The Hydra Protocol Page 12

  The dozer’s blade crashed into the pipes, the impact nearly throwing Chapel off. He did drop the gun, though he managed to grab it before he lost it completely. The pipes rang like bells and grated together.

  Nadia threw the machine into reverse, backed up, and rammed the pipes again.

  The pipes were held together in their stack by a thick plastic strap. It snapped with the second impact, and suddenly nothing was holding them back. They rattled and crashed together, rolling over one another, right into the gate. The gate wobbled and twisted under its own weight and started to open.

  A coil of razor wire at the top of the gate came loose, then, and started to unravel and fall. Chapel looked up and saw one end come spearing toward him, the head of a silver snake striking right at his face. He rolled over to one side as the wire slashed down across his jacket sleeve, one barb tearing deep into the silicone flesh on his artificial arm.

  With a great whoomp of displaced air the gate fell outward, off its posts. It crashed into the street beyond, burying parked cars. Chapel didn’t hear any screams—hopefully there’d been no pedestrians back there.

  Nadia didn’t let up on the gas. She rumbled up over the fallen gate and into the street beyond, where horns blared and Chapel heard the distinctive crump of metal colliding with metal. The little bulldozer hit a curb or a buried car or who knew what. It started to turn over, capsizing in slow motion. The two of them just had time to jump clear.

  BUCHAREST, ROMANIA: JULY 15, 11:51

  Behind him, the blonds were spilling into the construction lot. A couple of them had guns up and at the ready.

  “Come on,” Nadia shouted, and Chapel looked over to see her standing on the roof of a wrecked car parked by the sidewalk. The bulldozer blade was imbedded—nearly fused—with the car’s doors.

  The big pipes had kept rolling into the street, knocking aside anything they touched. They had piled up against the row of shops on the far side, smashing windows and decapitating parking meters.

  Already a crowd was gathering in the street. Chapel hoped the owners of the wrecked cars and shops weren’t among them. He raced after Nadia as she wove her way between cars stopped in the street, dozens of them crammed into a narrow little lane. Drivers slammed their horns and shook their fists and threw their hands in the air in impotent rage.

  “Our enemies will not bring a car through this,” she said, grabbing for Chapel’s hand. “Nor will they dare shoot with so many witnesses.”

  That last part sounded like wishful thinking. Chapel let her lead him down the street and around a corner. He couldn’t see their pursuers, but he was sure they were still coming. “This way,” Nadia whispered, and slipped down an alleyway between two buildings. She took a left on the next street, a right on yet another. She came to a flight of stairs and hurried down, nearly jumping onto the landing below.

  In the dark of the stairs, she grabbed Chapel and pushed him through a door, then slipped in behind him and closed the door behind her. The space they were in was nothing more than a custodial closet, a narrow space lined with shelves. It was so small he could feel her pressed up against him. He was glad to see she was finally breathing hard.

  “Two minutes,” she whispered. “If there’s no sign of them—”

  “Who?” Chapel asked. “Who were those guys?”

  “I have no idea,” Nadia said. In the dark closet he couldn’t see her face. “Bogdan is . . . involved with some people, some criminals, but—”

  “Hold on,” Chapel said. “You said he was a computer expert. Then you said this was the capital of cybercrime. Are we hiring a crook?”

  “I do not know that word,” she said, her Russian accent suddenly much thicker. It wasn’t much of a dodge. Maybe she thought she was being funny. “Please be quiet. Am listening for enemies.”

  He shook his head and let it go.

  “One minute,” she said. He kept quiet. “Now.”

  She opened the closet door and Chapel followed her out, down another flight of stairs into what he realized was a subway station. She bought a pair of tickets from a machine and handed him one. They headed through the turnstiles and down to a platform, where a train was just coming in. Nadia stopped and watched the windows of the train cars as they rocketed by.

  “Third car, second door,” she told him, and ran toward the train as it slowed to a stop. The doors pulled open and people started flooding out, swarming around them in their haste to reach the exit. Chapel saw a very tall, very thin man wearing clunky headphones start to step out of the car. Nadia pushed toward him and said something Chapel couldn’t hear, and the two of them stepped into the car.

  Chapel fought his way through the people and managed to get on the train before the doors closed again. He pushed through the commuters until he found Nadia and the tall guy sitting down, whispering back and forth.

  They looked up at Chapel as he approached.

  “Meet Bogdan Vlaicu,” Nadia said, as Chapel leaned over them. “Our third.”

  BUCHAREST, ROMANIA: JULY 15, 12:12

  Bogdan looked like a bundle of sticks in an old gray coat. Long, mousy hair fell down over his eyes and hid much of his face. The headphones he wore were hooked up to a tiny MP3 player wrapped in layers of ancient duct tape. Over one shoulder he carried a canvas satchel.

  He barely glanced at Chapel during the long subway ride, acknowledging him with a nod of his head and then turning back to his whispered conversation with Nadia.

  When they reached their destination, Nadia led them out of the subway and to the train station where they’d stowed their bags. They found an empty waiting room and hunkered down. “The plan,” she said, “was to fly to Tashkent from here. But our plane tickets aren’t for another six hours. I suggest we get out of Romania as soon as possible.”

  “Agreed,” Chapel said. “We drew a lot of attention back there. The police will want us for questioning, at the very least. So we go by train?”

  Nadia agreed. “A train to Istanbul, in Turkey. That puts a fair amount of distance between us and this trouble, and we can get a flight to Uzbekistan from there. Bogdan,” she said, “are you ready? You made the preparations I asked you to make?”

  “Yes, it is done. Yes,” Bogdan said. He sat down on a bench and stared straight ahead, one hand clicking the buttons of his MP3 player repeatedly, as if it were a nervous habit.

  Chapel pulled the headphones out of Bogdan’s ears to get his attention. “Do you have a passport?” he asked.

  “Some,” Bogdan replied. He reached inside his satchel and took out a handful of them. “Do you want I am Croatian, Latvian, or Czech?”

  Chapel took the passports and riffled through each of them. “This one looks the most authentic. Latvian,” he said, handing the rest of them back to the Romanian. Then he unzipped his own bag and took out a bag full of shampoos and travel-sized soap. The bag had a hidden compartment where he’d put two fresh passports, one for him and one for Nadia. He leafed through them. “Your name is Svetlana Shulkina now,” he said.

  Nadia wrinkled her nose. “That is the name of a mail-order bride.”

  “I’m Jeff Chambers,” he said, ignoring her. He zipped the old passports, the ones they’d used entering Romania, into the hidden compartment. “I’ll go get our train tickets—in a minute. First I want to talk about what the hell just happened.”

  Nadia smiled at him. “We got away,” she said.

  Chapel shook his head. “There was no reason for us to draw so much attention, not this early in the mission. You think they were looking for Bogdan?” He turned to the Romanian hacker. The man had his headphones back on. Chapel removed them again, expecting Bogdan to protest, but he didn’t. “Bogdan, who’s looking for you?”

  The Romanian just shrugged.

  Chapel wanted to grab him by the lapels and throw him up against the wall until he gave a proper answer. He fought back that urge. “Are you in some kind of trouble?” he asked.

  Bogdan shrugged again. “Usually.�
�

  Chapel turned to Nadia with a skeptical look. “You’re sure this is the guy we want?”

  “Absolutely. He and I worked together once before. Didn’t we, Bogdan?”

  “Yes,” the Romanian said. He was putting his headphones back on.

  “Ignore all of . . . this,” she said, waving at Bogdan to indicate what Chapel was looking at. “The first computers Bogdan ever saw—that a lot of Romanian kids ever saw—were looted from Soviet-era office buildings here, old Vector-06Cs and East German U880s. They were usually broken and outdated, so the kids had to teach themselves to rebuild them from parts. Bogdan was always a prodigy. He made a name for himself back in the early nineties by upgrading computers to run pirated copies of Western games. Now people hire him to port their old business software over to Western operating systems. He can write code for the ES EVM standard in his sleep.”

  Chapel didn’t understand much of that, but it sounded appropriately technical. There was one problem, though. “I take it most of his clients are people who don’t want their data uploaded to Facebook.”

  “Konyechno,” Nadia said. “He works for gangsters and thieves, yes. They hire him because he is very good, and because he does not talk.” She laughed. “He’s exactly who we want, ‘Jeff.’ The kind of man who will fly halfway across the world to do some computer work with no questions asked for fifty thousand U.S. dollars in cash—and never tell a soul about his adventure. Did you think I hadn’t thought this through? I’ve been planning this operation for years.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chapel said. “I didn’t mean to suggest—”

  He stopped because Nadia had turned her back and was pulling her halter top over her head. She grabbed a fresh shirt from her luggage and pulled it on, stuffing the halter top back inside. She ran her fingers through her hair to try to straighten it back out and then used an alcohol wipe to remove most of her makeup.

  “Impressive,” Chapel said. “You look completely different, now.”

  “I’m Siberian. Most people think I look Mongolian, or maybe Korean,” she said. “Around here I stand out, so I need to work the accessories. The farther east we get on this trip, the less conspicuous I’ll be and I won’t need all the costume changes.” She smiled at Chapel. “A gentleman might have turned his back.”

  Chapel felt his cheeks grow hot. “I’m sorry, I, I forgot, I just—”

  She gave him a forgiving smile. “Nothing you haven’t seen before, I think. Now, I believe you were going to go buy us some tickets?”

  “Yeah. Yeah . . . I’ll do that,” Chapel said. He headed for the door of the waiting room but stopped before he went through. “By the way,” he said. “You were really something back there. Using that bulldozer to escape was inspired.” He thought about the way she’d taken down Mustache, as well. “Pretty good for a glorified file clerk.”

  “There’s more than one way to deal with bureaucracy,” she told him. She reached around her neck and unhooked the crucifix she’d been wearing.

  Bogdan looked up, suddenly coming back to life. “Can I have this, if you don’t want anymore?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said, handing the necklace to him.

  “Are you a Christian, Bogdan?” Chapel asked.

  “No,” he said. “I just want all help I can get.”

  Nadia had said she’d worked with Bogdan before. Judging by what Chapel had seen so far, maybe he knew what he was getting into. Chapel was pretty sure he didn’t.

  IN TRANSIT: JULY 15, 19:44

  The toilet on the train to Istanbul—the first train they’d been able to catch out of Bucharest—looked like it had been made of a single piece of aluminum. It stank of bleach, and the toilet tissue had the consistency of cheap wax paper. But the door closed and latched securely, and the noise of the train meant no one would overhear Chapel’s communication with Angel.

  “What exactly have you been getting up to, sugar?” she asked, as soon as the call went through.

  “Don’t tell me we made the news sites,” Chapel said, his heart sinking.

  “No, nothing like that—there’s nothing about it anywhere that I can find in the mass media. The Romanian police haven’t issued any alerts, either, which means you’re off their radar. But the State Department—the U.S. State Department, I mean—got a call today asking to verify your passports. They went through just fine, but we had to turn over your names and your flight itineraries.”

  That could have gone much worse, Chapel decided. The names on the passports he and Nadia had used were false, and the plane tickets they weren’t using would send any pursuers off on the wrong track. It still worried him, though. “A bunch of guys tried to scoop us up in a tea shop on the Strada Lipscani,” he told Angel. “We got away. We thought they were looking for this computer tech Nadia likes so much, this Bogdan Vlaicu. He’s apparently in trouble with the local mob so I’m assuming it was organized crime. You think they might have requested that passport check?”

  “Eastern European gangsters usually don’t get a direct line to the State Department,” Angel said, mirroring his own thoughts. “Though they might have people in the local government on their payroll. I’ll look into this, see who made the request. Most likely it was the local police. If it was, it’s strange they wouldn’t issue an APB for the two of you, though. Maybe they have a reason to keep this quiet.”

  “Were you able to see any of what happened?” he asked.

  “No. I can only see what wired security cameras see, or what our reconnaissance satellites pick up. There weren’t any sats over your horizon at the time. There were some weird traffic reports and a couple posts on Twitter about a shooting in that district, but that was it.”

  “Two of the gangsters came into the tea shop, and they knew why we were there. We took them down.” Chapel was silent for a moment as he thought. “You should have seen Nadia in a fight. She was all over the place, doing high kicks and dodges I didn’t think were possible. She looked like Mary Lou Retton at her prime.”

  “We know she was a gymnast when she was a kid,” Angel pointed out.

  “This was . . . something else.” Something that kept nagging at Chapel. “I’ve seen moves like that before, somewhere, but I can’t remember where. Maybe in a movie.” He filed that question away for future consideration and moved on. “As for the men who attacked us, they were pretty well organized. I’d say a dozen men total, in three cars. They were all blond, which didn’t strike me as too weird at the time, but now that I say it out loud it makes me wonder. I don’t remember seeing a lot of blonds in Bucharest otherwise.”

  He listened to Angel tap away at her keyboard as she looked something up. “It’s not a common hair color there, according to the Internet. Would you believe there’s actually maps showing what percentage of the population has what hair color?”

  “It’s the Internet. There’s probably a map of what country has the most nose rings.”

  Angel giggled. “I’m looking at a map of blonds right now. Eighty percent of Scandinavians are blond, did you know that?”

  “These guys weren’t Scandinavian,” Chapel said. “They had Slavic accents. And judging by their grammar—” He stopped for a second, thinking. “Angel, they were speaking English.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Not well, but it was English. It didn’t occur to me at the time. But they came straight to me, speaking English.”

  “So they made you for an American.”

  “Yeah,” Chapel said. “Damn. I thought I was fitting in.” He thought about how easily Nadia had changed her appearance, and how she had elicited no stares or questioning looks in the tea shop. How well she’d handled the escape, even knowing exactly when Bogdan’s train would show up. “I’m out of my element here. Plunk me down in Afghanistan and nobody would mistake me for a local, but at least I would know how to act and how to not draw too much attention to myself. In Bucharest I might have jeopardized the mission.” He shook his head. “Maybe I shouldn’t have be
en the one to—”

  “Stop thinking like that right now, sugar,” Angel said. “The director approved you for this. There’s nobody he trusts more.”

  “Yeah.” Chapel sighed deeply and rubbed his face with his hands. “Okay. Well, let’s focus on what we do best. Have you found anything on Bogdan?”

  “A lot more than I found on Nadia,” Angel said. “Bogdan Vlaicu, alias Aurel21. That’s his handle, the hacker nickname he uses on message boards and blog posts. He has a pretty big reputation online as somebody who can break into supposedly secure eCommerce databases. Arrested a couple of times on counts of credit card number running and for being a public nuisance—specifically, for taking over a Romanian political party website and replacing it with hard-core pornography.”

  “Seriously? This is the guy Nadia thinks is so vital to our mission?”

  Angel laughed. “He may be an idiot, but if he is, he’s an idiot savant. He’s never gone to jail, even when he bragged online about his crimes. The Romanian government cut him a deal each time they arrested him. If he agreed to take down some real cybercriminals—money launderers, online drug dealers—they’d let him off. Hacking the hackers, in other words.”

  Angel couldn’t keep the grudging respect out of her voice. Chapel knew that her own story wasn’t that different. Though her real name, her location, and even what she looked like was kept deeply classified, even from him, she’d once told him how she’d ended up working for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Back when she was just a teenager (how long ago that had been was, again, secret), she had thought it would be fun to hack into the Pentagon’s servers. Instead of going to jail for the rest of her life, she’d ended up whispering sexily into Chapel’s ear. To her, Bogdan might seem like a fellow traveler.

  “The guy has chops,” Angel said. “He shut down one of the biggest dark net pirated software operations back in 2009 with a simple denial-of-service attack. Basically he flooded the website with fake orders, hundreds of thousands of them coming in every second. That’s nothing, that’s hacking 101, but it was just a smoke screen. When the criminals shut down their servers to stop the attack, they switched to a backup server for their internal e-mail and even their phones—maybe they thought that the Romanian government couldn’t tap into their VoIP connections. Normally they would have been right about that. But Bogdan had secretly hacked the backup server even before he began the denial-of-service attack, so every word they said over the server they thought was still secure got logged and recorded. He took down dozens of cybercriminals in one day, including a guy who was on Interpol’s most wanted list.”