Enemy of the Good

by Matthew Palmer

  She knew instinctively, however, that this was not ISIS or al-Qaeda or some other Islamic terrorist organization. This was purely local. Maybe the GKNB had figured out that she had supplied Boldu with the notarized transport form that had enabled the ambush on the prison convoy. Maybe one of Eraliev’s spies had followed her to the stable where she had met Ruslan.

  If so, it was likely that they were taking her to Prison Number One, where Torquemada was waiting in some dank basement interrogation room. Kate felt a chill. She was an American diplomat. The government could never afford to acknowledge that it had kidnapped her off the street and tortured her. If they started down that road, there could be only one ending. They would kill her.

  She felt the pressure on her mouth ease as the big man with hands the size of dinner plates loosened his hold.

  “Who are you?” Kate demanded as soon as she was free to speak. “Where are you taking me?” She spoke in Russian.

  “All in good time,” the man said back to her in the same language. “Now, be quiet.” He ripped a length of duct tape off a thick roll and slapped it forcefully over Kate’s mouth. Her teeth cut the inside of her lip and she tasted blood. He pulled Kate’s arms forward and used the tape to bind her wrists together. From behind her one of the other kidnappers slipped a black cloth bag over her head. He cinched it tightly around her throat with a leather cord and Kate’s anger began to give way to fear.

  It was okay to be afraid, Kate told herself. But she’d be damned if she would let them see it. She sat cross-legged with her back pressed up against the side of the van and concentrated on her breathing.

  No one spoke. Kate sat stock-still, bound and gagged and blind. She could do nothing but wait to learn her fate.

  With her heart racing, time was difficult to measure. But it felt to Kate as though at least an hour had passed before they came to a stop. The door swung open with an ugly rumble of metal rollers. Two men lifted Kate bodily from the van and frog-marched her about twenty feet before pushing her down onto a cold metal chair. Someone cut the tape at her wrists with a knife and then taped them again to the arms of chair. Someone—maybe the same person, maybe someone else—taped her ankles to the chair legs. A strap of some kind was wrapped around her chest, sitting just over her breasts. A second strap was wound around her abdomen, passing right over her diaphragm. They were tight but not painfully so and they did not seem to be tied to the chair. Kate was not certain what it was. Experimentally, she tried to move the chair just a bit, only to find that it was bolted to the floor.

  A hand at her throat made her freeze for an instant, but it proved to be just one of her captors loosening the knot that held the hood tight.

  When the hood was pulled off, Kate blinked hard as her eyes adjusted to the light. She was in a warehouse or a hangar of some kind, with a high ceiling and shelves along the walls piled with boxes and what looked like engine parts.

  As gloomy as it was, this was not a prison, and Kate felt a shiver of relief. Her situation was hardly ideal, but it was not yet her deepest fear.

  Kate could not see behind her, but she sensed that the men in the balaclavas were somewhere in her blind spot. In front of her was a wooden table with a metal box on it. Cords running from the box connected it to the bands strapped around Kate’s torso. A man sat at the desk in a short-sleeved dress shirt. If a toad was turned into a man and the process had somehow broken down at the halfway point, this was what he might look like. The man was small. His face was wrinkled and decorated with a forest of moles, warts, and lumps of uncertain origin. The thick glasses he wore had black plastic rims, and they magnified his eyes to the point where he looked almost amphibian. The hair on his head grew in mangy patches. The follicles on his ears were seemingly more reliable. He was an ugly troll of a man, and Kate sensed that he was someone she should fear.

  From behind her she could hear the sound of heels clicking on the cement floor of the warehouse. Even though this was not the central prison, Kate was still certain that the men who had taken her were GKNB. If this was Chalibashvili, maybe he had his reasons for interrogating her outside the formal system. The Kyrgyz authorities were children of the Soviet Union. They kept records.

  Kate fought the instinct to crane her neck to see who was behind her. It would look weak. Desperate. She would learn soon enough. The man stopped right behind her and Kate could feel him studying her. Slowly, he moved clockwise around her. When he had reached her shoulder, Kate turned her head and looked up.

  It was Askar Murzaev, the Boldu chief of intelligence.

  “I suppose I should be surprised by this,” she said. “But I’m not especially. Are you in the market for a wife? I wouldn’t have pegged you as a traditionalist.” Ala Kachuu, or bride stealing, was a custom with deep roots in Kyrgyz history. Depending on the circumstances, it could be either an elaborate form of elopement or a kidnapping followed by rape and forced marriage. As many as a third of Kyrgyz brides were taken against their will.

  “You flatter yourself, Ms. Hollister,” Murzaev answered. “But I have other surprises for you.”

  The Boldu intelligence chief was dressed in a dark suit and tie as though for work, which—Kate supposed—this was.

  “Are you working for Eraliev?” she asked. “Are you a traitor?” Did you sign Ruslan’s death warrant? she wanted to ask.

  “We’ll see who the worm in the apple really is,” Murzaev said flatly. He pointed to the box on the table. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Yes.”

  When he was secretary of state, George Shultz had successfully protected the Foreign Service from the intrusive indignity of regular polygraph testing. But Kate recognized the machine easily enough. And she had heard from her friends in the intelligence community what it was like to go “on the box.” It was the kind of thing that would make Mother Teresa come to doubt her own virtue.

  “Yuri here may not be much to look at, but I assure you that he’s the very best at what he does.” The man-toad sitting at the table scowled at Murzaev, an expression that seemed to suit him and perversely made him fractionally less ugly.

  At a signal from Murzaev, one of the musclemen who had grabbed her off the street pushed the right sleeve of her sweatshirt up over her elbow and wrapped something that looked like a blood pressure cuff around her forearm. Then he straightened the fingers on Kate’s left hand and slipped a metal clip over her index and middle fingers, securing it with medical tape.

  “Yuri is going to ask you a few questions to calibrate our little device,” Murzaev said. “And then . . .” He paused and stared at Kate with the intensity of a lover. “And then, I’m going to ask you some questions.”

  The questions from the examiner were mundane: her name, her birthday, her address, her place of employment. Most were phrased as “yes” or “no” questions. To some, she was instructed to answer falsely.

  Finally, it was Murzaev’s turn.

  “How long have you been working for Eraliev?” he asked.

  “What?” Kate was in turn flabbergasted, relieved, and angry. “Is that what this is about? You don’t trust me? Jesus, we could have had this little chat without the kidnapping bit.”

  “Please just answer the question. For how long have you worked for Eraliev?”

  “When did I stop beating my dog?”

  “Answer the question, please.”

  “I don’t work for Eraliev. He murdered my family. I’d sooner work for Stalin.”

  Murzaev looked over at the examiner, who shook his head.

  “Yuri doesn’t believe you.”

  Kate remembered one of her friends in the CIA telling her that the polygraphers would sometimes accuse the test subjects of lying, even when there were no physiological indications, just to shake them up. The box was based on questionable science, but it was an ace interrogation tool.

  Kate’s father had been scrupulously
honest, and he had tried to instill that same damn-the-torpedoes forthrightness in his daughter. Her mother, however, had grown up in the Soviet Union and her relationship with the truth was less dogmatic than that of her husband. It was more practical. Even transactional.

  “I thought you said he was the best,” Kate said, striving to project both confidence and disdain. “I hope you didn’t pay him in advance.”

  “How much does Eraliev pay you?” he asked.

  “I told you—”

  “Who is your handler with the GKNB?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Did you tell him Seitek’s real name?”

  Kate noted that he did not use Ruslan’s name, and she resolved to do the same. There were a large number of people in the room and she did not know if they were all privy to that information. They would not learn it from her.

  “Did your ambassador instruct you to make contact with Boldu?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he thought we could help you, and he thought you would talk to me.”

  “Because of . . . what do you Americans say . . . old school ties?” The last phrase was delivered in English that was heavily accented but intelligible.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell anyone Seitek’s real name?”

  “No.”

  “Not even your ambassador?”

  “No.”

  Kate saw Murzaev glance over at the man-toad, who made a gesture that she could not interpret.

  “I will ask you again, and I want you to answer truthfully this time. Did you tell the American ambassador to Kyrgyzstan—your uncle—Seitek’s real name?”

  “No.”

  “Did he ask you if you knew?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t tell him?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “You withheld important information from your ambassador, from your father’s brother. You lied to him, even when he asked you a direct question?” Murzaev’s skepticism was plain as day in his tone.

  “Yes, I did. And when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound too good.”

  “I’d imagine not. And you do understand why this is somewhat difficult to believe?”

  “I do.”

  “Have you seen Seitek since the night on the farm?”

  “You should ask him.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Asking me what?” Kate was stalling for time.

  “Have you seen Seitek after the meeting at the farm? When and where?”

  Kate vaguely remembered reading somewhere that curling your toes as hard as you could would confuse the polygrapher. She had no idea if that was true, but she curled them just the same.

  “No.” It was her first lie.

  “No, what?”

  “No. I haven’t seen Seitek since the farm.”

  Kate was now keeping so many different secrets from different players that it would be difficult to keep them all straight. In spite of that, or maybe because of that, Yuri seemed to accept her answer.

  The next question caught her unprepared, as the slick and experienced Murzaev knew it would.

  “Do you love him?” he asked

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a simple enough question. Do you love Seitek?”

  “It’s really none of your business.”

  “Of course it’s my business,” Murzaev sneered. “Love is a weakness, a vulnerability. I need to know if you love him and—more to the point—if he believes he loves you, if I am to have a comprehensive picture of the strengths and weaknesses of an organization that quite literally holds my life in its hands. Now I will ask you again and I expect an answer this time. Do you love him? Do you love Seitek?”

  “No. I do not love Seitek.”

  Murzaev seemed to realize his mistake, the loophole he had left for her.

  “What about the man who is Seitek?” Murzaev again avoided using Ruslan’s name.

  “What about him?”

  “Do you love him?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said miserably.

  Murzaev looked over at Yuri, who nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “Congratulations, Ms. Hollister,” Murzaev said. “I believe that’s the most honest thing you’ve said all morning.”

  “Yes,” Kate agreed.

  There was more. The questioning went on for hours, with Murzaev repeatedly circling back to the issue of whom she had told about Seitek and how she felt about him.

  “I assure you,” Kate said when Murzaev had asked for the twelfth time in twelve different ways whether she was in love with the great leader of Boldu, “no one is more frustrated that I am about my inability to answer that question.”

  Finally, it was over.

  Murzaev himself cut her loose and released the straps from her chest and abdomen.

  “All right, Ms. Hollister,” he said. “I am reasonably satisfied that you are what you say you are, which is not the same as saying that I like it.”

  “I understand. Paranoia is no doubt a priceless asset in your profession.”

  “Quite. I am sorry about this.”

  “Me too.”

  “You understand why it was necessary?”

  “Because if I had failed this little test, you didn’t want anyone to know that you were the last person to see me alive, especially not Ruslan.” They were standing together alone, and with the others out of earshot, Kate saw no reason to maintain the fiction.

  “That is the long and the short of it, yes. I am a hard man; it is true. But this is a hard world.”

  “I don’t really get you,” Kate admitted. “I checked out your background. You’re the consummate insider, a veritable alphabet’s soup of Soviet, Russian, and Kyrgyz security services. This is kind of an unusual résumé for a democrat and a dissident, isn’t it? Why are you doing this? Why are you with Boldu?”

  Murzaev was quiet. The expression on his face was almost wistful.

  “I was born here in Bishkek,” he said finally. “My family was Kyrgyz, but my father was a real Soviet man. Above ethnicity. A servant of the party and state. That’s what he taught me. Growing up, my best friend was Chorobek Rustamov. We were inseparable, Chorobek and I. We even lived together when we went off to Leningrad for college. I studied politics and Chorobek was a budding chemical engineer. After graduating, I went to Moscow and began a career in intelligence, and Chorobek returned to Bishkek and joined Acron Group, the state-run fertilizer manufacturer. We stayed close. I moved from the KGB to the FSB when the Soviet Union broke up and later joined the GKDO, Kyrgyz military intelligence. I never married or had children of my own. Family is not a good fit for spy craft. But Chorobek’s children were like mine. And then the fool had to go and develop a political conscience. He became a democrat and sided with Azattyk against Eraliev. He was arrested, of course, and tortured before they murdered him.”

  The spymaster’s expression hardened as he relived the insults visited on his childhood friend by Eraliev’s inquisitors. Kate wondered if Chorobek had known Zamira. He must have. Azattyk had not been that big or that careful about security.

  “Azattyk were amateurs,” Murzaev said as though reading her mind. “And I promised that the next time the opposition would be ready to match the regime for ruthlessness.”

  “You’re doing an excellent job,” Kate said.

  Murzaev almost seemed to smile at that.

  “Your aunt. Her sacrifice. That’s why I agreed to your initial meeting with Seitek. But I had to be certain about you.”

  “I understand.”

  They stood in silence, and to her irritation Kate found herself respecting the old spy, even liking him in a certain way.
/>
  “I have a little something for you,” Murzaev said.

  “A nice set of monogrammed thumb screws?”

  Murzaev looked confused, then seemed to decide, correctly, that Kate’s answer was pure sarcasm and could therefore be ignored.

  “It’s just a phone.” The old spy pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to Kate. It was an older, clunky candy bar–style phone and seemed to have been designed purely for function. There was no manufacturer’s mark on it. It was a plain tool.

  “Is this like one of the toys Q would give James Bond at the beginning of the movie? Does it have a laser?”

  “It just makes calls, I’m afraid. Actually, it makes one call to one number already programmed in. All you need to do is enter the value of pi to five places and hit the pound key. It will call me. If any other number is entered, the guts of the phone will melt down. It will be quite hot, so try not to burn your fingers. When I answer, you will say, ‘His forefathers were all khans.’ That means that you are not under duress. You recognize the line?”

  “Yes. It’s the first line in the Manas epic.”

  “Good. You will remember it then. This phone is clean. But there is no such thing as risk-free electronic communication. Use it only in an emergency.”

  “You think this is necessary?”

  “I do.”

  Kate put the phone in her pocket. It was heavy.

  “I’ll have the boys drop you back at your apartment,” Murzaev said.

  “Thank you.”

  Kate felt numb, emotionally drained by what she had been through. Her tracksuit was soaked with sweat, first from the run and then from the tension of the interrogation.

  “There’s one more thing,” Murzaev said.

  “Let me guess,” Kate answered, thinking of her earlier conversation with Val. “You want me to stay away from the great Seitek.”

  “No.” Murzaev sounded genuinely surprised by that. “Denying you to him would only make you more enticing. He’s that way, you see.”

  “Of course.”

  “I think it would be better for all concerned, however, if he didn’t learn of our little chat today.”