Enemy of the Good

by Matthew Palmer

  “Let’s cut to the chase, shall we, even if it is for wild sheep or geese. The ambassador showed me a number of finished intelligence products about Boldu, including one indicating that a woman named Valentina Aitmatova is potentially in a leadership position in the organization. I’d like your help making contact with her.”

  Crespo was quiet for a moment as he considered his response.

  “No,” he said flatly.

  “No?” Kate was somewhat incredulous. She was used to the CIA being unhelpful, but they usually did a better job of pretending otherwise. “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not a priority for my organization. I know about the reports the ambassador shared with you. They’re DIA products and I wouldn’t use them to wrap fish.”

  There was little enough love lost between the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Crespo did not so much as try to hide his contempt.

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “The raw intel that informed those products is hearsay. Two people talking about the activities of a third person. It’s worthless except as collateral. There’s no direct evidence that Aitmatova has any involvement with Boldu—much less a leadership role—or that Boldu even has anything that you and I would recognize as a leadership structure.”

  “Can I take a look at the raw product?” Kate asked carefully.

  “No. I don’t think you’re cleared for it. Or at least you shouldn’t be.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Crespo said nothing. He simply stared at her with his arctic eyes.

  He didn’t need to say anything.

  Kate understood.

  “It’s because of my mother, isn’t it?”

  “Intelligence information about Kyrgyzstan doesn’t belong in the hands of a Kyrgyz national.”

  “I don’t have Kyrgyz nationality.”

  “No. But you could, couldn’t you? Your mother was Kyrgyz. Your aunt was a democracy activist disappeared by the government. You spent a good part of your formative years here and you speak the language like a native. I’d say there’s good reason to wonder about ultimate loyalties.”

  Kate felt herself burn and she struggled to tamp down the anger.

  “That’s one way to look at it,” she said in a carefully measured tone. “Another would be that I know this country well, that I understand it, and I can leverage that understanding to advance the interests of the United States.”

  The CIA was charged with gathering and analyzing foreign government information, but it could be deeply suspicious of the foreign connections that made that possible. The agency’s institutional culture valued loyalty above all else, particularly on the operational side of the house. The State Department, in contrast, fetishized expertise and too often valued gut feelings over hard analytics. Both could be blind spots.

  “Let me ask you something,” Crespo said. “Who did you love more, your mother or your father?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “A simple one. There are only two options. Pick one.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Of course you can’t. Most people can’t. Those who can typically had pretty shitty childhoods. So what will you do when your parents are fighting? When the United States and Kyrgyzstan want very different things?”

  “I’ll do my job. Do my duty.”

  “I’m sure you will. But how would you define your duty? Don’t you worry that you’ll be inclined to shade your understanding of U.S. interests in the direction of Kyrgyz interests?”

  “I’m fortunate then that they align. I work on democracy, and a democratic Kyrgyzstan is good for the Kyrgyz people and good for the United States. Everyone wins.”

  “For now maybe. But that could change in a heartbeat. Our strategic interests lie in getting agreement for a long-term lease on the Birlik air base. That’s about containing a rising China and beating back a challenge from a resurgent Russia. That’s grown-up geopolitics. Democracy promotion. Human rights. NGOs. Rainbows and unicorns. That’s social work. It’s the policy of luxury, and right now, Ms. Hollister, we cannot afford luxuries. We need to pay the mortgage on our superpower status. National security is not a good fit for people with delicate sensibilities.”

  “That’s short-term thinking,” Kate protested weakly. “Longer term we need allies and partners in this region, not vassals and client states.”

  Crespo snorted derisively.

  “You’re young. It’s okay to believe that when you’re young. But you’re also awfully close to this particular problem set. Too close for my comfort. And I don’t give a rat’s ass if you go running to your uncle.”

  Kate shook her head. She had no intention of complaining to the ambassador.

  “Siz echteke tushungon joksuz.”

  It was a common enough Kyrgyz expression that in a few short words managed to combine “you don’t understand me” with “you have no idea what’s going on” and “you’re something of an idiot.”

  Crespo just looked at her, blinking. Maybe he spoke some Russian, not that the CIA would give him much chance to practice it by speaking to actual Russians, but it didn’t seem like he had a word of Kyrgyz.

  “Don’t get confused about who you are,” he said finally. “Who you work for.”

  “I don’t see how knowing this country and having empathy for the people here can be a bad thing.”

  Crespo leaned forward in his chair until his face was no more than eight inches from Kate’s. She could see the muscles in his jaw clenched tight and there was a twitch at the corner of one eye.

  “Because sometimes, sweetie, you have to take your favorite dog out behind the barn and shoot it.”

  6

  Kate was shaken by her conversation with Crespo. She had expected some friction in her new post because of her last name and the assumption that she owed her position to nepotism. She had not anticipated suspicion and hostility from her colleagues because of her mother, because of her ties to this country.

  Crespo’s accusations stung because they were not entirely without foundation. Kate was self-aware enough to know that her identity was somewhat ambiguous, her sense of American-ness occasionally tenuous. But she was a professional, damn it, and Crespo was trying to strip her of that. Kate resolved not to let him succeed.

  Nor would she run to her uncle and complain about Crespo’s bullying. Once she started down that road, she would never be anything but the ambassador’s niece. She would fight her own battles.

  So if the CIA wouldn’t help, Kate would just have to find Valentina on her own.

  She started, naturally, online. There was no trace of Val on social media, no Facebook page or Instagram account or Twitter handle. There were not many people in Kate’s age cohort who had not left a thick trail behind them as they blundered clumsily through cyberspace. That Valentina had managed to do so seemed to indicate a deliberate effort not to be found.

  Kate’s next shot in the dark was the alumni office at the International School of Bishkek. The school was located on the outskirts of town where land was cheap. A high brick wall topped with rusty barbed wire surrounded the campus. The gate was guarded and entry was controlled by a metal arm mounted on a fulcrum. The security overkill was an outgrowth of a special fund established by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security to harden soft targets overseas that were in some way linked to the United States. International schools around the world were big beneficiaries of the program, and competed aggressively for security dollars for the oldest of bureaucratic reasons. Because they could. Thanks to the largesse of diplomatic security, ISB had acquired a state-of-the-art sprinkler system, biometric ID badges and card readers, and a roving patrol that was expensively trained in surveillance detection.

  None of this was strictly necessary. The terrorist threat in Kyrgyzstan was low. But Kate underst
ood the logic. Al-Qaeda had a penchant for attacking the United States where it was strong—downtown Manhattan, fortress embassies in Africa, even a warship making a port call in Yemen—but its affiliates and franchisees were somewhat less discriminating. They were perfectly content to target the United States where it was weak. American facilities around the world were engaged in a security arms race. The competition was with themselves. And the loser was dead.

  American diplomatic license plates were something of a golden ticket at ISB. The guard lifted the gate without even bothering to check Kate’s ID. The school had changed little in ten years. Three two-story concrete and glass buildings were clustered around an open green space that served as a sports field, parade ground, picnic spot, and dance floor, depending on the season and the occasion. Walnut trees lined the far end of the field along with a few wizened apple trees that produced small, sour fruit that the boys used to throw at one another as they showed off for the girls.

  Kate parked in the gravel lot and was somewhat surprised to find a soft, gauzy feeling of nostalgia creeping up on her as she walked across the field to the main building. Kate was only twenty-nine. Too young, she thought, to be sentimental about her youth. But her four years here at ISB had been good ones, and were the last in which she had anything that most people would recognize as a family.

  Just on the other side of the main doors, Mrs. Larson was sitting behind the reception desk, as she had every morning when Kate was a student. She was an Australian national married to a Kyrgyz, who had arrived in Bishkek at about the same time Kyrgyzstan had become a country. For more than twenty years, she had been a fixture at the school, serving as registrar, guidance counselor, head librarian, substitute teacher, and informal life mentor to generations of ISB grads. Kate was aware that she must have a first name, but none of the students had known what it was. She was simply Mrs. Larson, and she had not changed. She was wearing the same type of pastel sweater set that she had worn back then. Her gray shoulder-length hair was held in place with a black hair band, and a pair of glasses with rectangular lenses and a tortoiseshell frame was perched at the end of her nose.

  Mrs. Larson smiled broadly when she saw Kate and walked around the desk to give her a hug.

  “Look at you,” she said. “Our little Katie, the American diplomat. And so lovely as well.”

  Kate blushed.

  “It’s nice to be back, Mrs. Larson.”

  “Your father would have been so proud of you, dear. And I’m so sorry about what happened to your parents. Such a terrible tragedy.”

  “Thank you.” There was a small lump in her throat. Kate knew that this was a conversation she would have many times over in the next few months. But that did nothing to make it easier. Being back in Bishkek made it feel as though her parents’ deaths were only a few weeks in the past.

  It was after-school hours, so Mrs. Larson invited Kate back into the office for tea, which she drank in the Australian way with milk and sugar rather than in the local fashion with honey or strawberry jam.

  “You mentioned on the phone that you needed my help with something,” Mrs. Larson said after a few minutes of catching up on the events of the last decade. “How can I be of service to you?”

  “I’m hoping to reconnect with some old friends while I’m back in town. I’ve lost touch with most of my old classmates, I’m embarrassed to say. I’m hoping that you can help me track some people down.”

  “I’ll do what I can. Any place you’d like to start?”

  Kate could not help but look away for a brief moment, as though she had been caught in a lie.

  “I’d like to see if I can get ahold of Valentina Aitmatova.”

  “Two peas in a pod, you were,” Mrs. Larson agreed. “But I was thinking that you might want to begin with that boy. What was his name? Oh my, I’m getting old.”

  Kate knew that there was no chance Mrs. Larson had forgotten the name of her high school boyfriend. The Aussie was both famous and infamous for her encyclopedic memory of everything that had happened at ISB and everyone who had walked through the doors of the school since its founding.

  “He’s long gone, alas. Last I heard he left for Moscow and then Berlin and then I lost track of him.”

  “You were such a sweet couple. As a high school guidance counselor you see a great deal of young love. Most of it is of the puppy variety. But you two were something else. There was something quite . . . mature about the two of you. It was unusual.”

  Kate knew she was right. Their affair had been relatively brief, the final eight months of their senior year and the summer before Kate left for college. But it had also been intense, and the first time they had made love was a memory that still burned bright and hot. It had been the first time for both of them, and Kate kept it close to her heart along with other memories of him that she had strung together like the beads on a rosary. Kate had had other lovers since, of course, including one at Georgetown that had been serious, at least for a while. Nothing, however, had quite measured up to that first flush of young love. Kate had no desire to discuss this with Mrs. Larson.

  “He was special,” Kate agreed. “But a girl can’t live in the past.”

  “No, of course not,” and for a moment Mrs. Larson had a faraway look in her eyes as though she were remembering her own youth and an early love that had offered, at the time, so much hope and promise.

  “But about Valentina . . .”

  “Oh, yes. I’m afraid that we’ve lost touch with her. Alumni outreach has always been one of our weak spots here at ISB. I can give you the last address that we had for her parents, but there’s no guarantee that it’s still good. I heard that her mother died, poor thing, and her father was a drinker. I remember some stories from PTA meetings that would curl your toes. Valentina had a lot on her plate, what with her brother and all. I don’t know what happened to him. Kyrgyzstan isn’t especially well equipped for that sort of thing.”

  “No, it’s not,” Kate agreed. Val’s brother was maybe five years younger than they were and he had been born with cerebral palsy. It was relatively mild, Kate remembered, but even mild CP was severely debilitating, especially in a developing country like Kyrgyzstan. Val had not spoken of her brother often, but Kate knew that she had been devoted to him.

  “Maybe there’s something I can do to help. I’ll take the old address if that’s all you’ve got.”

  Mrs. Larson went into the back room and returned a few minutes later with the address written in neat block letters on school stationery.

  “Good luck, dear.”

  —

  Kate’s luck was not good.

  Valentina’s old apartment had changed owners at least twice. In an awkward exchange conducted over the apartment’s aging intercom, a tetchy old man speaking in Russian had denied ever hearing the name Aitmatova. When Kate asked him the name of the person from whom he had bought the apartment, he hung up. Kate understood. Soviet-era abuses had so clouded the issue of property rights that even the most benign requests for information could come across to the nervous current occupants as a potential threat of litigation.

  A café across the street from the apartment building offered Kate an opportunity to drown her sorrows in cappuccino and contemplate her next move.

  How did you find someone in Bishkek who didn’t want to be found? For that matter, was Valentina even in Bishkek? What if Crespo was right, and the evidence that she was a key player in Boldu was a red herring? Either a misreading of the intelligence or deliberate misinformation. Boldu’s version of maskirovka. In that case, Valentina could be anywhere. She could be in London or New York or Timbuktu. Asking the Kyrgyz government for help was out of the question. Kate’s objective was not only to find Valentina but to win her trust and gain access to Boldu, to find out who the mysterious Seitek was, to learn whether—in fact—he existed at all.

  Kate was convinced, however,
that Valentina was in Bishkek. The conversation with Mrs. Larson had jogged her memory about the brother. If the parents were out of the picture and unable to care for him, it was impossible for her to imagine that Valentina would abandon her brother to the mercy of the state.

  Kate stiffened abruptly and almost spilled her cappuccino. Of course. The brother was the key. There were only a few institutions in the entire country that would be equipped to provide the kind of care he would need. Assuming, of course, that he was still alive. And Kate felt guilty for even thinking about measuring the value of a young man’s life in terms of how it furthered her mission. There was a part of her chosen profession, however, that required using people as instruments. A bias toward transactional relationships was one of the more unattractive aspects of diplomatic practice.

  Val would want to visit him on a regular basis. If she could find out which facility her brother was in, Kate would know the place Valentina would be, if not necessarily the time. It was the best idea she had. The only idea she had.

  Kate left without finishing her coffee, and twenty minutes later she was back in her cubicle. The embassy nurse gave her the contact number for a local neurologist who the medical unit had vetted for referrals. The doctor, in turn, gave Kate the names of every institution in Bishkek, public and private, capable of managing a patient with cerebral palsy. It was a short list, four public hospitals and two private clinics. Kate felt like she was minutes away from success.

  Forty-five minutes later she was back at square one.

  None of the hospitals or clinics had a record of a patient named Aitmatov.

  With a sudden insight, Kate realized her mistake.

  “Oh my god, I’m such an idiot.”

  “I promise not to tell anyone,” Gabby said from the next cubicle.

  “Thank you.”

  “Your secret dies with me.”

  “Take your time.”

  Kate had been asking the wrong question. She had been looking for someone with the family name Aitmatov. But if Valentina was trying to hide, she would not want to use that name. She would have registered her brother under a different family name. It was doubtful, however, that she would have wanted to change his first name. Cerebral palsy was often associated with intellectual disabilities, and it would have been confusing to her brother to force that change on him.