CHAPTER 3
Uzbekistan—Tashkent—
Husniddin Asomov Avenue
11 February, 1213 Hours (GMT+5:00)
If he hadn’t been so focused on chasing the hare, Charles Riess supposed he’d have seen the car coming. But then again, if he’d seen the car coming, Ruslan Mihailovich Malikov might never have made contact with him, so all in all, Riess figured it more than made up for the scraped knee and sprained ankle.
They’d started the run up on the northeast edge of Tashkent, about ten in the morning, just north of the Salor Canal, setting off in pursuit of a particularly sneaky son of a bitch from the Embassy’s Consular Division named Bradley Walker. Turned out his surname was more than a little misleading, and with the fifteen-minute head start that Riess and the twenty-seven other Hash House Harriers had given to Walker, he’d led them on a merry chase. Most times, you could count on the run being completed in about an hour, so everyone could get to the more serious business of drinking.
Most times.
Walker had been given the go, running with a bag of flour to lay trail—or more precisely, to lay false trail— and Riess and the others had stood in the freezing morning, stamping their feet and blowing on their hands. In another two weeks the winter would be over, and Uzbekistan’s traditionally temperate climate would return, but for now it was cold enough that Riess seriously considered forfeiting his participation altogether, just so he could return to his home on Raktaboshi Avenue and crawl back into bed. Another of the Harriers, joining them from the German Embassy, had seemed to read his mind, making a joke about calling the run on account of the weather. Riess had looked north, into Kazakhstan, and seen snow on the mountains.
The chase began, the pack setting off in pursuit of the hare, heading first toward the Botanical Gardens. Riess had run long distance in college but quit upon entering the State Department, only to pick it up again after he’d met Rebecca. They’d met early in his first posting, Tanzania, and it had been part of their courtship, what Riess had supposed was some Darwinian hardwired leftover proof-of-virility ritual. He’d gotten as far as picking out a ring and preparing a speech, had scouted locations in Dar es Salaam, just to find the right place to propose.
Then the Embassy had been bombed and eighty people had been wounded, and eleven had died, and Rebecca had been one of those eleven.
Now when he ran, Riess sometimes imagined Rebecca was running alongside him, and that was how he remembered her, and it made the going easy, despite the cold. Today, he soon found himself leading the pack. He stood five ten when his shoes were off, and one-seventy-eight on the bathroom scale after a shower, wearing nothing but his towel, with long legs Rebecca had described as spindly. If his German/English heritage had given Riess anything, it was a runner’s body.
He ran, eyes open for the trail, and just before the zoo, he saw what he was certain, at the time, was a smudged arrow of flour, pointing him toward the northwest. He pressed on, crossing the Jahon Obidova, heading northwest now, down along the Bozsu Canal. Splotches of flour appeared every hundred meters or so, keeping him on track, and behind him, he could hear the singing and laughter of the pack. Riess felt the warmth of his own breath as he ran through the clouds of condensation he was making.
It was when he saw trail indicating that Walker had crossed the canal that it occurred to Riess that this chase wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d thought it was.
It was an hour later, circling the TV tower along northern Amir Temur, that he realized that Walker had been planning this run for days, if not weeks, and had been laying false trails for it as well. He doubled back, heading south down Amir Temur, in the direction of the square, and it was as he crossed Husniddin Asomov that the BMW shot through the intersection, its horn blaring, and like an idiot, Riess looked to find the source of the sound rather than getting out of the way.
And it sure as hell looked like the car was going to hit him, so Riess did what people normally do in such circumstances: he dove, trying to reverse his direction, off the street. He was certain he could feel the front fender of the car brushing his sneaker as he tumbled, and then he was on the ground, trying to roll back to his feet, and that was when he twisted his ankle, and went down again, this time harder, and losing a few layers of skin off his knee as a bonus.
Riess rolled onto his back, sitting up, pulling his right knee to his chest with both hands, hearing himself curse. He was dimly pleased to realize that he was swearing in Uzbek. He’d have to drop a line later to the folks at Arlington who’d spent forty-four weeks beating the tongue into his head.
The BMW had come to a stop, and Riess saw it was an older model, maybe ten years old, and the driver’s door opened, and a man came out from behind the wheel, looking concerned, asking if he was all right. Riess’ first thought was that it was funny that he’d been hit by a man who looked just like President Malikov’s son.
“Are you all right, can you stand?” the man asked him, reaching down to take hold of Riess by the upper arms. “Can you stand?”
“It’s all right,” Riess said. “I’m all right.”
“I didn’t see you running like that, I’m very sorry. Are you sure you’re okay?”
Riess nodded, trying to figure out what to say next. He wasn’t a spook, he wasn’t one of Tower’s cadre of case officers, he was the Deputy Chief Political Officer for the U.S. Mission to Uzbekistan, most often referred to as a poloff. He’d had some basic training in tradecraft, mostly security, ways to keep himself safe, ways to determine if he was being targeted. But when it came time for cloaks and daggers to be handed out, Riess’ job was to stay at the embassy and well out of the way. Even working with Dina Malikov had been a stretch, a job he’d only undertaken at the request of his ambassador.
He wasn’t a spook, but he knew what this was, and he was quick enough to know that if Ruslan Malikov was trying to make contact with him covertly the day after his wife’s body had been found outside of Chirchik, the odds were that they were both being watched.
Riess let Malikov help him to his feet, wincing as he tried to place some of his weight on his ankle. The pain ran around the top of his foot like barbed wire, and he hissed. Malikov put one arm at the small of his back to support him.
“Do you need a hospital? I can take you to the hospital.”
“No, I think I’ll be okay.” Riess tried it again, stepping gingerly and gritting his teeth, and found that if he turned his foot inward slightly, the pain wasn’t quite so intense. Malikov’s hands came off him, and Riess hobbled experimentally.
“You’re certain?”
“It’s okay,” Riess said. “Really, it’ll be fine. Just needs some ice. I’ll handle it when I get home.”
Malikov studied him, as if trying to discern the truth of the statement, then nodded and moved around the BMW, back to the driver’s side. Without another word, he climbed behind the wheel, slammed the door, and pulled away, back into the thin traffic on the avenue.
Riess grimaced, swore again, louder, mostly for the benefit of anyone who might have been listening. He had to assume he was being watched now, even if he couldn’t see the watchers, even if he was, just perhaps, being paranoid rather than prudent. It took him a few seconds to realize that what he needed to do next was exactly what he’d been doing before, and he hobbled back toward the street, and spent the next three minutes trying to hail a cab to take him to the Meridien Hotel, near Amir Temur Square.
Once in the taxi and in traffic, Riess leaned back in his seat and reached around, behind his back, to where Malikov had slipped the note into the waistband of his sweats. It was a small square of paper, folded over several times, and easy to conceal in his palm, and so Riess did as he bent forward to check his sore ankle. He slipped the paper into his sock.
The cab dropped him at the hotel, and he hobbled up the steps and into the lobby to find that the others were already there, in the bar, with the hare, who was now drunk almost beyond all comprehension. Lydia Straight, the press attache at the Embassy, saw him and thus initiated the first round of heckling.
“Chuck! You made it!”
Jeers followed.
