Ali Zahid seemed to digest this information quite literally, making chewing motions with his mouth as he stared at the ground. “Very good,” he said at last. “Wait here.” He disappeared inside, and McColl could hear him and a woman talking. A few minutes later the Indian reappeared at the door, beckoning. McColl followed him into a richly decorated room and was handed a set of Uzbek clothes.
“You must wear these,” Ali Zahid said. “I will wrap your turban.”
Ten minutes later they were working their way through another maze of narrow streets, the delicious mélange of cooking smells offering McColl an acute reminder of how long it had been since he’d eaten. Another few minutes and they arrived at the foot of a low cliff. Worn steps led diagonally up the face; at the top there was only the darkness of open country.
“It is not so far,” Ali Zahid said encouragingly, almost disappearing from sight as he strode off down a near-invisible path. McColl’s eyes slowly grew accustomed to the dark: they were making their way through a cemetery that sprawled across acres of undulating bare earth. A copse of trees loomed in front of them, and beyond it a dry riverbed. Behind them the meager lights of the town had faded completely from view.
“We are almost there,” Ali Zahid said. He now seemed as eager to please as he had been to thwart.
They traversed a rock-strewn gully and emerged onto a wide shelf, beyond which the land dropped away again. The gnarled trunk of an ancient tree stood in splendid isolation.
“See here,” Ali Zahid said, pointing. A low sarcophagus lay in the sandy earth; at its head two long poles bearing horsetail emblems fluttered uneasily in the breeze.
“The wireless?” McColl asked.
“No, that is a little farther. This is the grave of Daniel.”
“Daniel who?”
The Indian smiled, his teeth flashing. “In your Christian book, he fought lions, I think. See these stones—they move a little each year as his body grows.”
“What?” If there was one thing McColl hadn’t expected that evening, it was a Bible class.
“He grows, about one half inch in every year. And that,” he added, pointing at the trunk, “is the sacred tree. Its touch cures leprosy.”
McColl looked at the tree, then the Indian. Which of them was crazier? “And the wireless?” he asked patiently.
“A little farther,” Ali Zahid repeated. “I thought you would be interested,” he added, sounding slightly indignant. “Come.”
McColl followed, doing the sums in his head. By his reckoning Daniel should have been around a hundred feet long by now.
They clambered down onto the desert floor, and had been walking for only a couple of minutes when dark shapes loomed ahead—the broken walls of abandoned houses. The Indian threaded his way between them, stopped at the side of a disused well, and started removing loose bricks from the base of the wall. The hole that someone had dug in the space beneath contained a bulky package wrapped in sacking.
His Majesty’s wireless in Samarkand.
McColl looked around as Ali Zahid unwrapped it. The moon would soon be rising in the east; a silver glow was already seeping above the distant hills. The night was silent save for the murmur of the town to the north. A train whistle blew, a long way off.
The Indian was fiddling with the dials, the headphones clamped against his turban. “Calling Red Fortress. This is the City of Gold calling Red Fortress. Come in, Red Fortress.” He repeated it several times. McColl could imagine some Indian dashing down from the IPI communications room to tell the former public schoolboy on duty that Samarkand was sending a message. He felt a wave of disgust with the whole business. With himself.
Ali Zahid was handing him the headphones.
“…is Red Fortress, City of Gold,” a voice was saying, in exactly the accent McColl had expected.
“This is Bonnie Prince Charlie in the City of Gold,” he said slowly. Bite on that one, lads, he thought maliciously.
The silence at the other end seemed to last a long time. “We’ve been expecting your call, Bonnie Prince Charlie,” the voice said eventually.
Like hell you have, McColl thought. The moon was easing itself out of the hills, washing the plain with spectral light. It was all absurdly beautiful. “Agent Akbar is dead,” he said. “The Good Indian team is headed your way.”
“Understood,” the voice in Delhi said.
Almost smugly, McColl thought.
“Where are they now?” the voice asked.
“Unknown. Probably still on Russian territory.”
“Understood. Does the opposition know of their plans?”
Which opposition? McColl wondered. Presumably the Cheka. “In general, yes.”
“Is the opposition attempting to interfere?”
“Yes.”
“Understood. You must facilitate their escape from enemy territory if possible, Bonnie Prince Charlie.”
“Please repeat that instruction.”
“You must facilitate their escape from enemy territory—”
“Understood.” Only too fucking well. “Over and out,” he said coldly, losing his turban as he ripped off the headphones. He hadn’t really expected anything else, but had, he realized, still felt a flicker of hope.
Not anymore.
Ali Zahid was looking at him anxiously, even fearfully. “Are there troubles to come?” he asked.
“Facilitate,” McColl muttered. “You speak better English than that bunch of bastards.”
The Indian’s smile was doubtful.
They returned the wireless to its hiding place and walked back to the city. Boy, mule, and droshky were still waiting patiently outside the carpet shop. “You should be in bed,” McColl said as he climbed aboard for the return trip. And so should I, he thought. Tiredness, hunger, and anger were congealing into a dull despondency.
He lit a cigarette as they rattled slowly up Tashkent Street, and recalled the impression that Gandhi had made on him all those years ago. And again, in 1915, when McColl had stopped to see him at the ashram outside Ahmedabad. Everything he’d learned firsthand about Gandhi, everything he’d read about him in the mostly hostile British press, told him that this was one of nature’s better men, a force for good in a world so full of the opposite. A troublemaker where trouble needed making.
But as far as the powers-that-be were concerned, the only good Indian was a dead one.
“Shashlik, mister?” The boy’s face was turned to his; they were outside an eating house. Probably the boy’s father’s.
McColl looked at his watch. Two hours had already passed, so what difference did it make? “Yes,” he said, his mouth suddenly watering at the prospect. He flicked his cigarette end into the street, and three young boys appeared out of nowhere to fight for its possession.
Caitlin lit another cigarette—she was smoking far too much—and accepted another inch of whatever the local liqueur was. It had a kick like a mule, as her father might have said, and the hint of apple reminded her of Arbatov, who would now be commencing his five years of exile in apple-growing Verny.
She and Komarov were sitting in the otherwise empty hotel dining room. Her lack of sleep the previous night had left her tired enough for bed, but when he had suggested a drink, she had thought it prudent to accept. With enough of whatever it was inside him, he might let something slip.
Or not. The more shots Komarov put away, the more he seemed drawn to the past. “I once worked with a man named Dvoretsky,” he said. “Pyotr Dvoretsky. I was his immediate superior in the Investigation Department, and I knew him quite well. A good man, all in all. Kind to his family, always generous when the charities came to the office. No politics to speak of. The revolution didn’t fill him with joy, but it didn’t make him angry either. He was more bewildered than anything else, like many ordinary people.