Out of Range: A Novel (14 page)

Chapter Twenty-four

J
ulie had the oddest feeling, as though she were swimming into her own life from some distant watery place. It was sort of like an experience she’d had years earlier when she had gone snorkeling in the massive kelp beds off the coast of California, weaving in and out of the giant strings of greenery, shafts of sunlight penetrating fitfully into the depths from the surface, no sense of distance or space or location—never quite lost, but never quite sure where she was either.

And then, finally, she found herself in a white room, seated in a sleek white chair. The walls were white too, with tiny black cameras installed in each corner. Her head was hurting, her mouth was dry, and one side of her face stung, as though she had been slapped or punched. But who had hit her? She had no recollection at all.

And then, slowly, the memories began clicking into place.

Night. Meagan crying unceasingly. A Cadillac Escalade parked across a street, a face half hidden in the darkness. Headlights turning toward her. Tearing through the streets. The children in the backseat. Slamming on her brakes. Cornered. Dark shapes erupting from the Escalade. Her thought at the time:
If I leave here, draw them away from the children, maybe they won’t hurt them.
Running.

The children! Jesus Christ! Were the children okay?

Suddenly she was seized with panic. She tried to stand, but there were bands made of heavy seat belt material Velcroed around her wrists. What kind of chair had restraints built into it?

She thrashed and screamed. But nothing happened.

Finally she gave up and slumped back into the chair.

How had she gotten herself into this? How had she come this far, hiding everything from Charlie? Her heart broke as she thought about what he must be going through. Was he aware by now of the dimensions of her betrayal? Or was he still muddling around in the dark, wondering why his wife had abandoned their children in a residential cul-de-sac?

She began to weep, her body shuddering. But after a few moments, it occurred to her that they were watching her—whoever
they
were. And she had to pull herself together. To deny them the satisfaction. She took a deep breath and steeled herself for whatever came next.

Then there was a metallic clunk—a key turning in a heavy lock. A door opened slowly and a man walked in, staring at her without expression.

It took a moment to make sense of who he was.

When she did, she knew that she should be terrified. But she also knew if she showed him any fear, he would never let her survive.

Chapter Twenty-five

W
e’re here,” Faruz announced.

They had climbed out of the lush Fergana Valley and into the barren, forbidding mountains near the Khazakh border to arrive at their destination.

Charlie peered through the windshield, trying to make out exactly where they were. There was an old stone wall, interrupted only by a large pair of guard towers with a rusting, twisted steel gate between them. A large sign with Cyrillic writing on it was so faded it was nearly illegible. Charlie was able to make out just enough of the letters to realize that they were entering what had once been some kind of Soviet military base. At first glance, the facility appeared to be deserted. A closer look revealed very modern surveillance equipment posted along the walls.

After a moment, the gate moved, opening smoothly on large steel hinges. The neglected appearance of the place was a sham. This was a carefully guarded and well-equipped facility.

“Shit,” Faruz muttered. “I’m not liking this, Charlie.”

“You want to stay here,” Charlie said, “I understand. But I’m going in.”

Faruz took a deep breath, then eased off the brake and began driving slowly down a long gravel road between two rows of planted hawthorn trees. As they passed the guard towers and the big steel gate slid shut behind them, Charlie saw that the guard towers were indeed occupied. Several armed men stood on both sides of the road, in the shadow of the guard towers, all of them geared up in the most current Western military gear—BDUs, plate carriers, M4 carbines with fancy optics and lasers.

Faruz drove about a quarter of a mile, creeping along at the same slow pace, when Charlie’s phone rang. The number was blocked, but he answered it anyway.

“It’s Garman,” the voice said. “I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour.”

“We’re in the boonies,” Charlie said. “No cell service.”

“Anyway, I told you I’d heard that Byko had gone into a dark place, right? Some drug issues, all that stuff? Well, here’s the bizarro thing . . .”

But then Garman’s staticky voice cut out.

“Garman? Garman?” Charlie checked the phone to see if he had a signal. One bar. He spoke again. “Garman, are you there?”

Faruz was driving a little faster now, the BMW bumping and rolling on the pitted gravel drive as they approached the end of the road. In the distance, Charlie could see the line of trees disappearing and the road widening into the parking lot of some sort of large compound. Beyond the lot lay a building covered with blue tile in a vaguely Arabic style, surrounded by several barracks. A wide variety of late-model cars were parked in the broad, recently paved lot. Armed men ringed the area.

Charlie looked at the phone again and saw an incoming call on the other line. Garman trying him back. Charlie answered.

“Is that you?”

“Did you get anything that I said?” Garman replied.

“You lost me at the bizarro thing.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“What is it?”

“Charlie. Quinn is working for—”

Again, Garman’s voice broke up in midsentence.

“Say that again,” Charlie said.

“Quinn . . . ,” Garman repeated, his voice crackling and echoing, “ . . . is working for Byko.”

Charlie felt a cold sensation run down his neck. “Are you sure?”

Garman’s voice dropped out, but Charlie was able to hear, “ . . . confirmed from my most reliable sources . . .”

“What is it?” Faruz barked. “What’s happening?”

Charlie saw the armed men coming toward their car. “We just walked into a trap.”

“Where are you?” Garman asked.

“Somewhere up near Khazakstan. We’re about to see Byko.”

“Jesus, Charlie, you gotta get out of—”

The voice dropped out once more.

“Garman? Garman?” But he was gone. The phone dead. “Goddamnit.”

“What is it?” Faruz demanded.

Charlie looked gravely at his friend. “Quinn works for Byko. He’s the one who has Julie.”

Faruz turned around to see if they could reverse out of there. Four armed guards stood a hundred yards back, watching them intently. Faruz’s face was sheet white and dripping with sweat.

“I make a run, I don’t think we get out of here.”

“No,” Charlie admitted. “It’s too late.”

A thousand questions raced through his mind, but the first one Charlie needed to answer was: had Byko brought him here to kill him?

If that was what Byko wanted, he could have done so at any of the checkpoints along the way. For that matter, Byko had left Charlie alive in L.A. when Quinn could have easily killed him in his basement. Charlie quickly concluded that he’d been brought here because Byko needed to ascertain what Charlie knew. Of course, Charlie knew next to nothing. About any of this.

“What fuck we gonna do?” Faruz asked, his voice shaking.

Charlie grabbed for his camera. The evidence against Quinn. Could he use that in some way? He popped out the disc and stashed it in his pocket.

“Stay here,” Charlie said, then bounded out of the BMW. To his dismay, Faruz climbed out, too. “Back in the car,” Charlie hissed. “You could still make a break for it if things go sideways.”

Faruz gave Charlie an infinitesimal shake of his head. “I’m not letting you go in there alone, Charlie.”

Charlie felt a burst of gratitude. And there was no time to argue. The security guards were almost within earshot and it wouldn’t look right for them to be bickering.

“Hi, there!” Charlie called out, waving to the guards and forcing a broad smile. “Charlie Davis. I’m here to see my friend Alisher Byko.”

Chapter Twenty-six

L
ying back against the warm stone and letting the scorching air envelop him, Byko felt as though his entire body was vibrating to the lowest note in a huge pipe organ. A very lovely and very naked girl crouched beside him on her knees, an opium pipe clutched in one hand, a gold lighter in the other. He nodded and she played the flame underneath the bowl.

When a few tendrils of smoke rose from the small black pearl of opium, the naked girl held the pipe to his lips. He inhaled deeply, relishing the onslaught of the smoke.

He could still smell the scent of Julie Davis in his nostrils. And it almost paralyzed him.

Julie had begged him, had pleaded for her life, had protested her innocence in all of the expected ways, and yet, as much as he ached to believe her, he simply could not.

She was Julie Wingate-Rees when he’d met her thirteen years ago at Cambridge. Fiery, committed, beautiful—she had represented everything that seemed good about the West. Her family had been rich and powerful members of the British ruling class for generations, Tories all. But she had forsworn that stuffy old British Empire nonsense, believing that a world of justice and freedom was around the corner if everyone was just willing to make it so.

She probably never realized how important she had been to him. A turning point in his life, really. He had been smitten with her. And she with him, as far as he could tell.

Their passion had been blinding, relentless.

But then, just before she left Cambridge, she had called it off. He had begged her to continue the relationship, to figure out a way to make it work. But in the end—she had never really articulated it, but this was his impression—she had rejected his privilege, rejected what she saw as his essential frivolity, rejected his willingness to ignore the pain and suffering that all his privileges rested on. On the evening of her graduation, he had made some sort of half-drunken, half-humorous suggestion that he would always love her—and she had laughed uproariously.

But she had never understood him, had she? She had failed to recognize that his partying and carousing and cocktail philosophizing was a mask to cover up his essentially romantic and serious nature. He’d dreamed of great things, but had felt trapped in his role as the son of a man who wielded great power in a place of utterly no consequence. He had always felt that if he’d just had more time, he could have shown her his true face. He even thought of going after her—to Africa, where she’d joined an international aid organization—but then his father died and he was forced to return to Uzbekistan.

Somewhat to his surprise, he found that running a sprawling business empire agreed with him. There was so much to do, and no time to gad around the world chasing after Julie. And so marriage and fatherhood had followed. His wife had been part of the ruling elite of Uzbekistan, the daughter of one of his father’s cronies, and so by all rights it should have been a marriage of convenience, a strategic alliance of mutually interested parties. But it wasn’t. He had great affection for Daniella, had even, in some way, loved her. And she had loved him.

But Julie’s laugh had continued to haunt him. How many times had he been sitting at his desk, facing a business decision, and thought: “What would Julie think of the choice I’m about to make?”

When he raised the pay of his miners, when he improved safety procedures, when he built the school in Dartak or the clinic in Pakhtakor—it was her voice in the back of his head that had driven him.

He hated to admit it, but much of what he had done to support democracy in his country had been a sort of adolescent Gatsbyesque attempt to impress her. It was absurd when you framed it that way. She wasn’t an important scholar or a famous statesman or a great writer. And yet she hovered constantly in his mind, a figure of conscience.

And then, eight years ago, nearly four years after he’d bade her farewell at Cambridge, she’d arrived in Tashkent as an emissary of an NGO called World Vision. When she’d first phoned him and announced that she’d moved to Uzbekistan, his heart had sunk. Because he was already married, already had a son by that marriage and now here was Julie. Had she come here for him? Was it possible she didn’t know that he was now a husband and father? Had he blown it by not pursuing her more, by not waiting for her to come around? She had insisted that it was a coincidence, that World Vision had offered her the assignment because of her proficiency in Russian. But he’d always wondered.

Almost immediately, they began working together on microfinance projects as well as the building of schools and hospitals in the Fergana Valley, though they were all too often frustrated at the intransigence of the Karimov regime. For a time, they grew close again, closer in a way than they ever had been at university when all of the embroiled passions of lust and youth cluttered the mind and spirit.

And then Charlie Davis entered the picture. Byko had heard about the new American journalist who’d been poking around some of the more fragile subject matters in the region, and was already curious about him when Julie walked into the Samarkand bazaar on his arm. The American and Brit had met, Byko was told, at an English pub in Tashkent, a dive that happened to be the favorite watering hole for European freelancers and members of BBC News stationed in the capital. It was clear from the moment that Byko laid eyes on the pair that they were steadfastly in love and, even more disheartening, that they were incredibly well-suited for each other. “Kindred spirits” was how he heard them describe it and, as sick as it made him to admit, it was hard to argue with that assessment.

That was how he’d lost Julie Wingate-Rees for the second time.

They had been courteous enough to invite Byko to their impromptu wedding in the dazzling Aral desert, but Byko had contrived an excuse. He simply couldn’t stand to watch it happen.

Over the next few months, as he watched Julie’s protruding belly blossom, Byko tried in earnest to let go of his jealousy and to be a friend to them both. In fact, he came to respect Charlie Davis more than he ever could have imagined. The man was committed to the cause of exposing Karimov’s tyranny and he had the resources, the savvy and the mettle to do just that. It was Charlie’s article about the torture of a young man at the infamous Jaslyk Prison that helped launch the protest movement.

Unfortunately for all of them, their hopes and dreams had been smashed that day in Andijan. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Charlie and Julie had shuttled off quickly to London and then to Los Angeles and Byko had counted on never seeing either of them again.

Since then, Byko had walled off his feelings, kept them at bay with opium, coke, single malt scotch, whores, scheming and responsibilities.

But when Julie emailed him last year after his sister’s death, the wall came down. It was a simple, emotional, yet elegantly worded note of sympathy for his grief—a breath of fresh air in the stifling desert of his life. The emails they’d exchanged since then had led Byko to believe that she was his for the taking again—so long as he bided his time and allowed it to happen naturally and without pressure.

By slow degrees it had all led to their first meeting in six years.

Sitting there at Padishah in the heart of Samarkand’s café district, she had seemed so glad to see him, fixing her warm brown eyes on him as though he were the answer to some great question in her own life. She had been radiant as ever but with a maturity and gravity that shone even brighter than the youthful intensity he had loved about her before. Just seeing her had nearly buckled his knees, and for a moment, he’d even considered putting a hold on his plans for revenge, as if a union with Julie might heal everything.

But it had all gone wrong. Forty-five minutes into their leisurely meal, he’d gotten the call saying that elements from Karimov’s Twenty-seventh Air Assault Brigade were converging on his location. He’d left her there without explanation and had barely escaped with his life.

Of course, Quinn, who saw threats behind every bush, was convinced that Julie had been sent, that she was a honey trap controlled by a Western intelligence agency. Byko had resisted at first, but Quinn had made a convincing case. Her inconvenient stopover in London the night before she flew to Tashkent, her quick return to Los Angeles after their rendezvous, her lies about visiting other countries in the region and, most crushing of all, the all-too-reasonable argument that Julie’s original condolence email was in fact the insidious beginning of the trap. And so he’d allowed Quinn to snatch her—on the condition that he brought her here so that Byko could talk to her himself.

And now that he’d spent a few hours with her, Byko was certain that she was hiding something. She hadn’t cracked, hadn’t budged an inch on her story. And yet, somehow, her reactions seemed too pitch perfect, too smooth, too clean—as though she had anticipated this moment and prepared for it.

And so, with some misgivings, he had handed her over to Quinn.

The initial tidal wave of the opium began to ebb away and Byko could feel his hands start to tremble. Once again his darkest suspicions began firming into a sense of outraged certitude. Because in his heart he knew what Quinn would find.

The lying bitch. All these years he had idealized her. And now she had turned out to be nothing but a willing tool for the same hypocritical monsters who ran the world as their private plantation.

He felt his teeth grinding, the rage threatening to explode, and opened his eyes. The lovely girl, no more than sixteen or seventeen, her skin flawless, her breasts soft and buoyant, sat expectantly on the stone shelf next to him, opium pipe still clutched in her hand. Waiting to serve him. He leaned back against the warm, moist wood and wordlessly closed his eyes. She knew her job well enough and she began to fumble with his belt.

A soft tap at the door interrupted them. He looked up see to his bodyguard Hasan enter, his eyes conspicuously ignoring Byko’s condition.

“Davis is here,” Hasan said.

“Make him wait,” Byko replied sourly. “I’ll be out in ten minutes.”

As Hasan exited, the girl took Byko’s flaccidness into her mouth but now the mood was ruined.

He felt a flash of anger accompanied by a brief urge to do something terrible to the girl, to bite her or rip her hair out or pound her with his fists until he heard bones shatter. But instead he simply slapped her in the face.

“Out,” he said.

She sat up, stared emptily at him, then padded out the door, seemingly unconscious of the blood running out of her nose. Byko closed his eyes, trying to find that meditative calm, that center where he was at one with himself. A few slow deep breaths and he was there. It was a matter of will, he told himself.

Close your eyes. Just close your eyes and let it come.

And finally it did, a consoling vision he’d turned to in his darkest moments since he’d learned the truth about his sister. In his mind an image formed, an image of a fire spreading across a nearly infinite expanse of city. At first it was just a thin line of red on the horizon. But soon the flames strengthened. And as they grew, they moved faster, racing toward him, growing higher with each approaching meter. Accompanying them was a roaring, rushing sound. The wall of fire grew closer and closer and closer, warming his entire body with a feverish heat. He could feel a smile on his face. It was coming.

By this time tomorrow, the destruction would be unleashed and for the first time in years the feeling of impotence that had invaded his every moment since Andijan would fade away. The heat grew and grew and grew, blotting out everything, enveloping him, transforming him.

It was coming soon. The fire.