From the moment he’d found out about Julie’s kidnapping, Charlie had been trying to find some duly constituted authority which would use its power and reach to help him. Now he finally had. So the only thing to do now was wait and pray.
He took the girl’s pink diamond-studded phone out of his pocket and dialed his house. It rang twice before he realized it would be four in the morning there and he would wake everyone. He hung up and thought about them. What they must be going through. Were they even able to sleep? Was Meagan bounding into their bedroom looking for Mommy and Daddy? He hoped that Becca was sleeping upstairs in his and Julie’s bed, and that she remembered to leave the hall light on, and the bedroom door open, in case Meagan came looking for her, and that Ollie slept with his Curious George curled up next to him.
He ached to talk to them, to see them, to hold them. But every time he imagined it, the fantasy quickly went sour. Because Julie wasn’t alongside him.
Charlie looked around at the miserable little town, trying to shake the sinking feeling that it was all going to shit. The village was a cluster of run-down brick buildings and houses that gave way to cotton fields stretching off in all directions. In the distance, a man in traditional Uzbek garb was urging a donkey cart forward, whipping savagely at the swaybacked donkey with a thin stick. But the donkey seemed uninterested—or incapable—of going any faster, the rain of blows nothing more than an exercise in pointless cruelty.
Charlie didn’t know if it was his hunger—he hadn’t eaten in a day and a half—or the sight of that man beating the innocent animal, but he suddenly felt light-headed. As if everything was spinning.
And his mind began to taunt him. If everything Hopkins had said was true—that dirty bombs were going to be set off in locations across the world—then far too much was at stake for MI6 to place Julie’s life anywhere near the top of their priority list. If an SAS team happened to hit the location where Julie was, they would undoubtedly do their best to save her, but what if Byko had already moved her? Or if they were in separate locations? Would MI6 really split the SAS team in two? When push came to shove, no matter what Charlie had threatened, would they really beat the bushes to find out where Julie was?
Charlie didn’t like the answers to any of these questions and he couldn’t help thinking about some of the accusations that had been hurled at him recently. Both Byko and Faruz had made essentially the same point—that Charlie was a self-serving coward who had cut and run when the going got tough, retreating to the easy shelter and security of America.
There were many times, back in Los Angeles, especially in those first couple of years, when Charlie had thought about Palonchi Ursalov and her sons, and all of those demonstrators in the Square, and he’d beaten himself up pretty nicely for giving up on them. But as time went on, he’d been able to push away that guilt, to focus on his new life and his new family. He’d told himself he was entitled to have that life, that God hadn’t put him on the earth to liberate Uzbekistan, that it was a kind of hubris to even contemplate taking on all of that.
But now that he was back here, he had to face it. The man who had been standing in his shoes the last six years was a scared man, a reactive man, a man just trying to survive.
Charlie picked up the phone and made a call.
“Garman,” he said, “it’s me.”
“Charlie!” The mercenary sounded enormously relieved—and a bit surprised. “You made it! Damn, I was worried about you.”
Charlie gave Garman a quick update about what had happened at the bathhouse, along with a thumbnail account of his escape and his conversation with Hopkins detailing Julie’s role as bait in the blown takedown.
“Holy shit!” Garman said. “That finally makes sense. I had heard that Byko came out of hiding. I couldn’t figure why. Of course, the Uzbeks blew it.”
“The Uzbeks?”
“The famous Twenty-seventh Air Assault Brigade. The Brits must have had to defer to them. It being their home turf and all.”
That made sense and actually made Charlie feel a bit better about the competence of Hopkins and his people.
“Anyway,” Charlie said, “the main thing is that MI6 is on the job now.” He hesitated for a moment, waiting to see if Garman would comment. “How long do you think it’ll take for an SAS team to get to her?”
“Depends where they’re deploying from. Let’s say they’re flying from Hereford on a C-17—that’s a cargo jet that cruises at about four hundred and fifty knots—you’re talking six hours absolute minimum. If they’re coming from Afghanistan, on the other hand, they could be there in a couple of hours. But the real delay is likely to come from the Uzbek bureaucracy.”
Charlie thought about it. If there was even a shred of plausibility to Karimov’s posture as one of the West’s biggest allies in the war on terror, surely he would be waiting by the phone right now, looking to give MI6 all the help he could.
Or . . .
Charlie suddenly had a horrible thought.
“Charlie? Charlie, you still there?”
“Back up a sec. Byko’s takedown—you said the Uzbeks screwed it up. What exactly happened there?”
“The story I heard was that Byko was at the Café Odillion near the Kukcha Mosque—”
“I know the place. It’s been around since the Soviet era.”
“Right. So anyway, he’s sitting there in broad daylight, apparently with Julie. Next thing you know, two or three companies from the Twenty-seventh are converging on the place. As you can imagine, it’s total chaos. They’re landing choppers in the street, throwing up checkpoints, sticking guns in everybody’s faces, stopping traffic. Everybody’s freaking out thinking they’re about to get scooped up and tossed in jail. Next thing you know there’s a ring of two hundred guys with AKs pointed at the Odillion. They smash the door down, rough up the maître d’, chuck everybody on the floor . . . And Byko’s gone.”
“But that café is at the end of a little cul-de-sac just off the Mannon Uygur. There’s a street in front and an alley in the back. Two ways in, two ways out. They could have surrounded that place with twenty secret policemen and a couple of German shepherds. Why would they send two hundred paratroopers in helicopters?”
“Typical totalitarian overkill.”
But Charlie had more information than Garman. And he saw the whole picture with crystalline clarity. It was all a show. Karimov wanted Byko to get away. It sounded absurd at first—Byko might be the one guy in the entire country Karimov was afraid of—but Karimov was and always had been a master chess player. Over the years, the West’s willingness to overlook Uzbek intransigence, inefficiency and graft had worn thin, and as the war on terror wound down, Karimov’s usefulness was inevitably waning. But if Byko could pull off his attack (and Karimov could claim that he’d done everything he could to try to stop it), then suddenly Uzbekistan would be catapulted to the front lines of the war on terror redux. Imagine the billions of dollars Karimov could squeeze out of the West in order to “clean up” the extremists within his borders. What a gorgeous piece of geopolitical jujitsu. Not only would Byko be completely marginalized as a player on the Uzbek stage, not only would Karimov practically get buried in Western money and military assistance, but he’d have the perfect excuse to clean house and wipe out any stray enemies whom he hadn’t squashed in the past few years.
If all of that was true, and Charlie felt quite certain it was, then Karimov would come up with some way to cock-block the entire MI6 operation.
“They’re never going to make it,” Charlie said, half to himself.
“What’s that?”
“Julie. She’s got maybe another couple of hours before she’s outlived her usefulness to Byko. SAS is never going to get there in time. If at all.”
“You don’t know that for sure. Anyway, there’s not much you can do about it.”
“I’m going to have to go back ther
e and bust her out.”
“All due respect, Charlie—”
“Give me some guys who can handle themselves. I’ve got eight grand and change as a down payment. Plus, Julie’s family’s got money—”
“Hold on a second. Okay? Just hold on.”
Charlie could feel the rationalizations coming.
“This isn’t about money, Charlie. There are practical issues here. I’m a professional. You can’t just grab a couple of yahoos with guns and charge into fortified locations full of armed men. These things take meticulous preparation. Floor plans, maps, transpo, special weapons, explosives, guys with very particular skills . . .”
“It isn’t just Julie!” Charlie blurted out. He’d been trying to heed Hopkins’s warnings about disclosure, but now he had to appeal to Garman’s morality. And to hope that he still had some whiff of humanity left in him. “The reason MI6 wants Byko isn’t to stop a coup. It’s because Byko is the mastermind of a plot to kill hundreds of thousands of people. And not here. I’m talking New York, London, Paris . . .”
This last part Charlie was making up, but given what Hopkins had told him, he thought those cities were a pretty safe bet.
“I don’t know all the details,” Charlie said. “But it’s happening tomorrow, and trust me, it’ll make 9/11 look like a walk in the park.”
“Jesus Christ,” Garman muttered.
“Julie was working for MI6. They recruited her to draw Byko out. She went into it eyes open, knowing what was at risk. Because she had to do something to try to stop it.”
This was Charlie’s last, best hope. Hooking into Garman’s sense of chivalry and shame. After all, how could a man like Garman stand on the sidelines and do nothing when untrained Julie Davis had thrown her pound of flesh into the game? And as Charlie recounted what Julie had done, said it aloud for the first time since uncovering all of her lies, he began to understand her choice. To feel for her. To admire her.
Charlie thought for certain he had gotten through to the mercenary because when he’d finished, Garman was silent. So he pressed on. “Byko and Julie are at the same place. We go in there to get her, we get him, too. You put the screws on him, we save the world.”
“Listen, Charlie.” Garman sounded anguished. “My wife’s Uzbek. My kids are Uzbek. This is my home now. You’re asking me to put my family on the chopping block for what sounds like a serious no-win proposition. Truly, I wish I could help you. But it’s just too little too late at this point . . . I gotta go, Charlie. I’m sorry.”
And the line went dead.
Charlie set the phone down slowly. Just ten minutes ago, it had seemed like the cavalry was cresting the hill and everything was going to be okay.
But he saw now that it was nothing but a mirage.
Everything was on him. As it had been from the start.
PART III
DESTINY
Chapter Thirty-eight
As Byko’s Escalade sped through the dark tunnel twenty feet below the surface of the ground, his young communications specialist quickly connected his gear to the onboard cameras and monitors that could be viewed from the rear of the vehicle.
Within a matter of minutes, the display was live.
Lipstick cameras had been hung at the various target locations—covertly taped onto telephone poles, set into holes drilled out of mortar joints or wedged beneath flowerpots. The young tech wordlessly handed the remote control to Byko then seated himself on a small fold-out chair built into one of the car doors.
Byko clicked from view to view to view. There was Hanover. There was London. There was Minneapolis. There was New York.
He smiled as the people on each screen scuttled around, full of the importance of their days, rushing from here to there on some little errand or other—pushing a mail cart, delivering flowers, walking to a deposition, chastising subordinates for some minor oversight—unaware that if they were in this same place tomorrow, their lives would be ended.
And Byko saw no sign of surveillance teams posted anywhere, no collections of heavily armed men with German shepherds, no unusual blast barricades or traffic barriers. Everything was still looking good.
“Are you ready, sir?”
Byko glanced at the young tech. “Not quite.” He wanted to take in the city scenes a bit more.
The tiny cameras transmitted amazingly clear and vivid pictures. Here was a lovely young woman, her breasts straining at her thin blouse; there a self-important-looking man with a briefcase and a tailored suit; here a woman limping along on a bad leg, stopping to massage her swollen ankle; there a young man who looked as though he might be rushing to make his first day of work.
One might be tempted to pity them . . . if one didn’t understand that their destruction would, in the end, lead to a world that was not so full of pain and ugliness and degradation.
“All right then,” Byko said, nodding to the technician.
The young man clicked away feverishly on his laptop, arranging for the transmissions.
The connection between Byko and the people he was about to speak to was known as a discontinuous link—a high-tech version of the trick used in old kidnapper movies where two telephones were duct-taped together in a safe house so that the phone company couldn’t trace the call. Only, in this case, instead of duct tape, they’d used a specially designed computer in a safe house somewhere in Bangladesh. Or maybe it was in Karachi. Or perhaps Lithuania. There were twenty-three safe houses around the world, each used only once, randomly chosen by computer, each wired to be destroyed as soon as the phone call was completed.
“Start with London?” the techs asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Byko replied.
The tech typed a few commands into his laptop. Then Rasul, the leader of the London cell, appeared on the screen attached to the driver’s seat back.
Byko greeted him calmly then asked, “Is everything arranged?”
“It is.” Rasul swallowed nervously. “But what about Samarkand? I heard you were almost captured just four days ago. I am very concerned.”
Byko laughed pleasantly and waved away Rasul’s worries. “Everything isn’t what it appears to be. I was never in danger. Not for a minute.”
Rasul frowned. “Are you saying—”
“Let’s not get distracted. Nothing has changed. The operation is still entirely on track.”
“But what about the targets? If they know where you are, they might know where we are.”
“You are ahead of yourself, my friend. Do you even know the targets yet?”
“I assume someone on the ground does, sir. And it—”
Byko smiled condescendingly. “Only I know the targets. In just a few hours, you will know them, too. But not until the time is right.”
“But we won’t have enough time to prepare if you still want to do this tomorrow.”
Byko gave Rasul a long, hard look, then leaned forward and softened his voice. “We are on the verge of something magnificent. You are on the verge of something magnificent. Your courage and resolve have never failed you. They will not fail you now. Have faith, my brother. Tomorrow we shall prevail.”
Byko thumbed the remote. The face of Idris, his man in New York, appeared. Byko took one look at him and knew he’d be facing the same withering of will.
It took Byko nearly the entire drive through the tunnel to talk his men down from their various psychological ledges. By the time he was finished, his stomach was churning and he felt fidgety, as if bugs were crawling under his skin—the sensation signaling that he was on the verge of losing control over himself.
Why was it so hard to find decent men?
He did a line of coke off the back of his hand. Better now.
Chapter Thirty-nine
This was where it had all started—the village of Radgovir. It was here that Charlie had seen the mutilated body
of Palonchi Ursalov’s boy, it was here that Charlie had written the story which catapulted the destiny of the Uzbek people toward Andijan.
Charlie’s initial instinct had been to try to recruit fighters from one of the villages where Julie had worked six years ago. But those villages were all too far from the Fergana Valley to do him any good in the short span of time that he had. So he’d surveyed his map, looking for a village where the people might remember him. As it turned out, Ragdovir was only eleven kilometers from that dumpy café. And it was a place where they would surely never forget him.
Crowded into the mayor’s living room was a knot of three dozen men. Hollow cheeked, traditionally dressed in the long shirt dresses of the region, beards down to the middle of their chests, they stared soberly at Charlie, faces blank, bodies unmoving. The room was dark, lit only by kerosene lamps and the light from one tiny window. It smelled of unwashed bodies, cumin and smoke.
On the drive, winding up the foothills of the Tian Shan Mountains, Charlie had rehearsed what he would say over and over again. But now, standing before them, seeing some of their eyes, filled as they were with judgment and suspicion, Charlie realized there were fences to mend before he could even contemplate asking for their assistance.
He would have preferred to speak to them in their native Uzbek
but for something as delicate as this he had to go with his superior Russian.
“Many of you remember, I came here six years ago because I wanted to help you. And I made promises that we could do something together to change your country.” He scanned the room and cleared his throat. “I’m sure some of you feel I left before completing the job, that I didn’t finish what I came here to do. Some of you may not know that I was shot that day in Andijan and I felt I had no choice but to return to my own country. But there has not been a single day that has passed in the last six years when I haven’t thought about you people and ached for your suffering.” Charlie paused and surveyed the room.
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