‘How can that be?’ the man asked, picking a fleck of tobacco from his tongue.
‘No bloody point in trying to break a man out of prison if he’s not there.’
The other man began to laugh, drily. ‘You want to break into the Castle?’ He wrinkled his brow in curiosity. ‘Then your defence is complete. You are clearly mad.’
‘It’s why I wanted to find you,’ Harry gasped, sucking in deep lungfuls of air. He began spluttering again; too much smoke. God, it hurt, his stomach muscles weren’t what they once had been. But the pain had been worthwhile. As he stared across the table, through bleary eyes, Harry felt sure he had found the leader of the Horsemen. ‘I want your help to get him out.’
The humour died on the other man’s face. ‘What foolishness is this?’ The tone was harsh, his lip curled. He suspected a trap.
‘My friend’s in trouble. I want him out. And I’m willing to pay, a very large amount of money. It’s the same deal I offered Amir Beg last night, except you will have the added reward of causing huge embarrassment to the government.’
‘You expect us to do your dirty work for you?’ the man spat.
‘No, not at all. I want you to help me. Whatever happens, whatever we do, I’m part of it.’
‘But you are a politician,’ the man sneered.
‘I’ve had my moments.’ Harry picked up a paper napkin and wiped the beer and sweat from his face. He was feeling better. They were talking rather than breaking his neck.
‘You would risk your life for him?’
‘Yes.’
‘And why would you do that, Mr Jones?’ It was a fresh voice, that of the waitress. For the first time Harry realized that she hadn’t left, had witnessed everything from the background. Now the men were looking towards her, waiting for her lead. It left Harry confused.
Why would he risk his life? It was an excellent question, one all soldiers are asked, but normally respond to with little more than a quiet smile. ‘I owe him. He saved the life of my wife many years ago. But it’s even more than that. Difficult to explain.’ Not the thing most soldiers talked about. Unless you’d been there, been part of it, how could you understand?
‘I’m a patient woman. No need to rush.’ She took a seat in the middle of the table, like a judge. Her dark eyes had an air of authority, of experience. It wasn’t just the grey at her temples but a sense that she knew about life and was accustomed to its many lies. An air of profound sadness clung to her.
‘Zac and I, we fought together. Put our lives on the line for each other.’
‘Friends.’
‘More than that, much more. A soldier’s code.’
‘Tell me about it – please.’
Her voice was soft, but insistent. The rest were silent, waiting on him, and on her. Even the cigarette had been allowed to die. They were putting Harry to the test.
‘OK,’ he began, struggling to ignore the pain that was still burning through his gut, ‘it’s like this. In my country you join up, become a soldier, for many reasons – the excitement, the challenge, those strange things men call their ideals, or maybe it’s because you’re just trying to escape from what or where you are.’
‘You have a choice? Interesting.’
‘Then, one day, you find yourself out there facing the enemy. And they’re trying to kill you. Rip the life from your body. You’re never the same after that. How do you put it into words? The bullets are tearing at the air around your head, your heart is flooding with fear, every instinct screams at you to run, to get out of there, to save yourself, but . . . you stay. Why? Sure, for Queen and country, and for the people back home, all those things you’ve sworn to protect, but it’s difficult to find much of a focus when you watch men torn to pieces and know you’re supposed to be next on the list. You stay put, not for your ideals, or because anyone orders you to, and no way for the money you’re being paid. You stay for the other guys.
‘You’re in it together, you see. This is what you’ve chosen, and there’s an instinct even more powerful than self-preservation, a fear even greater than that of your own death. A soldier would rather face a firing squad a thousand times over than just once have to look his own colleagues in the eye knowing he had failed them. You share the risk with them because they share it with you, and together you’re part of something that is so much more powerful and important than a collection of individuals.’
‘I think all of us here share that, Mr Jones,’ she said gently.
‘It’s how you measure yourself, as a man. The loneliest place on earth is looking in a mirror and being ashamed of who you see.’
‘Some people never bother to look in that mirror.’
‘I guess I must be the vain type.’
She steepled her fingers in front of her mouth, preparing a verdict. ‘Mr Jones, you must know that they intend to execute your friend. He has only a short time to live.’
It jolted him, more pain, yet somehow it was no surprise. ‘Why? What has he done?’
‘This is Ta’argistan. Reason is not required.’
Harry turned, confronted them all, eye to eye, before coming back at the woman. ‘Then you must help me! You are the last chance I have of getting him out alive.’
‘I think you are right,’ she said. ‘But we cannot.’
‘I was told you were the opposition.’
‘Yes, an opposition, of sorts, but not a resistance movement. We have no army. We are teachers, lawyers, bakers, postmen, engineers, taxi drivers. Even bar owners. Simple people, not soldiers. We try to fight with ideas, not AK-47s.’
‘You must help!’
‘He may be your friend, Mr Jones, and I pity him, but he is your friend, not ours.’ Her voice grew firmer as he pressed, while desperation began creeping into his.
‘I’ll pay you. Richly.’
‘We are not gangsters, either! We cannot help you.’ And the gorilla’s hand was on Harry’s shoulder.
‘I won’t accept this,’ he said, clenching his fists in frustration. ‘I want to talk to the leader of your Horsemen.’
Her hooded eyes flinched. ‘But you cannot. He is dead.’
He stared at her in bewilderment.
‘My husband . . .’ The words and their memories were clearly a struggle. ‘They took him. Last spring, when the snows began to melt.’
‘And since then?’ But he could see the answer in her face. Despair. Confusion. And defeat. The widow sat in his chair, but she would not take his place.
‘I am so sorry,’ he whispered.
Cold, dead eyes stared back at him.
‘But that is why you must understand,’ he pressed. ‘Zac, he saved my wife’s life.’ He thought he saw a flicker of some emotion in her features, but whether it was of sympathy or resentment, he could not tell. ‘What price would you pay, to get your husband back?’
‘Goodnight, Mr Jones.’
Harry was hauled to his feet. He tried to fight back, but it was pointless. The curtain was drawn back once more, its metal rings clattering along the rail like the bolts of the rifles in a firing squad. Only at the last moment did he turn upon her, with violence in his tone.
‘You say you fight with ideas. You want ideas?’ he spat. ‘I’ll give you one. From a man named Edmund Burke.’
‘An Englishman?’
‘A stubborn bloody Irishman, as it happens, and all the better for it. Nearly three hundred years ago. “The only thing that’s necessary for evil to triumph,” he said, “is for good men to do nothing”.’ Harry didn’t even try to hide his contempt. ‘I think he meant women, too,’ he shouted as he was bustled out.
A chair went flying, Russian curses were tossed about. Then a new voice joined in.
‘Mr Jones.’
Harry was almost out of earshot when he heard his name being called. It was the young man with the shoulder-length hair. Everyone stopped. Harry turned.
‘How would you have done it? The escape?’
‘No, Bektour!’ the woman said sharply. ‘Such knowledge is dangerous. We don’t want to know.’
‘It’s not the information that’s dangerous, Mother.’ ‘Even so.’
He shook his head, his neatly brushed hair rustling around his shoulders. ‘Information is power, Mother,’ he said softly. ‘You know we cannot leave it to them. Father would have understood.’
Harry remembered the kids huddled together in the other alcoves around computers, sharing monitors, often squeezed together two on a chair. ‘So that’s what you’re doing here,’ he exclaimed, ‘you’re running an Internet group.’
‘We are what the comics call cyber-activists, Mr Jones,’ the young man said. His English was excellent, with a slight American tinge. ‘We set up websites, form chat groups, offer news, all the sort of stuff the authorities try to cover up.’
His mother snorted in exasperation.
‘Yes, it’s not like the old ways, and it has its risks,’ he continued. ‘They keep trying to close us down, but they have difficulty in finding us in cyberspace, and when they get close, we move on. We use foreign servers, keep changing our encryption programs, we constantly do battle with their blocking software. It’s like a game of tennis, first they serve, then we return. They try hard but they’re not very good at it. We are better, even though we only wear T-shirts and jeans.’
‘They won’t bury you in cyberspace if they catch you, Bektour. They’ll bury you right here, alongside your father,’ his mother snapped.
‘In which case there’s nothing much more to lose by listening to what Mr Jones has to say,’ Bektour replied, with all the politeness of a loving son but with a sense of weariness that implied this was another round in a very old argument. ‘Please, Mr Jones,’ he said, indicating he should take his seat once more. ‘Humour me, and forgive my mother.’
Harry was angry, hurting, in two minds. Why indulge these people with their family squabbles? Yet it meant, for the moment, at least, he wouldn’t be thrown out into the snow and left entirely on his own.
‘How would I get Zac out?’ he muttered, taking care as he sat down once more that the gorilla wasn’t behind him. ‘I’m not entirely sure. It depends a little on you.’
‘I keep telling you,’ the mother spat, ‘we are not the Taliban!’ But already her tone had changed. She was no longer leading the discussion but was staring at Bektour in the manner of an old lioness who had lost her position in the pride. She was hurt, and more than a little afraid.
‘That’s the point,’ Harry said, ‘we don’t need the Taliban or any army. If there’s any commotion, let alone any shooting, it’s over.’
The gorilla returned, but this time only to place a fresh glass of beer in front of him. Harry accepted it as an offer of conciliation and took a sip. It tasted as if it had passed through a goat.
‘It’s not just a matter of getting him out of the prison, you see, we’ve also got to get him out of the country,’ Harry continued. ‘He doesn’t stand a chance if the security forces are put on alert. Everything has to be done quietly. No explosions. No guns. No violence. We’re not trying to do a remake of
The Dirty Dozen
.’ A fresh spasm of pain surged through his stomach. It didn’t seem to appreciate the beer, either.
‘So where would we come in?’ Bektour asked, pulling his hair back from his face, his eyes alert, expectant.
‘You have people on the inside.’
‘How do you know that?’ the mother hissed in suspicion.
‘You knew I was there this morning, with Sydykov. You must have friends working there.’
Bektour took a sip from his own glass and replaced it very carefully on his beer mat, lining up other beer mats in a row beside it, everything very neat. It seemed to be his way. ‘And what if we did?’
‘We need local knowledge. Intelligence –
information,
as you put it. Look, I know I was shown only a small part of the prison this morning. Useful, but not enough. I need to know precisely where Zac is, and how to get to him, what sort of security system they have, details of the inspections, that sort of thing. The Castle isn’t Guantánamo Bay, it’s old, decrepit, not up to date. From what I saw they have very old-fashioned locks, only a very small CCTV system, and the guards all seemed to be the kind who are a bit dozy by the middle of the night. Timing will be everything.’
‘You could have all the time in the world and it wouldn’t serve any purpose,’ the mother said. ‘Your friend is in the Extreme Punishment Wing – in the basement. You talk about locks, but you don’t even know where the door is.’
‘We may be in luck.’ Harry reached into a pocket and pushed his mobile phone across the table to Bektour. ‘Can you read the photos on this?’
‘But of course,’ the young man said. Within moments he had produced a laptop, into which he plugged the phone with its camera, and soon they were viewing the images Harry had surreptitiously captured that morning in the governor’s office.
‘Zoom in – right there!’ Harry instructed, jabbing a finger at the screen.
The wall chart from the governor’s office came into ever-closer focus. Staring out at them was a detailed plan of every floor of the prison.
‘You expect just to walk in and out?’ the mother said, incredulous, cutting through the shimmer of excitement.
‘Easier than tunnelling, I suppose.’
‘Nobody has escaped from the Castle in four years,’ she protested. ‘The last man to try was caught less than five hours later, wetting himself in the back of his mother’s wardrobe. He was never seen again. This is a small country, Mr Jones. It’s not easy to find a place to hide.’
‘I can get him out of the country if you’ll help me get him out of the prison. How did the last man do it?’
‘Through the sewers. In that part of the town they are old, large, almost the height of a man,’ the man with the moustache said. The others were listening, too.
‘But now they are blocked with bars,’ the mother interrupted. ‘No one can get out that way again!’
‘We won’t be breaking out, not at first. We’ll be breaking in. They won’t be expecting that,’ Harry replied.
The mother – one of the men called her Benazir – sat chewing the inside of her cheek with exasperation, yet for the moment she seemed to have run out of further objections.
‘If we can get him out,’ Harry continued, ‘we’ll have shown that Karabayev and his gang are vulnerable. And also that they are liars. Through Zac we’ll be able to show the world what they’re up to. The biggest propaganda victory you’ve ever had. Think about that!’ His finger was pounding the table in emphasis. ‘They’ll lose every friend in the West, put all the aid they rely on at risk. They’ll come under enormous pressure. I’m in a position to arrange that. It might just change the whole deal here in Ta’argistan.’