The Adversary (10 page)

“Report it as you need to with the judiciary. I imagine they need it on the record in case there are any subsequent questions about your impartiality.”

She looked up at him with a slightly startled expression. “Impartiality? Yes, well, I see what you mean. It's stupid of me. I should have thought of all this.”

Nergui watched her carefully. As he recalled, she was anything but stupid, or even absent minded. It was difficult to believe that she hadn't really thought through all this before turning up, unannounced and unexpected, at the door of police headquarters. “You're probably feeling anxious about it all—maybe more than you realize. After all, just hearing that name after all these years will have stirred up a lot that you probably thought was long buried.”

She nodded, as though this idea was also new to her. Nergui thought back to her earlier comment about being patronized. He suspected that she might be someone who tolerated being patronized if this allowed her also to be underestimated.

“I can deal with the police side of it,” he said, wondering even as he spoke whether this was entirely wise. “We can do some checking on the calls. We might be able to track down the calling number, though I wouldn't be too hopeful on that front. Might be a good idea if we give you some protection too.”

She smiled. “Is that really necessary, do you think?”

He shrugged. “I don't want to alarm you unnecessarily. Chances are that this is just some half-baked idiot who's trying to cause a bit of trouble. Maybe someone with a grudge against you. Someone you sent down, maybe?”

“Well, of course, that's possible. But do you think there's any real danger?”

“I doubt it, to be honest. These people usually just like to stir things up. Those who want to do harm will generally just go ahead and do it. But you can never be sure.”

“I bow to your superior knowledge,” she said. “I hope you're right.”

“So do I,” he said. He paused. “It's been good to see you again, Sarangarel.”

She nodded. “It must be fate,” she said. “I came to the wrong place, and you weren't supposed to be here. Though you never did explain what it is that you are doing here.” She looked around the tiny, sparsely furnished office. “And this hardly looks like the head man's room.”

“It isn't,” he said. “I'm not the head man here. Not anymore. And, to be honest, I'm not even entirely sure what it is that I'm doing here.”

“That's not like you, Nergui,” she said. “You usually knew exactly what you were doing.”

“I did, didn't I?” he said. His blue eyes were unblinking. “And, if I remember rightly, so did you.”

Tunjin was slumped on the bed, looking as though someone had just struck him a hefty blow in the stomach.

He looked again at the open file, the picture of Muunokhoi staring back up at him with its empty smile. If this meant what he thought it did, then he could expect far worse than a blow in the stomach in the near future.

He tried to find some other interpretation, some other explanation for the presence of this photograph. Perhaps it had been in the file all along, an aid to identifying Muunokhoi. There were, after all, no official police mug shots of Muunokhoi—not until his recent arrest, at any rate. The arrest for which Tunjin had been responsible.

But he knew that this picture had not been in the file. He had been through the file dozens of times, collating the genuine evidence, checking the confected material, searching for inconsistencies, searching for anything that would reveal the forgeries. He had been convinced that it had all been perfect, foolproof.

But Muunokhoi had seen through it. And now the only fool here was Tunjin.

And, in any case, even if the photograph had been
there all along, this didn't explain how the file came to be here, in Tunjin's apartment. He had been over and over this in his mind in the preceding few minutes. Okay, he remembered little or nothing of the past few nights, but that itself indicated that he had not been in a condition to start stealing files from police headquarters. There was no question—this file had been stolen and placed here by someone in a far more coherent state of mind than Tunjin.

He needed a drink. He really needed a drink. He thought back to the numerous nearly empty vodka bottles in the other room. There was still plenty of booze left. More than enough.

It was tempting. Simply to slip back into oblivion. Just lie there and wait for whatever might happen. Except, of course, that nothing would. He would die of alcohol poisoning before Muunokhoi would do anything to him while he was unconscious. Muunokhoi liked his victims to know precisely what was happening to them and why. Not someone with a great tolerance of ambiguity, Muunokhoi.

Tunjin shook his head. No, for once, the answer wasn't to hide himself away in drink. He shuddered at the thought that, sometime over the last day or two, probably while he lay in a drunken stupor, someone had entered the apartment, probably stepped over his comatose body, and placed this file on his bed. That was a fairly powerful incentive to eschewing the booze, at least for a while.

So how close were they? Were they nearby, just waiting for him to wake up, so they could finish things off?

He had to be careful. Fortunately, with the brilliance of the sunshine outside, he had had no need to switch on the lights and the curtains were already drawn back. No-one watching from the outside would have seen any movement so far.

Unless they were listening for the judder of the plumbing as he had turned on the tap to get himself some water.

No, he was being paranoid. The plumbing in this place was so ancient that there was no way of tracing any noise back to any individual apartment. But the principle could well be right. They could be waiting for some sign of life. Maybe waiting for him to leave the apartment so they could pick him up and take him to some more suitable place. But if that was the case, why hadn't they just snatched him while he was unconscious? They could have taken him where they liked and then waited for him to wake up.

Because they were playing with him. That was why they'd left the file here. That was why they were letting him wait. Because they knew what he'd be thinking. They knew what he'd be thinking about. They knew—because it was now here in front of him—that he'd read Muunokhoi's file.

And that was it. He knew—and they knew he knew—what Muunokhoi was capable of. He couldn't just sit here and wait for it.

He pulled himself to his feet and stumbled over to the window, standing carefully to one side so that he wouldn't be seen from outside. He blinked at the sunlight, noting from the position of the sun that it really was still morning.

The bedroom window gave a view of the main street below. It was certainly nothing impressive. Depressing Soviet-style apartment blocks—just like this one—lined both sides of the street, preventing the sun from penetrating except in the very middle of the day. The occasional puttering car went by, mostly clapped out old Ladas, the only kind of vehicle that could be afforded by the people who lived in these endless anonymous blocks. Tunjin peered out, his eyes flicking across the gray-stained concrete.

There was a figure standing, motionless, a hundred or so meters up the street.

Tunjin pulled back, hoping that no movement had been visible. The figure had been casually dressed—some sort of sweatshirt and loose pants, a shaved head, cigarette in hand. But watching, definitely watching.

Tunjin shook his head hard, trying to clear the confusion that was gathering there. He needed to think clearly. He needed to concentrate. He needed—he needed a drink, but, no, that was the last thing he needed.

What he really needed was to get out of there.

He looked down at his stained clothes. He couldn't go far dressed like this. He needed to plan this carefully, as carefully as a severely hung over man could.

He moved away from the window, and stepped back over to the built-in closet on the adjoining wall. He slid back the door and looked inside, his expectations very low. To his mild surprise, there were a couple of clean T-shirts hanging up, and at least one
pair of the large, elastic pants that were the only kind suited to his gut. The presence of these clothes was, he suspected, nothing more than proof that he had actually been wearing his current ones for several days.

He quickly pulled off his T-shirt and pants and tossed them casually into a corner, where they joined several others. After a pause, he pulled off his enormous Y-fronts and threw them in the same direction. There was a pile of apparently clean underwear on the floor of the closet.

He pulled on the new Y-fronts, then quickly donned the new black T-shirt and pants. Both were perhaps slightly too small and stretched across his fat body, but—he thought, as he caught sight of himself in the mirror—it was a definite improvement on his previous appearance. He thrust his feet into his only pair of boots, kicking off some of the dried mud, and then grabbed his anorak from behind the bedroom door.

Right, he thought, ready for action. The only question now was what he ought to do.

He walked slowly back through into the living room, taking care not to approach the windows. He reached the front door, carefully turned the catch and silently pulled open the door. This was make or break, he thought. If they were watching out in the corridor, this was the end. But he'd bargained on the fact that they wouldn't have left anyone inside the building. Too conspicuous, he thought. Some of his busybody neighbors would have challenged any intruder within moments.

The corridor appeared deserted. He glanced back at
the clock. Eight-forty now. Most of his neighbors would have gone off to work, other than the older ones who tended not to stir from their apartments till later in the day. He put the door on the latch, and then stepped quietly out into the corridor.

Nothing.

He walked, as silently as he could manage—and surprisingly so for one of his bulk—toward the head of the staircase that led down to the lobby. Tunjin's apartment was on the first floor, so from the top steps he could peer down into the entrance to the apartment block. It was a depressing hallway—a mix of discarded debris from previous tenants, a couple of stacked bicycles, and piles of uncollected mail and newspapers. But it was, at least, apparently unoccupied.

Tunjin made his way slowly down the stairs, trying to ensure that his movement was not visible to any external observer. The main doors to the apartment block contained large glass panels, but the glass was sufficiently filthy and the interior of the lobby sufficiently gloomy that no movement was likely to be visible from outside.

Tunjin moved forward slowly, reaching down as he passed to pick up two items from the pile of discarded items that littered the lobby. The first was an old broom, apparently thrown away because the head was worn out. The second was an old pencil stub. Improvisation was always his strong point.

He stepped slowly across the lobby, still keeping back from the door to ensure that there was no risk of his being seen from outside. Through the grimy glass, he could see the shaven-headed figure he had spotted
from the bedroom. There didn't appear to be any other observers that he could see, although it was possible that there was another at the opposite end of the street, out of Tunjin's sight. The man was looking bored, pulling on another cigarette and shuffling his feet. Tunjin waited until he had turned his back, sheltering from the breeze to light another cigarette, then he stepped forward swiftly and jammed the broom handle firmly into the pull handles on the doors, preventing them from being opened from the outside. Then, crouching down so that he was still invisible from outside, he locked the doors with his own set of keys and then forced the pencil stub hard into the lock, breaking off the end to ensure that the lock was solidly jammed.

He felt a little guilty about this. He was undoubtedly going to inconvenience the other residents of the block, and he just hoped that there would be no other, more serious consequences—in common with many of the Soviet-era apartment blocks, this unit had no other escape route in case of fire.

But given that he was unsure when Muunokhoi might decide that he had exercised enough patience, or even when the boredom of the man outside might precipitate him to take some unsanctioned action, Tunjin thought it was prudent to try to buy himself a little extra time. It would be possible to break the glass in the doors, of course, but the glass would be toughened and the act of breaking it would be conspicuous even in this relatively deserted thoroughfare. And there was no other route into the building, other than that which Tunjin was planning to adopt as his exit route,
and this, he hoped, would not be immediately obvious to an outsider.

He slipped back from the doors, and then began to climb the stairs as rapidly as his considerable bulk would allow. The worst symptoms of his hangover seemed to have receded now, though he couldn't claim that he felt well, either physically or emotionally.

He passed his own floor, and carried on climbing past the second and third floors, wheezing heavily by now, his breath coming in short spurts. There were definitely times when he thought that a healthier lifestyle might be recommended.

Finally, he dragged himself up the last flight of stairs on to the fourth floor. There were no apartments up here, only a couple of storage and utility rooms, mostly filled with junk. His objective lay in the far corner of one of the cluttered rooms—a skylight in the ceiling with a pull down ladder fixed beneath it.

He forced his way through the clutter, pushing aside a rusting twin tub washing machine and a couple of broken chairs, until he was standing directly underneath the skylight. As he passed, he reached down to pick up an old screwdriver that had been left on top of the washing machine. Pausing to regain some of his breath, he reached up and pulled on the ladder. It was stiff and a little rusty, but, as he tugged, it eventually juddered down.