The Hydra Protocol Page 23

  “Something is wrong?” he said.

  “Where were you?” Nadia asked. “I went looking for you.”

  “I hear people come, so I hide,” Bogdan said. He lifted his shoulders and let them sag again. “In the chicken coops, yes? Then I see men coming, with weapons, I think I am dead. The American killed those men, and later, the Uzbek killed another one. But he is our enemy, so I went in truck and found guns and kill him.”

  “That . . . makes sense,” Nadia said.

  “Was right thing to do, yes? He is our enemy?”

  “He . . . was,” Nadia agreed. “Jim?”

  Chapel wanted very much to sit down. He wanted time to figure out what had happened and where everything went wrong.

  Sometimes in life you don’t get what you want.

  “Okay,” he said. “We need to . . . we have to . . .”

  There was a course forward, a series of steps he could take that would get them out of there and to a place of safety. He was getting stuck, though, on the first step. He couldn’t think straight, couldn’t—“We need to hide these bodies,” he said. Because that had to be the first thing they did.

  His moment of doubt passed. One of the most useful things the army had ever taught him was that motion and activity were a passable substitute for a rational plan. “It may already be too late. Maybe someone in one of the buildings nearby heard something. Maybe they’ll come to look. Maybe they’ll find Mirza and report his death, and his friends in the SNB will know he was assigned to watch us. I’m sure he told them where he was headed, he would be a fool not to leave word with somebody that he was coming here, and Mirza didn’t seem like a fool.”

  “He fell for your cover story,” Nadia pointed out.

  “The cover was solid. Yours, on the other hand—”

  That was a whole other kettle of fish. He hadn’t even begun to process what Mirza had said about Nadia. That she was wanted by the Russian government. That the blond thugs had not, in fact, been Romanian gangsters looking for Bogdan but Russian security men sent to kill her.

  If he started down that path, he was going to have to question all kinds of things that so far he had comfortably taken for granted.

  Later, he told himself.

  “Never mind. Help me with these bodies. Bogdan, see if you can find a tarp or something. A sheet, a cloth, plastic—it doesn’t matter. We need to hide this mess as best we can and be out of here as soon as damned possible.”

  He realized he was babbling, that he was talking more than he was thinking, but he didn’t care. He started hauling bodies around, then, and talking through the process helped him not think too much about what he was doing, about what he’d already done to the dead men. With Nadia’s help he got them inside the shed, where at least they wouldn’t be seen from the street. Bogdan found some old stained blankets in the pile of trash that filled the lot, and Chapel covered the bodies because that seemed more respectful than just letting them lie there on the dirty shed floor.

  When it was done, he got the three of them in the truck. The driver’s seat was still wet with blood, the blood of Varvara’s man. There was still a bullet hole in the windshield. He ignored these things. He got the truck in gear and drove out of the shed. There was just room to drive the big truck around to the gates at the front of the lot, though it took a lot of maneuvering. Nadia jumped out and pushed the gates open wide enough so that Chapel could drive through them. Then she jumped back in the truck, and Chapel put it back in gear.

  “Head north,” she told him. “If we can get out into the open desert, away from the main roads, we have a chance to—”

  “No,” he told her.

  “No?”

  “No. We head southeast. To Afghanistan. Like I said.”

  Nadia shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. It is exactly the wrong direction!”

  “No,” Chapel said. “Afghanistan.”

  “But why?”

  “Because,” he told her, “we’re aborting the mission.”

  IN TRANSIT: JULY 18, 18:22

  Nadia was right about one thing—they needed to get into the desert before anyone came looking for them. Chapel took the truck to the edge of town and then rolled off the road, into a scrubby field of weeds. Ahead of them lay irrigation ditches and a few cultivated cotton fields and then nothing but sand as far as the eye could see. Though the truck was hardly inconspicuous, it was clearly meant for crossing rough terrain. The big tires always found something to grip, and the wide wheel base kept them from pitching about too much even when the ground rose and fell beneath them.

  The seats weren’t exactly comfortable, just a thin layer of padding over flat steel, and he imagined he would get pretty sore if he tried driving the truck all day. But the Afghan border was only a hundred miles away or so, and once they were across they could simply find the nearest American troops and then they would be safe. Hollingshead would get them space on a transport plane headed back to the States and they would be home free.

  All they had to do was cross that hundred miles of desert before the SNB realized that Mirza was missing and started looking for them.

  Bogdan sat in the back and clicked away at his MP3 player/computer. Chapel didn’t know what he was doing with his improvised keyboard and didn’t much care at that point.

  Nadia, of course, didn’t like his plan. She pleaded with him constantly to turn back, to head north again.

  “I’m the lead agent on this mission,” she said, staring at him from the passenger seat. “I’m ordering you to go back.”

  He didn’t even turn his head to look at her.

  “Jim, please,” Nadia said. “Just listen to me for one moment. I’ve spent years of my life planning this operation. If we just stop now, I’ll never get another chance.”

  “You have no chance now,” Chapel told her. “If we headed for Kazakhstan, how far do you think we would get? Even if we made it across the border, the SNB would just call up their friends over there and tell them that three dangerous fugitives were headed into their territory in a vehicle that any reconnaissance plane could pick up in a second. And that’s even assuming they don’t tell the Russians about us.”

  She looked away, out through her window over the endless rippling landscape of sand.

  “You know, the Russians? The people who are trying to kill you?” he asked. He was angry, and he didn’t care if he was shouting. “The people you said you worked for?”

  “Jim—”

  “You came to us claiming to represent the Russian government. You said this mission was sanctioned by the Kremlin. You lied to us, Nadia. You lied to me.”

  “It’s not how you think,” she insisted. “It’s . . . I admit that things have become complicated. But—”

  “Who do you really work for?” he demanded.

  “FSTEK. My superior is Marshal Bulgachenko.” She reached over and for a second he thought she was going to grab the wheel. Instead she reached for his arm. He shrugged her off. “I didn’t lie. I just omitted some of the truth.”

  “Jesus,” he said. He smacked the steering wheel with his artificial hand. “You put me in danger, Nadia.”

  “I know.”

  “You tricked the government of the United States into supporting this mission.”

  “Konyechno, but—”

  “You saw the Russian hit squad in Bucharest and you let me think they were just local gangsters and we could run away from them.”

  “This is true.”

  “Stop saying that! I’m not sure you even know what the word ‘true’ means.”

  She reached for him again and he shoved her away, harder than he’d meant to. She curled up in the far end of her seat, staring at him.

  “Bogdan,” she said, in a soft voice.

  Chapel started to ask a question, at least to vent his confusion. It took him a second to realize she wasn’t talking to him.

  Bogdan tapped some keys on his MP3 player, and suddenly the truck’s engine died. It w
heezed to a stop, the truck halfway up a sand dune, its nose pointed at the sky. For a second it just hung there as if it had hit a brick wall. Then it slipped backward a few yards as it lost its grip on the loose sand.

  Chapel stared at the dashboard. All the controls were labeled in Cyrillic characters, but the needles on all the gauges had dropped to zero—even the fuel gauge. All power had been cut to the engine and to the displays.

  “Clever,” Chapel said. “Let me guess. Antitheft controls.”

  Nadia’s voice was much easier to hear without the engine noise drowning it out. “This vehicle is of Russian military manufacture. We had a problem, a few years back, with our soldiers stealing our equipment. They weren’t getting paid, you see—they were owed a great deal of back pay—and many of them figured they were then justified to simply drive their vehicles off their bases and sell them on the black market. So we installed a chip in every vehicle to make sure this could not be done. Bogdan has simply activated that chip. He can deactivate it, if I feel he should.”

  “If I agree to continue with this crazy mission, you mean.”

  “Konyechno. Exactly. I still need you, Jim. I need my svidetel.”

  Chapel glared at her for a while. He said nothing.

  Eventually, when she didn’t relent just because he looked at her funny, he gave up. He popped open the door of the truck and jumped out, landing in the soft sand. It took a second to get used to the yielding ground, but he managed. Step by halting step, he started marching, to the southeast.

  Behind him Nadia leaned out of the cab door. She called after him, shouting his name over and over, as he went on, placing his feet carefully on the shifting sand.

  He didn’t get very far.

  “Jim,” she called, when he had taken maybe a dozen steps. “Jim, I think it is time to call your boss.”

  “He’s not going to like you any more than I do right now,” he called back.

  “Even so.” Her face was set, her normally jovial features very, very serious suddenly. “Jim, I think you should get Angel on the line.”

  That was enough to stop him.

  “I beg your pardon?” he demanded.

  SOUTHEAST OF VOBKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 18, 18:56

  Nadia jumped down onto the sand and walked toward him. “You need to contact Angel and set up an immediate call with Director Hollingshead,” she said.

  “Listen,” Chapel told her, “I don’t know what you think you know—”

  “Did you think I never wondered why you spent so much time in bathrooms with your tablet?” she asked. “Did you think I would not listen in?”

  Her face had changed in the last few seconds. The softness, the friendliness, was gone. Now she looked like a soldier. Resolute, unapologetic, and unflinching.

  “You spied on me?” he asked, though it sounded lame even to his own ears.

  “Of course I did. That is what we do,” she said. “And please, do not take this moral tone with me. I know you did the same—just yesterday, when you attempted to question Bogdan about my previous mission. You made some very educated guesses, didn’t you? You asked him about a plutonium theft, convinced him you knew everything so there was no harm in talking. I admire your skills, Jim.”

  Chapel shook his head. “So we’re putting all our cards on the table,” he said. “Okay. Tell me what’s really going on. Tell me about the Russians hunting you.”

  “I will tell Director Hollingshead. You may listen while I do.”

  Chapel stared at her, unable to process the way she’d changed. Unable to reconcile the Nadia he’d seen before with this woman.

  When he was done trying—and failing—he went over to the truck and climbed the ladder to the cab. He went to his bag and took out his tablet. Before climbing back out of the truck he looked over at Bogdan.

  The hacker was curled up in one of the backseats, clicking away at his MP3 player. Looking bored, mostly. He didn’t look at all like a man who had slaughtered an Uzbek security agent with an assault rifle. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who could screw up a mission in the time it took to empty a clip of bullets.

  It seemed like today was the day he learned who everybody really was. He reached over and grabbed the headphones off Bogdan’s head. The Romanian flinched and made a noise that might have been a halfhearted protest, but Chapel ignored it. He pulled the headphone jack out of the MP3 player and shoved the headphones into his own bag. For good measure he grabbed the MP3 player—Bogdan’s connection to the outside world—and shoved that in his pocket.

  “What is the meaning?” Bogdan asked, his voice high, almost squeaky. Maybe that was how he expressed outrage.

  “You get this stuff back when I’m sure you won’t get me killed with it,” Chapel told him. Bogdan had more to say, but Chapel didn’t listen. He climbed out of the cab and staggered across the sand. Nadia was waiting for him under a tree a few dozen yards away, the only shade available from the evening sun.

  He stared at her for a second, gritting his teeth. Then he switched on his tablet.

  “Angel,” he said.

  She answered immediately. “Sugar? Are you alone? I’m showing you don’t have your headphones plugged into this tablet. Is it safe to talk?”

  “No,” Chapel said, “but we need to anyway. Nadia knows all about you, apparently. Though watch what you say anyway. She’s tricky.”

  “I . . . see. Agent Asimova? Can you hear me?”

  “Yes, miss,” Nadia said. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance at long last.”

  Angel sounded pretty wary when she replied. “Likewise, I’m sure,” she said. “Um, I’m not really sure this is kosher. Sugar, you know what the director said about—”

  “We both know what he said. Let’s not go into it now. Angel, I need you to call the director, actually. We need to discuss whether or not we’re going to scrub the mission. Things have gotten . . . complicated.”

  Angel’s only reply to that was to switch the tablet over to its telephone screen. Digits appeared one by one there as if Chapel had typed them in: 01 00 000 000-000-0000. Chapel had seen numbers like that before—it meant Angel wasn’t taking any chances, not even letting Nadia see what American area code she was calling. The 01 at the beginning was just a country code, indicating the call was headed to the United States.

  Chapel set the tablet in between two low branches on the tree, so that it faced both him and Nadia at eye level. Hollingshead answered almost immediately. It would be midmorning in Washington, and he most likely would have had a line open with Angel anyway, just to monitor the mission in Uzbekistan. His face appeared on the screen, with just a plain neutral background behind him that didn’t give away anything about where he was. He looked out of the screen with genial eyes that opened a lot wider when he saw Nadia peering back at him.

  “Son?” he said. “This is a little unexpected.”

  “I understand, sir, and if circumstances were different, I wouldn’t be contacting you like this. But things have gotten bad over here. Very bad.” He explained as quickly as he could how Mirza had followed them to the truck’s location, and how Bogdan had killed him. He repeated what Mirza had told him—that Nadia had a price on her head, that the Russians wanted her dead or alive. Nadia glanced away when he said that, as if she were ashamed. Well, good, he thought. She should be. “She lied to us, sir. She misrepresented her support.”

  “Young lady,” Hollingshead said, blinking behind his thick glasses, “this is quite serious. You understand that? You involved the United States in this mission with the understanding that your country was fully in line.”

  “I know this, sir,” she said. “You have my apology.”

  “I’m going to want a bit more than that.”

  She nodded. “Yes, it is true, there are Russians who . . . disagree with what I am doing. My country is very large, and it has many, many security agencies. I think you will understand when I say they do not always cooperate, yes?”

  Hollingshead si
ghed. “All too well.” Chapel knew why that thought exasperated the old man. The secret directorate in the Pentagon had fought brush wars with American civilian intelligence groups in the past—one of which involved a CIA assassin sent to take Chapel’s life.

  “There are men, mostly ex-KGB,” Nadia explained, “who think Perimeter should be kept intact. That it is a vital part of the Fatherland’s defenses. These men have power in the Kremlin, power enough to call for my execution—or worse. Men who would very much like to torture me for the information I possess. I have avoided their clutches this far, but I knew they would come eventually.”

  “And you chose not to tell us this, when you came to us for help.”

  Nadia shrugged. “You would have said no, I thought.”

  Hollingshead’s frown deepened. “You’re quite right about that.” He turned to look at Chapel. “Son—what’s your plan now?”

  “I’m thinking we should abort,” he told the director. “Exfiltrate immediately and return home while we still have the chance. As for Asimova—”

  “No,” she said. “No, I do not agree. There is no reason to stop now. We have no reason to believe that the SNB knows of our plans, or that they are even tracing us right now. They cannot know our destination. If we move quickly, if we drive all night, we can be in Kazakhstan before dawn. This is not the time to turn back.”

  “I see,” Hollingshead said. “Well, now, this is a dilemma. You’re supposed to be lead on this mission. But I gave you that courtesy because I thought I knew who you were. I have to say, I’m inclined to Jim’s way of thinking.”

  Chapel nodded. “Very good, sir, I’ll—”

  “No!” Nadia said again. “No, I will not accept this! Do you have any idea how long I have worked toward this goal? What I sacrificed to get this far?”

  Hollingshead frowned. “Agent Asimova, who do you even work for?” he asked.

  “FSTEK, as I have always said,” she told him. “Call Marshal Bulgachenko. He will vouch for me, as he already has.”