The Hydra Protocol Read online

  “Just going to freshen up,” he told her.

  She turned her head to the side and fell asleep again, instantly.

  He pushed his way through the men in the aisle who were smoking and laughing at jokes in languages he couldn’t understand. In the tiny lavatory of the train car he opened his travel bag and took out his tablet and his own earphones. As soon as they were in place Angel greeted him.

  “We weren’t supposed to talk again until tonight, sweetie,” she said. “Everything okay?”

  “Fine, probably. I just thought of something I wanted to talk to you about. It concerns our young Romanian friend.”

  “Vlaicu? What’s he up to now?”

  “I’m not sure.” Chapel tried to figure out how to express his intuition. “We’ve been keeping him away from computers this whole time, anything with a screen and a keyboard.”

  “Probably wise,” Angel said, “though if he’s anything like me, that’s got to smart. It would be like being hopelessly nearsighted and the people around you won’t let you have your glasses.”

  “I’m sure he’ll survive a few days without the Internet. The thing is, I’m not sure he has to—I mean, I think he might have found a way to get online anyway.”

  Angel suddenly sounded very excited. “You think he’s hiding something on his person? Well, maybe. A smartphone, or a tablet—”

  “Nothing like that.” He described the MP3 player to her. “Last night when I was sweeping our rooms for bugs, the player made the bug finder go through the roof. I don’t know. It seems unlikely. There’s no screen, and maybe about ten keys total. Could you even make a computer like that? I know it sounds impossible—”

  “Not at all, actually. The original computers didn’t have screens or keyboards—they used punch cards.”

  “Yeah, but I’m talking about something a little more sophisticated,” Chapel said.

  “Well,” Angel said, “Maybe. There was a famous case of a bunch of computer science guys from the University of California, back in the eighties. They built computers into their shoes, using their toes to work the controls.”

  “Shoe computers? Did they do anything useful?”

  Angel laughed. “They took Las Vegas for a bundle, actually. They worked out a way to predict where a roulette ball was going to land and rigged the game.”

  “Jesus. I think Bogdan might have been hacking this whole time. When we were trying to lose our tail in Tashkent yesterday, I think he changed a traffic light, or at least made it change faster. And he—and Nadia—always seem to know when subway trains are about to arrive.”

  “That’s pretty easy stuff. Let me think about this,” Angel said. She sounded almost breathless. “I mean, you could reduce your inputs down to a small number of keystrokes if you used modal shifts, you know, like holding down a shift or control key to change the character you type on a normal keyboard. Say you have two mode keys, and eight input keys; that gives you twenty-four basic key combinations, which is almost enough for a complete alphabetic input, and that doesn’t even include multimode inputs, conditional mode inputs—”

  “You’re saying it could be done,” Chapel said. “But how would he remember all those combinations?”

  “Just by practice,” Angel replied. “You do anything long enough and it becomes second nature. Do you remember exactly where, on a standard keyboard, the H key is? But I imagine you could type the word ‘hello’ without having to think about it.”

  “And let me guess, he doesn’t need a screen, because—”

  “The headphones!” Angel actually laughed in excitement. “This guy’s brilliant! He probably just used a normal text-to-speech module, the kind that blind people use. They can’t see a screen, so the computer just reads everything on the screen aloud for them. Those headphones tell him where he is on the net, and he uses the keys to move from page to page, to enter form data, to—”

  “This is all guesswork,” Chapel said.

  “True,” Angel said, disappointed. “Except . . . maybe we can find out for sure.”

  “You have some way to scan for computers?” Chapel asked, incredulous. “By satellite?”

  “No. But the tablet you’re using now does. It has a Wi-Fi transponder built into it. It can scan for wireless networks. That’s just standard equipment on any wireless device. I can use it to triangulate a specific network. Let me ping it . . . there. There are a couple of dozen wireless networks in your local area right now.”

  “Really? In the middle of rural Uzbekistan?”

  Angel laughed. “Don’t start expecting to freeload off somebody else’s wireless so you can download a bunch of YouTube videos. The signals I’m getting are way too weak for you to access—they might be miles away—but I can still detect them. They get stronger the closer you get to them. Go back to your seat now but leave your tablet turned on. When you’re sitting next to Vlaicu, touch the screen so I know you’re close. If one of the signals ramps up superhigh at that moment, I’ll know it’s his.”

  “And you’ll be able to tell me what he’s looking at on the Internet?”

  Angel sounded apologetic when she answered. “Well . . . no. The signal will still be locked and encrypted, and even I can’t beat 256-bit encryption. But at least you’ll know your hunch was right. What will you do then? Confront him? Confront Nadia?”

  He thought about that. “Telling her I know about Bogdan’s computer won’t get me very far. Even if she admits she’s had him hacking away this whole time, so what? I’ve had you doing the same thing. It’s not like she’ll give me Bogdan’s password and we all get to share information, especially since I’m not letting her know about you. If you had enough time, do you think there’s any way you could break through his encryption? Maybe figure out his password?”

  “Not directly. Not with a brute force hack. But maybe I can do something. I don’t know. Let me think about it. For now, let’s just find out if you’re right. If he even has a working computer.”

  “Okay. Talk to you soon.”

  Chapel slipped the tablet into his pocket, his earphones still in place, and stepped out of the lavatory. When he got back to his seat, he climbed over Bogdan’s long legs and sat back down, not even looking at the hacker, just watching the world blur past the windows. He settled himself in, then reached into his pocket and tapped the screen of the tablet.

  For a second nothing happened. But then, in a very quiet voice, Angel whispered in his ear: “Gotcha.”

  VOBKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 18, 16:32

  The train only stopped for a minute in the town of Vobkent, as if it were in a hurry to finish the last leg of its voyage to Bukhara. They had to rush to get their bags down and struggle through all the people standing in the aisle, but they managed to get down to the platform before the train chugged away again, leaving them behind.

  On the map Vobkent had looked like little more than a flyspeck, but from the ground it was a vibrant, if sleepy little place, full of shops selling chicken feed and textiles. There was even a bit of tourist business—they saw a couple of European backpackers headed toward a minaret in the center of town. Its main attraction for Nadia, however, was that it was far enough away from Tashkent that it didn’t merit a significant SNB presence.

  “Varvara said the truck and the supplies would be waiting on the north edge of town, in an abandoned battery farm,” she told Chapel.

  Chapel nodded and folded up the map he’d been staring at, trying to get some sense of where they were headed. He scanned the street for taxis but found none. “I guess we’re walking,” he said.

  “It’s only about a mile,” Nadia said, and started off at a brisk pace, her bag swinging from her arm.

  It had been a hot day, and the late afternoon was showing no signs of cooling off. Before long Chapel had to wipe his brow. The streets of Vobkent were wide and open to the sun, and the smell of the desert was everywhere—everywhere, at least, that didn’t smell of chickens. They passed through the center of the town, th
rough a zone of little shops selling phone cards and soft drinks, and then into a more residential neighborhood where old women sat in the shade of their doorways, fanning themselves with beautiful little pieces of cloth. Chapel tried to smile a lot and look at the architecture so he would seem like a lost tourist, though he supposed he wasn’t dressed for the part. He’d taken off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves, but he still looked like American energy executive Jeff Chambers. He’d brought clothes more appropriate for the desert, but he hadn’t had a chance to change since they left Tashkent that morning.

  As they headed up a dusty avenue where the only shade came from the occasional tree, Nadia dropped back to walk alongside him. He didn’t move away from her, but he didn’t glance her way, either.

  “We will not speak of what happened last night, apparently,” she said, her voice low. She didn’t look at him when she spoke, as if they were trading vital secrets. “I understand that you need some time to think.”

  “Yeah,” Chapel said. He considered adding something, then decided against it. If he didn’t talk about what had happened, he didn’t need to think about it either. Instead he could focus on wondering what Bogdan was doing with his makeshift computer. The hacker was walking ahead of them, his long legs barely shuffling along but still managing to eat up the distance. As he walked he tapped at his MP3 player, as he always did.

  “You will not even look at me now, it seems,” Nadia said.

  Chapel shrugged. He adjusted his bag on his shoulder and made a point of turning to face her, still walking the whole time. He forced himself to look at her eyes.

  What he saw there made him turn away again.

  She didn’t look angry. She wasn’t winking or throwing suggestive looks his way either. She just looked sad. Like she understood, perfectly, how complex things were for him but she just wished they were . . . different. Simpler.

  He imagined he probably looked much the same way.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, when they were safely looking in different directions again, “what you thought was going to happen between us. We’re not the kind of people whose lives move toward oaths and ceremonies in little white churches. I wasn’t looking for a golden ring.”

  Chapel had to squeeze his eyes shut for a second when he thought of the little jewelry box that was probably still sitting on the hall table back in Brooklyn.

  “Our lives are not our own,” Nadia said. “We don’t get to make long-term plans.”

  Chapel grunted in frustration. “I know that better than anyone,” he told her. “And I thought we weren’t going to talk about this.”

  “Forgive me,” Nadia said. “But I really need to. She left you, Jim. She set you free.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Of course it does.” Nadia moved toward him, as if she would grab his arm. He took a step in the opposite direction, and from the corner of his eye he saw her drop her hands in frustration. “You have no obligation to a woman who—”

  “Nadia!” he said, loud enough to make Bogdan turn around and look. Much louder than he’d intended to. “Look,” he said, lowering his voice. “I think in some weird way you’re actually trying to help. That you think I need to hear this. But everything you say is just making it worse.”

  He was pretty sure she stared at him then, stared at him with wide eyes. He wouldn’t know because he refused to look in her direction. He turned his face away until he couldn’t even see her shadow.

  Eventually she gave up on him and hurried forward to catch up with Bogdan. The two of them carried on some light conversation in what sounded to Chapel like Romanian. He couldn’t have followed it if he wanted to.

  The road they were on petered out after another half mile or so. The shops and houses gave way to larger structures—warehouses, factory farms, and light industrial workshops. No one was on the street out there, and judging by the boarded-up doors and the broken windows it looked like the district had seen better days. It wasn’t much farther to their destination, a nondescript shed of a building maybe a hundred yards long but only one story high. Like many of the buildings they’d passed it was surrounded by a high chain-link fence, but the gate of this one was ajar.

  Nadia dropped back to point it out to Chapel. “Come on,” she said. “We still have a job to do, and we must do it together. Whether you like it or not.”

  “Fine,” Chapel said. “We can be professionals, at least.”

  Nadia shook her head and sighed. Then she strode forward, toward the open gate. Chapel and Bogdan followed close on her heels.

  VOBKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 18, 17:03

  It was clear right away that the shed had not been used in a long time. Its walls were made of corrugated tin that had turned white in the sun and rotted away in some places, big holes in the structure that showed only darkness and swirling dust. The ground around the shed was strewn with old litter—plastic shopping bags that skittered across the concrete like insects, old tractor tires full of stagnant water, broken wooden pallets. Climbing over all the debris took some work, since Chapel didn’t want to accidentally step on a rusty nail and give himself tetanus. Nadia scampered over it like a mountain goat, of course, while Bogdan carefully and painstakingly navigated around the trash, moving each foot carefully before setting it down as if he would be contaminated just by touching anything.

  The front of the shed ended in a tall doorway wide enough to drive a car through. It was locked up tight, with a massive rusted padlock hanging from a chain with links as thick as Nadia’s wrists. She rattled the chain for a second then let it drop back with a bang. “There must be a side entrance,” she said.

  Chapel scanned the street behind them. This wasn’t the kind of place tourists should be investigating. Anyone who saw them now might remember the strange foreigners wandering around the abandoned battery farm—and if they remembered them, they could tell the SNB what they’d seen. Luckily the street was deserted.

  Nadia made her way around the shed, climbing over a pile of blown-out old tires so high she could have climbed up onto the roof from its top. When she came down on the other side she was out of view, so Chapel hurried to follow as best he could. He heard her call out, and when he finally caught up with her, he saw she’d found a doorway that wasn’t locked.

  He followed her inside, into the low, dim interior of the place. The far end of the shed was wide open and let in enough sunlight to dazzle him. He could only make out the rough outlines of what he saw. The walls were lined on both sides with hundreds of chicken coops, tiny cages made of thin wire. Narrow conveyor belts ran along beneath the coops, perhaps to catch the eggs the chickens had once laid. There didn’t seem to be anything alive inside the shed now except some ants that crawled over his hand when he touched the door frame. He shook them off and walked farther inside.

  At the far end, near the open doors, he could make out the silhouette of the truck. It was bigger than he’d expected, a high square-cabined thing with a shovel-shaped nose that made it look more like a troop carrier than a commercial vehicle. It sat on eight massive fat tires, each with its own elaborate suspension. He supposed it needed all those tires to gain purchase on sand, but he could imagine less conspicuous vehicles to use on a covert mission.

  “Hello?” Nadia called out, her voice echoing off the steel rafters of the shed.

  There was no answer.

  Chapel came up beside her, wondering why this felt wrong.

  “Someone was supposed to be here to show us how the truck works,” Nadia said. “Varvara told me that someone would be here.”

  Chapel nodded and walked ahead of her, toward the truck. He tried to keep his ears open to any sound, but his shoes crunched on the old dust and debris that covered the shed’s floor.

  His eyes were slowly adjusting to the weird light in the shed. He thought he saw something inside the cab of the truck—maybe their contact had fallen asleep in there and hadn’t woken when Nadia called. Chapel hurried over to the dr
iver’s-side door. It was five feet up off the ground, reached by a short folding ladder. He climbed up, holding on to the door’s handle, and tried to peer inside through the smudged glass of the window.

  That was when he saw the bullet hole.

  The glass of the truck’s windshield had been punctured by a small-caliber round—he guessed a rifle shot—leaving the familiar cobweb-shaped cracks in the glass. Their contact was inside but he wasn’t moving. Chapel pulled open the door and reached inside, barely catching the man as he slumped out of the cab and started falling toward the floor of the shed.

  Chapel let the body fall the rest of the way, then jumped down to examine it.

  “Someone beat us here,” he whispered, and gestured for Nadia to get down. If the shooter was still somewhere nearby, if the rifle was trained on anyone who approached the truck—

  But the gunshot Chapel expected never came.

  He ducked low and studied the body. The man had been about Bogdan’s age, just a kid. He had dark hair and a sad little excuse for a goatee, and the expression on his face was one of surprise. The shot had gone in through his left eye, probably killing him instantly. “Jesus,” Chapel breathed.

  Nadia came up behind him, ducking low to use one of the truck’s tires for cover.

  “Who did this?” Chapel asked her, keeping his voice down.

  “How would I know that?”

  “Those gangsters who were chasing Bogdan? Would they come this far? Or maybe Varvara has some enemies? Think, Nadia.”

  She shook her head, but even in the half-light he could tell from her face that she knew something. He started to demand more answers, but he was interrupted as Bogdan shouted for them.

  “I’ll get him,” Nadia said.

  Chapel nodded. “There should be guns in the truck—I’ll look for them.” He climbed back up the side of the truck, feeling very exposed. If the sniper was still out there somewhere . . . but he got inside the cab without being shot. There were four seats inside, big bucket seats that looked like they belonged in an airplane instead of a land vehicle. The driver’s seat was covered in sticky blood that hadn’t had a chance to dry, even in the stuffy cab. Their contact must have been killed recently.