She was as good as her word. It may have seemed a lifetime for the faint of heart, but it was no more than a few minutes before the wheels touched down with barely the hint of a thump upon a snow-skimmed runway and the aircraft whined slowly to a halt. Not until then did Martha open her eyes. Hazel, with a hint of marmalade, to go with bobbed hair the colour of chestnuts. Did it come out of a bottle, like the Prime Minister’s? Harry wondered.
He was soon distracted from drawing any further conclusions about Martha by his first sight of Ashkek. The single terminal was drab and illlit, even with the power restored.
‘What are we doing here?’ the youthful Malik muttered, his brow creased in disappointment as he shivered in a blast of chill wind.
It was a question Harry hadn’t entirely resolved for himself. ‘Your first parliamentary trip?’
Malik nodded.
‘There are alternatives. You might prefer to discover a passionate interest in the film industry, or maybe space travel.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Hollywood and Florida. And you’d be surprised how many of our parliamentary colleagues have developed a previously unknown but unrelenting desire to study the impact of rising sea levels on places like the Maldives. That’s what this game is about. Just be careful not to get trampled in the rush.’
‘I’m not like that,’ Malik protested, a little piously, ‘I don’t see my job as a matter of privilege.’
‘Then welcome to Ta’argistan.’
There was a welcome, of sorts. While most of the passengers joined the shuffling queue to have their passports checked, Bowles and his group were taken to a VIP lounge, a solemn affair with severe furniture and dusty artificial flowers, and two armed guards on duty outside the door. There the group was greeted by an official with agitated eyes and stiff English who introduced himself as Sydykov. He collected their passports, offering them tea while he dealt with the formalities and their luggage. That got Martha going.
‘I’ve got three bags,’ she declared, slowly, her voice rising as though speaking to a village bumpkin. ‘Three,’ she repeated, holding up the appropriate number of fingers. ‘One is small, so please make sure it isn’t overlooked.’
Harry winced at the performance. He could tell a military man even in his civvies. Sydykov seemed to reciprocate, coming across to introduce himself to Harry more formally.
‘Your rank?’ Harry enquired, shaking his hand, noticing its firm grip.
‘I hold the rank of major,’ Sydykov replied.
‘In which service?’
But the man simply smiled and moved on, as though he hadn’t understood.
Sydykov was there once again as they gathered in the foyer of their hotel two hours later, his smile still stretched in that fixed, dutiful manner, as stiff as the covers of the passports he handed back. The visitors had been given time to unpack and rest and were now waiting to be driven to the Presidential Palace for dinner, their first formal engagement of the tour. Martha Riley was still behaving like grit in a shoe. She looped her arm through the major’s, as though they were now old friends.
‘Now, I don’t wish to complain,’ she began, ‘but I couldn’t find any sign of a hairdryer in my room.’
With her free hand she ruffled her hair and returned his smile, while he appeared temporarily speechless, almost stunned.
‘And may I ask what that elderly lady is doing, sitting outside our rooms at the end of the corridor?’
Sydykov stiffened. ‘She, Mrs Riley, is there to ensure your comfort,’ he replied, his lips now taut in exasperation.
‘I asked her about the hairdryer, of course I did, but she didn’t seem to understand. How can she help us if she doesn’t speak English?’
Once again Sydykov seemed anxious to move on. ‘Forgive me, Mrs Riley, while I make arrangements for your hairdryer.’
‘That’s so kind of you,’ she said to his retreating back. ‘A girl’s got to look nice for the President.’
Harry found himself torn between rising irritation and the gentle tickle of amusement. How could she be so crass? Hadn’t she realized who the hell Sydykov was? Yet the sight of a major in the internal security service being used as a dog to fetch a stick held its own small pleasures. This was touted as a goodwill visit, yet they weren’t even trusted to wander around the hotel on their own. He’d already spotted the additional plain-clothes security, two of them sitting stiffly in the foyer. The hotel was constructed in the monumental, almost brutal style of the Soviet era and its public parts had all the sense of fun of a funeral parlour. The foyer could comfortably hold two hundred, yet there weren’t twenty. There was no crowd to get lost in, everyone stood out, particularly two goons.
Harry’s mind went back to the researcher from Human Rights Watch whom he’d met in a coffee house in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum. He was an old, wizened Russian named Pyotr whose crooked back and pronounced limp told of a life of troubles behind what had once been the Iron Curtain. He had a cracked voice and a thick Slavic accent, and as he spoke tears formed in his eyes. Harry couldn’t decide whether they were caused simply by his age, or by the sad tales he had to tell of a land filled by perpetual snows and suspicion. Now Harry was here, and the old Russian’s stories seemed to be coming to life.
Sydykov had returned, bringing with him a hairdryer, a preposterously large contraption that Martha immediately claimed and held aloft as though she had just won an Oscar.
‘Thank you so much, Mr Sickof.’ She made a point of mispronouncing the name. ‘Back with you in five minutes, gentlemen,’ she declared, disappearing in the direction of her room.
They waited for Martha, then they waited some more. Bowles tapped his foot in exasperation, Proffit meandered off in search of a drink, Malik sat in a corner studying his briefing notes while Harry asked himself yet again what the hell he was doing here. He had no plan, or at least nothing he regarded as shower-proof let alone watertight. The closest he’d got was a plan so simple it bordered on the preposterous. Its sole merit lay in the fact it was so outrageous, it might just take everyone else by surprise, too, catch them napping. He would simply ask them to release Zac.
Outrageous, certainly, but perhaps not as stupid as it sounded. There were ties between Britain and Ta’argistan. The Central Asian state was desperate for aid, for experts, for sound advice, anything that might help it drag itself out of their yurts and into the twenty-first century. Many homes were still heated with dried camel turd, their walls built of mud, and the industrial infrastructure consisted of little more than haystacks and holes in the ground. The Ta’argis also needed help in clearing up the irradiated rubble left behind by the Soviets. In return for help in these matters, Britain’s rewards were likely to be less tangible. She’d gain a friend in a sensitive part of the world, and Britain had grown rather short of friends in recent years. If they were lucky, the Brits might discover that the Ta’argis, like some of their Central Asian neighbours, were sitting on an endless supply of oil or natural gas or uranium, buried somewhere deep inside the Celestial Mountains. That was a long shot, of course, but modern diplomacy was little more than a crap shoot, and you had to be in the game to stand any chance of winning.
A new world was waiting only to be discovered, yet for the moment it would have to wait on Martha. Sydykov paced up and down the foyer, examining his watch, his smile growing more forced with every glance. When, finally, she reappeared, blown and brushed, Bowles exploded in a theatrical gesture of impatience. ‘Really, Martha!’ he snapped.
‘Why, Roddy,’ she said as she breezed past in the direction of their waiting bus, ‘you’d spend more time with your hair, if you had any.’
His hand came up defensively to the sparse patch on the back of his head, as though to brush it away. He gave a snort of rebuke. Then he followed.
Soon they found themselves heading for the White House, the Presidential Palace. It proved to be an uncomfortable, angular building of six floors set in the centre of the city behind ornate railings, its name coming not in imitation of the US President’s home but from the pale stone cladding used in its construction. Harry recognized the style; Soviet, nineteen-sixties, built off a plan drawn up in some office in Moscow, presumably the same office that had supplied the plans for Lenin’s mausoleum. The entrance was guarded by young soldiers in exaggerated flat felt hats the size of dinner plates who snapped to attention as the visitors approached. Inside, the reception hall was vast, largely empty, like an aircraft hangar, every step echoing on the pink-marble floor. By contrast, the lift up to the top floor was claustrophobic and slow. They found themselves disgorged into a reception room, where they were greeted not by the President but by a man of slightly less than average height with a lean, pinched face and hair plastered thinly across his skull. He was wearing circular rimless glasses, and the eyes behind them were bright and almond-shaped, betraying the presence of something Mongol in his genes, yet his skin was pale by the standards of most mountain men, as though he rarely saw the light. With his sloping shoulders and modestly cut suit he gave the impression of an academic, a professor who loved nothing more than spending his days with books. Sydykov made the introductions.
‘May I introduce to you Mr Amir Beg,’ he said, ‘the President’s chief of staff.’
‘Welcome to the Presidential Palace,’ Beg said, offering a polite bow but without shaking hands. His English was halting but, as his guests were to discover, usually technically precise. ‘The President will be with us shortly. I’m afraid I can offer you no more than fruit juice, since the President himself doesn’t touch alcohol.’ He waved to trays carried by young girls in colourful native costumes.
‘That wasn’t in the bloody briefing,’ Proffit muttered in a theatrical whisper from the back of the group.
‘You never read the briefing,’ Bowles responded, leading the charge for the trays.
Apart from Beg and Sydykov there were only three other Ta’argis present, officials from various economic ministries; it was destined to be a small gathering. The room, like so much else in Ashkek, was stiff with formality and too large for their number, and fruit juice wasn’t going to help. Two oversized portraits of the President hung at either end, and the only splashes of colour came from cultural artefacts and murals on the walls. Many of the designs featured horses.
‘Used to do a little hunting myself when I was younger,’ Proffit ventured, tugging wistfully at his whiskers.
‘We Ta’argis are – or
were
– nomads,’ Beg said. ‘We claim descent directly from Genghis Khan. Our horses represent our freedom.’
‘Then Martha here should feel at home,’ Proffit exclaimed jovially. ‘I’ve always suspected she was in direct line from Cochise and the Sioux.’
‘Cochise was an Apache.’ She arched an eyebrow. ‘And I’m half-Irish.’
‘The other half?’ Proffit enquired.
‘Pure skunk.’
Proffit was about to offer several further observations about her probable genealogical roots when the large carved wooden doors at the end of the reception room swung open. Everyone turned, and fell to silence as Mourat Karabayev, the President of the Republic of Ta’argistan, strode through the doors, accompanied by two large hunting dogs close at his heels. He was tall for a Ta’argi, in his early fifties and only a little over-weight, with a full head of dark waving hair swept straight back from the temples. He had the high, prominent cheekbones so characteristic of his people, and a small but deeply incised scar just below his right eye. He also had a nose that at some point in his life had been badly broken.
‘Mr Bowles, it is so good to see you again,’ he said, extending his hand and sniffing – his broken nose seemed to give him the need to snuffle repeatedly. ‘And all of you: Mrs Riley, gentlemen, you are most welcome. I am sorry if I have kept you waiting. You must be hungry. Let’s eat!’
His suggestion was more than hospitality; it implied a man short of time and, perhaps, with limited patience. At a brisk pace he led them through to a neighbouring room that was much smaller, with windows on two sides facing out across the city, where the lights were beginning to change as shops were shuttered and in their place the nightspots came to life. Yet the view inside the room proved far more tempting. In discretely lit display cabinets hugging every wall was housed a collection of gold artefacts, exceedingly old and in remarkably fine condition. Items of jewellery, ornamental horse harnesses, burial goods, Buddhist figurines both seated and standing, ancient coins, amulets, with every piece crafted from gold. The display was overshadowed by yet another portrait of the President, watching protectively over a dining table set for ten. Karabayev took his place in the middle, looking out over his city, Bowles sat opposite. The two groups didn’t mingle but found their seats on either side of the table – like North and South Korea, Harry thought. Beg was at the President’s right hand, and Martha next to Bowles. It made Harry wonder if Bowles had been responsible for the British seating plan; he was left in no doubt when he found himself ushered to the floating seat at the very end of the table.
The meal was simple – meat that might have been mutton, with cabbage and potatoes. And cheese. Mountain food. Alongside the fruit juice, they were also offered a drink of sour-smelling liquid that was described as fermented mare’s milk, but even Proffit took only a cursory sip. The glasses were kept topped up, and they talked: of aspirations, of industries, of economic ties and political ambitions, all the many things that might turn the myth of the Silk Road into a modern reality. Then Karabayev raised his glass of mare’s milk and offered a toast: ‘To friendship.’
‘To trade,’ Bowles responded.
‘To aid,’ the President added.
Bowles smiled and sipped his fruit juice.
‘And in return for that aid?’ It was Martha. As usual, there was a note of challenge in her voice.
The President stared across the table. ‘In return? Why, our friendship. We are a proud and independent people, Mrs Riley, a natural ally of the West. Friendship in a turbulent world has its own value, I think.’ But he could see he had failed to impress Martha. ‘Is there more you would want?’