Out of Range

by Hank Steinberg

  “You should have bloody called me.”

  “With all due respect, sir, would you have bucked Whitehall on this? If you wouldn’t do it to catch Byko himself, would you have done it to protect a single agent?”

  The black eyes continued to watch him unblinkingly. “I should watch your tone, were I you.”

  Frank Hopkins considered himself to be a man of great self-control. But the simmering heat of his anger was threatening to burst out of him in a career-ending explosion. He forced himself to take a deep breath. “I recruited Marcus. I brought him along. He had a few personal problems that led him to his rather undistinguished assignment in Uzbekistan. But he was a fine field man and a decent human being. I sweated through several jungles, a handful of deserts and more than a few inhospitable cities in his company, and he dragged my arse out of more than a few rather tight spots. He was a friend.”

  “Look, Hopkins, we’re all damned sorry about Marcus Vaughan. Damned sorry.” Bryce paused for a moment, hands prayerfully clasped in front of the knot of his tie. Then, having made his show of compassion, he recomposed his face in its usual grave lines. “That said, if you wish to have a future in this organization, I suggest we put an end to this sort of finger-pointing and set our sights on finding Byko.”

  Hopkins gazed at the man incredulously.

  “I know I don’t need to remind you that the clock is ticking, Hopkins.”

  “No, sir. You certainly don’t.”

  And with that, Hopkins turned and headed out of the room, all too aware that one hand was still tied behind his back.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Charlie and Faruz were bombing down the highway outside Tashkent in Faruz’s beat-up BMW. Faruz had assured Charlie that while the Beemer might look tired, the engine had been reconstituted and was more than ready for prime time. Thus far, Faruz had been a man of his word. The car was humming along at ninety-two miles per hour with only the gentlest of purrs.

  “So where exactly are we heading?” Charlie asked.

  “The way this works, my cousin gonna call me, various steps along way. Byko very particular about who he talk to these days. People gonna be watching us for tails. Right now we heading to a checkpoint east of Samarkand.” He pointed at the mountains. “We get up there, my cousin gonna call, give us directions to next checkpoint. Eventually we gonna reach Byko.”

  “So you have no idea.”

  Faruz shrugged. He was normally hard to shut up, but it was clear he was nervous and they drove mostly in silence, Faruz pushing the speed, passing trucks and slower cars with his horn blaring, chain-smoking Marlboros.

  The low, drab outskirts of Tashkent gradually gave way to the arid countryside and then to a low, purple range of mountains, the first upwellings of the great spine of rock that ran eastward across Asia all the way to the Himalayas. In the foothills of the mountains near the Kirghiz border, they came upon a cell tower extending up from the hard, bare earth like some alien artifact in the midst of a moonscape of barren rock.

  “This is it,” Faruz said, climbing out of the car and whipping out his cell. “It’s me,” he said into the phone. “Where to next?”

  While Faruz was hashing out the details for their next checkpoint, Charlie noticed a car parked across the highway. Two young men sat in the vehicle staring at him through mirrored sunglasses.

  Charlie heard Faruz sign off, then watched him return to the car. As he opened the door and got in, the young men put their car in gear and took off.

  “Who were those guys?” Charlie said.

  “Watchers,” Faruz replied and threw his phone onto the dash.

  “Let’s go.”

  The Fergana Valley had been strategically carved up by Stalin and now lay divided between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It was devoted almost entirely to agriculture, with long strip-shaped cotton fields lining the sides of the A273 highway for mile after mile after mile. As the most fertile area in Uzbekistan—in fact, in all of Central Asia—the Valley should have been prosperous and lively.

  That was hardly the case and Charlie was reminded of it as he and Faruz sped past what appeared to be a graveyard of ancient Russian tractors sitting in an empty field, their paint bleached and rusted, tires pirated, picked clean of extra parts. In the succeeding field, women in colorful head scarves plodded listlessly through a vast field, backs bent, hacking ineffectually at the ground with primitive hoes.

  In the Soviet era, cotton picking had been largely mechanized, but the Karimov regime had avoided investing in new machinery or novel agricultural techniques. This was the best way to squeeze the resources out of the region while keeping the people mired in poverty.

  During the cotton harvest, schools and universities were shut down and entire towns and cities depopulated, their inhabitants forcibly removed to the Valley, where they picked cotton until the fields were stripped clean. For every dollar earned by the cotton crop, 25 percent went straight into the pocket of the President and his children. Another huge chunk went to Karimov’s various cronies and oligarchs. The rest went to the military and national infrastructure. Nothing but a few pennies came back to the people who toiled in those fields. As far as Charlie was concerned—and this was a point he’d argued many times in his stories and columns back in the day—this was a system that closely resembled the American South of a century and a half earlier, and the cotton pickers were essentially slaves of the regime.

  Still, the land was green and the mountainous backdrop was breathtaking. As anxious and wired as Charlie was, he couldn’t help but notice this and he felt mournful about how he’d left this place.

  “I’d forgotten how beautiful this country is,” Charlie said wistfully.

  Faruz seemed to perk up. “There were a lot of people who didn’t want you to leave.”

  “I had no choice,” Charlie said, as much to himself as to his friend.

  Faruz just looked at him. This was a conversation that had been sitting between them, unspoken, since they’d liaised in Tashkent and Charlie felt more defensive than he’d anticipated. “Julie almost died, I almost lost my son.”

  Faruz shrugged infinitesimally. “I was there. I lost people.”

  Charlie felt a flash of anger. “I’m a journalist. Not a freedom fighter.”

  “Julie didn’t want to leave. She still send packages to the villages she worked in. She still send email.”

  “Well, I guess she’s stronger than me,” Charlie said heavily. “Because I needed to forget.”

  “You never even say good-bye.”

  “I know,” Charlie said softly. “I’m sorry.”

  “So is it better for you in California? With the palm trees and yoga and blond girls in bikini?”

  Charlie snorted an ironic laugh. Both men, it seemed, were happy to return to the safer terrain of cynical banter. But as Faruz flicked ash out the window and futzed with his iPod, Charlie thought about what Faruz had said about Julie—that she’d stayed in touch with her old friends here, that she’d sent emails and care packages. Not really a surprising revelation, given who Julie was, but what struck Charlie was this: she’d never spoken to him about any of it. Why had she felt it necessary to hide this from him? Did she believe he’d be angry with her? That he couldn’t handle hearing about anything relating to Uzbekistan? Perhaps she thought it would humiliate him, that it would shove in his face precisely what he’d just said to Faruz: that she was stronger than him, that he needed to forget while she still wanted to remember.

  What if it was something even more difficult to swallow? What if she’d hidden it from him because she was afraid if he knew, then she would be exposed? That healthy gestures of her lingering affection for the Uzbek people would actually indicate something deeper: that she’d never accepted their choice to live in Los Angeles, that she was unhappy with the life they’d made there, that she yearned for a return to the time bef
ore the safe and rational compromise that landed them in suburbia? If that was the case, then she had spent the last six years living a life of dutiful obligation? Spurred by some kind of misguided sense of what? Loyalty? Guilt?

  Charlie was spinning. He knew that Julie had never felt a part of Los Angeles, that its affected Hollywood players and superficial culture were anathema to her. Of course, they were to him, too. But he’d grown to appreciate the sunshine, the mountains, the ocean, and he’d found a great many friends through the paper—people outside the entertainment business who were intelligent, erudite, conscientious citizens of the world. Julie used to joke that people came to L.A. for a “lifestyle” not a “life,” but she’d always said it with a wry smile, and he genuinely thought that she’d come to enjoy all that it had to offer.

  Had he misread her so badly? He kept hearkening back to what Sal had told him. How could Charlie have been so blind to what was happening in his own marriage? And if she was so unhappy, so restless and unfulfilled, why had she never come to him? Yes, she had raised the idea of going overseas again—of resuming their old way of life—but had she ever laid it all on the line? Then again, had he ever gone out of his way to ask her what she really thought of the life he’d foisted upon them? Or had he mostly avoided the subject, afraid of what her response might be?

  A part of Charlie told himself this was not what he needed to take on right now. Autopsying their marriage, beating himself up over what he did and did not do or say over the last six years . . . ? How was that going to be helpful? But there was another side of him—the morbid, unsentimental side—which reminded him that if he didn’t save her, this was what would be left of their marriage. A slew of unanswered questions, a score of issues never to be resolved. He would go to his grave wondering what had happened between them and what her lies meant.

  Charlie stared out the window, the cotton fields streaming by in slow, endless procession.

  How had they become such strangers?

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Julie 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

  We’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 vo
ice 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.”