Page 81 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
We’ve avoided a war, after all.
ALMOST THREE YEARS AGO, I asked Lenka Kocur to dance with me in Geneva, and while it was the first time I’d ever met her, it wasn’t the first time she’d met me.
“Bassas School,” she said quietly as we moved across the dance floor. “Do you remember it?”
Of course I remembered it. The insurgents had stormed into Bassas in order to block off a key road, shooting anyone who tried to stop them and lighting almost everything on fire to block our vision. Most of the town had managed to shelter in the high school, and there had been a bitter argument between me and my superior—he’d wanted to secure the entire perimeter before evacuating the school, I’d wanted to secure a safe passage out and start evacuating right away. In the end, I’d pretended not to hear his last radioed order and evacuated the building without securing an entire ring around it, and a good thing too, because the building went up in flames not moments after we got the last people out. I could have been court-martialed, but instead I was proclaimed a hero. Proof that PR makes all the difference in the end, although I only allowed myself a single, short moment of cynicism afterwards. It was enough to have done the right thing, and if I had been punished for it, I would have accepted it gladly, knowing that people were alive and safe because of what I’d done.
“I was one of the people trapped inside,” she continued. “You saved my life that day.”
“It was nothing,” I said, a little embarrassed. “We were just trying to help.”
“It was something to me,” she said. “The revolution—it was supposed to make our lives better. In Bassas, that’s what we wanted. But the revolution didn’t happen the way we thought it would—the young people who joined, it was like they forgot where they came from, and they’d torch their own family’s farm if they thought their family was anti-Carpathian.”
“I know, Mrs. Kocur.”
Her face turned bitter and sad. “It feels like there’s no justice for what happened—we have a new country, yes, but it’s half-empty and most of it is still in ruins, and there’s still so much pain. No one ever had to pay for that pain. They became rich, they became leaders.”
“Like your husband.”
She looked up at me. “Like my husband.”
“If you don’t mind
me asking,” I said, trying to be gentle. “Why are you married to him?”
“I had no choice,” she said, blinking back some terrible memory. “They came through Bassas a second time, killed my father and my brother. That’s how Melwas saw me, crying over their bodies, and he told me that he’d kill my mother too if I didn’t come with him. At first I was nothing more than a camp follower, a mistress that he loaned out whenever he pleased, then he had this idea that he couldn’t be a president if he wasn’t married. I suppose I was the convenient choice.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. “Can I help?”
“Well,” she said carefully, “I think you might be able to. Do you remember Glein?”
My throat tightened on reflex; I swallowed against it. “Yes.”
“There was footage of that night. A rebel following Melwas had recorded their incursion into the village, wanting to document a glorious victory for the cause. Instead he caught Melwas and his fellow soldiers sending the village’s children out to die on that boat.”
I stared down at her. “There’s proof?”
She stared back at me. “Clear proof.”
“And you have it?”
She nodded.
“What would happen if you released it?”
At that, she sighed. “I don’t know yet. And I don’t know what would happen after it was released—what if someone worse than my husband came to power? What if our country sank into chaos again?”
“You’d have to be careful,” I said, even though my thoughts weren’t being careful at all. My thoughts were spinning, racing. If Melwas could be exposed as a murderer, if he could be imprisoned or impeached, if someone new and safe could replace him…
So many problems, solved.
But it would have to be done with so much caution, and no one could ever, ever know I had a hand in it.
“Will you help me?” she asked.
“I’ll help you,” I said immediately. Because there was caution and then there was passivity, and I refused to be passive. “When can we talk next?”
“Not for a while,” she admitted. “But I go to Berlin to visit family in several months. There I can find a place to call where I won’t be overheard.”
