The Hydra Protocol Page 20

  “If you give all your personal details to a company like Facebook that makes its money by selling personal information to third parties, well . . . maybe you don’t really have a lot of right to complain,” Angel suggested.

  Chapel didn’t agree but he let it go. “It got me thinking. If he could break into this woman’s e-mail so easily, it shouldn’t be too hard to check up on somebody you were worried about. Just to make sure they were okay. You know, without them knowing about it.”

  “You’re right. That would be very easy,” Angel said. Any trace of flirtation was gone from her voice, and he knew she had guessed where he was going with this.

  “I’m not suggesting that I want to cyberstalk Julia—”

  “You just want me to check her e-mail and find out if she’s okay,” Angel said, completing his sentence. “Think about this one pretty hard, Chapel. Think about if that’s what you really want me to do for you.”

  He sighed and laid the tablet down on the bed beside him. “No,” he said.

  “No?”

  “No, I don’t want you to do that.”

  “Good,” she told him. “Because I would have refused. That sort of thing isn’t cool. What did she say when she left?”

  “She said she would call me. That I should give her some space. That was . . . more than a month ago.” He closed his eyes. “Do I sound as pathetic to you as I do to myself, right now?”

  “Chapel, I know you miss her. But your relationship status is not a matter of national security. I’m here to help you with your mission, with—”

  “I know, Angel,” he said. “I know. I just—miss her a lot. I’m only human, you know? I miss her and I wish . . . I wish for a lot of things.”

  Angel’s voice softened. “I get it,” she said.

  “Okay. Okay. Moving on,” Chapel said. “Tomorrow we’re going into the desert and—”

  He stopped. Focused all his attention on what he’d just heard.

  “Angel, I’ll call you back.”

  “Sure, honey.”

  He pulled off his earphones and hit the power switch on the tablet. Got out of the bed and padded to the door. With his ear up against the thin wood, he held his breath and just listened.

  There—he heard it again. The sound of metal scraping against metal. What could it be? He waited until he heard it a third time, then slammed open the door, bursting out into the common room of the suite. If someone had come to plant more bugs—or something worse, he would—

  Nadia stood in the middle of the room, wearing nothing but a thin nightgown. She was holding a fork and the lid from one of the room service trays.

  “I woke up hungry,” she said.

  TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 18, 01:49

  “I see you couldn’t sleep, either,” she said, as Chapel stepped out into the common room.

  He realized he was staring at her. Moonlight coming in from the balcony doors painted a swath of silver down her arm, the curve of her hip, the long straight muscle in her thigh. He forced himself to look away. “I’m sorry we didn’t wake you. Bogdan thought maybe you’d been trained to kill anyone who touched you while you slept.”

  Nadia grinned around a forkful of cold lamb. “I suppose I needed the rest. The worst part about drinking during the day is that you get the hangover before you go to bed. I seem to have missed most of that, for which I am glad.”

  Chapel walked over to the table and put his hands on the back of a chair. Her hair was mussed and her eyes were hooded with sleep, still. “Are you going to be able to go back to sleep after you eat that stuff?” he asked.

  “Should be no problem.”

  He nodded. “We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow, and—”

  “Perhaps you should be sleeping yourself,” she told him, with a smile. She poured herself a glass of water and drank it down without stopping. “Wouldn’t do to be dehydrated before we even reach the desert.” She put the glass down and looked over at the balcony doors. “Come get some air with me.”

  Chapel took a deep breath. Bad idea, he thought. Terrible idea. “All right,” he said.

  She stepped out onto the balcony and leaned far out over the concrete railing, way out over a twenty-story drop. Chapel came up behind her, watching the way her shoulders moved under the thin straps of her nightgown.

  He reached for her, because he was afraid she might fall. He almost grabbed her arm to pull her back away from the railing. Then he took a breath and dropped his hand.

  “I’ve been waiting so long for this,” she said.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  She smiled at him over her shoulder. Then she leaned forward across the railing, lifting her feet off the balcony floor. A good strong wind at that point might have blown her over the edge. He moved toward her, but she laughed and put her feet back down.

  “For years,” she said, “I have been working toward this moment. Toward shutting down Perimeter. Now it’s finally happening. It feels . . .”

  Chapel almost sighed in relief, but stopped himself. “Unreal?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “No. This is very real. More real than anything in a long time. The world we live in, people like you and me—that is what never feels real to me. I think you must understand what I mean. We are sent out into the field, never really knowing what we’re after. We gather intelligence, we neutralize threats.” She shrugged. “Then it is home again, or what we call home, and ‘thank you for your service.’ No one explains why we did what we did. No one acknowledges we were ever there. Even our names are secrets. We are never allowed to mean anything, in case we are lost. But tomorrow—tomorrow I’m going to do something important. Something meaningful. And at least one person in the world will know I was there, that I did it.”

  She turned to look at him. She reached for his hand, and he took it without a thought. Her small fingers stroked the hair on his artificial knuckles. “You will know, Jim. You’ll be my svidetel. You won’t forget me, as soon as I disappear.”

  She lifted his hand to her lips, kissed it.

  “Nadia,” he said, breathing out her name in a soft warning.

  She shook her head. Kissed his hand again. He tried to pull it away, but she clutched at his fingers.

  She brought the hand up to her face and made it cup her cheek. “Do you feel this?” she asked, rubbing her cheek against his silicone skin.

  “Yes,” he told her. “Not as much as with the other one.” He could feel basic textures with the artificial hand, some temperature differences. He could definitely feel how soft her skin was.

  “And this?” she asked, moving his hand. Pressing it against her breast. Through the thin fabric of her nightgown he could feel her nipple hardening.

  “Nadia—”

  “Shh. Just a moment,” she said. Her eyes were closed. She lifted his hand away from her body but didn’t let go of it.

  It wasn’t his real hand. It wasn’t him that had touched her like that, it was a machine. It wasn’t him. That was an utter lie, but lies can be useful things. If this ended now, if she stopped, he could forgive himself, he could—

  She brought the hand down past her waist. Turned a little so she could maneuver it inside her panties, press it against her soft and yielding flesh. One finger slipped inside her effortlessly and he felt her warmth, felt how wet she was.

  He tried to pull back, pull away, but his fingers brushed her clitoris and she trembled, her body as tight and as tense as a violin string. He stroked her there and her shoulders jumped. Her eyes were closed and her mouth slightly open, her breath deeper and stronger than before.

  This isn’t me, he tried to tell himself. It’s the fake arm, it’s not me.

  He started to take his hand away, but she brought both of hers down, covering his hand, pressing it back into place. He felt like this was inevitable, that it couldn’t be stopped now, not when it had already gone too far. He made a small circle with his fingertip and she sagged, as if her knees were getting weak. He touched her a
gain and felt the heat of her body between them, filling the thin sliver of air between her and his real body, his own flesh. He could put his other arm around her, draw her closer, but, no, he didn’t dare, this was wrong; he couldn’t keep doing this, he thought, even as his fingers found her clitoris again. His thumb and index finger held it from either side in the softest grasp, moving up and down the tiniest distance. He released her and she gasped; touched her again and she made a sound like a bird inside a cage that’s just been unlocked.

  “Yes,” she whispered, as he moved his hand, such tiny, precise movements, “Please,” she said, and he increased the speed, the pressure, but just by the smallest amount. “Don’t stop,” she said. “Jim, please, don’t . . . don’t stop . . . don’t . . .”

  She was hunched over his arm, her head down, only an inch from crashing into his chest. If any part of her touched him, he knew he would have to stop, but she was agile enough to balance herself there as if she knew, as if she knew that was the only way this could keep happening. He could feel her gasping breath on his skin, but even as her hair slid down across her face it didn’t touch him. Only his hand was in contact with her body at all, only his fingertips.

  He felt her start to shake, felt her body squeeze under his hand. And then with one convulsive noise like a sob she was there, the cage was open, the bird was free, its wings thrashing and taking flight . . .

  She lifted her hands toward his shoulders as she came, reached for his actual flesh, his body, and he knew if she touched him once, he would not be able to resist, that he would scoop her up in his arms and carry her back to his bed and he would make love to her—no, at this point, the way he was feeling, he would fuck her. If she touched him. If she touched him at all.

  He drew his artificial hand back, out of her panties, away from her. She stopped reaching for him. She let him go.

  At the door leading back into the suite, he turned and looked at her there, in the moonlight. Her head was bowed and her hands gripped the railing and she was still trembling. “It’s all right,” she said. “You did nothing wrong. Try to get some sleep.”

  He hurried back to his room and locked the door behind him. Sat down on his bed and reached up and unlatched the artificial arm, felt the clamps release and the arm fall away from him. He caught it with his good hand and wondered what to do with it. He wanted to throw it across the room. Smash it into pieces.

  It hadn’t been long enough. For all he knew, Julia was trying to call him right then, trying to get back in touch and tell him she’d made a mistake.

  No, he told himself. No, she hasn’t called. She’s not going to call. And Nadia is right here. Just waiting for me to get over myself.

  Of course—there was the other reason this couldn’t happen. The fact that she was a foreign agent and that she might have orders to seduce him, to pump him for information.

  He shook his head. He couldn’t resolve this. Couldn’t figure it out at all.

  He cleaned and plugged the arm into a wall socket so it could recharge. Then he went back and sat on the bed and scrubbed at his face with his good hand, covered his eyes as if to keep anyone else from seeing what was happening there, behind them.

  He did not sleep at all that night.

  IN TRANSIT: JULY 18, 05:43

  Nadia ordered down for breakfast the next morning, so they wouldn’t have to go down to the lobby and maybe run into Mirza. A huge platter of fruit and nuts and coffee and rolls came up to the room. Bogdan ate heartily, but Chapel and Nadia both just picked at the meal. Chapel drank a cup of coffee and announced he was ready to go.

  Nadia looked at him and he looked away, as simple as that. Neither of them said anything, neither of them did anything to indicate that something had changed. “We’ll head down the back stairwell,” Nadia said. “There’s a service entrance at the back of the hotel. It will be monitored by cameras, but I doubt there will be anyone waiting for us there.”

  Chapel nodded and hefted his bag. He led the way out into the hall, checking both ways to make sure it was clear before gesturing for the others to follow him. They weren’t expecting any trouble, but they wanted very much to get out of Tashkent without being followed.

  It was a long walk down the stairs and then a short bustle through the kitchens of the hotel. A chef looked up and scowled at them, but he was too busy to say anything or chase them out of his stainless steel domain. The service entrance was unlocked and unguarded, and soon they were out into the alleyway behind the hotel, the early morning air already thick with exhaust fumes and the tape-recorded chant of a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer.

  It wasn’t far to the metro station, just a few blocks, but it took far longer because they had to stay in the alleyways and back courts the whole way, sticking to where the night’s shadows still hadn’t been eroded by the rising sun. They never crossed a street or turned a corner without checking for watchers, for any sign of a tail.

  They made it to the metro without incident. Boarded the first train to come along. Changed at the next station, took the next train, changed again. They got a few looks from early commuters, but the people of Tashkent were used to minding their own business and no one spoke to them.

  Finally they took one last metro line to Tashkent Central Station in Mirabad, where Nadia bought three tickets with cash. She bought the tickets for the 8:30 train to Bukhara, though they had no intention of going that far. “It’s a shame. Bukhara’s lovely,” she said. “It’s one of the stops on the old Silk Road, and a UNESCO World Heritage site for its historic central—”

  “Please,” Chapel said, shaking his overcaffeinated, sleep-deprived head. “Don’t play tour guide today.”

  She laughed and tried to meet his eye, but he looked away. That simple.

  The train was right on time. There were SNB people on the platform. Anyone could have made them out for secret police the way they scanned everyone’s face and asked random passengers for their tickets and papers. They didn’t seem to be looking for anyone in particular. Chapel gave them a wide berth and herded Bogdan and Nadia into the first car on the train. It set off on time, and within fifteen minutes they watched Tashkent fade away from the car’s windows, its dense streets thinning out to residential neighborhoods, to wide, open green spaces full of trees, and finally to cultivated fields.

  No one came bustling into the car demanding papers. No men with shaved heads and mustaches appeared on the local platforms they stopped at. Nobody even called Jeff Chambers on his cell phone to ask when he was coming down from his room.

  Eventually, Chapel let himself relax. A little. He exhaled deeply and plopped back in his seat and let the waves of exhaustion crash through him, driving all thoughts from his head.

  Nadia smiled from the seat across from his. Tried to catch his eye.

  He turned his head to the side to watch the dusty-looking crops stream by, the sun glinting on irrigation ditches and the occasional stream.

  It was that simple. He just had to never meet her eye again, and he would be fine.

  IN TRANSIT: JULY 18: 10:14

  The train passed through the city of Samarkand, Uzbekistan’s second biggest. Chapel was sure it was important historically, and the name conjured up visions of a glittering past, of caravans of camels and spice merchants and dancing girls in veils, but the train didn’t stop long enough for him to even get a decent look at it.

  Nor was he awake enough to pay much attention. He kept slipping into a doze, a sort of half-sleeping state where he was only minimally aware of his surroundings. He slipped in and out of dreams of swirling cigarette smoke—the car was full of it, even with the windows open—of brown landscape rushing by him, of the constant swaying of the train, of Nadia’s perfume, of Bogdan’s incessant clicking.

  He blinked his eyes to try to clear them, but he was having trouble focusing. He could hear Bogdan’s fingers moving, make out a fluttering motion when he looked over at the hacker sitting next to him, but that was all. He fought through it
, fought for consciousness, and saw Bogdan clicking away at his MP3 player, like he always did.

  This time, though, something about it bothered him.

  Bogdan was facing away from him, looking up the aisle between the rows of seats. He had his big headphones on, as always. His fingers were moving over the keys on the MP3 player the way a clarinetist might work the keys of his instrument. It looked like there were more keys on the MP3 player than Chapel would have expected—more than enough to pause or stop the music, fast-forward or reverse. The main body of the player was wrapped in duct tape, and it looked like Bogdan had modified a commercial unit to his own specifications.

  Something else bothered Chapel about the setup, as well. Though he had rarely seen Bogdan without the headphones on, he’d never heard any music coming from them. They might just be very well insulated, but Chapel had never seen a pair of headphones that didn’t leak at least a little sound.

  Chapel turned away, wanting to shake his head and just let it go. So the kid was obsessed with his music, so what? Plenty of people his age spent their whole lives with headphones on. Bogdan was exactly the sort of person who would want to block out the real world as much as possible. The constant clicking at the keys was just a nervous tic. Chapel had no idea if he was constantly zooming back and forward within a given track, or just adjusting the volume up and down, up and down.

  He should just go back to sleep, he thought. He should just—

  Inside his head something came together, a pair of jigsaw puzzle pieces fitting perfectly to each other and showing a glimpse of a bigger picture.

  He forced himself to sit up, to stretch for a moment. Blood rushed back into his head and his extremities and he breathed deeply, pushing oxygen into his tired tissues. He stood up and reached for his small travel bag, pulling it down from the overhead bin. Across from him Nadia stirred and opened one eye—it looked like she’d been fully asleep.