Camel racing, I messaged back.
Cool! You seem interesting. Check out this site – lots of fun there.
I ran a virus scan and clicked. It was a website advertising pop bands and TV shows. I declined the invitation to subscribe.
Twitter and SoundCloud were blocked but a Virtual Private Network was easy enough to download and allowed you to search the internet without going through government servers. I looked for prostitutes. Prostitutes were often a good first step to finding both the political elite and underworld fixers. There was little information on prostitutes or red-light Astana generally. One gay traveller on a bulletin board asked where he might meet men. Someone mentioned a sauna, someone said Grindr worked. I checked Grindr. The only men within range currently looking for gay sex were two other Western travellers in a nearby hotel.
I ripped a photo of a young man from the internet – out of courtesy, I chose one safely domiciled in Toronto – and set up a profile on the Kazakh social network, Zuz.kz. Adilbek Antropov was twenty-seven years old, an engineer, loved Italian cars, European football, Kazakhstan. I sent some friend requests, then linked to a piece in the Washington Post about kleptocracy in Central Asia. After five minutes it was still up and I hadn’t been arrested.
Dictatorship is sometimes hard to put your finger on. People don’t go around visibly fearful or furious; you have to attune your senses. Water freedom with blood. Now I remembered where it was from: a poem by Taras Shevchenko. Bury me, be done with me, rise and break your chain; water your new freedom with blood like rain. 1880s, maybe 1890s. He was Ukrainian, exiled to Kazakhstan when he started agitating for independence. It was a select few who knew Shevchenko’s poetry these days, and not many of those painting graffiti.
The door chimed. A man walked into the café: clean-shaven, in his forties, a pale, sullen face – European, maybe English. He ordered a water in passable Russian, took a seat at a table in the corner. Beneath his smart grey winter coat was a pale, slightly crumpled suit. In Europe he would have been a perfect grey man, utterly unnoticeable, but not here. I gave it another moment, then finished my coffee and left.
I crossed the Presidential Park, then doubled back, over a low barrier into the grounds of the Keruen shopping mall. Shopping malls are good for counter-surveillance. It seemed Astana had a fine selection of them. A lot of the world was inhospitable a lot of the time, but that wasn’t going to stop consumerism.
I rode escalators up, then down again, with a nice clear view of faces. No indication the pale man had followed. The mall was still quiet. A kiosk at the back sold cigarettes and bus tickets. I bought a packet of Chung Hwa and two lighters.
‘And a travelcard, please; something that gets me on buses across the city.’
She slid one across the counter.
‘How long does this last?’
‘One week.’
‘Any bus? Unlimited?’
She nodded, palm waiting for coins.
I returned to the hotel. What I really needed was someone who had access to police files, an ear to the street, a local journalist or detective. Instead, thanks to the kindness and connections of Olivia Gresham, I had an appointment with a property developer. But that was better than nothing. He was local and would be sensitive to political currents, ones that could pull someone under.
I ironed a shirt, brushed my teeth, thought, Toby Bell. Economic opportunity.
We met in the lobby of one of the sapphire-blue towers in the business district. On the walls hung two framed photos blown up to grand scale: one of the governor of the Mangystau district opening the region’s first supermarket, the other taken inside a Siemens factory close to the Chinese border, with smiling Kazakhs in white coats and hairnets. Dimash Toreali appeared a minute after I arrived, hand outstretched, black polo neck under a grey blazer, thinning hair gelled back.
‘Mr Bell.’ He walked me into the lift and up to the office. ‘You know Olivia Gresham?’
‘Very well.’
‘A clever woman. If she recommends you, you are clever too. And lucky. She says your clients are looking to make significant investments here.’
‘Hopefully.’
‘Worked in Central Asia before?’
‘Not as such. I’ve had some involvement in China.’
‘And you studied in England?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oxford or Cambridge?’
‘Neither, I’m afraid.’
‘I spent a blissful year at Oxford.’
His office was decorated with two portraits of the President, one with a gold shimmer like a novelty postcard. In between them was a poster declaring: The City of the Future is Digital. Toreali beamed at me. I was reminded of Moscow in the Noughties, the excitement of money when it’s flowing free and there’s no end in sight. But I also got a sense that Toreali ran a tight ship.
He talked about entrepreneurship, a rising middle class, Kazakhstan as a link between China and Europe. As evidence of the country’s appetite for modernity he described his flagship development, Khan Shatyr – ‘Tent of the Khan’ – Astana’s biggest retail complex and, technically, the largest tent in the world. Its sloping glass walls were suspended by cables from a central spire. The shopping centre was modelled on a traditional Kazakh yurt, he said, and I gazed across the promotional images and nodded. Gap, Zara, Occitane; an air-conditioned paradise where history came to die. The upper levels were encircled by a jogging track and monorail. On the top floor was a beach with sand imported from the Maldives.
‘Did you know Astana had a beach?’ He smiled.
‘I might have read about it.’
‘Open until midnight. You can relax on the sand, minus 40 outside. Locals love it.’
‘I’m sure.’
After another twenty minutes the bottle and glasses came out. Ten-thirty a.m. I’d had worse. And I respected the tradition. The vodka in the drawer was like a confession: Of course, none of this is really bearable. It made you conscious of its absence in Western offices, and wonder what psychopathy replaced it.
We raised a toast to the unbreakable friendship between Kazakhstan and the UK, then one to peace, understanding and friendship.
I raised a toast to the President, then he said, ‘Let’s go for a drive.’
Four armed guards accompanied us through the centre of town, in a civilian-model Humvee, as Toreali pointed out the largest aquarium in Central Asia – ‘Possibly the only aquarium in Central Asia’ – and a new ovoid national archive building under construction. I probed for insight into the political situation, but he was on sales mode and I didn’t get anything useful.
‘We call Astana city of the future, gorod budushchego, and the city of dreams, gorod-mechta.’
‘Not quite the same thing,’ I said.
‘Where does the future come from but dreams?’ He smiled. We approached the Bayterek monument, its slender tower opening out to cradle a golden orb, and I realised what it reminded me of: the sculpture in Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout, flattened by Saudi tanks six years ago when it became a magnet for pro-democracy crowds.
‘This is the centrepiece of the city,’ Toreali said.
‘Does it do anything?’
‘It embodies a Kazakh legend, about a mythical bird that lays a golden egg in a tall tree, beyond human reach. The egg contains the secrets of happiness.’
‘And why is it here?’
‘Because the President wanted it to be here.’
‘If you go up do you discover the secrets of happiness?’
‘You discover a cast of the President’s hand, and when you put your own hand in it a recording of a choir plays.’
We lunched in the Palace of Peace and Harmony. The Palace was the pyramid I’d seen, sixty metres high, its apex formed of stained glass featuring giant doves. It had been constructed for a World Congress of Religious Leaders, Toreali explained proudly. ‘The Palace expresses the spirit of Kazakhstan. Different cultures, traditions and nationalities coexisting in peace and harmony.’ It
also housed an opera house, a national museum of culture and a projected ‘university of civilisation’ about which I tried to get information but failed.
We ate in a huge dining area right at the top with sloping glass walls – myself and Toreali and two Korean businessmen with Louis Vuitton bags to whom I was introduced as a successful British investor. The Koreans wanted to build residential compounds in the style of English town houses arranged around duck ponds. They had a promotional clip which they showed on an iPad: Georgian buildings set among trees, bridges, a supermarket. They’d already built two identical villages in Moscow, one near Shanghai. When I asked if the trees were going to be real they weren’t sure but said there were some convincing artificial ones these days. I flicked through, past the images of golf courses, Western shops and high-end restaurants, and thought of Egypt in 2011, which had had places like this opening every week and was soon in the throes of a revolution.
‘It’s going to have the country’s first Tesco,’ the Korean said.
‘The Chinese must love this.’
‘They buy five or six at a time.’
We ate sliced meats and an Uzbek-style plov of mixed rice and meat. The developer made me study the bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape, and read the label out loud. He filled my glass to the brim but drank Coke himself. His guards stood by the door. I kept thinking about a guy lying in an empty flat with his face shot off.
‘I hear the President’s daughter likes to sing,’ I said.
‘She is a beautiful singer,’ the developer said.
‘I have some connections. If she’d like any bands to perform, to play with her.’
‘Oh, she’d love that. Her birthday is coming up. Do you know Coldplay?’
I said I might be able to help. When desserts were done, the Koreans left and Toreali led me to the sloping glass wall. He pointed past a library that looked like a giant contact lens.
‘See that railway being built?’
I could see a dark line where earth had been turned, workers in hi-vis orange, small as ants.
‘It connects down through the country to the East–West highway, all part of China’s One Belt One Road scheme. They are building it for us, connecting up the world. Last week I was having dinner with a couple who have just made the first overland delivery of laptops from Chongqing in south-west China to Duisburg in Germany. This is the return of the Silk Road.’
I looked past the skyscrapers. Roughly the Silk Road, perhaps; the northern route: Khorgos, Alashankou. Six centuries ago the speed of British ships had drained this route of logic. Within a century or so, some of the greatest cities on earth had withered. Maybe someone then, on the Cape of Good Hope, had seen the galleons sailing past and got the same vertiginous sense of history turning.
‘The beauty of the route is it bypasses Russia.’ He winked. ‘Now that Russia’s put up trade restrictions on Western produce people are bringing chickens over the Caspian. Yesterday I had reps from Jiangsu province sealing a commitment to invest $600 million in related projects. So, as you can see, you have come to the right place. Think of Dubai.’
I thought of Dubai. Toreali continued: ‘These are places created on the basis of logistics. It was a small port where they made an economic zone. Now look at it.’
I gazed across the landscape. Almost, I thought. Only, where Dubai carried a certain regal cruelty, Astana remained more earthbound. It wanted to be liked, which gave the pomp an air of Disneyland rather than Singapore or Manhattan. But both had been built out of oil. I said: ‘Someone once described the world to me as countries with long histories but no oil and countries with lots of oil but little history.’ I’d spent time trying to divine the lesson in this. Toreali took umbrage.
‘Kazakhstan has as much history as anyone else. Just because there are not kings and castles.’
‘Of course.’
‘Not everywhere can be European.’
‘Can I ask you, as one investor to another, how stable you think things are here? A country like this, with its oil, its location, it must be a magnet for unrest and interference.’
‘It is very stable.’
‘Do the Russians cause any trouble? This is their backyard, right? How do you manage that?’
There was a hesitation that made me curious.
‘They know not to push it. The Russians can play a clever game when they want to.’
‘Cleverer than the West, perhaps.’
‘They have shown that.’
I had the sense, as often, arriving in a country, of waiting for the key to decrypt it: the one that made sense of things and brought disparate pieces together. It was always a shared narrative – not the events that made it into the papers, but the prism through which they were viewed; the stories told at home. The meeting had gone well in so far as proving to myself that I could live my cover. I didn’t feel any closer to understanding what I was doing here.
‘And the police – are they cooperative? Trustworthy?’
‘No more or less than the UK. We are not Nigeria.’
I nodded, gazing across a country that wasn’t Nigeria and considering the world’s gradations of prejudice. Then one looming building caught my eye. More than a building, a sprawling residential fortress on the horizon. It stood away from the others, slightly monstrous, centred on a tower with a spire, additional wings of various heights appearing to have conglomerated around it, each with its own battlements. It would have been chilling at the best of times, but it had an extra layer of uncanniness here. I thought of the CGI clip.
‘What’s that?’
‘That building? That is the Triumph of Astana.’
‘Know anyone who lives there?’
He laughed.
‘I have always wondered who lives there. People making money and people making trouble. It is not a place I have ever been.’
THIRTEEN
When I was back in my hotel room, I watched the clip again, studying the view beyond the window, the glimpse of exterior visible, the shape of the room’s own windows. Money and trouble. We were in the Triumph, I felt sure.
I paid it a visit. According to property sites, the Triumph of Astana had 480 apartments, plus shops, restaurants and a cinema. The closer you got the more outlandish it seemed, a fusion of Stalinist and baroque, evidently modelled on the Seven Sisters apartment blocks in Moscow. Stalin had demanded those skyscrapers as a point of pride after the Second World War to compete with Western ones. They were heavier though, and to achieve a scale commensurate with twenty million dead had to expand outwards, mutating as they rose. Their silhouettes haunted the Moscow skyline, and even before I knew their origins I thought they had the cold gravity of war memorials. They made you realise that the scale of other buildings was not born of necessity but a cultural sense of the humane.
Last night the Triumph had been lost in the storm. Twenty-two floors high in the centre, rising to a pointed tower with wings either side, eighteen floors each. Four hundred and eighty apartments. Which one did I appear in?
It felt strange crossing the threshold, onto a polished chequered floor, smiled at by a guard. I felt an urge to ask if he’d seen me before. I headed towards the supermarket, bought a gift box of nuts and dried fruit, registered the various security cameras.
The residential apartments were accessed past a concierge controlling barriers to a set of lifts reserved for occupants. Akhmetov was the most common Kazakh surname. I told the concierge I was here for Mr Akhmetov. Could he call up for me? He said he’d need an apartment number. Behind him was a screen with time and date display. 6 December. The date on the clip was 13 December, a week away.
I found an internet café a few minutes back towards the centre. I wanted to check for photographs of the Triumph’s interiors. The café was small, no cameras. Good for anonymous searching. Or so I thought.
A young woman at the counter put down a medical textbook when I arrived. I asked to use a computer and she asked for ID.
‘What kind of ID?�
�
‘Do you have a Kazakh ID card?’
‘No. I’m from the UK. I’m here on business.’
‘Then your passport.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s the law.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since last year. For security.’ She looked apologetic. Her face said: Obviously this should not apply to wealthy white Westerners, but the law is the law. ‘We are sorry.’
‘No need to be sorry. That’s fine. That’s good.’
Joanna had sent the email from a place called KS. If they were as rigorous as the café I’d just tried, then I had a potential lead to whatever ID she was using. I found KS on Daraboz Street. It turned out the initials stood for Kiber Sports, or Cyber Sports. You had to knock to get in. It was small, with booths divided by plyboard screens. One security camera focused on the door rather than the PCs. The ‘sports’ in its name presumably related to the old arcade machines at the back.
Two men in their early twenties sat behind the counter, working on a broken hard drive.
When they asked for ID I gave them the Bell passport and watched them make a photocopy on an old beige Xerox. They scribbled down the details in a logbook then assigned me a PC and wrote the number down too.
‘Can I see which computer I used last time?’
They looked confused. I took the sign-in book before they could object, leafed back to the date Joanna was here. I ran a finger down the page until I got to the right time. Eleven people signed in that afternoon, one woman: Vanessa McDonald.
The handwriting was Joanna’s. Joanna in a hurry. They even had which PC she used.
‘I want that one. Number three.’
I got the booth, with a grubby PC and a torn leather office chair. When I clicked into the control panel, the IP matched my records. She’d been sitting here. I checked files on the desktop, then searched the browser history for that date. It had been wiped.
More recent searches involved a lot of porn. The computer was running anti-block software. The country had a blanket ban on adult websites, so a lot of these cafés put on various forms of circumvention and made their money selling access to that part of the web. I sifted through the searches for various sexual practices, through Kazakh sports sites, social media, scrolled slower through news and local politics, but couldn’t see any leads.
A Shadow Intelligence Page 10
