The Reluctant Hero (23 page)

As she cowered beneath the tree, shivering, trying to struggle through the thick mud of uncertainty oozing into every corner of her mind, she heard the whine of aircraft engines. Two Pratt & Whitney turbofans were roaring, rising in pitch until the air around her started to shake. As she watched, the flight to London rose into the early morning sky. Within twenty minutes it would be out of Ta’argi airspace. Zac Kravitz was on his way home.

She found no sense of exhilaration. An icy wind bit at her ankles and carried away with it the courage that had bubbled through her only a short while before. She was standing in the corner of some foreign plot, freezing, and suddenly frightened of her own stupidity. It was all very well being carried off in the heat of the moment, but there was work to be done. Harry’s life
might depend upon her. She realized that she hadn’t the slightest idea what she should do.

He sat on the filthy straw, his mind brimming with despair. If he couldn’t get out of this putrid cell, Harry knew he was lost, totally and most comprehensively screwed. On this side of the door, there was nothing for him but disaster.

He scanned the cell once more, desperate for something he might have overlooked, but he found only scratchings on the wall. A date, from seven years ago. A phrase in Russian he couldn’t translate but which looked like a prayer. And a name. Polina. With a single word beside it.
Proshaite.
Farewell.

He dragged his thoughts away from what these marks implied; he had other priorities. He could hear the morning inspection drawing closer, and he began to reassess his own situation, realizing how vulnerable he was, particularly with the light back on. He cursed his idiocy – he still had Julia’s watch on his wrist. His lucky charm. Yet it seemed to have lost its magical powers, had even become dangerous, was something that could betray him. It had to be hidden, the head torch, too, which had been tossed into a corner during the chaos of Zac’s departure. The only hiding place was in the straw palliasse, and he quickly stuffed them into one of the rat holes, just in time. There was a clatter outside the door; he curled himself into a ball, like a hedgehog, back to the door, and stirred only enough to show that he was still alive.

There was a crash as a hatch at the bottom of the door was swung open and a metal bowl pushed through, scraping along the floor. Suddenly, Harry tasted fear, a cold, metallic sensation in the back of his throat that persisted, no matter how hard he tried to swallow. He became aware that the guard hadn’t gone, and was watching him through the grille.

‘Food, you bastard. Move!’ the guard growled, kicking the door.

Harry had to obey. He rolled over, very slowly, tried not to catch the guard’s eye, hung his head, collected the bowl, crawled back. The bowl contained a foul mess of porridge with some form of animal fat mixed in, coagulated, cold, made from oats milled so roughly that the husks came along too. No spoon. He tipped the bowl, took a mouthful, had to struggle to force it down; it tasted of soap. The guard was still watching. Harry took another small mouthful. Only then did the guard disappear.

Dejectedly, Harry climbed from his mattress, moved across to the slop bin, and poured the rest of the mess away.

Martha wasn’t the sort to dwell on her misery. Dealing with her father had taught her that. She sat in a taxi making the trip back into town, past the power station, its chimneys belching new smoke into the skies. Around her the people of Ashkek were stepping out to their daily grind, wrapped in caps or headscarves
against the cold, waiting for clapped-out buses with grimy windows and dirt splashed up their sides. At an intersection the taxi drew up alongside a police car, an aged Lada, and she had to struggle against the temptation to give herself away by sinking down into her seat and revealing her guilt. Already the driver was studying her in the mirror, a frown scratched across his face; did he suspect?

‘Where?’ the driver asked as the taxi drew away, its exhausted suspension giving a heave as it found yet another pothole. Martha merely waved down the road towards the city centre. She didn’t know where to go.

She desperately needed help. Yet Britain had no embassy in Ta’argistan. There was an honorary consul, should she contact him? Or the US Embassy? But they would be able to do nothing except ask questions – questions that Harry could ill afford to have answered. She thought about trying to phone the Foreign Office in London, but back there it was barely past midnight and by that time of night the princes had turned back into frogs. For now she was stranded in a strange place with no man to shout at, other than a taxi driver who understood scarcely a word of English. She was helpless. She felt fear closing around her like a fist, just as though she were still waiting for the creak of her father’s footstep on the stairs. Somehow now, as then, it felt as though it were all her fault.

‘Where? Where?’ the driver demanded yet again as they started hitting the suburbs.

Suddenly she realized there was only one place she could go.

‘The Fat Chance Saloon!’ she shouted in the driver’s ear, as though sheer volume would force its way past any lack of comprehension.

He scowled, waggled a finger in his abused ear, and put his foot down.

Amir Beg was also being driven through the capital. He no longer saw the huddled masses and the decaying streets that in his youth had fuelled his passions and screamed to him of injustice; nowadays his cares were more directly personal. He knew he was obsessive, couldn’t let things go, wouldn’t delegate or trust others. It was a fault, but it was his nature. That’s why he’d been alarmed by Harry Jones. Beg had recognized in him another remorseless soul who wouldn’t pass things by. But now he was gone, and Beg was relieved. Time for unfinished business. The American, Kravitz.

He wouldn’t be the first to die at Karabayev’s insistence. Wasn’t it an indisputable fact that the entire wretched country was dying? The President was a dangerous and vindictive man, and Beg was in no doubt that if he put a foot wrong, it would be his turn, too. The dreams he and Karabayev had once shared together had long since burned in the fires of the other man’s ambitions.

Beg had new dreams. In them, the President was strung up beside the foreign prisoner, his neck bent,
his body swinging lifeless. In one snap of the trapdoor Ta’argistan would have been cleansed of two sources of infection, the years of growing humiliation that Beg had suffered at the other man’s hands set aside. Yet, for the moment, at least, it was nothing more than a dream. Today, only one would die.

The sun was rising above the streets, the day moving forward. It was time.

‘The Castle,’ he snapped at his driver.

The guard, whose name was Bolot, turned from Harry’s door and began retracing his footsteps, his mind whirling as he tried to decode the meaning of what he’d just seen. It made no sense. He was barely nineteen, had only been in the job a few months, yet he wasn’t an idiot and knew that surprises weren’t welcome, least of all down here in the Punishment Wing. His anxiety quickened his pace, and soon he was running, his footsteps echoing back from the stones until he had reached the security gate. He began rattling the bars, demanding he be let through.

‘Who put the bee up your bum?’ his colleague on the other side muttered, dragged from his magazine and reaching lazily for the keys.

‘Come on, camel breath!’ Bolot spat in impatience.

‘What’s the matter, your sister caught crabs or something?’ the other man replied, making a point of fiddling with the keys, very slowly, taunting. When at last he unlocked the gate, he was almost bowled over as Bolot rushed through and past him.

‘She didn’t have crabs the last time I fucked her!’ the
other guard called after him, but in vain. Bolot didn’t stop, vaulting up the steps to the main level two at a time.

Bolot was a straightforward, unimaginative soul, a minor link in the chain of command. It was his intention to report to the duty captain. The captain was a sanctimonious prick, to be sure, married to Bolot’s cousin, on whom he cheated regularly, but he was the one who had provided Bolot with the job in the prison in the first place, and he was the one in charge of the duty roster. With luck, after what he was about to report, Bolot reckoned he might get a promotion away from the breakfast slop duty, and maybe even extra leave. The thought drove him on, too impetuously, for as he flung himself into the officer’s room he found not the captain but no less than the deputy governor, his balding head bending over his breakfast.

The deputy governor looked up, a face ready to spit bullets. ‘This had better be good,’ he growled in warning, his lips dribbling crumbs of bread.

Bolot hesitated, panting from his exertions and the excitement. ‘It’s . . . it’s . . .’

‘Get on with it!’

‘The American, sir.’

The deputy governor’s eyebrow rose, suddenly cautious. ‘What about the American?’

‘I think he’s wearing sports shoes . . .’

Martha had always been impetuous, ever since . . . well, ever since she’d left home. One of her first lessons in life,
get your retaliation in first, girl, while their minds are off duty, halfway up your thighs. Never stand still long enough to encourage them, always move on, and that’s what she’d done, from every relationship she’d ever formed, even from her marriage. No sticking place. That’s why men, even her political masters, had so much difficulty dealing with her, and why she’d never made it to the ministerial corridor; she pretended it was prejudice, glass ceilings and all that misogyny crap, but it was also partly down to her. She growled at them like a Rottweiler even while she was running, kept ducking responsibility, never allowing anyone to know how scared she was.

So why was she still here? She could simply have kept running, stayed on the aircraft, as they’d agreed, but something had got to her.

Harry. Bloody Harry, that’s what. Turning her world on its head.

Yes, she’d like to be back on his bed, making a mess of his sheets, no denying it. She might distrust a man’s intentions but she still had her needs. Yet it was more than that. She’d found herself being drawn not just to the muscle but also to the man inside. She recognized a fellow sufferer, another wanderer in the desert, someone who would understand. Why else had she blurted out all that stuff about her father?

She was tired of running away, putting on a front, smiling when she hurt, pretending it didn’t matter all the nights she was on her own with no one for company, still
waiting for a creak on the stair. Yet now, as she stood freezing in front of the Fat Chance, she found herself growing ever more confused. She’d stayed behind, for Harry, but Harry wasn’t here and she didn’t know what to do. The place was shut tight, the door locked. Silent. She chided herself. What else could she have expected? This was a club for middle-aged jazz freaks and spotty Internet junkies, assorted insomniacs who wouldn’t be crawling back into circulation for hours yet. God, she was acting like a teenager.

Damn you, Harry, for messing around with my life.

She’d had a teddy bear, when she was young, with grazed fur and a torn ear, that she used to hold, and talk to while her father sweated onto her chest. She still had it, tucked into her bed, waiting for her. How many nights had she run back from the Parliament, with both praise and protests ringing in her ear and the world thinking she was made of polished glass, only to cry into a pillow alongside her precious toy? If only the world had known the truth. For some reason, she wanted Harry to know.

A policeman stood on the street corner, idly watching her. He didn’t seem suspicious, not yet, saw nothing but legs and well-cut clothes, but soon his idle curiosity might breed questions. She couldn’t run that risk, because she could give him no answers. So she hurried on.

The deputy governor, Sergei Anisimov, was in no mood for distractions. He’d just been told that Amir Beg was
on his way, which was why he was trying to gobble down the last of his breakfast. God knew when he might next eat, could be hours. He’d already completed a rapid tour of inspection, checking that nothing had burned down during the night, and he’d found everything in reasonable shape, and better shape than usual after being spruced up for the visit of the foreign politicians. But sports shoes? The guard was clearly drunk, or had spent too long sniffing up the atmosphere of the Punishment Wing; there could be no other explanation, unless while Anisimov had been off duty they’d drifted into some parallel and entirely ludicrous universe. Being off duty wouldn’t save him if something was amiss, of course, the governor would make sure of that. Yet Bolot’s report made no sense. Prisoners didn’t wear shoes, not on the Punishment Wing. How the hell were you supposed to beat a prisoner’s feet or extract his toenails until he poured out every last bit of information if he was wearing bloody sports shoes? That wasn’t the way things worked, it made no sense, but Anisimov could take nothing for granted, not with Amir Beg descending. He looked despairingly at his unfinished breakfast, then turned angrily on Bolot, who flinched, but there was no option. He’d have to see for himself. With a sigh, he scraped back his chair and set off for the Punishment Wing.

Harry heard them coming all the way along the passage, men in a hurry, their boots noisy as they clipped the stone floor. He sensed trouble, curled himself up into
a ball once more, making himself as inconspicuous and anonymous as possible. He couldn’t make out what they were saying from outside the cell, but he felt their eyes on him. He lay totally still, trying to ignore whatever had crawled out from the mattress and was biting him.

Anisimov, like Governor Akmatov a few hours before him, didn’t enter the cell. He didn’t need to. He saw not only sports shoes but also a belt, and despite the dirt and the rents that Harry had torn in his clothing they were of too good a quality for any inmate in this wing. Harry had dealt with the wristwatch and the torch, but in the dark, and in the rush, it hadn’t been enough.

There was another reason why Anisimov wouldn’t go in. He was afraid. He was the creature of a System that required an order to things, everything in its proper place. The System didn’t welcome surprises. Yet something extraordinary had happened in this cell, and that spelt danger.