The Hydra Protocol (50 page)

He writhed in frustration against his seat. It was taking way too long for the plane to get moving. He needed to be airborne, headed toward his final meeting with her; he needed to—

Someone climbed in through the rear hatch of the plane and started walking up the aisle. Chapel didn’t even bother to look to see who it was. This must be what was delaying them—they’d had to wait for some VIP of the Russian military who had insisted on being on this plane. Chapel sneered in frustration and turned his head to look out the window. When the newcomer dropped down into the seat next to him, Chapel tried to remember the Russian words for “occupied” and “go away.”

He turned to face the newcomer and forgot all the Russian he knew. The VIP was, in fact, Senior Lieutenant Pavel Kalin. His erstwhile torturer.

“Good afternoon, Kapitan,” the bastard said. His smile was broad and genuine. He was thrilled to see Chapel here.

“Get away from me,” Chapel growled, in English.

“I don’t think so. I think I will be staying very close to you now.” Kalin leaned into the aisle and waved at someone. A moment later the plane’s hatch closed and its engines started to drone. Clearly the plane had only been waiting for Kalin’s arrival. “It took a great deal of persuasion to get myself assigned to this mission,” he told Chapel.

“You had to torture somebody for your spot?”

Kalin’s smile broadened. “Very droll. No, I called in some favors. But believe me, I would have moved heaven and earth.”

Chapel clenched his teeth and looked away. This was the last thing he needed.

The plane lifted away from the airstrip with only a few jolts. Soon they were up in the sky, up where there was nothing to see through the window but clouds. Better, anyway, than looking at Kalin’s face. It was taking pretty much all Chapel’s resolve not to reach over and strangle the man in his seat. Of course, if he did, the plane would have to put down prematurely, and that would delay Chapel in the course of his revenge against Nadia. He supposed you had to pick your battles in this life.

“It looks like we’ll be working together,” Kalin said. “My orders are to keep a close watch on you but to follow your lead until I am told this is no longer appropriate.”

“Let’s get one thing straight, Kalin,” Chapel said. “We are
not
partners. I’m not working with you. I’m working for Colonel Valits on behalf of my government. If you catch on fire during this operation, I won’t spit on you to put you out.”

“I could say much the same,” Kalin told him. “I advised strongly against this madness—this foolish notion of sending you to catch her. This is an internal Russian matter, and bringing you in is folly. You should never have been briefed about what happened at Izhevsk. But Valits is a frightened man, just now. He thinks we need every resource available to catch Asimova.”

“Maybe he’s right. Considering that if we don’t, she could start World War III any time she wanted to. And that she’s got nothing to lose.”

“There’s no need to lecture me on her capabilities. I’ve been chasing the terrorist Asimova for longer than you knew she existed,” Kalin explained. “I’ve gone to incredible lengths to find her and stop her. I will not waste all that time and effort.”

Chapel found that he needed to know, more than he needed to get away from Kalin. “How long have you known what she was up to?”

Kalin studied his face for a while, as if trying to decide how much to tell him. Finally he shrugged and said, “It doesn’t matter now. I’ll tell you everything. It started as a matter of routine. Any agent of FSTEK working on recovering lost plutonium is, of course, carefully screened. There are so many temptations in that mission—one must consort with criminals and foreign agents, any of whom would gladly pay a king’s ransom for even a small quantity of fissile material. Plutonium is, gram for gram, the most precious metal on earth. More than one of our agents has succumbed to making a deal with someone he should have arrested instead. So we keep a close eye on them. Asimova was especially worth watching, because she was a known political.”

“You mean because of how she was arrested for attending a protest rally,” Chapel said.

“Exactly,” Kalin said, as if Chapel was finally getting the point. “Add to this that she had charmed Marshal Bulgachenko, the head of FSTEK. He would have given her the moon for a New Year’s present had she asked for it.”

“Did she—” Chapel hated to even ask, especially of an officious monster like Kalin, but he had to know. “Did they—”

“Fuck?” Kalin asked, turning the vulgarity over in his mouth like a candy. He left Chapel hanging for a long, cruel minute. Once a torturer, always a torturer, perhaps. “No,” he said, finally. “The marshal had never had children, and he saw Asimova as a surrogate daughter. He was very proud of her, especially given her Siberian upbringing.”

Chapel frowned. “You have a surprising amount of information on a dead man’s inner thoughts and feelings.”

“I was the man who killed him,” Kalin said. His smile didn’t crack or even chip. “He was a traitor to the Fatherland. He deserved to die. But he was also a hero of our military, and I felt it was worth knowing why he had become corrupted.”

Jesus
, Chapel thought. How long had Kalin tortured the marshal before he killed him? The man might well have been a separatist—a terrorist, even—but nobody should ever be subject to the mercies of a man like Kalin. Nobody.

“I would have watched Bulgachenko even if he hadn’t promoted Asimova so quickly. He was a known troublemaker, from even before my time. When the Soviet Union fell, there was some interest among the Sibiryaks in splitting off from the Federation. It was a short-lived political moment, but in that time Bulgachenko added his voice to the chorus. He even petitioned Yeltsin in person for self-determination for the Siberian republics. He believed he could form a government in Vladivostok, with, of course, himself as president. Yeltsin was a drunk, but he understood that Russia could not survive without Siberia—”

“Without its resources, you mean.”

“Exactly,” Kalin said. “Yeltsin grew angry and threw Bulgachenko out of his office. Before that day Bulgachenko was well on his way to being in control of the entire state security apparatus. Afterward he was relegated to FSTEK, which at the time meant he was put in charge of ordering around a few border guards. FSTEK was a kind of very well-paid gulag. Bulgachenko, of course, was an intelligent man, and he knew better than to protest. Instead he took this as an opportunity. When plutonium started disappearing from the stockpiles, he volunteered to go after it. He only needed a field agent, someone who could actually go out and recover the stuff.

“Asimova must have seemed like a gift from Jesus. She was capable, she was brilliant, and she was beautiful. A perfect symbol of the Siberia of his dreams. She would be a—ah, I know there is an American term, for a person who is the perfect image of—”

“A poster girl,” Chapel suggested.

“Yes! That is it. She would be the poster girl for a new Siberia that was not beholden to Moscow. She doesn’t even look Russian. So of course he confided everything in her. Told her all his plans. Told her that simple political pressure, even nonviolent protest of the kind she had tried, would be useless in creating an independent Siberia. By then they had both seen what happened to Chechnya and South Ossetia under Putin. The Federation has finished giving away territory. It will fight to hold on to what it has left. If Siberia was to gain independence, it must be able to fight back. But how? There is no military presence out east that is not staffed completely by those loyal to Moscow. A coup was out of the question. Bulgachenko’s original plan was to use the confiscated plutonium to make dirty bombs. Put one in Moscow, one in St. Petersburg—perhaps a third in Nizhny Novgorod, just for good measure. Threaten to detonate them if demands were not met.”

“That’s—” Chapel shook his head. “That’s—”

“Terrorism, yes,” Kalin said. “The last resort of the politically deranged. It was Asimova who talked him out of it.”

“Nadia?”

Kalin’s eyes crept over Chapel’s face until he felt like he was covered in bugs. “It would perhaps be better if you stop calling her by that name.”

Chapel realized his mistake and shook his head. “I’ll call her what I want to,” he said. In his head the reply had been
I’ll call her what I want to, asshole
, but he had some sense of decorum left.

Kalin shrugged. “Yes, Asimova convinced him his dirty bomb plan was folly. Which anyone but Bulgachenko could have seen. FSTEK is not some miraculous organization that can act unobserved. The plutonium it recovered was quite carefully logged and monitored by other agencies. If it went missing again, the theft would be discovered very quickly. And the response of my group—the Counter-Intelligence Division—would have been swift, decisive, and without qualm. Beyond this, dirty bombs are notoriously dangerous to build and deploy—and she already knew far too well the danger of handling plutonium.”

“So it was her idea to hijack Perimeter?”

“They developed the plan together. But, yes, it was her brainchild. She knew, of course, that I would try to stop her. She knew that to get access to Perimeter she would need to become a rogue agent. She also knew she would be dead within the week if she did not find some protection somewhere. This, I believe, is why she went to the Americans. To you.”

“You could have shut her down then with one phone call,” Chapel pointed out. “You could have told us she was a terrorist. We would have arrested her in Washington and then held her for you.”

Kalin’s smile didn’t change, but his eyes did. They became weary suddenly, weary and resigned. “That would have meant sharing information with the Pentagon. Giving away secrets—telling you about Perimeter, for one thing. In Russia, some secrets are buried so deeply they can never be brought to light.”

Chapel nodded. “We have a few of those in America, too.”

“I was convinced,” Kalin said, “that I could run her down myself. I did, in fact, call the authorities in Cuba and tell them she was violating their national waters. Unfortunately, the photographs I sent did not make it in time and she slipped through their fingers.”

That explained the mysterious boarding of Donny’s party yacht off Cay Sal Bank, Chapel thought—and why the Cubans hadn’t arrested them then and there.

“Next I thought to catch her in Bucharest, and again in Uzbekistan, but both times you helped her get away,” Kalin pointed out. “It seems she picked her protection very well.”

“She convinced me that your agents were gangsters chasing Bogdan Vlaicu,” Chapel admitted, since it seemed there was no point keeping that from Kalin now. He did not confess that after Vobkent he’d known she was being chased by the Russians, that they wanted her dead or alive. No need to give everything away.

“Indeed. She can be very persuasive.” Kalin folded his hands in his lap. “Kapitan Chapel, I want to be clear on our roles in what is unfolding now. We need you to find her. That is all. Once we have a location, I will not permit you within earshot of the woman. I’d hate for her to charm you once more and have you switch coats again.”

Chapel bit his lip. He could hardly complain or protest. After all, she had done just that—charmed him—once.

But he had his orders, and he knew what he needed, personally. Whatever Kalin thought was going to happen, however this was going to go down, Chapel planned on looking Nadia right in the eye at the last moment. If Kalin didn’t like it, maybe he had to be taken out, too.

It wasn’t the most unattractive prospect.

It was a clear night over Siberia, and as the plane swung north toward its destination, Chapel got to see the sun set, then peek back over the horizon and set again. Yakutsk was close enough to the Arctic Circle that its nights were only six hours long this time of year. When they landed, the sun was rising again and the first pink tinge of dawn was still lining one side of all the airport buildings.

It was enough to give his jet lag jet lag. Chapel hobbled out of the plane, his legs cramped from the flight and still sore, bruised, and lacerated from the beating he’d taken at Aralsk-30. He stepped down a short flight of stairs to the tarmac and thought he could feel the world turning under his feet.

His guard detail emerged behind him, weapons in their hands. Kalin came down last, looking fresh and ready for whatever happened next. If Chapel hadn’t already hated the man with an undying passion, that would probably have been reason enough to start.

They were met by a Russian army officer in a long greatcoat with fur trim around the collar. He looked overdressed. Yakutsk was the coldest city of its size in the world, Chapel knew, but this was the height of summer and it couldn’t be less than fifty-five degrees out. Windbreaker weather, as far as Chapel was concerned.

The officer looked confused as to whom he should salute. He finally settled on Kalin, who returned the gesture with a perfunctory touch of his forehead. The two of them spoke in Russian. Chapel could follow most of what Kalin said, but the officer’s accent was so thick he might have been speaking ancient Etruscan.

They’d been expected, of course, and the officer had a car waiting to take them to an army base where they would be quartered. Kalin replied that wasn’t necessary, that they needed to get to work right away. He ordered that the local troops ready a long-range helicopter at once.

The officer seemed a little put out that his offer of hospitality was rejected. He relayed the order, though, then waved for his troops to come over. There were about fifty of them, and they looked tired. Chapel gathered that they had been part of the detail that was turning the city of Yakutsk upside down looking for Nadia—for the terrorist Asimova. They had searched about a third of the entire city, going door-to-door and checking every house and place of business. They’d gone into cellars and up into attics and found no trace of her, but they were sure that with a little more time—

“She’s not here,” Chapel said, in Russian.

The officer turned to look at him with genuine curiosity. Chapel wasn’t surprised. His presence here was a state secret, not the kind of thing Valits would have passed on to his low-ranking officers. Beyond that, a foreigner in civilian clothes with one arm was always going to stand out on an army base.