She sat up, still very close to him. Looked down into his face. Gave him a tentative little smile. Her mouth a question. He could feel the air prickle between them, feel the hair on his real arm stand on end. He couldn’t move, paralyzed by not knowing what was happening here, what was going to happen.
She leaned in close and brushed his lips with hers, just the tiniest suggestion of a kiss. Her lips were so soft, so delicate, barely grazing his own. He could reach up, put an arm around her shoulders, pull her in close…
“Wait,” he said.
It took all his energy, all his strength to say it, but he managed.
“We can’t,” he told her.
She slapped the bedcovers beside his head. Then she lowered her forehead to touch his. She was almost on top of him and he felt like if she grabbed his shoulders and pushed him back on the bed, if she straddled him right then and there, he would not be able to resist, he would just have to give in. She was so close. He could just grab her hips, he could—
“Konyechno. Of course we can’t,” she said. She roared in frustration and pulled away. Jumped off the bed and headed for the door to the common room. Her hand hesitated, though, when it touched the knob. “We can’t?” she asked, her back to him.
It wasn’t too late. One word and she would turn around, come back to the bed, and—
“We can’t,” he told her.
She opened the door and stepped through. Closed it behind her with a click.
By lunchtime it was ninety degrees outside. In a shady restaurant at the ground level of the hotel, the three of them ate some plov, a local dish of rice and mutton. Chapel didn’t have much of an appetite — he mostly just picked at a piece of bread and drank some water. He couldn’t meet Nadia’s eye throughout the meal. He assumed that the waitstaff would be listening to their conversation, so he kept talking to the bare minimum.
Bogdan ate two plates of rice and asked for more, but Nadia cut him off. “Don’t get over full,” she told him. “There will be a lot of walking today, in the heat.”
The hacker’s face fell like a petulant child’s. He’d been pouting all morning since he found out there was free Wi-Fi in their suite but he wasn’t allowed to use it. “You hire me for computer stuff,” he said, “and I cannot so much as check e-mail? Now I cannot eat what I like? Very well, Mother.”
Nadia laughed and tried to catch Chapel’s eye, but he just turned his face away.
When they were done, they headed out into the streets. Their meeting with Nadia’s local connection wasn’t scheduled for another hour, but she felt they needed the time to shake anyone who might be following them.
“You make anybody?” Chapel asked, as they headed through a strip of parkland. Sprinklers were running nonstop to keep the grass green.
“I don’t understand,” Nadia said.
Chapel shook his head. Her English was fluent enough that he sometimes forgot she wouldn’t know every obscure American idiom. “I mean, did you actually see anyone follow us from the hotel?”
“No,” she told him. “Which simply means they’re good at it.”
“You think we’re in danger? I was told the Uzbek government hates Americans.”
Nadia sighed and lifted her hands in exasperation. “I think, right now, the secret police are following you — for protection. Yes, they hate Americans, because they’re always asking so many uncomfortable questions. About human rights, about the way the government shells its own people out in the countryside. But they love American money. This is a country desperately in need of funds for development. So you — the American plutocrat — they will do anything to keep safe.”
“That’s good to know,” Chapel said.
“Don’t allow yourself to get complacent. Let me tell you a story. The president of this country has a nephew, a journalist. About ten years ago he disappeared off the street with no explanation. When your Hillary Clinton came here in 2011, she demanded to see him. He was produced and claimed it was all a misunderstanding, that he had been treated well. But a doctor examined him and saw that he had been starved and kept on psychotropic drugs for years at a time.”
“Jesus,” Chapel said. “At least we got him released.”
That elicited a bitter laugh from Nadia. “A few months after Hillary Clinton left, this journalist called up a friend of his and said he planned on writing a book about his uncle, the president. Even before he finished the phone call, the line went dead and he has not been seen since.”
Despite the heat of the day, Chapel felt a chill run down his spine.
“That was the nephew of the president,” Nadia pointed out. “A close family member. If your cover is blown while we’re here, well… imagine what they will do to a foreign spy?”
Chapel gave that some time to sink in. Her story was hard to bring into concordance with what he was seeing with his own eyes. Tashkent as seen from the sidewalks didn’t look much like the totalitarian hellhole she made it out to be. The streets were clean and full of cars and trucks and people going about their business. Stores were open and well stocked, full of customers, while the park was crowded with people out enjoying the sun. Every sign in every shop window was printed in two alphabets — Cyrillic and the Latin characters he was used to. “What I see here, though — it looks more like Montreal than Kabul.”
“You’d see it if you spent more time here, actually talking to the locals,” she told him, keeping her voice low but not whispering — whispering might seem suspicious. “You’d realize that no one here talks about politics. Ever. If you were to ask them about human rights abuses, about the way the government massacres its own people out in the countryside, they would run away from you as if you had started coughing up blood. Politics is never a safe topic in Tashkent, and everything is political. In 2009, the president decided to chop down some historic trees here. Trees the city was famous for. To this day no one knows why he did it. If they asked, they were taken away. This — for trees.”
They headed down a crowded shopping street, clearly one of the main thoroughfares of the city. A tourist information kiosk stood on one corner, with a very bored-looking middle-aged women stationed inside. She fanned herself casually, as if she were too bored to even keep cool. On the opposite side of the street was a shop that rented bicycles and mopeds for daily use. Out on the sidewalk were a small number of street vendors. They had hookah pipes and leather-bound books laid out on threadbare blankets, and their eyes moved around constantly. Maybe sizing up potential customers — or maybe keeping an eye out for something else.
“We need to lose our followers,” Nadia said. “My contact will not wish to be seen speaking with us.”
“It would help if we knew who our followers were,” Chapel pointed out. Then he saw something and had an idea. He walked away from Nadia and Bogdan and stooped down over one of the blankets, one selling sticks and cones of incense. The man who ran this impromptu store was wearing a pakol, the traditional soft round hat of an Afghan. Unlike most of the men Chapel had seen in Tashkent, he had a long, thick beard. “Aya ta pa pashto khabarey kawalai shey?” he said, asking if the man spoke Pashto.
The man looked up, surprised, and raised his hands in joy. “God is great!” he answered, in that language. “And full of surprises. A white man who speaks my language, and I am sure, has money to buy my wares, yes?”
Chapel got the point. A shared tongue wasn’t going to get him anything for free. “You’re from Afghanistan?” he asked. Not entirely surprising — Uzbekistan shared a border with Afghanistan, and the Taliban had driven a lot of refugees out of their country with nothing but what they could carry on their backs.