Matthew Palmer - Enemy of the Good

“Let’s go,” she said.

Ruslan stepped through into the shadows of the Presidential Gardens. From here, Boldu had plotted the escape routes. If they could lose their pursuers, there was a chance they could make it out.

The door clicked shut behind him and Ruslan heard the sound of a bolt being thrown shut.

He pounded on the door.

“Bermet,” he hissed. “What are you doing? Open the door.”

“They’re too close.” Her voice was muffled by the wall between them, but he could hear her well enough through a vent at the top of the doorframe. “I will lead them away. You are the only one we cannot lose.”

“Goddamn it, Bermet…”

“Good-bye, Seitek.” He heard the sounds of her running down the corridor and then the heavier sounds of the guards. The door shook as one of them pushed on the arm only to find it locked.

“They went left,” he heard one of the guards shout.

“After them, you bastards.”

Ruslan’s eyes stung with tears as he thought about the magnitude of the sacrifice Bermet was making. Sweet, beautiful Bermet. He knew that she loved him. That he did not love her only compounded his feelings of guilt. He wanted to scream his frustration to the night sky. But if they caught him, then Bermet’s sacrifice would be for nothing. On this side of the garden, there was a gate that a Boldu sympathizer on the palace guard force had arranged to leave propped open. Ruslan kept low as he moved through the shadows.

There would be an accounting for Bermet, he promised. The ledgers would be balanced.

If the government wanted a fight, then Seitek would give them one. It was time for Boldu to step out into the light.

Kate did not expect that it would be easy to do what her uncle had asked of her. Even so, it turned out to be much harder than she had thought.

The first few days after the dinner at the residence were the typical whirl of activity that always attended a PCS—a permanent change of station. The State Department, like all government agencies, was awash in acronyms, often to the point that the original meaning of the abbreviation had been lost in the mists of time. Sometimes the acronym did not even save any letters, and Kate knew that her first order of business would be to acquire a POV. No one seemed to find it odd that this government shorthand for personally owned vehicle was both cumbersome and required exactly as many letters as “car.”

As had been her father’s practice, she looked first at what was available from the German embassy. As much as she hated to traffic in national clichés, the Germans were appropriately obsessive about their automobiles. Kate knew she would find one that had been garaged and carefully maintained with all the records saved in color-coded folders. The German embassy was a dry hole, but Kate got lucky with the Swiss. The Germans’ Germans. A third secretary was selling a four-year-old Volkswagen Touareg with only fifty thousand kilometers on the odometer. He was sorry to see it go, the junior Swiss diplomat explained, but he was being transferred to India and the steering wheel was on the wrong side.

The transition at the embassy was not nearly as smooth. The Department of State moved thousands of people around the world every year, many to strange and exotic locales. For all that practice, one would think the bureaucracy would be better at it. But as Kate’s father had once said after getting caught up in a particularly infuriating tangle of red tape, every time you moved it was as though the department were doing it for the first time. You mean you’re bringing your family with you to post? You have a dog? The school year starts in September? It all seemed like a new experience for the personnel techs and admin specialists who must have, Kate knew, dealt with these same routine concerns a thousand times.

Neither of Kate’s government e-mail accounts had been successfully passed from Havana to Bishkek, meaning that it would be at least a week before she would get on either the secure SIPRNet system or the unclassified intranet. Her orders listed a dependent child that she did not have and the embassy management team seemed disinclined to take her word for it. And—as the capstone insult—the shipping coordinator informed Kate apologetically that her shipment of household effects would take six months to make their way from the island of Cuba to landlocked Kyrgyzstan.

In the meantime, she could continue to use the embassy welcome kit with its assortment of plastic plates and cutlery and polyester sheets. It was a fairly average level of chaos for a transfer, and Kate resolved to go shopping as soon as possible. It was because of mix-ups like this that the typical Foreign Service family traveled the world with three mismatched pasta pots.

Kate’s boss in the political section seemed like a pleasant enough man, if not exactly a ball of fire. Chester Grimes was somewhere north of fifty with a middle-aged paunch, unfashionable steel-rimmed glasses, and a rumpled safari suit. His skin had an unhealthy, almost waxy sheen. He was also getting a little long in the tooth for the job he had. With almost twenty-five years in the service, Chet should have been running one of the big political sections in a place like Nairobi or Moscow or Jakarta, or making his bones as a deputy chief of mission. The combined political-economic section in Bishkek was small, a total of four officers. In addition to Kate and Chet there was Lyle Koslowski, a “junior officer” on his first tour who was just a month shy of his forty-seventh birthday. He had finished his twenty years in the army as a lieutenant colonel and joined the Foreign Service as a second career. Gabby was the lone ECON officer in the section

Chet had the only office. The rest of them were in cubicles with waist-high walls. Government had come late to the open-office concept and was making the change at just the point where the private sector was having second thoughts. Kate shared a cubicle wall with Gabby. A framed photo of her Mustang was perched next to Gabby’s computer monitor.

On her first day in the section, Grimes had sat her down for the talk she knew was coming.

“Is this going to be awkward?” he asked. “You being the ambassador’s niece.”

Grimes ran his fingers nervously through his comb-over as he talked.

“Not on my part. Ethics gave it the green light. I don’t expect to be treated any differently than anyone else in the section. I don’t want to be treated differently.”

“And I want a full head of hair,” Chet replied sardonically. “I don’t think either of us is going to get our wish.”

“I suppose not,” Kate acknowledged.

He had been gracious about it, and Kate understood why Grimes might find her threatening. She would have to be careful, especially at first, not to do anything that would look like a challenge to his authority.

“The biggest thing our section is involved with,” Grimes said, “is the base negotiations. The defense attaché, Colonel Ball, has the lead on the issue for the embassy, at least when he isn’t running around in the mountains with his Kyrgyz Special Forces friends. But we play an important supporting role. Keeping tabs on the shifting political currents and advocating with various key players. I’ve taken personal charge of this issue with Lyle backing me up. Your responsibilities, Kate, are primarily democracy issues, human rights, and the opposition parties… such as they are. It’s not the sexiest portfolio in the section, I’ll admit, but it’s a good training ground for new officers. I know you millennials all feel you should be measuring the drapes in the ambassador’s office, but there’s something to be said for a bit of seasoning.”