Enemy of the Good

by Matthew Palmer

  Charlie DelBarco was in over his head, Kate thought. He was a perfectly competent management officer with no meaningful policy experience who had found himself elevated to the position of chargé d’affaires of the American embassy in Havana when the deputy chief of mission had been medevaced ten days ago with appendicitis. The DCM was actually the top dog in the mission. The position of ambassador was vacant because one of Florida’s two Republican senators had put an indefinite hold on the nominee’s confirmation. The United States and Cuba had restored diplomatic relations after an estrangement lasting more than half a century, but not everyone had gotten the memo.

  Temporarily at least, it was DelBarco’s embassy, and what happened next was up to him.

  The Tank, a secure room in the basement of the embassy, about the size and shape of a shipping container, was the only place in the country where the American staff could hold sensitive conversations. The Cuban services were aggressive and technically competent. The air inside the Tank was pressurized and oppressive. The air conditioners were cranked up high enough to give Kate goose pimples.

  In addition to Kate and Charlie, the group in the Tank included the embassy’s regional security officer and Kate’s boss in the political section, Barry Kriegler. One of the RSO’s contacts in the Cuban police had let slip that there would be a raid on a meeting of pro-democracy dissidents at an abandoned cigar factory on the outskirts of Havana that same evening. As ties with America improved, the Cuban government had grown more paranoid about the aspirations of its own citizens. Tonight the police were targeting three of the leading lights in the Cuban democracy movement, including Reuben Morales, who had become popular enough to represent a threat to the regime.

  Kate was the embassy’s human rights officer. It was her job to network with Cuba’s political dissidents, to report on government abuses, and to do what she could to advance the goal of democratic reforms in what was still very much an authoritarian state. Morales was an important contact—and a friend.

  “What good is the source if we can’t do anything with the information?” Kate said carefully. “Isn’t that the point of intelligence? Morales isn’t just another activist; he’s a symbol of hope. If the authorities lock him up, they’d be taking a chance that he’d become like Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. They won’t do that. They’ll just kill him and dump his body in the sea.”

  “And what about my guy?” the RSO asked. “What about the risk to him if the Cubans go looking for who blew the op and they find my guy sitting there when they turn over the rock?”

  “This is a big operation,” Kate explained for what felt to her like the tenth time. “There are bound to be a lot of people in a position to tip off the dissidents. If we move fast enough, there’s no reason the government needs to know it came from the Americans.”

  “They would assume it was us. When we sneeze, the G2 says bless you. The Cuban services know more about me than my wife does.” The G2 was the Dirección General de Inteligencia, the widely reviled and universally feared foreign intelligence arm of the Cuban state.

  “I could get Morales a message through cutouts,” Kate insisted. “The dissidents know how to get information to one another under the radar of the G2 and without tripping any alarms. They do it all the time.”

  “It’s too risky,” DelBarco said. “I can’t authorize it without instructions from Washington. We’ve asked for guidance. We need to be patient.”

  “It’ll take a week for D.C. to make up its mind,” Kate protested. “We have four hours.”

  Kate looked over at Barry Kriegler. He was a good boss. Smart, experienced, and supportive. Although Kate was only a first-tour officer, he had given her considerable responsibility and backed her up when she had pressed the front office and Washington for more open support of Cuba’s embattled democrats. Now Kriegler could only shrug.

  “You’re tilting at windmills, Kate. I know Reuben’s important. But we have to play the long game on this island, and that means protecting sources and methods at all cost.”

  “Five decades isn’t long enough for you?” Kate asked, incredulous. “We’re on the cusp of real change in Cuba. Finally. And Morales could be the catalyst. But only if he’s alive and free.”

  “If they miss him tonight, they’ll just pick him up next week,” the station chief said. “Or the week after that. It’s an island. There’s nowhere to go.”

  “He could go underground,” Kate said. “There’s a system in place to move dissidents house to house. They could keep him safe. If it came to it, they could smuggle him out to Dominica or even Miami. We just need to warn him.”

  “I’m sorry,” DelBarco said again. “The answer is the same. No.”

  Wordlessly, Kate stood up and left. She needed two hands to operate the lever that locked the door to the Tank tight.

  Kriegler followed her.

  He put a hand on her shoulder and forced her to slow down.

  “Kate . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Barry.”

  —

  There was no ambiguity in her instructions. There was no way, however, that Kate was going to allow her superiors to feed Morales to the sharks. She understood what she was risking. Kate was only on her first tour as a foreign service officer, but she had grown up in and around embassies as a diplomatic brat and she had absorbed many of the State Department’s rules and norms by osmosis. What she was about to do was the very definition of insubordination. As an untenured officer, she could be dismissed from the service for cause easily. But there was such a thing as right and wrong. And while it was not always easy to tell the difference between the two, when it was clear, there was no excuse for inaction. She would take the risk.

  Despite what Kate had argued in the Tank, getting a message to her dissident friends proved harder than she had anticipated. None of her contacts had cell phones or regular e-mail access, and even if they had, all telephone and electronic communications were monitored obsessively by the security services. Kate knocked on a few doors and tried a couple of the cafés the dissident and activist community would frequent, but she was not able to find anyone in a position to help.

  The sky turned from blue to purple and then indigo as twilight fell on Havana. Kate checked the time obsessively, but she knew that a meeting of Cuban dissidents was not run like a meeting of South Korean engineers. The start time for the meeting was notional and there was no official agenda and no chairman. It would start when there were enough people there to begin, and it would last for as long as they had something to say. The debate would be freewheeling and passionately intense. It was Cuba. And Kate had grown to love it. There was no way to know just how much time she had to work with, but she knew that it was not much. Likely not enough.

  Finally, at a secondhand bookstore run out of the back of a private house in a residential part of town, she found Paco, a middle-aged man who wrote terrible poetry and cultivated a bohemian air that he used to hit on Scandinavian tourists half his age. Kate thought he was a little skeevy and really only a fringe player on the dissident scene, but he was the best she could find. In hushed tones, she asked Paco to get a message to Morales that the meeting later that evening would be the target of a police raid. In typically florid language, Paco swore a blood oath that he would get the message to Morales. Kate’s level of confidence in the third-rate poet was low.

  Night had fallen and Havana was a city that only really stirred itself from its tropical torpor after dark. The scattered sodium-vapor lamps cast an ugly yellow-orange glow over Centro Habana. It was still too early for the streets to be crowded, and Kate found herself standing alone in front of a crumbling Batista-era villa now boarded up and abandoned. She checked her watch again. It was almost eight p.m., the time that had been set, in principle, for Morales’s meeting.

  She made up
her mind.

  “Okay, here we go,” Kate said out loud to no one in particular.

  It took her twenty minutes to get to her apartment. Three minutes after that, she was rocketing through the backstreets of Havana headed for the municipality of Boyeros in the direction of the airport. Kate’s car, a twelve-year-old BMW 5 series, handled smoothly at high speeds, and in the socialist paradise of Cuba there was little traffic to contend with.

  She made it to the old cigar factory in less than fifteen minutes. This part of Boyeros was industrial, or rather post-industrial, as most of the factories and workshops that lined the backstreets had closed their doors decades earlier. The Castillo-Barzaga factory had ceased rolling cigars sometime in the 1970s, but there was still a hint of tobacco smell in the air from where the juices had worked their way deep into the building’s timbers.

  Kate parked in the shadows and walked up to the front door. From inside, she could hear the buzz of conversation in machine-gun Spanish. Kate let herself in. As soon as she opened the door, the conversation stopped.

  There were, perhaps, two dozen people in the room. Kate recognized about half of them. The room was large and lit only by three naked lightbulbs hanging from the rafters.

  “Katie? How did you know we would be here?” Reuben Morales’s voice was deep and raspy.

  “I’m not supposed to know,” Kate replied in fluent Spanish. “But I do. Which means . . .”

  “Others know it as well,” Morales finished her sentence. “G2?”

  “Regular police, I think.”

  “Just as bad. Are they on their way?”

  Kate nodded.

  “Gracias, señorita.” Morales stood. He was dressed in jeans and a white shirt open at the collar. It was hot in the poorly ventilated factory and there was a thin film of sweat on his chest. Morales was no longer young, but his hair was still dark and curly and his mustache was so distinctive it had become a symbol of resistance to the Castro regime. A basic rite of passage for aspiring activists was to draw a Morales mustache on posters of Cuba’s unelected leadership. He was an attractive man, Kate thought. Magnetic. The future of the island. But only if he could stay out of prison. Stay alive.

  “You have to get out of here, Reuben,” she said.

  A beam of light shining through the window briefly pierced the gloom in the factory and swept across the far wall like a searchlight.

  Morales looked quickly out the window. “It’s too late, Katie. They’re here.”

  Kate moved to stand beside Reuben and saw a small convoy of cars turning onto the road that led toward the factory.

  “Come with me. I can get you out of here.”

  “No, Katie. I appreciate what you’ve done. And I know that it was not without risk to you. But I will not leave my friends.”

  An idea born of desperation clawed its way to the front of Kate’s consciousness. She tried to push it back, but she could not. It made sense to her. It could also get her killed.

  She swallowed hard. There was no time to think it through, no time to weigh the pros and cons.

  “Get the others out the back. I’ll buy you as much time as I can.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Something stupid.”

  Kate ran for her car. Within seconds the heavy BMW sedan was screaming down the road toward the line of Cuban police cars.

  The car in front flashed its lights, but there was no siren. The police would not want to alert those they had come to arrest. Kate ignored the lights and the instinct hardwired in her brain to turn away from danger, to turn the car. The distance between them closed with frightening speed.

  As the cars barreled toward each other. At the last possible moment, Kate flinched and the BMW struck the Cuban police car in the left front quarter panel. Kate’s car spun wildly and the air bag deployed, blocking her view and keeping her from flying through the windshield. Her head cracked painfully against the side window, starring the glass as the force of the spin flung her into the door. Her vision grayed at the edges and she wanted to vomit.

  Within seconds of the car coming to a stop, the door was ripped open and powerful hands were dragging her onto the ground. Blood ran down her face from a gash at her temple

  Kate lay flat on her belly and she felt the cold muzzle of a pistol pressed up against the back of her skull.

  “Quien coño eres tu?” Who the fuck are you?

  —

  Kate looked Charlie DelBarco right in the eyes, refusing to avert her gaze, to submit to his authority.

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” DelBarco’s voice was calm and even, but the vein throbbing in his neck made it clear what an effort it was for him to keep from yelling. They were in his office in the embassy. Only an hour earlier, Kate had been cooling her heels in a Cuban jail. Barry Kriegler had come to get her out, something he had told her had been a heavy lift with the Cuban authorities.

  “I had a car accident, Charlie.” She touched the bandage on her head like it was a Saint Christopher’s medallion.

  “Bullshit. I had to call the justice minister himself to get you out of jail. I should have left you there to rot for a week or two, diplomatic immunity be damned.”

  “What did you tell them?” Kate asked.

  “That it was a car accident.”

  “Well then, that’s what it was. It’s policy now.”

  The chargé waved his hands dismissively.

  “It doesn’t really matter. You won’t be my problem for long.” DelBarco picked up a legal-sized piece of paper from his desk and thrust it angrily in front of Kate’s face. “We got a dip note this morning from the Cubans. They’ve declared you persona non grata. You have thirty-six hours to leave Cuba forever.”

  The news stung. Kate had known it was a possibility, but to hear it put in such stark terms was painful. She had come to love this island with its warm people and vibrant culture. The loss would hurt. But Kriegler had told her when he escorted her from prison that no one knew where Morales was. The police had not found him and he had gone into hiding. It would cost Kate, cost her a great deal. But it was worth it. She had no regrets.

  “The only problem,” DelBarco continued, “is that we can’t punish you for insubordination in the way you deserve to be punished. Being PNG’d actually protects you. We can’t let the Cubans feel they got the upper hand by damaging one of our own. So we won’t sanction you, just to spite them.”

  “Thanks, Charlie. I appreciate the compassion.”

  DelBarco ignored the sarcasm.

  “But it looks like you aren’t completely insulated from the consequences of your actions.”

  “How so?” Kate asked nervously.

  DelBarco picked up another document from his desk. This one a regular letter-sized paper.

  “A transfer cable with your name on it, Kate. Say good-bye to mojitos and salsa music. I hope you packed a parka.”

  “Where are they sending me?”

  “The icky-stans. You’re going to Bishkek. I can’t even remember which one of those central Asian backwaters that’s the capital of.”

  “Kyrgyzstan,” Kate answered flatly.

  “Whatever. Seems they asked for you specifically. I’m not sure if that means someone’s looking out for you or if they have it in for you.”

  “Me neither,” Kate agreed. “But I know who it is.”

  2

  THE KYRGYZ REPUBLIC

  From thirty-five thousand feet, it looked as though they were flying over a storm-tossed sea. Except that the waves were frozen in place and the whitecaps were really ice and snow. The mountains of Kyrgyzstan’s foreboding Ala-Too range stretched to the horizon, and Kate amused herself by mentally flipping the landscape back and forth from rock to ocean like a Buddhist monk meditating at one of the ancient Zen gardens in Kyoto.

  This made it
easier to ignore her seatmate, a rotund Russian businessman with sweat circles at his armpits who had been popping hard-boiled eggs from a plastic bag like peanuts for much of the long flight and washing them down with liter bottles of vodka. They were still an hour or more from Bishkek, at the tail end of a two-day odyssey that had so far taken Kate from Havana to Toronto, Reykjavik, London, and Dubai. This final leg of the trip was on Egypt Air, known in State Department circles as Inshallah Airways for the cavalier manner in which the pilots and grounds crew seemed to slough off onto Allah all responsibility for passenger safety and on-time arrival. This was far from the most direct route possible, but the Fly America Act and the regulations governing contract carriers were anything but flexible, and the department’s travel office, Kate was firmly convinced, was staffed entirely by sadistic trolls.

  The stark, cold beauty of Central Asia was a far cry from Cuba’s lush greenery and turquoise water, but for Kate it was a homecoming of sorts. Bishkek was where she had gone to high school. Where she had experienced the joys and heartache of her first serious boyfriend. Where she had gotten drunk for the first time and smoked her first cigarette. Where she had discovered a love for Russian literature and the magical, romantic poetry of Pushkin and Lermontov.

  It was where she had buried her parents.

  The government had asked Kate, then just a few months into her sophomore year at Georgetown, where to send the bodies. She had not known how to answer. Her father had been in the Foreign Service and had somehow managed to avoid being posted to Washington. Assignments in D.C. were career enhancing, but her father had no interest in the bureaucratic knife fighting that was the essence of the Washington policy process. He turned down every offer that came his way to work at “Main State,” the department’s sprawling, run-down headquarters building in Foggy Bottom, even with the understanding that without Washington experience he was unlikely ever to make it to the higher ranks. In consequence, before freshman orientation at Georgetown, Kate had never lived in the United States. She had never spent more than three weeks at a stretch in America visiting grandparents in Ohio.