You check the phone wiki again and again. Digging deeper, looking for clues. Then a thought strikes you, and thirty seconds later you’ve got another number. You feed another contact to the phone app, and ten seconds later a voice answers you in the flattened vowels of London’s East End: “’ Ello, you’ve reached the consulate of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan. How can I help you?”
I not we, you notice. “Hi,” you say, “this is Anwar, at the Scottish consulate. Listen, can you tell me, have you had any email through from the Ministry since Monday afternoon?”
It takes a minute or two for you to get Mr. East-Ender to grudgingly acknowledge your identity, and another minute for him to get the picture, but by the time you put the phone down, you know two new facts: that IRIK have only bothered to establish a one-man consular presence in England, and no, he hasn’t heard anything from head office either.
Your moustache twitches at the half-imagined odour of dead Rattus norvegicus, and you turn to your browser. There are news aggregators and search engines and attention proxies, and you are a master of the web, a veritable expert. Even though you’re having to pipe everything through a mess of translation agents, it is but the work of half an hour for you to churn through a hundred searches, refining and reducing and recycling your terms until you’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s not going on. There’s no public holiday today. There are no football matches, riots, or debates going on in the chamber of deputies. More significantly, a bit more digging reveals that there are no bandits, bank robberies, or bombings. In fact, Issyk-Kulistan is a bit of a news black hole. It’s as if a cone of Internet silence has descended across the entire country, and nobody outside has noticed.
Your skin crawls; you’re running low on excuses. If Adam’s right—then the sock-puppet nation is about to be wadded up and thrown away. And you know too damned much. You know about empty-eyed men with suitcases they want you to look after, and trade delegations with bags of not-bread mix. You don’t have to be Inspector Rebus to know what happens to bagmen who aren’t sitting tight when the music stops.
You try a different strategy and waste a few minutes hunting for notifications of service outages afflicting the major trunks in and out of the country. Then you have a moment of blinding realization.
Voice mail.
You flip through the Ministry’s online directory until you come to a different section. With a shaky finger, you drag the address card into your phone and prod the connect button, already rehearsing your abject apologies. It rings twice, then a man answers it, speaking an unfamiliar language. There’s music in the background, tinny voices singing. “Hello?” you say tentatively: “Is Colonel Datka there?”
“One moment.” The speaker’s English is very good, almost unaccented. There’s a scraping sound, as of a hand covering a mobile phone, some muffled conversation. “Felix is tied up right now, but he’ll be along in a minute. Who should I say is calling?”
Your tongue swells abruptly, and you cough. “To whom am I speaking?”
“This is Bhaskar.” Whoever Bhaskar is, he sounds amused. “And you are?”
“This is the Scottish consulate,” you say, your voice barely above a dry-mouthed whisper. “I need to talk to the colonel.”
“The—you say the Scottish consulate?”
“Yes.” You swallow, hoping the phone app they gave you is adequately encrypted. “There’s a problem.”
“A problem. And for this problem you need to talk to Felix Datka.” His tone sharpens.
“Yes.” You realize you’re clutching the edge of your desk as if it’s a life-belt. “I know what you’re doing, what you’re using me for, and I don’t, I can’t…”
“Wait, please. Ah, Felix—you, you had better explain this to the colonel himself. He will speak to you now.” There’s a muffled noise, as of a phone being passed between hands, and then a new speaker.
“This is Felix Datka. Identify yourself.”
The background music has stopped. “It’s Anwar, Anwar Hussein. From Edinburgh, your honorary consul.”
The colonel snorts superciliously. “And you are calling because… ?”
All your indignation comes boiling up at once.
“My cousin’s dead, Colonel. Since your man arrived in my city, with his curious demands. Surely this is not a coincidence? And it is not bad enough being held up to ridicule by the other diplomats of this city, oh no! Everybody knows that Issyk-Kulistan is a front for some strange diplomatic game. And the trade delegations with the bread mix that is a culture medium for illegal nanosystems, you have me handing this stuff out openly as if on the street-corner! Where the police can find me, red-handed! And this week, this week even the news stops. There is no news, as if you cannot even be bothered to maintain the pretense! Have you no decency, sir?”
There is no sound from the other end of the phone, but a glance at the screen tells you the connection is still there.
“Sir?”
There is a pause. Then Datka asks, softly, meditatively, terrifyingly: “What do you mean, ‘bread mix’?”
Light-headed and nauseous, you collect your possessions and walk out of the consulate. You leave behind: the safe and its contents, the travelling trunk with its commercial samples of bread mix, the laptop, the furnishings, the stale posturing and lies. You are going home, home to your family and your future and the things that matter to you. Fuck Adam and his stupid get-rich-quick scheme, scamming scammers. Fuck Colonel Datka and his secret policeman’s eyes. Fuck the colonel’s man Christie, whoever he is. You don’t need any of them. They can’t give you back Tariq’s annoying jokes, his sly word-play. They can’t give you an extra minute to say good-bye to your cousin. And if they can’t do that, how heavily should your children’s futures weigh on your shoulders?
If it comes to it, you’ll turn yourself in to Mr. Webber and shop the lot of them. Go back inside Saughton, if that’s what it takes to keep them away from Bibi and the bairns.
You are hungry—you forgot to make yourself breakfast this morning—and you are sick at heart as you march determinedly towards the tram stop. You’re walking away from a good solid job that was paying you—well, it wasn’t paying you well in purely monetary terms, but it got you respect. And after what you threw in Colonel Datka’s face (or more accurately, his ear) you have zero expectation of keeping the job. Bibi will be livid. She’ll also be exhausted from sitting up all night with Aunt Sameena and Uncle Taleb and the kids, and she’s probably back at work by now—
Yes, you can see all this. Nevertheless.
You check your phone for the tram schedule, and it flashes a red warning at you: delays expected due to an accident on Leith Walk, get the bus instead. You can see at least one tram with your own eyes, but who knows how the network works? So you stop by the foot of the Mound, outside the big art gallery, and poke at the time-table. You’ve hit the morning lull after rush hour, it seems, when half the buses return to their depots. Irritated, you put your phone away and start walking. It’s only a couple of kilometres, and the weather’s fine. You’ll even chance a short-cut over the Mound, normally a steep climb best left to the buses’ fuel cell.