The Hydra Protocol (40 page)

The hacker nodded. For a second longer he just stood there. “You are sure you do not wish to shoot me? Only, I would prefer, if so, that is done quickly. I do not wish to draw things out, as they say.”

It was Chapel’s turn to laugh. He jumped up off the cot and clapped the hacker on his shoulder. “Nobody wants to kill you. In fact, if you’re interested in a job in America, I think maybe we could work something out.” Chapel already had Angel as his in-house hacker, but he imagined Hollingshead could find some use for the Romanian. Anybody who understood Russian computers as well as Bogdan did would find plenty of work. “You’d be safe, there, and—”

“He does not know?” Bogdan asked. He was looking at Nadia.

“Go wait in the cave,” she told him, harsher than before.

When he was gone, Nadia got off the cot and wrapped her arms around Chapel, kissing his chest and then leaning her cheek against his skin.

He pulled away. “What is it I’m supposed to know?” he asked.

She looked confused for a second. Maybe even hurt. “After all this,” she said, gesturing at the cot—which was leaning on one buckled leg and would never be the same again—”still you question me like some enemy agent?”

“When I asked why you were spying on my conversations with Angel, you said it was just part of the job. Nothing personal.” He put one hand against her cheek, and after a second she rubbed her face against his palm. “What am I supposed to know?” he demanded.

She hissed in frustration and started grabbing her clothes. “I’ll tell you. In a minute. Just let us see first what Bogdan has done.”

They dressed without another word and then hurried down the spiral staircase. Bogdan was standing next to the terminal desk. Chapel couldn’t tell if he looked bored or proud or sad that his work was done—all those expressions looked pretty much the same on Bogdan’s face.

“Show us,” Nadia said.

“Is nothing to see.” Bogdan tapped a key on Perimeter’s keyboard and the screen filled with Cyrillic text. It looked exactly the same as it had the first time Chapel had seen it. He still couldn’t understand any of it. “No change shows, as you asked. No one will know I was here. But! The system does not work now.”

Chapel frowned. “How’s that?”

Bogdan nodded. He tapped some more keys and more, but different, text appeared on the screen. Just as meaningless to Chapel. “I have put small subroutine in this program. Nothing that looks out of place. In normal times, if Perimeter activates, its first step is to query its atmospheric sensors, yes? It looks for heat, for light, for change in the barometer. If a signature is found, a specific signature for nuclear blast, then, and only then, Perimeter launches all missiles.”

“Sure,” Chapel said. “That’s what we don’t want it to do.”

Bogdan nodded. “So now, is extra step. If Perimeter checks sensors and finds such a signature, it goes to a new line in program that tells to check whether Perimeter has been activated. If is activated, it checks sensors. If sensors show signature, it checks for activation. If activated, check sensors . . . goes on forever, like this, but never gets to launch codes.”

“An infinite loop,” Chapel said, finally getting it. “It can never finish the program.”

Nadia clapped her hands in delight. “That’s perfect! And you hid your work?”

“Yes, yes. No one will find it unless they know exactly where to look. No sign of tampering, no obvious code insertions. No one will know system is broken, unless they make Perimeter launch, and nothing happens.”

“That’s . . . kind of brilliant. Bogdan, you’re a genius,” Chapel said. He fought back an urge to grab the Romanian and give him a hug. He turned to Nadia. He knew there was a big goofy grin on his face, but he didn’t care. “This is what you had planned all along, isn’t it? I thought you were going to blow Perimeter up, or just take a fire axe to those data banks. But you knew that wouldn’t work. You did it, Nadia. You did it!”

“I could not have come this far without you, my
svidetel,
” Nadia said, smiling at him. “My dear witness. You will tell the Americans it is done? That Perimeter is no longer a threat?”

“Absolutely. And then—who knows. This thing has been holding back any kind of nuclear disarmament talks for years. Maybe, someday we can live in a world without all these nukes. Maybe the world can finally stop worrying about the apocalypse and start getting things turned around . . . there’s just one last thing we need to consider.”

Nadia shook her head, but she was close to laughing with joy. “There is? What is it?”

“What did Bogdan think I was supposed to know?”

Her face fell instantly. She frowned and started to turn away, but then she stopped and looked him right in the eye. “Bogdan will not be going with you to America,” she said, “because he’s coming with me.”

“Where?” Chapel asked.

“That’s the big question.” She inhaled sharply. “There is something I have wanted to tell you. Something about my mission—something you are not cleared for, but I think, at this point, such niceties are unnecessary.”

Chapel could feel the muscles tensing up in his neck. She had lied to him once already about the mission—when she claimed she had unequivocal support from the Russian government. If there was more, if she had misled him further—

“You know I am an agent of FSTEK. At least, I was. If Marshal Bulgachenko is dead, then the bureau for which I worked is . . . no more. He
was
that office. I am an agent now with no agency.”

Chapel shook his head. “It’s not like that matters anyway. You can’t go back to Moscow. They’d shoot you the second you stepped off the plane.”

She nodded. “
Konyechno
. But my plan was never to return to Moscow, not even at the start. You see, the marshal and I, we had something in common. Something we believed in. It was why he chose me, why he allowed me to take on this mission, even after he knew I was dying. We thought we could make a grand play, a great leap that would carry our common dream forward, to—”

She stopped in midsentence, as if she’d been frozen in place.

Chapel frowned but just watched as she tilted her head to the side. “Bogdan,” she whispered. “What does that mean?” She pointed at the terminal desk.

Bogdan and Chapel both turned to look at the screen there. A line of Cyrillic characters had appeared in bright green. They flashed alarmingly as if demanding attention.

“Oh,” Bogdan said. “This is shit.”

“What kind of shit?” Nadia asked.

“Is saying, someone is here. Up top,” Bogdan said. He looked almost ashamed, as if it were his fault.

“It can tell that? That there’s something out of place up in Aralsk-30? Tell me it’s just picking up our truck,” Chapel demanded.

“If it makes you happy, yes, yes, I will tell you this. But is lie.”

Bogdan grabbed his MP3 player off the top of the data bank where he’d left it. Chapel checked the assault rifle he had carried down into the cave. None of them said anything. There was nothing to say, until they knew what they faced.

They came up the elevator into punishing sunlight—after the cool darkness of Perimeter’s cave, the heat and brightness of the desert above hit Chapel like a wall and it took him a second to adjust. Even with his eyes clamped shut, though, he could hear the helicopter just fine.

Shielding his eyes with his hands, he cursed when he saw it not a mile away, floating over the desert floor as if it were pinned to the air. It looked like a standard Russian military chopper—a Kamov Ka-60. Something occurred to him about it, though. “Nadia—that helicopter’s a newer Russian model. Does Kazakhstan have any of those?”

An agent of FSTEK, he knew, would have that information memorized. “No, none—they use Mil Mi-24s, only.”

Chapel nodded. “Then that’s not some random Kazakh patrol.” The idea had been unlikely, anyway. What reason would the Kazakh military have to be out here, in the middle of an uninhabited desert? There was no sign anyone had visited Aralsk-30 in years. Why would they do so now?

No, this helicopter was Russian, and the pilot didn’t care if he was seen violating Kazakh sovereignty. There was only one explanation. The assassins had come back for Nadia, and this time they weren’t foolish enough to just send a couple of thugs with pistols. This time they intended to finish the job.

“How did they find us?” Nadia asked. “We were so careful to hide our movements. They couldn’t have been following us all this time.”

Chapel shook his head. “Maybe they didn’t need to.”

The helicopter looked like it wasn’t moving at all, just slowly getting bigger, which meant it was headed directly for them. Chapel estimated they had a minute at most before it arrived.

He turned to Nadia. “Who knew you were coming to dismantle Perimeter? Besides you and the marshal, did anyone—”

“No! I can only think they tracked us by satellite, or—oh, no. They killed Marshal Bulgachenko. But they must have . . . questioned him first.”

Chapel wished he had time to comfort her, but there was no time left for anything but tactics. “It doesn’t matter right now. Come on—we need to get into that building over there.” He pointed at one of the buildings that had partially filled with sand. “Maybe they won’t see us. Maybe we can just wait them out.”

“You think this likely?” Bogdan asked.

“No,” Chapel said, and jogged across the intersection, away from the statue.

They crouched low under the sill of a broken window inside the shade of the building. Chapel risked a quick glance over the edge and saw the helicopter circling Aralsk-30, high enough up to avoid the walls of the canyon. He held his breath and closed his eyes and listened to the sound of its rotor chopping up the air, silently praying for that sound to diminish, to lessen, to indicate that the helicopter was moving away. That the pilot had given up his search, having found nothing.

Instead the noise got louder. The Ka-60 was coming closer, lower. He heard its noise echo off the dead faces of the buildings and knew it was coming in to land.

Beside him Nadia looked terrified. One of her hands reached for his and he took it. He would give her what comfort he could, as pointless as it might seem.

Bogdan had curled up, his knees up in front of his chin. He looked like he might be asleep, though Chapel doubted even the Romanian could relax at a moment like this.

He waited until he couldn’t stand it anymore, then took another quick peek over the windowsill.

The helicopter had landed near the mouth of the canyon, its rotor kicking up great clouds of dust that obscured much of what was going on. But dark shapes moved through that dust and Chapel knew that the chopper had off-loaded its passengers. He couldn’t get a good head count on them through the dust, but he thought there might be half a dozen. Six armed assassins, then. And no way out. The only way to escape the canyon was through its mouth, right past those men.

He whispered to Nadia, telling her what he’d seen.

“Even if we could get past them all, even if we could get the truck out of here—the helicopter could just follow us. There’s no way we could outrun it, not over the desert, and there’s no cover for us to make for. And that’s even if we
could
get to the truck. I have my rifle, you have a pistol. Not much firepower, considering what we’re facing.”

Nadia set her jaw, accepting the inevitable, perhaps.

“They’ll try to take you alive, for questioning,” he told her.

“I’m more worried about Bogdan,” she said.

Chapel grunted in surprise. It might have been a laugh, under different circumstances.

“If they take Bogdan, if they question him—he can tell them what he did to Perimeter. Tell them how to change the program back. All our work would be for nothing, then.”

Chapel hadn’t thought of that.

A different kind of man, the kind of agent that Hollingshead should have sent on this mission, would have been able to think about the situation without passion, without qualm. Such a man might have come to one inescapable conclusion.

The course forward was to shoot Bogdan, to make sure his information couldn’t be retrieved. And then probably shoot Nadia, and himself, for good measure. If none of them could be questioned—call it what it was, Chapel thought,
tortured
—then their secrets would remain safe.

If Hollingshead had picked some twenty-five-year-old Navy SEAL for this mission, or some MARSOC jarhead, some kid with no ties, no family, no obligations to anything but his country—such a man wouldn’t have hesitated.

But Chapel wasn’t one of those men. He thought of what his old trainer, Bigelow, had said about him.

You’re a smart guy, Chapel. But for some reason when you’re beat, you get dumb. You get too dumb to just give up.

So shooting each other in a horrific game of round robin was just out of the question. They were going to have to live through this, or at least try. Chapel racked his brain trying to think of a plan. Anything at all.

What he came up with sounded absurd even as he outlined it to Nadia. She didn’t laugh, though. Maybe she was willing to clutch at straws just as much as he was.

“You’re going to have to take out those assassins, as best you can. You’re going to move from building to building, cover to cover, and get to the truck. There are better weapons for you there—assault rifles, anyway, and the two of you can use those to shoot your way out of the canyon.”

“And what about the helicopter?” she asked.

“That’s my job,” he told her.

Chapel headed up to the roof of the building, up where he could get a better view. The building had a flat top lined with tar paper that burned in the sun. A two-foot-high lip ran all the way around it, providing enough cover for Chapel to lie down on the scorching roof and be invisible from the street level. He could poke his head over the lip just enough to see what was going on without exposing himself unduly to enemy fire.

It would have been a great position to set up a sniper nest, if he had a sniper rifle. The AK-47 he carried just didn’t count. He could theoretically give Nadia some covering fire from up there. If he’d had enough bullets.