“Is she there alone?”
“No, she is with the American. Lourds.”
Cherkshan wondered if his wife remained so enamored of the American archeologist now. But he didn’t ask her that, as it would only distress her further.
“I have asked her to come home. She tells me that the situation over there is very dangerous and that she cannot. She is in hiding.”
Cherkshan paled when he heard that, and his thoughts immediately went to trying to find a way to protect his daughter and get her home. If he were able. The FSB had agents in many places, and Afghanistan was a hotbed of activity with the Taliban, the Americans, and the British. Much could be learned from observing everyone over there.
“I will talk to her, Katrina.”
“Do not be forceful with her, husband. She has her pride. If you try to take that from her, she will only reject…whatever help you try to provide.”
Cherkshan knew that his wife was going to say “reject you” but had decided at the last minute not to go that way. She was attempting to either save his feelings or not to ignite his fuse. He wasn’t sure.
“I will talk to her, and I will keep in mind what you have said.”
“Thank you. Please let me know what she says and if you are able to help.”
“I will.”
“Have you been reading her stories? The ones from the archeological dig?”
“I have not had time to pick up copies of the paper.”
“You should read them. They are very good. If it were not our daughter caught in the middle of whatever is going on over there, it would be very exciting.”
Cherkshan looked at the map on the wall and realized that his wife didn’t know what true excitement lay ahead.
“When you have time, I have sent the stories to you by e-mail. You should read them. You should know what our daughter is doing. I think you would be very proud.”
“I will make time.”
“Good. Now call our daughter and see if you can arrange to get her home. Safely.”
“I will, if she is willing.”
“Thank you.”
Cherkshan told his wife that he loved her, then he hung up the phone. He went to the desk that was not his own and sat there feeling out of place.
Then he went to his phone’s address book and selected his daughter’s number.
28
Showered and feeling refreshed, dressed in slacks and a nice blouse that one of Captain Fitrat’s men had procured, Anna stood at the window of the room she’d been given and looked out at the snow-covered alley. There was not much of a view.
You are safe here, she told herself. At the dig, you were in danger. In Herat, you were in danger. On the road, you were in danger. Here you are protected.
She thought of Captain Fitrat and his men, so able, so methodical. In some ways, the ANA captain reminded Anna of her father. He was very stern, very complete, and very watchful. But he was also polite and respectful.
Her father had always insisted on telling her what to do, how to behave, and, sometimes, what to think. Growing up in her father’s house hadn’t been insufferable. She loved him for the things he did that were not tied so closely to his job or to his sense of Russian patriotism. When he was just her father, that was when she loved him most.
Since the Taliban attack at the dig site, she had thought of her father a lot. She remained convinced that if she were battling for her life, he’d be there to fight alongside her. He would never let any harm come to her.
If he were able to stop it.
That was the problem though.
Retreating from the window, she went back to the small desk in the corner. Her laptop screen showed the current story of her flight across Afghanistan with Lourds while being pursued by their mysterious attackers.
She’d had to be judicious in her narrative. She hadn’t been able to mention the scrolls or where they currently were, but she had written about Boris Glukov’s murder at the hands of a man whom she suspected might be a Russian agent.
Although she had no concrete proof of the man’s identity, she felt compelled to make that assumption public. The man — Yakov, or whomever he truly turned out to be — moved and acted like many of the men her father surrounded himself with. They were capable, dangerous men with cold hearts and dead eyes, even though they could smile at a moment’s notice.
As a girl, she had often seen her father among such men. She had been impressed to see how he instantly commanded respect and obedience from those men that she instinctively knew were warriors. Her father had told her nothing of what he had seen or gone through. That was what he was like. Very close-mouthed about those things. When Anna had asked her mother about them, if that was what made her father so stubborn and narrow-minded, her mother had admitted that the general had never told her anything of those times either.
But her mother did mention her father’s nightmares and that sometimes he called out to dead men in his sleep.
Her brother, Rodion, however, had sometimes told her stories of her father’s experiences fighting the Chechen rebels. He filled Anna’s head with the images of the war her father had waged. He’d researched the military efforts in Chechnya and brought back copies of newspaper stories and pictures. Those stories, the way they had laid out the struggles between the Chechen and Russian peoples against the Islamic International Brigade, had deeply affected her.
For the first time, she’d understood the power of the written word. Those stories had allowed her to step into her father’s world and get a better understanding of why he was distant and aloof at times. She had a deeper insight into why he lived his life in such a regimented and organized way and why he’d demanded that others around him do the same thing.
Her father had lived a hard life and seen many horrible things. She had learned that. So she had taken up writing, trying to put into words her own feelings about the Russian war on the Chechen rebels and what she saw in her father.
At seventeen years old, she had gotten a story published in The Moscow Times. It had been the culmination of her perception of her father and of the ongoing struggle in Chechnya. It had almost won a prize and had become the basis of the relationship she currently had with the Russian newspaper.
The general had not approved of the story, and he had made his displeasure known. He said that the story made Russians everywhere appear weak, that it made him appear weak.
Anna had been crushed. She had wanted the world to understand the sacrifices her father was making.
If she had to point at any one thing that had fractured her relationship with her father, Anna knew that story would be the one. She had continued to occasionally write for the paper, though she only had a few pieces published afterward, because she had been young and there had been so much she hadn’t known. She only understood later that her first story had been published mostly because she was the daughter of a much-decorated general.
That had driven her to the United States, to the Columbia School of Journalism, where she hoped to further hone her skills and become a success. She had been driven to show her father that she could succeed on her own.
Now, though, she just had stories to tell, and she hoped to help people embrace the idea of a new Russia, one with more freedoms and bravery and more prominence in today’s world. Her father, she realized, wanted the old Russia, the one that he had grown up with, back.
Thinking about such things only made her sad. She supposed the melancholy was brought on by Boris Glukov’s death. Or perhaps it was how close she had come to her own.