The Outcast (24 page)

“I was thinking of immediately, sir,” Batzorig said. “Unless you can provide it quicker than that.”

The mountains were more beautiful than he had ever seen them. The sun was high in the empty blue sky, and the temperature outside was well into the thirties. He had been using the truck's air-conditioning sparingly, aiming to conserve fuel. Not that they were short. He had planned that as carefully as everything else and the rear of the Land Cruiser was lined with plastic cans of diesel. Nevertheless, his instincts, as always, were for caution.

The sparse grassland became increasingly lush as they headed east, and there were thickets of trees in the middle distance. Every mile brought them closer to what he increasingly thought of as his spiritual home. Soon the desolate steppe would give way to rich pastureland, the green shade of woodlands, the undulations of the lower hills, the silent sweep of the river.

Odbayar slept on, undisturbed by the juddering surface of the dirt road. I could kill him now, Sam thought. A single shot to the temple, a knife in the heart. He would never even know. Or I could stop here and toss him, still barely awake, out into the deserted grassland. The chances that anyone would find him were minimal.

But that was not the point. That was why he needed to apply some discipline This was about the future. Realising his dreams. Reclaiming what was rightfully his.

Odbayar stirred suddenly next to him, his body shaking as if in the middle of some vivid dream. His eyes opened wide and he stared at Sam, his expression one of terror. “Who are you?” he said.

Sam was taken by surprise, and for a moment almost lost control of the vehicle, feeling the steering wheel slipping between his fingers as the truck bounced from boulder to boulder. He pressed his foot on the brake, knowing that the worst thing he could do was to overturn the truck on this remote track.

It seemed like an eternity before the truck came to a halt, its rear wheels twisting slightly. He looked at Odbayar, who was still staring blankly at him.

“It's me. Sam. You know me.”

“Sam?” Odbayar repeated the word as though trying out an unfamiliar sound in his mouth.

“Sam. You know where we are. You know where we're headed.” These were statements rather than questions.

“Sam.” Odbayar was speaking more quietly now, and his eyes were closing. It had simply been some dream, bubbling up towards consciousness, then vanishing back beneath the waves of sleep.

Sam restarted the engine and glanced briefly at the GPS system, reassuring himself that they were still travelling in the right direction. Then he accelerated down the dirt track, enjoying the rhythmic thud of the road, his eyes fixed on the distance, his senses already lost in the rich scent of the fir trees, the feel of the mountain breeze, the soft endless washing of the river in his ears.

“So what next?”

Tunjin gazed down into his empty glass. “I don't think I have the faintest idea.”

“You were looking for Doripalam,” Solongo reminded him.

“I know. I was going to throw myself on his mercy. Put myself back into the system.”

“You think your arrest was outside the system?”

“I'm not sure. Nergui usually knows what he's doing. Maybe it was for my own benefit.”

“You don't trust Nergui?”

“Do you?”

“I'm not a reliable witness. You've worked with him for years.”

“I have. And, yes, I suppose I do. That is, I trust him to do what's right. But I also think that might involve casualties.”

“And you might be one of those casualties?”

“I don't know.” He paused. “I suppose I need to track down Doripalam.”

“I suppose you do. Though Doripalam's another one who always does what he thinks right. And who also leaves casualties.” She gestured towards the nearly empty vodka bottle. “Take it from one who knows.”

“I should try the office again, see if Doripalam's there. Or his cell phone. It's just that …” he rose and walked over to the window. There were a few people about out there now, a middle-aged man in a smart suit hurrying to work, an old woman in a traditional robe shuffling slowly past, not obviously heading anywhere, “if it is Wu Sam, I want to know why he's back.”

“Doripalam will help you,” she said.

“Doripalam will hand me over to Nergui. He'll do it properly, by the book, and he'll make sure all my rights are protected. But that's what he'll do. He has no choice.”

“If it is this Wu Sam,” she said, “maybe Nergui's trying to protect you. Perhaps that's why he had you under guard.”

“It could well be,” he said. “But I don't think it's that simple. If Nergui was just looking out for my well-being, there are other ways he could have handled it. This was about containment. Nergui likes to be in control.”

“You don't need to persuade me of that.”

“The question,” Tunjin said, “is what was he trying to contain?”

“You think this Wu Sam was framed,” she said. “There's a story there. It could embarrass Nergui.”

“I've never known Nergui troubled by embarrassment,” he said. “Not on his own account, at least.”

There was something about the way he spoke the final words that made Solongo look up at him. “You think he might have been concerned about someone else's embarrassment? Yours?”

Tunjin laughed. “I think he might care marginally less about my
embarrassment than his own. I don't think Nergui's mind works like that.”

“If you ever find out how Nergui's mind works,” she said, “you must remember to let me know.”

“What drives Nergui,” Tunjin went on, “is his sense of duty.”

“Oh, yes. Nergui the patriot. I've heard a lot about that. It seems to be the justification for everything he does.”

“It is.” Tunjin spoke simply, as though he had not registered her irony. “It really is what he believes.” He paused, and she realised that he was pouring the last of the vodka into his empty glass. “So,” he said, “if Nergui is concerned about embarrassment, it's not his or my reputation that will be troubling him.” He raised the glass to eye level, as if making an elaborate toast, and then swallowed the contents in one mouthful. “No, Nergui will be concerned about the embarrassment of the nation.”

“What about Tunjin?” Doripalam said.

Nergui was working his way painstakingly through the reports of the previous night's incidents. “What about him?”

“I understood he was being detained.”

“He is,” Nergui said. “Or, rather, he was. Now he's absconded. I have people looking for him.”

“None of my people,” Doripalam said.

“I think this falls within the ministry's jurisdiction.”

Doripalam opened his mouth to respond, then shook his head. There was no point in debating any of this. Nergui would reveal his hand, if and when he chose to.

Nergui waved the wad of reports in the air. “What do you make of this?” he said.

“Which in particular?”

“All of it,” Nergui said. “We have a city in quiet chaos.”

It was a good phrase, Doripalam thought. There was a sense of unreality to it, as if the surface of things remained unchanged while turmoil bubbled beneath. He recalled a newspaper image he had seen a year or two before of a run-down apartment block somewhere
in the city which had partially collapsed after years of structural neglect. The block had been uninhabited and there had been no casualties. But, according to the experts, the collapse could have happened at any time over a number of years, while its residents had continued their daily lives unaware of the instability of the building in which they lived.

Nergui flicked through the papers on his knee. “How long do you think we have before this really hits the media?”

“We're doing the best we can from our side to contain it,” Doripalam said. “Your people saw to it that nothing was reported about the incident in the square. I don't know how you managed to swing that.”

“National security,” Nergui said. “The usual excuse. It stills works with the respectable media because they depend on us. They can't be bothered to go and hunt out any stories of their own.”

“What about the yellow press, though?” Doripalam asked, referring to the mass of cheap scandal sheets that now dominated the newsstands.

“We can't do much about that. But they're generally not too interested in this sort of story unless they can find an excuse to illustrate it with a photograph of a half-naked woman.”

“But people must be talking about it.”

“Probably. There were plenty of people about. People saw the shooting. There'll be a thousand and one paranoid explanations doing the rounds. But they won't be surprised that it wasn't reported.”

Another hangover from the old regime. People didn't expect the media to report the truth. Or, at least, they expected the media to report only the most boring, uncontroversial truths. And it wouldn't matter if the story did get reported in the yellow press since no one would believe that either. The rumour-mill would churn away, but no one would take it seriously. Doripalam had once assumed that a free press would bring dramatic changes to the national culture, but it had never really happened. The media had simply polarised—on the one hand, dutiful and dull reports of proceedings in the Great Hural; on the other, wild unsubstantiated scandals about transitory
celebrities. But nothing in the middle. Real, significant stories tended to emerge only when someone—usually a member of one of the opposition parties—took the trouble to leak them.

“What about the bomber?” he said. “The supposed bomber, I mean. Have you identified him?”

There was a silence. “It's the usual,” Nergui said, finally. “Endless legwork. We're making some progress.”

It wasn't quite the equivalent of a formal statement to the media, but it sounded far from candid. This was Nergui going native, or perhaps reverting to type. Despite his endless capacity to surprise, Nergui remained at heart an apparatchik of the old school.

“You think he's a local, or a foreign national?” Doripalam persisted.

“We're pursuing all lines of inquiry,” Nergui said. “As you would expect.”

“I'm sure you'll let us know if we can be of assistance.”

As always, Nergui seemed impervious to irony. “What about your own inquiries? The two bodies.”

“The same legwork,” Doripalam said. He wondered whether, if they really had made any substantive progress, he would be prepared to share it with Nergui. In practice, the question was academic. “But we're not getting very far. We have the pathology reports, but they don't tell us much we didn't already know. The first was literally kicked to death. Chillingly so, in fact—I'd assumed some sort of frenzied attack, but it seems to have been more systematic.”

“The victim was dead before being wrapped in the carpet,” Nergui said. It was not a question, and Doripalam was left wondering, yet again, about Nergui's access to supposedly confidential police reports.

“It looks like it. There are lesions on his wrists and ankles. The assumption is that he was tied up in some way, and then—”

“Kicked to death.”

“Carefully placed kicks, at that. Maximising the pain. Eking out the time until the assault would prove fatal. And substantial damage to the face.”

Nergui gazed at him, unblinking. “And what about the second body. At the hotel.”

“Stabbed. The weapon was left behind. A fairly ornate dagger—like something from the golden age of Genghis himself. We thought it might tell us something, but it's just a cheap ornament. They're selling them all over the city during the anniversary celebrations. There are hundreds out there. Made in China, ironically enough. Not much chance of finding out precisely which market stall it was purchased from. We're having it checked for prints and DNA, but I'm not optimistic.”

“He was killed in the storeroom?”

“As far as we can tell. There's no evidence that the body was moved after death.”

“Any clue as to the bodies' identities?”

“Not so far. No matches to their fingerprints. They weren't Mongolians. Not ethnically, at any rate.”

“So unlikely to be Mongolian citizens?”

“Yes.”

“Visitors?”

“Probably. Not likely to be illegals. Not from there.”

“Shouldn't be too difficult to identify, then.”

Doripalam shrugged. “We've asked immigration to find potential fits, males who've entered the country in the last month. But it won't be easy to match the photographs.” He gestured towards the photograph of the Chinese man. “Particularly if that's the quality of the images we have to work with. I don't know how they came up with that one so quickly,” he said. “They've told us it's likely to be tomorrow before they have a list of possibles.”

“It's who you know,” Nergui said, smiling. “I'll rattle the cage for you, if you think it would help.”

“Anything would help. We don't have much.”

“But it wasn't too difficult to find this one,” Nergui said. “They were looking for males of Chinese origin who'd not entered from China.”

“Why not from China?” Doripalam said. “You didn't know—you
still don't know, if this isn't him—that Wu Sam wasn't still living in China.”

Nergui shrugged. “One of my wild hunches. I don't think the Chinese wanted him back. I think they made arrangements for him to exit discreetly, so they could make use of him elsewhere and, if necessary, let some other government pick up the problem. Anyway, I was being pragmatic; it would take for ever to work through all the Chinese males entering from China. I thought we might as well start by looking at those who'd come in from elsewhere.”

Typical Nergui, Doripalam thought, that mix of off-the-wall intuition and common-sense practicality. “I don't think ours are going to be so easy to pinpoint. We can't even be sure about the ethnic origin, not yet, anyway. We think Indian sub-continent, but I don't know if we can really narrow it down beyond Central Asia, or even Eastern Europe. They could have come from anywhere. We can look for suitable surnames, but their names might be totally Westernised. It's not a lot as the basis for a shortlist.”