Out of Range: A Novel (13 page)

Chapter Twenty-two

G
ordon Bryce was well known in the Service for his calm and apparently dispassionate demeanor. But just now, he was clearly angry.

“Do you know, Hopkins, the last time we lost an officer of the Service?”

Hopkins assumed this to be a rhetorical question. But when the time stretched out and Bryce continued to stare silently at Hopkins through his thick glasses, he decided he better answer the question.

“Seven years ago, sir. Benson. In Pakistan.”

“Seven years ago.” There was another interminable silence.

Bryce brushed back a lock of hair from his forehead. In a time where everyone in England seemed to cut their hair like Americans, Bryce continued to wear what his detractors in the Service referred to as Empire Hair—parted on the left side and rising up in a strange bristling tangle to the right. “Empire Hair” because it harkened back to the days of the British Empire when a gentleman spent a thousand pounds on his suit and thirty-five pence on his haircut. Now if you didn’t spend fifty pounds on your coif no one took you seriously.

Unless you were the Chief of MI6.

“Seven years, Hopkins. Meaning that the last time a sworn officer died in the service of the Queen for this institution, my dearly departed predecessor was seated in this chair. Now I recognize that what we do is not without risk. But the reason my people have been safe under my aegis is that I have forsworn cowboying.”

There were those, Hopkins reflected, who argued that under Bryce’s aegis, MI6, out of caution, had forsworn doing its job.

“The days of Lawrence of Arabia are well behind us. ‘Ready, fire, aim’ is no longer accepted modus operandi in this house. Marcus Vaughan is dead because his operation was poorly planned, poorly executed and foolish.”

“Agreed, sir.”

Bryce’s left eyebrow twitched slightly. “You take full responsibility then.”

Hopkins gritted his teeth. “You will find, sir, that the dossiers of this operation are crammed full of uncharacteristically shrill appeals under my signature for more staff, more latitude and more resources in country. I was given instructions—as I was told—‘from the high-most authority in the realm’ that I was to leave no stone unturned. But when I requested a simple eight-man fire team on the ground in Uzbekistan to—”

“We are subject, Hopkins, to political limitations. Incalculable political consequences arising from—”

Hopkins’s hands clenched into fists. He struggled to keep his voice low. “Sir, you asked the question. I should like to reply in full. Perhaps out of the wound to my pride, but I rather think more because our missteps heretofore bear on our ongoing prosecution of this operation.”

Bryce eyed him unblinkingly—giving him enough rope to hang himself, Hopkins supposed. But right now, Hopkins didn’t care.

“Seven days ago we received hard intelligence as to the future location of Alisher Byko. A fixed place and a fixed time. A meeting with a person about whom we had very clear and accurate information. I requested a tactical team to seize Byko. My request was denied on political grounds, my hard-earned intelligence handed to the Uzbek government. The Uzbek government then tasked a small unit from its ‘elite’ Twenty-seventh Air Assault Regiment for the takedown.” Hopkins wrapped his voice in as much sarcasm as he could muster. “The Twenty-seventh, as is well known, is a sinecure for some of the dimmer members of the Uzbek President’s extended family. They are corrupt, inefficient, poorly trained and underfunded.”

Bryce let a slow breath trail noisily out of his long nose, as though he had become bored with the course of this conversation. “I made a terribly forceful case to the Foreign Office for sending in an SAS team. But they simply couldn’t sell it to the Karimov regime.”

Not forceful enough
, Hopkins felt like saying. But instead he stuck to the facts. “Sir, as you’re well aware, the Twenty-seventh blew the raid. Did someone tip off Byko’s people? Was it pure incompetence? I really don’t know. Perhaps a combination of the two. But what I
can
tell you is that it was entirely predictable.”

“I’ve read your report,” Bryce snapped.

“Marcus Vaughan contacted me two days later saying he had information and all he needed was tactical support. If not a full team of trained intelligence operators, then at least a handful of SAS lads. And I had to tell him, ‘It’s come down from the highest levels that we need desperately to find Byko, but as regards support . . . sorry, old man, you’re on your own, Whitehall have ordained there shall be no hard operations in Uzbekistan except by officers acting under credentialed diplomatic cover—of which, dear Marcus, I may remind you, there is only one. To wit, you.’ ”

“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

C
harlie 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.”

T
he 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 before 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?