The Outcast (8 page)

“It.”

“It. Him. The man. At the far end of the square.” He stopped, reconstructing the scene in his mind. “The man in the overcoat. Too heavy for the weather. The man opening his coat.”

“How did you recognise it?” Nergui said. “What was happening, I mean.”

“Doripalam,” Tunjin said. “One of those briefings. The US stuff on the war on terror.”

“I'd never seen you as the seminar type.”

Tunjin shrugged. “Easier than working. No, I thought it was quite interesting. Probably not very useful, but interesting. I take these things in, you know.”

“I'm sure. But you recognised it from that?”

“I suppose so. The stuff on suicide bombers. The film that Doripalam had. How to handle it. I thought it was nonsense here.”

“But you knew what to do when you saw it?”

“Yes. It was strange. I knew exactly what I was seeing. I knew how I ought to handle it. I knew there was only one way.”

“Immediate termination.”

“That's what they say. No time to give warnings, no time to disable the bomber. If you get it wrong, they've triggered the bomb anyway. All you can try to do is halt them before they can do it. Immediate termination.”

“And that's what you did.” It wasn't a question.

“That must be what I did.”

“And you had a firearm?”

Nergui had asked the question quietly, but the words again derailed Tunjin's train of thought. “No. Of course not. I don't carry a gun. Not off duty. Not on duty, if I can help it, these days.” Tunjin had trained as a firearms officer years before. He'd been a decent shot, once upon a time. Now, he wasn't sure he could keep his hand still long enough to pull the trigger.

“So where did the gun come from?”

It was growing dark outside, Tunjin realised. The sun had set, and the shadows were creeping into the pale room. The lights were on in the ward, but now he could barely make out the spider's web. “That's it,” he said. “That's what I've been asking. I don't know. It was there, suddenly. I didn't hesitate. I didn't think. I just used it.” He stopped. “I shot him.”

There was a long silence. “You did the right thing,” Nergui said at last. “You did the only thing you could have done. If you hadn't
done it—well, you didn't know what the consequences might have been.”

There was something in Nergui's tone. There was, Tunjin reflected, very often something in Nergui's tone. “But you do,” Tunjin said. “You do know what the consequences would have been.”

Nergui was staring past Tunjin, his eyes fixed on the blank glass of the window. “I do,” he said. “I do now. I have a luxury you didn't have.”

“Which is?”

Nergui shrugged. “Information.” He hesitated, as if suddenly aware of Tunjin's emotional state. “He wasn't a suicide bomber,” he said. “We know that now. He wasn't real. The bombs were fakes.”

The call came just as the pathologist arrived. It was typical, Doripalam thought. They'd spent all afternoon here, achieving very little, waiting for something that might shed some light. The scene of crime people had arrived with their usual lack of urgency, strolling in just as he'd begun to assume they'd deferred their contribution to the next day. They were painstaking enough, there was no question of that, but Doripalam wanted to urge them to move faster, cut a few corners, just to start getting some results. At that point, after an afternoon of fruitless interviews, he'd have settled for anything.

But there was nothing. He hadn't seriously expected that there would be. After all, this wasn't, actually the crime scene; it was just a place to which the body had been delivered. And, except for the blood of the victim, even the carpet seemed empty of any potential evidence. It had been removed for more detailed examination but he had little confidence that anything would be found.

Which left the body itself. The corpse had been removed earlier that afternoon, and the pathologist had been working on it since then, with all his usual mutterings about needing more time. Doripalam had insisted on an update that evening. There was little point in all of them dragging back across to headquarters, so he had asked the pathologist to come back to the museum.

And then, literally as the pathologist walked through the door, Doripalam's cell phone rang.

He gestured for the pathologist to sit down next to Batzorig, and impatiently answered the call. His mind was already distracted, focused on the thickness of the files under the pathologist's arm, wondering whether the size of the material would correlate to its value, but knowing from experience that the opposite was usually the case.

“I'm sorry,” he said at last. “Can you repeat that?” He had misheard or misunderstood what the caller was saying.

The caller, one of the control room team at headquarters, patiently repeated what he had said, “We think it may well be a bomb.”

Doripalam looked up at the two men sitting opposite. Batzorig looked as eager as ever, his enthusiasm undiminished by the hours of fruitless interrogation. The pathologist, a short mousey man with a constant air of grievance, wore an expression that suggested he had been unreasonably interrupted in some duty of far greater significance.

“A bomb?” Doripalam repeated.

“Well, we don't know for sure, but all the signs—”

“Where? I know you told me before, but tell me again. I'm not sure I'm taking this in.”

“A hotel, sir. On the south side of the city. Not one of the big tourist places.”

“Well, that's something,” Doripalam said and immediately regretted the words. That was the way things were going, he thought. His first instinct, faced with something like this, was to worry how it would play in the media, how it would affect his own position. “Are there any casualties?” he asked, conscious now that the question sounded like an after-thought.

“We're still trying to get in there.” The officer stopped, as if he had run out of breath. “The army team have just arrived. We're trying to find out if it's safe to go in.”

Doripalam nodded. He was listening to someone in mild shock, he thought. There were no precedents for this, no guidelines about
how it should be handled. “Okay,” he said. “I'm on my way.”

He ended the call and looked back up at Batzorig and the pathologist, who were staring at him quizzically. The pathologist was thrusting forward the pile of bulky files, with the air of a child trying impatiently to conclude the formalities of delivering a birthday present so he could get on with enjoying the party.

Doripalam stared down at the files. “Is there anything useful in there?”

The pathologist looked startled, as though he had been asked some unexpected and wholly unfair question. “Well, you know we can never be definitive, and there's even less to go on here than—”

“Nothing, then?”

The pathologist glared at him. “There's a lot of detail—”

“I'm sure there is.” For a moment, Doripalam gazed back at the hunched figure, wondering whether there was anything to be gained from this conversation. “We're very grateful for your hard work. And thank you for taking the trouble to bring it over.”

“Yes, but—”

“You'll appreciate,” Doripalam said, waving his cell phone gently in the other man's face, “that it's not really the priority just at the moment.”

There was smoke and dust everywhere. It was difficult to distinguish between the two, but the smoke caught suddenly in the back of the lungs, acrid and choking. It hit Gundalai unexpectedly, as he stumbled blindly down the corridor, his eyes still unaccustomed to the dull glimmer of the emergency lighting.

This was how people died, he thought. Not from the blast or the flames, but quietly, when they thought the worst was past. Their brains ceased to function, and they succumbed to a threat they hadn't even known was there.

He thrust out his hand against a doorway, trying to work out where he was. He didn't think he'd come far. Although it was difficult to be sure. He recalled the blast, the sudden glare, the extraordinary noise, as if the whole place was collapsing in upon them. The screaming …

And then what?

There was a period of time he couldn't grasp, that had somehow slipped beyond his memory. He had no idea how he came to be in this gloomy smoke-filled corridor. And he had no idea how long it had taken.

He took another step forward, his head still bowed, unseeing, uncaring about his direction but just trying to keep moving. To keep breathing. To keep alive.

And then his hand touched something cold and smooth, but noticeably a different texture to the plaster wall he had stumbled against before. Wood, he thought. A wooden door.

He pushed it hard with both hands, and then nearly fell back in despair as it failed to move. His fingers slid across the smooth surface of the door, searching for a handle, some form of purchase. There was a raised rectangle at head height—a window. His hands moved down, fumbling to the left and right until he found the cold stainless-steel doorknob.

Grasping it in both hands he turned it frantically. For a moment there was no movement and panic threatened to overwhelm him. Then he twisted it around once more and felt the door open in front of him.

Cool, clean air struck him in the face, and the dense grey fog was replaced by a battery of dazzling lights. He staggered out, retching, his throat and eyes raw from the rasp of the smoke. Almost immediately, overwhelmed by the glare and his own confusion, he lost his footing, slipping on the smooth tiled floor. He rolled, striking his shoulder painfully on the hard ground, and lay for a moment, trying to regain his breath and his bearings.

As his coughing subsided, he opened his eyes and stared up at the high ceiling above him. He was back in the hotel lobby, only metres from the room where the meeting had taken place. Apart from his own coughing and the internally exaggerated sound of his own breathing and heartbeat, there was an odd, unexpected silence. He had envisaged a mêlée of screaming and shouting and police sirens. Instead, it was as if there was a breathless audience out there waiting patiently for the next development.

He twisted his head, trying to work out what was happening. The frontage of the lobby was a series of large plate-glass windows, stretching across the façade of the hotel, facing out on to the street. The glass had been shattered by the blast, and innumerable glittering shards lay scattered across the polished tiles. Outside, there was darkness and the temperate air of the summer's evening.

And then, from his low vantage point on the floor of the lobby, he saw them.

Ranged across the deserted street, a line of blank-faced, uniformed officers and an array of unwavering rifle barrels.

Beyond the window, the pale glow of the streetlights was faintly echoed by the scattering of stars in the clear summer sky. Nergui glanced at his watch. Ten thirty. There were still a few people wandering through Sukh Bataar Square, mostly students and tourists enjoying the end of the warm evening.

From this high vantage point, Nergui could see most of the square. At the far end, flood-lit, was the newly constructed memorial to Genghis Khan. Another symbol of the 800-year anniversary. Another symbol of the state of this country.

The project had been vastly behind schedule. There had been serious doubt about whether it would be completed in time for the country's national day, the date of the memorial's official launch. Another embarrassment for the government, although only of the kind that most people expected these days. Nergui had observed the minor scandal with equanimity, his own minister was not involved. The security minister was, indeed, likely to benefit from any political fall-out, as he witnessed yet another of his rivals overwhelmed by the irresistible force of events. The minister had, to date, been a lucky politician. As Nergui was only too aware, this was a kind of skill in itself, but one that tended not to last forever. And now Nergui wondered whether the minister's luck was finally running out.

In another mood, Nergui might have enjoyed the irony. Bakei had never been one to let the facts stand in the way of a career opportunity. He took every chance to talk up the terrorist threat, astutely applying phrases such as “homeland security” to ensure that any proposed response sat squarely within his remit.

It was a smart enough tactic. You create a perceived threat, and then make sure that you're the only one with the capability to deal with it. Your colleagues defer to you because they don't want to risk being proved wrong. And they're quite happy for you to face the consequences if you are proved right. But that means, for the
present, they have to let you take the credit for being courageous enough to face up to that possibility.

Nergui had never had any doubt about the minister's courage, at least not in political matters. He struck while others were still wondering whether to risk picking up the knife. That was why everyone—especially Bakei himself—saw him as a future prime minister or even president.

In any case, Nergui had no doubt that if anything did go wrong, it would not be Bakei who took responsibility. It was no accident that over the last year or so the minister had assiduously built up Nergui's public profile alongside his own. By raising Nergui's profile, the minister gained a ready-made scapegoat. If things went wrong, it would be Nergui's neck on the block.

The thought didn't particularly trouble Nergui; there were more important things to worry about than political machinations. And clever as Bakei was, Nergui thought he was probably smart enough to keep at least half a step ahead.

But suddenly it was beginning to look as if these questions were no longer merely academic. Something was happening out there. Nergui didn't yet understand quite what it was, but a suspicion was stirring in his mind. And if he was right, then it really did look as if the minister's luck might finally be running out.