Autumn 2012

Colonel Konstantin Gavrilovich Ivanov stared out the window of his office at the headquarters of the Uzbek State Security Service in Tashkent.

The rain in Spain, he once heard, fell mainly on the plain. In Uzbekistan, it fell mainly on the ill-fated, the downtrodden, the unchosen. Not people of Ivanov’s ilk, in other words. He, by virtue of lineage, had spent...