Matthew Palmer - Enemy of the Good

“No. The president told me to ask you to go to the front gate and wait for a package from a Russian general. You are to bring this package to him immediately. You must give it to him directly and to no one else.”

The guard’s skepticism wavered.

“Why would he send a waiter to tell me this?”

“Do you think I’m really a waiter?” Ruslan replied. “Look closely. The uniform doesn’t even fit. But I was assigned to close protection as a last-minute stand-in. It was the best the Office could do.”

The reference to the Office caught the guard’s attention. It was how those on the inside referred to the GKNB.

“Why me?”

“Why the fuck not you?” Ruslan insisted. “Listen, I didn’t ask for you to do this. The president did. Do you want to go over there and ask him why you should be the one to wait at the gate in the dark and the cold? The night shift at Number One will be delighted. Things have been slow recently.”

Here again, the sense of confidence—of command—in Ruslan’s voice was more persuasive than any badge of rank. The guard pulled his shoulders back and might have saluted if Ruslan had not signaled him to discretion with a brief cutting motion.

“I’m undercover,” Ruslan reminded him.

The guard left, walking with pride of purpose. The president himself had entrusted him with a secret mission.

Poor bastard, Ruslan thought.

“Nice job, Seitek.” One of the other faux waiters, a slim, dark-haired woman named Bermet, had joined Ruslan in front of the heavy curtain, all according to the plan, which was back on schedule. The servers’ uniforms in the Great Hall included white gloves, which was fortuitous. They did not wish to leave fingerprints.

Ruslan slipped behind the curtain and felt along the wall until he found what he was looking for, a large metal wheel. There was a hatch built into the wall that was secured like the door on a submarine. Behind the hatch was a bomb shelter stocked with enough emergency rations to last the president and his family through a nuclear winter. The seals on the doorframe were rubber. The designers wanted to make certain that the room would be airtight in the event of a gas attack. It also ensured that the room was soundproof. Ruslan knew this because one of Boldu’s members had worked on the design team.

Boldu was growing and finding allies among the reluctant servants of the regime. The momentum in favor of the movement was building. Ruslan could feel it. And tonight he would make sure that Eraliev could feel it too.

He opened the door just a crack. There were no lights, but Ruslan could hear something moving in the darkness at the bottom of the stairs to the underground room. Something big. He whistled, a low note that rose quickly in tone. The villagers in Ruslan’s home province used this. It was a signal that had been imprinted on the creatures below through experience and repetition. It meant only one thing. Dinner.

“Now,” he whispered, and Bermet pulled the tapestry sharply to one side as Ruslan opened the door wide. An unpleasant, barnyard smell wafted up from the shelter along with the sounds of snorting and large bodies jockeying for space. There was a pounding on the stairs and four tons of hungry hog poured out of the cellar and onto the slick floor of the ballroom. There were a dozen Chinese Jinhua pigs, the smallest of which tipped the scales at three hundred kilograms. Ruslan and a team from Boldu had snuck the pigs into the cellar three days earlier, walking them like dogs on a leash from the back of a truck and across a tarp they had laid over the ballroom floor. The pigs had gone seventy-two hours without food, a new and unpleasant experience for them.

The hogs ran wild through the ballroom, slipping on the freshly polished parquet and knocking tables over in their eagerness to get at the food. Waiters had already begun to deliver the next course and they were carrying trays piled high with rice and mutton and grilled vegetables. The pigs pressed eagerly up against the waiters until the trays crashed noisily to the floor, spilling the food in front of them like so much slop.

A few of the women screamed. A guard pulled a pistol and shot one of the pigs, wounding it rather than killing it and only adding to the chaos as the panicked animal scrambled among the guests squealing in pain and leaving a trail of blood. Someone with more sense shouted at the armed guards to hold their fire.

“You’ll kill someone, you idiot. Someone who matters.”

The other members of the team had their assignments as well. Ruslan watched approvingly from across the room as the Boldu activists produced a stencil and spray paint from under one of the round tables and quickly spray painted a red fist onto the wall. The emblem of the movement. There should be no mistaking the message. Boldu had declared this a party for pigs.

Two of the giant hogs stuck their forelegs up on the head table in an effort to get at the food. The table collapsed as the legs buckled and the plates and silver slid across the floor. The crystal stemware shattered. Eraliev himself tried to rise from his seat, but one of the hogs bumped into him from behind and the president fell unceremoniously onto his ample rear.

It was perfect television, and Ruslan knew that two other Boldu operatives were filming the madness on their smartphones. The video would be uploaded to websites all over the world within hours. This was the Achilles’ heel of authoritarian regimes. They were vulnerable to ridicule.

The videos that his team was making would be the only ones available. Computer hackers loyal to Seitek and Boldu had disabled the security cameras. It would not do for Ruslan or the others to be captured on film. They were not yet ready for open war with the regime. That day would come.

Ruslan stood watch as the members of the Boldu strike force drifted away from the madness in the ballroom, stripping off their waiters’ uniforms to reveal plain dark clothing underneath and disappearing through the side exits into the garden and then out onto the streets of Bishkek. They were all wearing light disguises: wigs, cheek pads, and makeup. It was almost certainly an excess of caution. No one ever really looked at waiters. They were faceless servants of power.

“Why don’t you get moving, Bermet?” Ruslan said. “I’ll follow.” He would be the last to leave.

“I’m staying with you.”

Ruslan started to argue but Bermet shook her head to shut him up. She was not only Ruslan’s comrade in the movement, she was his occasional lover and not above exploiting that position.

When Ruslan was satisfied that the others on the team were safe, he and Bermet started toward the nearest exit. They had waited just a beat too long. He pulled up when he saw a small knot of guards standing by the door. The guard he had dispatched to meet the imaginary Russian general was gesturing in their direction. He drew his pistol and tried to take aim at Ruslan. The crowd blocked his line of fire.

“This way!” Ruslan grabbed Bermet by the arm and pulled her in the direction of a hallway that led away from the exits toward the central core of the palace complex.

“That’s away from the street,” Bermet protested.

“It’s the only way out that’s not blocked.”

The hallway was dimly lit and wove a crooked trail through the palace past office suites and ceremonial rooms that Ruslan assessed as dead ends. They had enough of a head start that they could not see their pursuers, but they could hear them. And Eraliev’s guards only needed to get within pistol range. Embarrassing the president was a capital offense.

The corridor took a sharp ninety-degree turn and there was a steel door on the far wall with a push-bar exit. It was unlocked and opened up onto the garden. Bermet held the door open.