The Hydra Protocol (19 page)

“That’s right.”

“Which ones?”

Angel tapped at her keyboard for a second. “You want the whole list? There are dozens of them here. Basically the protesters wanted every ethnic, religious, or language group to have its own autonomous country.”

“What about places in Siberia? I mean, specifically, anything close to where Nadia was born, near Yakutsk.”

More keys clacking. Then Angel clucked her tongue. “Right on the money. Twelve different areas in Siberia are named on the list, including Yakutia.”

“Very interesting,” Chapel said.

The plane set down on a runway near the center of the capital of Uzbekistan just as the sun was coming up. The passengers debarked onto the second floor of a small terminal where the floor was lined with oriental carpets. As Chapel, Nadia, and Bogdan headed down a wide central staircase toward customs and baggage claim a loudspeaker crackled and filled the air with the chanting of a muezzin calling the faithful to dawn prayers. Many of their fellow passengers heeded the call then and there, while less devout travelers streamed around them. It seemed like half the people in the airport were smoking all at the same time, and the air was thick with the stink of tobacco.

Chapel hadn’t slept much. He felt like a guitar string tuned too tight, like every breath made his body vibrate uncomfortably. He was going to need a nap, and soon.

There was no trouble with their passports. It took a while for the bags to come out, but it looked like no one had gone through them—something Chapel had worried about. He grabbed his black nylon bag and followed Nadia out through a pair of glass doors into the street.

The air of Tashkent shimmered with the last traces of a morning haze. A breeze swirled down the sidewalk, already warm, carrying with it the smell of a desert close by.

The smell made the hair on the back of Chapel’s neck stand straight up. He knew that smell, the ancient dusty spice of it. It smelled just like Afghanistan—like the place where he’d lost his arm.

Instantly Chapel’s muscles reacted, tensing and pulling his head down. Every day he’d been in Afghanistan, every hour, he’d been in danger. Death could have come for him at any moment. What had happened instead was maybe worse. Chapel felt the old familiar stress headache coming on, like a loop of wire was wrapped around his skull and it was constantly tightening.

Get it together
, he told himself. This wasn’t Afghanistan. That was all over for him, just a memory.

It was so very hard to fight it back.

The physical therapist who had worked with Chapel after he came home from the war—a fellow amputee named Top—had once told him that the percentage of veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder was one hundred percent. And that the percentage of wounded veterans with PTSD was one hundred and fifty percent, because some of them got it twice. He’d warned Chapel that you never really left the war behind, that it lived with you and all you could do was make a place for it in your head, a place you only visited when you had to.

Chapel fought to control his emotions. Part of him wanted to run away. To run back to the plane and beg the pilot to take him away from here. Part of him wanted to curl up in a ball in the corner.

Top would have understood. He’d been to Iraq—and left behind an arm, a leg, and one eye. Maybe he’d gotten PTSD four times over.

Maybe Nadia sensed Chapel stiffen. She put a hand on the small of his back and rubbed the skin there in small circles. It was surprisingly comfortable.

“I’m okay,” he told her, and stepped away from her hand.

She didn’t reply. She just stepped up the curb and held her arm out, down and away from her body. A car pulled up right away. The driver was smoking, and when he stopped, he rolled down his window and a bluish cloud billowed out, right into Nadia’s face. She didn’t seem to mind. She leaned in through the window and spoke a few words. Handed over some dollar bills.

“I’ll take the front seat,” she told Chapel and Bogdan. “The hotel isn’t far.”

Chapel climbed into the back. Once he was safely inside with the door closed, he shut his eyes.

Nadia woke him by stroking his cheek with the back of her hand. “Come on,” she said. “Time to perform.”

Chapel nodded, still groggy, and carefully levered himself out of the back of the car. The new jacket he’d bought in Istanbul reeked of cigarette smoke—the driver of the car must have chain-smoked all the way from the airport. He brushed himself down a little and looked up at the entrance to the hotel. It was a wide portico of giant concrete blocks, broken only by a pair of glass doors and a couple potted ferns that struggled vainly to make the place look less like a Soviet-era dormitory.

A couple of other cars were pulled up out front, their engines left idling as if for a quick getaway. At the end of the drive a bald man in a white button-down shirt was feeding some pigeons from a wax paper sack of breadcrumbs. He looked up when he saw them and started ambling over, shoving his hands in his pockets.

Chapel tried walking past the man, but he changed course so that Chapel would have had to walk right through him to get to the hotel doors.

Interesting.

Trouble, maybe.

“Hello,” the man said. “Are you staying here tonight?” His English was accented but fluid, a second language but one he’d been speaking for years.

Nadia stood just behind Chapel and off to one side. As drowsy as he was, he could feel the way she moved, changing her posture the tiniest fraction of a degree, could hear the tiniest gasp of breath she took.

Something was up with this guy.

Chapel narrowed his eyes and gave the man a good once-over, looking to see if he had a weapon on him. He didn’t see one, but he saw other things. He saw the waxy skin of the man’s bald head, the carefully combed rectitude of his mustache. This was a man who was perfectly groomed at dawn—and not just so he could go feed some pigeons.

Chapel forced himself into character. He’d rehearsed his cover story for hours before leaving the States—now was the time when he needed it. Now that they were in Uzbekistan everything had to be done just so.

“Heard this was the only decent hotel in Tashkent,” he said, adding a skeptical look.

The older man nodded agreeably. He didn’t smile. Chapel couldn’t help but think the man was just as in control of his expression as Chapel was, at that moment. They were both playing parts. Maybe they both knew it. “Oh, all our hotels are excellent. All up to American standards, I think you’ll find.”

“Uh-huh,” Chapel said. “Good plumbing at this one?”

He’d thrown that out as a sort of halfhearted insult, mostly to see if he could get a rise out of the other man. It didn’t work. “Oh, yes, yes. You’ll be pleased.”

Chapel gave the man a curt nod. “Thanks for the tip. You mind?”

The older man feigned a moment of incomprehension, then a slightly longer interval of embarrassment. “Oh, I’m in your way, please, my apologies.” He stepped out of Chapel’s path and gestured for Nadia to go in first. “Enjoy your time in Uzbekistan, Mr. Chambers.”

Chapel turned to face the man, but he was already walking away. As he followed Nadia up the hotel steps, he asked under his breath, “What the hell was that about? And how did he know the name on my passport when we just got here?”

“SNB—the secret police,” she whispered back. “They would have called him from the airport so he knew we were coming.”

Chapel shook his head and walked in through the glass doors. The message was clear, he supposed. The Uzbek government knew where he was, and they would be watching him. Well, he’d never expected this job to be easy.

At the reception desk Nadia made all the arrangements. Chapel was posing as an executive of an energy conglomerate, looking to invest in natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan’s interior. Nadia was supposed to be his personal assistant. Bogdan, who was supposed to be Jeff Chambers’s tech guy, wandered around the lobby while Nadia asked about the various services their rooms provided.

Chapel leaned over the counter, interrupting her and staring at the pretty desk clerk. “Nice scarf,” he told her.

She reached up and touched it. “Thank you, Mr. Chambers.”

“Are our rooms ready? I don’t want to hear anything about how they’re still being made up. I know it’s first thing in the morning. I start work this early, and I expect not to have to sit around waiting for other people to catch up.”

The clerk’s eyes widened a fraction of an inch, but she didn’t flinch. Good for her. Chapel felt like a jerk but that was his cover, and he had to play it perfectly. “As per your request your rooms are available now. Would you like to hear about our spa and exercise rooms, or about our three excellent restaurants?”

“What I want to hear,” Chapel told her, “is that I won’t be disturbed while I’m here. Think you can handle that?”

“Of course—”

“That means no maid service. No turndown service. It especially means no visitors unless I clear them first. I don’t want this to be a problem. I don’t want to have to ask about this twice. So when I ask you in a few seconds if my instructions are clear, all I want you to do is say yes. Are my instructions clear?”

“Yes,” the clerk said.

“Good girl.” Chapel took a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and laid it on the counter. The clerk just stared at it. “That’s for not making me repeat myself.”

He grabbed up the keycards the clerk had already laid on the counter and headed for the elevators. “Svetlana,” he said, over his shoulder, “I want you ready with my schedule in twenty minutes.”

“Of course, sir,” Nadia said.

Chapel stepped into the elevator and waited for the doors to close. Only then did he let himself droop and feel tired again.

He’d been in Tashkent for less than an hour and already he could feel how things had changed. Bucharest and Istanbul had just been layovers. This was where the mission really began.

Marshal Konstantin Bulgachenko spent the last night of his life at an exceptionally tasteless party.

There had been many of those, since the fall of the Union. The Soviets had possessed, at least, a sense of decorum—a certain restraint. Oh, the members of the Politburo had had their sprawling dachas on the Black Sea, their Italian mistresses and their fine cars, but in public, in Moscow where the world was watching they had favored cheap suits and proletarian tastes in food, and if they smoked Cuban cigars, they did so behind closed doors.

Nowadays, of course, the world was turned upside down. The power elite of Moscow—the oil executives, the top-end gangsters, the political machinists—lived their lives in the newspapers, on the gossip sites, and their duty was to show their fellow Russians just what wonders and new pleasures capitalism had wrought. Excess had become patriotic, decadence a virtue.

So when one arrived at the door of this particular party in the suburbs of Moscow, one was handed a little spoon carved from bone. Inside the house where camera flashes exploded nonstop, half-naked models walked from room to room with bowls of beluga caviar nestled between their breasts, and they would coo and laugh as fat men dug into their bounty for a taste. In the middle of the house, in its spacious living room, a Japanese sports car had been parked, its tinted windows continuously steamed up from whatever was going on inside. Bulgachenko had not bothered to find out. He had come to the party to speak to one particular person, the American ambassador. Finding the man had taken hours as Bulgachenko was harangued by one notable citizen after another, carried off course by the enforced jollity. He was dragged into rooms where drugs were being ingested openly, where only profuse and eloquent excuses had gotten him free. He was spirited onto a dance floor by an heiress of less than twenty years who did not even know who he was, only that there were medals on his uniform and that he looked like her grandfather. He was ushered with a crooked finger into tense, quiet discussions with small and greasy men who wanted to know just what it would take to corrupt him, men who seemed to want to bribe him simply to prove that he was not above such things.

In the end he had found the ambassador on a back deck, out in the clear night air. The American was a long, thin man with a cloud of white hair on the top of his head. If he’d had a mustache, Bulgachenko thought he might look like the writer Mark Twain. He looked every bit as disgusted as Bulgachenko felt, but as soon as he realized he was not alone on the deck, his manner changed utterly. Like an actor stepping out into a spotlight he came alive, his arms unfolding, his face opening into a wide and benevolent grin.

The expression did not change when Bulgachenko walked up to him and uttered a few simple words: “It was very warm inside, but out here the air is clear and refreshing.” The words were chosen carefully, as banal as they sounded, and the message they conveyed was that while there had been difficulties, they had been taken care of, that Russia still had the highest confidence in the mission. The ambassador responded with a similar pleasantry, this one meaningless in itself: “I like to come out here and look at the lights.” Had there been a problem the ambassador would have spoken about the weather.

With that it was done. Bulgachenko made his way back through the party with as much grace as he could muster and headed to his car, an inconspicuous black sedan. He stepped into the back and fastened his seat belt. “I am very tired,” he told the driver. “Please take me home.”

He must have accidentally inhaled some narcotic smoke, or perhaps simply the perfume of the young heiress had clouded his head—it had certainly been strong enough. It took him some time to realize that the driver of the car was not the usual man, and that he was not driving back toward Moscow, but farther out, into the country.

Even then Bulgachenko did not panic. Though the car was moving in excess of seventy kilometers an hour, still he tried to open his door and jump out. The door was, of course, locked and could not be opened. He had expected no less. He considered reaching over the front seat and strangling the driver, though this would likely end in death for both of them. Even if he did escape, though, he knew that he would simply be picked up at some later time, that he would only be delaying the inevitable. “Will you tell me where we are going, or who it is you work for?” Bulgachenko asked.