The Outcast (11 page)

Doripalam looked up sharply, glancing across at Batzorig, who had been systematically shining his own flashlight around the floor of the room, peering for anything the young man might have missed. “What do you mean?” Doripalam said. “What guy out front?”

The young man blinked, his eyes bewildered. “Well.” He stopped, as if searching for the right words. “The man with the gun. The man they picked up.” He halted again, obviously now reading the expression on Doripalam's face. “Didn't the chief tell you?”

For a long moment, Gundalai had been dazzled by the spotlights. Then, as his vision cleared, he remained crouched, transfixed by the row of rifle barrels. He could make out no faces, just blank
silhouettes, helmets glinting in the brilliant light, and behind them the endless clouds of dark billowing smoke.

It took him several seconds to realise that, though the rifles were pointed in his direction, they were not specifically aimed at him. He was still crouched in the shadows at the rear of the hotel lobby, outside the unrelenting glare of the spotlights. The rifles were aimed at the main doors, which, like the glass frontage of the hotel, had been shattered by the force of the blast.

Gundalai shifted forward tentatively, trying to work out what was happening.

He didn't know who was out there. The police? The army? Or someone else? He didn't know who or what they were looking for, or why their weapons were trained so fixedly on the hotel entrance.

He didn't know what might make them shoot.

Gundalai looked behind him. He had no desire to make his way back into the smoke-filled corridors. On the other hand, it was a preferable option to being gunned down.

He moved back slowly, inch by inch, trying to ensure that his movements would not be detected by the gunmen outside. Already, he could feel a catch in his throat as the smoke caught him. He closed his eyes, imagining the stinging fumes, the slowly thickening air.

He had almost reached the doorway to the corridor before he felt the cold, clean air. Not the breeze that had stirred from the hotel entrance. He was too far back for that. Something different.

He looked to his left. Beyond the hotel reception desk, almost hidden in the dark corner of the lobby, there was another doorway. It was open, blackness beyond it. The scent of fresh air.

Gundalai climbed slowly to his feet, edging backwards, his eyes fixed on the gaping frontage of the hotel. In a moment he was at the doorway, and he stepped out into the cool dark.

His eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, and he realised he was in a short passage. The walls were bare plaster, the floor nothing more than stone slabs. A route for the hotel's staff rather than its guests.

The passage opened into an unlit alleyway, its gloom intensified by the shade of an adjoining building. He hesitated for only a moment; behind him, the options were either gunfire or asphyxiation. To his left, the alley ended in the blank glare of the spotlights at the front of the hotel. To his right, there was only darkness.

His instinct told him to head towards the light. He would have more options in that brightly illuminated space than in some unlit uncertainty. He began to make his way down the alley, keeping his back to the wall of the hotel. He could hear voices, the sound of movement. Somewhere, there was the distant hum of traffic and, beyond even that, the far-off sound of a siren. He couldn't be sure whether it was moving closer or drawing further away.

Scarcely breathing, he reached the end of the alley, and peered cautiously around the corner of the building. There was a crowd of people there, still clustered close to the hotel, though uniformed officers were present, easing them back; other men in overalls were anxiously struggling to erect metal barriers.

Gundalai moved to his right, away from the building, back into the darkness, and slipped unobtrusively around the outsides of the barriers. He shuffled along behind the crowd, attracting an occasional curious glance. He must look a mess, he thought. His clothes and face were grimy from the dust and debris in the hotel corridors and he reeked of smoke.

He didn't know what he was doing or why, and it occurred to him, as if observing someone else, that he was probably in a state of shock. He stopped, trying to clear his head, apologising automatically as someone in the jostling crowd bumped into him.

There was no reason to be running away. He had nothing to hide. He was a victim here. The police would want to speak to him, would be trying to tally the numbers of those who had been in the hotel. He should make himself known, tell them he was safe.

And that thought brought another. He needed to find Odbayar.
He needed to check that he had emerged from the explosion unscathed. Gundalai had given no thought to the wider effects of the explosion. He had no idea how close they had been to the blast, or how much damage it might have done.

He twisted around, struggling against the crowd surging against him. He began to push his way back towards the police cordon, intent now on making himself known.

Then he stopped, his eyes caught by something to one side of the barriers. To the left of the hotel, past the alley from which he had emerged, was a patch of waste ground. Some building had been demolished, perhaps with the intention of developing the land, but to date nothing had been done and the space appeared to have been abandoned.

It lay unlit in the shadow of the hotel, but was given some illumination by the battery of spotlights erected on two police vans facing the hotel. In the corner of the waste ground, there was an unmarked white van. Next to the van there were three figures engaged in some kind of altercation. Two of them—apparently uniformed police officers—were holding the third. And it was the third figure who caught Gundalai's attention.

It was Odbayar, his arms pinioned by the police officers. For a moment, Gundalai thought his eyes were deceiving him—that he was seeing his friend, perhaps injured, being supported by the officers clustered around him. But he peered into the darkness, and knew that he had been right. Odbayar was struggling, pulling against the men's grip.

As Gundalai watched, Odbayar ceased struggling and fell forward, limply, as if he had been struck hard on the back of his head. At the same moment, the battery of spotlights shifted momentarily—Gundalai glanced around and saw that one of the police vans had moved to allow another metal barrier to be erected. By the time he looked back, the three figures had gone and the van was pulling away, disappearing into one of the streets to the rear of the hotel.

For a moment Gundalai wondered whether he should try to
prevent whatever might be happening to Odbayar. Perhaps he should try to attract the attention of one of the officers behind the barrier, explain who he was, explain—since they had clearly made some dreadful mistake—who Odbayar was.

But his better judgement held him back. If they were behaving like that towards Odbayar, why should they treat him differently? He moved slowly back into the crowd, trying to think what he should do next. There was, he thought, one obvious place he could go. One place that, perhaps, he should go. But he wasn't ready for that yet—he didn't know what the implications might be. He had to think it through. He needed someone he could talk to, someone with the right connections, the right knowledge. But someone he could trust.

He could think of only one person.

 

He held his breath for a moment, then walked forward into the icy darkness. Before there had been the occasional distant hum of traffic, a car or truck passing on the main road. As he stepped into the park, the sound fell away with an unexpected suddenness, lost behind the shelter of the trees.

He was taking a risk, he knew that. But he'd been taking a risk throughout. This was what his life had been leading to. The contact was his now. He had built the relationship from a distance, unwilling to trust any of the local agents on the ground. He knew this was his one chance.

He stopped, deep in the darkness of the park. There was some illumination from the richly starred sky, but he could see only a few yards around him.

And it was freezing now, far below zero. How long should he wait? How long
could
he wait in this temperature? The chill was already eating through his clothes, entering his limbs.

He turned again, wrapping his arms tightly around himself, trying to keep the cold from his body. Straining his eyes against the dark, his ears against the silence, searching for some indication that he was not alone.

And then, even though he had spotted no sign of any approach, a voice said quietly in his ear: “Good evening. I'm glad you could make it.”

Nergui had allowed himself to doze for a while, his feet propped on another chair next to Tunjin's sleeping form. In some ways, he envied Tunjin's slumber. Nergui had never needed much sleep, and over the years had acquired a habit of staying awake till the small hours, whiling away the time reading or listening to music, occasionally watching what passed for overnight television in this country. But sometimes he missed the repose, the opportunity to escape from the pressures of the day.

He had been thinking, over and over, about that last discussion with Lambaa, trying to make sense of what he had heard, of what he now knew.

“You think they're terrorists,” he had said. “These students. You think they're terrorists?”

Lambaa had shrugged. “I can only give you the evidence. I think it suggests terrorism. Or at least subversion. Disruption.” Nergui suspected that, in Lambaa's conservative mind, these terms were all essentially synonymous.

“Take me through it properly. You followed two of our subjects to a location in the south of the city—an abandoned storage unit.”

“In the industrial sector, yes. I was just keeping tabs on them, as you ordered.”

“And do you know why they went there? Were they responding to a message, some kind of signal?”

“Probably. We don't know for sure yet. There were calls, some again from numbers we haven't been able to trace.”

“But you had them tapped?”

“Of course. There was nothing suspicious. Not in what was said. But that doesn't mean that there wasn't a code of some kind.”

“And they seemed to know the way to this place, did they?”

“More or less. Not like natives of the city—they were using a map—but they seemed to have a reasonable idea of where they were going. It wasn't the easiest place to find, or somewhere that tourists would frequent. The whole place is a dump—abandoned factories, burned-out shops. Needs razing to the ground and re-building.”

“It will happen,” Nergui said. “It's happening everywhere else. The whole city is one big building site.”

“When they got there, they didn't hesitate, seemed to know it was the right place.”

Nergui glanced up at the doughy, misleadingly complacent face of the man sitting opposite. “You think they'd been there already?”

Lambaa shrugged, almost imperceptibly. “Maybe. They've not been here long, but they were here for a few days before we starting keeping tabs on them. Perhaps someone took them there before, which is why they needed the map. But once they were in the area, they seemed pretty confident.”

“And they had keys?”

“I think so. They both clustered around the door. It was one of those big industrial doors with a bolt and a padlock. I presume they had to unfasten the lock, but it might have been undone already. I couldn't get too close. There was no one else around, so I'd have been too conspicuous.”

Nergui didn't doubt it. He knew, from his own painful experiences, just how deserted the old industrial parts of the city could be, particularly once the working day was over. And, in many of those former factories, the working day had been over years before.

“But, yes,” Lambaa went on, with the air of one accustomed to precision, “I imagine they had keys and that they unfastened the
padlock. They closed it up again afterwards, but they wouldn't have needed the key to do that.” He said all this slowly, as if re-checking the facts in his mind. Years of training, Nergui thought. Committing everything to memory, noting all the facts with as much detail and accuracy as possible, resisting any speculation beyond what had actually been seen. And nothing on paper. Deniability, the mantra of the police state. Corrosive, he thought, in the new democracy.

“But that didn't stop you getting in there after them?” Nergui asked, superfluously.

“It was hardly a challenge,” Lambaa said, with apparent regret. “Whole place was falling apart. I didn't even try to get past the padlock—it was new, though it wouldn't have stopped me for long. I went around to the rear—always worth looking there first,” he spoke as if instructing a junior officer in the finer arts of trade-craft. “There were a couple of windows at the back. Boarded up, but it only took me a few seconds to pull away the wood. Wasn't even any glass in them. Climbed straight in. Made a bit of a mess of the suit, though.”

Nergui knew the ways of the agency well enough to recognise that a disguised expense claim would be forthcoming in due course. “How long had they been in there?” he asked.

“Not long. Fifteen, twenty minutes. I waited outside, keeping back in the shadows, till I saw them come out. I thought they might be carrying something, but I couldn't see anything.”

“We can check their apartments later,” Nergui said.

Lambaa looked back at him, a glint of amusement in his eye. “I already have,” he said. “I was in there this morning, as soon as they'd gone off to the university. Did each in turn—they're just student apartments. Nothing.”

“Okay,” Nergui went on, “tell me what you found. Not just the headlines, but all the details. Let's go through it.”

Lambaa nodded, and then closed his eyes momentarily, mentally reconstructing his experiences. “The window led into a storeroom. A warehouse. That's what the building had been. There was nothing
there, as far as I could see. I shone the flashlight around it—it was getting dark outside, and the windows were mostly boarded up, except for a few of the high ones, so I couldn't see much.” He paused. “I had to be careful with the flashlight—I didn't want to risk alerting anyone outside.”