The Hydra Protocol (26 page)

She laughed and tried to meet his eye, but he looked away. That simple.

The train was right on time. There were SNB people on the platform. Anyone could have made them out for secret police the way they scanned everyone’s face and asked random passengers for their tickets and papers. They didn’t seem to be looking for anyone in particular. Chapel gave them a wide berth and herded Bogdan and Nadia into the first car on the train. It set off on time, and within fifteen minutes they watched Tashkent fade away from the car’s windows, its dense streets thinning out to residential neighborhoods, to wide, open green spaces full of trees, and finally to cultivated fields.

No one came bustling into the car demanding papers. No men with shaved heads and mustaches appeared on the local platforms they stopped at. Nobody even called Jeff Chambers on his cell phone to ask when he was coming down from his room.

Eventually, Chapel let himself relax. A little. He exhaled deeply and plopped back in his seat and let the waves of exhaustion crash through him, driving all thoughts from his head.

Nadia smiled from the seat across from his. Tried to catch his eye.

He turned his head to the side to watch the dusty-looking crops stream by, the sun glinting on irrigation ditches and the occasional stream.

It was that simple. He just had to never meet her eye again, and he would be fine.

The train passed through the city of Samarkand, Uzbekistan’s second biggest. Chapel was sure it was important historically, and the name conjured up visions of a glittering past, of caravans of camels and spice merchants and dancing girls in veils, but the train didn’t stop long enough for him to even get a decent look at it.

Nor was he awake enough to pay much attention. He kept slipping into a doze, a sort of half-sleeping state where he was only minimally aware of his surroundings. He slipped in and out of dreams of swirling cigarette smoke—the car was full of it, even with the windows open—of brown landscape rushing by him, of the constant swaying of the train, of Nadia’s perfume, of Bogdan’s incessant clicking.

He blinked his eyes to try to clear them, but he was having trouble focusing. He could hear Bogdan’s fingers moving, make out a fluttering motion when he looked over at the hacker sitting next to him, but that was all. He fought through it, fought for consciousness, and saw Bogdan clicking away at his MP3 player, like he always did.

This time, though, something about it bothered him.

Bogdan was facing away from him, looking up the aisle between the rows of seats. He had his big headphones on, as always. His fingers were moving over the keys on the MP3 player the way a clarinetist might work the keys of his instrument. It looked like there were more keys on the MP3 player than Chapel would have expected—more than enough to pause or stop the music, fast-forward or reverse. The main body of the player was wrapped in duct tape, and it looked like Bogdan had modified a commercial unit to his own specifications.

Something else bothered Chapel about the setup, as well. Though he had rarely seen Bogdan without the headphones on, he’d never heard any music coming from them. They might just be very well insulated, but Chapel had never seen a pair of headphones that didn’t leak at least a little sound.

Chapel turned away, wanting to shake his head and just let it go. So the kid was obsessed with his music, so what? Plenty of people his age spent their whole lives with headphones on. Bogdan was exactly the sort of person who would want to block out the real world as much as possible. The constant clicking at the keys was just a nervous tic. Chapel had no idea if he was constantly zooming back and forward within a given track, or just adjusting the volume up and down, up and down.

He should just go back to sleep, he thought. He should just—

Inside his head something came together, a pair of jigsaw puzzle pieces fitting perfectly to each other and showing a glimpse of a bigger picture.

He forced himself to sit up, to stretch for a moment. Blood rushed back into his head and his extremities and he breathed deeply, pushing oxygen into his tired tissues. He stood up and reached for his small travel bag, pulling it down from the overhead bin. Across from him Nadia stirred and opened one eye—it looked like she’d been fully asleep.

“Just going to freshen up,” he told her.

She turned her head to the side and fell asleep again, instantly.

He pushed his way through the men in the aisle who were smoking and laughing at jokes in languages he couldn’t understand. In the tiny lavatory of the train car he opened his travel bag and took out his tablet and his own earphones. As soon as they were in place Angel greeted him.

“We weren’t supposed to talk again until tonight, sweetie,” she said. “Everything okay?”

“Fine, probably. I just thought of something I wanted to talk to you about. It concerns our young Romanian friend.”

“Vlaicu? What’s he up to now?”

“I’m not sure.” Chapel tried to figure out how to express his intuition. “We’ve been keeping him away from computers this whole time, anything with a screen and a keyboard.”

“Probably wise,” Angel said, “though if he’s anything like me, that’s got to smart. It would be like being hopelessly nearsighted and the people around you won’t let you have your glasses.”

“I’m sure he’ll survive a few days without the Internet. The thing is, I’m not sure he has to—I mean, I think he might have found a way to get online anyway.”

Angel suddenly sounded very excited. “You think he’s hiding something on his person? Well, maybe. A smartphone, or a tablet—”

“Nothing like that.” He described the MP3 player to her. “Last night when I was sweeping our rooms for bugs, the player made the bug finder go through the roof. I don’t know. It seems unlikely. There’s no screen, and maybe about ten keys total. Could you even make a computer like that? I know it sounds impossible—”

“Not at all, actually. The original computers didn’t have screens or keyboards—they used punch cards.”

“Yeah, but I’m talking about something a little more sophisticated,” Chapel said.

“Well,” Angel said, “Maybe. There was a famous case of a bunch of computer science guys from the University of California, back in the eighties. They built computers into their shoes, using their toes to work the controls.”

“Shoe computers? Did they do anything useful?”

Angel laughed. “They took Las Vegas for a bundle, actually. They worked out a way to predict where a roulette ball was going to land and rigged the game.”

“Jesus. I think Bogdan might have been hacking this whole time. When we were trying to lose our tail in Tashkent yesterday, I think he changed a traffic light, or at least made it change faster. And he—and Nadia—always seem to know when subway trains are about to arrive.”

“That’s pretty easy stuff. Let me think about this,” Angel said. She sounded almost breathless. “I mean, you could reduce your inputs down to a small number of keystrokes if you used modal shifts, you know, like holding down a shift or control key to change the character you type on a normal keyboard. Say you have two mode keys, and eight input keys; that gives you twenty-four basic key combinations, which is almost enough for a complete alphabetic input, and that doesn’t even include multimode inputs, conditional mode inputs—”

“You’re saying it could be done,” Chapel said. “But how would he remember all those combinations?”

“Just by practice,” Angel replied. “You do anything long enough and it becomes second nature. Do you remember exactly where, on a standard keyboard, the H key is? But I imagine you could type the word ‘hello’ without having to think about it.”

“And let me guess, he doesn’t need a screen, because—”

“The headphones!” Angel actually laughed in excitement. “This guy’s brilliant! He probably just used a normal text-to-speech module, the kind that blind people use. They can’t see a screen, so the computer just reads everything on the screen aloud for them. Those headphones tell him where he is on the net, and he uses the keys to move from page to page, to enter form data, to—”

“This is all guesswork,” Chapel said.

“True,” Angel said, disappointed. “Except . . . maybe we can find out for sure.”

“You have some way to scan for computers?” Chapel asked, incredulous. “By satellite?”

“No. But the tablet you’re using now does. It has a Wi-Fi transponder built into it. It can scan for wireless networks. That’s just standard equipment on any wireless device. I can use it to triangulate a specific network. Let me ping it . . . there. There are a couple of dozen wireless networks in your local area right now.”

“Really? In the middle of rural Uzbekistan?”

Angel laughed. “Don’t start expecting to freeload off somebody else’s wireless so you can download a bunch of YouTube videos. The signals I’m getting are way too weak for you to access—they might be miles away—but I can still detect them. They get stronger the closer you get to them. Go back to your seat now but leave your tablet turned on. When you’re sitting next to Vlaicu, touch the screen so I know you’re close. If one of the signals ramps up superhigh at that moment, I’ll know it’s his.”

“And you’ll be able to tell me what he’s looking at on the Internet?”

Angel sounded apologetic when she answered. “Well . . . no. The signal will still be locked and encrypted, and even I can’t beat 256-bit encryption. But at least you’ll know your hunch was right. What will you do then? Confront him? Confront Nadia?”

He thought about that. “Telling her I know about Bogdan’s computer won’t get me very far. Even if she admits she’s had him hacking away this whole time, so what? I’ve had you doing the same thing. It’s not like she’ll give me Bogdan’s password and we all get to share information, especially since I’m not letting her know about you. If you had enough time, do you think there’s any way you could break through his encryption? Maybe figure out his password?”

“Not directly. Not with a brute force hack. But maybe I can do something. I don’t know. Let me think about it. For now, let’s just find out if you’re right. If he even has a working computer.”

“Okay. Talk to you soon.”

Chapel slipped the tablet into his pocket, his earphones still in place, and stepped out of the lavatory. When he got back to his seat, he climbed over Bogdan’s long legs and sat back down, not even looking at the hacker, just watching the world blur past the windows. He settled himself in, then reached into his pocket and tapped the screen of the tablet.

For a second nothing happened. But then, in a very quiet voice, Angel whispered in his ear: “Gotcha.”

The train only stopped for a minute in the town of Vobkent, as if it were in a hurry to finish the last leg of its voyage to Bukhara. They had to rush to get their bags down and struggle through all the people standing in the aisle, but they managed to get down to the platform before the train chugged away again, leaving them behind.

On the map Vobkent had looked like little more than a flyspeck, but from the ground it was a vibrant, if sleepy little place, full of shops selling chicken feed and textiles. There was even a bit of tourist business—they saw a couple of European backpackers headed toward a minaret in the center of town. Its main attraction for Nadia, however, was that it was far enough away from Tashkent that it didn’t merit a significant SNB presence.

“Varvara said the truck and the supplies would be waiting on the north edge of town, in an abandoned battery farm,” she told Chapel.

Chapel nodded and folded up the map he’d been staring at, trying to get some sense of where they were headed. He scanned the street for taxis but found none. “I guess we’re walking,” he said.

“It’s only about a mile,” Nadia said, and started off at a brisk pace, her bag swinging from her arm.

It had been a hot day, and the late afternoon was showing no signs of cooling off. Before long Chapel had to wipe his brow. The streets of Vobkent were wide and open to the sun, and the smell of the desert was everywhere—everywhere, at least, that didn’t smell of chickens. They passed through the center of the town, through a zone of little shops selling phone cards and soft drinks, and then into a more residential neighborhood where old women sat in the shade of their doorways, fanning themselves with beautiful little pieces of cloth. Chapel tried to smile a lot and look at the architecture so he would seem like a lost tourist, though he supposed he wasn’t dressed for the part. He’d taken off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves, but he still looked like American energy executive Jeff Chambers. He’d brought clothes more appropriate for the desert, but he hadn’t had a chance to change since they left Tashkent that morning.

As they headed up a dusty avenue where the only shade came from the occasional tree, Nadia dropped back to walk alongside him. He didn’t move away from her, but he didn’t glance her way, either.

“We will not speak of what happened last night, apparently,” she said, her voice low. She didn’t look at him when she spoke, as if they were trading vital secrets. “I understand that you need some time to think.”

“Yeah,” Chapel said. He considered adding something, then decided against it. If he didn’t talk about what had happened, he didn’t need to think about it either. Instead he could focus on wondering what Bogdan was doing with his makeshift computer. The hacker was walking ahead of them, his long legs barely shuffling along but still managing to eat up the distance. As he walked he tapped at his MP3 player, as he always did.

“You will not even look at me now, it seems,” Nadia said.

Chapel shrugged. He adjusted his bag on his shoulder and made a point of turning to face her, still walking the whole time. He forced himself to look at her eyes.

What he saw there made him turn away again.

She didn’t look angry. She wasn’t winking or throwing suggestive looks his way either. She just looked sad. Like she understood, perfectly, how complex things were for him but she just wished they were . . . different. Simpler.

He imagined he probably looked much the same way.