The Reluctant Hero (16 page)

‘Some are off to the dam to play with the water pumps. The others are going home.’

‘May devils pursue them.’

‘One of them has brought the devil with him. Causing trouble. Keeps asking about our American guest.’

‘So what have you done?’ Karabayev asked, suddenly cautious.

‘I told him that we know nothing. And I have put an armed guard outside his door until he leaves.’

‘Double it.’

Beg nodded, taking care not to let his anger show. Damn him! Why was it that Karabayev always interfered, as if he knew better, wouldn’t trust him, even after all these years and everything Beg had done?

‘So why didn’t he try to bribe you?’ the President asked.

‘He did.’

‘How much?’

‘I never asked.’

For the first time the President turned from the window to face the other man. ‘You did well to refuse.’

Once again, Beg nodded.

‘But you should have told me,’ the President added.

Criticism. Always criticism. A man who piled his insecurities so high that one day he would surely stumble over them . . .

‘It’s under control,’ Beg replied.

‘It had better be.’

It sounded like a warning. Beg struggled hard to swallow his resentment. Regular practice made it no easier.

‘So what have you done with that piece of American shit?’ The President couldn’t bring himself to utter the name of the man who had screwed his wife and made such a fool of him.

‘We have fed him, brought him round. As you instructed.’

‘Good – excellent! I want the bastard to know what’s happening when we string him up.’

Martha had stopped on her way back to the hotel to purchase a couple of sweaters – made in China, presumably from recycled plastic bottles, cheap but bulky, which she shoved into her bag. She was, after all, supposed to be on a shopping trip. She also bought two bottles of very fine Russian vodka. Pshenichnaya. Forty per cent alcohol.

When eventually she returned to the hotel, she was dismayed to discover that there was now not one but two guards in the corridor outside Harry’s room, although the old crone appeared to have been given the night off. Martha put on a smile for the guards as she walked towards her own room. They were young, probably conscripts, seemed uncomfortable, and kept their eyes fixed firmly to the front until she had passed, after which she sensed their eyes had glued themselves firmly to her disappearing arse.

As soon as she had closed her door she lifted the phone and asked for four glasses to be brought to her room. She also ordered two meals, and a couple of DVDs – a comedy and a biopic, only recently released in the West and almost certainly counterfeit. While she waited, she began to pack her suitcases, all the time glancing at her watch. Harry had emphasized, timing would be everything.

The room service took ten minutes longer to arrive than she had anticipated, on a trolley under the command of a youth with a lopsided grin. She jumped at his knock; she couldn’t suppress the tension building inside her. It was twelve minutes to seven by the time she began pushing the trolley, now complete with the bottles of Pshenichnaya, out of her own door and down the corridor towards Harry’s room. She had changed into one of her new sweaters, brightly coloured and filled with static electricity so it clung closely to her body, a fact which the guards couldn’t fail to notice. She smiled at them once more, broadly, full in their face; this time their eyes faltered, stumbling in distraction between her sweater and the bottles of vodka. They even helped her open Harry’s door.

‘Harry!’ she called out. ‘You feeling better?’

A wan smile delivered from his bed suggested there had been some marginal improvement.

‘I’ve brought you dinner.’

One of the guards even pushed the trolley into the

room, saluting them both, his gaze lingering a little too long on Martha before he turned and left. As the door closed, Harry nodded in appreciation. ‘Ah, food.’ He nodded after the guard. ‘And I see you make a very good tart.’

A couple of minutes later Martha was back in the corridor, carrying one of the bottles of vodka and three glasses. She set these down on a hallway table beside a vase of faded artificial flowers and, looking at the guards, held her thumb and finger an inch apart. They shook their heads in denial. Then she filled the glasses. The young men watched her as closely as if she was priming a bomb. She took one of the glasses for herself, and nodded for the guards to take the others. For a moment they hesitated, flustered, but she raised her glass to her lips. ‘To the revolution!’ she toasted, and drank. It tickled like butterflies on the way down, but about three seconds after reaching her stomach turned into a nest of squabbling polecats intent on testing their claws. Twenty years earlier, back in her white clapboard sorority house, she had downed buckets of tequila with salt and lemon chasers. She winced. God, she was out of practice.

The guards glanced up and down the corridor, as though expecting the arrival of a punishment unit led by their dog-breath of a captain, but everything was silent, particularly now that Bowles and the others had left for the mountains. Their eyes were drawn back to the encouraging smile of Martha, and the vodka, which
would have cost each of them a week’s wages. They wavered in indecision. It was bad manners to refuse a foreign guest, especially a woman, and this one was not only well connected but also particularly well constructed. The decision was made. Screw the captain, even better his wife. They drank.

Fifty kilometres away, up in the mountains, Roddy Bowles was also raising his glass along with Bobby Malik, who was showing little of the Muslim orthodoxy he was prone to preach around his constituency and was well on his way to a state of alcoholic serenity. They were in a rough wooden chalet, more guest house than hotel, with huge log fires and subdued lighting – even here, beside the dam, the power supplies seemed stretched. The darkness and the warmth wrapped around them like a cocoon, an impression of comfort enhanced by the solid food they had eaten, and the ubiquitous vodka. Sydykov was there, too. It was he who poured.

‘Well, if you absolutely insist, perhaps one more,’ Malik said, affecting reluctance, settling in an armchair beside the fire.

‘But Mr Malik, in my country it is an insult not to finish the bottle. Please – relax. Enjoy a little Ta’argi hospitality.’

‘When in Rome,’ Bowles joined in, chortling, a throaty sound, as though coughing up his innocence. He raised his glass; the vodka was cold, as though it
had slipped from a mountain top all the way down a glacier, and tasted of lemon.

‘It’s a pity your other colleagues could not join us,’ Sydykov said, refilling their glasses, ‘but at least it will allow us to make faster progress.’

‘
Much
faster progress,’ Bowles replied, arching an eyebrow in emphasis.

‘I shall be sorry in particular to see Mr Jones leave,’ Sydykov lied. ‘I think I would have enjoyed getting to know him.’

‘That I very much doubt,’ Bowles muttered, his voice dripping in scorn. He held up his glass, inspecting its contents by the light of the fire as if they held the answer to all things. ‘You know, wherever that man goes he has the uncanny knack of leaving a long trail of trouble behind him. Bull in a china shop, as we say.’

‘I understand.’

‘The man still thinks he’s in the SAS.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The SAS. The Special Air Service. It’s one of our wilder military units. He was an officer. Didn’t you know?’

‘No,’ Sydykov said, his glass pausing halfway to his lips. ‘We knew so very little about Mr Jones. We were expecting Mr McKenzie.’

‘See what I mean?’ Bowles said, turning to Malik. ‘Harry Jumped-up Jones. Nothing but trouble.’

He tried to pass off the remark with a lighthearted chuckle, but a log on the fire spat in confirmation.

‘I had no idea . . . that Mr Jones was a soldier,’ Sydykov said softly.

‘Well, that was twenty years ago. But he’s the type that doesn’t seem able to leave it behind – you know the sort. Best time of their lives, all that stuff and nonsense. Gloryhunters, really.’ Bowles knew he was going too far, and glanced at Malik, but the younger man didn’t seem ready to contest the point, rolling the glass between his palms and staring into the fire.

It wasn’t often Bowles could relax like this, let his hair down, be totally frank, and the smoky atmosphere encouraged informality. The vodka helped, too. ‘Jones has been lucky, managed to help the Queen out of a bit of a scrape during the State Opening of our Parliament a couple of years ago. Got himself a George Cross for his pains – not that he really deserved it, just happened to be in the right place at the appropriate time, if you ask me. Ended up killing a man, though. A rough bugger, is Harry Jones, ’scuse my French. Unpredictable. Unreliable. Unelectable, too, in my book, and goodness only knows how he manages to hang on. Frankly, as head of this little delegation of ours, I didn’t want him with us in the first place, and I’ll be as relieved as a dog at a lamppost when I know he’s aboard the plane and on his way back home.’

He sat back, feeling better for his outburst, as though he had purged himself of a secret that had long been bothering him. He drained his glass and let his head
sink into the back of the chair, enjoying the moment. He was startled to see Sydykov rising to his feet.

‘Mr Bowles, please forgive me for just a moment,’ the security man apologized. ‘I have just remembered. I have to make an urgent telephone call.’

The DVDs were pirate copies, fuzzy, inferior, the artwork on the sleeve run off on a photocopier, the sound emerging as though through a sock, but it gave Harry and Martha cover while they talked.

‘You look different,’ he said, as they huddled close together on the bed, backs against the pillows.

‘How?’

‘I miss the dressing gown.’

‘Keep your mind on the job, Jones,’ she said, but a reluctant smile turned up the corners of her mouth. The vodka had had its effect.

‘A soldier’s perks. Before the hour of battle. Alcohol and sex,’ he suggested.

‘In my experience, that’s what every man regards as his perks, whatever the circumstances,’ she countered.

He turned on his elbow to look at her from close quarters, his tone no longer flippant. ‘Your experience, Martha. What’s it been?’

She flustered, discomforted by such a direct question, but perhaps it was another of those soldier’s perks before the hour of battle, the right to dig for the truth.
‘My experience? Like most women. Too broad,’ she replied.

‘Then why are you doing this?’ he asked softly.

She hesitated, studying her knees. ‘I’m not entirely sure. It’s a question I’ve been asking myself.’

‘Doubts?’

‘No, not that, it’s . . .’ She seemed to be on the point of a conclusion before habit drew her back behind her defences. ‘Anyway, what about you? You gave me all that bullshit about friendship and loyalty.’

‘No bullshit.’

‘But it’s not just that, is it? This sort of thing keeps happening to you, Harry, putting your neck on the line, finding trouble. You go looking for it. It’s as though you’re always testing yourself, having to prove yourself to others.’

So, she’d noticed. Not so much a stranger, after all.

‘Something in me, I guess,’ he replied. ‘From my father. He was a tough bastard – at times too damned tough.’

‘You, too?’

The heat that had crept into Harry’s voice was as nothing compared to the pain that suddenly flooded into hers. She had to gasp for breath, the room went cold. She lowered her head in embarrassment, and in shame.

‘My father was rich,’ he continued slowly, giving her time to recover, ‘some would say excessively so. A bit of a financial gangster. He worked hard and played hard.
Too hard. When I was a kid he told me there were no rules and gave me no limits. He let me live the high life. It was guilt, I guess, for the way he had treated my mother. I look back and I remember room service all the way, everything first class. Holidays. Parties. Sports tickets. And women. He took care of that, too, when I was still only sixteen. Then I grew up and he decided my childhood was over, so he dumped me. Forced me to stand on my own feet.’

‘You hated him?’

He shook his head. ‘No, not really, except about Mum. I loved him, most of the time. I just didn’t respect him very much.’ He took a deep breath, as though he had run a long way. ‘And you, Martha?’

‘I hope he’s rotting in hell, where he belongs,’ she whispered. The words came like old dust escaping from an opened coffin. ‘He wasn’t interested in me standing on my own feet. He wanted me on my back.’

‘You serious?’ And as he looked into her eyes, a door opened, just a fraction, but enough to allow him to peer inside and catch a glimpse of things that were hidden deep away. He saw a different woman, lonely, cautious, pitifully damaged, one who had more in common with him than he cared to admit. ‘So that’s why . . .’ As soon as he had uttered them, he bit the words back, but it was too late.They both knew what was in his mind.

‘What?’ she demanded defensively.

He shook his head.

‘Why I’m a professional man-hater. Is that it?’ Her tone was suddenly bitter, full of resentment, as it so often had been.

‘Martha, I have no right to judge . . .’

‘From the age of ten until I was seventeen, Harry. While you were on your yachts and . . .’ The hazel eyes were melting with resentment. Why the devil should he have had it so easy? ‘Until I found another man to run away with. He was almost as old as my father, and barely any better. In the years since, none of the bastards have been. As far as I’m concerned, they should all burn!’

‘You know that’s not true.’

‘What? You expect me to be fair? Offer some smug homily about give-and-fucking-take? With my legs up in the air? Turn over, girl, and take it?’

‘No, not at all . . .’

‘Alcohol and sex. A soldier’s perks,’ she sneered.

‘Look, Martha, I was wondering. When we get back to London—’

‘
If
we get back,’ she snapped.