“Close,” he informed her upon returning this time. “Very close. They move always.”
“How close?”
The boy thought, then held up his left hand, splaying his fingers.
“Five kilometers?”
“Five, yes.”
She watched the odometer then, and after three and a half came to a stop. Javlon looked at her in confusion, and then, when she killed the engine, in something approaching alarm.
“I want you to do something,” Chace told him.
He looked at her with open suspicion, his right hand moving with almost comical stillness to the handle of the door.
“Nothing bad,” she assured him, and then, very deliberately, still smiling at him, reached again into her coat and freed two more bills from her roll. She was drawing blind, mostly because she didn’t want to reveal exactly how much cash she was carrying, and was therefore relieved to see that she had pulled another two twenties, and not any of the larger denominations. She handed the bills to Javlon.
He took them, but the suspicion remained on his face.
Chace pointed out the windshield, over the front of the car. “It’s that way?”
“Yes, that way.”
“I want you to go first,” Chace said carefully. “You understand? You go first, with the money. You buy—”
“Buy?”
Chace gestured, miming the exchange of money. “Buy, yes?”
Javlon nodded.
“You buy a gun, please.” Chace raised her right hand, turning it sideways, extending her index finger, making the shape of a pistol, careful to not point at the boy. “A gun. And bullets. You bring them back to me here.”
Javlon’s face scrunched in confusion, and Chace was unsure if he was trying to fathom her directions or the logic behind them.
“Gun for you?” he asked.
“Yes, but you get it for me first, yes?”
“Then you go buy more guns?”
Chace nodded.
He thought about that for several more seconds, then suddenly let loose with a long “Ohh!” and began nodding.
“You have no gun,” he deduced.
“That’s right.”
“Oh!” He touched his forehead, grinning. “Smart.”
Chace gestured out the windshield once more. “You go. I wait here.”
She watched as he walked up the road, over a rise, then down and out of sight. She checked her watch, and wished, passionately, that she had bought cigarettes before leaving Tashkent.
After ten minutes, she opened her door and got out of the vehicle. This part of the country—countries, Chace corrected herself—was desert, hard dusty earth and a paucity of greenery. Chilly during the day, it would become freezing at night. But if she was still out here after sunset, the weather would be the least of her problems. She had no desire to walk into an open-air gun show in the middle of nowhere at sundown; it seemed like a very good way to make sure she wouldn’t walk out again, even if she was armed when she did it.
It was why she’d sent Javlon ahead, after all. A Western woman with a lot of cash on a shopping trip was going to be seen as an easy mark, and she knew it. Before any actual business could take place, she’d have to prove to the vendors that she wasn’t a valid target.
A wind came up, swirling dust off the ground, providing the only noise. She resisted the urge to check her watch again, then surrendered.
Twenty-one minutes.
Then thirty.
And then, coming back over the rise, Javlon, grinning from ear to ear, holding a pistol in one hand and a box of ammunition in the other. When he saw her, he began jogging toward her.
“Tracy! Look!”
Alarmingly, he pointed the pistol at her, and for an awful second, Chace wondered if she would have to kill him, if he didn’t kill her first. But the triumphant grin remained on his thin face as he closed the distance, the pride of a job well done, and when he reached her, she took the pistol from his grip quickly, and without any resistance.
“Good, yes?” he asked her, breathless. “Good gun?”
Chace examined the pistol, releasing the magazine, checking to see that it was, in fact, unloaded, before sliding back the breech and holding up the weapon, to cast sunlight into the chamber. She checked the barrel, saw nothing obstructing it, then turned the pistol and examined the firing pin. She’d expected the boy to bring her a Russian gun—given the proximity to Russia and the former Soviet involvement in the region—but instead he’d brought her a Turkish clone of a Czech pistol, the Sarsilmaz M2000.
It wasn’t the pistol she’d have chosen for herself, but Javlon could have done worse, and satisfied that the gun would function, she set it down on the hood of the Range Rover. The box of ammunition was unlabeled, the cardboard cracked and peeling. When she opened it, she found it held only sixteen rounds. She checked each bullet one by one, discovering that only half were the required 9 mm. Of those eight, she trusted five of them enough to load them into the magazine. The rest she left in the box.
“Good, yes?” Javlon asked.
“Good,” Chace agreed, slapping the magazine into place. She racked the slide, cocking the pistol, then checked the safety. Then she untucked her shirt and slid the gun into her pants, at the front. Javlon watched, his eyes growing wider.
“Okay,” Chace told him after she had smoothed her shirt back into place. “All done now.”
“All done?”
“You can go.”
Javlon shook his head. “I come with.”
Chace shook her head. “No.”
“But I come.”
“No. Dangerous.”
The boy shrugged.
Chace pointed at the ground. “Wait here.”
“I come.”
“No, you wait here,” Chace said, growing frustrated. She pointed at the ground beneath her feet again, more insistently. “Wait here. I come back.”
Javlon folded his arms across his chest, giving her a look that seemed to say she was both stupid and unreasonable.
“Wait here,” Chace said a last time, and climbed back into the Rover.
She left him at the side of the road.
It was closer to three kilometers than one and a half, and she ended up off the road entirely, finally parking at the edge of a gulley. She could see smoke from cooking fires rising from below, and as soon as she stopped the engine, she heard the din of livestock and voices and music. She got out of the car, locked it, pocketing the keys, then removing her sunglasses. She counted six other vehicles, all of them dusty, rusted, and at least as old as her own, parked around the edges of the market. The scent of roasting meat, fuel, and manure mixed in the dry, cold air.
She approached the edge of the gulley, hopped down into the dry creek bed, and made her way toward the noise. The livestock came first, goats tethered in groups of three or four to stakes driven into the ground, chickens in too-small metal cages lined up around them, dropping feathers every time they tried to flap their wings. A couple of dogs were similarly tied.
