Enemy of the Good

by Matthew Palmer

  Kate reflected on what had been a strange conversation. She turned it over in her mind as she sipped her coffee. It was not easy to parse the exchange between her uncle and Crandle. There was a level to it that she was not privy to. Brass, she suspected, knew more of the background than she did.

  What Kate did know was that she neither liked nor trusted the deputy secretary of defense. And she had no intent of sharing Ruslan’s name with him.

  She trusted her uncle. She had to. But who, she wondered, was calling the shots?

  19

  This time, he was sure she would come. Ruslan had sent Kate a message asking her to meet him here. He wanted to show her. It was important that she understand. And it would be easier to explain what he had in mind if Kate could see it for herself. He needed her to understand. He needed her help.

  She would see it. She would understand.

  He was sure of it.

  At least he was sure about something. Everything else about Kate confused him. He knew he had never gotten over her. She seemed still to feel something for him as well. All the rest would have to wait. There was work to do.

  It was early evening. There was enough daylight left to see, but it was dark enough that it would be hard for the GKNB to track them from a distance.

  Ruslan stood on the corner of Kiev and Panfilov streets a half block from Ala-Too Square, the center of civic life in Bishkek and the site of several mass demonstrations over the years that had attempted to challenge Eraliev’s right to rule in perpetuity. All had been crushed. The regime had responded to these threats with overwhelming force.

  He saw her the moment she rounded the corner onto Panfilov Street. She walked with confidence and purpose, as much at home on the streets of Bishkek as Ruslan himself. Her jeans were tucked into calf-high boots. It was a warm evening, and the short jacket she wore over a white top was open at the front. She wore her chestnut hair loose, brushed sleek and straight down to her shoulders. Ruslan did not hide the fact that he was staring at her.

  God, she was beautiful.

  The distance between them was closing rapidly, and when she was only a few meters away, Ruslan suffered a brief moment of panic. How should he greet her? Should he kiss her? Would she want that? Ruslan had now led men and women into battle. He had played bell-the-cat with the security services and taken unconscionable risks as the leader of Boldu. This was worse. He did not want to make a mistake. Say the wrong thing. And he knew instinctively that it would be easy to do.

  Better not to speak, he decided.

  Without a word, he stepped toward her and leaned forward to kiss her on the lips. Not passionately. But gently, questioningly.

  The kiss back was the answer he had been hoping for.

  “A nine-year-old told me to meet you here.”

  “You really shouldn’t let kids order you around like that.”

  “Then maybe you should stop employing child labor.”

  “I missed you,” he said.

  “You too.” Kate’s smile was shy and natural.

  “There’s something I’d like to show you.”

  She put her arm in his and stared him hard in the eyes.

  “I’ll follow you anywhere.”

  Ruslan felt himself flush and he looked away shyly, as nonplussed by Kate’s flirting as he was calm in the searchlights of the GKNB.

  “Good to know,” he said as casually as he could manage.

  Ruslan led Kate toward Ala-Too Square. They walked arm in arm and they fit together naturally, as though no time had passed since they had been together. Kate leaned in against him just slightly.

  Ala-Too Square was a broad open plaza of concrete and stone. A bronze statue of Manas on a red marble plinth dominated the square. The modernist Kyrgyz National Historical Museum loomed over the plaza on the far side of Chuy Avenue, which bisected the park. Triumphal arches to the east and west of the square managed to combine the worst aspects of Islamic and Soviet architecture in white marble and fake gold. The square was cold and windswept in the winter and hot and stifling in the summer. In the fall and spring, it was merely ugly.

  To the north, the snowcapped peaks of the Ala-Too mountains seemed to rebuke the eponymous square. Nothing mankind could build would ever compare to the power and glory of those mountains.

  The Presidential Palace was visible from the square, sheltered behind high walls and strong gates. This was where Kate had somehow managed to get Eraliev’s personal seal on the transfer order that had made it possible for Nogoev’s Scythians to free Bermet before she vanished forever into the Pit.

  “Want to stop by the office and see if you can lift Eraliev’s wallet and watch? Maybe steal his car?”

  Kate shuddered.

  “Don’t remind me. Scariest five minutes of my life.”

  They crossed Kiev Street, and walked to the base of the Manas statue. The father of all Kyrgyz was mounted on a horse with his sword sheathed. Although it looked like it had been there forever, the Manas sculpture was really only a few years old. It had replaced a winged woman on a globe meant to symbolize Kyrgyzstan’s independence from the USSR. Fittingly, that sculpture had replaced an enormous statue of Lenin, his arm raised as though hailing a cab on the streets of Moscow. To the left of the statue, there was a large fountain. The water was stagnant and choked with leaves.

  “This is what you wanted to show me?” Kate asked. “Ala-Too Square? It’s like bringing a Muscovite to the Kremlin.”

  “If you bring one Russian to Red Square, it’s a picnic. If you bring fifty thousand, it’s a revolution.”

  Kate looked at him sharply.

  “Haven’t we seen that movie already? I didn’t like the ending.”

  “This time would be different,” Ruslan promised.

  “Revolutionaries always believe that. And then they hang.”

  “Not this time.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because this time we’re ready to fight.”

  “To the battlements. Like the French Revolution?”

  “Like Maidan.”

  “That was pretty ugly too,” Kate said sadly.

  It was true. In 2014, tens of thousands of average Ukrainians had risen up against a Kremlin puppet government under Viktor Yanukovych. Protestors had taken over Maidan, the main square in Kiev, building a tent city surrounded by walls hastily thrown up and guarded by angry young men. They called their movement Euromaidan, and they asked for nothing more than the opportunity to choose for themselves whether to be part of the East or the West. They wanted a European future that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his cronies were determined to deny them.

  Tensions built over weeks and months, finally exploding in a spasm of violence that left several hundred dead, more than a thousand injured, and Yanukovych in exile in Russia. For a few brief weeks, everything seemed possible. But then Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, and the revolutionaries proved to be better at overthrowing governments than running them. Patriotic as they were, they turned out to be almost as corrupt and inept as the quislings they had displaced. As in Orwell’s story, the pigs had started walking on two legs.

  “We will do better,” Ruslan promised.

  “Really?”

  “We have the chance to learn from their mistakes and choose not to repeat them. We have the discipline and the training to defend the little tent city we will build here on Ala-Too and enough support from the people that the regime will not choose to slaughter us.”

  “You hope.”

  “Yes. I hope. And it is hope that drives me to action. But there is a problem.”

  “Just one?”

  Ruslan smiled resignedly.

  “More than one,” he admitted. “But one in particular.”

  “One that I can help you with, I presume.”

  “You always were a
quick study, Kate.”

  “Is that what this is all about? You and me?”

  “No,” Ruslan protested. “That’s not it at all.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair.”

  There was a stone bench by the fountain. They sat holding hands with their backs to the water, looking out over the square.

  “It’s perfectly fair. I’ve asked a lot of you. I’m the one who asked you to go into the president’s lair and get the seal on the transfer order.”

  “To rescue your girlfriend.”

  “My comrade. A woman who risked her life for mine. You and I had something special, Kate. Maybe we still do. God knows, I hope so. But the movement . . . Boldu . . . It has to come first. It’s too important.”

  “Tell me what you need.”

  “There’s a man who I’m afraid could force a confrontation before we are ready. A violent confrontation that we would be likely to lose. Even if we won, it would only be at a terrible price.”

  “Who is it?”

  “His name is Talant Malinin. He is the current head of the Special Police. And a sociopath.”

  “Hmm. That does sound like a problem.”

  “The moment when we first take the square will be the moment of maximum vulnerability. Malinin will know it. And he won’t hesitate to use the Special Police and their heavy weapons to crush us like bugs.”

  “How do I fit into this?”

  “Malinin has a deputy. An ethnic Kyrgyz named Davron Kayrat uluu. He’s young and thoughtful and—we believe—sympathetic to our cause. At least that’s what his sister thinks, and she’s one of us. It would be better for us if Kayrat uluu was the head of the Special Police rather than Malinin.”

  That Malinin’s deputy appended the suffix “uluu” to his name was itself a signifier. Like “Mac” in Scotland, it meant “son of” and was part of a Kyrgyz tradition more common in the countryside than in the Russified capital.

  “You want me to fire him?”

  “In a manner of speaking. We want you to start a rumor that Malinin is planning a palace coup. Eraliev lives in fear of ending his life like Caligula or Pertinax. Murdered by his own Praetorians. If word gets back to him that the Special Police are plotting against the palace, Malinin will be out and Kayrat uluu will be in. He will give us the time we need.”

  Kate shook her head.

  “What makes you think I can do something like that?” she asked incredulously.

  “I think you can do anything. Put the word out in your diplomatic circles. You know that the GKNB listens to every word you say on the phone. Call people and talk about it in a coded fashion that would be easy enough for them to understand. Leave them the dots to connect themselves. They’ll believe it that way.”

  The hairs on the back of Ruslan’s neck jumped to attention. Something had tripped his subliminal alarm bells. He had learned from experience to take those warnings from his subconscious seriously. The feelings of fear emanating from deep in his lizard brain. The fear of being hunted. Moving cautiously. Carefully. He scanned the square the way that Murzaev had taught him, casually but systematically, looking for something that seemed out of place.

  There! By the gates to the Presidential Palace. A man standing by himself with a camera around his neck. Even at fifty meters, Ruslan could see that there was something about the man that did not feel right. In a time when just about everyone carried around a minimum of eight megapixels of photographic resolution in a shirt pocket, this was a bulky SLR with a telephoto lens. Who needs that kind of power? The man was wearing a dark suit and a long black jacket cut like a trench coat. He was taking pictures of the square, zooming in on the Manas statue and the museum. Tourist photos. But he did not look like a tourist.

  To the right of Ruslan and Kate, on another park bench, an older Asiatic man wearing a white felt kalpak sat reading the newspaper. The light was fading now and Ruslan judged that it was too dark to read comfortably, but the pensioner—whose eyes were almost certainly not what they once were—seemed not to mind as he studied the paper in his hand. A nearby coffee shop with a view of at least a part of the square would have offered ample light, but the man seemed to prefer the bench, where, among other things, he had a clear view of Ruslan and Kate.

  “What is it?” Kate asked. “Do you see something?”

  “Time to go,” Ruslan answered.

  “Is someone watching us?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I’m growing paranoid. But paranoids live longer. Follow me.”

  “Where to?”

  “Someplace safe.”

  Ruslan stood up from the bench with a studied, casual air and offered Kate his hand. He led her toward Erkindik Avenue, a busy street that ran north-south parallel to the square. At Murzaev’s insistence, Boldu had acquired a couple of small apartments scattered across the city that could serve as safe houses. They did not use the apartments for regular meetings. They were held in reserve for emergencies. But if he and Kate were being followed, Ruslan reasoned, than this situation was awfully close to clearing that bar. It depended on who was following them.

  He risked a quick glance over his shoulder. Cameraman was pointing the telephoto lens right at them.

  Damn it. He was almost certainly GKNB. It seemed that they had grown a tail. It would have to be cut off. His hope was that they were following Kate, not him. If this was routine surveillance of an American diplomat, there might be no more than two or three operatives watching them. If the security service had even an inkling that she was meeting with Seitek—Public Enemy Number One—there would be hundreds of them and he was as good as dead.

  Murzaev had taught them all the basic principles of surveillance detection and evasion. Ruslan had not had many opportunities to practice, but now seemed like a pretty good time.

  He and Kate turned north on Yusup Abdrahmanov Street. It was growing dark rapidly and the streetlights came on as Bishkek transitioned from afternoon to evening.

  “Stop here for a minute,” Ruslan said as they walked past a bakery with a window display of French-style cakes and pastries. The lights on the inside made it impossible, however, to get any kind of reflection off the glass, and Ruslan risked a quick look behind them. He caught a glimpse of a figure in a dark jacket stepping out of one of the pools of light cast by the streetlamps and then back into the shadows. It was too brief and too far back for Ruslan to be able to judge with certainty that it was Cameraman.

  A family passed Ruslan and Kate, walking in the direction of Ala-Too Square, a multigenerational gaggle out for an evening stroll. None paid them the slightest attention.

  Ruslan and Kate continued north, turning right onto Frunze Street. A middle-aged woman stood on the corner looking at a display of clothing in a store window. Judging by the tight skirts and crop tops on the mannequins, the store was targeting a much younger demographic. Maybe she was shopping for a daughter or a niece, but maybe she was not interested in the clothes at all.

  Passing a narrow alley, Ruslan pulled Kate by the hand into the sheltering darkness. This was the old part of the city. The alleyway street was cobbled and the stones were slick with the greasy residue from the trash cans lined up along the walls. The air was still and stank of rotten food. A fat rat skittered behind a pile of plastic garbage bags. Ruslan and Kate were pressed up against the wall in the deep shadow cast by a commercial-grade dumpster.

  Kate leaned in close and whispered softly in his ear.

  “You always did know how to show a girl a good time.”

  She kissed his cheek. Ruslan squeezed her hand.

  “Stay still.”

  They watched the entrance to the alley and marked the passers-by. A pair of young men talking animatedly about football. A group of women carrying shopping bags. A boy and a girl holding hands. A shopkeeper wearing an apron.

  “Let’s keep moving,” Kate suggested in a
whisper.

  “A little longer.”

  An elderly man in a white kalpak, walking by himself, passed the alley entrance. He looked into the gloom in their direction, but he did not stop or turn off the main street. It was a different jacket, but Ruslan thought it was the pensioner from the square.

  “We need to get off the streets,” Ruslan said quietly.

  “Where?”

  “Not far.”

  He led Kate down the dark alley. They moved slowly so as not to make noise banging into trash cans. The alley ended at Gogol Street.

  Ruslan scanned the street in both directions. He did not see anything that would have indicated GKNB surveillance.

  “Let’s move. Not too slow. Not too fast.”

  After twenty minutes of zigging and zagging through the winding streets of the old city, they reached their destination. Ruslan was reasonably certain that they had slipped the surveillance coverage.

  “In here,” he said.

  The apartment building was old and had seen better days. The mailboxes in the entryway were rusted and buckled and the paint was peeling. The boxes were labeled with numbers, but no names. The lock on box number 14 was broken. On the inside lip overhanging the door of the box Ruslan’s fingers brushed over a piece of thick tape. Carefully he peeled it off and removed the keys that had been left there.

  The first key opened the door to the building. It was dark inside and Ruslan had to search for the switch that illuminated the stairwell. It was three flights up to number 14, which turned out to be a simple one-bedroom apartment with a sitting room and a galley-style kitchen.

  Before they turned on the lights, Ruslan made sure that the heavy curtains were drawn tight. Paranoia saves lives.

  There was a couch and two tattered armchairs set around a low wooden table. The floors were parquet. They might once have been nice, but they were now so stained and scratched as to be good for little more than firewood. The walls were bare and mottled with the plaster scars of repairs performed with a minimum of skill and enthusiasm. A single bulb dangling from the ceiling was the only source of light.