Читать книгу Anasazi Exile - Eric G. Swedin - Страница 14

CHAPTER NINE

TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN

A tall, blonde-haired women with strong features looked at the pictures with clinical detachment. Too many years of life had taught her to create a barrier in her mind, the kind that doctors and police officers and other people who become too intimate with death are forced to create. The photos were digital, of course, easily displayed on her computer screen, and the digital watermark on them gave her some confidence that they had not been faked. The two men in the photo lay in the grotesque way that bodies in rigor mortis often did, with their lips pulled back and limbs stiff. The men were naked, and if one looked closely, as she had to, the bruises around the wrists and legs showed that they had been shackled. The burns on their chests, working down their stomachs, and on their genitals, showed that the torturers had wanted them to talk. She typed notes of her analysis into her laptop, including vague details of the source who had smuggled the pictures out of the notorious Mustiu prison in a mountain valley outside of Tashkent.

She knew herself as Amanda, but everyone in Tashkent knew her as Anika Prokofiev, a human rights activist with a Russian passport that listed her city of birth as St. Petersburg. If asked, she described her grandparents as German communists who had fought the Nazis, then emigrated to the Soviet Union, which explained an accent that no one could place.

For a moment, anger surged inside her, bile rising in her throat. She wanted those men whom Uzbekistan employed to torture their fellow countrymen to feel the same pain that they caused others. She wanted to administer punishment. The moment passed quickly; she had found through bitter experience that she personally disliked killing or even hurting other people. But one had to act, and she had found her role: she believed in the power of speaking the truth, of bearing witness against those who did evil.

Her cell phone beeped and she glanced at the palm-sized screen. The message was short:

Need you in New Mexico now. Priority One—Franklin

Amanda blinked in surprise. She hadn’t heard from Franklin for three years, and that time it was only to get a new infusion of funds for her human rights foundation. Switching to another computer in her small office, she brought up the web and checked for airline tickets. She knew that the Uzbek security services were monitoring every byte that flowed in and out of the office; that’s why her laptop never touched a network and everything on it was encrypted. Strong encryption was a blessing for human rights crusaders everywhere, as well as other subversives of the established order, such as anarchists, hackers, criminals, and even terrorists.

There were only four international flights a day out of the country. She bought a ticket to San Francisco through Beijing. In a safe deposit box in San Francisco was stored her American identity, papers giving her name as Anna Mauss, as well as credit cards and tens of thousands of dollars in cash. She would buy a ticket for Albuquerque when she had changed names. No doubt Franklin would have further details for her when she got to the United States.

She tapped in a quick message to Franklin:

On my way—A

The flight left in five hours, just enough time to tidy up any loose ends and prepare for an extended absence. Putting away her laptop, Amanda went into the next room. Living space was at a premium in the capital of Uzbekistan, and she worked out of her apartment, as many people did. She lived in a simple room. The bed had a metal frame that she had spray-painted black, and the quilt on it was one of her treasured possessions, handmade many years ago by a good friend in Bangalore who had run an orphanage. The word for peace in thirty languages had been carefully stitched into white and blue panels. A bookcase made of stiffened cardboard sagged under books in five languages, an eclectic mix of history, novels, almanacs, and dictionaries. A hotplate shared her small table with stacks of newspapers, next to a small refrigerator that ran on either electricity or natural gas, whichever seemed to be flowing more reliably that day.

Even though she had lived in this room for five years, she had never bothered to buy a chest of drawers. Instead she lived out of two suitcases, which made packing very easy. She picked through her clothes, leaving most behind so that she would have room to pack the quilt and a couple of books. She looked forward to plane rides as an opportunity to read. Reaching under the table, she slid aside a board to reveal a concealed compartment. Three stacks of ten thousand American dollars each, all in twenties.

Amanda retrieved her laptop and stored it in the large purse that she favored. The laptop contained everything and was the heart of her operation. She looked over the apartment and office one last time, making sure that she hadn’t left anything, and then locked the door behind her. The hall smelled of urine and decay. She knocked on the door of the apartment across from hers.

Suraiya opened the door. A tall Uzbek with weathered skin from a youth spent living in a yurt, she had the kind of eyes of someone who chose to roll with the vicissitudes of life and not let the cruelty of her fellow humans scar her. A lawyer by training, she diligently filed suits and requests with the Uzbek courts, requesting trials when none were offered, or asking exasperated bureaucrats for information about disappeared people. Most of the legal maneuvers came to naught, but she knew that the first step to a functioning judicial system was to act like it might someday exist.

“Anika, what’s wrong?”

“I’ve received word that a relative in America is ill and I must go visit.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know—perhaps a long time, but I will bring back some gifts.” Amanda handed two bundles of the money to Suraiya. “Be safe while I am gone.”

Their words were carefully selected, revealing nothing, because they knew that Uzbek internal security forces had bugged the apartment. The state-controlled bullies mostly just harassed them, stopping their car in the street to check for proper papers, demanding excessive bribes for bureaucratic services, and a rock through Amanda’s bedroom window last month. Petty stuff, but petty minds dreamed up petty things. The reports that Amanda wrote to send to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the European Community, and the United States State Department kept her work visible to the rest of the world, and that was what kept her safe.

Yurgi came over, his crutches scraping along the wood floor. A landmine in Afghanistan had changed his life; only his thick upper torso allowed him mobility on his stick-like legs. Suraiya and he had no children, though they were both fond of little ones, and Amanda suspected that he could not father children. He may not even have been able to function as a husband. Amanda had never pried and didn’t want to know. The wife and husband were the only employees of Amanda’s foundation, but she knew that they only took the money in order to live; they were true crusaders at heart, just as she was.

“I need you to drive me to the airport, but first I want to take you both to dinner.”

As Suraiya drove to a restaurant that served the best Lebanese food in the city, Amanda looked out the window, wondering if she would be able to return. There were nicer neighborhoods, with nice homes and tree-lined streets, but the human rights workers chose to live as the masses lived. She had grown to love the Uzbeks and their city, even though too much of the city was dreary Soviet architecture, all crumbling concrete and barren lots. Very little was left to show that this sprawling city of two million was truly ancient, and had once been an important caravan center on the Silk Road from China to Europe.

She would miss Tashkent.