Out of Range

by Hank Steinberg

  Just then, a young man slipped into the back. At first, Charlie didn’t recognize him in the gloomy half darkness, but then he saw his milky left eye: it was Salim. He was nineteen or twenty now, the same age his older brother had been when he was murdered.

  Charlie nodded to him, then continued. “My wife never wanted to leave here. If it had been up to her, she would have stayed. Some of you have heard of the work she did in villages much like this one. Because she loves this country and wanted it to become a better place. Last week, she came back here and risked her life to stop a man who will only make things harder for everyone in this country.”

  He tried to make eye contact with the men in the room. “I need your help now to save her. But I’m not coming here with my hand out. I will pay. I will pay five hundred dollars to any man who comes with me.”

  A soft rustle spread across the room. Heads turned. Voices murmured. To most of these men, five hundred dollars was more than a year’s income.

  “And what do you need then?” asked one of the elders.

  “My wife was being held at a compound just south of here. If she’s still there, she’ll be guarded by professionals. But if—”

  “What is this compound? Whose compound is it?” This was a toughed-eyed clan chief named Khalil.

  “It belongs to Alisher Byko,” Charlie said.

  At the mention of Byko’s name several men got up and headed for the door.

  Charlie plowed on. “I understand that Byko is a powerful man, but we will have the advantage of surprise. And he’ll have no way to track any of you back to this town.”

  The murmurs became derisive and the men filtered out of the room en masse.

  “Wait a minute!” Charlie barked at them. “Just wait.” There was an urgency in his voice that stopped them. “There’s something else,” he said. “There is more at stake here than just my wife. Far more at stake.” He surveyed the men’s faces. “I am not supposed to tell you this, to tell anyone this . . .” He could feel everyone in the room tense. “Alisher Byko is planning a large-scale terrorist attack against the United States and Europe. If he succeeds, not only will hundreds of thousands of people be killed, but you and the rest of your people will pay the price for it. You can only imagine what President Karimov will do once he has an excuse like that to clamp down on ‘extremists’ in this region. That is why Byko remains at large. Because Karimov wants him to get away with it. Karimov can’t wait to have another reason to take away more of your freedoms . . .”

  Charlie felt sure this time that he had them. “So I’m asking you now, come with me. Together we will find Byko and bring him to justice. And we will prove to the world that the people of this region are a proud people, a worthy people, a noble people. This is what I was hoping to do when I was here six years ago, but now there is really a chance. To do something for the world and something for yourselves. Please. Come with me.”

  For a long moment, no one spoke. Charlie could see that many of the men were moved. But then Khalil spoke.

  “We have no reason to believe this man. And even if what he says is true, Alisher Byko has his own private army. The women of this village will all end up widows, the children orphans. What he wants . . . is simply not possible. Not for any amount of money.” He looked at the men and issued what might as well have been a command. “Now we go.”

  Charlie’s heart sank as one by one the men headed out and disappeared into the village square. Khalil waited by the door, apparently making sure that no one was fool enough to disobey him. Only when the exodus was nearly complete did Khalil notice that the one-eyed teenager was still here.

  “Salim!” Khalil called out sternly. He didn’t have to say anything more. The kid rose reluctantly and dragged himself toward the exit. But there were four others who did remain.

  “They’re grown men,” Charlie insisted. “They can do as they please.”

  Khalil looked them over for a long moment, as if deciding which tack he would take, then spit on the ground and warned Charlie, “If these four never come back, we will all be better off.” And with that, Khalil took his leave.

  Charlie turned to face the men who’d stayed. They were thin, wiry and disreputable looking with scraggly beards and torn clothes. Clearly the dregs of the town. But they were armed with battered AK-47s and at this point Charlie knew beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  “All right then,” he said and started counting out the money.

  “Not five hundred,” one of them said in Russian. “Five thousand.”

  Charlie looked up. The man, apparently the de facto leader, smiled without mirth, revealing all three of the teeth that were left in his mouth. “Apiece.”

  Charlie shook his head. “Not possible.”

  “Is possible,” said the man. “You want your wife, you want stop these killings . . . is very possible.”

  A long session of bargaining commenced. Tempers flared, threats were issued, automatic weapons were waved, and once the four men even made a feint toward the door. But Charlie had spent enough time in Uzbekistan to understand that the men had to go through this exercise, to make sure Charlie had left no money on the table.

  In the end the terms were made: two thousand dollars cash per man. One thousand now, one thousand upon completion of the mission with the men agreeing to supply their own weapons and transport. Charlie shook hands with each man in turn and suddenly everyone was smiling and laughing, the best of friends.

  As they exited the building, Charlie heard furtive footsteps behind them. He whirled, half expecting to be jumped.

  It was Salim.

  “I’m coming with you,” he said.

  The hired men laughed, but Salim ignored them, pointing at something on the hillside above the town. “You see that?”

  It took Charlie a moment to make out what he was being shown: it was a Coke bottle, perched on a rock. Over a hundred yards away.

  Salim lifted his ancient, battered Soviet bolt-action rifle and took careful aim. The rifle went off with a sharp crack and an explosion of foul-smelling smoke. The Coke bottle exploded in a shower of glistening pieces of glass.

  “I can help you,” Salim said with disarming confidence.

  “No,” Charlie said, “I can’t allow it.”

  Then something caught Charlie’s attention, just beyond Salim. A woman stepping out of the shadows. She was wrapped in a dark burka, only her eyes visible. But even after six years, those eyes were burned into his mind. They belonged to Palonchi Ursalov, Salim’s mother.

  For a moment no one moved.

  There was much Charlie would have liked to say to her, but she simply nodded then turned and walked back into her house.

  She’d given her blessing.

  “I can help you,” the boy said again.

  Charlie hesitated, then got into his stolen car.

  “Let’s go then,” he said to the kid. “You ride with me.”

  Chapter Forty

  Quinn was waiting for Byko in the large vaulted parking area at the end of the tunnel. A few small, innocuous buildings aboveground marked the location, which was part of the same former Soviet nuclear complex as the bathhouse Byko had left nearly an hour earlier. The moment Byko stepped out of the Escalade, Quinn launched in.

  “I have her primed and ready for you, but I honestly can’t imagine what else there is to get out of her.”

  Byko walked right past Quinn, in no mood to be second-guessed. “I’m telling you she’s not a pro,” Quinn hounded. “Let’s just kill her and get out of here.”

  Byko marched toward the entrance to what was once the command center of the Russian complex, explaining to Quinn, “I talked to my sources in the government on the way over. No military units are on standby and there’s no activity among any of the special police tactical squads.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. The America
ns could be sending in a Delta team from Qarshi as we speak. They’re not going to wait around for Karimov to get his act together. Not after what happened in Samarkand.”

  “I need to talk to her,” Byko insisted.

  Quinn kept following. “By my count, it’s eighty-three minutes since Davis escaped. Figuring it took him half an hour to get to the A217 and another five, ten minutes to get through to one of the intel agencies, our cover was blown forty, forty-five minutes ago. All of this is my way of saying we don’t have any more goddamn time.”

  Byko was sick of the mercenary’s insolence. He wordlessly stepped past him, then snapped his fingers at one of his own bodyguards, signaling him to open the huge steel blast door that linked the parking area to the former command center.

  Byko blasted through the door, entering a long, grim hallway made of reinforced concrete. At the end of the hallway, he climbed a flight of stairs that fed into a more finished part of the complex, this part resembling the interior of a pleasant but windowless house. Another hallway led to Julie’s cell, its heavy steel door flanked by two armed guards. At the sight of Byko, they opened the door.

  Julie sat slumped over in the heavy wooden torture chair, shivering hard, her arms and legs attached by Velcro straps. She looked terrible—her face pale and blotchy, her hair uncombed and unwashed, her clothes soaking wet. Byko wasn’t sure what Quinn had been doing to her—but he knew waterboarding must have been on the menu.

  Julie looked up at him blankly, almost as though she had never seen him before.

  “Bring her some bloody soup or something!” Byko shouted out the door. “And a blanket!”

  She moaned softly as he gently unfastened her straps, so weak that he had to support her with his own weight to keep her from sliding out of the chair.

  When one of the guards entered the room with a bowl of soup and a coarse wool blanket, Byko wrapped her up, then fed her himself, spooning the warm soup into her mouth as if she was a baby. She was so ravenous that Byko suspected she hadn’t been fed in days.

  Bloody Quinn. He was excellent at his job but Byko was beginning to realize he was also something of a sadist. It was one thing to inflict pain upon your political enemies, it was quite another to take personal pleasure in the agony of an individual. How Julie had been treated here was well beyond what was called for and Byko regretted it. Particularly because it cost him the moral high ground he so dearly coveted.

  As he cared for her, Byko began to feel something odd. A tender nostalgia for the halcyon days of their youth and a particular memory of a cold, rainy day at Cambridge. It was mid-December, and Julie had insisted they stay at school for the holidays. Against all of his better judgment, she’d convinced him it would be romantic to stroll the ancient courtyards when everyone else had gone home and they could have the place to themselves. By the second day, Julie had come down with the flu and was bedridden with a 103-degree fever. Byko had cursed his luck: he could have been sunbathing on a yacht in Dubai, but instead he was stuck in a dank dorm room having to play Florence Nightingale. Forced to make the best of the situation, he fixed Julie a bowl of plov from his grandmother’s old recipe and fed it to her much as he did now. On that day, her soulful brown eyes had conveyed such gratitude. Today, there was barely acknowledgment.

  Julie looked up at Byko and met his eyes for the first time since he’d entered the room. For what felt like days, she had been so consumed by drugs and physical pain, she hadn’t realized the toll that cold and hunger could take.

  But now that she had food in her belly, and some strength had returned, she was able once again to focus. And began to feel a glimmer of hope. Because she could tell by the way Byko was looking at her, the way he had fed her, the way he had stroked her hair, that he still had feelings for her. And this was what she would need to prey on.

  “I cannot say that I approve of how you’ve been treated,” he said quietly, “but I’m afraid you left me with no choice, Jules.”

  Jules. That name. The familiarity, the intimacy. It was what Charlie called her and it made her almost sick to hear Byko utter it now, as if they were at the quad back in Cambridge. But she knew she couldn’t afford to let her emotions get the better of her. She needed to play to Byko’s ego, to renew some kind of connection. “I understand,” she said. “You’ve been put in a difficult position.”

  “You know,” Byko continued, “Quinn thinks you were a dupe, that MI6 convinced you to lure me to that café without giving you half a reason why. But that just doesn’t make sense to me. Given who you are.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but who I am is a bored, lonely housewife, Alisher.”

  “Maybe so, but I don’t see you showing up in Samarkand and selling me out without some kind of proof from MI6 that I’m up to no good.”

  “So you admit that you’re up to no good?” she probed.

  “That is a matter of interpretation,” he answered, appearing oddly defensive. “I am quite sure they would have needed to convince you of as much. If you were to leave your family to come here. If you were to lie to me. And to your husband.”

  There was no arguing with his logic. He was too smart and continuing to tap dance with him would only backfire. She needed to give him something.

  “They told me about the uranium,” she admitted. “They told me that you intended for it to be used to make dirty bombs. I didn’t believe them. I told them there must be some kind of mistake. So they showed me the manifests. They showed me how they traced the shipments back to your reactor and processing plant.”

  “And where were the shipments sent to?”

  “Cities around the world,” she admitted. “They showed me specific ones to Boston and Manchester, but the names of the other cities were blacked out on the document. They needed to convince me, but they refused to give away all of the information.”

  “And you were convinced.”

  This was the moment. She needed to make him believe.

  “I was convinced there must be a misunderstanding. I told them that the Alisher Byko I knew would never do anything like that.”

  “And they said what?”

  “They showed me a photograph of your sister, of what happened to her.”

  “And then you started to believe them?”

  “No,” she said adamantly. “I told them it was impossible. I said, ‘Maybe someone from your processing plant had stolen the uranium.’ I told them there was no way you yourself could be behind it.”

  “And yet you came.”

  “There was no persuading them,” she implored. “And I was sure they were going to find you and kill you if I didn’t help them.”

  “Oh,” Byko chuckled ironically, “so you did this for me?”

  “I thought if I helped them get to you then you’d be able to convince them they were wrong. That you would help them figure out who in your organization had stolen the uranium.”

  Byko leaned back in his chair and folded his arms.

  “And why not just tell me the truth?” he asked.

  “Because I would have been committing treason.”

  “So . . . ,” Byko replied, “you were between the proverbial Scylla and Charybdis.”

  “I was, Alisher. You have to believe me.”

  She felt his eyes boring through her.

  “If I had it to do over again,” she said, “I would have just stayed in Los Angeles and minded my own business. Then none of this would be happening.”

  She could have sworn she saw something—a flicker of compassion—in Byko just then. Surely if he understood anything, he understood the devastation of being ripped away from one’s family.

  A knock interrupted what might have been a moment of connection. Byko turned and saw Quinn’s face in the door’s tiny window. The sadist held his wrist up to the window and tapped his Rolex with one beefy finger.

  Byko
simply glared at him and Quinn disappeared from view.

  When Byko returned his attention to Julie, the softness in his expression was gone.

  “So what would you have me do now?” he asked.

  “Let me go. Please. I just want to go home to my children.”

  “If this was the story that you had told me from the beginning, perhaps that might have been a possibility. But now . . . I’m afraid you’ve lost your credibility.”

  Julie put her face in her hands, her entire body trembling. “I’m sorry, Alisher. I should have. I should have told you from the beginning, but I was so scared.”

  “You told me that you loved me,” Byko said, staring right past her into space. She couldn’t tell if it was a question or merely a mournful statement of fact. But she felt it required a response—and she knew that if she overplayed her hand, he would smell it. Smell it and maybe strangle her right here and now.

  “Alisher,” she said, trying in vain to get him to look at her. “You know that I have feelings for you. I always have. I even had second thoughts about leaving you all those years ago.” She sighed. “But I love Charlie.”

  She felt a sudden and unexpected upwelling of emotion as she said those words. Things had been so tangled between them over the past couple of years, but now that she was here—staring death in the face—a newfound clarity came to her. It was Charlie. It had always been Charlie.

  Byko must have heard the crack in her voice and detected the tear in her eye, because he looked at her again. And his expression grew ice cold. “It’s too bad he couldn’t have seen you say that,” he teased. “I’m sure he would have appreciated it. Unfortunately, for him, the last thing he saw of you was you saying how much you loved me.” He paused. “How much you always loved me.”