the cries of the children from the park below. The pure blue sky seemed endless, echoing the eternal sweep of the green steppe beyond the city.
“I could get used to this,” Doripalam said. “So long as you were doing the pushing.”
“You do realize quite how vulnerable you are up here?” Nergui said, taking the wheelchair to the edge of the slope down to the park. “I could simply let go and you’d roll all the way down till you hit something.”
“Solongo’s already pointed that out,” Doripalam said. “Quite forcibly, in fact. I think it’s her way of expressing her affection for me.” Her reaction had been a characteristic mixture of concern for his condition and disapproval of the fact that he had allowed it to happen. He was hoping that, for the moment at least, the concern would remain paramount.
Nergui nodded, watching the flight of some bird of prey across the empty sky. The weather was finally warming up. It would be summer soon. “You’d better keep on the right side of her, then,” he said. “We need you back at work as soon as possible. Now especially. The Minister isn’t happy at losing my services while I cover for you.”
“There’s no one else, though, is there? No one we can trust, I mean.”
“There are some I think we can. But nobody with enough experience to cover for you while we start to clean things up.”
“And we don’t know who’s straight and who isn’t. We don’t know how much Muunokhoi was exaggerating.”
Nergui shrugged. “Muunokhoi had countless faults. But he had no need to exaggerate his influence. It’s a hard one. I’ve got some clues from the inquiries I was already conducting. And it should be easier now, with Muunokhoi out of the picture. There’s no one to protect them.”
“But there’s also nothing to protect. With Muunokhoi gone—well, they’re not corrupt cops anymore. Not active ones, anyhow. There may be nothing to find.”
“If they’ve been corrupt once, they’ll be corrupt again. Integrity’s like virginity. You can’t get it back.”
“Very philosophical,” Doripalam said, wondering if this was an apposite moment to ask about Mrs. Radnaa.
Nergui had described those final moments in the cellar, but even now Doripalam could barely imagine what it must have felt like. When, at the sound of the singl
e gunshot, Mrs. Radnaa had fallen, leaving Muunokhoi standing over her. Nergui had stared at his own hand, certain that he had not yet fired, but certain also that Muunokhoi had not shot Sarangarel, that the bullet had come from somewhere else. He glanced behind him, but there was no sign of movement from the two henchmen.
And then, just as the horror was rising in Nergui’s throat, Muunokhoi had finally staggered forward, his body twisting, and Nergui had seen the blood pouring from his back. It was as if, in those few seconds, Muunokhoi had been focusing every last ounce of will in a desperate effort to deny the inevitability of his own death. But then there was a second shot and Muunokhoi’s head had exploded as his body crashed down on to the stone floor. By then, mercifully, Sarangarel was already unconscious.
As so often, it was as if Nergui had read Doripalam’s thoughts. “I saw her—Mrs. Radnaa—this morning. She’s recovering well. There was no serious physical hurt. Her collapse was mainly shock.”
Was it corruption, Doripalam wondered, to bury the disciplinary charges against Tunjin? The shooting of Muunokhoi had been unavoidable, but Tunjin had been a long way from following any established procedures. And there was also the indisputable fact that, at the time of the killing, Tunjin had still been formally suspended from duty.
But Nergui had had no concerns about these niceties, and had applied his ministerial authority accordingly. Tunjin had saved their lives. Tunjin was unquestionably straight, one of the few about whom they could be certain. He was the kind of man they needed in the force. Tunjin himself—or so Doripalam had been told—had celebrated his return to duty by downing a bottle of vodka. Or possibly two.
“You never did finish the story,” Doripalam said.
“I never did, did I? But you will have worked it out for yourself.”
“Humor me,” Doripalam said.
Nergui smiled. “So what did we have? We had Muunokhoi trying to terrify the life out of poor Gavaa. Who, to do him credit, didn’t go along with—all the things that Muunokhoi was showing him, but made his exit as soon as possible. And did the only thing that an eighteen-year-old boy can do in those circumstances.”
Doripalam raised an eyebrow. “Which is?”
“Go home to his mother. Whatever’s gone on between them, his mother will always take him back in. He tells her the whole story, and she’s scared out of her wits. She knows Muunokhoi. She knows what he’s capable of. She knows how paranoid and vindictive he is and that he’s not going to let the boy out of his clutches. So she hides Gavaa, hoping that she’ll be able to look after him till Muunokhoi’s wrath subsides. And she even makes a lot of fuss about going to the press and the police about her poor missing boy, just so that Muunokhoi will never think that the boy’s being hidden as part of her family.” Nergui stops and smiles. “She was a resourceful woman, gives nothing away even when Muunokhoi’s heavies turn up. But then, maybe inevitably, one day Muunokhoi himself arrives. Maybe he tries to remind her of old times, tells her again that Gavaa is probably his son. Maybe he threatens all kinds of things.” He paused.
Nergui began to push the wheelchair back up the slope toward the temple. “But she’s smart. When she sees the way the conversation is going, she starts to intimate that maybe she’s got some evidence that Muunokhoi wouldn’t like to see the light of day. She threatens Muunokhoi with exposure if he doesn’t forget about her son. And Muunokhoi’s response is—”
“To murder her in cold blood.”
“Indeed. But not, as we know, before he also subjected her to some dreadful abuse, trying to force her to reveal her son’s whereabouts. Which, of course, being a mother she did not.”
“An interesting way to treat your ex-lover. And the supposed mother of your son. And Gavaa himself had already gone off with the rest of the family, pretending to be a cousin.”
“Exactly. Which is why they were so terrified about anybody—that is, Muunokhoi—catching up with them. Which, with a little help from our friend in the north, he eventually did.” They had still not managed to track down the bodies of Gavaa’s three relatives. Gavaa had told them how a team of police officers, apparently from Tsend’s team, had arrived in the camp in the middle of the night, dragging out the three men. Gavaa himself had been hidden away from the main camp, just in case of such an eventuality. He had heard the cries of the men being dragged away, supposedly under arrest, and had hidden himself further into the woods, emerging only once the team had gone leaving behind a solitary sentinel in case Gavaa should return. But it was the guard himself who had been taken by surprise as Gavaa had obtained at least some small revenge.
Tsend had been arrested and was being questioned, but to date had denied all knowledge of the men’s supposed arrest, as had all other officers in the Bulgan force. Maybe they would find the bodies one day, Doripalam thought, though Tsend was likely to have covered his tracks well.
Doripalam looked up at the line of monks crossing the path, still chanting. “But what about this supposed evidence? Do you think Mrs. Tuya really had it?”
Nergui shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it never existed. Gansukh and Khenbish were quite capable of living in a fantasy world and helping others to do the same. I can easily imagine that, having tried to gather meaningful stuff, Gansukh just faked some more serious evidence to keep Muunokhoi at bay. Maybe they really were just a bit too smart for Muunokhoi. And a bit too smart for their own good.”
“So all this was for nothing?”
“I fear so. But I think Muunokhoi had hit the paranoid stage long before this. He saw everything as a threat. All of this must have seemed—well, preordained. Muunokhoi found himself sitting in court for the first time in his life. A court overseen by the wife of the man he killed. I imagine he would have been scarcely able to believe it. Even though the trial collapsed, it might have been enough—with all of this going on—to tip him over the edge.”
“You think he went mad?”
“I think his world was much less stable and secure than he had imagined. I think he saw some cracks beginning to show. There was probably some justification to his paranoia. But, yes, in the end, I think he went mad.”
They had stopped at the edge of the temple ground, looking out over the windy spaces of Nairamdal Park. Below, the weathered amusement rides glittered faintly in the early afternoon sun. Children were racing across the grass, shouting and playing games. Clusters of old men smoked and talked, wrapped in their unseasonable dels. Beyond the park, there was the endless grassland, the distant mountains, the land without boundaries. Life continuing.
“So what now?” Doripalam said.
“We have a job to do,” Nergui said. “Muunokhoi is gone. Most people won’t know why or how. A lot of people will mourn him.” No one had challenged Nergui’s account of events—people did not tend to challenge Nergui on such matters—but there had been no desire, from the Minister upward, to make the circumstances of Muunokhoi’s death public knowledge. He had, it appeared, died unexpectedly of natural causes after a short illness. Which, Doripalam acknowledged, was at least a version of the truth.
“And there will be other Muunokhois coming to fill the vacuum. It’s the way of things. Our world here is changing. We can’t stop that. We can even welcome it. But we have to hold a line, make sure we retain control.” They listened to the distant sound of the monks enacting their ancient rituals in the ornate buildings behind them. “We have a job to do,” he said again.
Also by Michael Walters
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