Legends

And then his street sense kicked in—he felt the eyes burning into the back of his neck before he caught sight of the scavengers edging into view from behind buildings around the intersection. There were five of them, all wearing canvas laced leggings and canvas gloves that stretched to the elbows and glass face masks that Uzbek cotton farmers used when their crops were being dusted. Each of the men wore a curved Cossack saber from his belt and cradled a vintage bolt-action rifle in the crook of an arm, with a condom over the muzzle to protect the barrel from sand and moisture. Martin’s fingers instinctively slipped behind his back to where his automatic would have been if he’d been armed with one.

One of the scavengers motioned for Martin to raise his hands over his head. Another came over and frisked him for weapons. Martin’s hands were secured in front of him at the wrists with a dog’s leash and he was pulled around a corner and down a side street. When he stumbled, a rifle butt jabbed him sharply between the shoulder blades. Two blocks farther along a door was pushed open and Martin was prodded into a building and across a lobby with only a handful of its white marble tiles still in place. He and the others splashed across a shallow trough filled with a liquid that smelled of disinfectant, then walked under a shower head that sprayed him and the guards with a fine mist of disinfectant. He could hear the voices of other scavengers, speaking in a strange language he couldn’t identify, exchanging remarks with the five who had brought him in. Double doors were jerked open and Martin found himself in an auditorium with most of the folding seats unbolted and stacked against one wall. Eight men wearing white laboratory coats and latex gloves were sitting on the few seats still intact. Slouched in a high-backed throne-like wooden chair set in the middle of the stage, with a painted backdrop from an old socialist realist operetta behind him, the warlord presided over the assemblage. He was a dwarf of a man, so short that his feet didn’t reach the ground, and dressed in a rough gray sleeveless scapular that plunged to the tops of spit-shined paratrooper boots resting on an upturned ammunition box. His bare arms were as muscular as a weight lifter’s. He wore a shoulder holster over the scapular, with the steel grip of a large navy revolver jutting from it. The old-fashioned motorcycle goggles covering his eyes gave him the appearance of an insect. A stiff czarist-era admiral’s hat sat atop his oversized head. He talked for several minutes in a low growl with one of the men in jumpsuits standing behind him before raising his head to look directly at Martin. Lifting one stubby arm, he gestured for him to approach and, his voice pitched girlishly high, barked something in the strange language of the scavengers.

At a loss for a response, Martin mumbled “Uh-huh.”

From the back of the auditorium, a girl’s voice translated. “He insists to know for what reason you come to Kantubek.”

Martin stole a glance behind him. Almagul was standing inside the auditorium door, an armed scavenger on either side of her. She smiled nervously at him as he turned back to the warlord and saluted him. “Explain to him,” he called over his shoulder, “that I am a journalist from Canada.” He produced a laminated ID card identifying him as a wire service reporter and waved it in the air. “I am writing an article on the philanthropist Samat Ugor-Zhilov, who is said to have come to Vozrozhdeniye Island when he left Prague.”

When Almagul translated Martin’s reply, the warlord bared his teeth in disbelief. He snarled something in a high-pitched voice to the men standing behind the throne, causing them to titter. The warlord kicked over the ammunition box so that his feet danced in the air as he raged at the girl standing in the back of the auditorium. When he ran out of breath he slouched back into the throne. Almagul came up behind Martin. “He tells you,” she said in a low, frightened voice, “that Samat Ugor-Zhilov is the governor of this island and the director of Kantubek’s experimental weapons programs.”