Tom Callaghan - A Summer Revenge

And of course I remembered the trip to Lake Issyk-Kul that Chinara and I had taken the summer before she fell ill. We’d stayed in a yurt at the edge of the lake, eating fruit and cooking shashlik bought from the local village. The days were spent lying on the beach or swimming in water so crystal-clear the bottom seemed only a handspan away. The sun danced on the water, lit up the snow-capped mountains beyond the south shore. We call them the Celestial Mountains because their austere beauty seems as close to heaven as any of us are likely to get.

I remembered the photo I had at home, with Chinara on the Ferris wheel at Bosteri, her hair tangled in the wind, laughing, joyous. But no matter how hard I tried to picture her face, it remained blurred, indistinct, as if a wet cloth had been smeared across the glass. Sometimes memories are all you have, and when they fade, you’re left with nothing.

Perhaps Saltanat mistook my silence for annoyance, but all I wanted to do was work out how to find Natasha, get back to my country and restart my life.

At Saltanat’s hotel we took the lift to the twentieth floor and found an identical suite waiting for us.

“Why not change hotels?” I asked. “People already know you’re staying here.”

“True, but since we didn’t know about this room until five minutes ago, it’s unlikely to have been bugged.”

She opened the minibar, took out a bottle of Heineken and a mineral water for me. Saltanat sipped at her beer, waited for me to start.

“I haven’t been entirely honest with you up to now,” I said. “Natasha did take something belonging to Tynaliev. Access to secret bank accounts. Access to ten million dollars, so she told me.”

“So why doesn’t he just move the money to another account?”

“Well, once she got to Dubai, she changed the access codes, so she’s the only person who can get to the money.”

“It would have to be something like that to get Tynaliev so enraged.”

“Natasha’s not stupid. She knows she’s a dead woman walking if she steals all the money. So she’ll give it back—less a million dollars for her trouble—if Tynaliev agrees not to hunt her down.”

“And you think he’ll agree to that?”

I shrugged, sipped at my water. Privately I thought he would probably agree. Not out of generosity, but because he was a powerful man with powerful enemies. There was no benefit in making himself vulnerable for a mere million dollars. And after all he could always steal more.

“Who knows? She’s taking a big gamble. But if he does, he gets most of his money back, and she promises not to tell the world about his secret account.”

“Although,” Saltanat said, “he might decide to make sure she keeps quiet with a machete.”

“It’s a risk,” I admitted, “but then she does know how Tynaliev works, and we are talking about a million dollars if she succeeds. And of course she’ll cover herself by making sure the newspapers get the full story if anything happens to her.”

Saltanat drained the last of her beer and looked skeptical. She obviously had no more belief in the integrity of the press than I did.

“It explains why the Chechens are interested in her,” she said. “You can buy a lot of trouble with ten million dollars.”

I nodded. I’d read reports that the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York had cost the terrorists less than half a million dollars, and as everyone knows, that event had changed the world.

“You think they’ll use the money to spread terror, rather than just fund their independence movement?” I said.

“Sure, there’s a strong element that just wants independence,” Saltanat said. “At the same time the extremist wing of the movement wants jihad. It’s not just about getting the Russians out of Chechnya.”

“I’m sure you don’t need my help to find them,” I said, “but when you track them down, I’d like to be with you.”

“To rescue Natasha? Isn’t that being rather too much of a gentleman?”

“Better the money’s in Tynaliev’s pocket than being used to buy automatic weapons, plant bombs, assassinate leading politicians, don’t you think?”

I could see Saltanat thinking it over. If I was willing to get the codes out of Natasha and return the money to Tynaliev, then I wasn’t one of the bad guys. Which meant I was safe from Saltanat, at least for the moment. Once it was all over it might be a very different story.

“Do you have any leads?” I asked.

“There’s a guy who’s supposed to be a Mister Fixit, a real bastard called Marko Atanasov. He can get guns, girls, whatever you want, for a price of course.”

I explained how I’d made the brief acquaintance of the late and very unlamented Mr. Atanasov, and suggested that we’d be very unlikely to get any answers from him, since he was lying in pieces in a morgue somewhere.

“How did you run across him?” Saltanat asked.

“Tynaliev had someone working for him here in Dubai, that Chechen, Kulayev. He gave me Atanasov’s name, and I went to see him, found him dead and sliced up.” I didn’t mention that I’d gone to buy a gun.

“So I talk to Kulayev?” Saltanat said, annoyed at my earlier silence.

I had a pretty good idea what being talked to by Saltanat might entail, but I also knew that he too wouldn’t be answering any questions, even the painful kind. I explained about how I’d handcuffed Kulayev to the bed in my room at the Denver, about the fire-bombing, about seeing the twisted and blackened body being loaded into an ambulance.

“So basically the trail’s gone cold for the moment,” I said. “But they have something I want, and I have something they want. So I’m expecting a call pretty soon.”

Which showed that when I’d quit the Murder Squad, I hadn’t lost all my powers of detection. Because at that moment my phone began to ring.

The screen on my phone said “Number blocked.” I let it ring for a moment, then declined the call and switched off my phone. Saltanat stared at me, her hands spread in a gesture of puzzlement.

“Let them sweat a little,” I explained. “We need to convince them that we’re not at their beck and call. Let them get tense and fearful.”

It was a ploy I’d learned during a couple of hostage negotiations back in Bishkek. One of them had worked, in that the hostages had been freed and the gunman taken down. In the other no one inside the apartment had survived the firefight.

“I’ll give them an hour,” I said, “then we’ll talk.”

Saltanat opened the minibar again, took out a drink and popped the tab. Alcohol isn’t a good idea at such times. I noticed she didn’t offer me anything.

The hour dragged, as such times always do, when you’re waiting for the moment to act, for the adrenalin to start to pump. Saltanat lit a cigarette, inhaled, stared at it in disgust, stubbed it out. The tension in the room was almost as overpowering as the heat outside.

“I wanted to ask you how Otabek is,” I said.

Saltanat glared at me. “I wondered if you were going to mention him,” she said. “I assumed you weren’t interested.”

“That’s not fair,” I protested then wondered if, after all, she might not have a point. Maybe because I’ve never had any children of my own, I’ve never felt particularly paternal. And if you’re in a job that could get you face up on a morgue slab, fatherhood doesn’t necessarily seem like a good idea.

I remembered how we’d found Otabek hiding in a cupboard down in Morton Graves’s cellar, the room where he’d shot his vile films, where he’d tortured and murdered children. Otabek had been mute, his eyes wide and terrified, assuming that his own suffering was about to begin. He’d clung to Saltanat as a drowning man hangs on to a piece of driftwood, hoping it will provide salvation.