Chapel gave the man a curt nod. “Thanks for the tip. You mind?”
The older man feigned a moment of incomprehension, then a slightly longer interval of embarrassment. “Oh, I’m in your way, please, my apologies.” He stepped out of Chapel’s path and gestured for Nadia to go in first. “Enjoy your time in Uzbekistan, Mr. Chambers.”
Chapel turned to face the man, but he was already walking away. As he followed Nadia up the hotel steps, he asked under his breath, “What the hell was that about? And how did he know the name on my passport when we just got here?”
“SNB — the secret police,” she whispered back. “They would have called him from the airport so he knew we were coming.”
Chapel shook his head and walked in through the glass doors. The message was clear, he supposed. The Uzbek government knew where he was, and they would be watching him. Well, he’d never expected this job to be easy.
At the reception desk Nadia made all the arrangements. Chapel was posing as an executive of an energy conglomerate, looking to invest in natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan’s interior. Nadia was supposed to be his personal assistant. Bogdan, who was supposed to be Jeff Chambers’s tech guy, wandered around the lobby while Nadia asked about the various services their rooms provided.
Chapel leaned over the counter, interrupting her and staring at the pretty desk clerk. “Nice scarf,” he told her.
She reached up and touched it. “Thank you, Mr. Chambers.”
“Are our rooms ready? I don’t want to hear anything about how they’re still being made up. I know it’s first thing in the morning. I start work this early, and I expect not to have to sit around waiting for other people to catch up.”
The clerk’s eyes widened a fraction of an inch, but she didn’t flinch. Good for her. Chapel felt like a jerk but that was his cover, and he had to play it perfectly. “As per your request your rooms are available now. Would you like to hear about our spa and exercise rooms, or about our three excellent restaurants?”
“What I want to hear,” Chapel told her, “is that I won’t be disturbed while I’m here. Think you can handle that?”
“Of course—”
“That means no maid service. No turndown service. It especially means no visitors unless I clear them first. I don’t want this to be a problem. I don’t want to have to ask about this twice. So when I ask you in a few seconds if my instructions are clear, all I want you to do is say yes. Are my instructions clear?”
“Yes,” the clerk said.
“Good girl.” Chapel took a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and laid it on the counter. The clerk just stared at it. “That’s for not making me repeat myself.”
He grabbed up the keycards the clerk had already laid on the counter and headed for the elevators. “Svetlana,” he said, over his shoulder, “I want you ready with my schedule in twenty minutes.”
“Of course, sir,” Nadia said.
Chapel stepped into the elevator and waited for the doors to close. Only then did he let himself droop and feel tired again.
He’d been in Tashkent for less than an hour and already he could feel how things had changed. Bucharest and Istanbul had just been layovers. This was where the mission really began.
PART III
Marshal Konstantin Bulgachenko spent the last night of his life at an exceptionally tasteless party.
There had been many of those, since the fall of the Union. The Soviets had possessed, at least, a sense of decorum — a certain restraint. Oh, the members of the Politburo had had their sprawling dachas on the Black Sea, their Italian mistresses and their fine cars, but in public, in Moscow where the world was watching they had favored cheap suits and proletarian tastes in food, and if they smoked Cuban cigars, they did so behind closed doors.
Nowadays, of course, the world was turned upside down. The power elite of Moscow — the oil executives, the top-end gangsters, the political machinists — lived their lives in the newspapers, on the gossip sites, and their duty was to show their fellow Russians just what wonders and new pleasures capitalism had wrought. Excess had become patriotic, decadence a virtue.
So when one arrived at the door of this particular party in the suburbs of Moscow, one was handed a little spoon carved from bone. Inside the house where camera flashes exploded nonstop, half-naked models walked from room to room with bowls of beluga caviar nestled between their breasts, and they would coo and laugh as fat men dug into their bounty for a taste. In the middle of the house, in its spacious living room, a Japanese sports car had been parked, its tinted windows continuously steamed up from whatever was going on inside. Bulgachenko had not bothered to find out. He had come to the party to speak to one particular person, the American ambassador. Finding the man had taken hours as Bulgachenko was harangued by one notable citizen after another, carried off course by the enforced jollity. He was dragged into rooms where drugs were being ingested openly, where only profuse and eloquent excuses had gotten him free. He was spirited onto a dance floor by an heiress of less than twenty years who did not even know who he was, only that there were medals on his uniform and that he looked like her grandfather. He was ushered with a crooked finger into tense, quiet discussions with small and greasy men who wanted to know just what it would take to corrupt him, men who seemed to want to bribe him simply to prove that he was not above such things.
In the end he had found the ambassador on a back deck, out in the clear night air. The American was a long, thin man with a cloud of white hair on the top of his head. If he’d had a mustache, Bulgachenko thought he might look like the writer Mark Twain. He looked every bit as disgusted as Bulgachenko felt, but as soon as he realized he was not alone on the deck, his manner changed utterly. Like an actor stepping out into a spotlight he came alive, his arms unfolding, his face opening into a wide and benevolent grin.
The expression did not change when Bulgachenko walked up to him and uttered a few simple words: “It was very warm inside, but out here the air is clear and refreshing.” The words were chosen carefully, as banal as they sounded, and the message they conveyed was that while there had been difficulties, they had been taken care of, that Russia still had the highest confidence in the mission. The ambassador responded with a similar pleasantry, this one meaningless in itself: “I like to come out here and look at the lights.” Had there been a problem the ambassador would have spoken about the weather.
With that it was done. Bulgachenko made his way back through the party with as much grace as he could muster and headed to his car, an inconspicuous black sedan. He stepped into the back and fastened his seat belt. “I am very tired,” he told the driver. “Please take me home.”
He must have accidentally inhaled some narcotic smoke, or perhaps simply the perfume of the young heiress had clouded his head — it had certainly been strong enough. It took him some time to realize that the driver of the car was not the usual man, and that he was not driving back toward Moscow, but farther out, into the country.
Even then Bulgachenko did not panic. Though the car was moving in excess of seventy kilometers an hour, still he tried to open his door and jump out. The door was, of course, locked and could not be opened. He had expected no less. He considered reaching over the front seat and strangling the driver, though this would likely end in death for both of them. Even if he did escape, though, he knew that he would simply be picked up at some later time, that he would only be delaying the inevitable. “Will you tell me where we are going, or who it is you work for?” Bulgachenko asked.
The driver did not answer.
They did not go far. Bulgachenko did not recognize the street or even the district of their destination, but that did not matter. The car pulled into a warehouse full of empty shelves and a rolling door was closed behind it. The door unlocked itself, and a man in a black suit reached in to help Bulgachenko out. The man in the black suit did not speak or salute. He simply took Bulgachenko’s arm and led him deeper into the warehouse to where a chair sat in the middle of a stretch of open floor. Bulgachenko did not resist as he was forced to sit down, or as his hands and feet were tied to the chair.