Out of Range

by Hank Steinberg

Julie considered her odds if she tried to bull her way past Quinn and dive off the balcony into the crowd, but quickly rejected the idea. The fourth floor was too high and there was a pretty good chance she’d die if she fell. If not, she’d certainly break a leg and Byko’s guards down below would be on her in no time.

  Besides, before she could think of escape, she needed to take one more stab at Byko. She’d seen his vulnerability back there in the car and she still felt there might be an opening, however narrow and elusive, for her to convince him to call off the horrendous enterprise he’d set in motion.

  The French doors opened and Byko came in off the balcony.

  “How many people are down there?” she asked.

  He stared at her for a long moment, as if appraising how to get through to her. “I know you think that what I am doing I do merely for revenge. For my own pain. But it isn’t true. I am very well aware that my country is filled with people who’ve lost far more than me. Today I will speak for them.”

  “But you don’t speak for them, Alisher. If they knew what you were planning, they would be horrified.”

  “If you ask them, yes, that is what they would say. But in their hearts a part of them will cry out, ‘Finally! Finally someone has done something to wake up the world.’ ”

  “So you’re doing all this for ‘your people’? What do you think will happen after all the bombings? The West will rally around Karimov, America and Britain will give him more money to contain the ‘extremists,’ and he’ll have even freer rein to clamp down on the people in the name of fighting terrorism. You must know that.”

  “Sometimes things need to be pushed to a breaking point,” Byko replied. “For there to be real change.”

  “You still have time to call it off. Please, Alisher. There’s still decency inside you. I know there is.”

  “Decency is not a luxury I can afford,” he said. “And there is nothing inside me now but rage.”

  Charlie thought he was prepared for how strong his feelings would be when he got near the Square, but as soon as he spotted the sculpture of Babur in the distance, he broke out in a cold sweat.

  Even from afar, he recognized the precise spot where Byko had clung to his dead son and screamed up at the heavens. From there, his eyes trailed to the patch of stone where he had been gunned down. Then his gaze settled on a young girl. She couldn’t have been more than ten and her hair was blond but there was something about her face, her posture, her manner that reminded him of the girl from that day. The one he’d tried to save.

  And suddenly, he was back there again, reliving it all.

  As the memories overwhelmed him, spots of light swam in front of his eyes and he thought he might faint.

  “Sir,” someone asked. “Are you all right?”

  Charlie found his focus and noticed an elderly man in a beige linen suit standing next to him.

  “Are you all right, sir? Do you need something to drink?”

  The man offered him a bottle of water, but Charlie straightened and took a deep breath, “I’m fine,” he said. “Thank you. I’m fine.”

  The old man nodded as if he understood everything. “It is hard to come back here,” he said. His eyes met Charlie’s for an instant and then he headed into the Square.

  Charlie took another deep breath, then gazed around, unsure what he was looking for when he felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. He took it out and saw it was Hopkins.

  Was it news of Julie? Charlie closed his eyes for a beat, took a deep breath, then answered . . .

  “This is Charlie Davis.”

  “We were wrong,” Hopkins admitted. “We were wrong and you were right. Byko’s in Andijan and he has Julie with him.”

  Charlie stiffened. “Where?”

  “A safe house outside the city.”

  “And how do you know all of this?”

  “We’ve captured some of his men. They’ve coughed up the truth.”

  “So what do you want from me?”

  “We have no way to gain access to the country. Karimov has made himself unavailable and there isn’t the political will to send in a covert operation on foreign soil. Even if there were, there simply isn’t the time at this point.” Hopkins hesitated. “We need you to get to Byko.”

  “And do what?”

  “We believe he’s waiting until the last moment to give out the targets to his people. It’s possible there may still be time to stop him.”

  “And what if I’m too late?”

  “Then it would be a matter of coercing him to tell you where they are. Either way, it means apprehending him by force.”

  Charlie nearly laughed. “Oh, is that all?”

  Hopkins’s voice was gravelly and tired. “I know we’ve already asked too much of both of you. Believe me, I know that. But you are our only option at this point.”

  “The men you captured, they say Byko’s in a safe house?”

  “That part is our deduction.”

  “Well, it doesn’t make sense,” Charlie argued. “Byko didn’t come all the way here to hole up away from the action. He’ll want to be close, maybe even participate in the event.”

  “At this point, I am willing to defer to your judgment, Mr. Davis.”

  For the first time, Charlie could hear a defeated tone in Hopkins’s voice. He almost felt sorry for the man.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Charlie said. “You can trace my whereabouts by tracking this phone.”

  He hung up and looked around.

  Most of the buildings surrounding the Square belonged to the government. But there were a couple of hotels—the Metropol and the Rossiya. The Metropol was the nicer of the two, a hotel that went back all the way to czarist times. But Charlie vaguely remembered hearing that former Soviet premier Mikhail Brezhnev had visited Andijan once and had stayed at the Rossiya.

  According to the story he had heard, the local party bosses had spent millions of rubles to build a massive presidential suite on the fourth floor in preparation for Brezhnev’s one-day stay in the city. Charlie seemed to recall a photo of Brezhnev reviewing a parade from the balcony, wooden faced, with his giant cartoon eyebrows and his fur hat. From a security perspective, the huge suite would be the best place for Byko to stay. Plus, it would appeal to Byko’s grandiosity, his lunatic sense of historical mission.

  Charlie began pushing through the crowd toward the Rossiya, a squat, ugly building that took up an entire city block along the western edge of Babur Square. As he got closer he saw a figure standing on a balcony overlooking the giant expanse of the Square, but from a distance he couldn’t quite make out the man.

  He walked faster, heart thrumming with anticipation. Because Charlie could scarcely believe his eyes.

  Standing there alone—unguarded—was Alisher Byko.

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Charlie pulled the hood over his jacket to obscure his face from Byko. He was looking straight down at the people in the Square and Charlie felt sure that Byko could actually recognize him in the crowd. But Charlie quickly realized that Byko’s head was barely moving, that he didn’t seem to be looking around. He couldn’t see Byko’s eyes from that distance, but he imagined that Byko might not be surveying the crowd at all. That he, too, was back in time, reliving the events of six years ago.

  For a split second, Charlie’s heart ached for the man. After all, he had lost everything—his wife, his son—while Charlie’s wife and son had been spared, had in fact been delivered.

  It made Charlie think about the nature of pain and what people do with it. Some are able to rise above it, to survive and heal, while others slip deeper and deeper into anger. He wondered what it was that had sent Byko down this harrowing path.

  In any event, there was no saving him now. Now, he and his rage simply needed to be extinguished.

  Charlie stuck his hand in his pocket
and felt for his trusty Sig Sauer. Could he get off a shot from here? He dropped to a knee as if he needed to tie his shoe and lined up a shot with his finger. Byko must have been sixty yards up. And the balcony wall, plus the railing, created a very difficult angle. This would require a sharpshooter of the highest order. Someone like Salim.

  Charlie cursed himself. He should’ve brought the kid after all. Should he go back for him now? By the time he fetched Salim and brought him here, was there any chance that Byko would still be standing on the balcony in this private reverie?

  Charlie seriously doubted it. He would have to find another way. A way into that presidential suite.

  A light rain began to fall as Charlie approached the large green awning over the hotel’s main entrance. Immediately, Charlie noticed two men standing there. They both wore tiny earpieces and there were bulges under their leather jackets big enough to be submachine guns.

  Byko’s men, for sure. No way he’d get past them.

  Charlie pulled his baseball cap down over his face and circled around the block until he reached the rear of the hotel.

  An alleyway led behind the Rossiya to a loading dock.

  A door was propped open with a stainless steel trash can and Charlie could see cooks inside the kitchen, making food over large gas stoves.

  This was his way in.

  Charlie moved quickly, but surreptitiously. When he got twenty feet from the entrance, two men burst out of the door.

  Leather jackets. Earpieces.

  Charlie froze as Byko’s guards fixed directly on him. He knew that if he turned and ran, he’d give himself away. But he couldn’t just stand there frozen either. He had to do something. So he tripped intentionally. As he stood, he scooped up a champagne bottle from the ground next to the Dumpster and began singing loudly in Russian, weaving from side to side and waving the empty bottle in front of his face as though conducting an orchestra. Between the rain and the baseball cap and the bottle in front of his face, maybe the guards wouldn’t recognize him.

  “Get out of here, you shit-eating drunk!” one of them yelled. Charlie “slipped” and fell, crawled a few steps and then stumbled away, Byko’s men laughing and hurling abuse at him until he reached the corner. Righting himself, Charlie cursed and hurled the bottle at the wall in frustration. He was running out of options.

  He continued to circle the building—but every single entrance was guarded. Worst-case scenario, he would have to try shooting his way into the building, but he knew that would almost certainly be a losing proposition.

  Maybe a distraction? A disguise?

  No. There had to be another way into the hotel. He surveyed the area and spotted a recently built multistory parking garage behind one wing of the Rossiya. Next to it was a run-down old tenement. And the top floor of the garage was connected to the roof of the hotel.

  What if . . .

  He stared up for a few seconds, shading his eyes against the rain with a cupped hand. It was hard to tell from here.

  He jogged around to the front of the tenement. The property was surrounded by a rusting chain-link fence. Charlie crawled over it, sprinted through the gaping front door and up the urine-smelling stairway. At the top was another door, this one secured with an old padlock. Charlie kicked the door twice and the rotten wood gave way, the door falling onto the roof of the tenement with a sodden thud.

  The rain was coming down much harder as he walked out to the edge of the building and looked down. The top floor of the garage was about six feet from the roof of the tenement and about ten feet down. Surrounding the roof was a low brick wall, maybe three feet high—just high enough that it would be dangerous to jump over. He’d have to perch on the wall and leap with no running start. He felt the surface of the brick. Typical Soviet workmanship—the brick so spongy and friable that he was able to gouge it with his fingernails. And if that wasn’t bad enough, a stiff wind was driving the rain right into his face. He’d be jumping against the wind.

  He climbed up onto the little wall, balancing on his tiptoes. When he was standing on the roof it had looked like quite a drop, but now, swaying in the windy rain on a four-inch-wide piece of slippery brick, it felt like it was a million miles down.

  In the alley below, under an awning, one of the guards flicked his cigarette into the air, then stretched and surveyed the alley with a slow, professional sweep of his head.

  Charlie tested his weight, swinging his arms and readying himself to jump. Something gave way under his foot and he fought to keep himself from falling. He managed to recover his balance, but as he straightened, moving his foot to a more secure part of the wall, a small hunk of brick broke free and fell, tumbling slowly through the air.

  The brick hit not ten feet from Byko’s guards, letting out a sharp crack that echoed loudly through the alley. The two guards started, one of them frowning curiously, the other reaching under his coat and smoothly sweeping out an MP5 submachine gun.

  It was now or never.

  Charlie coiled, bent his knees and leaped.

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Julie sat on the piano bench in the palatial living room of the Rossiya Hotel’s presidential suite, playing “Chopsticks” on the astonishingly out-of-tune grand piano.

  Byko continued to stand on the covered balcony in the rain, looking out at the Square. Quinn sat ten feet from Julie, his feet up, whistling what she thought might be a tune from West Side Story. Across the room, the young man with the Homer Simpson shirt was setting up a computer and a video camera.

  There was really nothing she could do. Quinn carried a gun and had the reflexes of a cat. Unless there was some kind of distraction that would help her escape, she suspected she didn’t have more than an hour or two to live.

  It was a very strange feeling. The drugs and the waterboarding had given her something to fight against, something to focus her. But this—sitting around letting the clock tick down on her life, here in what passed for luxury in Uzbekistan—seemed ridiculous and surreal.

  The computer tech fussed with the camera, then the lights, then the camera, then pecked away on the computer again. When his work was complete, the technician moved to the balcony door and told Byko that everything was ready for him.

  Byko came in and sat in front of the computer. From Julie’s perspective it appeared to be a fancy version of Skype: a camera and several bright lights were pointed at the chair in which Byko sat.

  “Security protocols?” Byko asked.

  “Totally untraceable, high-prime encryption, parallel packet redundancy, sir. Everything’s working perfectly and the recipients are standing by.”

  Byko looked at his watch, then nodded at the technician.

  “Three . . . two . . . one . . . ,” the technician said. Then he pointed his finger silently at Byko as he pressed a button on the computer.

  On the side of the camera, a tiny red light blinked on. Simultaneously a rectangular window opened on the screen and Byko’s image appeared in hi-def, the lights perfectly picking up the lines of his jaw, the intensity of his eyes. He looked like the host of a news talk show on CNN.

  Byko stared solemnly into the lens. “The time is near, my brothers, and all has been said that need be said. Thirty minutes after I conclude this transmission, you will be sent the targets and routing plans for your escape. I will go into hiding. You may not hear from me for six months or a year. But I will contact you again, and we will see then what still remains to be accomplished. Until then, go with force toward what is right.”

  Byko nodded at the technician. With that, the red light blinked out and the connection to his far-flung network disconnected. Byko must have felt her gaze on him because he turned suddenly to face her.

  “There was so much you could have done in this world,” she said grimly.

  He assessed her coolly. “To know that you’ll be watching me, this will be very satisfying
. That it will be the last thing you do before you die—I’ll find a way to live with that.”

  Then he turned and strode out.

  As the door slammed shut behind him, she caught a glimpse of the two guards standing in the hallway. That certainly wouldn’t be the way out.

  Again, she considered making a break for the balcony and jumping into the crowd. It was her only chance at this point. If she could get to the balcony door and throw it open, it would block Quinn for a moment. Once she got out the door and onto the balcony, she’d have a step, maybe a step and a half lead time ahead of him. Throw in the element of surprise and she might just make it to the ledge.

  She clenched her fists, focusing, readying herself. Once she started to go, there would be no turning back. Three strides to the door, three strides to the—

  Quinn’s walkie-talkie crackled loudly, interrupting her train of thought. A voice said, “There’s something happening on the roof.”

  “Like what?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know,” the voice replied. “It’s raining like a bitch out here. But I think someone just jumped across it.”

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Charlie’s feet slammed into concrete and for a moment he teetered on the edge, fighting the wind that threatened to blow him over. Just as he was about to fall, he spotted a short stub of rusting conduit sticking up from the concrete, grabbed it and hauled himself onto the roof.

  Had the guards on the ground seen him? No way to know. Either way, he needed to move fast. He rolled, sprang to his feet, sprinted across the parking garage and climbed over a low concrete barrier that led to the adjoining roof of the hotel. A brief scan of the roof revealed a door. He tried the handle but it was locked. He kicked hard—several times—each kick sending a wave of shock through his back. Grimacing, he eyed the roof for something to pry open the door. A tool, a knife, a stray piece of metal. But there was nothing around but a broad expanse of wet gravel, a few rolls of tar paper and some conduit that appeared firmly affixed to the roof.