Enemy of the Good Page 16

  It was a fair point.

  “My uncle is hardly junior,” Kate protested weakly. “And he feels the same way I do.”

  “For now,” Murzaev noted coldly.

  The conversation began to wind down, and Kate glanced at her watch, surprised to find that it was almost two o’clock in the morning. The issue of the future relationship between Kate and Boldu was still very much in doubt.

  “We clearly have more work to do,” Ruslan said. “This is not a small decision and it is important that we are all of one mind. Kate, we are grateful for the risks you took on our behalf and the risks you may yet run. Stay alert. We will come to you.”

  Ruslan walked Kate and Val to the door. As he leaned forward to kiss her cheek, Kate felt him press a piece of paper into her hand.

  “I’ve missed you, Kate,” he whispered into her ear in English.

  Kate slipped the paper unread into her jacket pocket.

  “You okay?” Val asked when they had started down the dark road for Bishkek. “That had to have been something of a shock.”

  “Yeah,” Kate admitted. “But not an unpleasant one.”

  “He still cares about you. You should know that, but you should be careful with it as well.”

  “Careful?”

  “Why do you think we brought you out here for this meeting tonight?”

  “Because I delivered that prison transfer order with the presidential seal.”

  “No. That would likely have earned you a meeting with Nogoev and Murzaev. Hamid and the twins would probably have been there as well. But there is no secret we have more important than the real identity of Seitek. He’s the only one of us who can’t be replaced.”

  “So why was he there tonight?”

  “Because he insisted on it. He wanted to see you. Murzaev was against it. So was I,” she added.

  “Et tu, Val? I thought we were friends. It is March, so at least that sentiment is seasonally appropriate.”

  “Ten years is a long time, Kate. And there’s too much at stake to make this a test of friendship.”

  “Ruslan seems to feel differently.”

  “Yes. I’m not certain that he ever got over you.”

  “He seems to have landed on his feet.”

  “Who? Bermet? In her dreams, perhaps. She’s a . . . diversion. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. Ruslan is never anything but kind to the women who have shared his bed. But that’s all that he’s shared. He has given them nothing of his heart. And Bermet’s already gone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She can’t stay here. It’s too dangerous for her. She’s been smuggled to Germany where she can join up with the group raising money from the diaspora. It’s better for her . . . and for him.”

  Kate was quiet. Her own feelings were confused. She knew that she had never really moved on from Ruslan herself. Seeing him tonight had been like a wrinkle in time. Their first kiss and their last kiss and his lips pressed close against her cheek, all part of a single moment. The decade since she had seen him no more than a fleeting dream.

  Kate reached into her pocket and found the note from Ruslan. She ran her fingers over it as though it were written in Braille and she could somehow absorb its message through her skin.

  “You have to promise me something, Kate.”

  “Promise you what?”

  “Not to tell anyone Seitek’s real name. You owe him that. He wanted to see you for reasons of his own and we couldn’t deny him that. But every person who can draw a straight line from Seitek to Ruslan Usenov adds an exponent to the level of risk. Keep this confidence, Kate. Please. Don’t tell anyone. Not even your uncle.”

  Kate was silent. She did not know what she could say to this.

  “And there’s one more thing,” Val said, her tone careful and measured.

  “There’s more?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it involve turning lead into gold?”

  “Stay away from him.”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t try to see him. Turn him away if he comes to you. And for god’s sake, stay out of his bed.”

  “You’re getting a little ahead of things here, Val.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. But I’m serious. They’ll follow you and they’ll find him. And when they do . . . they’ll kill him.”

  The rest of the trip into town passed in silence.

  Val dropped Kate a block from her car. Bishkek was a safe enough city that Kate was at little risk on the streets, even late at night. This was the upside of life in a police state.

  It was growing cold, and Kate’s breath formed a few weak clouds, just barely visible in the light from the streetlamps.

  As soon as she was in the car, Kate pulled Ruslan’s note from her pocket and turned on the Touareg’s map light to read by. The handwriting was the same as she remembered it, thin and spidery and urgent. It was in English.

  Kate. I need to see you. Meet me tomorrow at 6 p.m. at the stables where we used to ride. Bring your boots. R.

  Kate was no longer cold. She felt flushed and, for the first time in a long time, happy.

  16

  Rosemary, It’s Kate. I need five minutes.”

  “Today? Not possible. He’s booked wall to wall.”

  “It’s gotta be today. Trust me. He’ll want to do this one.”

  “Five minutes?”

  “Scout’s honor.”

  “Washington minutes, not Bishkek minutes.”

  “How long is five Washington minutes?”

  “Three minutes.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Be here at two-thirty and I’ll try to fit you in before he has to go meet with the injustice minister.”

  It was an old joke, but Kate laughed politely as a show of respect. Rosemary’s position as the guardian of the ambassador’s schedule was one of considerable power. Junior officers, Kate knew, even favored nieces, would do well to remember that.

  “I’ll be there.”

  Kate hung up the receiver and looked over at her computer screen where the blinking cursor and the blank page mocked her efforts to write a report on the events of last night.

  —

  The Front Office was the usual hum of activity. A disparate group of embassy personnel representing various agencies formed a small scrum in the waiting room, leafing through briefing papers or one of the coffee-table books about the “Beauties of Kyrgyzstan” that government officials liked to give as gifts and that migrated to the Front Office with the predictable regularity of swallows returning to Capistrano. The ambassador was evidently running somewhat behind schedule. Although she had forgotten to bring anything with her to occupy the time, Kate resigned herself to a potentially long wait.

  Rosemary, however, motioned her to go into the ambassador’s office at precisely two-thirty. Kate offered the scrum of embassy supplicants what she hoped was an abashed smile as she jumped the queue. When dealing with royalty, and at least in their own embassies, ambassadors were royal in all but title, it was sometimes good to be a princess.

  “Kate, how are you?”

  Her uncle was sitting behind his desk with an intimidating stack of papers and color-coded folders piled up in front of him. The paperless office had been just around the corner for as long as Kate could remember. Somehow, she doubted that they would ever get there. Each week, the bureaucratic machinery of the U.S. government killed more trees than the chestnut blight.

  As always, the ambassador was impeccably dressed. Today, the suit was a charcoal gray with subtle white pinstripes. His shirt was monogrammed on the pocket and his cuff links were embossed with the Great Seal of the United States in black and gold.

  “You look sharp, Uncle Harry.”

  “Thank you. I gotta keep up. I’m going over to meet the justice min
ister in a few minutes, and he dresses like a man who sells underworld mobsters immunity from prosecution at twenty thousand dollars a pop.”

  “Imagine that.”

  The ambassador walked around the desk, putting one hand affectionately on Kate’s arm and steering her to the sofa. Kate sat and smoothed her skirt. Her uncle took a seat in a cream-colored leather chair set at a ninety-degree angle to the couch.

  “I only have a few minutes. Rosemary said it was urgent. What’s up?”

  “Boldu brought me in last night for a meeting with the senior leadership. I wanted to tell you about it. Val arranged it. The information about Ismailov being part of the leadership team is accurate. And there were a couple of others from ISB. But the real power players are older former Soviet types with backgrounds in the military and intelligence agencies. Serious people. They’re still not sold on me, or the United States, but I think I have a shot at bringing them around. The door is at least open.”

  “What about Seitek?” her uncle asked a little too eagerly. “Was he there as well?”

  This was it. The decision point. The thing that had been keeping Kate from writing so much as a single word of her report. Did she tell Washington about Ruslan? Did she tell her uncle? Kate had made the appointment with every intention of telling her uncle everything. But now she hesitated, uncertain about the right thing to do. She would not only be telling her uncle. The information would go into channels. Telling him meant telling a large number of people. She could not say something to the American ambassador and expect it to stay between them. That expectation would have been childishly naïve. Telling her uncle Harry that the great and powerful Seitek was actually her old high school boyfriend Ruslan Usenov meant telling Crespo and Ball and a basement full of intelligence analysts in Washington and the other U.S. embassies in Central Asia. Even if the report went out in one of the “captioned” channels that limited distribution, too many people would ultimately have access to the information. Moreover, the government’s recent track record of protecting classified information was somewhat less than inspiring.

  Her father would not have hesitated. He was first and foremost a creature of duty. He would already have written the report and brought it with him to this conversation so it could be cleared and out on the wires by close of business. Equally, her mother would have known what to do. She had grown up in the Soviet system and had learned to be deeply distrustful of authority. She had been a firm believer in the old adage that three people can keep a secret as long as two of them are dead.

  Kate could almost hear her mother’s voice whispering in her ear to be cautious and to always assume the worst. She had learned that lesson from bitter experience.

  Was Kate her father’s daughter or her mother’s? The distinction had never before seemed quite so stark and binary.

  She wanted to do her job. Do her duty. Make her uncle—the closest thing she had left to a father—happy and proud. But she was also sensitive to Val’s warning about the risks for Ruslan of expanding the circle of people who could connect him directly to Seitek. And then there was Ruslan himself, and the note he had passed to her. Why the cloak-and-dagger? Who was he keeping in the dark? Murzaev? Val?

  All of this shot through Kate’s mind in an instant, a complicated tangle of thoughts and feelings. Problems with no solution.

  The ambassador seemed to notice her hesitation.

  “Seitek, Kate. Was he there last night?”

  Kate looked her uncle in the eye and for the first time she lied to him.

  “No, Ambassador. Not yet. I’m closer. But I need a little more time.”

  An expression of disappointment, almost irritation, flashed across his face, but so briefly that Kate would have missed it if she had not been attuned to the nuances of Hollister family communication.

  “You’re doing well,” he said. “You’ve made more progress in two weeks than we’ve made in the last six months. Keep at it. And keep me looped in.”

  Kate was experienced enough to know when a meeting was over.

  “Thank you, Ambassador.”

  She walked out of his office deeply ambivalent about the choice she had made and uncertain about the reasoning behind it. To top it off, when she tried to parse her emotions, the only feeling that stood out with clarity was excitement over her upcoming meeting with Ruslan. She did not want to like the feeling, but she did.

  “Don’t be such a high school girl,” she muttered to herself.

  —

  “What do you think of the new guy?”

  With a subtle movement of her head, Val directed Kate’s attention to a boy sitting by himself two tables away. He looked Kyrgyz, with high cheekbones and black hair that reached almost to his collar. He had broad shoulders and a trim build, but there was something about him that made him seem more the artistic type than an athlete. He was certainly good looking. Kate had noticed him earlier that morning in the registrar’s office. This must be his first day at the school.

  “He’s cute,” she said, turning back to Val before it become obvious that she was looking. “Do you know his name?”

  “Ruslan. He was with me in European history this morning. Seems smart.”

  “I like smart.”

  “I know you do.”

  “Do you think I should go over and introduce myself?”

  “He does seem like he could use a friend.”

  “Couldn’t we all?”

  Before Kate could muster the courage, however, a group of boys in jeans and dark T-shirts walked up behind Ruslan, pinning him in. A large boy with acne-scarred skin and a substantial belly tapped Ruslan on the shoulder. This was trouble. A hush fell over the cafeteria as the students turned to watch.

  “You’re in my seat.” Maksim Orlov was the son of the minister of defense and the grandson of one of the wealthiest men in Kyrgyzstan. This gave him status that Maksim used along with his bulk to intimidate both students and faculty. Maksim had pulled a group of the older boys into his orbit, using them to enforce a rough hierarchy in the school with Maksim himself at the apex. He did not seem to have any particular objective in mind. He wasn’t dealing drugs or running a low-level protection racket. The goal, if there was one, seemed to be dominance for its own sake. It was a microcosm of Kyrgyz society, an irony that was not lost on anyone except Maksim and his enforcers.

  Ruslan looked unperturbed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in a tone that came across as genuinely sincere. “It’s my first day. I wouldn’t want to upset the natural order of things.” Maksim had spoken to him in Russian and Ruslan had responded in the same language.

  Ruslan tried to push his chair back, but one of Maksim’s boys—a star wrestler named Hamid—stopped him.

  “That’s mine too,” Maksim said.

  “What is?”

  “Wherever you were going to move.”

  “That’s kind of a problem, isn’t it?”

  “For you.”

  “You’re Maksim, aren’t you? I’ve heard about you.”

  “It’s all true.”

  Ruslan ignored him. He pushed the table forward to create space in front of him and then stood, turning to face the boy holding the back of his chair.

  “But you, Hamid,” he said, switching from Russian to Kyrgyz. “You disappoint me. This one,” and he nodded dismissively in Maksim’s direction, “has nothing of his own to offer, so he trades on the accomplishments of others, his father in particular. Maybe this appeals to some. You, however, have accomplishments of your own. You are a champion wrestler who could one day, perhaps, carry the Kyrgyz flag in the Olympic stadium. And yet here you stand, doing the bidding of a lesser man. Why would a champion follow a second-rate braggart and a bully? Can you explain that?”

  It may have been Ruslan’s first day at the school, but he had clearly done his homework on whom he would need to know. H
amid looked confused and Maksim appeared flustered. This was not the response they had anticipated to what for Maksim and his crew was a routine effort to reinforce the school’s social order.

  “You should do what Maksim says,” Hamid mumbled.

  “Why? Because he’s bigger than I am? Is that how you measure a man?”

  “No.”

  “Then is it because his daddy’s the defense minister? What are we? Five years old? You should value a man on his achievements and the strength of his character. How does this boy measure up?”

  Kate was struck not only by the sophistication and maturity of his argument but by the calm and persuasive way that Ruslan delivered it. It could not have been clearer that he was not intimidated.

  “Teach him some manners, Hamid,” Maksim commanded.

  “Is that your master’s voice?” Ruslan asked the wrestler. “Let him do his own dirty work. I doubt he’s ever fought his own battles. I wonder if he has courage.”

  Ruslan turned to Maksim and looked him hard in the eyes. “How ’bout it? Are you anything but a shadow of your father? Show me what you are.”

  Ruslan leaned forward as though daring Maksim to hit him. The warmth and openness that he had offered Hamid was gone, replaced by steel. Sharp and cold and strong. There was no doubt or uncertainty in him, just a quiet confidence.

  “Hamid,” Maksim barked.

  The wrestler stepped back, leaving space for Maksim and Ruslan to bring their dispute to resolution. The other two students who had been part of Maksim’s entourage did the same.

  “Looks like just you and me,” Ruslan said, softening his voice and—Kate realized—giving Maksim a face-saving way to de-escalate, to back down. “What do you think?”

  Maksim looked genuinely scared. And Kate almost felt sorry for him. But too many of her friends had been subject to his bullying for that feeling to last for more than a fleeting moment.