Private Wars

by Greg Rucka

  It was when he saw trail indicating that Walker had crossed the canal that it occurred to Riess that this chase wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d thought it was.

  It was an hour later, circling the TV tower along northern Amir Temur, that he realized that Walker had been planning this run for days, if not weeks, and had been laying false trails for it as well. He doubled back, heading south down Amir Temur, in the direction of the square, and it was as he crossed Husniddin Asomov that the BMW shot through the intersection, its horn blaring, and like an idiot, Riess looked to find the source of the sound rather than getting out of the way.

  And it sure as hell looked like the car was going to hit him, so Riess did what people normally do in such circumstances: he dove, trying to reverse his direction, off the street. He was certain he could feel the front fender of the car brushing his sneaker as he tumbled, and then he was on the ground, trying to roll back to his feet, and that was when he twisted his ankle, and went down again, this time harder, and losing a few layers of skin off his knee as a bonus.

  Riess rolled onto his back, sitting up, pulling his right knee to his chest with both hands, hearing himself curse. He was dimly pleased to realize that he was swearing in Uzbek. He’d have to drop a line later to the folks at Arlington who’d spent forty-four weeks beating the tongue into his head.

  The BMW had come to a stop, and Riess saw it was an older model, maybe ten years old, and the driver’s door opened, and a man came out from behind the wheel, looking concerned, asking if he was all right. Riess’ first thought was that it was funny that he’d been hit by a man who looked just like President Malikov’s son.

  “Are you all right, can you stand?” the man asked him, reaching down to take hold of Riess by the upper arms. “Can you stand?”

  “It’s all right,” Riess said. “I’m all right.”

  “I didn’t see you running like that, I’m very sorry. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Riess nodded, trying to figure out what to say next. He wasn’t a spook, he wasn’t one of Tower’s cadre of case officers, he was the Deputy Chief Political Officer for the U.S. Mission to Uzbekistan, most often referred to as a poloff. He’d had some basic training in tradecraft, mostly security, ways to keep himself safe, ways to determine if he was being targeted. But when it came time for cloaks and daggers to be handed out, Riess’ job was to stay at the embassy and well out of the way. Even working with Dina Malikov had been a stretch, a job he’d only undertaken at the request of his ambassador.

  He wasn’t a spook, but he knew what this was, and he was quick enough to know that if Ruslan Malikov was trying to make contact with him covertly the day after his wife’s body had been found outside of Chirchik, the odds were that they were both being watched.

  Riess let Malikov help him to his feet, wincing as he tried to place some of his weight on his ankle. The pain ran around the top of his foot like barbed wire, and he hissed. Malikov put one arm at the small of his back to support him.

  “Do you need a hospital? I can take you to the hospital.”

  “No, I think I’ll be okay.” Riess tried it again, stepping gingerly and gritting his teeth, and found that if he turned his foot inward slightly, the pain wasn’t quite so intense. Malikov’s hands came off him, and Riess hobbled experimentally.

  “You’re certain?”

  “It’s okay,” Riess said. “Really, it’ll be fine. Just needs some ice. I’ll handle it when I get home.”

  Malikov studied him, as if trying to discern the truth of the statement, then nodded and moved around the BMW, back to the driver’s side. Without another word, he climbed behind the wheel, slammed the door, and pulled away, back into the thin traffic on the avenue.

  Riess grimaced, swore again, louder, mostly for the benefit of anyone who might have been listening. He had to assume he was being watched now, even if he couldn’t see the watchers, even if he was, just perhaps, being paranoid rather than prudent. It took him a few seconds to realize that what he needed to do next was exactly what he’d been doing before, and he hobbled back toward the street, and spent the next three minutes trying to hail a cab to take him to the Meridien Hotel, near Amir Temur Square.

  Once in the taxi and in traffic, Riess leaned back in his seat and reached around, behind his back, to where Malikov had slipped the note into the waistband of his sweats. It was a small square of paper, folded over several times, and easy to conceal in his palm, and so Riess did as he bent forward to check his sore ankle. He slipped the paper into his sock.

  The cab dropped him at the hotel, and he hobbled up the steps and into the lobby to find that the others were already there, in the bar, with the hare, who was now drunk almost beyond all comprehension. Lydia Straight, the press attaché at the Embassy, saw him and thus initiated the first round of heckling.

  “Chuck! You made it!”

  Jeers followed.

  Riess showed Lydia his middle finger and took the offered beer from Walker’s somewhat unfocused grip. He drank it while leading a rendition of “The Real Story of Gilligan’s Island,” then started a second while joining in on the traditional version of Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” before excusing himself to the restroom. He used the sink first, running water to wipe the sweat from his face and the grime from his hands, then wet a paper towel to use in cleaning his skinned knee. When he finished, the only other patron in the men’s room had departed, and Riess moved to the toilet stall, where he dropped his sweats, sat on the toilet, and only then retrieved the note.

  It was written in English, which surprised him, all in careful block capitals, painstakingly laid onto the paper.

  CHARLES—

  I KNOW WHAT MY DINA WAS DOING FOR YOU AND YOUR AMBASSADOR, AND FOR THIS MY SISTER HAVE HER MURDER.

  MY FATHER IS SICK AND NOT FOR LAST LONG. IT WILL BE BETWEEN MY SISTER AND MYSELF THAT IS TO RULE. I AM YOUR MAN NOW. I WANT FOR MY COUNTRY MORE TO BE LIKE YOURS. I WILL DO WHAT EVER IT WILL TAKES.

  MY SISTER KNOWS THIS AND WILL TRY TO HAVE ME MURDER SOON.

  I WILL DO WHAT EVER IT TAKES.

  The note was unsigned, and Riess figured that was because a signature didn’t much matter. He read it again, slower, just to be sure he understood what was being said, then got to his feet, pulling up his sweats. He flushed the toilet, and used the rush of water to hide the noise of the tearing paper. He waited until the toilet refilled, dropped the fragments into the bowl, and flushed a second time. When the bowl refilled again with nothing but dirty water, he left the stall, relieved to see that he was still alone in the bathroom.

  Riess returned to the bar in time for another drink and the second chorus of “Put Your Thighs on My Shoulders,” then sang the raunchiest version of “Rawhide” he knew as a duet with Lydia. They were on the third verse when the management asked them, politely, to leave.

  He took a cab home, showered, changed, and then called the Residence using the house phone. The line had been checked by the Embassy’s security staff only three weeks ago as part of their standard evaluation, and Riess was as certain as he could be that it wasn’t bugged. Even so, when the Ambassador came on the line, he kept things vague, asking when would be a good time to come see him.

  “This what I think it is?” Ambassador Garret asked him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “DCM is hosting a dinner tonight at his residence for a couple of the DPMs, including that bastard from the Ministry of the Interior, Ganiev. Come late, Chuck. Come very late. Hour of the wolf.”

  “Hour of the wolf,” Riess agreed.

  “How?” Ambassador Garret asked.

  “They boiled her to death,” Riess answered. He tried to make the declaration merely factual. He failed.

  “Jesus Christ.” Garret passed a broad hand over his face, wiping the sleep away from his eyes. “Jesus Christ, she’s his daughter-in-law, she’s married to Ruslan, and Malikov let the NSS lobster-pot her?”

  “The Ministry of the Interior is claiming it was Hizb-ut-Tahir.”


  “I know what they’re claiming. Jesus Christ.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Ambassador closed his eyes, then opened them again. “She gave you up. If they tortured her, she gave you up.”

  “I think it’s a safe assumption, yes, sir.”

  “When was the last time you met with her?”

  “On the second, so that’s nine days ago now. That’s where I got the videotape.”

  Garret frowned, remembering the recording. “Why’d they kill her?”

  “It might have gotten out of control. They’re not terribly gentle about these things.”

  “But they can be, Chuck, they can be. They could have fixed it so they got what they wanted and then sent her back home.”

  “She would have told her husband.”

  Garret looked at him, his brow creasing, thinking. “Maybe.”

  “You think there’s something else to it?”

  “I think that Dina Malikov was alive on Thursday, dead by Friday, and today, Saturday, her husband arranged a meeting with you to say that he wants to play ball. The timing makes me nervous.”

  “I got the impression from his note that he’d been looking for an opportunity for a while, sir,” Riess said. “Dina’s death may have been the impetus he needed to make the move.”

  “Which may be why they killed her in the first place. If it was the old man who did it.”

  Riess heard the doubt in his voice. “You think it was Sevara?”

  “I think Sevara wants the crown, Chuck. And if Malikov really is coming up on his last legs, she may be trying to clear the way for a run at the throne.”

  Riess considered, watching as Garret looked away from him to the grandfather clock ticking solidly in the corner study’s corner. The Ambassador’s mouth tightened to a line, and then he used his broad hands on the broader armrests of his easy chair to push himself to his feet.

  “Four in the fucking morning,” he said. “Let’s go to the kitchen. I need some coffee.”

  The house was silent and dark. The trip from Riess’ house downtown to the Residence on the outskirts of Tashkent normally took half an hour, but at three in the morning, Riess had been able to make it in half that time. The roads had been almost entirely vacant, and he’d driven quickly, in an attempt to flush any possible tails. He hadn’t seen any, but that didn’t give him much confidence that he’d gone undetected. It didn’t really matter; he was known in the Embassy as the Ambassador’s legman, much to the annoyance of his immediate superior, Political Counselor T. Lindsay McColl. If Riess was called out to the Residence at half past three in the morning, then it was unusual, but not unheard of.

  Riess followed the Ambassador through the house, Garret alternately switching on lights to illuminate their way, turning off others as they no longer needed them. Riess wondered if it was a security measure or a habit. Maybe he did it to keep from disturbing his wife. Whatever it was, Riess was certain there was a purpose to it. In his experience, there was very little that Kenneth Garret, the United States Ambassador to Uzbekistan, did without a very good reason.

  Riess’ immediate superior in the Mission, McColl, as uptight and self-righteous a Europeanist as Riess had ever met in the Foreign Service, consistently referred to Garret as “the Grizzly,” though never while in earshot of the Ambassador. McColl did a poor job of hiding his resentment of Garret, a resentment born, Riess supposed, more of envy than of anything else. Both men shared the same political rank at State, and McColl not only had seniority, but a pedigree, and felt that Garret had robbed him of his rightful ambassadorship. The nickname was meant, therefore, as an insult of the highest order.

  But limping after Garret through the Residence, Riess thought it was anything but. Six foot three and easily two hundred and forty pounds, everything on Garret had that ursine sense of scale and restrained power, from the breadth of his chest and the strength in his shoulders down to the thickness of each of his fingers. In all the time Riess had known him, first serving as a junior political officer at the embassy in St. Petersburg where Garret had been posted as Deputy Chief of Mission, and now, six years later, serving as his legman in Tashkent, he’d never once seen Garret exhibit anything but an absolute, controlled calm. No matter what he did, if he laughed, if he despaired, it was all with the same gravitas.

  People underestimated the Ambassador to their peril, and while Riess himself had never heard Garret talk about it, it was well known among the Mission staffers just how tall the man could stand. No new arrival to the Chancery in Uzbekistan could make it more than a week before hearing the infamous “Fuck Off, Senator” story.

  It went something like this:

  Seems that Kenneth Garret had spent a year at CENTCOM as a political adviser after one of his DCM stints. His job had been primarily to offer political insight and counsel to General Anthony Zinni. After CENTCOM, Garret had rotated back to State, and then, the following year, had been nominated as Ambassador to Kuwait by the Clinton White House. It was a done deal as far as the White House was concerned, and even the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had looked to be smooth sailing, a rubber-stamp proceeding.

  Except that the Committee in question was chaired by Senator Jesse Helms, and Helms’ history with Zinni was, as one of Riess’ colleagues had described it, “defined by white-hot hatred,” as a result of a particularly harsh facing Zinni had delivered to the Senator following the Gulf War. After the war, Helms had gotten the not-very-bright idea of turning the Iraqi army-in-exile around on Saddam with CIA backing, in an attempt to overthrow the dictator. It was a plan that suffered from a legion of problems, small and large, so many in fact that General Zinni, in a public hearing, had referred to the idea as a “Bay of Goats.”

  The Senator was not well pleased.

  Garret, so the story went, was approached by one of Helms’ staffers prior to confirmation. The staffer informed the Ambassador-in-waiting that his confirmation would positively sail on through, but that, during the closed hearing, the Chairman would ask Mr. Garret some pointed questions about General Zinni. And if Mr. Garret then took it upon himself to perhaps criticize the General’s judgment and leadership, well, it would be appreciated. Certainly such comments in a closed hearing would be a small price to pay for Mr. Garret to finally achieve a posting of importance and prestige, one he’d been pursuing throughout his professional career.

  According to the story, Garret embarked on one of his infamous pauses, lasting—depending on who was recounting the tale—anywhere from fifteen seconds to an ungodly two and a half minutes, before offering his answer.

  “Fuck off.”

  When the staffer regained his ability to speak, he informed Garret that any confirmation hearing would not occur until the Chairman moved for the nomination to be considered by the Committee, something that Mr. Garret, by his answer, had just guaranteed would never happen. Not just this job lost, no sir. No position requiring a Senate confirmation. Ever.

  Nice knowing you, Mr. Garret.

  The Clinton White House, on the other hand, upon hearing of what had transpired, rewarded Garret for his loyalty with a position on the National Security Council. And it was on the NSC that Garret remained until Colin Powell came aboard as S and heard the story himself. Didn’t hurt that Powell and Zinni were tight, and so Garret found himself back at the State Department, working in Counterterrorism . . . a position that became the epicenter of the policy universe only a few months later.

  Riess liked the story for a number of reasons, but mostly because it had a happy ending. Helms and his winged monkeys on the SFRC left the Hill, and the moment they were gone, Powell pushed for Garret to get the Uzbekistan job. This was pre-Iraq but post-9/11, and the posting was second in importance only to the Mission in Islamabad, given the situation in Afghanistan. More, it was a reward for loyalty, for a job well done that put Garret in line for even greater things. After Uzbekistan, the Ambassador could expect his next posting to be in Turkey, or Australia, or Moscow, where
ver he damn well pleased.

  This was, in part, why what Garret was undertaking was so potentially dangerous. If it failed, it could end the Ambassador’s career.

  And Riess didn’t even want to think about what it would do to his.

  “I want Ruslan in charge,” Garret told Riess. “He’s the best bet we have going to turn this country into something resembling a free society.”

  “I agree.”

  “Problem is, Ruslan doesn’t have the muscle to take over when his old man kicks it. And right now, everyone back in Washington likes the looks of his sister. They think Sevara’s their girl. She’s made some overtures already, she’s indicated her willingness to play ball. As far as the old guard back at State are concerned, she’s already halfway into power.”

  “She’s as corrupt as her father is,” Riess said. “She’s just more subtle about it.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Garret said. “It’s the Kissinger legacy, Chuck. The realists are looking at her as someone who can get the job done, who’ll hold the line against the extremists, and who’ll continue to support the war. And we can’t lose Uzbekistan, we need the conduit into northern Afghanistan.”

  “We’d get all those things from Ruslan. If we supported him, we’d get all those things, and it’d be better for the country, to boot.”

  Garret studied him thoughtfully, not speaking for several seconds, and Riess wondered if he’d perhaps stepped over some unknown line. If it had been McColl he was speaking to, he’d never say these things, but the Ambassador had always encouraged him to speak his mind. Even so, Riess worried that he’d gone too far.

  “You’re going to have those ex-KGB bastards crawling all over you, you know that?” Garret asked, finally. “Even if Dina didn’t give you up, Ruslan’s contact with you today guarantees it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Ambassador gave him a small, paternal smile, then turned to the coffeemaker and proceeded to fill two cups. He handed Riess one, then asked, “You ever meet Ruslan? Before today, I mean?”