A Shadow Intelligence

by Oliver Harris

  The train was modern, but the cheap carriage felt Soviet-era as it filled with farmers and traders, women who sat down amidst bags of produce. Those who made the journey regularly settled themselves with blankets, the initiates stiff and staring at the small windows. I checked their hands and nails to see if they matched the clothes. I passed my vodka around. They shared lamb and flatbreads doled out of newspaper, the assassination smudged to whorls of black and grey. I told them I was from Belarus, which was as exotic and distant as England to them, but less worthy of attention. I said I sold electronic equipment, and was visiting my wife who was in Tashkent with her family, and was ill.

  China’s troop movements were on hold. The BBC showed Russian APCs rolling back from the Kazakh border. I had a message from Reza, curious about what had happened to Vishinsky: Suddenly off-radar. Call me. I deleted the message, then dropped my phone out of the window onto the tracks below. I saw Joanna’s serene death mask and felt, in some small way, I had completed the journey she had been trying to make.

  Bukhara, in southern Uzbekistan, had a tenth-century mosque rumoured to be built on the remains of a Zoroastrian fire temple. I’d always wanted to visit. I’d been told that a Sufi sect survived in the area, still worshipping God by staring into flames. The city had once been a great centre of world civilisation. I knew of a remote border crossing on the Zhanaozen–Turkmenbashi road where you could cross into Uzbekistan on foot.

  Around midnight the train stopped, troops boarded it and marched through, searching for something or someone. I felt torchlight in my face, and when it continued onwards I imagined the moment as a kind of benediction. We moved off again and five minutes later passed a lit platform with one guard holding a signal flag. A sign said Koshoba. You could see the scattered lights of oil derricks a few miles away. My companions fell asleep on each other’s shoulders, and I relaxed into the violence of the train, the relentless shudder of metal as if it had to drill through the space ahead of us.

  I wanted to see the fire temple and Bukhara’s fortress that had once contained a vast library of ancient manuscripts. From there onwards was straightforward: two nights in Dushanbe in Tajikistan, where forged paperwork would be available. Then keep moving south and east, through the world’s deep places: Kashmir, maybe Nepal. I would fix myself, regain equilibrium, until the day came when I looked up, met someone’s gaze and they looked away. It would turn out that they’d been asking after me. That night I’d unlock my room and the man would be sitting there, white and well spoken. ‘Elliot, excuse the intrusion, rather hoped you’d be able to lend a hand.’ No introduction is necessary. ‘Not much money in it,’ he explains, ‘but you might find it diverting. Needs someone like you: a field man.’ And I’ll show some reluctance before agreeing, mainly out of curiosity. Just to see, I’ll tell myself. What else is there to do?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to:

  Matthew Plowright, Tom Nuttall, Gulliver Cragg, Olga Nikonchuk, Yulia Erlykina, Stephanie Cross, Calum Murray, Thomas MacManus, Kuralay Kabdeshova, Rahat Tuyakbaev and his friend behind the bar, Clare Smith, Veronique Baxter, Judith Murray, Rana Feghali, Joanna Lillis, Ranjan Balakumaran, Neil Arun, Robin Forrestier-Walker, the Young Roots team, and one individual who has asked to remain anonymous.

  Very special thanks to Suzie Kim Jihyon.