Nergui glanced up at the imposing silhouette of the Chinggis Khaan, black against the clear blue of the sky, dominating the city center skyline. “It doesn’t seem likely.”
“He could have collapsed or something.”
“Or slipped and hit his head. I hope that’s not it, given the temperatures overnight.”
“Christ, if we don’t find him, this is going to be a major incident,” the ambassador said. “How is it possible to lose a senior police officer?”
Nergui had no answer. It was an excellent question, and one he suspected the Minister would also be asking in the next few minutes. In his own mind, he was conscious of the political ramifications of the situation, but was growing more aware of his own personal feelings. He had grown to like Drew in the short time they had spent together. Nergui was more than capable of detaching himself from the emotions involved, but he realized that underneath, for the first time in many years, he was feeling genuinely worried about another human being.
“I’ll get back to you as soon as we know anything,” he said. “That’s all I can do.”
He delayed calling the Minister till he was back at the office, partly just to buy a few minutes and partly because he wanted to ensure that he was in as much control of the situation as possible. As it turned out, the conversation was easier than he had feared. The Minister’s famous panic control mechanisms appeared to have kicked in, and he spoke calmly, even pleasantly.
“If you were anyone else, Nergui, I would have assumed that your message was exaggerated.”
“I’m afraid not, Minister. I set it out as clearly as I could.”
“You did indeed. So all you know is that he never returned to the hotel last night?”
“Well, we’re as sure as we can be of that,” Nergui said, trying to remain as objective as he could. “We know he didn’t sleep in his room. The night porter on duty has no recollection of him returning after midnight. And it doesn’t seem likely that he would have been able to enter the hotel any other way.”
“So when did you last see him?”
“Just after midnight. I gave the others a lift back in the car, and Drew-Chief Inspector McLeish, that is-insisted on walking back to the hotel.”
“Pity you didn’t insist on giving him a lift.”
Nergui didn’t need to be told this. But then Drew had been adamant about wanting to walk, the hotel had been literally a few minutes away, the streets were deserted. No one could have predicted that anything would happen. But Nergui knew there was no point in going through all this with the Minister.
“Indeed, Minister.”
“So what do you think could have happened to him? I take it that you’re treating this as in some way linked with the other incidents?”
This seemed to be everyone’s favorite euphemism at the moment, Nergui reflected. “Well, we have to recognize that there could be a link with the killings,” he said. “But there’s no way of knowing at the moment.” He paused. “If there is a link, who knows what the implications might be? It hardly bears thinking about. But there could be a host of more straightforward explanations. People do go missing, and sometimes for the oddest of reasons.”
“But they’re not usually senior policemen on official visits to overseas countries.”
“True enough.”
“And, unless I’m missing something, it’s not easy to come up with an explanation that doesn’t have a potentially negative outcome?”
“Well-” Nergui hesitated. But the Minister was right. Even the simplest explanations-that Drew had fallen and hit his head, that he had collapsed, that he had been mugged-did not bode well for Drew’s well-being. “I suppose you’re right,” he said.
“Which, in turn, doesn’t indicate a particularly positive outcome for you or me, Nergui. Do you have any leads on this at all?”
“On the disappearance?”
“On any of it. This whole sorry mess.” Nergui noted that, despite all his own reservations, the Minister had immediately elided everything into a single case.
“Some, but nothing substantive. Everything that happens seems to take us further away.”
“We need to get somewhere on this, Nergui. And quickly. Especially after this. This is going to be a major incident. The British government will be all over us. The Western media will be all over us.”
“I know.”
The Minister, never one for niceties, ended the call without saying anything more. Nergui looked at the phone and nodded. “Don’t hesitate to pass on any ideas you might have,” he said to the now-dead receiver.
“Nergui?”
He looked up. Doripalam was standing in the doorway.
“I just heard. Is it true?”
Nergui shrugged. “It’s true he’s disappeared. What that means-well, your guess is probably a lot better than mine.”
“I wouldn’t have disturbed you, except-well, this is maybe not the moment, but I’ve got a bit of an idea. It’s probably stupid, but I wanted to check it out with you.”
“What’s your idea?” Nergui said. He knew that anything Doripalam came up with was unlikely to be a waste of time.
“Well, it goes back to Delgerbayar. You remember that he’d been involved the gold prospecting case?”
Nergui nodded, wondering where this was leading. “Some small-time thing, as I understood it. Dispersing one of the illegal camps. He was due to go up there with another officer the day after he went missing.”
“That’s right. Well, I had a check back through the records. I don’t think anybody picked it up, but I think Delgerbayar had already been up to the camp.”
Nergui raised his head and stared at Doripalam. “What do you mean?”
“Just that. He’d been up to the camp before.”
Nergui was sitting up and paying attention now. He was also cursing himself for apparently missing something that might have been important. “He wrote a report on the visit?”
Doripalam shook his head, looking slightly embarrassed. “Well, no, that’s just it. There was no report. No one knew that he’d been.”
“So why did you think he had?”
“I was having a look through the stuff that was cleared out of Delgerbayar’s desk. I don’t know why. Just clutching at straws, I think. We’d already been through it to see if there was anything important there. By the time I got to it, there wasn’t much left apart from paperclips and old rubber bands.”
“And?”
“Well, his desk diary was still there. Someone had already been through it but Delgerbayar wasn’t one for making detailed entries so there wasn’t much in there that was useful. Mainly just single names or abbreviations. Times of meetings, that kind of thing. Scribbled in there, usually. Obviously meant something to him, but wouldn’t mean much to anyone else. But I went through it one more time, just in case anything new struck me. And what I noticed was that the phrase he’d written in the diary for the scheduled visit to the camp looked the same as something he’d scribbled in about a month earlier. I couldn’t really read it, but in the end I became convinced the two words were the same.”
“Doesn’t sound a lot to go on.”
“It isn’t. But I’ve checked back in the records-it looks as if Delgerbayar had various things officially scheduled for that day, but none of them actually check out. Nobody noticed, because most of them were just routine activities, but there’s no question he wasn’t where he was supposed to be.”
Nergui looked at the younger man with some admiration. “And you accused me of being overoptimistic. I don’t know what this means, but it looks as if it’s worth pursuing, especially as we’ve got nothing else to go on. Who was it spoke to the people in the camp? I mean, after we found Delgerbayar’s body.”
Doripalam shifted uneasily on his feet. “Well, that’s the other thing.”
Nergui began to have a sinking feeling. “What other thing?”
“Well, I’ve checked back in the reports and, well, it doesn’t look as if anyone
went out to visit the camp.”
“You’re joking.”
“Well, it’s not really all that surprising,” Doripalam said, looking uncomfortable. “The original job was a pretty routine piece of work-”
“Police as the paid lackeys of the mining corporations?”
“If you say so,” Doripalam said. “After Delgerbayar’s body was found in the city and there was all that stuff about his journey to the Gobi, it never occurred to us that the illegal prospecting stuff was relevant anymore.”
Nergui shook his head. “We never learn, do we? We tell ourselves that good policing is following up every avenue, no matter how trivial or potentially irrelevant. But then we all still manage to miss the obvious.” He caught Doripalam’s expression. “I mean all of us. It never occurred to me to think about the prospector angle, either.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, it looks as if the camp had broken up in any case before Delgerbayar’s death. The visit that was due to happen the day after he went missing never took place. So there’s no reason why anyone should have thought that it was worth following up.”
“Except you did,” Nergui said.
Doripalam nodded. “So what do you think we should do about it?”
Nergui shrugged. “I think I need to get out of this place. I think we should go exploring.”
CHAPTER 15
“It shouldn’t be allowed,” Nergui said. “These are the people we should be treating as criminals.”
Not for the first time on their journey, Doripalam regarded Nergui with some amusement. It would be interesting to observe Nergui’s interactions with the Minister, he thought. They must have some lively political discussions.
“Look at it,” Nergui went on. “It’s a shambles. And here of all places.”
Ahead of them, the grassy steppe swept up toward the smooth grandeur of the northern mountains. The rounded contours of these mountains were like nothing found in the west, Nergui thought. He remembered days spent walking up here in past summers, the grassy hillsides thick with wild flowers and darting butterflies, an extraordinary profusion of natural beauty.
But it was autumn now and late afternoon, the sun already hanging low over the mountains, reddening the slopes. It had been a long journey, and they were anticipating a further long trip back in the dark.
Their objective lay immediately ahead of them. The valley, as Nergui had accurately pointed out, was a mess. On the far side, there was a makeshift shanty town of gers and wooden huts, providing storage and accommodation. Closer by was the valley itself. Its sides were scarred and rutted with endless excavations, ripped randomly into the landscape. The summer’s rains had turned the ground to mud, and now, with winter approaching, the earth was hard and frozen. On the far slope, a battalion of bulldozers and tractors worked away at the land, tearing rutted holes into the grass.
At the heart of the valley, the river was slick with spilled oil and other chemicals. Piecemeal dams and embankments had been built to shift the course of the river at various points, providing access to areas that had previously lain under water. From the sodden and disturbed state of the valley floor, it was clear that the river’s path had been manipulated many times.
“It’s not pretty,” Doripalam acknowledged.
This was one face of the country’s expanding minerals industry. Not all the production sites were as ugly as this, but there were increasing numbers of opencast excavations in the land northeast of the capital. Some of the production companies were relatively responsible, taking care of the environment where possible, giving consideration to the local flora and fauna, restoring the landscape once the work was completed. But others-a substantial number of others-paid little attention to such concerns. They came, took what they wanted, and left an unholy mess behind them. This, Nergui presumed, was one of those.
The worst part was that it was all legal. These companies had obtained their licenses quite legitimately. The government was only too keen to do deals, so long as investment entered the country and the government was able to take its share. Most of the mines were joint ventures involving companies from Canada, the US, China, South Korea, Russia and elsewhere. These opencast mines were the cheapest option, the minerals simply ripped from the ground. Over the last decade, much of the production had been here in the north of the country in areas like this. Inevitably the resources would be finite, but for the moment there was abundance, and the country had experienced an extraordinary gold rush as producers had converged here to seize their share.
In principle, the licenses were subject to regulation in respect of environmental impact, health and safety, and other human considerations. In practice, there was no will or ability to enforce this regulation. Bureaucracy, the producers would tell you, was the enemy of enterprise. And enterprise, as the government well understood, lay at the heart of investment and growth. Who cared if a few landscapes-or even a few people-were damaged in the process?
And, with an all too familiar irony, the forces of law and order were directed, not toward these despoilers of the environment, but toward those who tried to gather up a few crumbs from their table. The illegal camp that Delgerbayar was supposed to have visited was some way downstream from here. The inhabitants were former herdsmen whose livelihoods had been damaged or destroyed by years of economic chaos and a sequence of harsh winters. They were attempting, with some success, to scrape a living by panning for gold in the riverbed. They emerged at night, once the floodlights were extinguished, scanning the valley with their feeble flashlights. They called themselves “ninjas,” a reference to the cheap imported green plastic buckets they used for panning. As they worked their way across the valley floor, they strapped the buckets to their backs, in ironic homage to the ninja turtles of the cartoons.
No one with a grain of human feeling could blame them, but their actions were nonetheless illegal. The gold they found belonged to the ruthless predators operating in the valley before them. And the police were summoned like hired lackeys to do the producers’ dirty work for them.
Nergui wondered vaguely why the encampment had broken up and moved on before the police had visited. It was quite possible that one of the mining companies had taken the law into its own hands, maybe irritated at the police’s insistence on going through the proper channels. It would not have been the first time. But there was probably no way of ever finding out.
Their current interest lay not in the environmental chaos immediately in front of them, but in the cluster of gers that lay a mile or so beyond. It was here that, according to the records, some of those in the original camp had now retreated, hoping to find a livelihood among the fragments of gold. Nergui drove their Hyundai truck carefully past the pounding bulldozers and across the grasslands toward the encampment.
There was a group of men clustered around the gers, drinking beers and playing cards. They looked up, with some hostility, as the truck drew closer.
Nergui was unsure how to play this. The police were unlikely to be popular among this group, since they were seen as being little more than the hired hands of the mining companies. Except, Nergui reflected, that they weren’t even hired. They did this dirty work for nothing.
But there was little point in hiding their identities as police officers. They had to give a reason for being here, and, if it came to it, it was always possible to indulge in a little official intimidation. Maybe, as so often, the simplest route was complete honesty.
Nergui pulled the truck to a halt and jumped out. Doripalam followed him, a step or two behind. Nergui thought the younger man was making a creditable job of not appearing nervous. Or maybe he was just more confident than Nergui.
The group of men looked at them, unspeaking and expressionless. Their ages were mixed-the youngest probably in his thirties, the oldest maybe late sixties. They were all dressed in traditional clothes, wrapped warm against the chilly air.
“Good afternoon,” Nergui said, breaking the heavy silence.
No one
spoke. Nergui sighed inwardly. This was not going to be an easy process.
“We’re police officers,” Nergui said. “We’d like a word.”
The youngest of the men smiled thinly. “Well, well. I would never have guessed. I’m just surprised it took you so long.”
Nergui shrugged. “I couldn’t care less what you do down there. Someone may come to stop you, but it won’t be me.”
“Oh, someone will definitely come to stop us. And soon. And I couldn’t care less if it’s you or someone else. But that wasn’t what I meant.”
Nergui looked at the young man more closely. He sounded well educated, much more articulate than most of the nomads he had encountered out here. He had, Nergui noted, already positioned himself as the spokesman for this group, despite apparently being the youngest of the men. The others seemed content to defer to his leadership.
“So what did you mean?”
“We’ve been expecting a visit from the police for some time now. It’s taken you longer to get out here than I imagined. But I suppose it is off the metropolitan beat.”
Nergui nodded, slowly. “You sound as if you’re rather off the metropolitan beat yourself.”
The man laughed. “It’s still so obvious? After all this time. I thought I’d put all that behind me.”
This was all getting a little too opaque for Nergui’s tastes. He had a sense that he was losing dominance of the conversation. It was not a common sensation for Nergui, and his usual response, in professional circumstances, was to engage in some intimidation. He had a feeling, though, that this approach would not be effective here.
“Can we sit?” he said mildly. “I need to ask you a few questions.”
“I should perhaps be careful,” the man said. “If you’re here in an official role, I might incriminate myself.”
“Are there grounds for you to incriminate yourself?”
The man smiled. “You’ll need a more sophisticated approach than that, I’m afraid.” He gestured toward the ger behind them. “Come in. We can talk in here.”
Nergui and Doripalam followed him into the dark confines of the tent. Inside, there were benches draped with blankets. He gestured the two officers to sit, and then squatted on the floor opposite them.
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