Enemy of the Good Read online

“Better for you, you mean.”

  “Me among others. My methods are somewhat extreme, I grant you, but I am committed to this cause, and if we are going to do it, then we are going to do it the right way. There are some aspects of the right way that should be kept away from idealists like our mutual friend. He is indispensable but not infallible. He has his blind spots. This would be one of them. You understand, of course.”

  “I understand that you’re concerned about protecting your position in Boldu.”

  “Boldu relies on my ability to do my job. Should Ruslan decide that he no longer requires my services, the cause would suffer a grievous blow. There is no one else in the movement with my background. My training. It would be a shame for the organization to lose this particular set of skills unnecessarily. Revolution, Ms. Hollister, is not for the faint of heart.”

  Kate knew he was right, but she hated it nonetheless.

  “You’re asking me to protect you after you kidnapped me and interrogated me for hours under white-hot klieg lots and then casually threatened me with death.”

  “Lights?” Murzaev looked around the dimly lit warehouse as though searching for something he had misplaced.

  “The lights are metaphorical.”

  “I see.”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. But you do understand my point.”

  “Are you certain that Ruslan would be so quick to cast you out because of our little tête-à-tête here?”

  “My profession is based largely on reading people. Their strengths and their shortcomings. Their desires and ambitions and frustrations. Espionage is really a branch of psychology.”

  “And what does your training tell you, Doctor?”

  “That Ruslan’s feelings for you are real and deep. Maybe more so than even he knows.”

  Kate felt herself blush, embarrassed at how much she wanted this statement to be true and wary of being manipulated by a self-confessed master manipulator.

  “All right,” she agreed. “I’ll keep your secret.”

  Another secret to keep. She was going to have to start writing this all down.

  18

  For the first time since her return to Kyrgyzstan, Kate found herself back at Manas International Airport. This time she was in Gabby’s role, waiting patiently for a new arrival. As he had promised, the ambassador had made Kate the control officer for the visit of deputy secretary of defense Winston Crandle.

  Managing official visitors was an unavoidable fact of embassy life. In some of the nicer western European embassies it could be a significant burden. Every executive branch visitor and congressional delegation required a control officer, an embassy official who set up the meetings, arranged the transportation, and wrote the reporting cable after the fact. Embassies in major capitals like London or Tokyo or Buenos Aires—or consulates in touristy towns like Florence and Capetown—were so deluged with visitors that they functioned as little more than informal travel agencies.

  In a small post like Bishkek, however, official visitors were few and far between. There had not been a congressional delegation in town since the closure of the transit base on the military side of the airport. They were not missed. Congressional delegations, or CODELS in State Department argot, were almost always a source of anxiety and frustration. Many visits involved more shopping and sightseeing than government business. Somehow or other there always seemed to be some important issue requiring congressional attention in Paris in the spring. And away from the stifling confines of Washington and after a few drinks, elected members of Congress could be as rowdy, boorish, and ill behaved as Dartmouth frat brothers at a freshman mixer on Saturday night. After such visits, the control officer was responsible for coordinating the official apologies.

  Another of the control officer’s duties was “meet and greet,” which is why Kate was at the airport waiting for Crandle’s military aircraft—or MILAIR—flight to touch down. Kate’s diplomatic credentials allowed her out on the tarmac, and she stood in the early morning sunshine with Alisher, the embassy expediter who would take care of the luggage and visa formalities.

  Crandle’s aircraft, a U.S. Air Force C-20, landed on time. Kate and Alisher waited planeside as the ground crew maneuvered a set of “VIP” stairs covered in a ratty, stained red carpet into position. The door swung open and an airman in a green jumpsuit locked it into place before stepping back to make way for the VIP to exit first. Crandle appeared at the top of the stairs, shading his eyes against the sunlight. And there was something vampiric about the deputy secretary. He was tall and angular and almost entirely bald. The skin on his face was pulled tight as though it were too small for his skull. His aquiline nose was shaped like a hawk’s bill and defined his face as, Kate suspected, it had defined his childhood. His dark suit added to the impression that he was one of the undead.

  When he reached the bottom of the stairs, Kate offered her hand. Crandle shook it noncommittally, his pale gray eyes seeming to look past her for somebody important. The liver spots on the back of his hand matched those on his skull. He gave off the faint odor of cologne, as though he were trying to mask the stench of cadaverous decay. The Fossil was a suitable enough nickname, Kate decided.

  “Mr. Crandle, I’m Kate Hollister, your control officer.”

  At the mention of her name, Crandle stopped scanning the tarmac and focused his attention on her with a suddenness that Kate found mildly disorienting.

  “Hollister? Yes. The niece. I knew your father. He was a talented officer. It was unfortunate that his attachment to the periphery of the Russo-sphere limited his career the way it did. Otherwise, he might have been somebody. You’re here alone?”

  Crandle’s blithe dismissal of her father’s thirty-five years of service to the United States stuck in her craw, but Kate understood that the deputy secretary had been trying in his own way to say something complimentary.

  “Alisher is here to help with the expediting,” she said.

  “Alone then. Your uncle had something more pressing it would seem.”

  There was a subtext to the conversation that Kate could sense but not interpret. Ordinarily, she knew, an ambassador at a mission the size of Embassy Bishkek would go to the airport to meet a visitor at this level, but it was hardly a requirement. The way he had zeroed in on her family name made Kate feel like there was more to that story, however.

  “He’ll meet you at the residence for breakfast,” Kate said. “In the meantime, if Alisher can take your passport, we’ll get the formalities sorted out.”

  “Brian will get it for him,” Crandle said dismissively.

  A harried-looking twenty-something aide stumbled down the staircase carrying three bags and juggling a cell phone and an iPad as he scanned frantically for a signal. He was overweight with unruly hair and a tan suit that looked like it had been slept in. But he was cute in a Jack Black sort of way. Alisher stepped forward to relieve him of the bags.

  “I’ll get these over to the hotel,” he said. “And I’ll deal with immigration if you leave me the passports.”

  The aide handed him two brick red official passports and mumbled his thanks.

  “Let’s go,” Crandle said impatiently. “We’re on taxpayer time.”

  Kate signaled to the “motorcade,” which was only two cars long, to pull up planeside. She and Crandle and the aide, Brian, piled into the Suburban with the deputy secretary in the right rear “seat of honor,” the aide behind the driver, and Kate up front. No one needed to be told where to sit. It was all according to diplomatic protocol and as second nature to all of them as breathing.

  The follow car was for security, provided as a courtesy by the Special Police. Autocrats were always careful to extend courtesies to the powerful.

  Neither Crandle nor his aide turned out to be much for small talk, and Kate knew that they would not want to talk business in
a serious way with their Kyrgyz driver listening. The ride into town passed mostly in silence, with young Brian dealing with urgent e-mails and text messages while Crandle sat in his seat unmoving, staring straight ahead as though sleeping with his eyes open.

  This is what Nosferatu must have looked like lying in his coffin, Kate thought to herself, and she glanced in the rearview mirror half expecting to see that Crandle had no reflection.

  —

  Breakfast at the residence was on the austere side—coffee, orange juice, and croissants—and Kate wondered whether there was a message in that as well. Protocol and subtle signals. The language of diplomacy could sometimes be so elliptical that it was all too easy to misread the message, even when both parties shared a single culture and a long history.

  “It’s nice to see you, Winston,” the ambassador said, although there was nothing in his tone to indicate that this was, in fact, true.

  “And you, Harry.” Crandle’s greeting was equally distant, his handshake as limp and disinterested as the one he had offered Kate at the airport.

  Crandle was more effusive in greeting Brass. Kate was not especially surprised to find that the defense attaché had been included in the breakfast, but neither was she especially pleased to see him. Brass had already made clear where his loyalties lay in whatever dispute existed between the two ambassadors.

  Breakfast was served at the small table in the sunroom rather than in the formal dining room. Meryem poured the coffee, and they helped themselves to pastries. The ambassador’s chef, Kate was happy to learn, was even better at baking than he was at paloo. Brian took a cup of coffee and sat by himself at a side table, tapping away nonstop on his phone.

  “How are things going with the Fifty-fourth, Colonel?”

  “Progressing, Mr. Secretary. We’ve cycled most of the unit’s leadership, including Colonel Shakirov, through advanced training, and we’ve equipped the brigade up to near-NATO standard.”

  “Good. Eraliev needs to know he can count on the Fifty-fourth to defend him personally, and he needs to know who made that possible.”

  “You did, sir.”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “What are your priorities for this visit, Winston?” the ambassador asked. “We’re seeing Eraliev at ten. What’s the message you’re bringing from Washington?”

  “The Eraliev meeting will be fine. I’ll meet him halfway on the base services issue. He can dip his bill, but only up to a point. I’m confident he’ll be reasonable, which I am defining here as not embarrassingly greedy, or at least not publicly so. But what I’m really here to do, Harry, is to light something of a fire under your ass about Boldu.”

  “Do tell,” the ambassador said with an icy calm.

  “I’ve been following the reporting. And it looks like you’ve finally started to make some progress on identifying the leadership. Congratulations. But I’m worried that it’s too little, too late. The second tier, really. I hope you appreciate the urgency of this particular task.”

  The ambassador broke his croissant in half and dropped a spoonful of strawberry jam into the center.

  “We’ll see,” he said, and Kate suspected that biting into the pastry helped him bite back a sharper response. “As you said, we are making progress. The credit really belongs to Kate here. She’s the one who made contact with Boldu and has started earning their trust.”

  Crandle turned to Kate and examined her in what seemed an almost clinical fashion.

  “Not enough trust, it would seem. How much progress are you making, Ms. Hollister, in identifying the real name of the mysterious Seitek?”

  “Why does it matter so much?” Kate asked. “What his real name is? His profession? His hometown? Whether he even exists? Boldu is real enough and there are people in the movement we know by name who are willing to work with us, people with influence in the organization and a demonstrated commitment to a democratic Kyrgyzstan that I hope we all share. Isn’t that enough? We can work with the movement through the people we know, even if we never see a copy of Seitek’s birth certificate.”

  Kate was afraid that she had gone too far, that she had embarrassed her uncle in front of a powerful bureaucrat she had come to dislike deeply in a remarkably short time. But when she glanced over at him, there was no hint of disapproval. Instead, the ambassador winked at her as though they were co-conspirators and offered a discreet thumbs-up that would have been hard for anyone else to spot.

  Crandle was not, however, thrown off his game. He smiled a vulpine smile that was entirely lacking in warmth.

  “Ms. Hollister, if this was a charitable enterprise, I might agree with you. We toss a few hundred thousand dollars to the group and hope for the best. No great loss if things don’t work out. But we would be committing more than money. What we are talking about is a partnership with this organization. We would be investing political capital in the group. Consider it a form of insurance against the collapse of the existing political order in this country. It could be seen as a vote of no confidence in Eraliev. There’s even a chance that our open support for Boldu could trigger the kind of safe-haven seeking that can hollow out a tyrant’s kingdom in a remarkably short time.”

  “But why is it personal?” Kate asked. “Why the focus on Seitek himself rather than on what we can do with Boldu as a broader movement?”

  “Our outreach to Boldu is essentially a business proposition. For better or worse, Seitek is the CEO of a company with which we have proposed a merger. How can I go to my board—which in this case includes the president of the United States and the secretary of state—and recommend that merger without ever having met the chief executive? How can I judge him? How can I take the measure of the man, if I don’t know who he is? It would be a form of malpractice.”

  When Kate was young, she had loved Dr. Seuss. She had made her father read the Seuss books until the pages fell off the spine and together they had worn out the DVD of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. In that story, Little Cindy Lou Who catches the Grinch, dressed as Santa Claus, stealing the family Christmas tree. He feeds her a line of crap about fixing a broken light at his workshop in the North Pole, gives her a glass of water, and hustles her off to bed.

  Kate did not enjoy being treated like Little Cindy Lou Who.

  Crandle’s heart was as shrunken and leathery as that of the Grinch and she did not believe a thing he said.

  “Deputy Secretary Crandle has it exactly right, Kate.” Brass managed to convey both condescension toward Kate and fawning admiration toward Crandle in a single eight-word sentence. It was no mean feat, even for a practiced sycophant. “We don’t know enough about Boldu to take the risk of backing them, at least not openly. Maybe if we knew more . . .”

  Brass had already shared with Kate his private opinion of Boldu. He was using her to position himself, but who was the audience? Crandle or the ambassador?

  “We know a hell of a lot more than we did even three weeks ago,” Kate said. “My sense is that support for Boldu is broad and growing. The more they do to challenge the regime publicly, the more credibility they earn with a populace that’s had about enough. It’s a big tent and it would be a mistake to focus exclusively on the name of the ringmaster.”

  “It is something of a circus,” the ambassador agreed, seemingly in an effort to lighten the mood. “We’re a superpower,” he continued, directing his comments at Crandle. “We can walk and chew gum at the same time, meaning that we can leverage our engagement with the Eraliev government to advance the base negotiations, even as we work to build a relationship of trust with Boldu. That should eventually include a face-to-face meeting with the titular head of the movement. In the meantime, we work with them, help them, but also learn more about them. It’s not going to happen overnight, Winston. You’ll need to be patient.”

  “Patience is an overrated virtue,” Crandle replied. “It is impatient people who do great thi
ngs. I want that goddamn name, Harry. And I don’t care how you get it. I will not be either ‘patient’ or complacent. And I don’t expect you to be either.”

  “Fair point. We’ll make establishing direct contact with Seitek our top priority. Kate, you have your orders.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kate did not offer anything else, afraid that anything she might say would be a lie.

  “You’re doing well,” her uncle said gently. “Keep it up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s almost ten. We should head over to the palace. Kate, this is all going to be about the military aspects of the negotiation. I’m going to take Brass with us, but I’d like you to take Brian back to the embassy. I’ll fill you and Chet in on anything you need to know after the meeting.”

  “Of course.”

  Kate did not let anything show on her face, but she was unhappy at being excluded from the meeting. The one positive aspect of control officer responsibilities was the opportunity to get into top-level meetings. Her uncle was taking this away, and while there was no reason to believe it was intended as a punishment, it sure felt like one.

  It was well into the twenty-first century, and the delegation heading off to meet with the head of state was still three white men. It was the kind of delegation that was the exclusive norm when Crandle had begun his career in the early days of the war in Vietnam. That was supposed to have changed. But it hadn’t really.

  I’ll take care of the dishes. Kate was proud of herself for keeping that retort bottled up. In diplomacy, knowing when to shut up was at least as important as knowing what to say. And ulcers were as much a professional hazard for diplomats as alcoholism.

  The men took their leave, and Kate and Brian stayed behind, finishing their coffee and croissants. The windows of the sunroom looked out over the residence’s rose garden and Kate admired the view. Brian barely looked up from his phone, intent on managing his e-mail or responding to whatever D.C.-based crisis was demanding his attention.