Enemy of the Good

by Matthew Palmer

  “So you did turn over my reporting to Eraliev’s people. You let them use my information to kill my friend.”

  “Your reporting? Your information? Your friend? Kate, this isn’t about you. That’s the fundamental truth that you have been unable to grasp. I understand why you’re a little unmoored by what happened to . . . Albina, was it? . . . but I’m not going to share with you what we have passed to the relevant Kyrgyz authorities as part of routine intelligence cooperation. Frankly, you’re not cleared for it.”

  “That was State Department reporting and it was classified at the secret level. It doesn’t belong to you. You had no right to share it through DOD channels.”

  “Take it up with Winston Crandle.”

  “I will. But first, I’m taking it to the ambassador.”

  “Excellent,” Brass said, and his smile was cold. “We have certain issues that we need to discuss. Together.” The defense attaché gestured in Crespo’s direction, including him in the conversation for the first time.

  “Such as?”

  Instead of answering, Brass reached over to the phone on the side table and hit first the speaker button and then a number on speed dial.

  Rosemary picked up on the second ring.

  “Yes, Colonel?”

  “Is he ready for us?”

  “Yes. He’s expecting you now. Frank is already here.”

  “Good. We’ll be right down.”

  Brass hung up and looked at Kate. His smile was gone. His eyes squinted almost shut as though he were marking a distant target from the cockpit of his F-22.

  “Such as why you are sleeping with Seitek, whose real name it would seem is Ruslan Usenov. And why you lied when you were asked about it. I think I’m going to enjoy hearing your explanation.”

  And Kate knew that she was now in a great deal of trouble.

  —

  “I have to say, Kate, that I’m concerned about what I’m hearing from Frank and Colonel Ball. But I want to hear your side before I make any decisions.”

  Her uncle looked stern and serious, and almost exactly like her father the night when she was in high school and had snuck out of the house, gotten drunk with her girlfriends, and gotten caught.

  “Thank you, Ambassador. But I don’t know what you’re hearing.”

  “Frank, why don’t you tell Kate what you told me.”

  The RSO looked at Kate the way he might have looked at a suspected meth dealer back in his days as a beat cop in Chicago. With contempt. He pulled a slim reporter’s notebook out of his jacket pocket.

  “Ms. Hollister told us that the man we observed her with at Ala-Too Square was Grigoriy Vetochkin, who was, according to her account, an old boyfriend from the International School of Bishkek. I took the pictures from Ala-Too Square to ISB, where the registrar”—he glanced briefly at his notebook— “Jane Larson identified the man in the photos as Ruslan Usenov, who she indicated had been romantically involved with Ms. Hollister. Additionally, Ms. Larson reported that while there was, in fact, a student at ISB named Grigoriy Vetochkin, he was in the class a year ahead of Ms. Hollister and the two of them were never, so far as she knew, intimate.”

  Kate’s face flushed with embarrassment as the four men processed these decade-old details of her love life. She should have thought to call Mrs. Larson—Jane, she now knew—and ask her to back up the story she had told. It was too late for that now.

  “Kate, what’s your side?”

  Possible answers to that question cascaded through Kate’s mind. The truth was not one of them. She was loyal to her country, her family, and her employer, but the circumstances were complicated. Right and wrong were increasingly murky, free-floating concepts. Kate had come to understand at a bone-deep level what her uncle had meant when he spoke of values complexity. She was torn, and the sensation was almost a physical pain.

  Ultimately, Kate was willing to sacrifice what little was left of her government career to protect Ruslan and defend what he stood for. The fight for freedom was why she had gone into government in the first place. She was determined to buy Ruslan as much time as she could. She had done the same for Reuben in Havana. She would do no less for the man and the country she loved.

  Kate looked her uncle squarely in the eyes. It took considerable willpower not to look away.

  “It’s true. The man in the photos is Ruslan, not Grigor. I lied to you about that. And I apologize. Ruslan is married, unhappily if that matters, but married nonetheless. I didn’t want to make trouble either for him or for me, and when Frank ambushed me with those photos, I panicked and I lied. This wasn’t about Boldu. It was about protecting my privacy.”

  “You have a top secret security clearance,” Barrone protested. “You have no right to privacy.”

  The ambassador cut him off.

  “So are you telling me that Usenov is not part of Boldu? That he isn’t Seitek?”

  “Yes, I am,” Kate lied, and a little part of her soul died, sacrificed on the altar of values complexity. “I don’t know why you all jumped to the conclusion that he was. I would have expected more intellectual discipline from the CIA”—she turned and looked at Brass—“if not necessarily from the DIA.”

  Brass shrugged.

  “We had our reasons.”

  “Such as?”

  “It fit the profile.”

  “Seitek’s?”

  “Yours.”

  Kate was stunned.

  “Mine?”

  “We don’t know who Seitek is, but that doesn’t mean we don’t know anything. According to the fragments of intel we have, he’s young, charismatic, and reportedly has a weakness for attractive women.”

  “You don’t mean . . .” Kate was at a loss for words.

  “If you gained access to the Boldu inner circle, there was at least a reasonable chance that Seitek would seek to establish a relationship with you. Whether you were open to that or not, it would at least let us learn who he was.”

  “And you approved of this, Uncle Harry?” Kate’s tone was sharp and accusatory. “Pimping out your niece? That’s pretty low.”

  The ambassador held up his hands in a calming gesture that only made Kate angrier.

  “It wasn’t like that at all. I was hoping that you’d be able to make contact with the Boldu leadership, which you did. Anything beyond that was entirely in your control. No one asked you to do anything other than your job. You did good work. But you also lied to me. And I told you when you first arrived that I would not tolerate divided loyalties. I have tremendous respect for you, Kate, but I’m not certain I can trust you.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to think about it.”

  The signal was unambiguous. The meeting was over. And Kate was in limbo.

  As they stood to leave, Crespo’s jacket got caught on Kate’s handbag, knocking it onto the floor and spilling the contents onto the carpet, including the phone that Murzaev had given her.

  Crespo knelt on the floor with Kate and helped her repack her bag. Kate moved quickly to retrieve the phone before the station chief had a chance to ask about it. She was not supposed to bring any electronics into the controlled-access area. Ball and Barrone were out in the hall, and the ambassador was on the other side of the room already digging through the stack of papers on his desk.

  Crespo leaned in close and whispered in Kate’s ear.

  “They’re going to kill him.”

  He stood and left without saying another word.

  Kate left the Front Office suite staggering under the load of what had been an ugly, emotionally charged exchange. She needed air. And she needed to reach Ruslan. Quickly.

  Twenty minutes later, half a dozen blocks from the embassy, Kate pulled Murzaev’s phone from her bag and punched in the code 314159. Pi to five places.

  Murzaev ans
wered.

  “Da?”

  “His forefathers were all khans.”

  “I’ve been expecting your call.”

  23

  The mountains loomed over the plains as they loomed over the Kyrgyz soul. Dark and forbidding. Eight hundred years ago, Genghis Khan’s armies had ridden across these plains in the shadows of these unconquerable mountains.

  Ruslan tilted his head back and looked up into a perfect blue bowl of sky, unblemished by even a wisp of cloud. Behind him, the Ala-Too mountains were a dull steel gray. In front of him, the flat plains were all muted browns and tans with only the occasional flash of green where a few farmers scratched a hard living from the thin soil. The Kyrgyz were not farmers, Ruslan thought. They were herders, and raiders, and warriors. The settled life of the village had been forced on them. But their nomadic hearts rebelled at that role.

  He had been driving for almost seven hours, more a testament to the rugged roads than the distance. The Russian jeep he was driving was reasonably reliable and it handled well in the mountains, but it was also cramped and uncomfortable. Ruslan had stopped at a bend in the road to both stretch his legs and drink in the beauty of the valley.

  The landscape was stark and severe and the Ala-Too would make any man feel small. But Ruslan also felt at home here. He had been born in Kara-Say, a village that clung to the side of these harsh mountains like a barnacle on a whale. He had spent his summers here with his father’s extended family, learning to ride as a Kyrgyz should, fearlessly, to shoot, to hunt, and to help a ewe deliver a lamb in a breech birth. Under the watchful eyes of his grandfather, he had competed in the annual horse festival in which young men from across the province challenged one another in traditional games including wrestling on horseback, grabbing bags of silver coins from the ground at a gallop, and the wild and dangerous game of ulak-tartysh, a kind of polo with few rules that used a headless goat carcass as a ball.

  For Ruslan, Kara-Say was salty meals of mutton and paloo, the comaraderie of the wolf hunt, and ice-cold swims in the Naryn River, fed by melting snow from the mountain peaks. He could see the Naryn off in the distance, stretched out across the valley floor like a turquoise green ribbon. The river ran hard and fast in the spring, but for all its vitality the waters of the Naryn would never reach the sea. And by fall, the river would be a mere trickle. It was a good thing to remember, Ruslan thought to himself. Strength fades. Nothing lasts forever. For more than twenty years, the Eraliev regime has seemed invincible. Ruslan hoped that this was about to change.

  Back behind the wheel, he steered the tough little jeep down the rutted road that led through the center of Kara-Say and then on to the Chinese border. It had been a few years since Ruslan had been back here, but the town was largely as he had remembered it. The village was far from beautiful, mostly one- or two-story concrete buildings that bore the unmistakable look of Soviet pragmatism, all right angles and rough materials. A kind of brutalist utopia. The Kyrgyz preferred the yurt, rounded and soft-sided. A product of the family rather than the state. Many of the buildings in this village had been painted in pastel colors, pale peach or light blue, the architectural equivalent of lipstick on a pig.

  It might not have been picturesque, but Kara-Say was vibrant and alive. The outdoor markets were well stocked with fruits and vegetables, rice, meat, and housewares. Many of the buildings had ground-floor stores with hand-painted signs advertising a variety of goods and services. There was a hair salon and a teahouse and an outdoor restaurant serving roasted lamb and fermented mare’s milk.

  There was something missing, however. Men. Or at least young men. There were boys and old men in felt kalpaks and the padded coat with a high collar called a chapan. But there were very few men of working age on the streets of Kara-Say. Nearly all, Ruslan knew, had left for Bishkek or Moscow or Kazakhstan, where they worked low-skill jobs in construction or dirty and dangerous jobs in the oil fields. Remittances from men working abroad were the lifeblood of the Kyrgyz economy. For an extended family, money from even one “guest worker” could be the difference between security and hunger.

  Traffic in the village was light, mostly carts pulled by horses or small tractors with a few Russian or Chinese cars mixed in. Ruslan parked in front of an unassuming single-story building made of whitewashed concrete. The shutters were dark wood carved with elaborate scenes of horsemanship and falconry, the two great preoccupations of the building’s principal resident. This was the home of Kara-Say’s most prominent citizen, Tashtanbek Essenkul uluu. The village was something of a backwater, but Tashtanbek was regarded as the de facto leader of the Adygine, and Ruslan would need his support if his plan for the occupation of Ala-Too Square was going to have any chance of success.

  In theory, Ruslan was expected. He had sent a message ahead that should have beaten him to Kara-Say by half a day at least. He would know soon enough.

  The door was made of local walnut and the brass knocker was shaped like a horse head. The woman who opened was dressed in traditional Kyrgyz fashion in a maroon skirt embroidered in gold thread and trimmed with fox fur. Her hair—which Ruslan knew was long and streaked with gray—was hidden under an elechek, a tall linen headdress that identified her as a married woman. If it were not for her chunky tortoiseshell glasses, she might have been straight out of the time of the khans.

  Naz was one of Tashtanbek’s innumerable nieces. She had run the clan leader’s household for as long as Ruslan could remember.

  She kissed Ruslan gently on the cheek.

  “He’s waiting for you.”

  And Ruslan knew that his message had preceded him to Kara-Say.

  “Thank you, Naz.”

  The shutters were closed. It was dark inside the house, dark as a yurt. In the center of the main room, a fire burned in a stone pit. The smell of wood smoke was strong but not unpleasant. The walls were hung with shyrdak, felt carpets dyed with geometric patterns in bold colors. On the far wall, behind the raised wooden platform where the men sat, a stunning embroidered tapestry called a tush kyiz marked the seat of honor. Shyrdak were relatively commonplace. Tourists would buy them in the bazaars as souvenirs. Tush kyiz were works of art and deeply personal statements about family ties and the connection with the land. They would typically hang over the marriage bed, but Tashtanbek’s beloved wife had passed away more than twenty years ago, and the ornate tush kyiz that she had brought to the marriage as part of her dowry had been repurposed as a marker of Tashtanbek’s status.

  The clan leader sat cross-legged on the platform under the tush kyiz, sipping tea out of a ceramic bowl. Like Naz, Tashtanbek wore traditional clothing. His jelek, a kind of belted coat, was made of brown velvet, and his kalpak was tall and four paneled with a pronounced brim that would shield him from the sun and rain when he rode. He was not a tall man, but even at more than seventy years of age his back was straight and his shoulders broad. Tashtanbek’s name meant “strong as stone,” and it was an appropriate moniker for a man whose impassive face seemed to have been carved from a block of granite.

  Ruslan could not recall ever seeing him smile.

  “Kosh kelingiz, Ruslan,” Tashtanbek said, welcoming him. “Assalom aleykum.”

  “Aleykum assalom, Grandfather.”

  Ruslan’s father, Taalay, was Tashtanbek’s son, the youngest of four. The Soviet education system, as voracious in its own way as the state-run sports programs, had reached out even as far as Kara-Say, and it had identified Taalay early on as an exceptionally gifted student of mathematics. Reluctantly, Tashtanbek had allowed his youngest son to move to Bishkek for high school and to Moscow for university. Taalay had married outside the clan and taken a Russified name. Tashtanbek had insisted, however, that his grandson stay connected to the village and the Adygine. Ruslan was about to test the strength of those bonds.

  He sat next to his grandfather on a small carpet and accepted a bowl of green tea from Naz.

 
; “It’s been too long since you have been back to Kara-Say,” his grandfather said with a hint of admonition in his gravelly voice.

  “You’re right, Grandfather. And I apologize. Things have been a little crazy at work.”

  Tashtanbek was one of the few outside the inner circles of Boldu who knew Seitek’s identity. For a brief moment, Ruslan thought that the corners of his grandfather’s mouth might have twitched up into the slightest of smiles. But it was probably just a trick of the firelight.

  “We will talk about your work later,” Tashtanbek said. “Family first.”

  For the next hour, the clan leader spoke at length and in detail about the whereabouts and well-being of Ruslan’s entire extended family. Ruslan contributed what he could, but since Boldu had begun to challenge Eraliev, Ruslan had been careful to keep his distance from family. He was dangerous to be around.

  At first, Ruslan was restless, wanting to dive straight into the business of revolution he had come to discuss with his grandfather. But he knew that there was no rushing a Kyrgyz village elder. The social conventions were sacrosanct. There would be talk and food before business could be done. So he did his best to relax. And he found that it was both pleasant and refreshingly normal to talk about the day-to-day doings of friends and relatives.

  While Ruslan and his grandfather talked over tea, Naz was directing preparations for the mandatory feast. Tables set up in the garden were soon groaning with food. Guests, all of them men, began to arrive and joined Tashtanbek and Ruslan around the fire, drinking bowls of green tea and kumys. Many were related to Ruslan in some way.

  When Naz signaled that all was ready, they made their way to the tables. The walled garden was spacious and green. It was twilight, and a string of lights hung between two walnut trees gave the dinner the feeling of a festival.

  The meal itself, as was the norm in Kyrgyzstan, was protein intensive. A small team of village women served the men from heaving platters of mutton, beef, and horsemeat. Naz was famous for her beshbarmak, mutton boiled in broth and served over noodles with coriander and parsley. Beshbarmak meant “five fingers” and it was to be eaten with the right hand.