The Adversary (7 page)

So he'd tried to get smart. But smartness wasn't his thing. Granted, he could call on some low cunning when he needed to, and he'd thought that would be enough to get him through. But he should never have tried to get smart. Not where Muunokhoi was concerned. That had been a big mistake.

The thought of Muunokhoi made him uneasy. He wasn't clear, even now, quite how much Muunokhoi knew. The word was that Muunokhoi knew everything, and on the whole Tunjin was inclined to believe that. He'd certainly managed to unravel Tunjin's idiotic plan quickly enough, though Tunjin had no idea quite how. It was obvious that Muunokhoi had sources on the inside, though Tunjin had thought he'd had all that covered. But they'd clearly worked out what was going on, and it surely wouldn't take them long to finger Tunjin as the perpetrator.

His suspension hadn't exactly been publicized—he was supposedly on sick leave—but he couldn't believe
that it wasn't already common knowledge. And if Muunokhoi was getting the right information, it wouldn't take long for him to put two and two together.

And in the middle of all that Tunjin had taken the opportunity to render himself comatose for—well, who knew exactly how long? No, smart definitely wasn't his thing.

For a moment, panic almost overwhelmed him. If Muunokhoi was after him, he was finished. There was no question about that. He knew more than enough about what Muunokhoi could do to people who crossed him. He'd seen plenty of evidence of that, which is why he'd taken the steps he had. But all he'd done was make things worse, and put himself in the firing line.

He breathed deeply and forced himself to relax. That was the one thing you could say about blind panic. It could take the edge even off a hangover like this. Suddenly a pounding headache and churning guts seemed a relatively small price to pay for staying alive.

Okay, so he wasn't smart. But he was cunning and streetwise. He knew this city, and he knew more than enough about the lowlifes who frequented it. He ought to be capable of staying one step ahead of Muunokhoi, at least for a while.

But for how long? That was the question. He couldn't keep hiding forever. And he knew enough about Muunokhoi to recognize that he was a patient man. Ruthless. Unforgiving. Implacable. Vengeful. All of those. But nonetheless patient. Unlike Tunjin, he wasn't the kind of man who would rush into some half-formed scheme without a clue how it was going to end up. He would take as much time as it needed.
Tunjin might make himself safe today, tomorrow, maybe a year or more from now. But at some point, probably when he was finally beginning to relax again, Muunokhoi would be there.

And that, of course, was assuming that Tunjin managed to keep himself at least moderately sober. He shivered at the thought of just how vulnerable he'd been over the last few days, no doubt stumbling from bar to bar and then back here to knock back more dregs of vodka from all these scattered bottles. All things considered, it was surprising that he'd woken up at all.

Tunjin staggered up from the sofa, trying to force himself to think clearly. It was possible, of course, that he was simply below Muunokhoi's radar. Why would a big wheel like Muunokhoi concern himself with an insignificant mite like Tunjin? But then he knew the answer to that well enough. Muunokhoi would bother with Tunjin because he was the only person who had ever come close to putting him behind bars.

Tunjin looked around the apartment. Maybe Muunokhoi's people had already been here. Frankly, they might have ransacked the whole place and it wouldn't look very different. Though maybe the smell would have been sufficient to discourage them. Taking care to avoid the scattered plates and bottles, Tunjin stumbled through into the bedroom. It was in a marginally better state than the larger living room, in that there were no plates of half-eaten food and only a single empty vodka bottle lying by the bed. The bed itself was disturbed, though he had no recollection of using it on the preceding nights. But then he had no clear recollection of sleeping anywhere else either.

He moved slowly into the bedroom, shaking his head to try to clear his thoughts, swallowing the panic that was once again beginning to well up in his stomach. And then he stopped, and for a moment the fear overwhelmed him.

There was something lying in the center of the unmade bed. A gray cardboard file, bound with an elastic band. A file he recognized. A file he had last seen sitting, apparently unregarded, on the Chief's desk.

The case file relating to Muunokhoi.

He walked forward slowly and reached out to touch the file, as though suspecting that it was a hallucination. Stranger things had happened, he imagined, after the consumption of this much alcohol. But there was no question that it was real.

Had he somehow contrived to bring it home with him? Maybe sometime over the last few days, his drunken logic had somehow led him back to police headquarters with the aim of stealing the evidence. Though it was difficult to imagine that anyone would have let him in, and he couldn't believe that he had been in a state to enter without being spotted.

Maybe he'd somehow picked it up on the day of the interview with the Chief. Picked it up off the Chief's desk, without either of them registering the fact. It didn't seem very likely.

Or maybe someone else had stolen the file on his behalf and brought it here as—well, as what? As a warning? To incriminate him in some way?

He leaned over and carefully picked up the file, a wave of nausea sweeping over him as he did so. He
pulled off the elastic band and opened the file, rifling through the stack of papers inside.

They were exactly as he recalled them. Including those notes and documents that he had either forged himself or had had painstakingly prepared by one of his contacts, a former fraudster, who had worked for nothing other than a few mild blackmail threats. Tunjin wondered, in passing, whether Muunokhoi might have expressed any interest in the person who had actually carried out this skilled work.

But Tunjin's more immediate concern was his own well-being. The papers in the file were almost as he had seen them last. But not quite. There was one small, but highly significant, difference. Slipped into the front of the file, on top of the pile of documents, was something new, something which Tunjin was sure had not been there when he had last seen the file.

It was a photograph. A high quality photograph, apparently taken in a photographer's studio, with the subject carefully posed. If the subject of the photograph had been, say, an actor or a singer, this might have been the shot selected for sending out, over the artiste's signature, to fans. There was no need for a signature here, though, since Tunjin recognized the subject only too well. It was Muunokhoi. His eyes were empty, but his mouth, as always, seemed to be smiling.

“I'm here to report a crime. Or a potential crime, I'm not sure. Is this the correct place?”

Sangajav, sitting uncomfortably at the reception desk, looked up confusedly. He had been working painstakingly through a series of statistics that
Doripalam had requested and now he had lost his place. “I'm sorry?”

The woman before him presented an impressive figure. Probably around forty, he thought, with a severe haircut and features that were striking rather than conventionally attractive but still with a very decent figure. Very fashionable clothes, too, he noticed—an expensive-looking dark business suit, probably imported from the West somewhere. Sangajav had little aptitude for mathematics, but, at least in his own mind, he was highly experienced when it came to appraising women.

“Is this the right place to report a crime?”

Sangajav carefully gathered up his papers and looked up at her. “Well, no, not really. I think you want the police station.”

“Isn't this the police station?”

Sangajav shook his head, as though dealing with a very elementary error. “No, this is police
headquarters.
”

“And you're not a police station as well?”

“Well, no. This is mainly administration, and some specialist units—”

“But you are the police?”

“Yes, we are, but—”

“So why can't I report a crime here?”

“It's just that—well, you have to go to the police station.”

“But since I'm here, can't you deal with it anyway?”

“That's not really the way—”

“But why not? If you're the police and I want to report a crime, why can't I do so?”

Sangajav sighed. Why did this sort of thing always
happen when he was around? This wasn't even really supposed to be a reception. The building wasn't strictly open to the public, so the desk was really just here for greeting official visitors. But visitors were so few that there was little point in employing a permanent receptionist, so the informal procedure was that one of the officers rostered for administrative duties would sit here just in case anyone turned up. As far as Sangajav could judge, this only ever happened on his watch and it was always people like this.

“It just doesn't work like that,” he explained patiently. “We're not an operational police station. That's on the other side of the square. As I say, we're mainly admin people here, and one or two specialist units like the Serious Crimes Team—”

“The Serious Crimes Team,” she interrupted. There was a faint hint of a smile around her mouth. “Well, what if I wanted to report a
serious
crime? Could I do that here?”

Sangajav was beginning to suspect that, despite her impressive appearance, the woman was deeply insane. He wasn't sure quite how to respond. “Do you want to report a serious crime?” he asked.

“I'm not sure,” she said. “What constitutes a serious crime?”

Sangajav shook his head, despairingly. His only thought now was how he might get rid of this woman. It didn't seem appropriate simply to throw her out. “It's difficult to say,” he said at last. “Perhaps if you tell me what the crime is, I can tell you whether it's serious. But you'll still have to report it at the police station.”

She nodded as though carefully absorbing this information. “What about a threat of physical violence?” she said. “Would you consider that serious?”

“We might,” he said. “It would depend on the circumstances.”

She nodded again. “What if the purpose of the threat was to intimidate a member of the judiciary?”

“A member of the judiciary?”

“Yes,” she said. “A judge. A judge who generally deals with major criminal trials. That is, what you might call ‘serious crimes.'” She stared fixedly at Sangajav, and it was impossible to be sure whether she was being ironic.

“I think that might count,” Sangajav said. “If that were the case.”

“It's the case,” she said, slowly. “I'm a judge. And I've been threatened. It may just be nonsense. But it may not.”

Sangajav still wasn't entirely sure about her sanity. But if what she was saying was true, then it probably merited taking seriously. The Chief probably wouldn't thank him if he turned away a senior judge from the door. And, at the very least, it would give him a legitimate reason to fob her off on to someone more senior. “I think I probably need to get someone to talk to you,” he said at last.

She paused, as if some thought had struck her. “You said the Serious Crimes Team was here? It's just that I think I know the Chief.”

“Doripalam?”

There had been a look in her eye which Sangajav—experienced as he was in the appraisal of women—
couldn't quite read. But as he spoke, the look vanished with the suddenness of a light being extinguished. “Doripalam?” she said. “No, I don't know him. I was thinking of someone else.”

“Perhaps his predecessor,” Sangajav said, intrigued despite himself. “Doripalam's not been in the job all that long. His predecessor was a man called Nergui.”

The same look, or something very close to it, reappeared in her expression. “Nergui,” she said. “Yes. It was Nergui I knew.” She hesitated. “We had some dealings—oh, years ago. He has—moved on?” She asked the last question hesitantly, as though concerned about the possible nature of Sangajav's response.

“Promoted,” Sangajav said, bluntly. “To the Ministry of Security.”

She nodded. “That's good,” she said. “Though hardly surprising, I guess. I'm sorry not to have been able to meet him, though.”

Sangajav had begun to see a way in which he might extricate himself from this increasingly insane conversation. She had expressed a desire to see Nergui, and that was good enough for Sangajav. “Well, actually, you probably can,” he said. “He's here at the moment, as it happens, carrying out some assignment.” Like most of the team, Sangajav was as yet unclear precisely why it was that Nergui had reappeared, though experience suggested that the impact of his return was unlikely to be straightforward or comfortable. “I can try to track him down for you, if you like.”

She smiled fully for the first time, and Sangajav was forced to revise his original judgment. She was indeed
a striking woman, but she was also, he realized, actually very beautiful.

“I would like that,” she said. “I would like that very much.”

“I still don't understand what exactly it is you're up to, Nergui. But I do know that I don't feel very comfortable about it.”

They were sitting in Nergui's temporary office. It was much smaller than Doripalam's, tucked away somewhere at the end of the corridor. When he had first received the request from the Ministry to provide some temporary accommodation for Nergui, Doripalam had been tempted to find him a broom cupboard, if only on the accurate grounds that they were already severely pressed for space. In the end, by reorganizing some of the administrative staff, they had managed to vacate this room, which was an improvement on the proposed broom cupboard in that it at least had a window. In fact, it had a window which, unlike those in Doripalam's office, actually had a partial view, sandwiched between two adjoining office buildings, out over Sukh Bataar Square.