“Better?” he asked.
“It’s a start.”
He put his arm around her and Kate snuggled in close, laying her head on his chest.
“So what do we do?” she asked. “Wait and see?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then what?”
“The plan that I told you about for occupying Ala-Too, our own little Maidan revolution?”
“Yes.”
“We need to accelerate it. We don’t sit and wait to be hunted. We go after them.”
“Are you sure about that?” Kate asked, and Ruslan could hear the concern in her voice. He knew she was thinking of what had happened to Azattyk, to her own family.
“Who can be sure about anything?”
“The biggest thing you’ve tried to date has involved no more than thirty people. To take over Ala-Too Square, to challenge the regime, you’re going to need hundreds, thousands maybe. Does Boldu have that many followers?”
“Boldu? No. But I know where I can get them.”
“You’re going to order them from Amazon? Do you get free shipping with that?”
Ruslan laughed.
“Too slow.”
“Where then?”
“The clans.”
Kate cocked her head. “From the villages?”
“From the whole countryside.”
Kate looked skeptical . . . and beautiful. Ruslan leaned over and kissed her neck lightly.
“You’re Kyrgyz, Kate. But you’re a city girl. You don’t know the countryside. We are still, at heart, a nomadic people. Clan identity is a serious matter. Even the word ‘Kyrgyz’ means ‘we are forty,’ as in the forty clans unified by Manas. Eraliev is not just the president. He’s the head of the Sarybagysh, who owe their privileged position to the patronage of Joseph Stalin. The other clans are jealous, and the Solto and Buguu and Adygine and Kara-Kyrgyz are looking for a chance to hit the political reset button. The Buguu, for one, were the most powerful clan until the bloody purges of the nineteen thirties. They haven’t forgotten.”
“This was always your plan, wasn’t it? Focus Eraliev on the threat close at hand—students and democracy activists in the city—so he doesn’t see the danger from the countryside. That’s what you were doing with your pranks and spray paint. It’s like the way a stage magician uses misdirection.”
“You’re pretty smart. Bishkek is the anvil. It’s the clans that are the hammer. And we’ve been working on this for the better part of a year. I think they’re ready. Do you know how Cortés, with five hundred men and a dozen horses, managed to conquer the Aztec empire?”
“Guns and steel.”
“That didn’t hurt. The key thing, however, was local allies, all the other peoples that the Aztecs had kept down and exploited. Cortés gave them a rallying point, but it was the Aztecs’ own subjects who brought them down. We can do it here too.”
“Can the other clans really challenge the Sarybagysh? They’re so much smaller.”
“Individually, that’s true. But there are dozens of clans and they are organized into three ‘wings.’ The Sarybagysh dominate one wing. The Adygine lead another. The third wing, the Ichkilik, is the most diverse. Some of the clans in that wing aren’t even Kyrgyz. We will need to mobilize both the Adygine and the Ichkilik if we are going to have a chance. Murzaev has close ties to the Ichkilik. My job is the Adygine.”
“When will you be ready?”
“Soon. Very soon.”
Ruslan’s tone was calm and confident, his voice level and even. That was for Kate’s benefit. He had no idea whether the clans were really ready, who would answer the call when it came. But there was only one way to find out.
22
Kate left the next morning before dawn, sneaking into her apartment building through the back door just in case Barrone’s people or the GKNB were watching the front entrance. She was simultaneously exhausted and exhilarated.
At the office, Kate felt dreamy and detached from a combination of sleep deficit and what she realized was an emotional state dangerously close to love. How could that happen so fast? she wondered. It was as though she and Ruslan had hit the pause button when they were eighteen, and it took only the lightest of touches for the music to start playing again.
Her cubicle mate noticed that something was off.
“You okay, Kate?” Gabby asked about halfway through the day, leaning over the low partition that separated their work stations.
“Hmm? Oh yeah, never better.”
“You’ve been sitting there for forty-five minutes without touching the keyboard or picking up a piece of paper, looking at the ceiling. What are you doing, playing chess in your head?”
“I’m thinking, Gabby. I need the practice.”
She saw her uncle only once that day, walking down the hall talking animatedly to the embassy management counselor, an African American woman who had taken her Taiwanese husband’s name and was now Carol Zhang. Par for the course in the Foreign Service. The ambassador had nodded at Kate absentmindedly as he walked past, paying her no more attention than he would have any of the hundreds of others who worked in his embassy, as if their meeting in the Cone the other day had never happened.
Kate left work early and took advantage of the comfortably crisp weather to walk back to her apartment. She left her car in the embassy lot, planning to get a good run in the next morning and finish up at the embassy. She could shower in the basement gym and change into one of the outfits that she kept in the supply closet.
The walk helped Kate clear her head and focus on what was going to happen next. Ruslan had explained his plan for occupying Ala-Too Square and forcing a Maidan-like standoff with the government. He was confident that the regime was weaker than it seemed. Brittle. Vulnerable. Kate was not so sure.
“What happens if the security services open fire on the protestors?” she asked.
“They won’t,” Ruslan had promised her.
What Kate knew about Boldu’s plans was precisely the kind of thing that the United States government paid her to learn . . . and report. But she had no intention of writing up what Ruslan had told her as a cable or a memo. Crandle and Brass could not be trusted to keep the secret, and if Eraliev knew about the threat he would move quickly to crush it. She thought about telling her uncle, but she was uncertain about what he might do with the information, whom he might tell. Kate was aware that she was picking a side, drifting seemingly inexorably into the Boldu camp and violating her oath as a foreign service officer. Her professional responsibilities were clear, but so was the right thing to do. If it cost Kate her career, that would be a small enough price to pay for freedom for Kyrgyzstan and, if she was being honest, revenge on Eraliev.
Kate stopped at the newsstand on the way home, not really expecting that Ruslan would have left her a message quite so soon after their tryst, but not entirely unhopeful. The wife was on duty this evening, and Kate’s pulse quickened when she placed her copy of the Times of Central Asia near the register—and out of sight—while making change. Sure enough, back at her apartment, Kate found a small square of translucent onionskin paper with a note that told her to be at the corner of Ochakovskaya and Patrice Lumumba at nine-thirty.
Kate should have been overjoyed. But there was one problem. The handwriting was not Ruslan’s.
—
So if the note was not from Ruslan, then who was it from? Was this a trap of some kind? And did that mean that Ruslan was already in the Pit at Prison Number One, surrendering secrets like Boldu’s network of newsstand messengers a little bit at a time as the Georgian Torquemada exercised his dark inquisitor’s arts?
There was no one to ask for either information or advice. Kate thought fleetingly of using the phone Murzaev had given her. It was sitting like a brick at the bottom of her handbag. She quickly dismissed the idea. That was for genuine lif
e-and-death moments.
The decision she was faced with was largely binary. She could show up at the appointed time and place or not. Kate knew immediately that she would be there.
The hours until nine-thirty crawled by as her anxieties expanded to fill the void in her knowledge. She tried to play but could not feel the music. The Mozart concerto she attempted sounded flat and dull. “Paseo Iluminado” by Cuban jazz great Gonzalo Rubalcaba was, to her expert ear, cacophonous and atonal.
She took a shower and changed, more to pass the time than because she needed to.
At the appointed hour, she was standing as instructed on the corner of Ochakovskaya and Patrice Lumumba. Waiting. Unsure of whom she was meeting or why. It was hard for Kate to know how to dress for the occasion. She wore black jeans and a short jacket. The boots she had chosen had low heels in case she needed to run and steel caps in the toes in case she needed to defend herself. The can of pepper spray in her purse was wholly inadequate for any actually dangerous situation. But it was better than nothing, she reasoned.
The neighborhood was more commercial than residential. After business hours, there were few people on the streets and traffic was light. An older Chinese model caterpillar bus roared past, belching a noxious cloud of diesel fumes.
At 9:35, a metallic silver late-model BMW pulled up to the curb. The passenger side door opened. Shaking her head slightly at the risk she was taking, Kate got in the car.
“Hello, Kate.”
Hamid Ismailov was behind the wheel, wearing a black leather jacket. He did not look happy to see her.
The BMW pulled smoothly away from the curb.
“What’s going on, Hamid? What happened?”
Kate felt an icy stab of fear for Ruslan.
“Not yet. Not here.”
Hamid offered nothing more. Kate knew he did not trust her, and she had to admit that she did not entirely trust him.
After about fifteen minutes on mostly backstreets, Hamid pulled into an underground parking garage. This part of Bishkek was all but deserted at night. The garage itself was dark and empty. Kate’s fear for Ruslan’s safety expanded to include herself. Revolutionaries were notoriously fratricidal. And although he was less bulky than he had been in high school, Hamid was still far stronger than she was.
Hamid parked on the lowest level of the garage, deep in the shadows. There were no other cars visible.
“What are we doing here?” Kate asked. “Is it about Ruslan? Is he in trouble?”
“Albina is dead.”
So Ruslan was safe, and Kate felt a brief and dislocating happiness at the terrible news about Albina. She hated herself for it.
“How?” she asked.
“The Special Police raided their apartment this morning. Albina didn’t want to be taken alive. She knows too much. The twins kept a pair of pistols in their bedroom. We have a friend in the Ministry of Interior who told us that she got into a gun battle with the police. Wounded two of them. Albina made sure that the police had no choice but to shoot her.”
“What about Yana? Is she okay?”
“She was out shopping. We have her in hiding. But she’ll never really be okay.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Are you?” Hamid’s voice was cold.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that there has been a pretty significant breakdown in security. This happens not long after you are invited to a meeting of the council. And you’d have to be stone stupid not to wonder whether these two things are related.”
Hamid shifted in his seat in Kate’s direction. There was a bulge visible under his jacket. He was armed. Through the driver’s-side window, on the other side of the garage, Kate thought she saw something moving in the shadows. Hamid may have brought Scythians with him to this conversation.
“What is it that you’re accusing me of?”
“Nothing yet. But I want to know who you told what. The Special Police got Albina’s name from someone. Was it you?”
“No.”
“Who did you tell?”
“I wrote a report. The whole point of this was for us to be able to help Boldu. But to do that, we needed to know more about the group, including the leadership. But the report was classified and distribution was strictly limited.”
“How limited? Who knew about Albina?”
“I don’t know,” Kate had to admit.
“Your uncle?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Others in the embassy?”
“Yes.”
“The CIA?”
“Yes,” she said miserably.
“Who else do they know about?”
“Valentina. That’s how I got in touch with you in the first instance. The embassy gave me her name.”
“Who else?”
“You,” she admitted.
“You told them about me?” There was an edge in his voice that might have been anger . . . or fear. The two were so closely bound together that it could be hard to tell them apart. Like twins. Like Albina and Yana.
“No. They told me about you. But my report confirms what they knew. I also told them about the twins and about Murzaev and Nogoev.”
“What about Ruslan? Did you give him up as well?”
Kate felt like she had been slapped.
“No. I told them I didn’t know Seitek’s real name.”
“Why not?”
“Because Val asked me not to, and because . . .” Kate struggled for a way to express her internal conflict.
“Because you didn’t trust your own people.” Hamid’s analysis was too simple, too one dimensional. But it was not wrong.
“That’s the long and the short of it, I suppose.”
“You killed Albina. You might as well have pulled the trigger yourself.”
Kate fought back tears.
“We don’t know that,” she protested. “There’s no reason to believe that it was my reporting that exposed the twins. The Special Police have all kinds of sources.”
“Occam’s razor, Kate. The simplest answer is the right one.”
Kate suspected that he was right. And she thought she knew who was responsible.
“I’m sorry, Hamid. I really am.”
“Stay away from us. Stay away from Ruslan. And get out of my car.”
Kate stood alone in the darkened parking garage long after Hamid had driven away, thinking about her next move.
—
The next morning, Kate went to Brass’s office with murder in her heart. The defense attaché suite was just down the hall from the political section in the embassy’s controlled-access area. In acronym-dependent government speak, the DATT’s office was next to POL in the CAA.
The OPSCO, or operations coordinator, opened the door. Chief petty officer Archie Rose ran the day to day of the DATT office. Rose was black and somewhere in his thirties. He had been a sand sailor in Iraq when a roadside bomb cost him the hearing in his right ear and almost ended his career. The navy moved him to intelligence, where Rose had demonstrated a diplomat’s knack for discretion and a flair for managing complex programs. Kate liked him and respected him. It was a shame that a man like this had to work for a man like Brass.
“Good morning, Kate. How can I help you?” Rose’s smile was warm and genuine. He turned his head slightly in conversation, favoring his good ear.
“I need to see Brass,” Kate said. She could feel the anger coiled in her stomach like a snake, but she worked to keep it out of her voice. Her smile, she feared, looked much less natural than the chief’s.
“I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting.”
“He’s going to have to reschedule.”
Kate brushed past Rose and stepped into the suite. She was being rude to a man whose good opinion she valued, but her anger over Albina’s death
and her fear for Ruslan’s safety was driving her. There was no time for the niceties of coordinating calendars.
Brass Ball’s capacious office would easily have accommodated six or seven of Kate’s cubicles. The defense attaché was evidently a collector of military memorabilia, and the office walls were hung with swords, old medals, and battle-scarred flags alongside the more typical framed citations, unit souvenirs, and grip-and-grin photos of Brass with senior military leaders, their shoulders heavy with stars.
The attaché was sitting in one of the brown leather chairs set up in a corner of the office as a place to receive visitors. The CIA station chief was sitting across from him. Thick stacks of classified material were spread out on the coffee table. Crespo was wearing one of the twenty or so identical dark blue suits Kate suspected he had hanging in his closet. Brass was wearing a starched sky blue short-sleeved shirt with a tie and a look of smug self-satisfaction that Kate wanted desperately to shatter.
“Hello, Kate. We were just talking about you.”
That could not possibly be a good thing.
“Why’d you do it, Brass? For the air base? For promotion? Do you want a star that bad? Maybe Eraliev is paying you. Or Svetlana is screwing you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Someone’s been leaking my reporting on Boldu to the security services. I think it was you. And the Special Police killed a friend of mine this morning because of it. Her name was Albina, and she was twenty-seven years old. Goddamn you to hell.”
Crespo watched the angry exchange without saying a word, his head swiveling slightly as Kate and Brass went at it, as though he were watching a tennis match.
“I think you’re a little confused about the nature of this profession,” Brass said with patently false concern. “And I’m frankly a little offended that you would accuse me of leaking. That kind of thing does happen from time to time, I’m sure. But I’m certainly more disciplined than that. Now, if what you’re talking about is intelligence sharing through normal, established channels, that’s something entirely different. That’s something that our country does all the time as a matter of policy. I would hardly call it leaking.”
Enemy of the Good Page 23
