Whoever the bastards were, Muratov thought, they were certainly well informed. And the man at the other end of the line was probably exactly what he claimed to be, just a messenger.
‘Is that all clear?’ Sayriddin asked.
‘Yes,’ Muratov agreed. ‘How did you get my private number?’ he asked innocently. His answer was the click of disconnection.
In the office of the carpet shop Sayriddin was also wondering how Nasruddin had got hold of such a number. But his second cousin was a resourceful man.
He placed the roll of carpet back up against the wall, and let himself out through the back door.
In the apartment on what had, until recently, been Leningrad Street, Bakhtar Muratov sat for a moment on the side of the bed, replaying in his mind what he had just heard. He was a tall man for an Uzbek, broadly built with dark eyes under greying hair, and a mat of darker hair across his chest and abdomen. He was naked.
His latest girlfriend had also been undressed when the phone first rang, but now she emerged from the adjoining bathroom wearing tights and high-heeled shoes.
‘I’m going,’ she said, as if expecting him to demand that she stay.
‘Good,’ he said, not even bothering to look round. ‘I have business to deal with.’
‘When will I see you again?’ she asked.
He turned his head to look at her. ‘I’ll call you,’ he said. Why did he always lust after women whose tits were bigger than their brains? he asked himself. ‘Now get dressed,’ he told her, and reached for his discarded clothes.
Once she had left he walked downstairs, and out along the temporarily nameless street to the NSS building a hundred metres further down. The socialist slogan above the door was still in place, either because no one dared take it down or because it was so much a part of the façade that no one else noticed it any more.
Muratov walked quickly up the stairs to his office on the first floor and closed the door behind him. He looked up the number of the Samarkand bureau chief and dialled it, then sat back, his eyes on the picture of Yakov Peters which hung on the wall he was facing.
‘Samarkand NSS,’ a voice answered.
‘This is Muratov in Tashkent. I want to speak to Colonel Zhakidov.’
‘He has gone home, sir.’
‘When?’
‘About ten minutes ago,’ the Samarkand man said tentatively.
The bastard took the afternoon off, Muratov guessed. ‘I want him to call me at this number’ – he read it out slowly – ‘within the next half hour.’
He hung up the phone and locked eyes with the portrait on the wall once more. Yakov Peters had been Dzerzhinsky’s number two in Leningrad during the revolution, just as idealistic, and just as ruthless. Lenin had sent him to Tashkent in 1921 to solidify the Bolsheviks’ control of Central Asia, and he had done so, from this very office.
If Peters had been alive today, Muratov thought, he too would have found himself a big fish in a suddenly shrunken pond. And an even less friendly one than Muratov’s own. Peters had been a Lett, and from all the reports it seemed as if the KGB in Latvia had actually been dissolved and had not simply acquired a new mask, as was the case in Uzbekistan.
Muratov opened one of the drawers of his desk and reached in for the bottle of canyak brandy which he kept for such moments. After pouring a generous portion into the glass and taking his first medicinal gulp the NSS chief gave some serious thought to the hijack message for the first time. If it was genuine – and for some reason he felt that it was – then it also represented a new phenomenon – hijackers who didn’t want publicity. Their name obviously suggested some strain of Islamic fundamentalism, but could just as easily be a cover for men who wanted money and lots of it. Which it was would no doubt become clear when the demands arrived on the following morning.
Muratov walked across to the open window, glass in hand. The dim yellow lights on the unnamed street below were hardly cheerful.
The telephone rang, and he took three quick strides to pick it up. ‘Hamza?’ he asked. The two men had known each other a long time. Four years earlier they had been indicted together on corruption charges for their part in the Great Cotton Production Scam, which had seen Moscow paying Uzbekistan for a lot of non-existent cotton. The break-up of the Soviet Union had almost made them Uzbek national heroes.
‘Yes, Bakhtar, what can I do for you?’
The Samarkand man sounded in a good mood, Muratov thought. Not to mention sleepy. He had probably gone home for an afternoon tumble with his new wife, whom rumour claimed was half her husband’s age and gorgeous to boot.
‘I’ve just had a call,’ Muratov told him, and recited the alleged hijackers’ message word for word.
‘You want me to check it out?’
‘Immediately.’
‘Of course. Will you be in your office?’
‘Either here or at the apartment.’ He gave Zhakidov the latter’s number. ‘And make sure whoever you assign can keep their mouth shut. If this is genuine we don’t want any news getting out, at least not until we know who we’re dealing with and why.’
Nurhan Ismatulayeva studied herself in the mirror. She had tried her hair in three different ways now, but all of them seemed wrong in one way or another. She let the luxuriant black mane simply drop around her face, and stared at herself in exasperation.
The red dress seemed wrong too, now that she thought about it. It was short by Uzbek standards, far too short. If she had been going out with an Uzbek this would have been fine – he would have seen it as the statement of independence from male Islamic culture which it was intended to be. But she was going out with a Russian, and he was likely to see the dress as nothing more than a come-on. His fingers would be slithering up her thigh before the first course arrived.
She buried her nose in her hands, and stared into her own dark eyes. Why was she even going out with the creep? Because, she answered herself, she scared Islamic men to death. And since the pool of available Russians was shrinking with the exodus from Central Asia her choice was growing more and more limited.
There was always the vibrator her friend Tursanay had brought home from France.
She stared sternly at herself. Was that what her grandmother had fought for in the 1920s? Was that why she’d pursued the career she had?
She was getting things out of proportion, she told herself. This was a dinner date, not a life crisis. If he didn’t like her hair down, tough luck. If he put his hand up her dress, then she’d break a bottle over his head. Always assuming she wasn’t too drunk to care.
That decided, she picked up her bag and decided to ring for a taxi – most men seemed to find her official car intimidating.
The phone rang before she could reach it.
‘Nurhan?’ the familiar voice asked.
‘Yes, comrade,’ she said instinctively, and heard the suppressed amusement in his voice as he told her to report in at once. ‘Hell,’ she said after hanging up, but without much conviction. She hadn’t really wanted to go out with the creep anyway, and after-hours summonses from Zhakidov weren’t exactly commonplace.
She