The Hydra Protocol (53 page)

“I would ask where you are now, but maybe it’s better I don’t know,” he told her.

“I only wish you could be here with me,” she told him.

He was dumbstruck by the idea. Did she have no idea how badly she’d betrayed him? No idea how he must feel about being used like this? He wanted to shout at her, to scream with frustrated rage, but he forced himself to control his voice. “Maybe we should talk some business,” he told her.

“Yes, you said your president wants to help me,” she replied. “I am a little surprised. I would have thought the alliance of your country with Russia would be too much damaged by such a thing.”

She was right there. Though it could have gone a different way. He tried to imagine that alternative history, the one where he was actually negotiating with her. Making it up on the fly was tricky, but it had to be done. “Our top people considered that. They also considered the fact that if you launch those missiles, they’re headed straight for American cities. We want to avoid that any way we can. Talk to me, Nadia. Tell me how we can get out of this with nobody pressing any big red buttons.”

She must have wanted that, and badly. She must have been desperate for any kind of international recognition she could get—anything to put pressure on Moscow and make them bow to her demands. He could hear in her voice how relieved she was to think she had friends in Washington, even if she had to hold a gun to their heads to make them smile.

“Marshal Bulgachenko and I had this all planned out,” she said. “We must obtain a United Nations resolution recognizing the sovereignty of the Siberian republics and their right to self-determination. The main barrier to this will be Russia’s seat on the Security Council, but if they can be swayed by diplomatic means . . .”

She droned on and on about politics. Chapel tuned most of it out—it meant little to him. He’d always been a good soldier, and good soldiers didn’t worry about how the civilians brokered peace agreements. Good soldiers just prepared themselves for when those talks inevitably broke down. The main thing was that he’d gotten Nadia talking, and every second she went on was another chance to get a fix on her location.

Not paying attention to her, though, meant he was stuck inside his own head. Lost in there with his anger at her.
God, listen to her
, he thought.
She thinks this is all so reasonable. So possible. She betrayed me! She betrayed my country’s faith! She used us, manipulated us, and now she thinks we’ll help her finish what she started—

“Jim? Did you hear that last part?” she asked. “It’s crucial to building a lasting constitutional entity that recognizes the civil rights of all the disparate ethnic groups. Moscow won’t like it because—”

“I’ve got to admit, Nadia, this is all a little over my head,” he told her. “But keep going. This is all being recorded, of course, and I’ll pass it on to people in the State Department who will understand it much better than me. In fact—”

There was a click on the line. Angel’s voice cut in, stopping him in midsentence.

“Chapel,” she said.

He froze, unsure if Nadia could hear him or not, unsure what Angel was going to tell him.

“I’ve got her,” Angel said, her voice thick with emotion.

For a second Chapel refused to believe it.

“You have her location?” he asked. “Really?”

“Down to a resolution of about ten square yards,” Angel told him. “You must have flown right past her. The signal was incredibly strong.”

Chapel closed his eyes and said a little prayer of thanks.

“I’ve suspended your transmission to her,” Angel said, “so she can’t hear us talking. But I have her audio and she’s asking if you’re still there, if you’re going to finish that thought. Do you want me to patch you back in?”

Chapel considered it. Nadia might get spooked if their conversation just stopped there. Then again, if he had to keep talking to her, chances were he would eventually lose his cool and start telling her what he really thought.

“No. And don’t give her any sign why,” Chapel told Angel. “Let her just think we got cut off by some technical glitch or something.”

“Okay,” Angel told him.

“Give me her coordinates,” he said. “Tell me where she is, Angel. So we can finish this once and for all.”

Angel relayed the latitude and longitude, minutes and seconds down to three decimal places. Chapel read the numbers off to Kalin, who relayed them to the pilot. The helicopter slowed way down and then banked into a wide turn—they had already passed Nadia’s location, and they needed to double back.

“She’s outside of a little village called Venaya, about seventy miles northeast of Lake Baikal. The village has about sixty people total, but the house she’s at is far enough away that none of them have any reason to be out there. I’m guessing she’s alone in the house, but I can’t guarantee that. I
can
see smoke coming from its chimney. There’s also a small single-prop airplane nearby, sitting on an improvised landing strip.”

“A plane?”

“It’s not surprising. There are no real roads anywhere near her—which isn’t uncommon for Siberia. The permafrost devours anything less robust than a metaled highway every winter. For a lot of these villages the only way in or out is by air—or on the back of a reindeer.”

There were places in Alaska that could only be reached by aircraft, Chapel knew, and probably for the same reason. No wonder this country was so sparsely populated. How long, he wondered, would it have taken the Russians to find Nadia, just searching door-to-door throughout Siberia? Nadia must have thought she had plenty of time—time to spin out her blackmail scheme, time to make the Russians do what she wanted.

Well, she was about to find out just how little time she had left.

Kalin ordered the helicopter to set down half a kilometer away from Nadia’s location. Within another minute they were on the ground, and the soldiers started jumping out of the side hatch.

Time to go.

Chapel grabbed a stanchion and started pulling himself out through the hatch. Before he could touch his feet to the ground, though, Kalin turned and put a hand on his chest. “What do you think you are doing?” the torturer asked.

Chapel knocked Kalin’s hand away. “I’m going in with your soldiers. I’m going to find her and make things right.”

“I hardly think so. Do you honestly think I trust you around Asimova?” Kalin asked. “She has fooled you so many times already into betraying yourself. Why risk such shameful behavior again?”

“This time’s going to be different,” Chapel promised.

Kalin laughed. “You’ll stay here, with the helicopter. We will not be gone for very long.”

Chapel glanced at the soldiers already moving away through the trees. They were keeping low and staying silent, so they wouldn’t alert Nadia to their approach.

He looked back at Kalin. Then he head-butted the torturer, hard enough to knock him right out of the helicopter.

In a moment Chapel was out, too, his feet making soft thuds as he ran across a carpet of pine needles as soft as a mattress.

He was pretty sure Kalin wouldn’t shoot him. Not, at least, until Nadia was dead. Even afterward Kalin would want him alive just so he could torture him again. Nor would Kalin order his men to seize Chapel—that would be too noisy, now when quiet was an absolute necessity.

He had no doubt that Kalin would find a way to make his life hell, but that was in the future. Right now Chapel had his orders from the director, and the only way to carry them out was to keep moving, to run as fast as he could—and get to Nadia first. Kalin would want to take her alive, for questioning. He’d want to make sure he got every last bit if information squeezed out of her before he let her die. Chapel’s orders, on the other hand, were to kill her as quickly and as neatly as possible.

That would be tricky without a firearm, but he had learned long ago how to improvise.

He caught a look at the face of one of the soldiers as he sprinted past. The Russian looked more confused than anything else—Chapel passed him by too quickly for the man to register anger or curiosity. Chapel didn’t slow down to learn how the soldier felt about an American spy running past him toward their shared target.

Soon he was past all the soldiers. They were taking their time, watching their backs. Chapel just wanted to get to the damned house. Before long he could see it up ahead, or at least one corner of it. It looked like it had been made of logs that didn’t quite fit together, the gaps between the logs filled in with mortar. Its roof was high and peaked and covered in pieces of bark cut down to the size of shingles. He saw the smoke coming from the chimney. He saw it only had one window on the side that faced him, one narrow pane of glass.

He ducked lower until he was almost crawling, then dashed up to the corner of the house and slid along its side until he found the door. Angel hadn’t said if there was more than one door—most likely she couldn’t tell just from satellite imagery. If there were two doors and Chapel came running through the front, he would need to move very fast before Nadia could escape out the back.

Well, he’d planned on getting this over with as quickly as possible, anyway.

He got his good shoulder into the door and burst through it, shattering the cheap lock that had held it shut. Immediately he dropped his head in case Nadia was armed, in case she started shooting as soon as she saw him.

As it turned out, she had something better than a gun.

“Jim,” Nadia said. Her eyes were very wide.

Chapel took in every detail at once and had to sort through them. The house comprised a single room, with a cot on one side and a table on the other. Nadia was lying belly down on the cot, her feet up in the air behind her. She held her phone in both hands as if she’d been trying to make it reconnect to Angel’s frequency. A short-barreled submachine gun lay on the cot next to her.

On the table was a laptop computer. Bogdan sat behind the laptop, clacking away furiously at the keys.

Chapel hadn’t expected to find the Romanian here. He’d assumed the two of them would have parted ways after Aralsk-30, that Bogdan’s work was done. But of course it made sense. Nadia had been busy since then, setting up a secure line of communication and the ability to hack into the Russian nuclear arsenal. She would have needed some technical help for that.

Not that it mattered. Not in the slightest.

“Jim, I didn’t think I would see you here,” Nadia said, twisting around until she was sitting up and facing him. It was warm in the little house, and she wore nothing but a halter top and a pair of jeans. Her feet were bare. She looked good. She looked so good . . .

“You betrayed me,” Chapel growled. “You used my country.”

“Jim,” she said, very carefully.

“You convinced me we were doing good. That we were going to make the world a safer place. When what you really wanted was to drive us to the brink of war,” Chapel went on. He was on a roll now. “You—”

“Jim, stop,” Nadia said.

“You’ve had your chance to talk. Now’s my turn,” Chapel said.

“No, I mean, stop moving.” She carefully set down her phone and picked up the submachine gun. She didn’t point it at him, but her meaning was clear. “I think you came here to kill me. Yes?”

“You betrayed me,” he said.

“I lied to you, it’s true. And now you want to kill me for it. But right now I have the gun. So let’s all be calm.”

He grunted in inarticulate rage and took another step toward her. Let her go ahead and shoot. It would only take him a second to get close enough, to get right up next to her and—

“If you’re not afraid of this,” she said, hefting the weapon, “then maybe I can stop you by telling you that Bogdan has the Perimeter software booted up and ready to launch.”

That part of Chapel’s brain which hadn’t been overwritten by pure anger started to speak very loudly in the back of his mind, just then. It forced him to stop, for a second anyway, and turn to look at Bogdan.

“Is true, yes,” the hacker said. He shrugged. “I can send the bombs. So be chill, man, yes?”

“He’s got them on that laptop?” Chapel asked. “The codes you stole from Aralsk-30?”

“That’s right,” Nadia said. “So please, just stay calm. And don’t move.”

Chapel nodded and licked his lips.

He glanced around the room, seeing for the first time the rest of its contents. A pyramid of canned food in one corner. A wood-burning stove. A gasoline generator, its exhaust vented through the chimney, chugged away in one corner, providing power for the laptop. A thick cable ran from the generator to the laptop. If he could get close enough to pull that plug—but no, it would have battery power, still. Pulling the plug wouldn’t shut down Bogdan’s link to the missiles.

Chapel must have taken a step in that direction anyway, because Nadia jumped up and pointed the SMG at him again. “Please, Jim. Just don’t move. Don’t make me shoot you—I don’t want to.”

Through the anger that distorted his vision, Chapel could see that she meant it. She didn’t want to kill him—she still thought there was something between them. Just how deluded was she?

Deluded enough, maybe, to launch a nuclear attack if he didn’t do exactly as she said? He nodded and stepped back to the middle of the room, between her and Bogdan.

She must have caught a flash of movement outside the windows, then, because she jumped up and ran over to one and peered out. “Russian soldiers,” she said, her breath catching in her throat. “You brought them here?”

“They’ve probably surrounded this place by now,” he told her.

“Shit!”

Chapel nodded. “How exactly do you think this is supposed to end?” he asked her. “How long do you think they’ll wait before they start shooting?”

“A very long time, if they know what they’re risking,” she said, ducking below the windowsill. She moved quickly around the room, to another window, and peeked out through that one. What she saw made her bite her lip in frustration.

Maybe it was just that—frustration—that caused her not to notice that Chapel had taken a step back, toward Bogdan.