Out of Range: A Novel

by Hank Steinberg

  Charlie pushed again. He thought maybe he felt something this time, a miniscule shifting of weight beneath his feet. But still the rock was there. Charlie took two deep breaths, closed his eyes and summoned images of Ollie and Meagan. Anger filled him like a furious red fire. He took one more deep breath, then screamed, pushing with all his might.

  Slowly, slowly, slowly, it began to move—at first propelled only by the strength of his muscles—then, suddenly, the boulder lightened as its own momentum took over.

  And it began to fall.

  It seemed to go in slow motion at first. But then it hit another rock, bounced a little, and began to accelerate, sweeping dozens of smaller rocks in front of it. Those rocks drove another hundred into motion and soon the entire hillside was moving.

  The landslide made a curious, horrifying noise, like some mythic giant grinding its teeth, and suddenly the bodyguard, who had looked so intimidating and huge, appeared as insignificant as a gnat before the vast carpet of earth and stone.

  For a few terrifying seconds, Charlie was sure the entire hillside would collapse, sucking him down with it. But then the terrible noise of the landslide subsided, replaced once more by the rush of the waterfall. As the dust began to settle, Charlie walked over to the edge of the hill and looked down at where the big man had been. He was barely recognizable now, just a heap of twisted limbs, one arm trailing in the river.

  For a moment it seemed unthinkable. Unreal.

  Charlie had been in many situations over the course of his career where he thought he might have to defend himself, or someone he cared about. And he had always assumed that if the time came, he would do what needed to be done.

  But as he peered down the hill at his adversary’s corpse, he was shocked by his own reaction. There was no revulsion at the act, or even fear of the line he’d just crossed. Instead, he was filled with a wheeling sense of triumph. A desire to stick out his chest, point at the dead man and laugh.

  And then, as quickly as that feeling came, it was replaced by a wave of nausea. That nausea was a reaction not to what he’d done, but to the primal relish which had just overtaken him.

  Charlie shook his head, pushing away the self-analysis. He had no time for introspection or guilt now.

  It wouldn’t take long for Quinn and his men to figure out that he’d escaped. And he had to get through to MI6 before they did.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Charlie ran in an awkward trot, his hands still cuffed behind him. He knew the moment Byko learned of his escape, he’d be on the move and Charlie would lose any chance of finding Julie.

  From the ridge running along the small river, Charlie could see the ribbon of concrete in the distance, the A217 highway running back to Tashkent. It was probably about two or three miles away if he went cross-country, but the problem was that once he got down off the ridge, he was liable to lose his way.

  As he jogged unsteadily past a bend, he spotted a small track diverging from the little road. It was barely more than a cow path, unpaved and weedy, with two deep ruts that probably had been made by tractor wheels, but it seemed to lead off in the direction of the main highway.

  He headed down the path, which led up and down a series of small hills and then out into the valley below. Still shivering from the cold water, he crested the final hill and looked down into the valley, spotting a small farmhouse flanked by a ramshackle barn and a livestock pen. The track on which he was running headed straight across the cotton fields toward it.

  He had been planning to flag down a ride on the A217 and convince someone to lend him a phone, but this was a much better option.

  When he grew closer, he saw two cars parked in front of the farmhouse. He moved faster at first, anxious to see what was going on here, then slowed as he discovered what those cars were.

  A blue Toyota van and a sleek red Mercedes SEL. Outside a farmhouse?

  Had he stumbled upon one of Byko’s outposts?

  He scanned the surrounding fields and realized where he was. The characteristic maroon flowers in the fields had faded, but each waist-high plant was still topped with the bulbous capsule that remained after the flower disappeared—a feature that gave the crop a comical air, as though it might have been invented by Dr. Seuss. This was opium.

  And even if this property didn’t belong to Byko, even if Charlie had just stumbled upon the property of a local drug dealer, getting any help here was a dubious proposition. In fact, merely cutting through the property to get down to the highway was a perilous idea.

  The problem was that the fields were very large. If he went all the way around them, he would double the distance to the highway and waste precious time. But if he kept the barn between himself and the main house, he might just be able to scoot through the area unseen. A quick dash past the farmhouse and he’d be no more than a couple of hundred yards from the tree line on the other side of the fields. And then he’d be home free.

  When he got within earshot of the house, he slowed. He could hear a steady thump from the building and crept toward the barn, easing his way around the corner. He peered through the open back door and saw two men, wearing identical Adidas hoodies, bright colored warm-up pants and a great deal of gold.

  They were dancing. Gyrating to the noise of the horrible electronic music coming from a primitive boom box. Clearly they were partaking of the bounty in the field. How else to explain the sight of this?

  Suddenly, a buxom young woman with dyed blond hair and thick black eyebrows moved out the door, wearing nothing but a half-buttoned man’s shirt and a pair of thigh-high leather boots. Mumbling and cursing as she moved drunkenly toward the cars, she fumbled with a set of keys and managed to unlock the trunk of the red Mercedes. It was a case of vodka she was looking for.

  But as she pulled it out of the trunk, it slipped from her hand and fell on the dirt with a clatter of glass.

  She swore in Russian, though somehow the bottles managed not to shatter.

  Charlie tried to back quietly away, but it was no use. She saw him.

  “Who the hell are you?” she demanded.

  “I got picked up by the Internal Security Police,” Charlie improvised, swiveling to show her his cuffs. “Have you got a knife or something?”

  She stared at him as if he’d dropped in from outer space. “Where did you come from?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Somewhere in the hills.” He gestured in the direction opposite Byko’s compound. “They had me for a couple of days, but I managed to escape. If they find me here with you guys, it’s not gonna be good for you. For your own sake, the best thing you can do is cut these cuffs off and let me get the hell out of here.”

  “I don’t know.” The woman winced nervously, looking back at the house. “Maybe one of the guys has a knife.”

  “No,” Charlie said. “I’m sure we don’t want to bother them.” He glanced inside again. “They seem pretty busy with what they’re doing in there. Maybe we can find something out here to do the trick.”

  Charlie quickly scanned the car for something she could use. There was nothing inside the cabin of the Mercedes, so he moved back toward the rear of the car. Lying inside the trunk, next to a loose jack, was a small pallet knife. “See that?” he said. “You can just cut them off yourself.”

  The drunk girl rubbed her face, smearing her heavy eyeliner. This was too much thinking for her. “I don’t know,” she said. “I better go grab—”

  “Wait!” Charlie barked, immediately regretting how much he’d raised his voice. He peeked inside the house again but the blinged-out dealers were still rapping away. “Wait,” Charlie said again, voice softer now. “Five hundred dollars, cash American, if you help me.”

  “Five hundred?” She appraised him skeptically. “You got it on you?”

  “Uncuff me first.”

  She sneaked a glance at the house, then grabbed the knife and came toward him.

  Charlie turned around to expose his cuffed hands. But freeing him turned out not
to be the first thing on her mind. Instead, she lifted the back of his shirt and touched the blade to his skin.

  “Don’t move,” she said.

  “What are you doing?” Charlie asked, though he already had a pretty good idea.

  She ripped off his money belt, unzipped the flap and pulled out the cash.

  Charlie wheeled around to face her. “You don’t want to do that,” he warned, combing his mind for something that might coerce or scare her. And then it came to him. “I work for Slavik Omarich. You screw with me, you’re screwing with him.”

  Six years earlier Slavik Omarich had been one of the biggest drug smugglers in Uzbekistan, a man unparalleled in reputation for violence and ruthlessness.

  The woman stopped, eyes widening, mouth opening slightly. Apparently Slavik was still alive. Good for him and good for Charlie.

  “Now get the cuffs off me or your head’s gonna end up on a pole.”

  With trembling fingers, she took the pallet knife out of the trunk and cut off the plastic flex cuffs.

  He eyeballed her with menace. “Okay, you stupid cow, my money.”

  “What about my five hundred?”

  He grabbed the girl by the shirt, pulled her toward him and snatched the cash. “You already blew your shot at that. Now your cell phone.”

  When she hesitated, Charlie got in her face, playing the part. “Your phone, wench! I know you got one on you.”

  She reached into her boot and handed him a pink, diamond-studded Nokia. Charlie looked at it—no signal. Not up here.

  He grabbed the keys from the trunk of the red Mercedes, hopped in the driver’s seat and cranked on the engine. Before he pulled away, he leaned out the window.

  “You tell those assholes in the house about me, I’ll come back here and kill you myself.”

  But as he floored it and tore out of there, he heard the girl shouting. By the time he made it to the trees, he could see the men boiling out of the house, shooting wildly toward him, then piling into the blue van.

  Charlie thought there were only a few hundred yards of trees separating the fields from the highway beyond, and that escape would merely be a matter of zipping down the dirt track and up onto the A217.

  But the reality was not so simple.

  The track was rutted and full of potholes deep enough to swallow an axle—if he just floored it and flew down the road, he was likely to bottom out and rip a wheel off the Mercedes.

  So he slowed as much as he dared. The little road meandered through the woods, looping around gnarled trees and boulders, then suddenly took a hard left into a small dry creek bed. Charlie poured on the gas and the powerful Mercedes quickly gained speed, but suddenly the dry wash divided in half, creating a fork. Which way?

  He knew that left was east. And east was where the highway was.

  He went left.

  Thirty seconds later, the path narrowed and the drab brown walls closed in on the Mercedes until he was unable to squeeze through any farther.

  He’d chosen wrong.

  Charlie turned off the engine, put his head out the window, and listened for the sound of the van.

  Nothing.

  Were they lying in wait, ready for an ambush as soon as Charlie backed up? Or were they going to wait for him by the highway, expecting Charlie to jump out of the Mercedes and try to make his way on foot?

  It was a fifty-fifty proposition and either way there wasn’t much time for deliberation.

  Charlie threw the car in reverse and backed slowly up the dry wash. As soon as he saw the fork again, he stopped and listened for the van. But he couldn’t hear anything over the sound of his own engine. He eased his foot off the brake and continued creeping backward, hoping the drug dealers couldn’t hear him.

  And then he saw them in his rearview. Backing up from the other fork, no more than fifty feet behind him. Point-blank range.

  Charlie floored it.

  The big Mercedes flung itself backward so hard that he nearly banged his face into the steering wheel. Within seconds, he was doing almost forty miles per hour.

  One of the dealers was hanging out the window looking for Charlie, nothing but his legs inside the van. His eyes widened as he saw the Mercedes hurtling toward him and he swiveled around, trying desperately to bring his AK-47 to bear before impact.

  But he was too late.

  With a metallic thud and a ripping of metal, the Mercedes smashed into the van. Charlie heard a skittering thud, saw the would-be shooter pinwheel over the top of the Mercedes and disappear below the line of the hood, arms flailing wildly at the air.

  Pulse racing, Charlie dropped the Mercedes into drive and stomped on the gas again. The big German V8 responded with a throaty roar and the car jumped forward as he shot down the other fork.

  He glanced one more time in his rearview. There was no sign of the driver trying to get out of the car. He must have been crushed by the impact.

  As for the Mercedes, its legendary engineering had proved its mettle here. The trunk lid was completely buckled and the cover on the rear bumper fell off after dragging behind the vehicle for a few hundred yards—but there was no sign that the car had sustained any mission-critical damage.

  Charlie gripped the wheel tightly and poured on the gas.

  He soon crested the incline and found himself on the edge of the highway. Bumping and slaloming onto the A217, Charlie picked up speed then checked his watch—it had been just thirty-six minutes since he’d left Byko’s compound in that Escalade.

  He pulled out the girl’s diamond-studded phone. The moment he got into range, he dialed the British Embassy.

  After three rings, he was greeted by a pleasant female voice.

  “My name is Charlie Davis,” he said. “I need to talk to somebody at MI6. Tell them it’s about my wife. Julie Davis.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Julie sat in a heavy wooden chair, soaking wet and shivering uncontrollably—so exhausted and wrung out that if she had not been duct-taped to the arms and legs of the chair, she would have simply collapsed and fallen to the floor.

  “So let’s go over that first meeting again,” Quinn said for at least the hundredth time. His voice was patient, measured, maybe a little bored. “Where was it again?”

  “Santa Monica. The promenade. I told you. His name was . . .” For a moment, her mind skittered out of the room. Why couldn’t she just go home and be with her children? Ollie and Meagan needed her. Charlie needed her. Why didn’t Quinn understand that?

  “The name,” Quinn said.

  “Hopkins. Frank Hopkins.” Each syllable seemed an overwhelming effort. “He’s an officer. With MI6.”

  Quinn had been asking the same questions over and over in different ways for what seemed like days. Of course, the tactics that accompanied these questions kept changing. After using the combination of red and green drugs, Quinn had switched gears and played the father confessor for a while. But he soon tired of that tactic and turned to what seemed like his natural home: waterboarding. Which turned out to be even worse than the drugs.

  The chair was attached to the floor with hinged rear legs so that it could be tipped backward. Then one of Quinn’s henchmen held a towel firmly over her mouth while a second man poured water over the towel until it was so soaked that breathing became impossible. And then, inexorably, as she kicked and thrashed, the water began leaking into her nose and mouth and she began to drown.

  Uncannily, Quinn seemed to know precisely the moment at which she would lose consciousness and just before that moment, he would let her breathe again. As the drowning continued, with brief pauses to let her cough out the water in her lungs or occasionally to vomit, the sensation grew more and more hideous. By now, she felt as though she were falling down a dark path that could end only with her own death and her mind was starting to play tricks on her, as though it were slipping through the cracks of time and space, wending its way back to Los Angeles . . .

  She had been warming up for her daily run when a
short rumpled man wearing an unambiguously English bespoke suit had risen from a bench, folded the pink sheets of his Financial Times under his arm and approached her, saying, “Mrs. Davis, my name is Hopkins. I wonder if I might have a word with you.”

  Ten minutes later, she was walking down the promenade overlooking a broad sweep of the Pacific Ocean while Frank Hopkins spun a story that had at first seemed ridiculous and surreal.

  He had said that her old friend, and lover, Alisher Byko was involved—somewhat tangentially—in a political conspiracy which had the potential to have a major negative impact on the entire Western world. MI6 knew she had been corresponding with Byko—had in fact been intercepting their email exchanges—and needed her to go to Uzbekistan to see him.

  According to Hopkins, Byko had gone underground and was unreachable due to some internal political conflicts in Uzbekistan. Her going to meet Byko was apparently the only way the man could be drawn out into public. They promised that Byko would not be harmed, that they just needed to talk to him. But Julie’s years of NGO work in faraway places had taught her to be suspicious of intelligence agencies.

  Bullshit, she had told him. Do you seriously think I’m that naive?

  Hopkins had persisted, giving his word that he’d told her everything, but she knew he was lying and walked away. He’d chased after her and reluctantly surrendered more. Thousands and thousands of lives were at stake, he told her. British lives. American lives. European lives. Then he showed her documents and photographs and played tapes of conversations. And finally he’d convinced her that Byko was . . .

  No! She forced herself to put all of that out of her mind. If she even allowed herself to think about what Hopkins had told her then Quinn would ferret it out. She had to make that into a blank spot in her mind.

  She fast-forwarded to her decision. Hopkins had stressed that there was very little time and he insisted that she not discuss it with anyone, not even her husband. Julie had felt terribly guilty as she spent that evening at home—cooking, playing with the children, engaging in small talk with Charlie. Everything had seemed so excruciatingly normal. But even then, she knew that she had to go.