Performance Anomalies (24 page)

“Don’t you want a woman?” the driver asked. “I can get you a good one. Not so expensive. For the price of a few drinks, maybe a little more.”

“Sorry, just the stars for me tonight.” Cono sat so that his face was not visible in the rear-view mirror. “Queen Cassiopeia is up there waiting for me. She’s for free. It’s a long drive. I’ll pay you double, and the price of a hooker.”

“Stars,” the driver said. “You must be a fucking astronomer.”

Timur ripped the bandage off his forehead and took a slug of vodka to make himself alert. He called the Bureau’s telecom surveillance desk from the fixed line of the apartment where he sat, not far from the barracks where Cono had deposited him thirty-two hours earlier. Timur snapped at the officer on the phone, demanding the latest on the series of calls they had been intercepting between the Kitai and the woman named Oksana. He listened for two minutes, then put the phone down, smiled, and grunted with disgust. “Humans.”

He had been seated in the same padded lounge chair since midnight, sleeping only intermittently. He hated sleep; it was a waste of time. Besides, he had plenty to think about. He didn’t know what to expect from the jihadis. He’d be doing the deal alone—no backups, no leaks. But if it went right, he might not need the Kitais to force the coup. To install himself. To be at the top at last.
Genghis
. He liked the name Cono had given him. Timur sloshed some vodka from his hip flask onto the floor. “Here’s to you, Cono, brother, you naïve bastard.” He took another gulp and lit a cigarette. When he’d finished the smoke and snubbed it out he took a cell phone from the side table and removed the battery before he put it in his coat pocket. There was more than one party who might be interested in tracking his movements through the mobile network.

Fifteen minutes later Timur was driving a dented Daihatsu pickup truck along empty Al Farabi Street, where the city surrendered to the slope of the foothills, heading west toward the road that would take him up to the quarry. Beneath his armpit he felt the nudge of the CZ 75 that had replaced the lost Makarov. He looked at his watch: 5:15. Yes, he was a few hours early. Why not? He knew he wasn’t going to sleep anymore. He had to move some things out of the tunnels, rearrange some of his treasures. And the quarry was more a home to him than anywhere else.
My handiwork
, he thought with a flush of pride.

In the darkness several blocks behind Timur’s pickup truck, another vehicle chugged along with its lights off; it was an old Lada sedan, a Zhiguli 2103, one of the last in Almaty, a sturdy vestige of the crumbled Soviet empire.

The stars were bright in the black sky as Cono lifted himself to the top of the fence adjoining the locked gate at the quarry. He had to flatten a curlicue of razor wire before he could slide his legs down the other side of the fence. One foot felt the top of a gate hinge, which supported him for a moment, and then he jumped free. But his frail legs couldn’t absorb the landing and his rear end hit the ground.

He got up slowly and gazed northeast, beyond the gaping quarry pit and down toward the slanting grid of streetlights in the city below. He looked up to Cassiopeia and from her he traced with his eyes the converging arches of Andromeda. Perseus was next to her, holding the head of Medusa at a safe distance.

He heard no sounds from the building before him. The padlock on the high aluminum riser at the front was made of hardened steel as thick as two fingers. It would be a tough job for his cutting wire. Guided by the starlight, he edged around the side of the building to look for another entrance and found a small door of corrugated metal. Its padlock was much smaller. Cono reached into his vest for the looped alloy wire; one of the rings still had the feel of dried blood. He wrapped the wire around the lock and tugged back and forth. Metal rasped against metal in a soft, fast, rhythmic whine. The lock snapped free.

Cono wedged the door open just enough to enter the pitch-black vaulted space, which smelled of rust and machine grease. He waved his hand along the crusty interior wall until he found a switch, then hesitated. He didn’t have a flashlight; what good would it be anyway, in a minefield like this? And after all, wasn’t he awake in this hampering pre-dawn so that he could do his work before the crowd arrived? He tripped the light switch. Three incandescent bulbs beneath tin umbrellas glowed, suspended from a high I-beam running the length of the cavernous structure.

The interior shed where Cono and Timur had locked up Zheng’s cash was just before him, to the right, and beyond it was a stack of cardboard boxes labeled “Dynobel Sweden,” with crude stencils of an explosion and exclamation marks. Against the wall to the left was a stack of ovoid tanks, probably acetylene, Cono judged by the tubing and welding mask hanging from them. Huddled near the wall was a squad of upright gas cylinders, and parked askew next to them was a blasting machine whose drilling armature resembled an enormous probing finger.

Farther on was the forklift with two rigid arms raised high; beyond it was the rusting framework of flywheels. Between the forklift and the flywheels was the double cellar door that had caught Timur’s wary gaze for a moment. On the far wall of the building were metal lockers with faded white lightning bolts painted on them. Cono could just make out the nearly vanished Russian lettering: “Danger! High Voltage!” In the far corner, diagonally across from where Cono stood, was a stairway that ascended to an enclosed platform supported by struts of angle iron.

Cono cautiously made his way to the left, scanning the floor for trip wires. Instead of going directly to the cellar doors he knew he would have to enter in search of the high-U, he went to the stairs at the far corner and climbed up to the small room that rested on stilts. Inside was a control panel with large red and black buttons and gauges that reminded him of the cockpit of an old freighter that had once taken him to the Yemeni port of Aden. The window next to the chair was protected by wire meshwork and covered with a film of dust. Cono looked out the window; below was a giant funnel-shaped bin formed by steel flanges. Full of rocks bigger than watermelons, the bin was tilted toward the mouth of a crusher, draped with heavy chains to prevent debris from being expelled from the force of the grinding. “It all makes for easy burials,” Timur had said.

From this vantage point, Cono could see the starlit outlines of conveyor ramps radiating from the chute of the main crusher; without this elevation it hadn’t been possible to see the full depth and expanse of the quarry crater two days earlier, when he and Timur had come.
Two days ago?
Cono thought his mind was blanking out, misleading him, so he started to retrace his steps since Xiao Li’s first phone call. He cringed when his memory came to the bank and Zheng and his men.
Yesterday?
Time and events seemed to have accelerated. He tried to concentrate, but the gaps in his recall screamed out at him. His thoughts jumbled and scattered. Where was Xiao Li?
Home with her vile mother and her son. No she wasn’t. She was dancing on a balcony. Singing over the edge …

Cono banged his head against the wall of the cockpit and shook away Xiao Li and the confusion. He propped his forehead against the window and stared at the conveyor ramps that distributed the crusher’s feast, delivering the fragments to sifters and onward to other ramps. Each conveyor was angled upward and supported by two tall legs, like a praying mantis, and each in its turn seemed to be preying on the tail of the next and the next until the last ramps led to piles of grit and gravel so far away they were just faint smudges at the edge of the crater.

He moved his gaze to the control panel and turned on the switch labeled “Main Crusher.” The lights within the building dimmed for two seconds, then recovered as the pair of heavy wheels outside slowly came up to speed. Cono pushed several buttons at the top of the console, and the lights in the building dimmed again. From the wide expanse of the quarry came whines and moans like cats in heat as the conveyor belts started to move. Cono pushed a small lever marked “Main Crusher Feed.” The pile of rocks in the bin moved forward in slow pulses, as if they rested on the back of a giant who was shrugging his shoulders. After three pulses, a mound of rocks at the narrow end of the bin fell into the draped chains.

The crusher roared for a few seconds, followed by thwacking sounds and growls, then just a loud hum. Cono saw the first of the ground-up rocks ascending the primary conveyor belt, making their way to the head of the nearest praying mantis. At the head he saw them fall into a subsidiary crusher joined to more ramps ready to carry the discharge of smaller fragments to the awaiting sieves and follow-on conveyors sprawling outward from the hub.

Cono’s view was toward the east. He was disturbed by the indistinct hint of lilac in the sky above the highest tier of the quarry. Soon it would be daylight. And the noise? The quarry was far enough into the middle of nowhere that there was little risk, but Cono shut off all the controls anyway. The humming and whining faded. He checked his watch, focusing intently: 5:20. His mind had been cleared by the onslaught of sounds and the whirring rhythms from the machines. He left the cockpit and went down the stairs. Near their base he examined a door adjoining the wide ledge on which the crusher’s bin was mounted. The door had no wires, no sensors, only two deadbolts. He slid them aside and opened the door. From here it was only a few paces to the crusher’s bin. If the high-U was down below in the tunnels Timur had mentioned, he’d have to haul it back this way. He wondered how it was packaged, if it was here at all, and how much weight he’d have to carry with his weakened muscles.

He turned toward the horizontal double-doors set in the ground next to the skeleton of rusting flywheels. Mounted on the concrete rim around the doors was a digital touch pad identical to the one Timur had keyed his passcode into.

On the drive up from the city, Cono had tried to replay the tones of the touch pad in his mind. Some had sounded true, others … he wasn’t sure of. His lack of sleep made them hard to catch, flitting away like sparrows.

He flipped open the metal lid and focused on the keypad, trying to make the array of buttons make sense in his mind. His stooped body was swaying.
Sit down. Concentrate. Pretend you are surfing.

He knelt, his hand hovering over the buttons. He would have to touch each number on the keypad to see which tones corresponded to which number. Could Timur have wired it to blow up if the code was entered incorrectly? Cono balked. This was Timur’s private fortress. No one else was allowed entry, so a wrong code would be deserving of retribution. But Timur must be well aware of his own sloppiness. No, he wouldn’t have risked the embarrassment of blowing himself up.

Cono took a deep breath and exhaled. He tapped on the numbers in order; each one emitted a distinct two-frequency combination that was gratifying, pleasing in such a grim space. He got through them all. All was quiet. He took a deep breath again; now he was clearly remembering the tone sequence of the code, as clearly as he remembered the patterns on his mother’s only dress.

He replayed the code in his mind again, sound by sound, and as each sound rang in his memory, he pushed its corresponding number on the keypad. Six tones, then a click.

Cono stood up and bent over the double door. He hesitated, then put his fingers around the handle. He twisted it and pulled the door up, easing it until it lay to the side. He opened the other door just as carefully.

Beneath the open doors was square pit a little more than a yard deep. A box mounted on one of the concrete walls lining the pit was connected to wires that linked a series of plastique charges molded into holes gouged out of the concrete. By the pallid yellow-gray of the molded charge ribbons, the color of a dead man’s face, Cono knew it was Cold War-era Semtex, manufactured by the thousands of tons in the former Soviet bloc. Production was now tightly controlled and minuscule, but that didn’t really matter, because the material had a shelf life of twenty years or more and there was plenty of it dispersed around the world. He’d used it himself. Semtex, PE4, C-4, Plastrite, Netrolit, Spring Korper, Rowanex—Cono felt slightly shameful about his familiarity with plastics, and yet seeing them here, even so amateurishly arranged, gave him a perverse comfort.

There was enough plastique lining the pit to make the whole building disappear, even without help from the nearby stacks of boxed dynamite. Any intruder trying to force his way into the heart of Timur’s palace would be vaporized. So where was the heart of the sanctuary, which would have to survive such an explosion? In the left wall of the pit was an arched hole with a ladder descending into darkness.

Cono got on his hands and knees, eased himself backward into the hole, and began stepping down the ladder. After a dozen rungs he felt something brushing against his back. He froze. The brushing stopped.

“How convenient,” he said out loud.

Slowly, he reached back and felt a string between his shoulder blades. He pulled it and a bulb lit up above his head. He felt a smile stretching his swollen face.
Timur must be afraid of the dark
.