Enemy of the Good

by Matthew Palmer

  “Remember how he was always force-feeding us Goethe?”

  “It was better than the philosophy class we took with him senior year. All that Nietzsche and Kant with his accent so strong it was like listening to it in the original German.”

  “I suspect you also remember when he had us read Faust.”

  “It’s not like that, Val.”

  “Isn’t it? The good doctor bartered earthly success in exchange for his soul. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “So does that cast me in the role of Mephistopheles?”

  “You tell me.”

  “If I remember right, Faust made it to heaven in the end. Thanks to the grace of the eternal feminine. That sounds more like you and me.”

  “Goethe didn’t have the courage of his own convictions. And he was kind of a sap. If he were alive today, he’d be writing romantic comedies for some cable channel. But it’s an old tale, and most versions end with Mephistopheles carrying Faust’s soul to hell.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way. I’m not asking you to sell your soul or sign some contract reeking of sulfur and written in blood. I just want to meet with Seitek and offer my help. Our help. He doesn’t have to take it. I just want him to hear me out.”

  Valentina finished her coffee. She turned the cup upside down on its saucer as though she were a village woman about to read Kate’s fortune in the pattern of the grinds at the bottom of the cup. But she had been drinking a latte rather than a Turkish coffee and the old ways of the village did not mesh well with the modern world.

  Valentina reached into her purse and pulled out a violet five-hundred-som note. She held it up so that Kate could see the face on the front before setting it down on the table to cover the cost of the coffees.

  The five-hundred-som bill featured an image of Sayakbay Karalaev, a renowned Manaschi, one of the reciters of the Epic of Manas. It was a good omen.

  Valentina stood up.

  “Don’t look for me,” she said. “I’ll come to you.”

  8

  I want to get her out of there.”

  Ruslan was emphatic, and his tone brooked no argument. He got one anyway. Such was leadership in a democracy.

  “Bermet’s in Number One. She might as well be on the moon. All you’d accomplish is to get her rescuers killed.”

  Daniar Nogoev was a good man, loyal to the cause and absolutely fearless, at least when it came to his own personal safety. Nogoev was a Red Army veteran, an infantry officer who had fought the mujahideen in the harsh, unforgiving mountains of Afghanistan. He was in his sixties, reliant on bifocals, and what was left of his hair was steel gray, but he still carried himself like a soldier. His courage was beyond question. When the subject at hand was a risk to the movement, however, Nogoev could sometimes be, in Ruslan’s opinion, overly cautious.

  Meetings of the council were always dangerous. This was the inner circle, the only people in Boldu who knew that Ruslan was Seitek. One security slip and the GKNB could decapitate the entire movement. They were all of them sensitive to what had happened to Azattyk. None were eager to repeat that mistake. A bottle of vodka shared among them helped to take the edge off the tension.

  They were meeting in an apartment, one of hundreds in a nondescript block of concrete high-rises. The eight members of the Boldu Council sat in a rough circle in the living room on mismatched chairs. The shades were drawn. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 5 played on the radio to help mask their conversation from any listening devices. A single floor lamp in the corner of the room cast dark shadows. Conspirators’ shadows. The apartment belonged to Nogoev’s sister. Family ties were the closest proxy they had to a thorough background check. Even so, this was the one and only time they would meet here.

  “What do we know?” Ruslan asked. “Askar, what have you learned?”

  “It’s not good,” Askar Murzaev replied, choosing his words carefully, clearly concerned that an inaccurate word or an undisciplined phrase could push the Boldu leader into a rash decision that would cost lives they could not afford to lose. Murzaev measured all his words, spending them reluctantly as though each were a gold coin in a miser’s purse. He was short and slight with features that were so Asian he could have passed for Chinese. His stock-in-trade was information. Murzaev had spent nearly fifteen years in the military intelligence directorate. He had been purged after exposing a major case of military contracting fraud that led back to Eraliev’s brother-in-law. In truth, Murzaev had been lucky to escape with his head still fixed to his shoulders. Few who crossed the Eraliev family could make the same claim.

  He kept his cards close to his chest, a habit that Ruslan both understood and respected, but one that could be infuriating if you were playing as partners.

  “Tell me,” Ruslan demanded.

  “We have some supporters on the prison staff, not guards unfortunately. Just clerical. So there are some gaps. What we know is that Bermet spent the last six days in solitary confinement. There will be a show trial in three days’ time. It shouldn’t last more than a day or two. Then, I’m afraid, she is likely to be sent to the Pit for interrogation.”

  Ruslan shook his head.

  “I won’t allow that.”

  “She won’t last long,” Murzaev said. “Two days. Maybe three. She’ll tell Torquemada everything she knows. Please tell me that she doesn’t know your name.”

  That was the risk. As awful as Ruslan felt about Bermet’s sacrificing herself to keep him from getting caught, Murzaev and the others on the council had to think first about what she knew. What she could be compelled to divulge. Boldu was extremely security conscious, bordering on paranoid. The group used a cell structure to minimize the number of activists that any one prisoner or turncoat could betray. As far as the Kyrgyz system was concerned, Ruslan Usenov was living a comfortable life somewhere in Europe. If they knew his real identity, the security services could and would threaten his family. Ruslan had no close relatives in the capital. His father was dead and his mother was safely in exile, but he had grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles, all of whom would be targets for revenge. He kept a low profile as Boldu gathered its strength, but Ruslan believed that the time to strike was approaching rapidly.

  “Not so far as I know,” Ruslan answered Murzaev with more confidence than he felt. “She knows me only as Seitek.”

  “Even during pillow talk?” Predictably, Valentina was the only one with the courage or the lack of tact to ask what Ruslan knew they were all thinking. She was a leader, and the de facto spokesperson for the younger members of the council, the former Olympic wrestler Hamid Ismailov and the Tatar twins Albina and Yana Garayev, who were also graduates of the international school.

  “Bermet was using your stage name in bed?” Val continued.

  Ruslan held up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

  “Yes. She asked about my real name, of course. It’s only natural. But I thought it would be dangerous for her to know.”

  “And for you,” Valentina added with a hint of steel. Ruslan knew that she had never approved of his casual affair with Bermet, considering it a vulnerability. It was easier and easier to see her point.

  “That too.”

  Ruslan knew he had a reputation as something of a womanizer. He did not enjoy the reputation, but he did seek out female company. And he knew he was attractive to women. He was tall for a Kyrgyz and slim with a thick shock of black hair and eyes as dark as onyx. He had an easy smile and a charisma that drew women in in the unconscious way a planet might capture a moon. None of the relationships was serious. It had been a long time since Ruslan had been serious about a woman, about anything but his mission and his responsibilities as a leader of idealists and amateur revolutionaries.

  “I just don’t want you making decisions on behalf of all of us because you and Bermet were making the beast with two backs.”

/>   “Romeo and Juliet?” Ruslan asked.

  “Othello. But half credit for Shakespeare.”

  Valentina could always be counted on for a good literary allusion. She had once jokingly suggested to Ruslan that she’d like to be minister of culture in his government when Eraliev had been deposed. Ruslan had replied quite seriously that he needed Valentina as minister of foreign affairs. Typically, her riposte had been a quote from the American revolutionary John Adams: I study politics and war so that my children might study mathematics and commerce and their children might study music and poetry.

  Valentina was an intellectual and an artist. Ruslan respected that, but he was not a thinker. He was a doer.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not some lovesick puppy,” Ruslan replied. He knew, however, that this was personal, not because he and Bermet enjoyed the occasional dalliance, but because of the way she had thrown herself bodily to the wolves to save him from their pursuers. If he could rescue her, he would. Even at great cost.

  He said none of this to Valentina. She would not have understood.

  “What are our options, Askar?”

  The Boldu security chief shook his head.

  “None that jumps off the page. Her cell in Prison Number One is entirely secure. According to our source, once the trial is over, Bermet will be sent directly back to the prison and transferred to the Pit.”

  “Can we break her out of her cell?” Ismailov asked. He was hunched forward on the edge of his chair, a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He had an athlete’s predilection for action. “Can our agent get us inside?”

  “No,” Murzaev was matter-of-fact about it. There was little room for sentiment in his profession. “Another prison, maybe. Number One is too carefully guarded.”

  “What about the Scythians?” Ruslan asked.

  Boldu was a political movement, but the council did not expect the Eraliev regime to pack up its tents and slink off into the night. The ruling clique would fight to hold on to power, and Boldu would have to be ready to respond in kind or risk being slaughtered like spring lambs.

  Nogoev was an experienced soldier. He and Ismailov had handpicked a group of Boldu supporters—young and fit men and a few women—and trained them as the armed wing of the movement. Murzaev had been able to get them a small cache of military-grade weaponry from his contacts in the Kyrgyz army. The country’s sparsely settled countryside offered countless places where they could train without fear of being observed by government spies. When the time came to challenge the Eraliev government openly, the movement would not be defenseless. Nogoev had given his small strike team the name Scythians, a nomadic horse-riding culture that had dominated the steppes of central Asia some three thousand years ago and cast a shadow that stretched as far as the Nile before being eclipsed by Alexander and his Macedons.

  “I can get us inside the prison,” Nogoev said. “But I doubt very much that I can get us back out. The Scythians are getting better. But they’re not Spetsnaz. Not by a long shot.”

  “What about the courtroom? It should be less well guarded than the prison. Can we raid the trial?”

  “It’s possible,” Nogoev said. “But it’d be bloody. There would be civilian casualties. Maybe significant casualties. In my opinion, it’s not worth the risks and the costs.”

  Ruslan bit back the impulse to tell Nogoev that in his opinion nothing was ever worth the risk.

  “So where does that leave us?” he asked instead, trying to make the question sound conciliatory. If he was going to find a way to save Bermet, he was going to need Nogoev’s enthusiastic cooperation.

  He was not there yet.

  “Mourning a falling comrade. This is a war, Ruslan. There will be losses. Grievous losses.”

  “I need a better answer than that.”

  “If they were going to transfer Bermet to one of the labor camps, and we knew which one and when, we could potentially ambush the convoy. The Scythians would be up to that, I think.”

  “Any indication that Eraliev may be planning to do that? Send Bermet off to one of the labor camps.”

  “No. At least not before she’s been summoned to Torquemada’s house of pleasure. And there won’t be much left of her after that, I’m afraid.”

  Ruslan knew what Nogoev was doing. Baiting him. Hoping that he would get angry with his military advisor rather than choose a course of reckless desperation because of anger at either Eraliev or himself. He knew that Nogoev was not unaffected by thoughts of what awaited Bermet in prison. He had liked her. Ruslan squeezed his right hand into a fist and tamped down the anger that Nogoev had succeeded in fanning.

  “So we need to get Bermet transferred to a labor camp now,” Valentina said. “Before the trial.”

  “Only the president can do that,” Murzaev said dismissively. “Somehow I don’t see him accommodating us.”

  “How would it work?” Valentina asked. “If Bermet was going to be transferred to one of the camps, how would the order come down? Who would it be from and what would it look like?”

  Ruslan had the sense that Valentina was not merely grasping at straws. That she had something in mind. That the questions were purposeful.

  “Bermet’s been classified as a Tier I political prisoner. Any order to transfer a Tier I within the prison system has to come directly from the president’s office.”

  “How?” Valentina pressed. “Does the president make a phone call? Send a letter?”

  “The transfer order is on a form. I’ve seen it done for military prisoners.”

  “Could our person on the inside get a copy of this form?”

  “I suppose that wouldn’t be too difficult,” Murzaev said as though he were making some grand concession. “The form itself should be readily available on the computer system at the interior ministry. But it’s only valid if it’s stamped with the presidential seal. Without the seal, it’s useless. And the seal we don’t have access to.”

  “Who is the keeper of the seal? Surely not the president himself. That sounds too much like work.”

  “Eraliev’s personal secretary keeps the seal. It’s almost certainly somewhere in his office.”

  “In a safe?”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible. But I doubt it. The secretary would need to use it regularly, and the office suite is so heavily guarded that the whole thing might as well be inside a safe.”

  “Well, that’s the answer then. We get a blank form, fill in the order to have Bermet transferred to one of the labor camps, maybe Kosh-Dobo. It’s isolated enough. And we borrow the presidential seal for a brief moment to make it all official. Then the Scythians would have a relatively soft target. And it seems like they could use a little field experience.”

  Murzaev pulled a red pack of Altai cigarettes and a lighter from his jacket pocket and lit one. The cheap local tobacco had a foul smell. “You glossed over the tricky bit. We just waltz into Eraliev’s office and ask to borrow a cup of sugar and the presidential seal? Maybe the guards will be laughing too hard to kill us. There’s always hope.”

  “That’s one of the things I’ve always admired about you, Askar. Your sunny optimism.”

  “Optimism is for the inexperienced.”

  “What if I said that I had a way of getting access to the seal and getting a stamp on the form, making it all nice and legal.”

  “I’d say you were a liar.”

  “Askar. That’s not especially helpful,” Ruslan admonished him. “Tell us what you have in mind, Val.”

  She told them.

  Ruslan shook his head and whistled his astonishment.

  He could not quite decide if the gods had just smiled on him or were laughing at him.

  9

  The symbolism was simple but powerful. A group of thirty or so women ranging in age from eleven or twelve to perhaps eighty stood in a loose semicircle
on the wide plaza of cracked concrete tiles. They were all dressed entirely in black, although some more stylishly than others. Each woman held a single white candle that flickered fitfully in the twilit gloom. The sky was an iron gray and the dark clouds threatened rain. The air was cool, almost chilly.

  The women stood there stoically without jackets or umbrellas. Their silence was eloquent. Their pain spread out before them as an almost physical thing.

  These were the Women in Black. And in addition to the somber hues of the clothes they wore they all had one thing in common. Someone they loved—a father, a daughter, a husband, a sister, a son—was rotting away in a cell somewhere inside the enormous, sprawling prison that seemed to mock them with its impassivity.

  A small crowd had gathered behind the protestors, watching the women as they kept their silent vigil. Kate stood with them but off to one side, removed and distant from the emotional currents of the moment as a good diplomat should be.

  She hated it.

  Kate wanted to be standing there in the half circle of demonstrators, right alongside her sisters, dressed in black and protesting the system that ground so many young lives down to powder. Kate was one of them. In her heart, she was wearing black and honoring her mother’s sister. She did not believe Zamira was dead. She could not believe it. She would not allow it.

  But diplomats accredited to a government did not go out in the streets and protest that government. Not and keep their jobs. And if Kate was PNG’ed from a second post within the span of a few weeks, the State Department might reassess where it considered the blame to lie.

  Diplomats do not march. They do not throw stones or storm the prison gates. They observe and report. So Kate stood to the side, absorbing the scene so that she might later record it faithfully in a stiff, bloodless cable for Washington.