The Restoration Game (27 page)

Ross rolled down the window, cocked his ear to a sentence in Krassnian, called back in confidently mangled Russian, and handed over eight Georgian twenty-lari notes topped with a five-dollar bill, and was waved through. We bumped forward, and were directed around corners and into a vacant space by uniformed cops, and in one case an army corporal.

“No uniforms at the border,” Ross remarked. “Looks like this is where they all went.”

“The guys at the border took a bigger cut,” I said.

“Noted,” said Ross. “Worrying. Not good.”

He took a bulging plastic wallet of customs-related (etc.) documents from the glove box, and leaned over the back of the seat for his bag, swinging that bulky weight around and into his lap with one long strong arm like a chimp bowling a coconut.

“Time to go,” he said. “Don't leave anything, OK?”

“Won't the truck be safe?”

“Oh, it'll be safe,” said Ross. “But you know how it is.”

I didn't know how it was at all, but I took him at his word. As I heaved my bag (by now, the pillowcase of unwashed clothing filled about half of it) into the front, he recovered the small aluminium case from some cubbyhole which (again) I didn't see, and slid it into a side pocket of his bag, which he zipped shut.

“Got everything?”

I patted my big bag and lifted my small one.

“Toothbrush? Cloth?”

“Ah, shit.”

I rummaged and stuffed.

“Definitely ready?”

“Definitely,” I said, shoving recalcitrant zipper teeth into the slider, more or less one by one.

“Hot meals, hot showers, and cool beds beckon,” said Ross.

That thought kept me going as I lugged my bags along the lumpy aisles between the trucks, and scowled away the urchins who offered to help for “Fifty tetri, only fifty tetri to the taxis.”

“Yeah, and ten lari to get it back once you're there,” Ross grunted. He said something I didn't catch in a stream of fluent and well-accented Russian that scattered the kids, their rebuffed faces giving me a momentary pang of sentimental guilt.

Around us, the huge parking lot was going like a fair, which as the swift dusk descended it was beginning to resemble, with hawkers and hookers, stalls and fires, and every where money moving and deals being done, between truckers and traders from all over the Caucasus and Central Asia. The air stank of diesel exhaust, tobacco smoke, roasting shashliks, and heated sugar. Ross ignored all temptations and attractions, and glared at any guy who ogled me. We slogged through the gate with a nod to the cop, and took a taxi into the centre.

The hotel was just behind the main drag, a five-storey Soviet-era concrete building freshened by French ownership, Croatian management, and Georgian staff. Grubby and sweaty as we were, we got dirty looks at the reception desk. Ross changed that with a ten-euro note and a sheaf of lari for two adjacent single rooms with ensuite. The lift worked.

“Twenty minutes,” Ross said, unlocking his door.

I flicked my hair. “Forty.”

“Half an hour,” Ross conceded.

The room was clean, neat, and had drawn inspiration from (I guessed) the cheap end of the Scandinavian market and the better efforts of the late GDR. After the days in the cab and in motels, it felt like luxury. I showered, changed, and tapped Ross's door two minutes under budget. Ross appeared in polo shirt, green cords, and brown deck shoes, and still with his sovereign ring and gold neck chain, as if aiming to look more like a businessman on holiday than a trucker and then ruining the effect with bling. He beckoned me in.

“Are you
trying
to get noticed?” he asked.

My one sparkly top and my last clean pair of jeans. It didn't seem fair.

“This isn't the Soviet Union anymore,” I said.

“Ach, it'll do,” he said. “For the restaurant, anyway.”

“Good,” I said. “I'm starving.”

“Business,” he said. “Then we eat.”

He sat down on the bed. “Pull up a chair.”

When I did so he had the little aluminium case across his knees. His thumbs flickered over a combination lock, and turned the open case around. On top were my American and British real passports, and my cards and note-book. Ross nodded. I took these out, and found underneath a plain-covered paperback book that turned out to be a bound volume of reduced photocopied pages of Avram Arbatov's thesis, a folded map, and what looked like a slightly oversized mobile phone.

I took out the map. It unfolded to over a metre square, much larger than it had looked folded up. The material was as thin as balloon foil but stiffer and tougher, like something recovered from a flying saucer wreck. One side was a fine-detail map of the supposed route, from the main road up onto the mountain. The other was a highres satellite image of the final kilometre or so.

I looked around the room. “Can we talk?”

“Like you said,” Ross told me, “this isn't the Soviet Union anymore. But yeah, as it happens, I've swept the room.”

“What with?”

He patted his shirt pocket. “A handy gadget.”

“Very James Bond.”

“Chinese, actually,” said Ross. “Bought it on eBay.”

He lifted the phone from the case and held it up as if weighing it in his hand. “This thing, however, really is James Bond, or maybe Jack Bauer. It's a satellite phone, state of the art, Agency bespoke this year, Special Forces standard issue by about 2010, I guess. Builtin GPS accurate to a metre, video camera with live streaming uplink, battery life of about twelve hours' talk time and two hours' video time, solar recharging, Internet access, and for all I know a word processor and iTunes. Oh, and a very intuitive interface.”

He pressed his thumbnail to a switch in the side, then handed the phone to me. “Take a look.”

The thing wasn't much bigger than one of the chunkier mobiles, like last year's Sony Ericsson, but it weighed about a pound. It was like holding a bar of lead, a theme continued by the colour scheme of the case, a patternless dapple of shades of grey that I guessed was camouflage. The lens cover was flush with the back and slid without a click. The face was all screen, like an iPhone, the display sharp even before I touched the backlight's virtual toggle.

I played about with the phone for a minute or so. The interface was indeed intuitive, and also like the iPhone's, but with less fat and more muscle.

“Three numbers,” I remarked, looking up. “In Calls.”

“The first one's for this,” said Ross. He flipped out his cheap-looking mobile. “Hmm, better tab that to your iPhone while I'm at it.” He did, then put his phone away again. “The second—that's like 911, it's your helpline for emergencies. Matters of life and death. It's like a scream. You don't even have to say anything, just ring it. The GPS will tell them where you are, and the fact that you're using it will let them know you're in serious trouble. The other, the long number…that's for the video uplink. Might not be a good idea to use it for anything else, given that you'd be talking to a chip on a geosynchronous satellite, as far as I know.”

“Hang on,” I said.

I gave each number a contact name: ROS, 911, and SKY, just so I'd never get them mixed up.

“OK,” I said. “And as for what I'm supposed to do with this—it seems pretty obvious.”

“Yes?”

“Use the GPS and the map to get to the place, the camera to video it and uplink to the satellite, and the call to you to say mission accomplished—or the scream call if something's gone badly wrong.”

“Near enough,” said Ross. “Only, not the call to me. You can do that after you get out, not after you've done your job on the mountain. I don't need to know and I couldn't do anything even if I did.”

“How not?”

“Well, for one thing, I'll be in Turkey or Bulgaria by then.”

“What?”

“Sure.” He looked like he wanted to say
duh.
“I'm heading back on the return trip tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yup,” he said. “I have a container load of Chinese coming in tonight for Germany. Can't leave them hanging around for days on end, they'll go off.”

“Off where?”

“What I mean is, they'll die.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I check the exporters very thoroughly,” he said, still as if talking about ethically sourcing free range eggs. “The passengers have perfectly adequate supplies. But there isn't much margin for error.”

“OK, OK,” I said, shaking my head to dislodge the images overcrowding it. “But when I saw you were driving me all the way here, I thought—”

“That you'd have the benefit of my on-the-spot experience and advice? Sorry, no can do. That's exactly why I'm the wrong person to have around you here. I can't go into the underside of this place because too many people there know me. And for all that I'm a master of disguise…”

He smiled and shrugged. “Klebov would at least do a double take, and that might be enough. So, even besides that this trip is business, I'd best be off ASAP, for your sake.”

I boggled. “So I'm supposed to do it all myself?”

“Oh, no.” Ross looked taken aback at the suggestion. “No, no. There's an Agency contact, obviously. He's expecting you. I'll give you the details before I leave.”

“All right,” I said. “And what about my return journey?”

Ross sighed, standing up and sidling away from between my knees and the end of the bed.

“Bus to Batumi,” he said, pacing the room. “Or on to Trabzon, if Batumi's shut. Plane to Istanbul, then Edinburgh via London. Whatever. You have five thousand pounds cash on that Switch card, twenty thousand dollars credit on the Visa.You don't need to worry about being able to afford a last-minute booking, that's for sure.”

“But what if—I don't know, the revolution's started or the Russians move in or—”

Ross sighed again. “Use your initiative, Lucy. You're your mother's daughter. How hard can it be?”

2.

So, here I was about eleven in the morning of Wednesday, August 20, dawdling along Krasnod's main drag, still called Kommunisticheskii

Prospekt and dotted rather than lined with (mostly) trendy modern shops: five cafés, ten wine bars, three boutiques, one hardware store; the relict Sovietera department store Krasnorglav; an ill-advised direct retail outlet for the plastics factory, KrasNorPlasKom, with a window full of U-bends and dust; an HSBC branch, one supermarket, and a secondhand bookshop, Anti-kwariat, that doubled as a newsagent. This last sold week-old editions of
USA Today
, the
FT
, and
Das Bild
, as well as the alarmingly named Turkish paper
Fanatik
(entirely devoted to soccer), yesterday's Georgian daily news-papers
24 Sati
and (in English)
The Messenger
, and the current editions of Krassnia's:
Respublika Krassnya
, which backed (and was backed by) the government, and
Novaya Krassnya
, for the oppo.

The Western front pages, of course, were all screaming headlines about the Russian invasion of “Georgia proper,” as the rather self-negating catch-phrase had gone, and might as well have been history books by now (and inaccurate or at least tendentious history at that, as Ross and I had sussed while it was happening, just from listening to different radio stations in the cab). That didn't surprise me. What did surprise me, as I shelled out a couple of lari for each of the local rags, was that the opposition paper had finer paper and sharper print than the government paper. A moment later, I realised I shouldn't have been surprised. This was Colour Revolution 101: covert financing of the opposition. At the next café along I dropped a fifty-rouble note for a coffee and sat down at a table on the sidewalk outside to read.

The air was warm, but not humid—Krasnod's about a kilometre above sea level—and with an occasional breath of refreshing chill from the mountains carrying the smell of trees, which made a welcome change from the all-pervasive acetone tang from the plastics factory and the brown haze from the copper mine that had always hung over Krasnod in my childhood. As both factory and mine were still operating, I guessed this was due to better anti-pollution equipment having been installed since they were privatised. Strange to think that Ilya Klebov was now involved in running, or at least owning, the mine. (A mine which, now that I came to think of it, my mother's side of my family had once partly owned. I wondered idly if Eugenie or Amanda still kept the share certificates, and whether anyone was still pursuing the Ural Caspian Mineral Company's claim for compensation. A fine sort of counterrevolution it had been, I thought, that had left the former

Communists
still
owning the property their predecessors had stolen from the legitimate owners all those decades ago! A fine restoration of capitalism, that didn't restore any actual capital to the capitalists! The notion nagged away at me, but I couldn't see its relevance, and dismissed it to the back of my mind.)

From this low vantage—I could just see the white peak of Mount Krasny above the rooftops if I craned my neck—Kommunisticheskii Prospekt looked almost normal for a post-Communist provincial capital. Well-dressed people walked briskly with hard-shell briefcases or designer handbags, or tapped at laptops and PDAs over tiny cups of coffee and tall glasses of water at the pavement tables of the cafés. Old men sat smoking at the long, awning-shaded tables outside the wine bars. Old women trudged about with laden plastic shopping bags. The flow of traffic was sparse, but the cars were mostly German or Japanese. Even the tractors were new, the trailers full of fresh produce or plump animals, and the old ladies sitting at the backs of the trailers wore bright headscarves, clean black dresses, and black stockings without holes. The businesses along the street could have been anywhere—except most British small-town high streets, what with the lack of charity shops and estate agents.

It was only when you noticed odd little things like the traffic cop's shoulder-slung AK-47, and the squad of six or so likewise armed irregulars strolling down the other side of the street systematically ripping down entirely legal-looking election posters, and spray-painting over spray-painted stencils, on street furniture and walls, of an innocuous-looking maple-leaf, that the seasoned observer might get the subtle impression that Krassnia's internal affairs weren't quite as relaxed as they seemed.