The Hydra Protocol Read online

  “You’re suggesting we take in the local sights,” Chapel said. The idea sounded ridiculous—this wasn’t a vacation. But he glanced around at the other people in the café, mostly Turks poring over newspapers or checking their phones before they had to get in to work. There were more than a few tourists, though, recognizable by their casual clothes and the bags they all carried. “That might not be such a bad plan,” he said. Among the well-dressed business professionals of Istanbul, Bogdan stood out like a sore thumb. In a crowd of gaudily dressed tourists he might be less conspicuous.

  “One must take one’s pleasures where one may, yes?” Nadia said. She pushed her chair back and stood up. “This is the last chance we’ll have to relax, before things get serious.”

  They’d already been attacked by Romanian gangsters and had to flee Bucharest ahead of the police. Chapel wondered how serious she expected things to get.

  “Before I go anywhere,” Bogdan announced, still firmly seated in his chair. “I finish this cup.”

  The two of them stood and watched while he slurped his coffee.

  ISTANBUL, TURKEY: JULY 16, 07:49

  They headed down Kennedy Avenue, following the curve of the strait. Soon Chapel could see a big domed structure rising above them, flanked by four needlelike minarets. Helpful signs confirmed this was the Hagia Sophia, one of Istanbul’s most important landmarks and a major tourist destination. They joined a mob of people from every country in the world flowing into its forecourt. Signs posted everywhere in a dozen languages told him about the place. “This was built in the year 360?” Chapel said aloud. “Is that . . . is that right?” The signs assured him it was true. They told him the Hagia Sophia had originally been a basilica of the Orthodox Christian Church, the biggest church in the world for a thousand years. For a while it had been a Roman Catholic cathedral, and then in the Middle Ages it was converted into a mosque. In the twentieth century, it had been converted into a museum.

  The building was massive, a sprawling complex of domes topped with golden spikes, with broad stone walls that glowed pink in the morning sun. As they passed through its main entrance into the shadowed interior the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees, and Chapel smelled old stone and wood. When his eyes adjusted, he took in just how big the place was—the walls seemed to stretch upward forever, pierced with rows of arches and massive columns. Round panels displaying Arabic calligraphy hung overhead, so wide each character was taller than Chapel. The walls were lined with golden mosaics or cut from veined marble or rich, colorful stone that gave the place a sense of immense solidity, even as the open space between the walls felt infinite and expansive.

  Chapel looked up and saw an enormous dome that stretched so high over his head he felt dwarfed, rendered insignificant. Daylight streamed in through hundreds of arched windows, filling the air under the dome with a bright presence that seemed to shimmer and twist like something trying to take form and existence.

  All the noise, all the anger in his head seemed to drain away as he stood there, taking in the sheer immensity of the place. The scale, the power of it. It might well look like a mosque, it might have been packed full of tourists laughing and griping and snapping pictures, but it took Chapel back to a very different place. Strangely enough, it made him remember the little white-paneled church in Florida where, as a boy, he’d gone to services with his mother every Sunday. He had spent those hours fidgeting on the pews that stank of wood polish, bored and wondering what he was missing on TV. But now, in this place, he didn’t think about that. He thought of his mother, in her Sunday dress, kneeling with her head bowed in prayer. He thought of the times when the congregation would come together in song, their voices joined over the sound of the church’s pipe organ, and how it had felt like there was something there, something bigger than himself. Something special. The people who had built the Hagia Sophia, he knew, had been looking for the same thing. The sacred.

  He realized his jaw was hanging open, and he forced himself to look down, at Nadia standing beside him. She looked up at him with a quiet smile.

  “Perhaps you think me trivial,” she said, “for wanting to see this when there is so much work to be done.”

  “No,” he said, softly. Inside him, something let go, something he’d been holding on to for a long time. He felt strangely at peace. “No, I don’t. I’m glad I got to see it myself.”

  She nodded. “This career we choose, it does not offer us much time to ourselves, to think, to simply be people. We are kept so busy, and our lives could end at any time.” She shivered as if she were cold. “I feel I must take advantage, any compensation I can. Being able to see much of the world is one of the best.”

  She reached over and took his hand. His good, living hand. It was such an innocent and affectionate gesture it didn’t occur to him to stop her. Her fingers were warm and soft in his, and after a moment he didn’t want to let go.

  He closed his eyes, and just for a moment, a short span of time, he was okay. It was like having Julia there with him. Or even more basic than that—just having another human being to share the moment with, to not be alone.

  “Happy honeymoon!” someone shouted, and Chapel’s eyes opened just as a flash of light dazzled him. His first instinct was to reach for a gun that wasn’t there. His second was to pull away from Nadia’s hand, as guilt flushed through him and made him want to duck his head.

  Then he saw what had happened, and he growled in frustration.

  A Turkish man with a camera stood in front of them, grinning from ear to ear.

  ISTANBUL, TURKEY: JULY 16, 08:09

  “Such a handsome couple. I take your picture,” he said. “Then, if you give me your e-mail, your home address, I can send you a copy, all right? You can remember this happy moment forever.”

  Damn. This was not acceptable. They couldn’t leave any trace behind, any sign they’d been here—not even a picture on some random man’s camera. Chapel forced himself to smile. “Can I see the picture? On your camera?”

  “Fifty lira for the picture, printed in a lovely frame,” the man suggested. “For eighty, I will make smaller prints and send them to all your friends.”

  “I just need to see the picture first,” Chapel said. “I think my eyes were closed.”

  “If it’s no good, okay, I take another,” the man tried.

  “Just let me see the picture,” Chapel said, taking a step closer to him. The man started to turn and move away so Chapel had to reach out and grab his arm. He tore the camera out of the man’s hands and let him go.

  Instantly the photographer started shouting something in a language that Chapel didn’t know. His hand gestures and the look on his face made it very clear what he was trying to communicate.

  The last thing Chapel wanted was to have the police come and ask questions. He studied the camera in his hands. The buttons were all labeled with letters and numbers he couldn’t figure out, but he managed to bring up the last picture taken. It showed him—his eyes were, in fact, closed—and Nadia, hand in hand. Bogdan was just visible in the background, though he was walking away from them.

  Chapel found an icon that looked like a trash can. He deleted the picture and handed the camera back to the photographer.

  “This is an outrage!” the man said, in English. “This is not—”

  Nadia spoke softly to him in the same language he’d used before. She held up her left hand and pointed at it several times. When that didn’t do the trick, she handed him a couple of bank notes.

  The photographer made a nasty gesture at Chapel, but he took his camera and left.

  “What did you say to him?” Chapel asked.

  “I said we were married, but not to each other,” she said, with a shrug and a wry smile. “Then I gave him twice what he was asking. I should have led with the money.”

  Chapel nodded, only half paying attention. He was scanning the crowd, looking for Bogdan. “When was the last time you saw our third?” He raised an eyebrow at Nadia, and her fa
ce got very serious, very fast.

  “We need to find him,” she said, and pushed into the crowd. Chapel went a different direction, looking for anyone tall and thin, looking for headphones.

  When he spotted Bogdan, Nadia had already reached him. The hacker had discovered a rank of computerized information kiosks. Each was just a box with a screen and a trackball, designed to give tourist information in several different languages. The screen of each one was displaying pictures of the dome above and the word Welcome! in multiple alphabets. The kiosk that Bogdan was using, however, showed a black screen covered in lines of tiny, blurry text.

  Even Nadia looked surprised, for once. “How did you . . . ?”

  “Is a screen for maintenance,” Bogdan explained, moving the trackball across the screen with the deftness of a champion video-game player. “In case system goes down and needs to be fixed. Easy if you know the way in, yes? Hold on.” He clicked the ball and the screen lit up with the home page for an Internet browser. “I just go to check my VKontakte page.”

  Chapel frowned. “What’s VKontakte?” he asked.

  Nadia looked up at him. “Russian Facebook.”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Chapel said, grabbing Bogdan’s shoulders and pulling him back from the kiosk. “No, we’re not going there.” He pressed his back up against the screen so Bogdan wouldn’t even see it. “Low profile, okay? Coming here wasn’t the best idea. We need to stay out of sight. We need to go straight to the airport.”

  “Konyechno,” Nadia said, with a weary sigh. “The time to relax is over.”

  IN TRANSIT: JULY 16, 22:59

  Even in his sleep, Bogdan kept tapping away at his MP3 player. He lay twisted up in his seat, his long frame bent to fit into the little legroom he had. His face hung on the seat back as limp and loose as a rubber mask, his mouth open and flecked with drool. The hair that always covered his eyes obscured half his face and made him look barely human.

  Another airplane, another night. Economy class this time, just to throw off anyone looking for business-class travelers matching their description. Chapel still couldn’t sleep. Nadia sat across the aisle from the two men. Chapel studied her sleeping face and wished he could be next to her, breathing in her perfume, her soft shoulder rubbing up against his. Maybe she would have laid her head against him, used him as a pillow. Maybe he could have put an arm around her for warmth.

  Jesus. This had to stop.

  He plugged his earbuds into his tablet and booted up his Kazakh language program. Almost as soon as the monotone voice of the vocabulary lesson began it stopped and Angel spoke to him instead.

  “How are you doing, baby?” she asked.

  The sexy voice speaking to him out of the ether was almost enough to get him to stop thinking about Nadia. He inhaled sharply and put his fingers on the virtual keyboard on the tablet’s screen. He wasn’t entirely sure how to answer.

  “Can you talk, or is this not a good time?” Angel asked, because apparently it had taken him too long to frame his reply.

  NO, IT’S FINE, he wrote.

  “The director’s been pressuring me for an update. I told him you’re on your way to Tashkent now. He doesn’t like this kind of mission, where he just sends you into the field and you’re left to your own devices. I have to say I’m not crazy about it either. I wish we could talk more often, the way we usually do.”

  ME TOO, Chapel typed. HAS TO BE THIS WAY, THOUGH. WE SPENT DAY IN ISTANBUL. VERY NICE PLACE.

  “Glad to hear it,” Angel said, with a laugh.

  ANY NEWS FROM BUCHAREST?

  “If you mean, are you still being chased by blond gangsters, I don’t think so. The police eventually did put an alert out for two people matching your description, but there were no reports of sightings. And then out of nowhere the alert just . . . went away.”

  WEIRD.

  “Not necessarily. I think they just assumed you left the country when nobody could find you. Most likely they just wanted you to identify the men who tried to scoop you up. I checked, but there’s no warrant out for Bogdan Vlaicu, either. I think you got a get out of jail free card, sugar.”

  GOOD NEWS, I GUESS.

  “If anything changes on that front, I’ll be watching. So anything else I can do for you tonight?”

  He stared at the screen for a while. It only showed the list of language files he was supposedly listening to, but it was the closest he could get to looking at Angel. He’d spent a long time trying to imagine what she looked like, but all he could ever really see in his head was a computer screen. More than once he’d wondered if she was a real human being, or just some kind of very clever artificial intelligence.

  She was, he knew, his best friend in the world. The one person he could always rely on. She’d saved his life dozens of times and helped him out in a million ways. He trusted her implicitly—even more than he trusted Director Hollingshead. Maybe more than he’d ever really trusted Julia.

  “Sweetie,” she said. “I can tell something’s on your mind.”

  Of course she could. He wanted desperately to talk to her, just then. Not just type on a screen. HOLD ON, he tapped out. He got up from his seat and headed back to the lavatories. Inside, sitting on the toilet, he listened to the noise of the engines and the hiss of pressurized air. If he was quiet, it should be all right.

  “Angel,” he said, barely more than a whisper. “Can you hear me?”

  “I can, sugar. You’re somewhere secure now?”

  “Yeah.” He glanced up at the lavatory door. Made sure it was locked. “Listen,” he said, “I need to tell you something. Something that’s got me worried.” He hesitated for a moment longer, but he knew that if he didn’t tell her now, he never would. “I’ve had inappropriate contact with N.”

  Angel was quiet for so long he thought maybe she’d hung up on him. He should have known better—she never did that.

  “Sugar,” she said, finally. “Please repeat that. Because I can’t believe you said what I think you just said.”

  Chapel scrubbed at his face with his hands. “I’ve been . . . fraternizing with her.”

  “You know that’s not okay,” Angel told him. “Are you telling me you slept with her? Because that’s definitely not okay.”

  “I know. I know that,” Chapel said.

  Angel’s voice got very soft then, which he knew meant she was being utterly serious. “Have you even considered the possibility that she’s a swallow?”

  “A what?”

  “A . . . you know. The woman who sets up a honey trap.”

  “You think she’s trying to seduce me to learn our secrets?”

  “Men will say anything after sex. They have no filters at all.” Angel cleared her throat. “At least, that’s what I’ve heard.”

  “No, no,” Chapel said. “It’s nothing like that. She would have been way more forward if that was the case. This was—it wasn’t much. We just held hands.”

  “O . . . kay,” Angel said.

  “I know. I know. I sound like a teenager getting weird about his first crush. But I thought I should tell you. And you should tell the director.”

  “I could do that,” Angel said. “I am required by protocol and professional ethics to do exactly that,” she told him. “And you know what would happen then. He would tell you to scrub the mission and come home.”

  “Yeah. That’s why I brought it up. I don’t want to give up, but—”

  “Or,” Angel said, “I could not tell him. We could keep this between us. And you could get your shit together right now.”

  Angel didn’t often swear. She was one of those people who understood that when you save profanity for special occasions, it actually does lend emphasis. Chapel felt like someone had dumped cold water down his back.

  “I’m not sure I can,” he told her.

  Angel almost sounded angry when she replied. “You can and you will. There’s a lot depending on this mission, Chapel. Your emotions can’t come between you and completing this.”


  “I know that,” he told her. “But—”

  “But what? What could be more important than that? What could come close to measuring up to the fate of the entire world?”

  “I’m lonely,” he said. “That’s all.”

  Another long silence from her end. He thought he heard some muttering in the background, but with all the noise in the lavatory it was hard to tell.

  When she came back, her voice was much softer. “I know you miss Julia,” she said. “I know what you’re going through.”

  “Do you?” he asked. “You know what it’s like to be dumped by somebody you thought you would spend the rest of your life with?”

  “Maybe not . . . exactly, but—”

  “I’m human, Angel. I’m just a man. I’m supposed to be this elite soldier, this machine that fights for its country. I’m highly trained and totally professional. But sometimes—sometimes I don’t want this anymore. Sometimes I think about getting married and starting a family. This job took that away from me.”

  “You chose this job.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you want to scrub the mission? Do you want to give up?”

  “No,” Chapel said. “No.” Going home now, in disgrace—it wouldn’t solve anything. He would still be headed back to an empty apartment. An empty life. “That’s why I brought this to you, though. Because maybe I’m not the best judge of my fitness for duty right now.”

  “I understand,” Angel said. “Tell me something. If you put the moves on N right now, I mean, really laid on the charm—you think she would go for it?”

  “I can’t tell. She’s been very friendly. But, well, for one thing—I’m an amputee. A lot of people are nice to me because they think I’m some kind of wounded hero and that I deserve to be treated like a sick kitten or something. Not a lot of people want to . . . to have sex with someone like me. I think maybe she just feels sorry for me.”

  “There’s such a thing as pity sex,” Angel pointed out.