Private Wars

by Greg Rucka

  A last checkpoint, this time with two more Marines, and he was in the office of the Chief of Mission, waiting in the secretarial pool. He didn’t wait long.

  The door of Garret’s office opened within a minute of his arrival, and the Ambassador emerged with Aaron Tower, both men looking grim. Tower, like Garret, was a big man, perhaps ten years younger, in his mid-forties, blond, and perpetually slouched. Tower acknowledged Riess with a nod, then turned back to the Ambassador.

  “I should know more in the next few hours,” Tower said.

  “Keep me posted.”

  “Oh, I will, believe me.” Tower turned toward Riess. “Chuck.”

  “Sir.”

  Riess followed the Ambassador into his office. It was, as far as Riess knew, the biggest office in the building, with a view of the garden from the three windows that overlooked the chancery grounds. The desk was large enough to handle a computer, credenza, telephones, and an endless supply of papers, with a leather-backed executive chair for the Ambassador to park himself in while working. A round table, currently bare, was positioned off in the corner. The couch and four chairs in the center of the room were for more informal meetings. From a flagpole in the far corner hung an American flag, anchoring the requisite glory wall of photographs, the History of Kenneth Garret, spanning a career of thirty-plus years and five presidents. Shots of the Ambassador with Zinni at CENTCOM and Yeltsin at the Kremlin and with the President on Air Force One, and others, the faces of people less famous but no less important in Garret’s life. On the desk were an additional two framed photographs, one of Garret’s daughter at her wedding, the second of his son’s family, including Garret’s two grandchildren.

  Garret moved behind his desk, pressed a blinking light on his phone, killing a waiting call, then looked up at Riess.

  “Malikov’s been hospitalized,” he said. “They’re saying he had a stroke in the small hours this morning, but we don’t have confirmation yet.”

  Riess stopped himself from swearing. “Can he speak?”

  “We don’t know, but I’d be damn surprised if he could.”

  “Ruslan can’t take it. If Malikov goes, Ruslan doesn’t have the backing.”

  “I know.”

  “If he tries for it, it’ll get ugly. That’s if Sevara doesn’t try to remove him preemptively.”

  Garret looked at him patiently, waiting for Riess to stop stating the obvious.

  “Is it natural?” Riess asked. “I mean, the stroke?”

  “It’s possible, but it’s just as possible the old man was helped along.” Garret hesitated, then added, “That’s not why I wanted to see you.”

  That was even more of a surprise. “Sir?”

  “There’s a woman arriving sometime today, name of Carlisle. She’s here to lift Ruslan. Starting tonight, you need to hit the hotels. The Meridien, the InterContinental. Make contact with Carlisle, find out what she needs, if we can help. And it goes without saying that we don’t want the NSS knowing what you’re up to. For that matter, we don’t want Tower or McColl finding it out, either.”

  Riess shook his head, trying, and failing, to hide his confusion. “This woman . . . who is she?”

  “She’s a Brit, she’s here to get Ruslan and his kid out, that’s all you need to worry about.”

  “She’s SIS?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Garret stopped, reading Riess’ expression, then sighed. “I’m sorry, I can’t even remember who I’m lying to anymore. Sit down.”

  Riess sat, looking at the Ambassador, bewildered. Garret sighed a second time, now regarding him more kindly, then came around the big desk and took the seat beside him, turning his chair so they could sit face to face. He kept his voice low when he spoke.

  “After we talked about Ruslan, I floated a query back to State about Malikov’s replacement. And the situation is exactly what we knew it would be—it’s the Kissinger realists, and they think they can work with Sevara. We’re getting no backing there, nothing, and you can bet your ass that Tower’s already informed Langley that Malikov is circling the drain, and Langley’ll pass that on to POTUS first thing in the morning, and we’re going to be right back where we started.

  “So I reached out to a friend at the FCO. Upshot is, the British are willing to aid in the transition: they’ll back Ruslan. Hence the presence of this operative.”

  Riess thought, and all he had immediately were questions, so he began voicing them. “Then why isn’t she going through their Station? Why involve me?”

  “It’s got to be done quietly, and that means she’s here outside of channels. Figure the FCO is rowing the same direction as the crew at State—they’re looking at the realist solution. But my guy, he’s got a green light from the Prime Minister as long as we can pull this off quietly.”

  “How quietly?”

  “The White House doesn’t find out until after the fact. Their Prime Minister sure as hell isn’t going to want to get into a knife fight with POTUS over Uzbekistan. Not during a time of war.”

  Riess shook his head. “I don’t know how much help I’m going to be to her.”

  “Neither do I,” Garret said. “But if the NSS and/or Sevara has Ruslan in their sights, they’re sure not going to let him just hop on a jet and fly to London. And this agent, she’s hitting the ground naked. You need to provide her with some clothes, so to speak.”

  Riess didn’t speak. One agent, without support, coming to lift Ruslan and his son. He couldn’t begin to imagine how she would pull it off.

  But sitting in the office, his Ambassador fixing him with a gaze as heavy and serious as stone, he had to believe it was possible. Certainly Garret believed it.

  Riess nodded. “All right. I’ll hit the Meridien first. You want me to come by after I make contact?”

  “If it’s pressing. Otherwise, it can wait until the morning. You’ve still got the NSS on you?”

  “Yeah, ever since Sunday. They’re not trying to be subtle about it.”

  “Then contact only if it’s pressing. They see you rushing out to my place in the middle of the night, they’ll be asking a lot of questions.”

  Riess thought about the way the NSS asked questions, and said nothing.

  He ran into Aaron Tower, coming out of Lydia Straight’s office.

  “Have a good talk with the Ambassador?”

  “I suppose, yeah.”

  “He told you about Malikov?”

  “Asked what I thought the DPM response would be.”

  “Feeding frenzy.”

  “Feeding frenzy,” Riess agreed.

  Tower tucked his hands into his trouser pockets, straightening up to his full height, grinning, as if they were sharing some private joke. It made Riess nervous, and suddenly he found himself wondering if they’d crossed paths by accident, if Tower wasn’t already aware of what the Ambassador was planning.

  It was an open secret at the Embassy—and at the NSS, and probably in downtown Tashkent, and possibly as far south as Kabul—that Aaron Tower was the Uzbek COS, Chief of Station, for the CIA, though there was no official confirmation of that fact, nor was there likely ever to be. On paper, Tower was listed as the Mission’s Special Adviser to the Ambassador on Matters of Counterterrorism, a title that defied easy abbreviation or acronymizing, and consequently was never used, except by the handful of personnel who hadn’t actually figured out what Tower really did.

  What he really did was run CIA operations in Uzbekistan. Which meant he had what the Company liked to refer to as “assets” inside the military and the NSS and the Oliy Majlis and God only knew where else. Sometimes Riess wondered why they were called “assets,” as opposed to, say, sources, or even contacts. He supposed it was a holdover from the Cold War, when Communism versus Capitalism had defined the ideological battle, rather than Communism versus Democracy.

  So Tower had assets, and he also had agents, some undetermined number of officers in play throughout the country. They took their orders from him, brought their findin
gs to him. Who they were, where they were, what they were doing at any given time, Riess didn’t know. He never asked. He wasn’t supposed to.

  But it occurred to him then that Tower most certainly had either an asset or an officer in both of the hotels Garret had told him to check for Carlisle, and that however he was going to proceed come nightfall, he’d better do it carefully.

  “You’re the Deputy Pol Chief, Chuck,” Tower said. “What’s your guess?”

  “I’m sorry, for what?”

  “Malikov’s successor.”

  “You mean until they hold an election?”

  Tower’s grin expanded. “Yeah, before that.”

  “Ganiev.”

  “You mean Sevara.”

  “Right, that’s what I meant.” Riess laughed. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ve got to get back to my desk.”

  “Ah, yeah, McColl. Tightass. You make sure he remembers who we’re working for, okay?”

  “I’ll make sure he knows the Ambassador’s in charge.”

  “Not the Amb, Chuck. The President. We work for the President.” Tower’s grin dropped a fraction. “Don’t ever forget that.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Good man,” Tower said, and he flashed the grin one last time, then moved out of the way, and Riess continued on, past the Marines and the locked doors, to the relative safety of his desk.

  Where he sat and wondered if Aaron Tower didn’t already know about a British agent named Carlisle, and why she was coming to Uzbekistan.

  CHAPTER 11

  Uzbekistan—Tashkent—Hotel InterContinental

  16 February, 1924 Hours (GMT+5:00)

  It was a nice room, recently renovated, with new carpet and modern furnishings and a sleigh-backed king-size bed, and it reeked of a scent that Chace was certain came advertised as smelling like “Spring” or “Flowers” or some other nonsense printed on the bottle. She locked the door after her, threw the deadbolt, fixed the security bar in place, then dumped her duffel on the bed and pulled back the curtains, looking out at Tashkent at night. Lights glittered off a body of water in the near distance, some artificial lake in the nearby park, and she watched as headlights drifted along the road to the south—Husniddin Asomov, she remembered—and winked in the windows of the nearby apartments.

  She was tired and sore, and it made her feel acutely aware of how long she’d been out of the game. She’d been unable to sleep on the flight, despite her best efforts, and that bothered her, too. In the past, she’d always managed to steal sleep on the way to a job, with the knowledge that once things started rolling on the ground, rest would be hard to come by. This time, as often as she had closed her eyes and repositioned herself in the too-narrow-and-not-enough-legroom seat on the plane, sleep evaded her.

  She watched the lights flicker on the lake, and wondered what Tamsin was doing. She wondered just what she was doing.

  She closed the drapes, and brought out the guidebook and map she had purchased at the airport after she’d cleared Customs. The guidebook was rife with typos and misspellings, badly translated from Uzbek, and full of useless advice about the sort of things she absolutely must do before leaving Tashkent. Apparently, seeing a ballet at the Alisher Navoi Opera House topped the list, followed closely by enjoying a traditional meal of samsa—a meat-and-onion pie—and plov—a pilau rice dish.

  She tossed the book into a corner, then unfolded the map, and was heartened to see that it, at least, looked to be more useful. After studying it for several minutes, orienting herself in the city, Chace refolded it and placed the map aside on the desk. Then she opened her duffel, digging out first a GPS unit she’d bought in London, then the satellite phone she had purchased when she’d bought the pager she’d given to Porter, and finally, its charger.

  The GPS unit was nothing out of the ordinary, and Chace switched it on, making certain the battery was still charged and that it still functioned as it should. The LCD lit up, and she moved to the window, canting the device to capture an uninterrupted signal. She took a reading, read the numbers, then cleared the screen and took a second reading, seeing that the figures matched the first set. Satisfied, she switched the GPS off and replaced it in the duffel, then picked up the satellite phone.

  At first blush, it looked like nothing more than a slightly out-of-date mobile, and could be easily mistaken for such, until one extended the antenna. Stowed against the back of the unit, it swung out and away from the phone, a thick, black baton. Chace deployed the antenna, switched the power to on, then punched in her access code. For several seconds, there was nothing on the display but the luminous green glow, and she’d just begun to think something had gone wrong with the device when it beeped in her hand, and the word “Iridium” appeared on the screen. The bars marking signal strength expanded, then settled, and Chase released the breath she’d been holding, relieved. If the phone failed, the exfil would go all to hell—she’d have to find a way to procure another, and in Tashkent, she doubted that would be easy.

  But the phone was working, and that, at least, meant that she had a way to get home.

  Chace switched the phone off, collapsed the antenna, then plugged the charger into the outlet by the desk, grateful that the hotel sockets didn’t require an adapter. She hooked the phone to the charger, waited until she was certain it was drawing power, then turned once more to the bed.

  The telephone on the nightstand rang.

  Chace started, stared at it as it jangled a second time, its message light shimmering in time with the noise, and she felt her stomach contract with sudden vertigo.

  She hadn’t been made at the airport; she was creaky, she knew that, she was maybe off her game, but she was sure of at least that much. There’d been no surveillance in the lobby that she’d seen when she’d checked in, no one casually disinterested in her business, nobody carefully avoiding her gaze.

  No one knew she was here. No one was supposed to know.

  But her phone was ringing, and unless it was a wrong number, unless it was the front desk calling, it meant that she was wrong, that she had been made. She had the sickening fear that it was someone from the U.K. Embassy on the other end of the line, someone from the Station who wanted to know why Tara Chace was in Tashkent, and what she was planning on doing here.

  The phone rang a fourth time, and finally Chace answered.

  “Ms. Carlisle?” The voice was male, American.

  “Yes? Who is this?”

  “I heard from a mutual friend that you were coming to town,” the voice said. “I thought maybe I could show you around?”

  “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s Charles. Chuck.”

  “Tracy,” Chace said. “A guide would be wonderful, Charles. Is there anything in particular you’d like to show me? I’ve heard the performances at the Alisher Navoi are not to be missed.”

  He laughed. “If you’d like to see ballet, sure. There’s a lot to see in town. Would you like to get together, so we can discuss it?”

  “I’m a little tired after my trip, I don’t much feel like going out.”

  “I can come there, if you like.”

  “Would you?”

  “Take me about an hour and a half.”

  “Call me from the lobby when you arrive,” Chace said, and hung up.

  Charles called from the lobby one hour and fifty minutes later, and four minutes after that, knocked on the door of Chace’s room. She loosed the security bar and the deadbolt, turned the knob just enough to free the latch from the wall, and stepped away, putting her back to the wall.

  “It’s open,” Chace said.

  The door swung in, and a man stood on the threshold, slender, perhaps an inch or two shorter than Chace, brown curly hair, wearing a black wool coat and heavy trousers. He entered in a lean, one hand at his side, the other still on the doorknob, looking around as he said, “Tracy?” and from the posture and the motion, she knew he wasn’t, at least, an immediate threat, and she felt the t
ension go from her shoulders and back, felt her stomach settle a fraction.

  She waited until he was through before she said, “Charles.”

  He turned, smiled, and Chace didn’t return it, closing the door and then locking it once again, as she had done before. He was still standing exactly as he had been when she turned back, so this time Chace did smile.

  Then she grabbed his crotch with her left hand, and shoved him back against the wall.

  “Hey—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Chace said, and tightened her grip, feeling the heat and weight of his testicles in her hand. He was wearing boxers, which made the holding of him easier. He grimaced but didn’t move. As far as immobilization manuevers went, it was entirely inadequate, and Chace knew it; it kept his hands free, and it absolutely allowed for a counterattack, even if she were to bear down with all of her might. As a psychological move, however, it had no equal, and for the moment, it seemed to be doing its job quite well.

  Maintaining her grip, Chace began patting him down with her right. She found a wallet in an inside jacket pocket, and a small digital camera in an outer one. She tossed both onto the bed. She ran her free hand through his hair, then along his neck, front, and back, then over the front of his chest, working lower until she had to crouch to check his legs.

  “This might be fun if you loosened your grip,” Charles said.

  Chace ignored him, working upward again, this time feeling along the backs of his legs, over his buttocks, checking the waistband of his pants, untucking his shirt, sliding her hand up over his back.