The Hydra Protocol Page 31

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” Chapel asked. “Those boxes—”

  “Yes,” Nadia whispered. “Those are the data banks. And the terminal, there on the desk, it is the only access point. This place, this cave . . . is Perimeter. You know, I never really believed I would see this.”

  “You weren’t supposed to. Nobody was.” The three of them moved forward, onto the platform. The light streamed down all around them. On the faces of the data banks huge spools of magnetic tape turned slowly, while polling lights flashed on and off as bits of data moved through the system like red blood corpuscles drifting through arteries and veins. Chapel felt something like awe, or reverence. Like what he had felt in the Hagia Sofia, when, for the first time, Nadia had taken his hand. There was something here larger than them, bigger than human scale—

  The spell broke instantly when Bogdan started laughing.

  Chapel spun around to look at the Romanian. Bogdan was bent over, studying one of the data banks. There was a big, goofy smile on his face, and his eyes were sparkling. Chapel had never seen the hacker so animated, not even when he’d killed Mirza.

  “What’s so funny?” he demanded.

  “Is like old man’s computer!” Bogdan exclaimed. He slapped one of his long thighs. “Is what everybody so afraid of? Is end of world, here? I see more advanced calculators, in my time.”

  PERIMETER: JULY 21, 05:38

  “He’s got a point,” Nadia said. “This system was installed in the early 1980s and never upgraded. You could probably fit all its data in one little corner of a smartphone and carry it around with you.”

  “That would make it the world’s most dangerous smartphone,” Chapel pointed out, “since then you would have the launch codes for every nuclear missile in Russia.” He looked around at the data banks, standing in a circle around the desk. Each had two big reels of magnetic tape on its front, behind a plastic dust cover. “Jesus. I haven’t seen a reel-to-reel system like this since I was a kid, and that was just for recording music. What happens if one of these tapes breaks? They used to do that all the time.”

  “One of them has,” Nadia said, pointing at one of the data banks. A dull red light flashed on its control panel. “That’s why there are eight of them. Each one must contain the entire program and database, so that even if seven of them broke at once, the last one could still function. Remember up top, where we saw one lamp lit above the keyboard? I believe that indicated that one of the reels was reporting an error.”

  “So we can just grab these tapes and go?” Chapel asked. “That would cripple this thing, right?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it. That is one of those safeguards I told you about. If you lift the covers and remove one of the tapes, Perimeter activates itself automatically, and—”

  “—and it can’t be shut down again until Moscow sends the right signal,” Chapel finished.

  “For the same reason we cannot blow this place up with C4 or smash the data banks with a lead pipe, even.”

  He nodded. “So we can’t touch this thing without activating it, and we don’t want that. So what do we do here?”

  “You and I do nothing. This is why we brought Bogdan,” Nadia said.

  Both of them turned to look at the Romanian. Bogdan wove his fingers together and cracked his knuckles with a sickening pop. He took off his MP3 player and his headphones and set them down on top of one of the data banks, then went to the desk and sat down before the terminal.

  “Is my turn,” he said. “Bogdan for the win, yes?”

  Chapel went to stand behind the hacker and look over his shoulder. “How are you going to break in to the system?” he asked, suddenly nervous. If Bogdan did this wrong, would it activate Perimeter? Maybe it would launch the missiles out of pure paranoia. Chapel tried to remember some of the things Angel had done to computers on his behalf. “Are you going to try a brute force approach? Run a logging script? Or do you think there’s a backdoor you can exploit to get you past the firewall?”

  The Romanian looked up at him with a sneer. Then he reached over and switched on the monitor. It took a second to warm up, but when it did Chapel saw nothing on the screen but a greenish-white rectangle in the top left corner of the screen.

  Bogdan tapped one key on the keyboard—the Cyrillic equivalent of a D.

  Instantly the screen filled up with green text, line after line of Cyrillic characters Chapel couldn’t begin to read.

  “So I am in,” Bogdan said.

  Nadia smiled. “Jim, you forget. This computer isn’t connected to any others. It predates even the earliest forms of the Internet. It doesn’t even have password protection—or rather, it did, but we’ve already broken that, when we turned on the elevator.”

  Chapel nodded. “If you’re in here, if you’re sitting in that chair, it assumes you’re an authorized user,” he said. “Okay. So shut this thing down and we can go.”

  “It’s not quite that simple,” Nadia told him. “We don’t just need to shut it down. As you know now, there are people in Russia who want Perimeter to remain functional. The same ones who tried to kill us.”

  The ones who had put a price on Nadia’s head, Chapel thought—they’d only tried to kill him because he was standing next to her at the time. But he didn’t say as much.

  Nadia shook her head. “If we just shut this down, they’ll figure out what we’ve done, eventually. They’ll come here and they’ll start it back up. No, we must be more subtle. Bogdan is going to cripple Perimeter—but he will leave it so it looks functional. So that it thinks it is functional, and it will tell so to anyone who comes down here to ask.”

  “Yes, yes,” Bogdan said. He tapped some keys and new lines of text appeared on the screen. “This I do. And this I do much easier if he does not lean over my head this whole time.”

  It took Chapel a second to realize Bogdan was asking for some space.

  Maybe it was time to give the Romanian his due. This was his area of expertise. If you wanted something blown up or shot at, if you wanted to sneak in to a secure area without being seen, Chapel was your man. But now it was Bogdan’s time to shine.

  “Sorry,” he said, and took a step back.

  Bogdan cleared his throat. Apparently that wasn’t enough space.

  “Come, Jim,” Nadia said, grabbing his hand. “We’ll let him get to it. I have something else for us to do, just now.”

  PERIMETER: JULY 21, 05:49

  From the way Nadia kept laughing, Chapel knew exactly where she was taking him. He didn’t resist.

  He wanted this. He hadn’t wanted anything so much in a long time.

  As she led him out of the cave, up the spiral staircase, the music from the overhead loudspeakers changed. “Rimsky-Korsakov,” she said, and laughed. He didn’t know why. He didn’t care about the music. She kept turning back and trailing her fingers across his chest. The second time she did it, he grabbed her by the hips and pulled her to him and kissed her. He wanted to pick her up and carry her. By the time they reached the little cot in the tool room, his shirt was off. He started to take off his artificial arm but she stopped him, kissing down from his shoulder to his fingertips. He pulled her shirt away from her neck and kissed the hollow of her throat, the top of her breasts.

  She wasn’t laughing by that point.

  He pulled her shirt over her head and bent down to put his face between her breasts, to drink in the smell of her, the smoothness of her skin, her warmth. With his right hand he cupped her breast, his thumb stroking the nipple until she shivered and curled against him. She looked up at him with wide eyes and he kissed her deeply, even as he slipped his hand down across her flat stomach and inside the waistband of her shorts. He felt lace and pushed his fingers under it, felt the sparse hair between her legs. She swiveled around, rubbing against him with her whole body until she was facing away from him. She pulled his left arm around her until he was holding her tight, then she grabbed his right hand and pushed it farther down until his fingers sank inside of her
. She was already wet and he met no resistance as he slid his fingers back and forth, back and forth, slowly, rhythmically.

  Her back pulsed against his chest, her body jerking every time his thumb made contact with her clitoris. At the same time her ass rubbed against his crotch, which felt maddening and amazing at the same time. She let out a trapped breath with a little moan and just when he thought he couldn’t wait any longer, that he was going to have to throw her down on the cot, her whole body shuddered and went limp and she fell away from him, tumbling gracefully around until she was sitting on the cot in front of him. She lifted his hand to her face and looked deeply into his eyes, then licked her own wetness from his fingers.

  He started grabbing for her shoulders, intent on pushing her down onto the cot, but she batted his hands away with a laugh. She unzipped his shorts and pulled everything down until he stood naked before her.

  She took him into her mouth and he was certain that just that would make him come, but she held him back, her tongue playing along the tip of his penis but never quite letting him thrust away.

  Then she stopped. With her hand on him, she drew her head back and looked up at him. “Is it okay that we’re doing this?” she asked. “Is this—”

  “Don’t ask me that yet,” he warned her. Already they’d gone too far for him to stop, even if he’d wanted to. If she was willing, and he wanted her this badly, what could be the harm? Julia had thrown him away, pushed him out of her life. He had no obligation to her now. Hollingshead and Angel never had to know about this.

  She lay back on the cot, pulling down her shorts and her black lace panties. She twisted on the cot, reaching for him.

  He climbed on top of her, and it was no effort at all to slip inside her. Their bodies just meshed and it was happening, he was thrusting against her hips and he knew it wouldn’t take long. Once he’d passed this border, he knew he would never look back. He would never hesitate again.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him toward her. She pressed her face into the crook of his shoulder and made a little whimpering sound that he knew wasn’t a cry of pain. He pushed into her, desperate with need, with lust, with anguish that had to be expressed somehow. She rose off the bed to meet him, her hips smashing against his as he pushed harder and harder into her and her whimper became a plaintive wail. And then it happened, the dam broke, and all his pain, all his frustration came rushing out of him as his muscles locked, as his face writhed in a grimace of release.

  He fell on top of her, panting and spent. He would never be able to put into words what had just happened, what he’d let go, but he felt empty and light and clean for the first time in weeks. He felt like he was floating in limitless space, and he didn’t dare open his eyes.

  He opened his eyes. She was stroking his hair, shushing him as he started to struggle up onto his hands. She pulled him close. “You must savor this,” she told him. “Truly feel it. Let nothing else intrude. This is what I’ve learned.”

  He closed his eyes again and just lay there, letting the blood pound in his ears, letting his chest heave for air. The floating sensation came back, though not as strong as before. It slipped away from him, little by little.

  He rolled off her onto his side, grabbed her with both his arms and pulled her close to him. Her lips found his and they just kissed for a while, their tongues finding each other slowly, searchingly. The emptiness he’d felt began to fill up with her, her presence, her smell, her body heat. His hands roamed across her back, grasped at her buttocks. She moved across him sinuously, with all the grace of the gymnast she’d once been, and then she was on top of him, lying across his chest, her breasts against his skin.

  His hand just seemed to find her on its own, his fingers twining inside her. He felt her shake and knew she wanted more. He didn’t need to do the work this time—she moved against his hand, pressing herself against it then sliding away, pressing again, sliding away until she’d built up a rhythm that made her breath come fast. Her mouth was against his ear and he felt her wet exhalations on his skin, felt the muscles of her face and neck tense as she rubbed herself to a climax against his fingers, his palm, his wrist. As she rode it out he was surprised to find that he was hard again—he hadn’t recovered that quickly since high school.

  She hooked one leg over him and twisted around until she was upright, her hands on his chest holding her above him. She reached down and guided him inside her in one quick motion, then she bent to kiss him and rose again to ride on top of him, moving up and down steadily. A thin sheen of sweat covered her face and the top of her chest and her eyes were squinted shut and he realized she was still in the throes of her orgasm, that she hadn’t stopped coming.

  She surprised him again, this time by rocking up onto one leg and swinging the other one across him, then turning around so she was facing away from him but still engulfing him. She reached down and grabbed his ankles as she moved against him, rising and falling, her muscular ass grinding back and forth against him. He pushed himself up with his arms and then reached forward to hold her, his hands grabbing her hips and pulling her down hard against his body, hard enough she let out an explosive cry. “I can feel all of you,” she told him. “I can feel you inside me.” She grabbed his hands and lifted them to her breasts. Sitting on his lap like that she lifted and fell with just the muscles of her thighs and slowly, slowly drew him onward, closer and closer. He pulled his good hand away from her breast and reached down to find her clitoris, making tiny circles on it with his forefinger and she burst, her body heaving as he came inside her, as they came together, as they rocked back and forth and both cried out.

  The third time was a lot slower, but no less intense.

  Both of them had a lot of tension to burn off.

  PERIMETER, JULY 21, 08:45

  Chapel must have dozed off, because he woke to the smell of their sex, to Nadia wrapped around him, a rumpled sheet hanging from her shoulder—

  —and Bogdan standing over them, looking down at them through his bangs.

  Chapel licked his lips—they were very dry—and grunted out something like a question. He’d meant to ask what Bogdan thought he was doing there, but it mostly came out as a growl of surprise.

  “Is finished,” Bogdan said.

  “What?” Nadia asked, twisting around until she was sitting up, the sheet wrapped around her breasts. “What did you say, Bogdan?”

  “The reprogramming work, is done, yes? Yes,” Bogdan said. “I have finished.”

  “That’s . . . great,” Chapel managed to say. He grabbed for his shorts and found that he’d picked up Nadia’s by mistake. They were tiny in his hand. Sheepishly, he handed them to her. “Great stuff, Bogdan. Thanks for, uh, letting us know. Why don’t we meet you down in the cave and you can . . . show us what you did.”

  Bogdan didn’t move. He wasn’t leering at Nadia’s near nakedness—nor Chapel’s—but he didn’t seem ready to go.

  “Is time, I guess,” the Romanian said. Then he let out a very long, very put-upon sigh.

  “Time for what?” Nadia asked him.

  “Is time, my usefulness it is complete. So now is time when you shoot me, yes? So I am no witness. Yes, I know how this works.”

  Nadia laughed. “Bogdan! Nobody’s going to do that.”

  “Yeah,” Chapel said. “We’re the good guys.”

  Bogdan just shrugged.

  “If you could . . . just . . .” Chapel shook his head. “Bogdan, we need to get dressed. We’d prefer to do that without you watching us.”

  The hacker nodded. For a second longer he just stood there. “You are sure you do not wish to shoot me? Only, I would prefer, if so, that is done quickly. I do not wish to draw things out, as they say.”

  It was Chapel’s turn to laugh. He jumped up off the cot and clapped the hacker on his shoulder. “Nobody wants to kill you. In fact, if you’re interested in a job in America, I think maybe we could work something out.” Chapel already had Angel as his in-house hacker,
but he imagined Hollingshead could find some use for the Romanian. Anybody who understood Russian computers as well as Bogdan did would find plenty of work. “You’d be safe, there, and—”

  “He does not know?” Bogdan asked. He was looking at Nadia.

  “Go wait in the cave,” she told him, harsher than before.

  When he was gone, Nadia got off the cot and wrapped her arms around Chapel, kissing his chest and then leaning her cheek against his skin.

  He pulled away. “What is it I’m supposed to know?” he asked.

  She looked confused for a second. Maybe even hurt. “After all this,” she said, gesturing at the cot—which was leaning on one buckled leg and would never be the same again—”still you question me like some enemy agent?”

  “When I asked why you were spying on my conversations with Angel, you said it was just part of the job. Nothing personal.” He put one hand against her cheek, and after a second she rubbed her face against his palm. “What am I supposed to know?” he demanded.

  She hissed in frustration and started grabbing her clothes. “I’ll tell you. In a minute. Just let us see first what Bogdan has done.”

  They dressed without another word and then hurried down the spiral staircase. Bogdan was standing next to the terminal desk. Chapel couldn’t tell if he looked bored or proud or sad that his work was done—all those expressions looked pretty much the same on Bogdan’s face.

  “Show us,” Nadia said.

  “Is nothing to see.” Bogdan tapped a key on Perimeter’s keyboard and the screen filled with Cyrillic text. It looked exactly the same as it had the first time Chapel had seen it. He still couldn’t understand any of it. “No change shows, as you asked. No one will know I was here. But! The system does not work now.”

  Chapel frowned. “How’s that?”