Out of Range: A Novel (10 page)

Chapter Sixteen

A
lisher Byko walked up the long stretch of waving green grass toward the simple stone structure. The hill was long and steep, but this didn’t trouble him. In fact, he enjoyed the exertion and the solitude. From the top of his private oasis, the grim city and its problems seemed very far away.

This was one of the largest tracts of undeveloped land in Tashkent and Byko had purchased it for the graves of his family. He could have built a monument as elaborate as the Taj Mahal if he’d wanted, but that would not have suited him. The large but unadorned mausoleum was enough. Flanking the mausoleum where his wife, son, and sister were buried were a handful of additional gravestones marking the resting places of friends who had died in Babur Square, their simple inscriptions all carved in Uzbek.

Byko stopped when he reached the graves, his mind drifting back to the time just after the massacre. If he had not been as rich and powerful as he was, he probably would have died in prison six years ago. Instead, after his wife and son had been killed, he had visited President Karimov and begged forgiveness.

The tyrant had sat at his huge and grotesquely carved desk in his gymnasium-size office, the walls covered with vast, ugly murals depicting various scenes of invented Uzbek history, and listened in silence as Byko humbled himself. Byko had said that he was sorry, that his opposition to the regime had been a youthful indiscretion, and that Karimov would see: Byko would become his biggest supporter.

Byko had walked out of Karimov’s palace with his life, but he’d left a piece of his soul there. In the weeks and months that followed, he had stumbled around in a haze of humiliation, rage and pain, a choking cloud that had kept him from being able to concentrate, to think, to act. He neglected his businesses, instead holing up in rented villas in Bangkok or Abu Dhabi or Gstaad, drinking and banging a virtual United Nations of socialites, debutantes and whores. Gradually, the humiliation dissipated and the anger turned inward. Yes, Karimov was a ruthless and brutal dictator. But it was he—Byko—who’d been the fool to try to play revolutionary. It was, in fact, his own hubris that had killed his wife and son.

The self-loathing only made the pain more dear. And all the drinking and women and skiing and Ferraris couldn’t dull it. Couldn’t even begin to touch it. Then one day at a club, a girl handed him an opium pipe. It was the sort of thing that the old Byko, even the partying Byko of his college days, would have rejected out of hand. But he had come to feel by then that doing one thing was hardly different from another. Any distraction was a worthy distraction. And so he’d taken a hit.

Instantly, there was a shift. The opium filtered out the noise that had been threatening to overwhelm him for nearly every instant of his life since the bullets had taken his wife and son. The pain didn’t go away, but he was able to pack it neatly into a little box in the back of his brain. And as soon as he did that, he was able to see the world with startling clarity. Like a snapshot caught in the brilliant flare of a camera flash, he saw that it was not he who was to blame. Or even Karimov. It was the larger political system—the inheritance of a corrupt Russian autocracy mixed with the financial backing and tacit approval of the West. Yes, the opium allowed him to see all of this. See it clearly.

Of course, every drug has its cost. As he quickly came to find out, opium sapped your will, your drive, your energy. And so there had been cocaine. Which required a certain delicacy of application—and, for want of a better word, management. That “management” had taken the form of various other mood enhancers, stabilizers and modifiers, both legal and illegal.

But it was all carefully administered, neatly titrated, scientifically applied. The drugs didn’t control him. Quite the contrary. All the drugs were in the service of keeping Alisher Byko—the purest, most crystalline version of Alisher Byko—focused like a laser beam on his plan of action.

That plan, originated in an opium den in the hills of Thailand, began as a way to take back his country. The assassination of Karimov and his cabinet, a military coup, the installation of himself and a handful of respected tribal and sectarian leaders in a transition government. He would spend the next four years scrupulously calculating how it might be done. Gradually, after hundreds of clandestine meetings feeling out generals, clerics, and strongmen, Byko felt confident that he saw a path.

And then his sister was taken.

The revelations which followed her death would change how he saw everything. With that change in vision came a change in plan. A plan that was now, at long last, about to come to fruition.

Byko knelt before the graves of his family, the soft wind stirring his hair. He kissed each one in turn. “You will be avenged,” he promised. “All of you.”

Chapter Seventeen

A
s Frank Hopkins made his way down the hallway toward the War Room in MI6’s headquarters in Vauxhall Cross, he had a queasy feeling about the impending operation. Apparently he wasn’t the only one. Eyes probed him watchfully from the offices that lined the hallway and he knew there was talk going around. Something to the effect that perhaps he didn’t have the magic anymore.

Hopkins had been an MI6 field man since leaving the British Army twenty-seven years ago. He had been a Sandhurst-educated infantry officer and spent his career working in the Middle East with a reputation as one of the best in the business. But one’s reputation, he reflected as he put his eye to the retinal scanner at the door of the War Room, was only as good as one’s last successful assignment.

And this one wasn’t going well.

The door opened and everyone in the room looked up.

“Everything sorted?” he asked.

“Comms online, sir,” the communications officer said. He hit a few buttons as Hopkins picked up the headset.

“Bird’s online,” a technician said. As he spoke, the feed from the MI6’s TopSat-II spy satellite appeared on the big screen at the front of the War Room. It was an infrared image from seventeen miles above Samarkand, Uzbekistan, the picture composed of a series of greenish blobs that were not easy to make sense of. Then a greenish-white blob moved, revealing itself as a human figure.

It was Osprey—real name Marcus Vaughan—the sole MI6 agent operating under diplomatic cover at the British Embassy in Uzbekistan.

“How’s my level, Osprey?” Hopkins asked. A second screen blinked to life. This one monitored a microcamera in Marcus’s glasses.

“Five by five,” Marcus responded.

“Give me a sitrep,” Hopkins said.

“I don’t bloody like it, that’s my situation report. Two big abandoned factories to my left and right. In between we’ve got a big space about the size of a bloody football pitch. And it’s full of machinery. Gantries, locomotive parts, cranes, can’t even make them all out. They could be hiding an army in there, I’d never see it.”

“Looks clear,” Hopkins said. “No heat signatures.”

“What about in the factories?” Marcus asked, the fuzzy outline of his head moving from side to side as he attempted to track activity in the adjacent buildings.

“You know how it works,” Hopkins replied. “The bird can’t see through walls.”

“Right. Just thought I’d ask,” Marcus said. “I’m heading in, recon a bit, see if I’ve got company.”

Through the minicam, Hopkins saw a pair of headlights swing around the far corner of the factory.

“Too late,” he told his agent. “Visitors. Vehicle incoming.”

Marcus muttered something under his breath. He was frightened and Hopkins didn’t blame him. To do this right, they ought to have an eight-man team in there. But Marcus was there by his lonesome on the most important piece of intelligence Hopkins had worked in years.

As Marcus began walking between the two buildings, Hopkins stood at the shoulder of an expert video analyst. “Mercedes S-Class,” the analyst said matter-of-factly, pointing at the image on the big screen. Two men climbed out of the car. Even here, at a two-thousand-mile remove, Hopkins could feel his agent’s palms sweating.

“Two subjects leaving the vehicle,” Hopkins said.

Marcus began walking silently toward the Mercedes. He carried a small, cheap briefcase with twenty thousand dollars inside.

That would be a small price to pay if it led to information on how to find Alisher Byko.

Marcus had been working overtime on the project for months and this was his first concrete lead, but Hopkins still hadn’t told Marcus why London wanted to find Byko so badly. It was part of the trade that Hopkins had never liked, men going into harm’s way for things they didn’t even understand.

There had been an attempt to take Byko down three days earlier—based on intel to which Marcus had not been privy. Much to Hopkins’s chagrin, the takedown had been a total cock-up and Byko had gotten clean away.

All of which made it that much more important that Marcus successfully complete this transaction. Marcus had gotten a tip from one of his trusted sources that he could put him together with someone in Byko’s organization, someone who could give Marcus an exact time and place where the billionaire would be within the next twenty-four hours. The source knew enough details about Byko’s security and traveling arrangements to make his story sound plausible. And the price, twenty thousand U.S., was cheap under the circumstances.

As Marcus approached the car, Hopkins thought he saw a tiny flash of greenish white, peeking out from under one of the big pieces of machinery in front of his agent. He put his hand over the mic and turned to the video analyst. “What’s that?” he barked, pointing at the screen.

“What’s what?”

But by then it was gone.

“Bloody lights,” Marcus muttered. “Can’t see shite now.”

His wobbly green image pointed in the direction of the Mercedes.

“Turn off your lights!” Marcus shouted in Russian.

The man on the passenger side of the Mercedes waved languidly. “Come over this way.”

“No!” Marcus called back. “Not till you turn off the bloody lights.”

“We’re friends! Come on.”

“Turn off the lights or I’m leaving.”

“What’s wrong?” the man called, switching to English—Uzbek accented with a sprinkling of American vowels. “We’re friends, bro. Friends!”

Hopkins had debriefed Marcus extensively and knew that he’d never identified himself as an Englishman, much less as an agent of the British government. From the beginning, Marcus had played the false flag game, claiming to be a Pole freelancing for the Russians, never using his diplomatic car or his embassy phone. So how did this man know to speak English to Marcus?

“I’m leaving,” Marcus shouted.

Hopkins picked up the distant voice of the man by the Mercedes. “Okay, my friend. You don’t like lights, no problem.”

The car’s lights went out.

Marcus picked up the briefcase and started walking toward the men. Hopkins could see the jaunty confidence of his walk, even from the satellite. And he knew just what an act of will it was for Marcus to keep calm under the circumstances.

When Marcus got halfway to the Merc, he looked toward one of the factory windows and nodded, as though signaling to a shooter hidden in overwatch. If this was a simple rip-off, the hope was that a little crumb of humbuggery like that might be enough to make these men think twice.

“Base, do you see anything on my ten?” Marcus whispered furtively.

Hopkins scanned the screen. “Nothing,” he answered. “You’re clear.”

Marcus began moving again, his right hand inside his jacket. No doubt gripping the butt of the SIG under his jacket as he approached the two men.

“Stop there, Osprey,” Hopkins said as Marcus reached a point about forty feet from the Mercedes.

Again Hopkins saw the briefest flash of white next to one of the fallen cranes.

“Was that us?” Hopkins said urgently to the video analyst, cupping his hand over the mic so that Marcus couldn’t hear.

The analyst’s eyes widened slightly. “I saw it too. I don’t like it, sir.”

“Come on!” Hopkins said. “Is that a hostile or not?”

The analyst shrugged. “How bad do you need what these men have?”

“Bloody well badly.”

The analyst sighed. “Then I’m telling you I don’t know if that was a video artifact or a hostile.”

“Watch your nine, Osprey,” Hopkins hissed into his mike.

But Marcus must have already sensed something, too. The Minicam scanned from side to side as he eyed various piles of machinery. All Hopkins could see was a blur.

The driver came out from behind the open door of the Mercedes and began walking cautiously toward Marcus.

“That’s close enough, mate,” Marcus said.

“You got the money, bro?”

“You don’t see a penny until I know something.”

“I don’t tell you nothing till I see the Benjamins.”

“You’ve been watching too much bloody American TV.”

The man crossed his arms and shrugged. “Hey, bro, we do it or we don’t.”

“Who’s behind that pile of rubbish?” Marcus demanded, cocking his head toward the pile of equipment to his left.

“What! Dude! There’s nobody here but me and my boy Vladislav,” the man said, teeth flashing.

Hopkins’s heart was slamming in his chest. This didn’t feel right.

But Marcus was already opening the briefcase, tossing a small stack of money onto the ground in front of the car. “That’s a taste,” Marcus said. “The rest when you talk.”

The guy from the car didn’t even bend over to look at the money.

And Hopkins knew this had all gone sideways.

“Abort, Osprey,” Hopkins said, his voice rising louder than he wanted it to. “Abort, abort.”

A flash of white by the crane. Then gone.

Another, up in the window of the factory.

“Oh, shit,” gasped the analyst.

“Abort!” Hopkins shouted. “Shooters at nine and three o’clock high. Repeat, shooters at nine and three high!”

The SIG appeared in Marcus’s hand.

And then there were shapes moving all around him, greenish-white blobs disconnecting themselves from the dark piles of machinery.

Marcus got off two shots, perfectly composed masterpieces of combat shooting, the two men by the Mercedes crumpling to the ground.

Then Marcus was running.

Hopkins could hear the tiny
pop-pop-pops
of automatic fire and then a grunt.

“Marcus! Marcus, are you all right?” Blatant violation of radio discipline, calling his agent by his name rather than his radio code.

“Cheers,” Marcus said. “Getting a bit sporty right now. I’ve taken two I think.”

Another grunt.

“Bollocks. That one was bad.”

Then Marcus fell, the view from the Minicam taking a whirling tumble.

The figures who had come out of cover were advancing now, firing and firing and firing.

“Christ,” Hopkins muttered, forcing himself to keep watching.

It was the professionalism in their movements, the telltale signatures of experienced men at arms, moving briskly but unhurriedly—firing, reloading, firing—that told Hopkins the story. These were not cheap gun thugs, but highly trained, disciplined fighters.

One of the assassins leaned down toward the camera.

“He’s wired,” the assassin said in perfect English. “Switch it off.”

There was a burst of static then the monitor went dead.

And Hopkins knew. Knew by the way it had all gone down.

This was the handiwork of John Quinn.