The Reluctant Hero (22 page)

The captain was, as Martha had been told, signing off on his load sheet that recorded fuel, weight and passenger numbers on board. The only other person
present was the co-pilot. The captain appeared distracted, head down, not best pleased at the interruption, but when he looked up, his expression softened.

‘Mrs Riley, isn’t it?’ he asked, his accent suggesting that home was somewhere near Bristol. ‘Saw you on the box the other week. You didn’t take any prisoners, I seem to remember.’

‘Then you’ll know I don’t dick around, Captain.’ The smile faded. This clearly wasn’t a courtesy call. He shifted in his seat. She had his full attention. ‘There are a couple of my parliamentary colleagues seated in first class. One is Harry Jones . . .’

The captain’s eyes indicated he recognized the name.

‘So there are two things you need to know, Captain. The first is that Mr Jones has made himself deeply unpopular with the Ta’argi authorities.’

‘I seem to remember he has something of a reputation for getting himself into scrapes . . .’

‘More than that. I think someone has tried to poison him. He’s not at all well. Whatever happens, it’s imperative that he leaves on this flight and the Ta’argis aren’t allowed to take him off.’

The captain’s brow creased. ‘Once he’s on board, Mrs Riley, he’s pretty much legally on British territory. They’d have to use crowbars to get him off.’

‘I don’t think that’s likely to happen. I just want to get him home.’

‘Well, we’re almost done with our pre-flight checks. Another ten minutes or so, we should be on our way.’

‘Thank you, Captain.’

‘Poisoned, eh? Sounds like you’ve had a lucky escape.’

‘Not quite.’ She took a deep breath. It was the moment for decision. She hadn’t been certain that she was capable of carrying through with what she had in mind. She stood on the very edge, suffering from vertigo, trying to ignore the nausea rising in her stomach, remembering Sid Proffit’s words that everything that had happened had been Harry’s choice. She also remembered she had a life and a one-eyed cat to feed back home, but – what the hell, where had playing everything straight got her? And that’s all she had back home, a cat. So she jumped. ‘There’s the second thing you need to know.’

‘Which is?’

‘I’m not coming with you.’

The captain couldn’t hide his surprise. ‘Can I ask why?’

‘Unfinished business.’

‘Well, that’s your choice, I suppose. But it’ll delay things. We’ll have to unload your baggage first.’

‘Not necessary. I have none.’ And it was true. Sid Proffit had taken care of it, all the baggage receipts were on his boarding card.

‘I see.’ The captain fell silent, ransacking his memory for the regulations covering this situation and pondering the downpour of corporate crap that awaited him if he got it wrong. ‘I can’t force you to fly with us, Mrs Riley.’

‘Some other time, I hope.’

‘But if the rest of us are to get underway on schedule, I’m going to have to ask you to leave. We’re about to close the doors.’

‘You don’t need to inform the Ta’argis that I’m getting off, do you?’ It was more plea than question.

‘I have to fill out an LMC – Last Minute Change – on the load sheet. But that’s all. The Ta’argis are notoriously poor with their paperwork, and my handwriting’s rubbish. It might be days before they decipher it.’

‘Thanks.’

He nodded. She turned to leave.

‘Mrs Riley.’

‘Yes?’

‘On this plane, you’re safe. But the other side of that cabin door isn’t. You’re a long way from home. Please take care.’

Beg slid beneath the water in his bath tub, so slowly he caused barely a ripple. He let out a long sigh as the water closed around him, carrying him away from the weariness that had seeped into every one of his bones, and from the fug of cigarette smoke that had taken over in his bedroom. That was unusual for Beg, he’d often go days without a cigarette, yet sometimes his dark moods would gather and he was a man who preferred to keep his comforts close at hand, totally private. But he’d been surprised to discover there had been a continuous stream of cigarettes in the last couple of hours,
ever since the phone call. He’d lost track somewhere along the way. Too much to think about, too many concerns. And his hands hurt so.

Through the window of his bathroom he looked east, to the Celestial Mountains, where the embers of time were being fanned gently back to life. That’s where he was from, the mountains, with the villages and communities huddled beneath the peaks, where the herds were still driven up to their summer pastures and where, during winter, when the snow reclaimed the earth, the mountain people gathered round their fires and the
akyns
sang their songs of long ago. Amir Beg had promised himself that one day he would go back there, for good, leave the corruption of the city for the simple wooden chalet he had built beside the Shimmering Lake, where, during the summer months, he would sleep in a felt-covered yurt, like his father had done. No TV. No telephone. Just old ways and enduring loyalties. Leave Karabayev, his casinos and his petty conquests far behind. Slowly he lowered his hands into the water, but quickly lifted them again as the water seemed to scald. The pain was getting worse.

It hadn’t always been like this, with Karabayev. There had been a point when they had shared their lives, studied at the Lenin University together, in the Soviet time. It was when the Russians had got stuck in Afghanistan, getting their eyes gouged and their balls hacked off, and the terror had spilled over the mountains into Ta’argistan. Beg and Karabayev had been
part of the nationalist movement, kids’ stuff, really, but that hadn’t saved them. They, and many more, had been rounded up and fed into the vast machinery of retribution and repression that Moscow had kept oiled almost to perfection. Beg had had it worst, three years of it, to the point where he would fall asleep every night praying he wouldn’t wake up in the morning. He’d lost count how many times they’d crushed every one of his knuckles with hammers, but he wouldn’t submit.

Karabayev’s passage through the machine had been altogether smoother, and substantially shorter. Somehow he’d managed to talk his way out, done some sort of deal, so it had been rumoured. He was always doing deals. But what could you trade to get out of a prison cell, except, of course, other lives? And by the time the Russians had retreated from Afghanistan and their empire came crashing down, Karabayev had transformed himself into a symbol of national resistance, while Beg was left to pick up the pieces of his life – not that he could pick up much at all. So Karabayev slept in the Presidential Palace, while Beg chain-smoked through the night.

Through the window, Beg could see the light slowly building up behind the mountains. That was another of his concerns. Something was going on up there, in the shadows of the peaks. In the last few months there had been a noticeable rise in the number of foreigners visiting Ta’argistan – it was officially encouraged, since
visitors brought with them vital foreign currency, but too many had been making the trip to the mountains for Beg’s taste. They weren’t tour operators with an eye to a new market or backpackers chasing spiritual salvation and cheap drugs, these were businessmen with mining connections. The excuse was the old mines down which the Soviets had tipped all their radioactive garbage, and which in the minds of some nervous observers now threatened to turn into some sort of ecological doomsday whose every rad and roentgen would be the match of Chernobyl. So an international consortium had been created to tackle the situation, paid for by international busybodies like the UN and European Union, and administered by foreign companies. That was the obscenity of such projects; fabulous sums of aid were promised by the West, but all of it seemed to end up in the pockets of companies back home. And what in the name of God did thick-necked thugs like Kravitz know about nuclear waste? No, there was something else going on, Beg could feel it in his aching bones. Foreigners had never brought Ta’argistan anything other than death and despair, and those huge dumps of irradiated trash. They came and helped themselves to everything, including the President’s wife, then left. Well, not this one. That bastard was going nowhere. Ever.

God help him, but his hands hurt! It was as much as he could do to hold the cigarette that, to his surprise, he was smoking. Here in the bathroom. He shook his head
in self-mockery. There was too much going on. Time to sort it. Starting with the foreigners. Well, one, at least.

Martha had to force herself not to run. She paced herself as she walked from the plane back to the VIP lounge. No one was there to stop her, no security to shout foul, no men in well-pressed suits demanding to see her passport. They had all gone to other duties. On the other side of a glass wall the airport was beginning to grow busier, with people milling around waiting for a flight to Istanbul. She could see passengers lining up to have their hand luggage checked; one elderly woman in an embroidered native headdress was quarrelling furiously with an official about her oversized bag that seemed to be stuffed to bursting point with thick
nan
flat breads. Didn’t they bake bread in Istanbul, for pity’s sake? The cautious customs man was beginning to tear one apart, anxious about what might be inside. The woman screamed in objection, almost in tears. No one looked in Martha’s direction.

The door to the VIP room was as she had left it, locked open, when their host had left them alone. She drew it back, very slowly, expecting to be accosted by accusing eyes, but the room was empty and she scurried across to the door on the far side. Then she was through, into the main concourse. No one challenged her. Those in the growing crowd had their own distractions with their unruly children and aged parents, tickets, Tannoy
messages, luggage, or had their attention fixed on the TV monitors in the waiting area that were showing an ice-hockey match. A Russian league match. It seemed the empire wasn’t yet dead.

Suddenly she stopped, flooding with alarm. Barely a few yards away, talking to a security guard with a dinner-plate hat and a Kalashnikov hooked over his arm, was the official who had said farewell to her only minutes earlier in the VIP lounge. It would take only a turn of his head and she was undone. But he didn’t. She hurried on, through the swing doors and back into the freezing dawn of Ta’argistan.

The power came back on and the single bulb in the cell snapped back into life. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, Harry looked around him. He was in a space no more than ten feet square, with walls and floor constructed from rough-hewn stone and substantially older than the Soviet-era prison built above it. There were no windows, only a small funnel that led upwards from the ceiling and was connected, he presumed, to a primitive and spectacularly inadequate ventilation system. There were bars across the funnel, which in any event was too small for a man to slip through.

This had once been a storage cellar, Harry guessed, and he was surprised how damp it seemed and how much moss and slime grew on its walls, until he realized that the damp was condensation created by the
prisoners, whose bodies provided the only source of heat. The cell was entirely devoid of furniture except for a rough wooden pallet six inches off the floor, on top of which lay a thin straw palliasse stained so deeply that it was impossible to tell anything about the colour of the original covering. It was riddled with holes where the rats had gnawed. A slop bucket glowered from the far corner. Apart from that, and the solitary bulb, there was nothing else, except for the pervading stench of things rotten from which he couldn’t escape, even when he closed his eyes. It was like being buried at the bottom of a medieval garbage pit. Harry had been in worse places – always when he found himself in difficulties, he reassured himself that he’d seen worse and survived. Only problem was, right now, that he couldn’t remember when. Now he realized why Zac had been so determined to press on him the chess piece; it was a connection with the world outside, fuel for the imagination, something that might sustain hope. A few hours in this place and that tiny horse would grow to almost mythical dimensions.

But Harry wouldn’t be here long. Already he was forming a plan. The prison’s security had been tried and found wanting, the bolts on the door were disgracefully illfitting and the battered lock was loose. What more did he need, apart from a little luck? He had a way out, by the same route he’d broken in, and although the lighting and CCTV had been restored,
they would only prove a problem if the guards lifted their heads from their trough. Yet they were bound to be dozy, and he would be quick, like a rat in the shadows. He would be out tonight, once it was fully dark, so long as no one looked too closely in the meantime and they left him alone. Why, he reassured himself, once he was on the other side of this door he was already halfway there!

The sound of approaching activity echoed along the passageway, interrupting his thoughts. The morning breakfast inspection was underway, but not yet close at hand. Harry hated simply sitting still, waiting, while his mind was agitated and his imagination on fire. He had a little time before the inspection arrived with its inquisitive eyes, so he crossed to the door, the barrier between him and his escape route, the door that had swung open so easily during the night. Too easily, perhaps? He couldn’t afford for a loose lock to arouse suspicion. On the other hand, he needed to be able to break it once more.

He nudged the door. It was satisfactorily tight. He put a shoulder to it, with the same result. A flood of uncertainty began to leap around him. He squeezed his body between the doorjambs, placing his back against one and his foot against the other, and heaved with all his strength, then heaved again, and again, until his heart began pounding in his ears.

Nothing.

Without Mourat’s persuasive talents and four tons of
pressure from the hydraulic spreader, the lock was going nowhere.

And neither was Harry.

Martha stood in the shadows of the airport car park beneath the branches of a leafless tree, struggling to come to terms with the enormity of what she had done. God in Heaven, it was cold. She wasn’t prepared for this, had rushed, been impulsive, was wearing clothing that was entirely inadequate for standing in a car park, let alone anything else. She had brought nothing with her, apart from the contents of her handbag.