Private Wars Read Free Page A

deepen, and didn’t answer.
    And Chace found herself at a loss, the speech she’d so carefully rehearsed abruptly gone, disappearing like the vapor from her breath. She tried to retrieve it, found only bits and pieces, incoherent and useless.
    Valerie Wallace shifted, one hand holding the door, still staring at her.
    “We were lovers,” Chace finally managed. “Before he died. We were friends and we were lovers, and I’m pregnant, and it’s his. It’s ours.”
    She thought it would garner some reaction, at least; if not the words, at least the clumsiness of them. And it did, because, after another second, Valerie Wallace blinked, and then opened the door more fully, inviting her inside.
    “Perhaps you’d like to come in for a cup of tea, Tara Chace,” Valerie Wallace said. “And you can tell me why you’re here.”
             
    On the twenty-eighth of May, at seventeen past nine in the morning, at Airedale General Hospital in Keighley, with Valerie Wallace holding her hand as she screamed through the final surge of labor, Tara Chace gave birth to a daughter. The baby was healthy, twenty-two inches long, weighing seven pounds, eleven ounces.
    She named the child Tamsin.
             
    There were nights when, despite exhaustion, Chace found she could not sleep.
    Staring out the window that overlooked Valerie Wallace’s well-tended and now fully in-bloom garden at Weets Moor, holding Tamsin in her arms as the baby slept, Chace would sit and stare at nothing. She could feel her daughter’s heartbeat, the rustle of her breath, the heat of her small body.
    And Tara Chace would wonder how she could feel all of that, and still feel nothing at all.

CHAPTER 1
    Uzbekistan—Tashkent—14 Uzbekiston,
Malikov Family Residence
    9 February, 0929 Hours (GMT+5:00)
    They gave it an hour after the husband left, just to be certain he hadn’t forgotten anything, that he wouldn’t be coming back, before they knocked on the door. Four of them went to do it, while another two waited in the second car, the engine idling.
    The two who waited were jealous of the four who went. They thought they were missing the fun.
    All were men, and all wore business suits of the latest style, acquired for them in Moscow and Paris and Switzerland, then altered by tailors here in Tashkent, men who were paid pennies to adjust clothing worth thousands. All six finished their look with neckties of silk and shoes of Italian leather and cashmere-lined kidskin gloves. A few wore overcoats as stylish as the suits they covered, to ward off the howling chill that blew down out of the mountains in Kazakhstan to the north.
    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