Matthew Palmer - Enemy of the Good

Kate pulled her phone out of her purse and unlocked it. She activated the camera function and took a few quick pictures of the face-off between the demonstrators and the police. The moment felt as though it were poised on the edge of a precipice—balanced just on the tipping point, such that the lightest breeze could knock it back onto solid ground or send it over the brink into free fall, spiraling out of control.

“Ready!”

With their tinted faceplates pulled down, Kate could not tell which of the riot police gave the command. But the black-clad paramilitaries raised their shields, and the sound of batons being drawn from their leather holsters was a reptilian hiss.

Kate took a picture.

“Advance!”

The police stepped forward three paces until they were face-to-face with the demonstrators. The no-man’s land between the two lines was no more than half a meter. One of the Women in Black who looked like she might have been about college age began to sing. Her voice was light and brittle but clear. Kate recognized the song, a Kyrgyz folk ballad of longing and lost love. She knew the words. They all knew the words and one by one the demonstrators and bystanders added their voices to the chorus and the singing became an act of pure defiance, a gauntlet dropped at the feet of the RoboCop-like police. Kate joined them, linking arms with Patime and abandoning any pretense of diplomatic neutrality.

As the last notes of the song died away, a single stone thrown from somewhere in the back of the crowd struck one of the Special Police on the helmet. The policeman reacted instinctively, pushing forward with his shield and knocking two of the Women in Black, including a young girl, to the pavement.

The fragile truce dissolved in an instant with riot police swinging their truncheons and the crowd of onlookers grabbing their arms and clawing at their shields.

Kate snapped photographs.

One of the Women in Black ran past Kate, blood streaming down her face from where a riot trooper’s baton had left a gash on her scalp deep enough to expose the white of her skull. A man with a dark coat and the build of a wrestler got ahold of one policeman’s shield and dragged him to the ground.

But it was an unequal fight. And it did not take long for the Special Police to establish control, scattering the demonstrators and handcuffing the die-hards who continued to resist. Patime had waded into the melee and was one of those lying facedown, her hands tied behind her back with neon yellow flex cuffs.

One officer, a large man with broad shoulders and legs like tree trunks, approached Kate. He lifted his faceplate and stretched out his hand.

“Give me your phone,” he said in Russian. “No pictures.”

“I am an American diplomat and this phone is U.S. government property. It is covered by the Vienna Convention. It’s inviolate. So am I for that matter.”

The cop blinked hard. The uncertainty was plain on his face, but so was the skepticism. Kate realized her mistake. Her Russian was perfect and if it was at all accented the accent was Kyrgyz. He did not believe Kate was an American because there was nothing “foreign” about her.

“You do not want incident international.” Kate tried to make her Russian sound American and she deliberately screwed up the grammar, but it was too late to correct the first impression. The riot trooper stepped in close and grabbed her wrist. He took Kate’s phone, a brand-new Samsung Galaxy, and smashed it on the concrete. He seemed to think for a moment about shoving Kate to her knees and strapping her wrists together with flex cuffs but instead chose discretion as the better part of valor, on this point at least.

Kate bent to one knee and gathered the broken pieces of her phone. Maybe something could be recovered from the memory. She watched as the Special Police bundled the Women in Black and their supporters—the broken fragments of the demonstration—into the back of a windowless van.

Here and there, the cement tiles of the plaza were slick with blood.

To the extent that Kate had anticipated that others in the embassy would share her outrage at the heavy-handed treatment of the Women in Black, she was disappointed. As required, immediately after getting back to the office, she had filed a report with the regional security officer that focused primarily on her own confrontation with the police and the destruction of embassy property. Within the hour, she had been called to the ambassador’s office.

Her uncle was solicitous and obviously concerned about her safety, but there had been an undercurrent of annoyance as well, as though it were somehow Kate’s fault that the police and the demonstrators had come to blows. “I’m doing everything I can for you, Kate,” he had said to her, “but if there’s a rerun of Havana here in Bishkek I won’t be able to protect you.” Although it was unlikely that he had meant it that way, it sounded to Kate almost like a threat.

Kate had written up the incident in a cable for Washington. Her narrative laid the blame for the violence squarely at the feet of the Special Police, who had needlessly escalated the confrontation with a group of nonviolent demonstrators. She had described the ensuing violence in graphic detail and added a comment paragraph at the end that described the actions of the security services—including the Special Police—as reflecting a growing nervousness on the part of the Eraliev government about pressures for democratic change building just beneath the surface of Kyrgyz society. When the pressure grew to be too much for the security services to contain, Kate’s report had warned, there would be a volcanic explosion to rival Krakatoa.

That had been the first draft.

Kate was required to clear her cables with a number of other sections in the embassy, including the regional security office and the defense attaché, as well as the deputy chief of mission. What had come back from that exercise in sausage making was a bland, deracinated report so weighed down by caveats and false equivalences as to be almost entirely without value. This cable, Kate knew, would sink without a trace into the ocean of information lapping at the shores of the Washington policy process. It might as well never have been written.

Kate stayed late that night, updating the matrix of actions and events that she would use in drafting the annual human rights report in the spring. If she could not get an accurate accounting into the system through a same-day cable, she could bundle it together with other data points in the congressionally mandated report and use that to help shape the overall narrative. Her father had taught her that no decision in Washington was ever final, and patience was the indispensable virtue.

By nine o’clock, she had just about wrapped everything up when she heard the door to the political suite click open. A moment later, Lieutenant Colonel William Ball, USAF, turned the corner and made a beeline for Kate’s cubicle.

“Kate, do you have a minute?” The defense attaché was wearing his service dress uniform, a light blue short-sleeved shirt with an open collar and dark blue slacks. The salad bar of decorations over the left shirt pocket included a bronze star with a small v for valor.

“Sure thing, Brass.”

Even talking to civilians, military pilots preferred to go by their call signs, no matter how obscure or embarrassing in origin. Over the last few years, however, the air force higher-ups had cracked down on some of the more risqué or scatological call signs. Kate knew two pilots—Jason “Skid” Marks and Gordon “Maker” Moan—who had been forced to pick new radio monikers. But Carl “Notso” Bright could keep his and evidently “Brass” Ball had made the cut as well. That one, Kate suspected, had been right on the bubble.