Out of Range: A Novel (16 page)

Charlie stared at Hasan’s pistol, certain that he was next. But Hasan holstered the gun and buttoned his coat, expressionless as a man who’d just polished off some routine household chore.

With that, Byko rose and beckoned to Charlie. “Come. There’s something I’d like you to see.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

T
his way,” Byko urged.

He smiled and motioned to Charlie, heading up a dark flight of stone steps and through a doorway. With Hasan right behind him, and three other bodyguards ten yards down the hall, Charlie had no choice but to follow, joining Byko in what was a much smaller room than Charlie was expecting.

Unlike the rest of the building—which was decorated with ancient tile work—this room was brightly lit and antiseptic, with banks of computers, video monitors and communications equipment, all manned by a young Uzbek dressed in Western geek fashion—baggy jeans, trucker hat, a black T-shirt complete with a picture of Homer Simpson.

“Pull up the first interview,” Byko ordered.

Homer hit a few buttons and cued up Byko’s request. A high-quality video feed appeared on the largest monitor. Charlie could tell the video was taken by a wide-angle surveillance camera. The room in the video had white walls, a white tile floor and was lit with banks of fluorescent lights. Occupying the majority of the screen was a man with his back to the camera. Charlie could immediately tell it was Byko, but the person beyond him, the person Byko was talking to on-screen, was blocked from view.

“This was recorded several hours ago,” Byko informed Charlie, crossing his arms.

On-screen, Byko stepped aside, revealing Julie.

Her hands and feet were manacled, she looked strung out and haggard and desperate, but at least she was alive.

C
uffs,
Alisher?” Julie growled, jerking her wrists. “Come on!”

“You must understand,” Byko said. “Things are very delicate for me right now. I can’t afford even the tiniest mistake.”

Julie looked down at her lap, her long dark hair momentarily obscuring her face.

Charlie gave Byko a brief glance. He was staring fixedly, almost greedily, at the screen.

Julie’s shoulders began to quake. She made no sound, but it was obvious she was crying. Byko said nothing.
Finally Julie looked up, her face streaked with tears. “Don’t you understand, Alisher?” she said softly. “I love you!”

The words cut through Charlie like a swath of napalm. But it wasn’t just the words. It was the way she said them, filled with such ferocious conviction.

Byko did not speak.

“I’ve always loved you.” Julie strained toward him. “Don’t you know that? Don’t you remember how hard it was for me to escape from you at Cambridge?”

“And why did you?” Byko asked.

“Because I was afraid you were going to swallow me alive! It was too intense, what we had. You know that!”

“Then why did you come back here again?”

“Because I couldn’t fight it. Because I never stopped loving you, even after I married Charlie.”

Charlie felt Byko’s eyes on him and realized what a fool he’d been. Leaving Oliver and Meagan in Los Angeles, flying out here pretending he was James Bond, ready to save his damsel in distress when in fact she was no longer his damsel to save.

“Then why now?” Byko asked. “After all of these years?”

“Because I realized that I can’t sacrifice my whole life to be with a man I don’t love. He’s a good man, but he’s a shadow of himself and I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

Byko was sitting next to her now, his profile visible, his face betraying the depth of his conflict. “You think I don’t want to believe you? You think I don’t burn to believe these things you say?”

Julie slumped back, her head flopping in resignation. She stared up at the ceiling. Finally she sighed and locked eyes with Byko.

“I love you, Alisher,” she said softly.

“Then why did two hundred handpicked members of the Twenty-seventh Air Assault Brigade decide to join us for tea the other day?”

Julie shook her head wearily. “We’ve been corresponding for a year. Maybe the regime is tapping your phones or your email. Maybe you’ve got a mole in your organization. Maybe one of the waiters at the restaurant recognized you and ratted you out. Maybe the CIA located you with a spy satellite. I still don’t know who you’re hiding from or why. It could have been a million things. For God’s sake, Alisher, you have to believe me!”

Byko leaned forward and hit the keyboard, pausing the image on the screen. “Well?” he drawled, his face deadpan. “Do you think she’s telling the truth?”

Charlie couldn’t speak.

“Answer me, Charlie. Do you think she’s telling the truth?”

Charlie looked at the floor. “I do.”

Byko studied his face for several seconds, then smiled without warmth. “Unfortunately, I didn’t. So I let your friend Quinn take a crack at her. I was only just informed of the results.” He looked down at the young man in the Homer Simpson shirt. “Cue up what Quinn wants me to see.”

The tech hit the fast-forward button. The screen went blue and empty, nothing left but a digital clock in the upper-right-hand corner. Several hours scrolled by before Julie appeared again. When she did, Charlie could barely recognize her. Hollow-eyed and gaunt, her entire body shaking, she was a broken woman. And Charlie knew all too well what had done that to her. It was the red.

However angry Charlie had been toward her only moments earlier, however betrayed he’d felt, it all washed away, replaced by a tenderness he couldn’t have imagined possible. She was still the mother of his children and the love of his life—and to see her this way, reduced to this, was nearly unbearable.

Quinn walked slowly to a small table by the door, set down his syringe, then returned and squatted down in front of Julie, like a kind teacher about to console a child who’d skinned her knee.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Quinn said softly. He reached forward and brushed the hair back from her face, tucking it behind her ear. “Just tell me the truth and we’re home free. Then all of this goes away.”

Julie looked up at Quinn, her eyes hopeless and empty.

“I’m with MI6,” she said.

“MI6?” Quinn nodded. “You’re a spy for the British.”

Julie shrugged with defeat. “I wasn’t a trained agent. Somehow they found out about my correspondence with Alisher. They said that Alisher had gone into hiding and that they needed to locate him. Just to have a talk. In person. They wanted me to help them with that one thing.”

“Just to have a talk,” Quinn said dubiously.

“They said it was important. Very, very important. And I believed them.”

Quinn continued to grill her, but Charlie could no longer hear it. Because he was putting it all together now. Why she’d lied to him, why she’d been acting so strangely the last few weeks, why she’d run so quickly when Quinn tried to grab her at the gas station, why there were no charges on her credit cards for her flights—it all made sense. She’d been recruited by MI6 and they must have convinced her to hide everything from him.

Quinn
leaned in close to Julie. “And they never told you why they needed to speak to Alisher?”

“They said that he’d gotten involved with some dangerous people. That they thought they could help him.”

Byko switched off the video.

“What do you say about that, Charlie?”

Charlie took one look at Byko’s unforgiving eyes and understood the shift that had occurred just a few minutes ago, when Hasan had interrupted their meeting and whispered that Quinn had finally broken her. He knew that with this admission Julie had signed her own death warrant—unless Charlie could turn things around.

“She’s making it up!” Charlie said. “For godsake, that son of a bitch doped me up with that red shit, too. After about five minutes, you’d sell him your mother just to make him stop.”

Byko dismissed Homer with a flick of his wrist, took out his phone and hit two buttons. Charlie heard a semidistorted ring, then a voice on the speaker—“Yeah?”

Byko spoke into the phone. “I’m standing here right now with Charlie Davis.”

“Wow Charlie,” said the tinny voice. “I never figured you’d find your way out to our neck of the woods.”

It was Quinn.

“You lay another hand on her,” Charlie warned, “I swear to God I’ll rip your heart out.”

There was a brief delay then a burst of laughter from the phone. “He certainly has the American bravado,” Byko said to the speaker, one eye on Charlie. “Now how do we know his wife wasn’t just making up all that business about MI6?”

“Too many details,” Quinn replied. “Who recruited her, when and how. Information about her debriefings before and after Tashkent. She’s given most of it up, as far as I can tell. Though I can’t say I’m convinced she was drawing you out just so you could ‘talk’ to them. She’s even gone so far as trying to convince me that she was doing it for your own good, to protect you.”

“If that was the case,” Byko said, “she would have told me that when I first talked to her.”

“Agreed,” Quinn said.

“Okay, keep working on her.”

And just like that, Byko hung up.

“You know,” he said to Charlie, “for all we know, her NGO work was a cover. Maybe she’s been a professional spy all along. Even back in the day, was she using you to plant those stories about the regime?”

“You’re out of your mind,” Charlie snapped.

“You do realize that MI6 recruits over half of their agents from Oxford and Cambridge. I’m beginning to think that’s why she left me when university came to an end. Because she was heading off for her training. Of course, she ended up in Uzbekistan anyway when it was time to spy on me.”

“So she was spying on you and using me at the same time? That’s your theory?”

“She was sent here to investigate the potential for an uprising and possibly to help foment one. I suspect the Brits were just trying to put pressure on Karimov for more strategic concessions by stirring up the people. Then when it went too far, when we were ten thousand strong that day in Andijan and it looked like we might really create some instability, even topple the regime, they panicked and tipped off Karimov.”

Charlie looked at Byko incredulously.

“Haven’t you ever wondered how Karimov managed to mobilize his southern regiments to the square that day? I happen to know that it was MI6 who alerted the regime. Just as I know that it was the CIA who kidnapped and tortured my sister for eight days at Jaslyk. Not only is Julie a user and a liar, but she’s working for the wrong side. Has been all along. She helped kill my wife and son,” Byko said. “And she might as well have been the one who shot you in the back.”

“You’re wrong,” Charlie said, refusing to accept this. “If she was ever working for MI6, she was merely an asset like she said—recruited in the last few weeks because she knew you. They played her, Alisher. Isn’t that the more plausible scenario? That they told her she would be helping you and she bought it?”

“Come on, Charlie,” Byko said. “Does that sound like her? If she is who she led us to believe she was, would she ever have been so naive as to accept something like that? Coming from MI6?”

Byko shrugged and pulled out a .45. “Well, my friend, it should hardly matter now to you. Seeing as I have to kill you.”

“Alisher . . .”

“I spared you in Los Angeles. But now that you’ve come here, I really have no choice in the matter.”

Charlie held up his hands. “Alisher, listen to me.” Charlie was stalling, tap dancing, grasping at straws. “I know you’re a man of conviction. Of inherent decency. And you know that I have no love for the Western intelligence agencies. If you’re working against them, chances are that you’re doing something good. If it’s toppling this regime, you know you’d have no stronger advocate for that than me. I respect your . . .” Charlie didn’t want to overdo it. But instinctively he felt sure that there was no underestimating the man’s vanity. “I respect your purity, Alisher. Your rigor. I’m even a little in awe, I guess. It must take enormous will to do whatever it is you’re doing.” He paused, forcing himself to maintain a sincere expression as he delivered this absurd flattery. “But if you still feel a scrap of friendship for me—or any feeling for Julie for that matter—give me a chance to say good-bye to her. Give us a chance to speak whatever needs to be spoken. Let us go to our graves knowing that there’s nothing left unsaid between us.”

“You need to know who she really is,” Byko added.

“I do,” Charlie agreed. “Give me that before I die.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

C
harlie was sitting in the back of a Cadillac Escalade, hands secured tightly behind him with plastic flex cuffs. Two of Byko’s paramilitary goons accompanied him, one driving, the other seated in the back, a tricked-out AK-47 pointed at Charlie’s chest.

The SUV was tearing down a road leading toward a small range of hills to the north. Presumably it was all part of the same former Soviet military complex where the bathhouse was located. Infested with massive potholes and gaps in the tarmac, there was no indication that the paving had been improved in at least twenty-five years. But this didn’t stop the driver from keeping up a steady pace of close to 90 miles per hour.

“How far?” Charlie asked the man sitting next to him.

But the mercenary or guard or whatever he was stared at Charlie in stony silence.

Left to his own thoughts, Charlie reflected on his strange send-off by Byko. The man had shaken his hand gravely and said, “Well, I’m genuinely sorry it worked out like this, Charlie. I do hope you will be able to find some consolation in the fact that your sacrifice will be part of a greater movement, one that will propel us toward a better world.”

A better world? The overthrow of Uzbekistan would almost certainly be good for the people of this country, but it was grandiose, to say the least, to think that anyone outside this region would ever feel the impact of it. It made Charlie wonder—was there something else Byko had planned? Something less obvious than a coup? He was clearly angry with the West. Was it possible Byko’s plan was something on a grander scale?

As the car whipped around a hairpin turn, Charlie pushed all of these thoughts aside and tried to focus on coming up with a way to escape. He knew that wherever Julie was being held, it would be indoors, heavily guarded, probably fortified. Quinn would be there. And Quinn was not a guy who’d be bamboozled or outmaneuvered.

No, if he was going to get away, he had to do it now. Before they reached Quinn.

Charlie surveyed the interior of the Caddy with clinical interest.

The cabin was utilitarian. No weapons, no communication devices, nothing that would be of use. He studied the man next to him. Typical mercenary chic. Olive drab cargo pants, military boots, baseball cap, wraparound Oakley knockoffs, nylon rigger’s belt, Glock in a thigh holster and of course the ever-present load-bearing bulletproof vest that soldiers call a “plate carrier.” The plate carrier’s desert tan skin was covered with myriad pockets containing spare mags, med kit, flashlight, and a large fixed-blade knife in a Kydex sheath.

The man was slight and fit, with the barest tinge of the sadist showing through his impassive expression. Charlie guessed he was probably former Uzbek military. But in subtle ways Charlie could see the marks of Western training—the way he held his gun, the pistol grip of the carbine high on his chest, wrist cocked, trigger finger resting lightly on the frame of the weapon. Uzbek soldiers didn’t carry that way. They brandished their guns heedlessly, as though they were fishing rods or planks of wood. Odds were strong that this man had been trained by Quinn.

As the car bucked and slammed over the broken pavement, the first thought that entered Charlie’s mind was bribery. Byko’s men had frisked him back at the house but hadn’t bothered with his money belt. But eight grand and change? Split between the two of them? That would never be enough.

Next, he considered running. If he told them he needed to take a whiz and they pulled over, he could try making a break for it through the fields. But with his hands tied behind him, he figured he’d make it about ten yards before Quinn’s guy blew him away.

So bribery and flight were out of the question. The only option left was to somehow fight his way out of this. Which meant he needed his hands free and he needed a weapon. He made a subtle attempt to slide his cuffed wrists under his butt in order to pull them in front of his body, but realized that he was neither long armed nor flexible enough to accomplish the task. What then? Throw himself on the mercenary and
bite
the guy to death?

It was hopeless.

He’d have his five or ten minutes with Julie and that would be that. Call it a life.

He tried to imagine what those minutes would be like, how much needed to be accomplished. Demanding from her the truth, working through the anger and guilt, doling out apologies and forgiveness, coming to a reckoning and hopefully some kind of peace. Having one final chance to pull back her hair, to touch her skin, to kiss her lips.

On the face of it, the whole thing might be something out of a Shakespearean tragedy. Romantic and poignant and fraught. But Charlie knew that it would most likely end in pathetic fashion—them begging Quinn for more time only to find that he wasn’t feeling so generous; or in clumsy, brutal bloodshed, with Charlie forcing a confrontation he would inevitably lose, all the while knowing that he was leaving Julie behind to more torture and anguish and his children to a lifetime of loneliness and grief.

The children. Beautiful sweet Oliver. Mercurial luminescent Meagan.

Was this really it? Would he never see their faces again? Read them another bedtime story? Teach them baseball? Take them to the beach? Piggy-back them in the sand?

No. He would not allow his mind to go there any further. There had to be a way out of this. As long as he had breath, he could not give up. If he was going down, he was going down fighting. He assessed the situation again. The mercenary three feet to his right, gripping his bull-pup carbine, the hulk of a driver commandeering the Escalade faster than it had any right to be going on such a road.

The car hit an especially big pothole, shocks bottoming out as Charlie flew up, his head banging on the ceiling, his legs lifting up so far that his toes almost smacked into the driver’s headrest. As his body slammed back into the seat, a thought came to him . . .

The car.
The car itself was a weapon. If he could somehow find a way to harness it.

A sense of calculating calm settled over Charlie’s entire body. He remembered the same feeling sometimes when he played football, when the entire field seemed made of crystal—every player, every formation, every blade of grass sharply formed in his mind. And when he fell into that state of clarity, he had always known exactly where he needed to cut or spin, where to shuck a block, where to hit a man with every ounce of his strength.

He slid over slightly so he could see out the front of the vehicle. The road was climbing into a small mountain range and began winding in and out of the hills. At the highest point, the road followed the ridgeline for at least a mile, then took a hard jog to the left as it passed onto a bridge leading across what was likely a wild mountain river.

In an instant, a plan came into his mind, fully formed. A bit of distraction, split-second timing, perfect execution—if he played it all right, he had a chance. Maybe one chance in a hundred, but still . . . a chance.

The car rolled slowly through a series of hairpin turns, then accelerated sharply as it reached the straightaway running along the ridge. Charlie could see the speedometer climbing: 50 miles an hour, 60, 70.

The bridge was getting closer and closer, but still the car rolled on at full speed.

Charlie’s heart pounded in his ears. He turned toward the mercenary and gave him a knowing grin.

The mercenary’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

Charlie leaned back in his seat. He had to sell it perfectly. Not too quick, not too strong. One beat, two, three—still with the expression of amusement on his face. Then he eased himself forward in his seat—just the tiniest bit—and sneaked a quick I-can’t-help-myself glance out the window on the other side of the mercenary.

With all his gear, the mercenary would have to swivel his entire body around in the seat to look out the window, to see what it was that Charlie thought was so damn interesting out in the cotton fields.

They were almost to the bridge. But would the man take the bait?

Just as the driver hit the brakes so he could make the turn onto the bridge, the merc turned. And in that crystalline moment, Charlie knew he had it. He bucked his hips upward and thrust his back against the seat, jumping so hard that his feet cleared the top of the driver’s seat back. He looped his right leg around the driver’s neck, hooking his left leg over his own right foot in a tight triangle of muscle. And squeezed with all his strength.

As the moment slowed—the driver shouting and clawing at Charlie’s leg, the merc whirling back around and fumbling with the safety on his AK, the car braking with a juddering of antilock-brakes-assisted traction—he felt the driver lose his grip on the steering wheel.

The Cadillac swung right, fishtailed . . .

And then they were rolling, once, twice, three times . . .

Impact.