The Hydra Protocol (18 page)

Chapel found an icon that looked like a trash can. He deleted the picture and handed the camera back to the photographer.

“This is an outrage!” the man said, in English. “This is not—”

Nadia spoke softly to him in the same language he’d used before. She held up her left hand and pointed at it several times. When that didn’t do the trick, she handed him a couple of bank notes.

The photographer made a nasty gesture at Chapel, but he took his camera and left.

“What did you say to him?” Chapel asked.

“I said we were married, but not to each other,” she said, with a shrug and a wry smile. “Then I gave him twice what he was asking. I should have led with the money.”

Chapel nodded, only half paying attention. He was scanning the crowd, looking for Bogdan. “When was the last time you saw our third?” He raised an eyebrow at Nadia, and her face got very serious, very fast.

“We need to find him,” she said, and pushed into the crowd. Chapel went a different direction, looking for anyone tall and thin, looking for headphones.

When he spotted Bogdan, Nadia had already reached him. The hacker had discovered a rank of computerized information kiosks. Each was just a box with a screen and a trackball, designed to give tourist information in several different languages. The screen of each one was displaying pictures of the dome above and the word
Welcome!
in multiple alphabets. The kiosk that Bogdan was using, however, showed a black screen covered in lines of tiny, blurry text.

Even Nadia looked surprised, for once. “How did you . . . ?”

“Is a screen for maintenance,” Bogdan explained, moving the trackball across the screen with the deftness of a champion video-game player. “In case system goes down and needs to be fixed. Easy if you know the way in, yes? Hold on.” He clicked the ball and the screen lit up with the home page for an Internet browser. “I just go to check my VKontakte page.”

Chapel frowned. “What’s VKontakte?” he asked.

Nadia looked up at him. “Russian Facebook.”

“Oh, no, no, no,” Chapel said, grabbing Bogdan’s shoulders and pulling him back from the kiosk. “No, we’re not going there.” He pressed his back up against the screen so Bogdan wouldn’t even see it. “Low profile, okay? Coming here wasn’t the best idea. We need to stay out of sight. We need to go straight to the airport.”

“Konyechno,”
Nadia said, with a weary sigh. “The time to relax is over.”

Even in his sleep, Bogdan kept tapping away at his MP3 player. He lay twisted up in his seat, his long frame bent to fit into the little legroom he had. His face hung on the seat back as limp and loose as a rubber mask, his mouth open and flecked with drool. The hair that always covered his eyes obscured half his face and made him look barely human.

Another airplane, another night. Economy class this time, just to throw off anyone looking for business-class travelers matching their description. Chapel still couldn’t sleep. Nadia sat across the aisle from the two men. Chapel studied her sleeping face and wished he could be next to her, breathing in her perfume, her soft shoulder rubbing up against his. Maybe she would have laid her head against him, used him as a pillow. Maybe he could have put an arm around her for warmth.

Jesus. This had to stop.

He plugged his earbuds into his tablet and booted up his Kazakh language program. Almost as soon as the monotone voice of the vocabulary lesson began it stopped and Angel spoke to him instead.

“How are you doing, baby?” she asked.

The sexy voice speaking to him out of the ether was almost enough to get him to stop thinking about Nadia. He inhaled sharply and put his fingers on the virtual keyboard on the tablet’s screen. He wasn’t entirely sure how to answer.

“Can you talk, or is this not a good time?” Angel asked, because apparently it had taken him too long to frame his reply.

NO, IT’S FINE, he wrote.

“The director’s been pressuring me for an update. I told him you’re on your way to Tashkent now. He doesn’t like this kind of mission, where he just sends you into the field and you’re left to your own devices. I have to say I’m not crazy about it either. I wish we could talk more often, the way we usually do.”

ME TOO, Chapel typed. HAS TO BE THIS WAY, THOUGH. WE SPENT DAY IN ISTANBUL. VERY NICE PLACE.

“Glad to hear it,” Angel said, with a laugh.

ANY NEWS FROM BUCHAREST?

“If you mean, are you still being chased by blond gangsters, I don’t think so. The police eventually did put an alert out for two people matching your description, but there were no reports of sightings. And then out of nowhere the alert just . . . went away.”

WEIRD.

“Not necessarily. I think they just assumed you left the country when nobody could find you. Most likely they just wanted you to identify the men who tried to scoop you up. I checked, but there’s no warrant out for Bogdan Vlaicu, either. I think you got a get out of jail free card, sugar.”

GOOD NEWS, I GUESS.

“If anything changes on that front, I’ll be watching. So anything else I can do for you tonight?”

He stared at the screen for a while. It only showed the list of language files he was supposedly listening to, but it was the closest he could get to looking at Angel. He’d spent a long time trying to imagine what she looked like, but all he could ever really see in his head was a computer screen. More than once he’d wondered if she was a real human being, or just some kind of very clever artificial intelligence.

She was, he knew, his best friend in the world. The one person he could always rely on. She’d saved his life dozens of times and helped him out in a million ways. He trusted her implicitly—even more than he trusted Director Hollingshead. Maybe more than he’d ever really trusted Julia.

“Sweetie,” she said. “I can tell something’s on your mind.”

Of course she could. He wanted desperately to talk to her, just then. Not just type on a screen. HOLD ON, he tapped out. He got up from his seat and headed back to the lavatories. Inside, sitting on the toilet, he listened to the noise of the engines and the hiss of pressurized air. If he was quiet, it should be all right.

“Angel,” he said, barely more than a whisper. “Can you hear me?”

“I can, sugar. You’re somewhere secure now?”

“Yeah.” He glanced up at the lavatory door. Made sure it was locked. “Listen,” he said, “I need to tell you something. Something that’s got me worried.” He hesitated for a moment longer, but he knew that if he didn’t tell her now, he never would. “I’ve had inappropriate contact with N.”

Angel was quiet for so long he thought maybe she’d hung up on him. He should have known better—she never did that.

“Sugar,” she said, finally. “Please repeat that. Because I can’t believe you said what I think you just said.”

Chapel scrubbed at his face with his hands. “I’ve been . . . fraternizing with her.”

“You know that’s not okay,” Angel told him. “Are you telling me you slept with her? Because that’s definitely not okay.”

“I know. I know that,” Chapel said.

Angel’s voice got very soft then, which he knew meant she was being utterly serious. “Have you even considered the possibility that she’s a swallow?”

“A what?”

“A . . . you know. The woman who sets up a honey trap.”

“You think she’s trying to seduce me to learn our secrets?”

“Men will say anything after sex. They have no filters at all.” Angel cleared her throat. “At least, that’s what I’ve heard.”

“No, no,” Chapel said. “It’s nothing like that. She would have been way more forward if that was the case. This was—it wasn’t much. We just held hands.”

“O . . . kay,” Angel said.

“I know. I know. I sound like a teenager getting weird about his first crush. But I thought I should tell you. And you should tell the director.”

“I could do that,” Angel said. “I am required by protocol and professional ethics to do exactly that,” she told him. “And you know what would happen then. He would tell you to scrub the mission and come home.”

“Yeah. That’s why I brought it up. I don’t want to give up, but—”

“Or,” Angel said, “I could not tell him. We could keep this between us. And you could get your shit together right now.”

Angel didn’t often swear. She was one of those people who understood that when you save profanity for special occasions, it actually does lend emphasis. Chapel felt like someone had dumped cold water down his back.

“I’m not sure I can,” he told her.

Angel almost sounded angry when she replied. “You can and you will. There’s a lot depending on this mission, Chapel. Your emotions can’t come between you and completing this.”

“I know that,” he told her. “But—”

“But what? What could be more important than that? What could come close to measuring up to the fate of the entire world?”

“I’m lonely,” he said. “That’s all.”

Another long silence from her end. He thought he heard some muttering in the background, but with all the noise in the lavatory it was hard to tell.

When she came back, her voice was much softer. “I know you miss Julia,” she said. “I know what you’re going through.”

“Do you?” he asked. “You know what it’s like to be dumped by somebody you thought you would spend the rest of your life with?”

“Maybe not . . . exactly, but—”

“I’m human, Angel. I’m just a man. I’m supposed to be this elite soldier, this machine that fights for its country. I’m highly trained and totally professional. But sometimes—sometimes I don’t want this anymore. Sometimes I think about getting married and starting a family. This job took that away from me.”

“You chose this job.”

“I know.”

“Do you want to scrub the mission? Do you want to give up?”

“No,” Chapel said. “No.” Going home now, in disgrace—it wouldn’t solve anything. He would still be headed back to an empty apartment. An empty life. “That’s why I brought this to you, though. Because maybe I’m not the best judge of my fitness for duty right now.”

“I understand,” Angel said. “Tell me something. If you put the moves on N right now, I mean, really laid on the charm—you think she would go for it?”

“I can’t tell. She’s been very friendly. But, well, for one thing—I’m an amputee. A lot of people are nice to me because they think I’m some kind of wounded hero and that I deserve to be treated like a sick kitten or something. Not a lot of people want to . . . to have sex with someone like me. I think maybe she just feels sorry for me.”

“There’s such a thing as pity sex,” Angel pointed out.

Chapel grinned and shook his head. “Not as much as some people might hope. Anyway. No. I don’t think I could seduce N without a lot of effort.”

“So just don’t put in that effort. No more holding hands, right? No more fraternization. Because even if it seems innocent now—she might just be building to something more. You can’t know. And you definitely can’t trust her.”

“Understood,” Chapel said. “Angel—thank you. This was weighing on me.”

“Always here to help, honey,” she told him. “And in fact, I might have something that really does help. I’ve been doing some more digging on N. Looking for anything that wasn’t obvious, something I missed the first time around.”

“And you found something,” Chapel said, frowning. She wouldn’t have brought this up if there was nothing there.

“Yeah, though not something I can prove. N is a pretty slippery fish, and her records are very hard to turn up. But it looks like she might have a criminal record.”

“I beg your pardon?” Chapel asked.

Angel sounded almost coy as she answered. She got that way sometimes when she’d done a particularly clever thing and wanted to share but didn’t want to come off as bragging. “Oh, it’s not very serious, really. It’s not like she robbed a bank or anything.”

“Come on, Angel. Spill.”

“A woman matching N’s description—and I mean
matching
, height, weight, everything—was picked up by the Moscow police a couple of years ago for subversive political activity. Which probably just means she went to a protest rally and chanted louder than the person next to her. Under Putin, the Russians aren’t putting up with much in the way of dissidence.”

“What kind of a protest rally?” Chapel asked.

“It was a meeting of a number of student groups, but the focus was on self-determination for ethnic minorities. The protesters were demanding that places like Chechnya, South Ossetia, and some eastern ethnic territories be allowed to split off from the Russian Federation and become their own countries. Their plan was to get a crowd assembled in Red Square and then march across Moscow waving signs and shouting slogans. They didn’t get very far. The police moved in and, well, the official record says they ‘peacefully dispersed the illegal gathering without incidence of violence.’ Which means nobody sued them afterward. I’m guessing they used fire hoses and pepper spray to break things up. A lot of people were arrested, among them somebody who looks and sounds exactly like N. She refused to give her name, which meant she would have been taken into central processing where they could make an ID. Except there’s no indication she got there. There’s a brief mention of her particulars and her arrest, and then nothing.”

“When it comes to N, that’s starting to sound familiar,” Chapel said.

“Exactly. I figure she waited until she was alone in the police station to tell them she was a government agent, and then they sprang her. It couldn’t hurt that she had that medal. I mean, she probably wasn’t wearing it at the time, or anything. But the police—and the Putin administration—would have been embarrassed if they had to admit they had arrested a decorated citizen.”

“Interesting,” Chapel said.

“Yeah. She’s not as squeaky clean as she looks, huh?” Angel said. “I kind of like her more now, though. Makes her a little more human.”

Chapel thought of the woman he’d left sleeping in her aisle seat. He had no trouble thinking of Nadia as human. But this did change things, a little. Something occurred to him. “Angel—you said the protesters were asking for self-determination for some eastern ethnic territories.”