Private Wars by Greg Rucka Read Free Book Online

“Let’s go to the kitchen. I need some coffee.”
             
    The house was silent and dark. The trip from Riess’ house downtown to the Residence on the outskirts of Tashkent normally took half an hour, but at three in the morning, Riess had been able to make it in half that time. The roads had been almost entirely vacant, and he’d driven quickly, in an attempt to flush any possible tails. He hadn’t seen any, but that didn’t give him much confidence that he’d gone undetected. It didn’t really matter; he was known in the Embassy as the Ambassador’s legman, much to the annoyance of his immediate superior, Political Counselor T. Lindsay McColl. If Riess was called out to the Residence at half past three in the morning, then it was unusual, but not unheard of.
    Riess followed the Ambassador through the house, Garret alternately switching on lights to illuminate their way, turning off others as they no longer needed them. Riess wondered if it was a security measure or a habit. Maybe he did it to keep from disturbing his wife. Whatever it was, Riess was certain there was a purpose to it. In his experience, there was very little that Kenneth Garret, the United States Ambassador to Uzbekistan, did without a very good reason.
    Riess’ immediate superior in the Mission, McColl, as uptight and self-righteous a Europeanist as Riess had ever met in the Foreign Service, consistently referred to Garret as “the Grizzly,” though never while in earshot of the Ambassador. McColl did a poor job of hiding his resentment of Garret, a resentment born, Riess supposed, more of envy than of anything else. Both men shared the same political rank at State, and McColl not only had seniority, but a pedigree, and felt that Garret had robbed him of his rightful ambassadorship. The nickname was meant, therefore, as an insult of the highest order.
    But limping after Garret through the Residence, Riess thought it was anything but. Six foot three and easily two hundred and forty pounds, everything on Garret had that ursine sense of scale and restrained power, from the breadth of his chest and the strength in his shoulders down to the thickness of each of his fingers. In all the time Riess had known him, first serving as a junior political officer at the embassy in St. Petersburg where Garret had been posted as Deputy Chief of Mission, and now, six years later, serving as his legman in Tashkent, he’d never once seen Garret exhibit anything but an absolute, controlled calm. No matter what he did, if he laughed, if he despaired, it was all with the same gravitas.
    People underestimated the Ambassador to their peril, and while Riess himself had never heard Garret talk about it, it was well known among the Mission staffers just how tall the man could stand. No new arrival to the Chancery in Uzbekistan could make it more than a week before hearing the infamous “Fuck Off, Senator” story.
    It went something like this:
    Seems that Kenneth Garret had spent a year at CENTCOM as a political adviser after one of his DCM stints. His job had been primarily to offer political insight and counsel to General Anthony Zinni. After CENTCOM, Garret had rotated back to State, and then, the following year, had been nominated as Ambassador to Kuwait by the Clinton White House. It was a done deal as far as the White House was concerned, and even the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had looked to be smooth sailing, a rubber-stamp proceeding.
    Except that the Committee in question was chaired by Senator Jesse Helms, and Helms’ history with Zinni was, as one of Riess’ colleagues had described it, “defined by white-hot hatred,” as a result of a particularly harsh facing Zinni had delivered to the Senator following the Gulf War. After the war, Helms had gotten the not-very-bright idea of turning the Iraqi army-in-exile around on Saddam with CIA backing, in an attempt to overthrow the dictator. It was a plan that suffered from a legion of