Enemy of the Good

by Matthew Palmer

  “Do you need some walking-around money?” the ambassador asked. “I’m sure Crespo would be able to help out with that if that was the price of admission to the inner circle.”

  “No. I think that would be the very worst thing we could do.” Kate tried not to make it sound like she was teaching her uncle how to suck eggs, but she had seen the CIA muscle in on too many developing relationships and then squash them with their bull-in-a-china-shop lack of finesse.

  “It would scare them off,” she added. “Make it seem as though we were trying to buy them. We’ll need to be patient.”

  “So what do they want?”

  “They want to know that I’m worth their time. That I have influence.”

  “They must know that you have pretty easy access to me.”

  “That comes from blood ties, but I need to show them that I’m more than your niece, that I’m on the inside of the policy circle as well as the family circle.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “You’re seeing the president tomorrow.”

  “Yes.”

  “Take me with you.”

  Harry shook his head.

  “Presidential protocol is pretty tight on numbers. Principals plus two. That’s me and Brass and Chet. It might be possible to ask for another seat, but not in twenty-four hours. This place doesn’t move that fast. You know that, Kate, better than anyone.”

  “I don’t mean as the third wheel,” Kate said. “I mean instead of Chester.”

  Her uncle smiled like the Cheshire cat.

  “You understand what you’re asking?”

  “Of course.”

  “And it’s safe to assume that you haven’t mentioned this to Chet?”

  “Of course.”

  “He not going to like it.”

  “Of course not.”

  There was a long pause as the ambassador digested his niece’s proposition, one of which Machiavelli himself would have been proud.

  “This will help you get close to Boldu?”

  “No guarantees. But, yes. I think so.”

  “That’s more important than poor Chet’s ego.”

  “Agreed.”

  “This would have to be my idea, you understand. Not yours.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Will you be able to handle the fallout with Grimes? He’ll still be your supervisor. And no matter how I frame this, he’s going to see this as favoritism.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “Okay then. I’ll set it up.”

  The look on the ambassador’s face was almost that of parental pride. It made Kate feel both warm and sad.

  —

  Diplomatic messaging is a subtle game. Players keep score according to an arcane set of rules rooted in long tradition but often with a modern twist. In the court of Louis XIV, rank and status dictated a complex set of privileges. Whether a particular nobleman could sit in the presence of the king and on how many cushions. How many horses he could use to pull his carriage. How many attendants he was entitled to.

  Kate was a part of the ambassador’s small delegation headed to meet the president. That said something. But it was Brass who rode with the ambassador in the limousine while Kate was relegated to the follow car, a dull gray Ford Taurus. That said something too.

  The supercharged engine on the ambassador’s aging up-armored Cadillac was so loud that the embassy staff had nicknamed the limousine Humbaba after the fire-breathing monster in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Humbaba was also, the embassy’s cultural attaché insisted, the onomatopoeic sound the Cadillac would make on a cold morning as the engine struggled to turn over. It was the kind of joke that only college professors and overeducated diplomats would find funny.

  The small motorcade—Humbaba, Kate’s Taurus, and the police follow car with the ambassador’s security detail—drove past Ala-Too Square, which many considered the heart of Bishkek, before turning onto a narrow cobblestone side street that led to a covered stone portico and the bronze doors to the Presidential Palace. The honor guard soldiers stood on either side of the doors, one tall and broad and Slavic looking, and the second shorter, stocky, and Kyrgyz. Their sky blue jackets were heavy with gold braid and they carried their Kalashnikovs at port arms with bayonets fixed to the barrel. They were both handsome, but neither would make eye contact with Kate as she hurried up the stairs past them. They stood ramrod straight staring out at some unseen threat to the safety and security of the head of state.

  Presidential protocol was there to meet them at the front door.

  “Good afternoon, Ambassador.” The protocol officer was, as they so often were in the former Soviet space, pretty and blond. She gave Kate’s uncle a smile that could have melted the Tian Shan glacier. She was almost six feet tall, but Kate guessed that a good three inches of that could be attributed to heels that would not have been out of place on a stage with a brass pole. Her white suit was cut just a little too tight, leaving her breasts straining against the fabric. The ambassador seemed oblivious to this, but the defense attaché stared unabashedly at her chest.

  “Good afternoon, Svetlana,” the ambassador said, returning the greeting.

  “Hello, William,” Svetlana said to Brass, and the smile she offered him was more come hither than the one she had given the ambassador. “And you must be Katarina, daughter of Kyrgyzstan. The president is especially looking forward to meeting you.”

  Her smile had somehow gone cold—her beauty now that of the stark northern mountains rather than the soft plains.

  Kate shook Svetlana’s hand and looked her hard in the eyes, refusing to be intimidated. Inside, however, Kate was on edge. Her stomach twisted in on itself as she tried not to think about what she had come to do. If she thought too much about it, she would not be able to go through with it.

  The lithesome Svetlana led them up a grand set of marble stairs covered in threadbare Soviet-era carpet. Brass walked right behind her, looking lecherously at the protocol assistant’s shapely ass. Men were idiots.

  The president’s office was on the second floor. The formal meeting room was oval-shaped with massive oil paintings on the walls. Dark colors in heavy gilt frames. Mostly landscapes and portraits. The kind of art that might convey with the purchase of a castle in Transylvania.

  The flags of Kyrgyzstan and the United States stood next to each other on polished wood poles capped by brass hawks. A semicircle of chairs was set up in front of the flags. It was one of the odd diplomatic arrangements that had the principals in the meeting sitting almost side by side and having to twist their bodies to look at one another. Their advisors sat in a row of armchairs to either side that curved away from the principals like wings. While somewhat impractical, this setup had one compelling advantage. It looked good on television.

  “The president will be out shortly,” Svetlana said, and with a final flip of her hair and a last flirty look for Brass, she took her leave though a set of French doors that led to the presidential office suite.

  Kate stared eagerly through the open doorway. She could see the secretary’s desk on the other side of the threshold. It was piled with papers. A young, slender man with a neatly trimmed beard sat behind the desk typing. He wore a white dress shirt open at the collar. No tie. Kate reasoned that he must be the president’s personal secretary.

  The printer along the back wall hummed briefly and disgorged a document. The secretary picked it up and carried it back to the desk. After a moment rummaging through the drawers, he pulled out a metal stamp with a long black handle and used it to fix a raised seal to the document. Kate had used something similar in her consular training when she had learned how to notarize documents for Americans overseas.

  This nondescript hunk of metal was Kate’s sole reason for being there and she had to force herself not to stare. She was afraid that her interest in
the seal was obvious to everyone. The young secretary returned the machine to its drawer, but Kate could not tell which one it was. If she could not find some way to get time alone in the president’s outer office, it was all moot in any event. The seal was no more than fifteen feet away, but it may as well have been on the bottom of the ocean.

  Kate was so intent on tracking the seal that she almost jumped out of her skin when Eraliev stepped out of his office and into her field of vision.

  12

  For all the outsized influence that the president of Kyrgyzstan had had on her life, this was the first time Kate had seen Eraliev up close and in the flesh. He was a massive figure, with the body of a sumo wrestler and the arms of a butcher. His hands were thick and covered in dark hair. The president’s features were flat and expressionless, his porcine eyes set so far apart that they seemed to be looking in separate directions. One of the jokes that periodically made the rounds among members of Bishkek’s political class was that Eraliev needed three hundred and sixty degrees of vision to keep the knives out of his back.

  The president was sixty-four, but he looked younger. His hair was crow black and as shiny as his shoes. The wags had it that he used the same product to color them both.

  Eraliev smiled when he saw Kate, a toothy grin like that of a hungry shark. He walked over to her with light, mincing steps that belied his bulk and offered his hand. Kate took it and tried not to shudder as his greasy palm wrapped around her fingers.

  “Ms. Hollister,” he said in Kyrgyz. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Your deep roots in this country are well known. And you’re so much more attractive than your uncle’s regular cast of advisors.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” Kate said calmly, even as she suppressed a fantasy of stabbing her pen into the vein she could see pulsating at his temple. “It’s a pleasure to be back in the land of my mother’s birth . . . and death.”

  “Your mother, yes. What happened to your parents was a terrible tragedy. You have my condolences. Our mountain roads can be so treacherous.”

  “Treachery is so often fatal,” Kate replied, her expression studiously neutral. She was grateful that neither the ambassador nor Brass spoke Kyrgyz.

  Eraliev looked uncertain for a moment, which was itself sufficient compensation for Kate’s decidedly undiplomatic response.

  Switching to Russian, the president greeted the other members of the delegation and exchanged a few whispered words with the ambassador. Eraliev’s “plus two” introduced themselves to Kate. Aziz Isherbaev was the president’s national security advisor, and the second man was a relatively junior official from the defense ministry who, like Kate, would be expected to take notes and keep quiet.

  They took their seats in the lumpy armchairs, and the lovely Svetlana led a group of scruffy photographers into the room to take pictures of the president and the American ambassador chatting amiably about nothing in particular, their words drowned out by the clicking shutters and the hum of the motor drives. After less than a minute, Svetlana ushered them out so the real work could begin.

  “Have you given any consideration to my latest proposal, Ambassador?” Eraliev asked. “I think it represents a fair compromise.”

  Kate’s uncle had briefed her on this earlier. Eraliev wanted to use the base as a source of political patronage. He wanted the government—meaning Eraliev and his Kyrgyz National Party—to pick the companies that would provide services to the base under fixed-cost contracts, with the costs to be fixed by . . . Eraliev.

  Even the U.S. military, infamous for procuring eight-hundred-dollar hammers, had its limits. Both Crandle and the ambassador saw these proposals as a black hole sucking tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars into another dimension.

  “We’re making progress on this point, Mr. President,” the ambassador lied smoothly in excellent Russian. “We understand the value of ensuring seamless linkages between the government and the operations of the base. But the numbers need some work.”

  Kate took notes. It would be her job to write the reporting cable back to Washington.

  Eraliev and Harry went back and forth on the issue for the better part of half an hour. Brass occasionally chimed in on the more technical parts of the discussion, always careful to express “the views of the secretary of defense” rather than his own. Brass’s Russian was heavily accented and his grammar was spotty, but he followed the discussion easily enough and had little trouble making himself understood.

  Kate had trouble concentrating. A small part of her brain directed her hand to jot down notes on the back-and-forth over trash pickup and cafeteria services. But she kept looking across the room at the French doors that led to the president’s outer office. The doors were closed and the glass was frosted, but in her mind’s eye Kate could see the oversize birch-wood desk with the presidential seal tucked away safely in one of the drawers.

  In her jacket pocket, Kate had the prison transfer form folded up neatly in an envelope. She needed thirty seconds alone with the seal, and she had no idea how she was going to get that. As her uncle and the president sparred over the base agreement and Kate mechanically wrote down what they said, most of her brainpower was concentrated on solving this puzzle. Even without any flying monkeys to worry about, it was not an easy problem. Each of the elaborate scenarios she spun out in her head ended with her being shot or lying flat on the ground with one of the handsome honor guard soldiers pointing his rifle at her head.

  After mentally rejecting a dozen different plans, a germ of an idea took root. It was simple and that was its strength, but it was still high risk with a number of branching variables she could not hope to control. Kate would have to play it by ear. In music at least, the part of her that was classically trained rebelled at that idea. But the part of her that was a student of Cuban jazz was ready and eager.

  Kate realized that she had missed the last couple of exchanges between the ambassador and Eraliev. She could only hope that it had not been anything important.

  Why was she doing this? Kate asked herself. Why was she so invested in the success of a secretive organization that three weeks ago she had never heard of? The risks she took and the sacrifices she made in Cuba were something else. She did it for her friends, for people she knew and cared about. She did it for Reuben. She did it for love. So why? Was it for love of her mother’s country?

  Kate looked to her left at Kyrgyzstan’s obese head of state with his sallow skin and bulging bullfrog-like neck, and she understood. Hate. She hated this man and she would gladly see him dead. He had murdered her parents. As a motive, hate may have been less pure than love. But it was just as honest.

  Eraliev would not die in bed, not unless one of his many mistresses stabbed him in his tiny heart. Eventually, he would reap what he had sown. But Kate was impatient. If there was something she could do to hurry the day of his demise, she would do it and damn the risk.

  At the forty-minute mark, the two principles wrapped up the conversation with a ritualized exchange of pleasantries. Kate had only been half listening. The report she would write would be something of an exercise in creative writing. That was the least of her worries.

  As she stood up, Kate used her foot to push her shoulder bag under the chair and out of sight.

  Eraliev shook hands with the ambassador and Brass and turned to Kate. She wondered if he could see the hate in her eyes. Did he know? Would he care if he did?

  The president took her hand in both of his and leaned in close as though he were going to kiss her. She could smell garlic on his breath and it made her stomach turn.

  “I will be watching you,” he whispered to her. It was disturbingly intimate. Like a lover’s promise.

  Svetlana the protocol assistant emerged from the office suite and led the small American delegation back down the grand stairway.

  Halfway to the car, Kate stopped.

  “I’m sorry, Ambassador.
I forgot my purse,” she said. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll meet you back at the embassy.”

  Brass looked at her condescendingly as though to say a man would never forget his purse. Bite me, Kate thought.

  “After that last set of negotiations, you may want to cancel your credit cards,” her uncle joked. “The president may be putting a new air defense system on your Amex as we speak.”

  Svetlana laughed lightly and touched the ambassador’s arm flirtatiously.

  “Is it okay if I pop back upstairs to get my bag?” Kate asked Svetlana in Russian. She was afraid that she was talking too fast. Her breathing, meanwhile, was too shallow and the muscles in her back were like tightly coiled springs.

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t wait for me, please, Ambassador,” Kate said to her uncle as she concentrated on keeping her agitation from showing on her face.

  “No worries, Kate. See you back at the office.”

  Svetlana led her now diminished delegation back to the motorcade and Kate started up the stairs fighting back the urge to take them two at a time. She scooped up her purse from where she had left it and knocked confidently on the door to the outer office. Moments later the president’s secretary opened it, looking annoyed.

  “Yes?” he asked curtly.

  “Sorry to bother you. But the ambassador asked me to get the president a copy of my notes for the meeting as a record of the negotiations. Could I ask for your help with that?” Kate did her best to smile warmly, but it felt unnatural and she was afraid that it would come across more as nervous than friendly.

  “The president asked for this?”