Enemy of the Good Page 10

“We do this every Friday.” The woman by Kate’s side, Patime Akhun, was one of the group’s organizers. Ordinarily, Patime would have been out in front leading the protest, but she had invited Kate to come tonight as an international observer and a representative of the powerful American embassy. And a good host did not abandon her guest.

  Patime was an ethnic Uyghur woman who looked to be in her sixties but who Kate suspected was at least ten years younger than that. She wore thick glasses in black plastic frames and her gray hair was cut close to the scalp as though she were a cancer patient who had recently finished a round of chemotherapy. Her black dress hung on her shapelessly. The body underneath seemed an almost perfect cylinder with no breasts or hips to break the line.

  Her son was a poet who had blended the Russian and Uyghur traditions, publishing long, literate sonnets that had been well received in a small rarefied circle of cognoscenti. He had also been active in Azattyk. Twelve years ago, he had gone into Prison Number One and never emerged. Patime had accepted that her only child was dead. But she could never forget. And she would never forgive.

  “Your parents used to join us here on occasion,” Patime continued. They spoke in Russian. “When I heard that their daughter was back at the embassy, I jumped at the chance to get you here. Your uncle always seemed . . . less interested . . . in what we are doing.”

  There was a note of bitterness in her voice, the inevitable result, Kate suspected, of a decade spent protesting in front of an inanimate object that could not react in any way to the entreaties of even the most passionate demonstrator.

  “Are these guys always here to keep you from tearing down the walls with your fingernails?” Kate asked.

  A line of Special Police stood between the Women in Black and the prison gates. They were stone-faced and unsmiling, as hard and implacable as the prison itself. Their black tactical gear, a dominatrix-themed mix of Kevlar and leather, seemed to have been chosen in an ironic tribute to the protestors. They wore helmets with tinted plastic faceplates that, for the moment at least, were pushed up and locked in the “open” position. The rectangular clear plastic riot shields were held at their sides rather than interlocked like a legion of Roman foot soldiers. Their slick black batons were holstered at the hip.

  “There’s usually a police presence,” Patime said. “But I’ve never seen this many before. And it’s not typically the Special Police. Look at us. We’re hardly the most physically imposing group.”

  “Are you worried at all about this? That video of the pigs running wild through the Hall of the People seems to have put the government on edge.”

  “We’ve been doing this for years,” Patime said reassuringly. “I don’t see them deciding all of a sudden that we’re a real danger. Change will come, but it will come slowly.”

  Kate was not so sure about that. Change had a way of sneaking up unnoticed and often uninvited and then announcing itself with a bang and a crash of cymbals.

  As though they had been listening in on her thoughts, the Special Police—with the precision of well-drilled soldiers—lowered their faceplates.

  Kate’s guard went up.

  “That can’t be good,” she muttered.

  “I don’t understand,” Patime said, seeming to speak more to herself than to Kate. “We haven’t done anything threatening.”

  “Patime, you are something threatening.”

  The half circle of female protestors stood their ground, but they shrunk together, closing ranks with the defensive instincts of a herd. The onlookers similarly refused to back down. Without anyone seeming to lead, the group of some fifty ordinary citizens took a step forward in a show of solidarity with the demonstrators. To Kate, there was nothing special or noteworthy about them. It was the same cross section of people she might have seen waiting for a bus, a mix of young and old, prosperous looking and working class. Most wore Western clothes, but a few of the older men were dressed in traditional Kyrgyz embroidered jackets with the tall felt hats called kalpaks.

  Kate pulled her phone out of her purse and unlocked it. She activated the camera function and took a few quick pictures of the face-off between the demonstrators and the police. The moment felt as though it were poised on the edge of a precipice—balanced just on the tipping point, such that the lightest breeze could knock it back onto solid ground or send it over the brink into free fall, spiraling out of control.

  “Ready!”

  With their tinted faceplates pulled down, Kate could not tell which of the riot police gave the command. But the black-clad paramilitaries raised their shields, and the sound of batons being drawn from their leather holsters was a reptilian hiss.

  Kate took a picture.

  “Advance!”

  The police stepped forward three paces until they were face-to-face with the demonstrators. The no-man’s land between the two lines was no more than half a meter. One of the Women in Black who looked like she might have been about college age began to sing. Her voice was light and brittle but clear. Kate recognized the song, a Kyrgyz folk ballad of longing and lost love. She knew the words. They all knew the words and one by one the demonstrators and bystanders added their voices to the chorus and the singing became an act of pure defiance, a gauntlet dropped at the feet of the RoboCop-like police. Kate joined them, linking arms with Patime and abandoning any pretense of diplomatic neutrality.

  As the last notes of the song died away, a single stone thrown from somewhere in the back of the crowd struck one of the Special Police on the helmet. The policeman reacted instinctively, pushing forward with his shield and knocking two of the Women in Black, including a young girl, to the pavement.

  The fragile truce dissolved in an instant with riot police swinging their truncheons and the crowd of onlookers grabbing their arms and clawing at their shields.

  Kate snapped photographs.

  One of the Women in Black ran past Kate, blood streaming down her face from where a riot trooper’s baton had left a gash on her scalp deep enough to expose the white of her skull. A man with a dark coat and the build of a wrestler got ahold of one policeman’s shield and dragged him to the ground.

  But it was an unequal fight. And it did not take long for the Special Police to establish control, scattering the demonstrators and handcuffing the die-hards who continued to resist. Patime had waded into the melee and was one of those lying facedown, her hands tied behind her back with neon yellow flex cuffs.

  One officer, a large man with broad shoulders and legs like tree trunks, approached Kate. He lifted his faceplate and stretched out his hand.

  “Give me your phone,” he said in Russian. “No pictures.”

  “I am an American diplomat and this phone is U.S. government property. It is covered by the Vienna Convention. It’s inviolate. So am I for that matter.”

  The cop blinked hard. The uncertainty was plain on his face, but so was the skepticism. Kate realized her mistake. Her Russian was perfect and if it was at all accented the accent was Kyrgyz. He did not believe Kate was an American because there was nothing “foreign” about her.

  “You do not want incident international.” Kate tried to make her Russian sound American and she deliberately screwed up the grammar, but it was too late to correct the first impression. The riot trooper stepped in close and grabbed her wrist. He took Kate’s phone, a brand-new Samsung Galaxy, and smashed it on the concrete. He seemed to think for a moment about shoving Kate to her knees and strapping her wrists together with flex cuffs but instead chose discretion as the better part of valor, on this point at least.

  Kate bent to one knee and gathered the broken pieces of her phone. Maybe something could be recovered from the memory. She watched as the Special Police bundled the Women in Black and their supporters—the broken fragments of the demonstration—into the back of a windowless van.

  Here and there, the cement tiles of the plaza were slick with blood. />
  —

  To the extent that Kate had anticipated that others in the embassy would share her outrage at the heavy-handed treatment of the Women in Black, she was disappointed. As required, immediately after getting back to the office, she had filed a report with the regional security officer that focused primarily on her own confrontation with the police and the destruction of embassy property. Within the hour, she had been called to the ambassador’s office.

  Her uncle was solicitous and obviously concerned about her safety, but there had been an undercurrent of annoyance as well, as though it were somehow Kate’s fault that the police and the demonstrators had come to blows. “I’m doing everything I can for you, Kate,” he had said to her, “but if there’s a rerun of Havana here in Bishkek I won’t be able to protect you.” Although it was unlikely that he had meant it that way, it sounded to Kate almost like a threat.

  Kate had written up the incident in a cable for Washington. Her narrative laid the blame for the violence squarely at the feet of the Special Police, who had needlessly escalated the confrontation with a group of nonviolent demonstrators. She had described the ensuing violence in graphic detail and added a comment paragraph at the end that described the actions of the security services—including the Special Police—as reflecting a growing nervousness on the part of the Eraliev government about pressures for democratic change building just beneath the surface of Kyrgyz society. When the pressure grew to be too much for the security services to contain, Kate’s report had warned, there would be a volcanic explosion to rival Krakatoa.

  That had been the first draft.

  Kate was required to clear her cables with a number of other sections in the embassy, including the regional security office and the defense attaché, as well as the deputy chief of mission. What had come back from that exercise in sausage making was a bland, deracinated report so weighed down by caveats and false equivalences as to be almost entirely without value. This cable, Kate knew, would sink without a trace into the ocean of information lapping at the shores of the Washington policy process. It might as well never have been written.

  Kate stayed late that night, updating the matrix of actions and events that she would use in drafting the annual human rights report in the spring. If she could not get an accurate accounting into the system through a same-day cable, she could bundle it together with other data points in the congressionally mandated report and use that to help shape the overall narrative. Her father had taught her that no decision in Washington was ever final, and patience was the indispensable virtue.

  By nine o’clock, she had just about wrapped everything up when she heard the door to the political suite click open. A moment later, Lieutenant Colonel William Ball, USAF, turned the corner and made a beeline for Kate’s cubicle.

  “Kate, do you have a minute?” The defense attaché was wearing his service dress uniform, a light blue short-sleeved shirt with an open collar and dark blue slacks. The salad bar of decorations over the left shirt pocket included a bronze star with a small v for valor.

  “Sure thing, Brass.”

  Even talking to civilians, military pilots preferred to go by their call signs, no matter how obscure or embarrassing in origin. Over the last few years, however, the air force higher-ups had cracked down on some of the more risqué or scatological call signs. Kate knew two pilots—Jason “Skid” Marks and Gordon “Maker” Moan—who had been forced to pick new radio monikers. But Carl “Notso” Bright could keep his and evidently “Brass” Ball had made the cut as well. That one, Kate suspected, had been right on the bubble.

  As a lieutenant colonel, Brass would have to be somewhere in his late thirties, but he looked considerably younger. The only feature that threatened to betray his age were the lines at the corners of his eyes that seemed to speak of long hours spent squinting into the sun. The eyes themselves were a dark brown the color of chocolate, but there was nothing soft or warm about them. His hair was a little long for military standards, more “fighter pilot regulation” than regular air force. He was fit and handsome, albeit in a way that Kate found somewhat bland and conventional. The most interesting thing about his face was a thin white scar along the length of his jawline that hinted at some long-ago act of violence.

  Kate had spoken to Brass a couple of times since she had started at the embassy. He was the lead on the air base negotiations and her uncle seemed to think highly of him. Kate was not so sure.

  When she had asked, Brass had told her that he flew the F-15C and the F-22. He was a pure air-superiority specialist, the absolute apex of the air force’s informal hierarchy. And he carried himself with a concomitant arrogance that Kate found off-putting.

  Brass took a seat in the one guest chair that would fit in Kate’s cube. He sat with his back straight and his shoulders set as though he were delivering testimony at a court martial.

  “I wanted to talk to you about your cable from earlier today, the comment paragraph in particular.” Although Brass had a sizable team under him in the attaché’s office, he had edited Kate’s report himself with a red felt-tip pen.

  “The one you slashed to pieces and fed to the fish?” Kate asked. She tried to smile as she said it to make it seem like a joke, but it was hard to do. It had been a long and difficult day.

  “That’s the one,” Brass said, and there was no humor in his response. “I’m concerned about the way you tried to link the human rights situation in this country to the base negotiations. They need to be kept completely separate. The negotiations are going well. We have a very good chance of closing this deal in the next couple of weeks and transforming our strategic posture in Central Asia. But a message like yours—in the wrong hands—risks stirring up the goody-two-shoes contingent back in D.C. and adding a new set of requirements to the negotiations. If that happens, if some democracy or human rights conditionality gets attached to these talks by the Hill or the poodle-hugging parts of the State Department, this process is going to crash and burn.”

  This was an old argument, one that people who cared about human security had been waging, and largely losing, against the hard security types for years. The pendulum swung back and forth, but at the moment the hard security “realists”—a name they chose for themselves—had more or less succeeded in marginalizing the human security advocates as “social workers” and their policies as unaffordable luxuries in a dangerous world. Kate believed strongly that this view was myopic and one-dimensional. She was not going to win this fight, she knew, but she would give it her best shot.

  “I hear you, Brass. And I understand where you’re coming from. But we can’t be too short-term in our thinking. I promise you that Eraliev and his cronies are thinking ten years down the line. They see change coming and they want to hold that day off for as long as possible. I see it coming as well, and I want to make sure that we’re on the right side when it comes, not because I believe in unicorns and fairies but because it’s in the long-term interests of the United States. It doesn’t do us any good if we win the air base and lose the country. We can’t have one policy for the base negotiations and another policy for everything else. It’s all tied together and our job is to find the balancing point.”

  This was pretty close to the values complexity speech Kate had gotten from her uncle, albeit with a bit of a twist intended to benefit her position. It was a perfectly reasonable argument, which made Brass’s reaction all the more surprising.

  A shadow passed across the attaché’s face like a dark cloud. For a moment, Kate thought that he was going to lose his composure, but with a visible effort of will the fighter jock wrestled back into submission whatever demon had temporarily broken free of its restraints.

  “You’re young,” he said flatly. “And naïve. I understand that. I even respect it up to a point, but your inexperience is dangerous and I won’t allow it to endanger our prospects for success. And don’t think for a minute that your uncle will be abl
e to protect you because he won’t. He can’t. He’s not the one in charge of this. He’s really just a bag boy for Winston Crandle, and I don’t give a damn if you tell him I said that.

  “Stay in your lane, Kate, or you’re going to get run over. This isn’t a kid’s game. This is big-boy stuff.”

  Kate decided right then that her first impression of the fighter pilot had been correct. She did not like Brass Ball.

  “What exactly are you threatening here?” she asked.

  “I’m not threatening you,” Brass replied, and the angry demon look reappeared for a brief moment before once again being subdued. “I’m just pointing to a big steaming turd pile and warning you not to step in it. Be smart, Kate. Don’t undercut the single most important thing we have going in this country.”

  Kate knew that it would seem hopelessly naïve to point to a nascent underground democracy movement as being more important than the base negotiations, even if she believed that over time this would turn out to be the case. And she did not want to damage her relationship with the defense attaché in her first few weeks in the country. It was time to sound the retreat.

  “Thanks, Brass. I’ll keep that in mind next time.”

  —

  About an hour later, Kate was walking back to her apartment from where she had parked her car on the street. As she was nearing the front door of her building, a kid who looked to be maybe ten years old approached her. He was small and dark and dressed in a dirty white T-shirt and jeans. It was cold, but he was wearing flip-flops, probably the only footwear he had.

  “Chiclet?” he asked, stepping into the weak circle of light cast by the streetlamp.

  “Sorry,” Kate said in Kyrgyz. “I don’t have any gum.”

  “Well, I have something for you, Ms. Kate.”

  Kate’s internal threat radar started screaming. It was late and they were the only two people on the dimly lit street. She looked around quickly, expecting to see the kid’s grown-up accomplices emerging from the shadows with murder in their eyes. But there was nothing. No one else.