The only thing that marred the line of their clothing, each in turn, was the slight bump at hip or beneath an armpit, where they carried their guns.
Back before Uzbekistan had declared its independence from the creaking and cracking Soviet Union, before the failed hard-liner coup in August of 1991, when they were still called the KGB, none of them would have dreamed of wearing—let alone owning—such finery. Signs of Western excess, such garments would have flown in the face of Communism. Certainly they would have made a mockery of the subtleties required for their work.
But those days were long past, and fewer and fewer of them remembered a time when orders came from Dzerzhinsky Square. They weren’t KGB, and they weren’t Communists. They called themselves the National Security Service now, the NSS, and if they believed in anything anymore, it was in power and money, in that order. They were the secret police, and they didn’t care who knew it. They were beholden to—depending upon whom you spoke to—one of two people. Either they marched to the tune played by their nation’s leader, President Mihail Izmaylovich Malikov, the man who had led the country since he declared its independence in August 1991, or they danced to the music played by his elder child, his daughter, Sevara Malikov-Ganiev. That’s where the true power was. While President Malikov’s other child—his only son—Ruslan, had influence and friends of his own, they paled in comparison to that held by both his father and his sister.
This was why the four NSS men who entered Ruslan Mihailovich Malikov’s house at half past nine on a frigid February morning had no hesitation whatsoever in arresting his wife, Dina, for espionage and treason. This is why they did not hesitate to beat her in front of her two-year-old son when she tried to keep their hands from her body. This is why they did not hesitate when they had to drag her, flailing and screaming, down the stairs and out onto the street.
And this was why they did not hesitate at all when it came time to torture her.
They hooded her once they had her in the car, and they bound her hands, and when she made a noise, they struck her, telling her to be quiet. Best as Dina Malikov could tell, they didn’t drive for long or very far, and when the car stopped, she was dragged from the vehicle, and felt the instant bite of winter on her skin. They propelled her down echoing corridors, yanking and shoving her, sometimes pulling her hair, sometimes her shirt. There was the cold sound of heavy metal sliding on concrete, and someone shoved her so hard then that she couldn’t keep her feet, falling to the floor. Red light exploded across her vision as she was hit in the head again, and when she could see once more, the hood had been removed.
She’d seen this room before, but never in person. It was larger than she’d thought it, lit by a string of naked bulbs that dangled from the ceiling, shining too bright, banishing all shadows and all illusions of the safety to be found in them. The floor was cold, poured concrete, the walls of gray cinder block. The odors of urine and mildew and cigarette smoke combined, still not strong enough to obscure the scent of feces.
There was a table, wooden and stained, and three chairs, also wooden. A video camera stood on a tripod in one corner, and beside it, on the floor, a red metal toolbox. Other tools lay nearby, devices designed for one purpose that could be redirected to another, far crueler. Against the opposite wall, a claw-footed old bathtub sat, anchored by two pipes, one to fill it, one to drain it.
Three men stood staring at her. Two of them she didn’t know, didn’t recognize, but the third she did, and that terrified her more than any of what had come before, because it drove home to her exactly how bad things were going to get. As they had taken her from her home, as they had dragged her and beat her, she had allowed herself the illusion of hope, that Ruslan would return, that her marriage would offer her some protection, that she might survive. But looking at Ahtam Zahidov as he removed his suit jacket and carefully draped it over the back of one of the chairs, for the first time, Dina Malikov thought she was going to die.
“Dina,” Zahidov said, and he gestured to her with his left hand, absently, and the two other men took this cue to move forward, and they began to strip her. She struggled, alternately cursing and pleading with them, with Zahidov, and Zahidov merely watched, and the other two hit her in the back and the belly until she had no air, until she couldn’t struggle any longer. The two men tore the clothes away from her, mocking her, mocking her husband, and when she was finally naked they forced her to the table. Again, she tried to fight them, and again they beat her until she could not, and they laid her across the tabletop, and they held her down.
Ahtam Semyonovich Zahidov moved behind her, and put one hand on the back of her neck, and with his other forced himself inside her.
“Where did you get the tape?” Zahidov asked. “Who gave it to you?”
She tried not to sob, shaking on the floor, tears and blood mingling on her face.
“Who gave it to you?” Zahidov asked.
She drew a long inhale, feeling the air burn her torn lips. “My husband—”
“Is in Khanabad for the day, making nice with the Americans at their air base, and will not be home until evening.” Zahidov canted his head to one side, as if seeing her for the first time. “Tell us what we want to know, and you will be home before he returns. Back with your boy. He needn’t ever know what happened here.”
She spat at him.
“We can blame the extremists, Dina,” Zahidov said, his voice soothing with reason. “He doesn’t ever have to know.”
The sob escaped her without her meaning it to, the shame scorching through her, hurting more than her body itself. Ruslan would believe it, if she told him, if she blamed the Islamic extremists, if she blamed Hizb-ut-Tahir, he would believe it. She could be home, she could hold Styopa again, hold her baby again, and Ruslan would come home. So easily he would believe it, he would want to believe that she had been taken, had been kidnapped, that it was the Islamic extremists who had wanted her as a hostage, but she had escaped, somehow, some way, and she could tell him, and he wouldn’t know, he wouldn’t ever have to know what had happened, what had really happened, what Zahidov had done, had let the others do, all it took was a name, one name—
“Just tell me who, Dina,” Zahidov said. “Tell me, and this will all end.”
She blinked through her tears, through the glare of the lights at him, sitting in the chair, looking at her like he was her friend.
Dina Malikov shuddered, and closed her eyes, and said, “I can’t.”
She heard him sigh, a sound of mild disappointment almost lost in the size of the room, and then she heard the rasp of metal on metal, as the toolbox was opened.
In the end, she told Zahidov everything.
She told him the name of the NSS officer who had given her the videotape documenting the torture of Shovroq Anamov’s sons while the old man watched, helpless to ease the suffering of his children. The tape that recorded the obviously false confession of the old man as he swore up and down that, yes, he had been south to Afghanistan, yes, he had met with the terrorists, yes, he had helped arrange the bombings that had struck the market in Tashkent in the spring. The tape that showed the tears running down the old man’s face and captured his keening when his eldest boy, shocked one time too many, stopped moving the way a human being moved, and instead jerked like a fish on the end of a line.
She told Zahidov how she arranged to get the tape out of the country, how she’d made contact with a junior political officer at the American Embassy by the name of Charles Riess, how it had happened at the embassy holiday party this past December, hosted by Ambassador Kenneth Garret at his residence, just outside of town. How it had been Riess she’d been passing information to, so Riess could in turn pass it on to the State Department. How it was her fault that the White House was withholding another eighteen million dollars in aid to their ally Uzbekistan.