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Authors: Dan Mayland

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BOOK: Spy for Hire
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At the moment, two narde boards were in play, both of which were set up on a long, cigarette-scarred laminate table in the back of the restaurant. Two players sat across from each other at each board. A Kyrgyz with a round brown face and perpetually flushed cheeks was up against a bald and bearded Uzbek. Mark sat across from a heavily jowled Kyrgyz-born Russian. All the men, save Mark, were in their seventies.

Each man’s face registered total concentration. Four open half-liter bottles of Arpa, a local beer, sat on the table. The loud smacks of narde pieces hitting the wooden playing boards created a steady staccato din that could be heard all around the room.

Mark rolled the dice, came up with a four and a six, and then slapped down his pieces in a way that set him up to start bearing them off in a turn or two. That was the ultimate object of the
game—start off with all your pieces in one corner, circle them around the board, and then bear them off the board entirely. The first person to remove all his pieces won. Though luck played a role, it was also a game of strategy and skill.

At the adjacent board, the Uzbek looked as though he was about to roll his dice. But instead he leaned in toward Mark and, as if sharing a confidence, said in Kyrgyz, “Always so lazy.”

Mark got a whiff of sour old-man beer breath. He turned away.

The Uzbek lifted his eyes slightly from the board and briefly made eye contact with his Kyrgyz opponent. “He worships his pieces like his relations worship their sheep. Ha!”

The loser of the round-robin tournament had to pay for the beer, and the second-to-last player had to cover the gratuity—an easy burden to bear, especially if you were the Uzbek, though the Russian and Kyrgyz were not known for their big tips either.

Lately the Uzbek had been buying a lot of beer and he wasn’t happy about it. So he’d taken to insulting his opponents, after which he’d claim he’d just been joking. That wasn’t what bothered Mark, though. It was that he did it during the game.

Mark exchanged a glace with the Russian. The Russian then shot the Uzbek a look that simultaneously managed to convey aggression, boredom, and pitiless disdain. The Kyrgyz almost certainly
did
have extended relations who still herded sheep, and who likely still believed in at least some aspects of paganism. So the insult, on top of disturbing the game, was also a bit of a low blow.

“Play,” insisted the Kyrgyz.

Suddenly Mark’s cell phone rang. He was supposed to have turned it off before the game started, but he’d forgotten to do so.

His Russian opponent threw his hands up in the air. The implication was clear—first the insufferable Uzbek and now this.

“I’m sorry,” said Mark. “I’ll turn it off.” But when he pulled his phone out of his pocket, he saw the call was from Daria. “Actually, I have to take this.”


Chert poberi
,” said the Russian.
The devil take you.

“Hey,” said Mark to Daria.

“I need your help.”

Mark could hear kids crying in the background and a woman talking loudly, about what he couldn’t tell though.

“Now?”

“Yes, now. There’s been—”

The Kyrgyz slapped down a narde piece, clearly frustrated by Mark’s behavior.

Daria asked, “Are you playing narde?”

“I dropped off the
paloo
.”

“I thought you said you played narde this morning?”

“I did.” He took a sip of his beer. “What’s up?”

“Someone took one of the kids from the orphanage. I think they’re headed your way, and I need you to intercept them.”

“Back up. Who took a kid?”

Mark’s Russian opponent groaned and with both arms gestured to the breach of narde protocol that was taking place in front of him.

“Two guys,” said Daria. “One of them claimed to be the boy’s uncle.”

Mark figured this was just some family custody struggle gone bad. After all, this was the same country where wannabe husbands occasionally just kidnapped their future brides rather than proposing to them. It wouldn’t shock him to learn that someone had circumvented the law to speed up an adoption process. “Well, was he?”

“I don’t know. Either way, he can’t just take a child from an orphanage. That’s kidnapping.”

“OK. But now you want me to…”

“Intercept them. Stop them. I need your help.”

Mark recognized that passionate tone of voice in Daria. He’d heard it before—whenever she believed that some grave injustice
had taken place, or was talking about what a morally bankrupt monstrosity the Iranian government was.

He knew that arguing with her would be pointless. “All right.” He paused, but just for a moment. “I’m on it.” As he stood up, he downed what was left of his beer in one long swig, then, cupping his hand over the phone, said, “I lose, beers are on me,” and left a thousand Kyrgyz soms—about twenty dollars—on the table.

The Uzbek shook his head, disgusted. Even the Kyrgyz looked appalled.

Mark walked out of the Shanghai, trying to hear Daria over the angry complaints of his narde partners. “What do we know about this boy?”

“I didn’t know him. Nazira says he’s only been here a day.”

“Who’s Nazira?”

“She’s the director of the orphanage. I’ve told you about her.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“This is all kind of weird. She told me the child only speaks Arabic.”

“What’s a kid who only speaks Arabic doing in Kyrgyzstan?”

“Like I said, it’s kind of weird.”

“This just happened?”

“Well, they showed up two hours ago and tried to give Nazira ten thousand dollars in exchange for her releasing the boy to them.”

“What the hell?” Ten thousand dollars was a small fortune in Kyrgyzstan.

“Yeah, I know. Nazira managed to stall them for a while—”

“She didn’t just take the money?”

“No, she’s honest, and, frankly, I think it was a large enough sum that it scared her. A couple hundred dollars and we might have had a problem. Anyway, she said they needed to wait until I got here with the adoption papers, but they got impatient and just took off with the boy. One of them had a knife and
threatened Nazira with it. She said they left here twenty minutes ago, so I probably won’t be able to catch up to them, but they’re headed your way so you might be able to intercept them.”

“How do we know they’re coming
my
way?”

“Nazira tried to follow them on a bike,” said Daria. “She says she got far enough to see that they turned toward Bishkek. It’s worth a shot.”

One main road led all the way from Balykchy to Bishkek. For the first half of the drive, there were virtually no turnoffs or alternate routes.

“Did you call the cops?” he asked.

“They were pulling up when I got here.”

“And?”

“And what do you think?”

“That bad?”

“They say I need to go down to the station to file an incident report before they can take any action.”

If Daria hadn’t been so damn honest, thought Mark, she would have just handed the cops a couple thousand soms to cut through the red tape. But it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Even with a bribe, the cops’ reaction time would have been too slow.

“All right. I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

By this time, Mark had reached his Mercedes, which he kept parked on the street near his condo. As he climbed into the driver’s seat and inserted his key into the ignition, he asked, “What kind of car am I looking for?”

“Tan Toyota Camry.”

“The two guys inside?”

“I think.”

“Kyrgyz?”

“No. Foreign, but they spoke Turkish well enough for Nazira to understand them. They spoke Arabic to the boy. The younger one claimed to be the boy’s uncle.”

“Guns?”

“Not that I know of, but be careful.”

“Always.”

“Thanks.” Daria sounded relieved. “You’ll call?”

“As soon as I know anything.”

4

Mark’s Mercedes clattered loudly as he hurtled down Route 365 at ninety miles an hour, feeling a little buzzed from the two half-liter beers he’d downed at the Shanghai.

His car, he’d come to realize, was a Potemkin village—nice to look at, especially with the Mercedes hood ornament, but pretty crappy on the inside. He’d bought it used upon arriving in Kyrgyzstan, before he’d started making any serious cash.

Which meant he’d saved a couple thousand dollars, but now had to deal with no power windows, a cheap plastic interior, a fickle heater, and a steering wheel on the wrong side of the car because the used first-world cars that got shipped to places like Central Asia to be driven into the ground included those from Britain.

He passed a turnoff for a border crossing to Kazakhstan, where soldiers were standing in front of a gate that blocked access to a two-lane bridge that spanned the Chu River. He saw no tan Camry, so he kept going.

What had been a wide, newly paved road transitioned abruptly to a much older, narrower one hemmed in by low mountains. Along this stretch, Chinese laborers were building big stone retaining walls to contain landslides, preparing to widen and repave this section of road the way they had the previous one.

The damn Chinese were everywhere, thought Mark as he drove. He knew that they were building this road, which would run from Bishkek to the border with China, at no cost to Kyrgyzstan, in an effort to help pry open the Kyrgyz market. He
didn’t blame them; the Americans were also trying, with limited success, to get good transit routes running from Central Asia to Afghanistan. But he found it unsettling to see just how much faster the Chinese were getting the job done.

A minute later, he came to a bumpy transition between the old asphalt road and a patch of dirt road, which caused the Mercedes to bottom out.

No Chinese workers were in sight, so he parked behind a huge pile of gravel and grabbed the Russian-made sport version of a Dragunov rifle—he’d bribed the appropriate bureaucrats to qualify for a rare hunter’s license—from where he’d hidden it underneath the trunk of the Mercedes. He took ten cartridges from a box of ammo that he’d wedged in next to the rifle, loaded them into the magazine, then jogged over to a half-built stone retaining wall. Standing on a little rockslide that had accumulated behind the wall, he practiced aiming his rifle at the point where the road switched from old asphalt to dirt.

As he was waiting, he thought of the narde game he’d been forced to forfeit. That would cost him with the guys. Thanks to his abrupt exit, his moral position was now even worse than the Uzbek’s. What really bugged him, though, was that he’d been beating the Russian when Daria’s call had come through.

A cold breeze started to blow and he shivered. He’d been too rushed to think about grabbing a coat, but he wished he had one now. It was only November, but out here in the country, way above sea level, winter had already long since arrived. Though the mountains were too dry, treeless, and windswept to hold much snow, their tops were covered with a light dusting of white. All the roadside yurts that had been stocked with fresh apricots, blackthorn berries, and smoked trout during the summer had been taken down for the season. The tourists from Russia and Kazakhstan, crammed into cars overstuffed with beach umbrellas, towels, and inflatable rafts, had stopped coming through months ago. No fishermen stood on the banks of the Chu River.

Now the Chinese were the only ones in the area. And crazy people, like his do-gooder girlfriend. And himself.

What the hell are you doing out here, Daria? What the hell am I doing out here?

Kyrgyzstan wasn’t his home. Baku was. His buzz had worn off, leaving him just tired.

In truth, though, he knew perfectly well why he was here—because of Daria. Things had actually been going pretty well between them, mostly thanks to her. She put up with his narde games; she was rarely in a bad mood; she’d hooked him up with a LASIK doctor in Almaty so he could finally see without glasses; she’d made him get a physical so he was now taking Lipitor to control his cholesterol; and despite working as hard as she did, she often came home with a healthy libido. She did all that and more—Mark sometimes wondered where she got the energy—without expecting much in return.

But that didn’t mean she didn’t expect
anything
in return.

They’d never talked about it, but he knew that she needed for him not to cheat on her. Which he didn’t. She needed for him to love her. Which he did, even if he didn’t always express that love particularly well. And when the shit hit the fan, like it had this afternoon, she needed for him to be there for her.

Which, Mark noted, he was. But he still wished he’d brought a jacket.

A tan Camry appeared. One man was driving. Another sat in the back, next to what appeared to be a small boy.

Mark sighed, brought his cheek down to the worn leather riser that was clipped to the stock, and stared down the iron sights. He wasn’t a fantastic shot without a scope, but at this range—less than a hundred feet—he figured he didn’t need to be. As the Camry hit a big bump where the road transitioned, bottoming out with a loud smack, he fired two quick shots.

The rear tire didn’t immediately deflate, but by the time the car was almost out of sight, it was riding on its metal rim. The
driver would almost certainly believe that he had suffered a flat as a result of lousy road conditions.

BOOK: Spy for Hire
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