Enemy of the Good

by Matthew Palmer

  Ruslan slipped behind the curtain and felt along the wall until he found what he was looking for, a large metal wheel. There was a hatch built into the wall that was secured like the door on a submarine. Behind the hatch was a bomb shelter stocked with enough emergency rations to last the president and his family through a nuclear winter. The seals on the doorframe were rubber. The designers wanted to make certain that the room would be airtight in the event of a gas attack. It also ensured that the room was soundproof. Ruslan knew this because one of Boldu’s members had worked on the design team.

  Boldu was growing and finding allies among the reluctant servants of the regime. The momentum in favor of the movement was building. Ruslan could feel it. And tonight he would make sure that Eraliev could feel it too.

  He opened the door just a crack. There were no lights, but Ruslan could hear something moving in the darkness at the bottom of the stairs to the underground room. Something big. He whistled, a low note that rose quickly in tone. The villagers in Ruslan’s home province used this. It was a signal that had been imprinted on the creatures below through experience and repetition. It meant only one thing. Dinner.

  “Now,” he whispered, and Bermet pulled the tapestry sharply to one side as Ruslan opened the door wide. An unpleasant, barnyard smell wafted up from the shelter along with the sounds of snorting and large bodies jockeying for space. There was a pounding on the stairs and four tons of hungry hog poured out of the cellar and onto the slick floor of the ballroom. There were a dozen Chinese Jinhua pigs, the smallest of which tipped the scales at three hundred kilograms. Ruslan and a team from Boldu had snuck the pigs into the cellar three days earlier, walking them like dogs on a leash from the back of a truck and across a tarp they had laid over the ballroom floor. The pigs had gone seventy-two hours without food, a new and unpleasant experience for them.

  The hogs ran wild through the ballroom, slipping on the freshly polished parquet and knocking tables over in their eagerness to get at the food. Waiters had already begun to deliver the next course and they were carrying trays piled high with rice and mutton and grilled vegetables. The pigs pressed eagerly up against the waiters until the trays crashed noisily to the floor, spilling the food in front of them like so much slop.

  A few of the women screamed. A guard pulled a pistol and shot one of the pigs, wounding it rather than killing it and only adding to the chaos as the panicked animal scrambled among the guests squealing in pain and leaving a trail of blood. Someone with more sense shouted at the armed guards to hold their fire.

  “You’ll kill someone, you idiot. Someone who matters.”

  The other members of the team had their assignments as well. Ruslan watched approvingly from across the room as the Boldu activists produced a stencil and spray paint from under one of the round tables and quickly spray painted a red fist onto the wall. The emblem of the movement. There should be no mistaking the message. Boldu had declared this a party for pigs.

  Two of the giant hogs stuck their forelegs up on the head table in an effort to get at the food. The table collapsed as the legs buckled and the plates and silver slid across the floor. The crystal stemware shattered. Eraliev himself tried to rise from his seat, but one of the hogs bumped into him from behind and the president fell unceremoniously onto his ample rear.

  It was perfect television, and Ruslan knew that two other Boldu operatives were filming the madness on their smartphones. The video would be uploaded to websites all over the world within hours. This was the Achilles’ heel of authoritarian regimes. They were vulnerable to ridicule.

  The videos that his team was making would be the only ones available. Computer hackers loyal to Seitek and Boldu had disabled the security cameras. It would not do for Ruslan or the others to be captured on film. They were not yet ready for open war with the regime. That day would come.

  Ruslan stood watch as the members of the Boldu strike force drifted away from the madness in the ballroom, stripping off their waiters’ uniforms to reveal plain dark clothing underneath and disappearing through the side exits into the garden and then out onto the streets of Bishkek. They were all wearing light disguises: wigs, cheek pads, and makeup. It was almost certainly an excess of caution. No one ever really looked at waiters. They were faceless servants of power.

  “Why don’t you get moving, Bermet?” Ruslan said. “I’ll follow.” He would be the last to leave.

  “I’m staying with you.”

  Ruslan started to argue but Bermet shook her head to shut him up. She was not only Ruslan’s comrade in the movement, she was his occasional lover and not above exploiting that position.

  When Ruslan was satisfied that the others on the team were safe, he and Bermet started toward the nearest exit. They had waited just a beat too long. He pulled up when he saw a small knot of guards standing by the door. The guard he had dispatched to meet the imaginary Russian general was gesturing in their direction. He drew his pistol and tried to take aim at Ruslan. The crowd blocked his line of fire.

  “This way!” Ruslan grabbed Bermet by the arm and pulled her in the direction of a hallway that led away from the exits toward the central core of the palace complex.

  “That’s away from the street,” Bermet protested.

  “It’s the only way out that’s not blocked.”

  The hallway was dimly lit and wove a crooked trail through the palace past office suites and ceremonial rooms that Ruslan assessed as dead ends. They had enough of a head start that they could not see their pursuers, but they could hear them. And Eraliev’s guards only needed to get within pistol range. Embarrassing the president was a capital offense.

  The corridor took a sharp ninety-degree turn and there was a steel door on the far wall with a push-bar exit. It was unlocked and opened up onto the garden. Bermet held the door open.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Ruslan stepped through into the shadows of the Presidential Gardens. From here, Boldu had plotted the escape routes. If they could lose their pursuers, there was a chance they could make it out.

  The door clicked shut behind him and Ruslan heard the sound of a bolt being thrown shut.

  He pounded on the door.

  “Bermet,” he hissed. “What are you doing? Open the door.”

  “They’re too close.” Her voice was muffled by the wall between them, but he could hear her well enough through a vent at the top of the doorframe. “I will lead them away. You are the only one we cannot lose.”

  “Goddamn it, Bermet . . .”

  “Good-bye, Seitek.” He heard the sounds of her running down the corridor and then the heavier sounds of the guards. The door shook as one of them pushed on the arm only to find it locked.

  “They went left,” he heard one of the guards shout.

  “After them, you bastards.”

  Ruslan’s eyes stung with tears as he thought about the magnitude of the sacrifice Bermet was making. Sweet, beautiful Bermet. He knew that she loved him. That he did not love her only compounded his feelings of guilt. He wanted to scream his frustration to the night sky. But if they caught him, then Bermet’s sacrifice would be for nothing. On this side of the garden, there was a gate that a Boldu sympathizer on the palace guard force had arranged to leave propped open. Ruslan kept low as he moved through the shadows.

  There would be an accounting for Bermet, he promised. The ledgers would be balanced.

  If the government wanted a fight, then Seitek would give them one. It was time for Boldu to step out into the light.

  5

  Kate did not expect that it would be easy to do what her uncle had asked of her. Even so, it turned out to be much harder than she had thought.

  The first few days after the dinner at the residence were the typical whirl of activity that always attended a PCS—a permanent change of station. The State Department, like all government agencies, was awash in acronyms, often to the p
oint that the original meaning of the abbreviation had been lost in the mists of time. Sometimes the acronym did not even save any letters, and Kate knew that her first order of business would be to acquire a POV. No one seemed to find it odd that this government shorthand for personally owned vehicle was both cumbersome and required exactly as many letters as “car.”

  As had been her father’s practice, she looked first at what was available from the German embassy. As much as she hated to traffic in national clichés, the Germans were appropriately obsessive about their automobiles. Kate knew she would find one that had been garaged and carefully maintained with all the records saved in color-coded folders. The German embassy was a dry hole, but Kate got lucky with the Swiss. The Germans’ Germans. A third secretary was selling a four-year-old Volkswagen Touareg with only fifty thousand kilometers on the odometer. He was sorry to see it go, the junior Swiss diplomat explained, but he was being transferred to India and the steering wheel was on the wrong side.

  The transition at the embassy was not nearly as smooth. The Department of State moved thousands of people around the world every year, many to strange and exotic locales. For all that practice, one would think the bureaucracy would be better at it. But as Kate’s father had once said after getting caught up in a particularly infuriating tangle of red tape, every time you moved it was as though the department were doing it for the first time. You mean you’re bringing your family with you to post? You have a dog? The school year starts in September? It all seemed like a new experience for the personnel techs and admin specialists who must have, Kate knew, dealt with these same routine concerns a thousand times.

  Neither of Kate’s government e-mail accounts had been successfully passed from Havana to Bishkek, meaning that it would be at least a week before she would get on either the secure SIPRNet system or the unclassified intranet. Her orders listed a dependent child that she did not have and the embassy management team seemed disinclined to take her word for it. And—as the capstone insult—the shipping coordinator informed Kate apologetically that her shipment of household effects would take six months to make their way from the island of Cuba to landlocked Kyrgyzstan.

  In the meantime, she could continue to use the embassy welcome kit with its assortment of plastic plates and cutlery and polyester sheets. It was a fairly average level of chaos for a transfer, and Kate resolved to go shopping as soon as possible. It was because of mix-ups like this that the typical Foreign Service family traveled the world with three mismatched pasta pots.

  Kate’s boss in the political section seemed like a pleasant enough man, if not exactly a ball of fire. Chester Grimes was somewhere north of fifty with a middle-aged paunch, unfashionable steel-rimmed glasses, and a rumpled safari suit. His skin had an unhealthy, almost waxy sheen. He was also getting a little long in the tooth for the job he had. With almost twenty-five years in the service, Chet should have been running one of the big political sections in a place like Nairobi or Moscow or Jakarta, or making his bones as a deputy chief of mission. The combined political-economic section in Bishkek was small, a total of four officers. In addition to Kate and Chet there was Lyle Koslowski, a “junior officer” on his first tour who was just a month shy of his forty-seventh birthday. He had finished his twenty years in the army as a lieutenant colonel and joined the Foreign Service as a second career. Gabby was the lone ECON officer in the section

  Chet had the only office. The rest of them were in cubicles with waist-high walls. Government had come late to the open-office concept and was making the change at just the point where the private sector was having second thoughts. Kate shared a cubicle wall with Gabby. A framed photo of her Mustang was perched next to Gabby’s computer monitor.

  On her first day in the section, Grimes had sat her down for the talk she knew was coming.

  “Is this going to be awkward?” he asked. “You being the ambassador’s niece.”

  Grimes ran his fingers nervously through his comb-over as he talked.

  “Not on my part. Ethics gave it the green light. I don’t expect to be treated any differently than anyone else in the section. I don’t want to be treated differently.”

  “And I want a full head of hair,” Chet replied sardonically. “I don’t think either of us is going to get our wish.”

  “I suppose not,” Kate acknowledged.

  He had been gracious about it, and Kate understood why Grimes might find her threatening. She would have to be careful, especially at first, not to do anything that would look like a challenge to his authority.

  “The biggest thing our section is involved with,” Grimes said, “is the base negotiations. The defense attaché, Colonel Ball, has the lead on the issue for the embassy, at least when he isn’t running around in the mountains with his Kyrgyz Special Forces friends. But we play an important supporting role. Keeping tabs on the shifting political currents and advocating with various key players. I’ve taken personal charge of this issue with Lyle backing me up. Your responsibilities, Kate, are primarily democracy issues, human rights, and the opposition parties . . . such as they are. It’s not the sexiest portfolio in the section, I’ll admit, but it’s a good training ground for new officers. I know you millennials all feel you should be measuring the drapes in the ambassador’s office, but there’s something to be said for a bit of seasoning.”

  “Of course.”

  —

  Even as she was settling into her new job and learning the unique rhythms of a new embassy, Kate was working to track down Valentina. Her first stop was the CIA station and its chief, Larry Crespo. The station was located on the basement level behind a massive metal door. Kate hit the buzzer to the right of the door and waited. She stood there for almost four minutes, feeling increasingly foolish until a severe-looking woman with her gray hair pulled back into a librarian’s bun opened the door and ushered her in wordlessly. Behind the door was an airlock-like arrangement with an elevator-sized holding area and a second steel door on the far wall. Kate’s nameless escort stared straight ahead avoiding both eye contact and small talk. Her demeanor and Kate’s long wait at the front door offered an unambiguous message. You may be the ambassador’s niece, but down here you’re unimportant. The CIA and the State Department were bound at the hip and yet barely tolerated each other.

  On the far side of the door was a nondescript open-plan office space and one additional reminder of Kate’s low-caste status. On the back wall, next to a line of cheap government-issue clocks showing the time in Washington, Bishkek, and Moscow, a red light lit up, a warning, Kate knew, that there was an outsider in the suite and the staff should watch what they say.

  As station chief, Crespo had the only private office in the suite. In Kate’s experience, CIA operations officers came in two distinct flavors. There were the former military types—usually army or Marine Corps, occasionally navy and only rarely air force—their knuckles dusty from dragging them on the ground as they learned to walk upright. The other flavor was the back-slapping used-car salesman with an Ivy League pedigree and a passionate interest in tennis. Crespo was of the first sort.

  He was short, no more than five foot five, and Kate regretted her decision that morning to wear the pumps with the four-inch heels. Shaking hands with Crespo, she felt like a giraffe.

  The station chief’s windowless office was ultra-modern, uncomfortable, and Spartan in the extreme. The walls were completely bare, with none of the standard awards and plaques and pictures with “Washington famous” people that made up the I-love-me display that was seemingly de rigueur for senior government bureaucrats. The desktop was clean. The metal in-tray was empty. There were no family pictures anywhere in the office. The only decoration of any kind was a pen set on the desk embossed with the Marine Corps globe and anchor.

  And Crespo looked like he still woke up early for PT. He was trim and fit with a regulation-short haircut, and as he shook her hand he looked at Kate with ice blue
eyes and the kind of focused intensity she associated with psychotics.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” Kate said.

  “You have ten minutes,” Crespo replied. “Don’t waste them.”

  Crespo was thinking to unbalance her, get her on the back foot. Kate resolved not to give ground. He sat in the one chair and gestured for Kate to take the low-slung couch.

  “You know why I’m here?” she asked.

  “The ambassador’s wild sheep chase for Seitek and Boldu.”

  “Why do you call it that?”

  “Because I’m not persuaded that Seitek is a real person. There are some sharp analysts at Langley who think he’s just a symbol. It could even be a collective name for a group of people, some kind of politburo. Me, I’m not convinced that Boldu is more than a handful of college kids playing pranks.”

  “What about last night? That couldn’t have been easy to carry off. And their video of chaos at the state dinner had to be deeply embarrassing to the palace.”

  “Embarrassing for sure,” Crespo offered. “But damaging? I don’t see that. The government blocks access to YouTube and Facebook. Only foreigners will see that video. Boldu is playing with fire and they run huge risks for minimal returns. Eventually, and I mean soon, they’ll take one risk too many and the government will bury them. It won’t be the first time. You of all people should know that.”

  It was an unkind thing to say, a sharp-edged reminder of what Eraliev had done to her family. And it was deliberate, an attempt to establish dominance in the conversation, to blunt Kate’s focus. She ignored the jibe.

  “The ambassador doesn’t see it that way.”

  “No,” Crespo acknowledged. “That’s why you’re here. And why your ten minutes are with me. I wouldn’t ordinarily meet with a junior officer from the political section, even if she is the ambassador’s daughter.”

  “Niece.”

  “Whatever.”