Oath of Office

His mother had often told him the Tolstoy story about a peasant who went to steal cucumbers from his neighbor’s farm. This cucumber thief became so engrossed in thoughts of becoming wealthy from planting the seeds of the stolen loot that he began to daydream others were stealing from him — and absentmindedly shouted to his imaginary guards, “Keep an eye out for thieves!” alerting the real guards. It was his mother’s favorite story, and she told it every time she thought Dovzhenko had his head in the clouds. A spy, she said, could not afford to daydream.

In Afghanistan, she was surely right.

Herat was one of the safer cities in the country, which was to say that one might expect to get blown to pieces by an unexploded cluster bomb or be murdered by common criminals instead of having your body torn apart by a blast from a suicide bomber — though that was always a possibility as well. The Taliban generally kept their business to other parts of the country. Around here that was the south, in the scrub-filled wadis below Shindand and to the east where they smuggled opium across the border with Iran. At least that’s where they’d been when it had been his job to provide them with Russian Kalashnikovs and F1 hand grenades.

Dovzhenko’s taxi driver was somewhere in his early thirties, with the look of a man who had once been muscular and fit but was now muscular and fat. He spoke of politics, the way everyone in Afghanistan talked about such things after half a century of occupation and war. The ride into Herat would have cost around eight U.S. dollars. Dovzhenko offered the man twenty to take him through the city itself and then another five kilometers east through fields of saffron crocus and pistachio trees to the dusty village of Jebrael. The driver kept to the back roads rather than the highway, admitting that the headquarters for his old unit of the Afghan National Army was along the highway. Dovzhenko didn’t ask about the bad blood, but it was enough to make the driver spit on the floor when he mentioned the 4th Armored Brigade.

The driver was familiar with the address for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and, though he appeared to have almost as much bad blood for Russians as he did for his former employer, he took Dovzhenko to the dusty yellow building on the edge of town. The wind was blowing steadily by the time they arrived, sandblasting Dovzhenko’s skin and nearly ripping the money out of his hand as he stepped out of the vehicle. The driver snatched away the twenty and headed back the way he’d come without another word.

In front of the building, a boy of twelve or thirteen wearing shalwar kameez, the loose, pajamalike pants and long shirt ubiquitous in Afghanistan, leaned against the wall with his little sister under the swinging wood UNODC sign. They squinted at the new foreigner in the stiff wind. A moment later, a woman in a black chador came out the door and said something to the children. She shooed them past Dovzhenko, her head down. The little girl looked up at him with green eyes and smiled.

Dovzhenko shouldered his duffel and walked inside. The wooden desk in the sparse front room was clean and neat, with a single manila folder in the center. A cup of tea sat on a clay coaster beside it, half full, as if someone had just walked away. A rotating rack full of pamphlets about farming and drug addiction was the only other furniture.

The wind blew the door shut behind him with a loud crack, causing him to drop the duffel and spin instinctively. He released a pent-up sigh, cursing this awful wind.

The sound of a man’s voice carried in from somewhere in the back, gruff and confrontational. Dovzhenko opened his mouth to call out, but thought better of it. More voices, angrier now, then the muffled cry of a woman, and the clatter of furniture.

Hackles up, Dovzhenko stepped past the desk and down a dark hallway. His hand went instinctively for the Makarov, reaching inside his jacket pocket before he remembered the pistol wasn’t there. Rounding the corner into a concrete storage room, he found two men leaning over the figure of a woman. The men blocked Dovzhenko’s view, but he could see a dark blue headscarf. One of the men shoved her against some metal shelving, earning himself a slap to his ear. The other cuffed her hard in the neck, earning himself a kick to the groin.