“How do you know me?” Kate asked.
The young boy stepped in close to her and Kate reflexively shifted her purse to the far side and pulled it close against her body.
“I have a message for you,” the boy said, ignoring her question altogether. Although he was a child, he seemed to be the one in control of the situation and Kate felt vaguely embarrassed by that.
“From who?”
“Your friend from school.”
Val.
“Yes?” Kate was now eager to hear what he had to say, her earlier fear gone.
“She said to meet her in the place you used to go to smoke cigarettes.”
“I remember. When?”
“Midnight.”
And the boy stepped back out of the light from the streetlamp and disappeared into the darkness.
10
During the day, Kara-Su Park was lively. Families with young children picnicked in the grass. Older kids enjoyed the dangerous pleasures of a few antiquated and rusted-out carnival rides. Young lovers strolled hand-in-hand through the well-kept gardens.
Nighttime was a different story. A few streetlamps formed an archipelago of weak, sickly light in an ocean of dark. Kate avoided the lights, navigating around them as though they were hazardous shoals. If there was something threatening hiding in the dark, she would rather not make herself easy to find. The dark was safer. Even so, she walked with her hand in her purse and her fingers wrapped lightly around a small canister of pepper spray.
The route she chose led past the bumper cars and Ferris wheel in the small amusement park that was open every day despite looking like it had been abandoned years earlier. The path took a hard turn to the right and dipped down toward a pond, passing under a stone bridge that would not have looked out of place stretched across the Seine. Kate and Val and a group of friends from ISB would sometimes gather here in the evenings, away from the eyes of prying adults, to smoke and drink and flirt and carve their initials into the soft limestone using crumpled bottle caps as chisels.
Under the bridge, it was ink dark. Kate could not see her hand in front of her face. The air was damp.
“Hello?” she said in Kyrgyz, feeling both nervous and foolish. Her greeting echoed off the walls. “Is anyone here?”
There was no response. Kate resisted the urge to call out Val’s name.
Just as she was about to abandon hope and turn back, a match flared brightly only a few feet away. Kate almost jumped out of her skin. She closed her eyes against the sudden light and green dots danced on the inside of her eyelids. When she blinked her eyes open, the match light had been replaced by the warm orange glow of a lit cigarette. Val’s long, angular face was barely visible in the light it cast.
“Smoke?” she asked.
“Thanks.”
Kate did not smoke often, typically when she was drunk or nervous. And she was nervous. She took the cigarette Val offered from a pack of Marlboros along with a thick kitchen match that she struck on the tunnel wall just like they had done as high school students a decade earlier.
“So you still remember the place,” Val observed.
“It’s hard to forget.”
“Yes, it is,” and there was a depth of pathos in the response. It was hard to forget many things. Harder still to forgive.
“Do you have a cell phone?” Val asked.
“In my purse.”
“Take the battery out, please.”
Kate did as Val asked, somewhat sheepish that she had not thought of this herself. It was a reasonable precaution. Cell phones were transmitters with built-in microphones. Even the most cut-rate spy agency had the software necessary to turn them on remotely and use them to record conversations. It was even easier to do this with a compliant state-run telecom monopoly.
“I’m glad you reached out to me,” Kate said. She took a deep drag on the cigarette and felt the nicotine rush into her blood, speeding up her heart and focusing her thoughts.
“You may not be when you hear what I have to say.”
“Really? Is there some kind of problem?”
“For us. And maybe for you. We’ll see.”
“Us?”
“Boldu.”
In the dark, Kate smiled. She had her foot in the door.
“Thank you for trusting me,” she said.
“Well. We have our reasons.”
Kate leaned against the limestone wall of the tunnel. The rocks were cool to her touch. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark and she could see in the dim glow from the burning cigarettes graffiti on the tunnel walls that looked like cave paintings. She ran one finger lightly over a spot where someone had carved a set of initials into the stone. Evidently K.R. loved M.T. In stone, at least, it would be that way for many years.
Val lit a second cigarette off the end of her first and crushed the butt against the wall. Kate did the same. She could not remember the last time she had chain-smoked in this way. College maybe.
The cigarette smoke floated between Kate and Val like a fog.
“I’d like to meet the others. I’d like to meet Seitek.”
“Hold on, girl. There are some things we need to talk about first.”
“Tell me.”
“You saw the video of the pigs crashing Eraliev’s party.”
“Of course.”
“We lost someone there, a woman named Bermet who was picked up by the police.”
“Where is she now?”
“Prison Number One.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. As in oh, shit. We need to get her out of there before her case goes to trial and she gets sent to the Pit.”
“Torquemada?” Kate asked apprehensively. “He’s still there?” Kate’s father had told her about Eraliev’s chief inquisitor, and her mother had had nightmares of her sister being subject to the mysterious Georgian’s less than tender ministrations.
“He’s a vampire. He’ll never die.”
“Does this woman know something in particular that needs to be protected?” Like Seitek’s real name?
“No. That’s not it.”
“Then what is it? I don’t mean to sound callous here, but you’re not playing Parcheesi. Revolution is a dangerous game. There will be losses. What’s so special about this one?”
Val was quiet.
“You need to be straight with me if you want my help.” Kate kept her voice even and level. These conversations were like fishing. Too much tension would snap the line.
“Bermet and Seitek were close,” Val admitted. “Maybe too close.”
“She’s his girlfriend?”
Val snorted.
“I wouldn’t use that word. Bermet might, but she’d be the only one. Still, he seems to feel an outsized sense of duty to her, both because he was . . . ploughing her field . . . and because she was arrested saving him from capture. So unless we can find a way to get her out, there’s a real chance of Seitek doing something foolish. And he’s the one man we truly can’t afford to lose. Without him, Boldu is finished before it begins.”
“So what does this have to do with me? You think the American embassy can get Bermet out of prison? We don’t have a great track record there.” Kate was thinking of her aunt and the countless hours her parents had invested in trying to find her.
“No,” Val replied. “Believe me, if we thought there was a political angle, we’d take it. This isn’t about the American embassy, Kate. This is about you.”
“Me?”
“We can’t get into the prison. It’s too hard a target. We need to get the prison authorities to move Bermet out, preferably to one of the labor camps in the countryside. But Bermet’s a Tier I political prisoner. Which means that the only way to do that is to get the transfer form stamped with the official presidential seal.”
Kate had a sinking feeli
ng in her stomach. It did not take a clairvoyant to see where this conversation was headed.
“I don’t suppose that’s a terribly easy thing to do,” she said.
“No. It’s not.”
“Where’s the seal kept?”
“In Eraliev’s office. His secretary keeps it. Probably somewhere close at hand. His desk, perhaps.”
“Perhaps?”
“It’s the best we can do.”
“And what do you want from me?”
“Isn’t it obvious? We want you to take this form,” and Val pulled an envelope from her shoulder bag and held it out to Kate, who took it. “And get it stamped with the presidential seal to make it nice and official.”
Kate opened the envelope, but it was too dark to read what was inside.
“How the hell am I supposed to do that?” she asked, making no effort to disguise her skepticism.
“You’re a smart girl. You’ll figure something out.”
“Why me?”
“Because none of us can get into Eraliev’s office.”
“And you think that he and I meet for coffee every Wednesday?”
“He meets with your uncle often enough. And there’s also your diplomatic immunity to be considered. Any of us who tried and failed would be sent to the Pit. They wouldn’t do that to an American diplomat. You’d just be sent home.”
“I am home, Val.”
“Back to Washington then.”
Kate thought about her parents’ car lying in a crumpled wreck at the bottom of a ravine.
“You really think that’s the worst thing this government would do to a diplomat?”
Val understood what Kate meant.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”
“It’s okay.”
The two were silent for a moment. Kate wanted a drink to go with her cigarette.
“And if I don’t do this?” Kate asked. “If I can’t do this?”
“Then this is as close to Boldu and Seitek as you’re ever going to get, Kate. I’m sorry. But you understand.”
“And if I do succeed? What then?”
“Then we’ll see what happens next.”
“Bring me the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West,” Kate said bitterly.
Val chuckled softly. She had been educated in international schools since she was five. She understood the reference.
“I know you have the brains,” Val said. “Now what we want to know is if you have the courage to go with them. And a heart.”
11
Dorothy had made it look easy. Three loyal friends and a bucket of water, and that was all she wrote for the Wicked Witch and her flying monkeys. Kate had no illusions about what she was up against, but she did know where to begin. Like Dorothy, she would have to get inside the witch’s fortress. The intrepid Kansan had been protected by some magical electric field emanating from the ruby slippers. If she was caught, Kate would have to hope that her diplomatic immunity could serve the same purpose.
She tried not the think about the witch’s plan for overcoming the force field.
The ambassador had a meeting with Eraliev in two days’ time to take stock of progress in the base negotiations. It was a complex process, covering not only the terms of the lease but the all-important status of forces agreement establishing the protections and privileges that would be afforded American military personnel deployed in Kyrgyzstan, everything from their tax status to their legal rights in the event they were charged with a crime. SOFAs were, sadly, essential to any base agreement. Gather a large enough group of twenty-something males and the likelihood of one or more committing a violent crime was depressingly close to one hundred percent.
Brass typically accompanied the ambassador to meetings with the president, representing the interests of the Defense Department and handling the purely military aspects of the negotiations. He was also, Kate suspected, acting as a spy for Winston Crandle. Kate’s boss, Chester, covered the political angles. The best way to get into Eraliev’s office, Kate reasoned, was as part of the ambassador’s team. And if that meant she had to play the family card, then so be it.
Kate asked Rosemary, her uncle’s longtime office management specialist, for ten minutes of his time. She got it. No questions asked. No other junior officer would have that kind of access to the ambassador. As always, when her nose was rubbed into it in this way, Kate was a little chagrined by the extent of the privileges afforded by her family connections in the Foreign Service. But as Frederick the Great reportedly said of Austrian empress Maria Theresa when it came time for the big powers of the day to divvy up Poland among themselves: She wept, but she took. Kate may not have earned it on the merits, but she got the time.
There were several people waiting in the outer office when Kate was buzzed into the executive suite. The suite, which in every embassy is known as the Front Office, was home to both the ambassador and the deputy chief of mission. Harry’s DCM was a twenty-year veteran of the consular service who focused more on embassy administration than on policy.
The Front Office in Embassy Bishkek was expensively decorated. One wall of the suite was covered in marble the color of dirty snow. Lithographs by Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning hung on the walls courtesy of Art in Embassies, a State Department program that arranged the long-term loan of museum-quality pieces to American missions around the world. It was ironic that this program intended to project American soft power overseas was used to decorate the executive suite, which was located in the embassy’s controlled-access area and out of bounds for foreign guests.
The ambassador stepped out of his office looking the part of the proconsul. Her father’s suits, Kate remembered, had always looked like he had just picked them up from the floor, wrinkled and shiny at the elbows. His brother’s clothes looked like they were fresh from a bespoke tailor on Savile Row. The tie was Italian. The perfectly polished alligator-skin loafers were Brooks Brothers. Men could be extraordinarily vain about their bald spots and never seemed to appreciate that women were more likely to be impressed by their footwear than their comb-over. Uncle Harry had it down; and somehow he made it look natural rather than affected. More power to him.
Kate knew she was trading on his affection for her. And to her relief, her uncle did not hug her or pat her head and tell her how much she had grown. Not in front of the colleagues waiting their turn for an audience.
“It’s good to see you, Kate,” her uncle said instead. “I’m sorry I’ve been so busy the last few weeks. Come on in.”
“Thanks for making some time for me, Ambassador.” Kate was always careful to use his title when there were other people around. Never “Harry” or, god forbid, “uncle.” It would be like calling the pope “Stinky” because that was the nickname you knew him by in elementary school.
The ambassador’s private office was surprisingly small, consistent with the global design for new embassy compounds. The furniture was nice enough but standard government issue. It simply would not do for a visiting congressional delegation, or CODEL, to launch a long and expensive fact-finding investigation into why the American ambassador in the Central African Republic had a walnut desk and an executive-model leather chair. It would be far from the nuttiest thing the Congress had ever done.
They sat facing each other on a pair of cream-colored sofas. The ambassador poured Kate a cup of black tea from a plain silver samovar.
“How are things going?” he asked broadly. “You settling in okay?”
“I am. It’s a little weird to be back here, but in a good way.”
“How’s Grimes treating you?”
“The way he would any second tour officer, I suppose.”
“Good. That’s what I told him to do. I don’t want you coming out of this job thinking that you’re already a superstar. You will be. I have a lot of confidence in you. But you can learn a thing or
two from someone who’s been around the block a few times.”
“Chet’s certainly done that,” Kate said mischievously.
“He is a little old for the job. And maybe not a ball of fire. But he’s a good man. You’ll see.”
After that exchange, Kate was a little chagrined about what she had come to ask. But there was no turning back. Kate took a sip of the tea. It was bitter and tannic from steeping too long in the samovar.
“So how’s the hunt for Boldu going?” the ambassador asked. “Any leads?”
“As a matter of fact . . .”
“Really?”
Kate was a little hurt that her uncle seemed surprised at this news.
“Yes. I was able to get in touch with Valentina. It took a little work, but she was ultimately prepared to admit that she was with Boldu. Somewhere in the leadership, I think.”
“What about Seitek? Have you met him yet?”
“No. I’m going to need to earn the privilege of an audience, I’m afraid.”
“How?”
“By showing them that I can be useful. Val was my friend in high school, but that only goes so far. The leadership of Boldu has good reason to be paranoid.”
The ambassador leaned back on the sofa and sipped his bitter tea. Her father had liked his the same way. Maybe there was a gene for it that skipped a generation.
“This is what you wanted to see me about, isn’t it? Whatever it is you need to do to prove your bona fides. All right. I’m all ears.”
Uncle Harry was impressively perceptive. He was maybe not the kind of serious intellectual that her father had been, but Kate’s dad had frequently praised his older brother’s emotional intelligence. Harry Hollister could read a room, he said, the way regular people read the newspaper. It was easy and automatic, and he was as skilled in one-on-one exchanges as he was in the more macro diplomacy.
“I need to show Val and the others that I matter. That I have access. That I can do things for them.”
Kate was loyal to her uncle, of course, but she had had absolutely no intention of sketching out just what Boldu had asked her to do. It was insane. Potentially high reward, but very, very high risk. If Kate put her plan forward as a serious suggestion, the only sensible response would be to get her on the next plane back to D.C., ideally under sedation. She understood that omitting all this from her narrative could be seen as bad faith. The end would have to justify the means.
Enemy of the Good Page 11
