The Hydra Protocol Read online

  TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 17, 14:06

  The three of them hurried through the streets on foot, stopping now and again to duck into the shadowy vestibule of an apartment building and listen for the sounds of pursuit. They heard no more sirens, saw no more obvious SNB agents. It looked like they’d finally lost their shadows.

  The sun was high overhead and it prickled the back of Chapel’s neck as they walked out into a broad, open area where the light glared off spotlessly clean concrete. Only a few trees stuck up around the broad plaza to offer any shade. Ahead of them stood a building Chapel immediately assumed was a mosque. It was made of concrete slabs piled up around a massive gothic arch, and at each corner of the building stood a tall, tapering column with a turquoise dome at its top. As he got closer he realized those weren’t minarets. The columns looked more like missiles with festively painted warheads.

  “Rockets,” Nadia explained, when he asked what the columns were. “At least, they are supposed to resemble rockets.”

  They were far more elaborately decorated than any rocket Chapel had ever seen. But as he got closer he supposed he could see what she meant. The building, it turned out, was just a very ostentatious subway entrance, the main portal into the Kosmonavtlar Station.

  They headed down a broad flight of steps into a cool, slightly dim hallway. The pseudo-arabesque exterior gave way to a space-age interior that was no less ornate. The columns that held up the ceiling were a glittering black, while the walls were striped in an elegant blue, more intense near the bottom, fading nearly to white at the top. Set into the walls were round bas-reliefs depicting men in space suits surrounded by swirling stars and planets. Each of them wore the same dead-eyed, resolute expression, except one—Yuri Gagarin, who wore a wide, mischievous grin. Chapel thought back, trying to remember a photo of Gagarin where he wasn’t showing that same toothy smile. He couldn’t think of one.

  Beneath them, under the floor, trains rumbled and sighed and hissed. The station was busy with commuters, people walking quickly in one direction or another, totally ignoring the opulent surroundings.

  Chapel couldn’t help himself. Despite the danger they were in, despite the nature of the meeting that lay ahead of them, he drank in the bas-reliefs and the wide murals showing the history of space flight, from the earliest astronomers with their clunky telescopes to space stations orbiting the earth.

  “You have an interest in cosmonautics?” Nadia asked.

  Chapel nodded his head. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. I thought about it a lot. Dreamed about it, I guess. What about you?”

  Nadia’s smile was a trace bittersweet. “I did not want to be a cosmonaut.” She tilted her head to one side and reached out to touch Gagarin’s sculpted cheek. “I knew I would be one.” She looked over at Chapel. “Every day in our classes, we would be reminded. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was at the forefront of space science. We were taught that all our futures lay up there, in the cosmos. That we would live on space stations as big as cities and get all our power from the sun. That we would fly to Mars before the millennium was out.”

  She dropped her hand. “Then the Cold War ended. And somehow, it was no longer our destiny. Oh, we were still the best with our rockets and our space stations. But now it’s all about making money, selling space on our rockets to other countries. Funny, is it not? How politics can do that, turn destiny into commerce into . . . nothing.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it funny,” Chapel said.

  Nadia shook her head sadly. Then she turned away and headed down another flight of stairs toward a platform. A train was coming in, but she held back until it had disgorged its passengers and left the station again. When the platform emptied out, she led Chapel and Bogdan to its far end, where the station gave way to a dark tunnel. She looked around for any sign they were being watched, then jumped down to the level of the tracks.

  Chapel nodded at a camera mounted on the ceiling.

  “No worries,” she said. “It’s broken.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because,” she said, “my vory friend pays to keep it broken. Come on.”

  She headed into the almost perfect darkness of the tunnel, hugging the wall away from the electrified rail. Chapel and Bogdan followed, keeping close together.

  TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 17, 14:21

  The tunnel stretched on ahead of them for miles, perhaps, though it was hard to judge distances in the nearly perfect dark. They trudged along in darkness broken only by too-infrequent lamps, some of which flickered so much their light was worse than nothing. It was all Chapel could do to keep from tripping and breaking his leg.

  At one point a train came through. There were shallow alcoves built into the tunnel wall, no more than twelve inches deep. As the air pushed a great belly of wind ahead of it, ruffling their clothing, they had to press themselves back into these narrow holes. The train came so close Chapel thought it would crush him, so fast he was sure its speed alone would tear him out of his hiding place and pull him along with it. He could look in through its windows, see all the people perched on its seats, none of them looking up at him. In a few seconds the train had moved on and he could breathe again.

  After another ten minutes of marching through the gloom, they saw a little more light appear ahead. As they drew closer Chapel could see it came from a pair of spotlights mounted on the tunnel ceiling. His eyes had adapted to the darkness, and now they stung when he looked at the harsh bulbs. It was impossible to see anything beyond that glare, and so he was completely surprised when someone shouted out a curt order.

  He understood the tone, if not the words. He was being told to halt. Presumably by someone well-enough armed to enforce the command.

  He stopped where he was and held his hands out away from his body.

  Nadia, on the other hand, gave the unseen voice a wave. “Smert’ suki!” she called out, presumably supplying a password.

  One of the spotlights swiveled away from them. Chapel blinked away afterimages and saw that up ahead a hole had been blasted in the wall of the tunnel, a ragged portal with edges of broken brick. Beyond was a much softer light, yellow and warm. A man with a rifle—Chapel could only see him in silhouette—stood in that entrance, waving them onward.

  The three of them passed through the broken entrance and into a wide, dusty room that looked like the cellar of someone’s house. At least, it looked like the cellar of the house of a black marketeer.

  The walls were lined with shelves full of cartons of cigarettes and gallon bottles of vodka. At the far end of the room stood a workbench over which hung a row of tools up on pegs. There was a red stain on the workbench that Chapel did not want to investigate. He told himself it was just old paint.

  There were two other people in the room, beyond the sentinel who had ushered them in. One was a young man, maybe even younger than Bogdan, in a maroon tracksuit. He held a ridiculously large pistol in each hand. He kept his weapons pointed at the floor.

  The other inhabitant of the room was a woman who was maybe ten years older than Chapel. She wore a turtleneck sweater, and despite the years written on her face, her hair was black and silky and formed a great mane around her head and fell nearly to her waist. She wore a necklace with a seagull pendant, and when she saw Nadia, she came running over to kiss her on both cheeks. The two of them spoke for some time in a language that sounded mostly like Russian, though Chapel didn’t understand much of the vocabulary. He knew that Russian prison inmates had created their own language, a kind of patois of code words and slang called Fenya—handy for making deals around people who weren’t in the loop.

  When they were done, they both turned to look at Chapel. “Jim,” Nadia said, “meet Varvara. She’s an old friend and she’s going to help us out.”

  Chapel held out his hand and the woman shook it.

  “Traditionally,” Varvara said, her English deeply accented but fluent, “in my country when we welco
me someone, we offer them bread and salt. I am afraid unless you wish to smoke or drink, I cannot be so courteous.”

  Chapel smiled, though he wasn’t sure how much he liked this. He wasn’t thrilled that Nadia had used his real name, not the Jeff Chambers alias—even if they were all sticking to first names. “Thank you for meeting with us,” he said. “Your country, you say—so you’re not an Uzbek. You’re Russian.”

  Varvara peered at him through hooded eyes. “An observant man,” she said. “People who pay attention can be dangerous.”

  “Only if they’re enemies,” Chapel told her. He glanced around at the shelves, then back at the hole in the wall. “This is an ingenious setup you have here.”

  “Oh?” Varvara asked.

  Chapel nodded. “This location—totally hidden, but surprisingly convenient. You pay the train conductors to stop in the middle of the tunnel, just outside your warehouse, probably late at night when the trains are mostly empty. You load your contraband onto the subway trains and they can take your goods anywhere in the city, without the police seeing anything.”

  Varvara’s eyes narrowed. She reached up and touched her seagull pendant. “You are perhaps thinking of informing the police of my operation?”

  From the corner of his eye Chapel could see Nadia stiffen, just a little. This wasn’t how she had expected this meeting to go.

  He ignored her. “Why would I do that? I have no interest in helping such a repressive regime. And I need your friendship if our own plans are going to move forward.”

  Varvara nodded. “You’re just expressing . . . admiration for my resourcefulness, then?”

  “Sure. Anyway, even if I wanted to inform on you, I’m sure you could brick this wall back up in an hour, move the goods out of this cellar in even less time. Then you just break through another cellar wall, somewhere else in the city, and resume your operation after only a minor delay.”

  Varvara went over to the workbench and opened a low cabinet. Chapel was suddenly very aware of the two armed men standing behind him. If Varvara had just decided he was a threat and she wanted to go to work on him with a power drill or a pair of pliers, he wouldn’t be able to fight his way out. Maybe he’d pushed a little too hard. He glanced over at Nadia and saw a look of surprise on her face. She hadn’t expected him to say anything during this meeting. It looked like she was wondering why he had chosen to antagonize such a dangerous woman.

  When Varvara lifted four crystal pony glasses from the cabinet, though, he knew he’d made the right decision. She slammed the glasses down on top of the workbench and reached for a bottle of vodka. Cracking it open, she said, “This one, Nadia dear, this American you should keep.” She laughed and poured three generous shots. “You see what he does? He shows he knows my business, that he’s two steps ahead of me, just in case I was thinking of betraying him. But he is also clear in that he knows he can’t truly hurt me. Very subtle, very sharp.” She handed one of the glasses to Chapel. “Are you looking for work, young man? I can always use smart fellows.”

  “Sorry, I’ve got my own business to attend to,” Chapel told her.

  “Then let us discuss it, eh? To mutual trust.” She raised her glass high. “You, Jim. You drink first.”

  Chapel studied the liquor in his glass. He didn’t see any sign it had been poisoned or drugged, but then, he wouldn’t, would he?

  Here goes nothing, he thought, and knocked back the drink. It was harsh, very strong stuff, more like moonshine than the vodka he was used to, but it didn’t make his throat close up or his heart stop.

  Varvara laughed. “Brave, too. Now. To business. What do you need, Nadia darling, and where do you want it delivered?”

  TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 17, 15:11

  Three shots of vodka later, Chapel was starting to feel a little off his game, so he refused a fourth. Bogdan sat on the floor, staring morosely at his first shot. He’d been sipping at it for a while, much to the sneering disdain of the two gunmen.

  Nadia and Varvara, however, had polished off half of a liter bottle already and were still coming up with things to toast—they were down to local football teams and the glorious memory of some gangster Chapel had never heard of, and they seemed in no hurry to stop. Between drinks they’d hammered out prices for a truck that could cross the desert, a large quantity of purified water, tents, camp stoves, preserved foods, fuel. At one point Varvara had suggested she could get them a very good deal on some camels, which she said would be even better for crossing the desert than the truck. Nadia’s eyes lit up at the idea, but Chapel was still sober enough to say no.

  “This is how business is done, in this part of the world,” Nadia announced, when Chapel suggested that she might slow down on the drinking. Her cheeks were a little red and her eyes a little glazed. “You don’t know this because you are—” She stopped herself before announcing to the room that he was an American spy. “You are not used to it,” she finished, a little lamely.

  Varvara didn’t seem impaired at all. She gave Chapel a sly look. “We’re almost done. Can I interest you in some Soviet-era maps of the desert? A bit out of date, but they show many things that history has forgotten. Perhaps if I knew what you were looking for, I could help you better.”

  “What you don’t know, the SNB can’t beat out of you,” Chapel replied. Nadia seemed to find that uproariously funny. She laughed and sputtered and reached for the bottle to pour herself another drink. “Speaking of the local authorities,” Chapel said, putting his own glass down on the workbench, “what can you tell us about one who has a shaved head and a bristly mustache?”

  “You’ll have to be more specific,” Varvara said. “That describes half the old men in Uzbekistan.”

  Nadia laughed at that, too.

  “He’s definitely ex-military,” Chapel said, remembering what he could about the man who’d been following them. “Very disciplined. The first time I met him he was feeding some pigeons.”

  Varvara nodded her great mane of hair. “Konyechno, I figured it was him you meant. Jamshid Mirza. Interesting. You have drawn some very distinguished attention, there. Mirza was a colonel in the old Soviet army, and of course, a KGB man. He’s one of the top men in the SNB. You say he’s following you personally?”

  “Everywhere we go,” Chapel confirmed.

  Varvara shook her head. “If I hadn’t already promised to help you . . . Mirza might scare even me away. If he has taken an interest, he must think you are very important to his country. When you checked in at your hotel, what did you say you were doing in Tashkent?”

  Chapel appreciated that she hadn’t asked the direct question—what his cover story was. “I told them I was an American venture capitalist looking into energy development.”

  Varvara smiled. “This explains it. Mirza is also head of security for Uzbekneftegaz, the state energy concern. Uzbekistan has a number of very productive natural gas fields, up near what is left of the Aral Sea. So far mostly Korean companies have buzzed around these fields, but the government would be very interested in drawing American flies as well. He will be very disappointed when you don’t buy up half his country for exploitation.”

  “In honor of mother earth!” Nadia said, lifting her glass. Varvara lifted her own and they drank. “Source of all Russian wealth, she gives so much and we are so bad to her.”

  Chapel shook his head. He had no idea what she was on about. “There’s one last thing I want to talk about. More equipment.”

  “Oh?” Varvara asked.

  “Guns,” Chapel said. “Can you get us some weapons?”

  Varvara lifted an eyebrow. “Now I definitely don’t want to know what you’re doing out in the desert. But yes, yes, of course. All the guns you desire.”

  “In honor of guns!” Nadia said, and lifted her glass. “If you have enough of them, you don’t need politics.”

  TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 17, 16:04

  The negotiations stretched on a while longer. Varvara named an absurdly high price, w
hich Nadia haggled with for a while before getting the total down to a number that was only barely ludicrous. They completed things with one last shot of vodka and a great deal of hugging and cheek-kissing. Varvara even grabbed at Bogdan and kissed him, though he tried to squirm out of her arms the whole time, which she seemed to find endearing rather than insulting.

  Varvara made a phone call, and a few minutes later Chapel heard a loud rushing noise and a squeal of brakes as a subway train pulled up at the hole in the wall. The train’s doors opened and revealed an empty car. Chapel, Nadia, and Bogdan got on board and took the train back to Kosmonavtlar Station. Once off the train, Nadia almost ran up the stairs. She didn’t seem nearly as drunk as she had back in the contraband warehouse, and Chapel wondered how much of that had been for show.

  While they were still underground, Chapel leaned in close and asked, “You’re certain we can trust Varvara?”

  Nadia snorted out a laugh. “Always with you, the trust issues.” She smiled and grabbed his arm playfully. “Occupational hazard, yes? If we can trust anyone, it is my friend. She was the wife of a very famous vory, a man of impeccable honor. After he died, she took over his operation, something almost unheard of here, but no one can doubt her position now. To be accepted by other thieves she has been ruthless in her time. But she and I get along very well, and she has helped me in the past. It’s nice dealing with a woman. All the men, the male vory, they just want to fuck me. To prove they can.” She gave Chapel a sly look. “I think they watched too many James Bond movies, with the ice queen Russian spies who melt in the arms of the right man.”

  Chapel ignored the flirtation. “You seem to know a lot of criminals,” he said, glancing over at Bogdan, who was lost in his headphones.

  “Kleptocracy,” Nadia shrugged. “It is how things work here. You want information, you want more than the local government is willing to give, you go underground. In this case, literally.”