The Hydra Protocol Page 25

  “Fortunately—for you at least, young lady,” Hollingshead went on, his voice softening by the narrowest degree, “it needn’t come to that. Chapel can escort you back to the United States. Once you’re here we will protect you from the FSB. We will strive to make the remainder of your life comfortable. Of course, you’ll have to sing for your supper. You’ll be questioned, and while I do not torture those who fall under my microscope, I can assure you that we will be thorough. You will tell us everything you know, every tiny detail, every name, place, and date before we’re done with you. But you won’t be hunted down like a dog. That, Agent Asimova, is the very best you can hope for right now.”

  “You’re assuming Chapel can subdue me,” Nadia said, baring her teeth.

  “Are you really going to make me find out?” Hollingshead asked her.

  Nadia had a pistol tucked into her belt.

  Chapel had one, too.

  If it happened—if he was given the order to detain her—it wasn’t going to be a fistfight. It would be over very quickly, and one of them was going to get shot. Maybe killed.

  He didn’t know if he could do that.

  Hollingshead and Nadia stared each other down, through the screen of the tablet. Maybe, Chapel thought, maybe if he moved fast enough, and quietly enough, he could anticipate the order. Maybe he could get his arm around her neck, put pressure on her carotid artery, knock her out before she could react . . .

  Maybe it would work. But maybe not.

  Spetsnaz. She said she’d been trained by the Spetsnaz, the Russian special forces, and he knew it was true. Those acrobatic moves she’d used in Bucharest and again at the shed in Vobkent, the high kicks, the twisting evasions—he knew he’d seen them before. Back in Ranger school, his trainer Bigelow had showed him videos of those moves and told him just how dangerous they were. If he tried to choke her out, she would have a dozen different ways to reverse his attack, to put him at the disadvantage—

  “Wait,” he said.

  Nadia turned to face him. On the tablet’s screen he saw Director Hollingshead nod, just to indicate Chapel had his attention.

  “Maybe,” he said, “maybe there’s a way to still pull this off.”

  SOUTHEAST OF VOBKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 18, 20:01

  Chapel scrubbed at his face. It had been a hot day and he felt grimy and very tired, but he forced himself to focus.

  “Son,” Hollingshead said through the tablet, “I think we all want to—”

  “Sir, just . . . please. Just hear me out. When Mirza tracked us down, he blew Nadia’s cover—the Russians told him who she was. But he never figured out that I wasn’t who I said I was. He still thought I was Jeff Chambers, that I was a venture capitalist looking to invest in Uzbek energy concerns. He thought he could blackmail me, holding over my head the fact that I’d somehow gotten involved with a Russian criminal. We can use that. We can make it look like Nadia kidnapped Chambers and is on the run, but still in Uzbekistan.”

  He glanced over at the truck, a few yards away. “I don’t think the SNB knows about the truck. Neither do the Russians. The three of us can drive to Kazakhstan right now and get out of the country. Meanwhile Angel can plant some false information—phone in anonymous tips, saying that we’ve been sighted, getting on a train in Bukhara, say, or trying to cross into Afghanistan. You know Angel can make it sound good, make it sound like credible intelligence. Maybe . . . maybe she can pose as someone from Chambers’s company back in the States and demand to know where he is. The SNB will put all their resources to tracking us down in their own country. They’ll have no reason to alert the Kazakhs, and no reason to go looking for a giant desert-crossing truck. Perimeter is only a few days from the border, it won’t take us very long to get there. By the time they figure out we’re gone, we can already have completed the mission.”

  “And then what? How do you get out of there? Once you leave Uzbekistan, coming back won’t be an option,” Hollingshead pointed out. That had been the original plan, to retrace their steps, but Chapel had to agree it was no longer possible. “And you can’t very well exfiltrate through Russia.”

  Chapel nodded, thinking hard. “We go out through the Caspian Sea. You can send a submarine to pick us up from the Kazakhstan shore, take us to . . .” He went over the map of Asia in his head. “Azerbaijan.” It was the closest thing to a NATO country in the region, the nearest place where they could expect a warm welcome. “From there we can just take a commercial flight back to the States.”

  “That . . . could work,” the director said, though he still sounded skeptical.

  “Angel can arrange the whole thing. Sir—we can do this.”

  Hollingshead frowned. “Son,” he said, very softly, “weren’t, ah, you the one calling to scrub the mission in the first place?”

  “Yes. But only because I didn’t know the whole story.”

  “Don’t let emotion cloud your judgment,” the director told him.

  Chapel shook his head. “Sir, I get it. I just—” He tried to think of some way to explain why he’d changed his mind. Nothing he thought of would sway the director. But he thought he knew one argument that might. “Sir. When you first brought me into your directorate, when you gave me this job, you told me what you wanted to do. What your directorate was designed to do.”

  “I remember, son.”

  Chapel nodded. “You said you wanted to shake all the skeletons out of the closets of the Cold War. You wanted to find every dangerous thing left over from seventy years of fighting communism, all the obsolete secret stuff just waiting to come back and bite us when we least expected it. Well. It seems to me that Perimeter ought to be job one.”

  Hollingshead watched him closely through the tablet. Chapel had the sense the director doubted that he was thinking logically. But the argument was sound. Nadia’s last operation—her life’s work—was aligned perfectly with Hollingshead’s mission statement. Turning back now, aborting the operation, thwarted both of them.

  Maybe it would be enough.

  “The risks you’d be taking on are, well, astronomical,” Hollingshead pointed out.

  “I’ve never shied away from risk before, sir,” Chapel pointed out.

  The director nodded. “True enough. That’s my job.” He shook his head. “This mission already required violating the sovereignty of Kazakhstan. Now you’re talking about running counter to the security interests of Russia. We can’t afford to antagonize the bear, son. If the Russians discover that we ran a mission behind their backs, conspired with someone they’ve declared an outlaw . . . the diplomatic blowback could be horrendous. Ordinarily I couldn’t even consider doing such a thing without a direct order from the president.”

  “We don’t have time to run this through channels,” Chapel pointed out.

  “No, we don’t. But if I were to authorize something like this and it blew up, you know who would take the blame, don’t you? You understand what this would do to me and my directorate?”

  “I understand that if we fail, I’ll most likely be dead. Or left to rot in a Russian prison for the rest of my life,” Chapel pointed out. “Sir, this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. We can take down one of the biggest nuclear threats mankind was ever stupid enough to build, but we have to do it now. If we wait, the Russians will just put a fence around the thing and we’ll never be able to touch it.”

  Hollingshead stared at him through the thick lenses of his glasses. If it were anyone else, any other intelligence director, Chapel knew how this would end. Any spymaster but Hollingshead would simply shut the mission down. Call for further study, or declare the whole operation untenable. Anyone else would cover his or her ass.

  Hollingshead, though—the man had principles. He still had things he believed in. And more than once that had led to him doing something real, something good, for his country. It was why he still had his job, because the president needed somebody with the backbone to actually get things done.

  “Jim, you’re asking for a lot.
Make it worth my while,” Hollingshead said. “Agent Asimova,” he called.

  Nadia looked up at the screen. She’d been silent since finishing her story, as if it had taken all the wind out of her sails to relive all that. “Yes, sir?” she asked.

  Hollingshead cleared his throat. “You are absolutely certain you can dismantle Perimeter? If you can get to it, you can shut it down for good?”

  “Konyechno,” she said.

  “Don’t just say ‘of course’ as if this were something easy. You convince me this is worth putting so much at jeopardy.”

  “Sir, it will be done. It is all I have left in my life to do,” she told him.

  Hollingshead was silent for a long while. On the screen Chapel could see the wheels turning behind his eyes, the calculations being worked through, the numbers crunched. It was the kind of decision he was glad he didn’t have to make himself.

  “All right,” the director said, finally. “Get moving, don’t stop for anything—and let me make this very clear: do not get caught. No matter what.”

  “Understood,” Chapel said, and grabbed the tablet off the tree before the screen even went dark.

  IN TRANSIT: JULY 18: 21:24

  Night fell before they’d gotten very far. At the wheel of the big truck Chapel felt a little relief once they were out of the sun—he was an intelligence operative and the shadows were always more comfortable for him—but even so he was keyed up enough to hunch forward in his seat, every nerve strained as he wondered where the next threat would come from.

  Angel kept a very close ear on the police band chatter in Uzbekistan, listening for any sign that they were being pursued. No one had reported Mirza’s death, yet, nor was there any sign that the SNB was worried. That gave them a little breathing room.

  The quickest route to Kazakhstan would have been to drive straight north, through the desert, but that way lay danger. To curb drug trafficking, the Kazakhs had built a high fence with barbed wire and floodlights along the border. Patrols swept the area every night, focusing on the main roads from Tashkent to Astana, the Kazakh capital. To the west, however, where there were no roads and only a few farms, the border was much more porous.

  So they took the truck northwest, past Vobkent, using the best roads they could find. As long as they weren’t being actively pursued, they wanted to make the best time they could, and that meant sticking to graded surfaces. The truck was designed to cross sand and slickrock, but it was still a lot faster on a highway.

  Chapel worried at first that the truck was going to give them away, that it was just too conspicuous with its eight wheels and its high cab. It turned out that wasn’t a problem. North of Vobkent the roads were almost deserted, and what little traffic they did see was all construction vehicles and big segmented trucks hauling goods back toward Tashkent. The desert-crossing truck didn’t stand out at all—if they’d been driving a late-model sedan, that would have drawn more attention.

  “The northern half of Uzbekistan is all desert,” Nadia explained. “The Kyzyl Kum, three hundred thousand square kilometers of nothing but sand. Almost no one lives there, other than a few herders. The people who come there come for work, to dig for gold, uranium, natural gas, live back in the cities. They are all headed home now for their dinners, tired and uninterested in us.”

  “Fine,” Chapel said. “I won’t feel comfortable until we’re out of anyone’s sight, though.” He still wasn’t sure he’d made the right decision. How much had Nadia’s story affected him? He thought of himself as a logical person, a smart guy who at least tried not to make dumb mistakes. But her revelation, the fact that she was dying—he wasn’t heartless, after all. Had he allowed himself to be swayed?

  He supposed it didn’t matter now. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  He glanced at the tablet sitting between them, wedged under the emergency brake. Angel would be sending their pursuers in the wrong direction, he knew. She was too busy to talk, and now was hardly the right time, with Nadia sitting next to him, but he desperately wanted to know what she thought.

  In the backseat Bogdan was busy, too. Chapel had returned his makeshift computer, and the hacker was raiding the SNB’s archives, looking for anything they thought they knew about Jeff Chambers and his mysterious assistant Svetlana. So far Bogdan had turned up nothing to worry them, but if Mirza had left some case notes behind, or even a voice mail to his superiors telling them where he was headed before he disappeared—

  “Jim,” Nadia said. “I want to thank you.”

  He glanced over at her. “For changing my mind?”

  “For allowing me to finish my mission,” she said. “It means . . . a great deal that you trust me. That you believe in me.”

  “I believe in what we’re doing,” he told her, and left it at that.

  This woman had lied to him. She could do it again. Maybe there was more to her story she wasn’t sharing, maybe—

  “Sugar,” Angel said, “you’re going to see the town of Zarafshan coming up in a few miles. You might want to detour around it.”

  “Understood,” he told the tablet.

  Diverting around the population center took enough of his attention to keep his doubts and fears in the back of his mind for a while. The town wasn’t very big, but there weren’t a lot of roads around it, either, so he had to go off-road for a while. He had to admit he was impressed when the big tires grabbed at the sandy soil and they barely lost any speed. Varvara had done right by them.

  Beyond Zarafshan the road turned into little more than a gravelly track that stretched on for many more miles, slowly but steadily turning into nothing more than a ribbon of slightly paler dirt in the midst of the desert. At one point they saw the lights of a village up ahead and had to go off-road for a few miles to stay clear. Eventually the road disappeared altogether, and they entered the Kyzyl Kum proper. To either side there was nothing to see but sand dunes, no oases or rivers or even many trees to break up the horizon.

  There was no turning back. Chapel might have his doubts, but it was time to put them aside.

  IN TRANSIT: JULY 19, 03:37

  They took turns, one of them driving through the night while the other rested. Both of them were too alert to really sleep, though, and driving through the desert was never going to be a restful experience.

  The truck was an old military vehicle designed by the Soviet Union for prospecting work in the open desert, and it had been built extraordinarily well. It had special filters in its air intakes to keep out blown sand. It had a doubly redundant coolant system to cope with the heat of the desert sun, and special heating filaments wrapped around the fuel lines to handle the bitterly cold night. Even the groove pattern on its massive tires had been designed to offer the best possible grip on the sand.

  After driving for nearly four hours, Chapel cursed the designers anyway, cursed them for not considering what a thinly padded seat could do to a human tailbone.

  Nadia shrugged when he told her how sore his ass was. “The Soviets, they were brilliant in their way. They understood machines, basic engineering, so much better than anyone else,” she told him, “because they had to. They had such a large country to conquer. But they never built a car seat that a human being would want to sit on, and their chocolate is terrible.”

  “Got to have your priorities, I guess,” Chapel said, shifting on what felt like a bare metal bench. The rivets in the steel dug into him no matter how he held himself.

  It didn’t help that the damned landscape wouldn’t just lie flat. The desert was a great rumpled sheet of long crescent-shaped barchan dunes, giant mounds of sand that moved grain by grain as the wind carried them along. There was no way to drive around the dunes, so the truck had to constantly climb the face of each one, powering its way up the face, then scramble down the far side with the engine almost idling. It was like riding the world’s most boring roller coaster, and at the bottom of every dune the truck came down with a jolt no matter how carefully Chapel steered into the impact, lau
nching him into the air. He thought Bogdan had the right idea. After moaning for nearly an hour about the rough ride, the Romanian had wedged himself down into the leg well between the front and back seats. Maybe the carpeting on the floorboards was thicker than the seat upholstery.

  Chapel peered out through the windshield, anticipating the next dune. They had gotten lucky in that the moon was new, and only starlight lit up the landscape. With the truck’s banks of lights turned off, that would make them hard to spot, even by satellites. It gave them a fighting chance. “You really hate the Soviets, don’t you?” he asked. “Ever since we started this mission, all you’ve done is tell me how awful they were.”

  Nadia shrugged. “It is a national pastime. We all live in their shadow now. We live with their mistakes every day.” She clutched her arms around herself. Even in the heated cab it was cold—outside the night winds would be truly bitter, despite the warmth of the day.

  “And the Russians, now? The Russian Federation? How do you feel about them? They’re trying to kill you, after all.”

  Nadia looked over at him with guarded eyes. He’d touched something, but he wasn’t sure what. “You doubt my patriotism? Tell me, do you support everything your government does? Every member of your Congress, every elected official?”

  Chapel frowned as he peered ahead into the endless waves of sand. “My government tried to kill me, once,” he said. “Well, one of its organizations did, anyway. Governments, even good ones, aren’t ever really of one mind. As for Congress, well, I guess hating Congress is our national pastime. Sometimes I think we elect our politicians just so we’ll have something to be angry about. Yeah, there are things about America I don’t like. It doesn’t stop me loving my country. Fighting for it. I guess I’m asking how you feel about your country, not its leaders.”