“So who are we talking about?”
“Fringe groups. The kinds of people who’ve been organising the protests.” He spoke with a contempt for extra-parliamentary action that could only be mustered by a former secret policeman. “They’re hardly an organised force—a cluster of idealists, I guess you’d say, sir.” He paused, allowing the ambiguity of the second-person pronoun to hang in the air. “But potentially a threat to public order.” He succeeded in implying that this was the very worst kind of threat.
“So why would our young men be in touch with this group?”
“Well, that’s the question, sir. It’s not clear who initiated the contact, or whether the students were in contact with this group before their arrival here. Or even whether the students even knew quite who they were talking to. We’ve listened repeatedly to the recordings we have of their conversations and calls, but they didn’t give much away. Obviously we missed their initial discussions.” There was the faintest implication, perhaps, that this had been the fault of Nergui’s tardiness in authorising the operation. Nergui had already detected in Lambaa an instinct for political survival that easily matched his own.
“So what were they talking about?”
“Some kind of operation. The nature of it wasn’t clear, but there were references to something being planned.”
“Doesn’t sound like much, given we’ve had them under full surveillance for a week. Maybe they were just planning another tribute to the birth of the Mongol empire. Students are generally looking for an excuse for a party, I’m told.”
Lambaa looked pained, though it was unclear whether he was more affronted by the implied criticism of his own performance or by the flippant reference to their national heritage. “Something more than that, sir, I think. Some kind of covert operation.”
“But what kind of covert operation?” Nergui said. “Assuming they’re not just ordering the vodka and beer.”
Lambaa sat back in his chair, as if the whole conversation had been leading up to this moment. “Terrorism, sir,” he said.
Nergui blinked at the quietly spoken, anonymous-looking man sitting opposite him. “Terrorism,” he repeated, trying to keep any note of cynicism out of his voice. “And you’re sure about that?”
“Pretty sure, sir.”
“But you don’t know what the nature of this covert operation actually is?”
“Not in detail, no.”
Nergui shook his head slowly. “Forgive me if I’m being a little slow on this one, Lambaa. But do you actually have any evidence to support any of these assertions?”
Lambaa looked up, smiling broadly now. “Yes, sir, as it happens, I do.”
It seemed to Nergui now that this meeting had occurred a lot longer ago than just three days. It was like looking back into another life, a world where all this discussion had been hypothetical. In Nergui’s mind they had been two professionals speculating on possibilities, his own scepticism buoyed up by decades of experience of over-stated threats, imagined enemies.
But now suddenly it was real. It was here, on his doorstep, impossible to ignore or rationalise away. It was baffling, incomprehensible, illogical. But it was here, and it was as real as Tunjin’s sleeping body.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Doripalam had borrowed a flashlight from one of the uniformed officers, but the thin beam made little impression on the hazy dark. The smoke and dust hung motionless in the warm summer night, the fumes harsh at the back of his throat. Ahead, he could make out the occasional flicker of another flashlight, but he had lost sight of the officer who was leading them to where the body had been found.
“I suppose it would be possible for them to be less helpful,” he called back to Batzorig. “Though I’m not quite sure how.”
“Never high on the local agenda,” Batzorig said, inches behind him. “Helping out the visiting team from HQ. Especially when we’ve just snaffled a juicy case from under their noses.”
“We’re here to lighten their load.”
“But always unappreciated. I don’t know why we bother.”
Doripalam was placing his feet warily. The narrow alleyway was cluttered with several years’ worth of accumulated rubbish. At this time of the year, it might be a favoured sleeping area for some of the city’s homeless. Directing the flashlight warily around him, he spotted, behind a row of overflowing refuse bins, a bundle of blankets that might well be someone’s stowed bedding.
The end of the alleyway came suddenly, and Doripalam stumbled out into a small open area, his flashlight beam lost in the smoky space. To his left, along the rear of the hotel, he saw a rectangle of deeper darkness—a double doorway, gaping open. He flicked the light across the wall and found the local officer, leaning against the doorway, a lit cigarette in his mouth.
“Maybe not the smartest move,” Doripalam said, “if there really is a gas leak.”
The man shrugged. “I don’t smell it,” he said. “Do you?” Nevertheless, he tossed the cigarette to the floor and ground it out under his boot.
Doripalam stared at him for a moment, trying to make out the officer’s expression in the dim light from the flashlight. “This the place?” he said, finally.
The officer gestured towards the open doorway. “In there,” he said. “I’ll wait out here, if that’s all right with you.”
Doripalam stepped forward, playing his flashlight across the gaping doorway. “Not really,” he said. “We’re all in this together, you’re supposed to be guiding us.”
The officer stared at him for a second, as if wondering just how much Doripalam’s authority was actually worth down here. Then he nodded. “If you insist,” he said. “I don’t think any of us will want to stay in there any longer than we can help.” He switched on his own flashlight and shuffled slowly through the doorway, Doripalam following close behind.
The smell struck him at once. Not strong—the body had clearly not been here for long, given the heat of the day—but unmistakable even through the acrid burn of the smoke.
“Where is it?” Doripalam said, trying not to breathe too deeply.
“There,” the officer said, lifting his flashlight. The pale light ran across a row of wooden crates, piles of some kind of fabric, a clutter of old machine parts.
The body was lying behind all of this debris, face up on the filthy concrete floor. Doripalam had to concede that the local officers had carried out their jobs with some rigour—it was surprising that the body had been spotted at all.
He moved forward and shone the flashlight into the narrow space. The body was wedged between the cold stone of the wall—dripping with damp even in the height of summer—and the jumble of discarded rubbish that dominated most of the room. The limbs were twisted awkwardly, the head at a disturbing angle, as if the neck had been broken. On the face of it, though, that did not appear to have been the cause of death. The cause of death was, most likely, the ornate-handled knife protruding from the victim’s T-shirted chest.
“Probably not an accident, anyway,” Batzorig said, inches behind Doripalam.
“Not overcome by the fumes, either,” Doripalam replied, moving slowly forward. He looked up at the local officer. “Nobody’s touched the body since it was found?”
“What do you think? Don’t imagine anyone’s been down here to do an impromptu post mortem.”
Doripalam glanced up at the young man but said nothing. Instead, he leaned over the body, getting as close as he could without touching or disturbing it. He had already put in a call to the scene of crime team and the pathologist, but he recognised that neither would be in a hurry to arrive, given the demands they had already faced that day.
The body was male, its hair trimmed very short, balding slightly at the crown. The head was thrown back and angled towards the wall, but the cast of the face did not look Mongolian. It was difficult to make out much more. The body was clothed in the now blood-stained T-shirt, a leather jacket—apparently fairly new, good quality—and a pair of denim jeans. Proba
bly a relatively young man—no more than thirty or so at the most. Thin, but quite muscular.
Doripalam played the flashlight beam gently around the supine body. There was no sign of any other possessions, nothing that the victim might have dropped. To the left of the body there was a rapidly coagulating pool of blood, evidence that the murder had indeed been committed here.
He flashed the flashlight beam back towards the door, where the young local officer was leaning. “Was it you who found him?”
The young officer nodded, less cocky now, more sombre. Perhaps, Doripalam thought, he had been more shaken by his first sight of a dead body than he had wanted to admit. “There were two of us,” he said, after a pause. “We’d been asked to check out the back of the hotel—make sure the fire was properly out, check if there was any other damage. You know.”
Doripalam nodded. “Where’s your colleague?”
“Out front somewhere. I think the chief asked him to look after things out there. I’ll find him for you if you need to speak to him.”
“Later we will,” Doripalam said. “You didn’t spot anything else?” His voice was less dismissive now of the young man. He wondered whether he had volunteered to act as their guide back here, or whether the local chief had given him no choice.
The young man frowned, clearly taking the question seriously. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I mean, it was too dark to see much at all. We were just looking around, looking for anything obvious. We didn’t want to get too close to the building.”
“In case there was another explosion?”
“Yes. Or some damage done to it. You know, falling masonry, things like that.”
“So what made you look in here?” Doripalam said, shining his flashlight around the narrow storeroom. The walls were badly plastered, cracked and stained with damp. The dark corners were thick with dust and cobwebs. “It might have been risky.”
The young man nodded, his eyes wide as if the reality of this had only just occurred to him. “I—We just thought we ought to look in here. At least to check. I mean, after the guy out front—”
Doripalam looked up sharply, glancing across at Batzorig, who had been systematically shining his own flashlight around the floor of the room, peering for anything the young man might have missed. “What do you mean?” Doripalam said. “What guy out front?”
The young man blinked, his eyes bewildered. “Well.” He stopped, as if searching for the right words. “The man with the gun. The man they picked up.” He halted again, obviously now reading the expression on Doripalam’s face. “Didn’t the chief tell you?”
For a long moment, Gundalai had been dazzled by the spotlights. Then, as his vision cleared, he remained crouched, transfixed by the row of rifle barrels. He could make out no faces, just blank silhouettes, helmets glinting in the brilliant light, and behind them the endless clouds of dark billowing smoke.
It took him several seconds to realise that, though the rifles were pointed in his direction, they were not specifically aimed at him. He was still crouched in the shadows at the rear of the hotel lobby, outside the unrelenting glare of the spotlights. The rifles were aimed at the main doors, which, like the glass frontage of the hotel, had been shattered by the force of the blast.
Gundalai shifted forward tentatively, trying to work out what was happening.
He didn’t know who was out there. The police? The army? Or someone else? He didn’t know who or what they were looking for, or why their weapons were trained so fixedly on the hotel entrance.
He didn’t know what might make them shoot.
Gundalai looked behind him. He had no desire to make his way back into the smoke-filled corridors. On the other hand, it was a preferable option to being gunned down.
He moved back slowly, inch by inch, trying to ensure that his movements would not be detected by the gunmen outside. Already, he could feel a catch in his throat as the smoke caught him. He closed his eyes, imagining the stinging fumes, the slowly thickening air.
He had almost reached the doorway to the corridor before he felt the cold, clean air. Not the breeze that had stirred from the hotel entrance. He was too far back for that. Something different.
He looked to his left. Beyond the hotel reception desk, almost hidden in the dark corner of the lobby, there was another doorway. It was open, blackness beyond it. The scent of fresh air.
Gundalai climbed slowly to his feet, edging backwards, his eyes fixed on the gaping frontage of the hotel. In a moment he was at the doorway, and he stepped out into the cool dark.
His eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, and he realised he was in a short passage. The walls were bare plaster, the floor nothing more than stone slabs. A route for the hotel’s staff rather than its guests.
The passage opened into an unlit alleyway, its gloom intensified by the shade of an adjoining building. He hesitated for only a moment; behind him, the options were either gunfire or asphyxiation. To his left, the alley ended in the blank glare of the spotlights at the front of the hotel. To his right, there was only darkness.
His instinct told him to head towards the light. He would have more options in that brightly illuminated space than in some unlit uncertainty. He began to make his way down the alley, keeping his back to the wall of the hotel. He could hear voices, the sound of movement. Somewhere, there was the distant hum of traffic and, beyond even that, the far-off sound of a siren. He couldn’t be sure whether it was moving closer or drawing further away.
Scarcely breathing, he reached the end of the alley, and peered cautiously around the corner of the building. There was a crowd of people there, still clustered close to the hotel, though uniformed officers were present, easing them back; other men in overalls were anxiously struggling to erect metal barriers.
Gundalai moved to his right, away from the building, back into the darkness, and slipped unobtrusively around the outsides of the barriers. He shuffled along behind the crowd, attracting an occasional curious glance. He must look a mess, he thought. His clothes and face were grimy from the dust and debris in the hotel corridors and he reeked of smoke.
He didn’t know what he was doing or why, and it occurred to him, as if observing someone else, that he was probably in a state of shock. He stopped, trying to clear his head, apologising automatically as someone in the jostling crowd bumped into him.
There was no reason to be running away. He had nothing to hide. He was a victim here. The police would want to speak to him, would be trying to tally the numbers of those who had been in the hotel. He should make himself known, tell them he was safe.
And that thought brought another. He needed to find Odbayar. He needed to check that he had emerged from the explosion unscathed. Gundalai had given no thought to the wider effects of the explosion. He had no idea how close they had been to the blast, or how much damage it might have done.
He twisted around, struggling against the crowd surging against him. He began to push his way back towards the police cordon, intent now on making himself known.
Then he stopped, his eyes caught by something to one side of the barriers. To the left of the hotel, past the alley from which he had emerged, was a patch of waste ground. Some building had been demolished, perhaps with the intention of developing the land, but to date nothing had been done and the space appeared to have been abandoned.
It lay unlit in the shadow of the hotel, but was given some illumination by the battery of spotlights erected on two police vans facing the hotel. In the corner of the waste ground, there was an unmarked white van. Next to the van there were three figures engaged in some kind of altercation. Two of them—apparently uniformed police officers—were holding the third. And it was the third figure who caught Gundalai’s attention.
It was Odbayar, his arms pinioned by the police officers. For a moment, Gundalai thought his eyes were deceiving him—that he was seeing his friend, perhaps injured, being supported by the officers clustered around him. But he peered into the darkness, and knew that h
e had been right. Odbayar was struggling, pulling against the men’s grip.
As Gundalai watched, Odbayar ceased struggling and fell forward, limply, as if he had been struck hard on the back of his head. At the same moment, the battery of spotlights shifted momentarily—Gundalai glanced around and saw that one of the police vans had moved to allow another metal barrier to be erected. By the time he looked back, the three figures had gone and the van was pulling away, disappearing into one of the streets to the rear of the hotel.
For a moment Gundalai wondered whether he should try to prevent whatever might be happening to Odbayar. Perhaps he should try to attract the attention of one of the officers behind the barrier, explain who he was, explain—since they had clearly made some dreadful mistake—who Odbayar was.
But his better judgement held him back. If they were behaving like that towards Odbayar, why should they treat him differently? He moved slowly back into the crowd, trying to think what he should do next. There was, he thought, one obvious place he could go. One place that, perhaps, he should go. But he wasn’t ready for that yet—he didn’t know what the implications might be. He had to think it through. He needed someone he could talk to, someone with the right connections, the right knowledge. But someone he could trust.
He could think of only one person.
WINTER 1988
He held his breath for a moment, then walked forward into the icy darkness. Before there had been the occasional distant hum of traffic, a car or truck passing on the main road. As he stepped into the park, the sound fell away with an unexpected suddenness, lost behind the shelter of the trees.
He was taking a risk, he knew that. But he’d been taking a risk throughout. This was what his life had been leading to. The contact was his now. He had built the relationship from a distance, unwilling to trust any of the local agents on the ground. He knew this was his one chance.
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