The Reluctant Hero (15 page)

‘Christ, this is a mess,’ he muttered.

Ah, just business, then. ‘That’s why you’ve got me,’ she said.

‘No, Martha. I can’t let you, not now.’

‘Patronizing bastard. I think I’ll make up my own mind.’

‘There are too many risks in this.’

‘I never thought it was a game.’

‘Look, they say Zac doesn’t even exist. So if we get him out and he gets paraded in front of every humanrights
commission on the planet, it’ll cause them tremendous damage. They’ll do anything to stop that.’

Anything.
The word hung between them.

‘And being a woman, being a Brit, won’t protect you,’ he continued. ‘The gunboats will never make it this far up the mountains.’ He had to tell her, make sure she understood.

‘We still have gunboats?’ she enquired. ‘How sweet. Anyway, I’m an American, only a Brit by adoption.’

‘Martha, this is your chance to bow out gracefully. It’s getting much too dangerous.’

‘Have you forgotten? I don’t do graceful, Harry. And you can’t do this on your own, can you?’

His silence told her she was right. She retrieved the pillow and tossed it back to him. ‘You’re going to need more than pillows for this one, Harry. And right now I’m the only alternative you’ve got.’

Martha knocked urgently at Sid Proffit’s door. She didn’t have much time. She found him packing for his trip to the dam, throwing his clothing distractedly into his battered and much-travelled suitcase.

‘Damn you, Martha,’ he said. ‘I was comforting myself that at least I’d have you to look at on this ridiculous trip up the mountains, but now you’ve decided to play Florence Nightingale I’m left with nothing but that wanker Roddy.’ He was being deliberately provocative; he enjoyed it, in his nature, a moment of mild revenge for the times he’d scraped up against the rough side of Martha’s tongue. He threw a couple of pairs of faded and overstretched underpants onto the heap.

‘Sid, I want to ask you a great personal favour.’

He stopped fussing over his underwear and turned slowly to her, tugging thoughtfully at his beard. ‘There was a time, my dear, when those words would have reduced me to a state of total servitude. But that was before the afternoon in the Tea Room you referred to me as a ludicrous old wreck. Very loudly. Over baked beans on toast, I seem to remember.’

‘That was in jest,’ she protested, a little feebly.

He raised an eyebrow, and continued with his packing. It hadn’t been
one of her more memorable moments, even she had to admit to that, but she was surprised to discover that the words still rankled; she’d never thought he paid much attention to anything she said, which was perhaps why she sometimes went over the top. Now she felt awkward.

‘Sid, this is really important. I need your help. I want to ask you not to go on this trip. To come home on tomorrow’s flight.’

‘An early bath, away from Roddy? With you?’ he teased.

‘With Harry and me.’

‘Oh, Harry, is it? Pity. Always thought that three’s a crowd.’ He was hamming it up, he owed her nothing.

‘I’d be so very grateful.’

He closed the suitcase lid with a thump. ‘Sorry. Just finished packing for the mountains.’

‘Please!’

He sighed. ‘Look, Martha, I don’t know what this
is about, but I do know that you don’t much like me. It’s all very well tramping round the corridors of Westminster denouncing me as you do, but what have I ever done to offend you? You want to get up on your high horse, that’s your business, but don’t expect me to follow behind you with a bucket and spade clearing up your mess.’

‘Have I been that much of a pain?’

‘Yes.’

She chewed on her lip. ‘Well, things have changed.’

‘Oh, really,’ he muttered, disbelieving.

‘Can’t do without you.’ She attempted to appear playful, even a little coquettish, but she was desperately out of practice. She was making a mess of it.

He snapped the locks shut.

‘Sid, it’s really important.’

‘Which is really sad.’

‘Give me five minutes to explain.’

‘Roddy is already waiting downstairs.’

‘What do I have to do, offer you my body?’

His eyes fastened on her, like an angler with a sudden bite. Any trace of humour had gone, replaced by an air of quiet sorrow. ‘Twenty years ago, for sure. Maybe even ten. But now . . . I have to leave things to my imagination, dearie.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call me that.’

‘Given what you’ve just offered me, I think I’ll call you what the bloody hell I like.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m making a mess of this.’

‘And since you are the one who raised the subject, I’ll tell you something. I think a few good nights of rumpty-tumpty’ – God, he was showing his age – ‘would do you good, woman. You go around the place casting aspersions like the Spanish Inquisition. Relax, for pity’s sake. Give yourself a chance – give a man a chance! Don’t waste your entire life poisoning the well just because at some point in the past one or two miserable specimens have run off with your bucket.’

‘Don’t judge me, Sid.’

‘Don’t have to, Martha. It’s written all over your face. You accuse a man with your eyes before he’s even opened his mouth.’

He expected to unleash a whirlwind of rebuttal, but instead he was alarmed to see her gasp, bite her knuckle, clearly distressed by what he had said. Her vulnerability trickled through, and as he saw her suffer, he softened.

‘No reason why I should say this, Martha, no reason at all,’ he muttered, ‘but you’re better than that. In my opinion.’

She hung her head in silence. It was an unusual condition for her, and he knew it. ‘Why do you want my help?’

‘A friend of Harry’s, here in Ashkek. He’s in trouble. Right up to his neck, and almost beyond. We don’t have much time. We’re trying to help.’

‘What would I have to do?’

‘Just be ready to come home with us tomorrow.’

‘Is it worth that much to you?’

‘I offered you my body, didn’t I?’ she replied, attempting a weak smile.

‘You’re an aggravating bloody woman, Martha Riley. So what if I pretend to be a bit if a rogue? A woman like you should be able to see through that. I’m nothing but a harmless old idiot whose bits are falling apart but . . . well, who likes to take his imagination for a stroll around the block occasionally.’ He wiped his moist nose. ‘Beats going straight back home to a lonely supper.’

Suddenly she saw not the sulphurous predator that lived in her mind but a rather frightened, lonely old man.

‘I’m so sorry, Sid.’

His beard bristled once more, as though attempting to frighten off the enemy. ‘I’m way north of seventy, I’ve got varicose veins and an enlarged prostate. And you think I can help.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, if it’s a choice between you and bloody Roddy . . .’ He paused. ‘He made it plain to me this morning that I had rather overstayed my welcome here.’

‘So . . . you’ll help us?’

‘I do so love a dominatrix.’

‘Thank you!’

‘I’m not helping you, mind, nor Harry either. I’ll be helping myself. Sounds like a bit of an adventure, and
I can do with a bit of adventure at my time of life. Need to feed that imagination, you see.’

‘You’re wonderful.’

‘Oh, and that offer of yours? Well, give me a few days and a new doctor – and who knows?’

Martha walked out of the hotel with a shopping bag over her shoulder. The guard outside Harry’s room didn’t try to stop her, just watched all the way down the corridor.

It was her first chance to see the city of Ashkek from any viewpoint other than the back of a speeding government car or minibus. As she walked from the hotel, the Union flag was fluttering in the car park, along with the Stars and Stripes, and the Russian, Chinese and several other flags. Yet the car park itself held no cars. It had been dug up, the crumbling tarmac and concrete left in untidy piles where the architect’s plans had called for trees and bushes. As she found her way across uneven pavements, taking care to avoid the open storm drains, she discovered a different world. Ashkek was a city still only half completed, yet already half destroyed. Those parts that had been built during the near-eighty years of Soviet rule had, in the twenty years since, been under attack from a combination of natural forces and human neglect. She came across construction sites, abandoned for so long that trees were growing through the empty windows. Everything seemed covered in a blanket of brown winter dust. She
passed a motorist leaning wearily over the wing of his old Moskvitch, the bonnet up, looking forlornly at his engine, his slumped shoulders suggesting this wasn’t the first time, his sighs of frustration condensing around his head. Meanwhile, along the road behind him came a Mercedes SUV, all black and chrome, freshly cleaned, darkened windows, glossed tyres. It rushed past in the direction of the Presidential Palace.

As she walked, the solid tin sky squeezed lower, as though it had become too heavy for whatever was supporting it – the air had grown bitterly cold, too cold for snow. Martha hurried along on her errand. She followed Harry’s directions and found the Fat Chance Saloon without difficulty. It was as he had described it – a basement jazz club filled with old smoke and worn sofas, but no clients, not at this time of day. Instead, youngsters huddled round computer monitors in the alcoves, deep in conversation, tapping away or excitedly sharing some new idea or nugget of information. Martha sensed their enthusiasm was infectious but it didn’t seem to extend as far as Bektour and his mother, who she found arguing ferociously in a corner by the tiny, overstocked bar. They stopped when they saw her. The mother was red in the face.

Harry had already agreed with Bektour the means by which they might get Zac out of the prison; it was Martha’s job to explain how they intended to get him out of the country. As Harry had set out the plan to her, it seemed so simple it was almost laughable – in fact,
Martha had laughed, until she looked into his eyes and saw only total focus, and behind that, as though reflected in mirrors, a fleeting glimpse of something she thought was fear. Now she, in turn, told Bektour and his mother, and they looked at her in similar disbelief. ‘Harry says he’s sorry, but he hasn’t had time to think of anything more complicated,’ she explained. Bektour smiled, but the irony seemed to pass Benazir by.

There were other things he had thought of; clothing was needed, boots, too. Harry had given her a list that she had memorized. And the timings.
Everything
depends on the timings!
he had told her, grabbing her
wrists as though she might run off and tell Sydykov. Not that there would have been any point. He would-n’t believe what they were planning.

When she was finished, and was sure they understood, Martha thanked them, and told them that when she and Harry returned to Britain they would do everything in their power to make sure that Bektour’s cyber group was placed on a sound footing. He needed money, and they would make sure he had it, along with other things that money couldn’t buy in a place like Ta’argistan. Like a fully qualified systems administrator, and encryption software so good it would leave the authorities in Ashkek drowning in their wake. Plus the latest hardware, subscriptions, and any satellite access they might need. Harry and she had money, backed by friends in universities and foundations who would be willing to sustain them.

‘I know what we’re asking,’ she said, ‘but it’s only for a few hours. Tomorrow we’ll be gone. I know it will take much longer than that to change Ta’argistan, but this is the sort of thing that can tip everything in your favour.’

Bektour bounced with excitement. ‘Mother, this is what we’ve been waiting for, what we’ve dreamed about.’

She brushed aside his enthusiasm with a scowl, yet he wouldn’t be beaten down.

‘All those years you and Father fought, all the times you’ve suffered. But at last we can make it worth while. Now it’s possible to bury their lies, sweep them away in a tidal wave of information. We can beat them with weapons they don’t even understand!’

But Benazir didn’t seem to understand, either. She sat behind her bar looking sullen and suspicious. ‘It’s too risky,’ she insisted.

‘Wasn’t it Father who said it was a greater risk to do nothing? Much like Mr Jones.’

‘How can you trust these people?’ she spat. ‘

Distrust is Karabayev’s weapon, not ours,’ he replied softly.

She would not be comforted. As Martha walked up the steps to the street, night was already falling, and Bektour and his mother went back to arguing.

Karabayev looked from the window of his presidential home towards the outline of his capital several kilometres in the distance. Before him stretched a path
of lights, like an airport runway, that led to his palace in the city centre. The Avenue of Heroes, it was called. The trees that bordered it were immaculate, its paving fresh, its kerbs and signage cared for as though they were prime livestock. It was the only adequately lit road in the country, but soon there would be more lights. Close to the city, but out of sight of Karabayev’s windows, they were building three new casinos. Ten per cent of the action would find its way into the President’s pocket as a guarantee of official favour. And from somewhere, somehow, there would be those who would find the money for the tables – visiting Kazakhs and Uzbeks, mostly, particularly when the recession had paled and their oil wells were pumping at full capacity again, but some Ta’argis, too. Then the foreigners would restart their building programmes, new houses in specially created suburbs where they could escape with their money from the prying eyes of their own countrymen. A tax haven. Ta’argistan would become the Switzerland of Central Asia. Well, somebody had to plan ahead. What else could you do in a country that had fuck-all except irradiated rock?

He took the glass of orange juice that had just been presented to him on a beaten metal tray and raised it to his nose. He could smell the orchards. He sipped it carefully, but methodically, until it was gone, and held out his hand for more. From beside the fireplace, Amir Beg waved away the offer of a second glass.

‘So what are they up to, these Britishers?’ the President demanded.