The Hydra Protocol Read online

  They headed up the stairs and then had a long walk back to where they’d left the scooters. Nadia turned them in and got her deposit back, and then they returned to the hotel, taking their time, trying to look like innocent tourists.

  Chapel was not surprised at all to find a man with a shaved head and an immaculate mustache waiting in the lobby, sitting casually on a leather sofa near the reception desk. Apparently Mirza had come back here after losing them in the city. There was no way to get to the elevators without walking right past him.

  “Mister Chambers!” the SNB man called out, as Chapel passed by. “Did you have a good day? See many of our wonderful sights?”

  Chapel gave the man a nasty look. “We rented some scooters and took a tour. Can’t say I was much impressed.”

  “It occurs to me we have not been introduced. My name is Jamshid Mirza. Perhaps you’d do me the honor of letting me show you around tomorrow,” he said, smiling. “There are some people you should meet.”

  For a second Chapel was certain he was about to be arrested. He met Mirza’s gaze as steadily as he could and tried to think of what to do next. “Sorry,” he said. “We have plans. Business.”

  “Of course. Perhaps you’d like to discuss that business with me? You’ll find, I think, that Tashkent can be very friendly to foreign capital. Our policies may seem harsh to you, but we can be very . . . lenient for foreign investors. All manner of things can be forgiven.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, buddy,” Chapel said, and headed once more toward the elevators.

  He expected Mirza to stop him, or at least make some more cryptic comments, but the SNB man seemed to be done.

  Back in the suite Bogdan retired sulkily to his room without a word. Nadia went and got her bug sweeper and went over the usual spots—light fixtures, under the beds and tables, the television set, the phone. She found three new microphones, each of which she destroyed. She dumped the broken circuit boards in a glass ashtray and then rubbed at her forehead with one hand. “I think I need a nap.”

  “I’m not surprised, the way you were putting away that vodka,” Chapel said, smiling at her.

  She smiled back. “I know Russians are famous around the world for drinking too much,” she said, “and there is some truth to this particular stereotype. I’ve never had the time to build up a proper Russian liver, though.”

  “Don’t worry,” Chapel said. “I’ll stand watch while you sleep.”

  She nodded and turned toward her room. Stepping inside she held the door open for a second. She said nothing, though, and after a few seconds she closed the door behind her.

  TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 17, 19:44

  Chapel didn’t want to risk going down to one of the hotel’s restaurants—it was too likely he’d find Mirza there, waiting to ask him more questions. His cover story was ironclad, and if Mirza called up the company that Jeff Chambers supposedly worked for, he would find receptionists and executives to vouch for Chapel’s bona fides, but Chapel knew any cover was only as good as one’s ability to act. That had never been his forte. If Mirza really started grilling him, Chapel knew he would eventually give himself away. He wouldn’t know enough about the geology of natural gas domes or he would forget what town Jeff Chambers was born in, and then Mirza’s promised “lenience” would disappear in a hurry.

  So he ordered room service, and a few minutes later a smiling bellhop came to the door with three orders of lamb curry and a couple bottles of Baltika 3, the only beer on the menu that Chapel had heard of. Chapel tipped the bellhop to just leave the trays by the door. When the kid was gone, he went over the trays with Nadia’s bug finder. It squealed and hissed, but it didn’t find anything, so he brought the food inside. Just past the door he found Bogdan waiting, holding a pair of ice tongs over his head.

  “Is all I could find,” Bogdan said, gesturing at the tongs.

  “Okay,” Chapel said. “And what exactly did you want them for?”

  “In case the boy was an assassin, I would fight him off,” the hacker said, putting the tongs down on a table.

  Chapel kind of wished the bellhop had been a threat, just so he could have seen what the ensuing battle looked like. Bogdan was so thin he looked like an averagely built bellhop would be able to break him over his knee.

  Smiling to himself, Chapel pushed past the hacker, a tray balanced on each hand. The bug finder made a high-pitched shrieking noise, and he nearly dropped the food. Putting the trays down carefully, he picked up the bug finder and waved it over the trays again, thinking maybe he’d missed something. When he got no result, he pointed it at Bogdan and heard it start to screech.

  Bogdan stood very still, his eyes wide.

  Chapel moved closer, sweeping the bug finder up and down the length of Bogdan’s long body. When it passed over the MP3 player, it went crazy.

  Chapel looked up into Bogdan’s terrified eyes. He switched off the bug finder. “False alarm,” he said, and smiled.

  Bogdan nodded and tried to smile back. It didn’t quite take.

  When dinner was set up, Chapel went to Nadia’s door and found it was slightly ajar. He pushed it back and looked inside her room and saw her curled up in her bed, one arm flung wide and her small hand dangling over the edge. She was snoring like a steam engine, but her face was open and innocent and he thought—

  Well. It didn’t matter what he thought.

  “Do not wake her,” Bogdan whispered. The hacker had come up beside Chapel unnoticed, and Chapel nearly jumped when he spoke. “She may lash out and karate chop you in neck if you touch her now.” He pointed at his own ridiculously long neck and shook his head.

  “She does look like she could use the sleep,” Chapel said. “We’ll start without her.” He closed her door and went over to the table. “It’ll give us a chance to talk. You and I have never had a proper conversation, have we, Bogdan?”

  The hacker dropped himself into one of the table’s chairs and started picking apart a tray of food. He ignored the beer and drank tap water instead, but he put away an astonishing amount of curry while Chapel sat and watched him. It was clear if they were going to have a conversation, Chapel was going to have to get it rolling.

  “So,” he said, trying to think of anything the two of them had in common. What he came up with wasn’t a great start. “How long have you known Nadia?”

  Bogdan peered at him through his fringe of bangs. “Some years.”

  “Since before 2011?” he asked. The year Nadia got her medal. The year she had worked her biggest mission, as far as Chapel knew.

  “No, just then,” Bogdan said. “I am not sure this is proper for discussion.”

  Chapel waved one hand in the air. “I know. It was a secret mission, and you’re not supposed to talk about it with people who don’t know what you did.” He nodded affably and sipped at his beer. “But I’m a secret agent type, too. I know about things.”

  Bogdan lifted his fork as if he would defend himself with it. Chapel sat back and pretended he wasn’t extremely interested in what Nadia had done in 2011. Clearly Bogdan wasn’t going to give anything away for free. Luckily, part of Chapel’s intelligence training had included a course in cold reading—the art of tricking people into thinking you already knew their secrets, so they could talk about them freely.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me anything. I mean, I know most of the details already.” He thought of what Nadia’s mission might have been. If she’d been working for FSTEK and she’d been in Romania, it had to deal with technology transfer. If she had gotten mixed up with organized crime, that meant she had been tracing something stolen or misappropriated. And Nadia wasn’t just a low-level bureaucrat, tracing serial numbers on stolen computers. She would have been working at the very top level of FSTEK’s operations. “It was about the missing nukes,” Chapel tried, knowing if he had it wrong he would reveal his ignorance. But if he got it right—

  Bogdan put his fork down on the table,
very carefully. “May I have one of the beers?” he asked, in a very tentative voice.

  Chapel popped the cap off the remaining beer and handed it over. Bogdan sucked deeply at the bottle, drinking half of it in one gulp.

  Gotcha, Chapel thought.

  “I can see why you’re so paranoid,” he told Bogdan. “No. That’s harsh. Let’s say—reasonably cautious. You must have pissed off some very powerful people when you took away their radioactive toys. A lot of guys wouldn’t have done what you did. They would have been too scared. But you—”

  “It was a challenge, yes,” Bogdan said. “The bigger the challenge, the harder to resist, sometimes.”

  Chapel nodded. “And you worked a pretty sweet hack on them.”

  “The sweetest.” Bogdan’s eyes were getting brighter, and not just because of the alcohol he’d consumed. People like Bogdan—loners, reclusive intellectual types—had a desperate need to brag when they were in the real world. They worked miracles in the virtual world, in cyberspace, but nobody was there with them to congratulate them on their successes. They told themselves that didn’t matter, but it did.

  Chapel thought of Angel and the various methods she used to break into encrypted systems. “What did you use? A keystroke logger? Packet sniffer? Or just brute force decryption?” Chapel had no idea what most of those words meant, but he was certain Bogdan would.

  “Not even,” Bogdan said, looking down at his plate. He was starting to smile, for real this time. “Social engineering,” he whispered. “Is always the best way.”

  “Social engineering?”

  Bogdan nodded and put his hands on the table, fanning his fingers. “Computers, you will see, are very, very good at holding to secrets. They are designed this way. But information is useless if it cannot be accessed by human beings. Someone always knows the passwords. Someone can always get in. You find that someone, you can work them. Hack them, instead of machine. In this case, it was a woman. It was she who made arrangements. You know, meetings between the seller and the buyer. She introduced the parties but had no knowledge of what they sold or how much they paid.”

  “A cutout,” Chapel said. “That’s what we call it.”

  Bogdan nodded. “Did not matter—she was the link, the one at center of deal. Knows everybody, e-mails everybody. Middle-aged woman, single, no babies, yes? Is a common enough problem, in postfeminist world.”

  “Sure,” Chapel said, having no idea what he was getting at.

  “She had online dating page. So I seduce her.”

  Chapel’s eyes went wide. The idea of the lanky hacker seducing someone—anyone—was pretty hard to imagine. “What, you bought her flowers, took her for drinks—”

  “Online. I created a profile with a fake picture, fake statistics. Same height as me, but that was all. Said I was a banker in Ploiesti—this is a town just north of Bucharest—with a dead wife. Wanted children in a hurry, wanted someone to travel with, grow old with. Best sales pitch possible. She responded and we go to chatting. I looked up love poetry, romantic comedies online, looking for code words. I found the words most often used in successful dating profiles. My e-mails to her are peppered with these words. She never stood a chance.”

  “Jesus, I feel sorry for her now,” Chapel said.

  Bogdan shrugged. “To be fair, she was setting up this deal to sell stolen plutonium to a rogue state.”

  “Yeah, I guess there’s that,” Chapel replied.

  Bogdan had warmed to his topic and didn’t want to stop talking. “She responded very quickly, wanted to set up a date. I said my schedule is too hectic, me being a banker, you see? So she gives me her telephone number so we can text, and her private e-mail she checks always.”

  “And then she started talking about the deal?” Chapel asked.

  “No, of course not! If I ask about that, she sees through me in an instant. No. I just want her contact information. As soon as I get it, I delete my profile, and this fabled banker man, he just disappears from the earth. I had her e-mail address, now I need her password. From her VKontakte page I learned the town where she was born—Lugoj; mother’s name—Irina Costaforu; favorite movies, everything. I call up the e-mail host service and say I have forgotten my password, can they help? They ask security questions, and I know the answers.”

  “Her mother’s maiden name, the town where she was born—”

  “What secondary school she went to, yes, what is her favorite color . . . I am in. They help me change her password, and now I control her e-mail. I download all her contacts and e-mail folders. Then I change this password back to what it was before, so she does not know I have been there.”

  “You mean she never even suspected what happened?”

  “Whole thing, from online profile to download, takes six hours,” Bogdan said, really smiling now. “I did it in middle of the night, when she sleeps. I turn this information over to Nadia and my part, it is done.”

  “Wow,” Chapel said. “That’s incredible. You stole her e-mail that easily? Remind me never to piss you off!”

  Bogdan actually laughed, then, a kind of wheezing, halting noise that made him sound like he was choking. It was the laugh of somebody who hadn’t heard a good joke in his entire life and had no practice at laughing. “I am good, yes. The best, maybe.”

  “I’ll say. So this woman you duped, what was her name?”

  Instantly Bogdan’s face fell. He picked up his fork and speared another piece of lamb. Chapel could tell he’d pushed too hard.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I forgot myself for a second. You can’t talk about this.”

  “It was a secret mission,” Bogdan said. “I take very serious. Nadia would not like if I told you anything, any small detail.”

  “I understand,” Chapel said. “We won’t talk about it again.”

  “Thank you,” Bogdan said, and stuffed the lamb in his mouth.

  TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 18, 01:34

  “These once-a-day phone calls are driving me crazy, sugar,” Angel said.

  Chapel smiled in the dark of his room. “Me, too. But I have to wait until I’m sure we won’t be overheard.” Through the thin walls of the hotel suite he could hear Bogdan snoring in the room next door. The one beer the hacker had drunk with dinner seemed to be enough to put him down for the night. As for Nadia, she’d never woken up for dinner, and the last time he’d checked on her she was still sprawled across her own bed. He needed to get to sleep himself—tomorrow was going to be a big day, the day they illegally crossed the border into Kazakhstan, if everything went right. But first he needed to check in. “We met with a Russian gangster today,” he told Angel. “She’s the one providing our equipment. Her first name was Varvara.”

  “Let me check the Interpol database,” Angel said. He listened to her click away at her keyboard. It was one of the most reassuring sounds he knew—it meant she was looking out for him. “Here we go. Varvara Nikolaevich Lyadova. Wanted in four countries, that’s impressive. Arrested on a dozen different charges, actually did jail time on one of them—wow. Murder.”

  “Yeah?” Chapel asked, suddenly worried.

  “Let’s look at the case files . . . okay, actually it was conspiracy murder. That’s why she only did three years. Looks like her husband killed a rival gangster back in the midnineties and Varvara helped destroy some evidence. A bloody shirt . . . when the police came for her husband, she jammed it in the oven and baked it for thirty minutes at four seventy-five degrees. They pulled it out before it was good and crispy, but at that point it was tainted. They couldn’t get any DNA from the blood.”

  “Huh. So she was loyal to her husband, and kind of smart about it,” Chapel said. “The real question is—will she show us that same kind of loyalty? I know she’s worked with Nadia before.”

  “Well, my sources say she’s a real Russian gangster, not just a run-of-the-mill criminal. She’s what they call a vory v zakone, a—”

  “‘Lawful thief,’” Chapel said, “yeah, I got that
from Nadia. Does that really mean anything, though?”

  “Probably yes,” Angel said. “The Russian gangs are what they call a Bratva, a brotherhood. They live by a very strict code. Unless they have a good reason to sell you out—if they think you’re a police informant or something—they stick by a deal. Even if they don’t care much about moral codes, they have a financial reason to honor their obligations. If they just took your money and never delivered the goods, they would lose their reputation with other vory, and that would cost them in the future. From everything I see here, Lyadova is the kind to stick to her word.”

  Well, that was something, anyway. “Nadia seems to have pretty good contacts in the criminal world. She says that’s just how things work over here.” Chapel frowned. “Speaking of which—I just had a very informative conversation with your opposite number.”

  “You mean Bogdan Vlaicu? He’s good, but I wouldn’t put him in my league,” Angel said, sounding a little huffy.

  Chapel grinned to himself. “I don’t know. I got him to tell me how he hacked into a ring of plutonium smugglers.”

  “Plutonium?”

  “Apparently that was why Nadia got that medal back in 2011. I don’t know the details, but I figure the American intelligence community might be interested in knowing that the Russians let some radioactive material walk away back then.”

  “I think they’d be very interested in knowing about that,” Angel said. He could almost hear her sitting up straighter in her chair. “What can you tell me?”

  “I can give you a puzzle to work out,” he said.

  “You always did know the way to a girl’s heart, sugar.”

  Chapel tried to remember exactly what Bogdan had said. “The deal was brokered by a woman whose mother’s maiden name was Irina Costaforu. The woman was born in a town in Romania called Lugoj.”

  “You’re going to make this one too easy,” Angel said.

  Chapel shrugged. “Bogdan seemed to think it was a piece of cake. See what you can figure out. I don’t mind telling you—the story of how he got that information was a little chilling. It’s way too easy to find out everything about somebody these days.”