The Hydra Protocol (46 page)

It was not a good place. Combined with the subject of Kalin’s speech, it was enough to make Chapel’s skin crawl.

“Some men resist pain better than others. Some can go longer without food. The same dosage of a truth drug might open one man up and kill another.” Kalin shrugged. “All very frustrating. But some agent of the KGB, some man who will be forever nameless, took this problem and saw that it was actually an opportunity in disguise. If every subject responded to torture differently, then it was clear to him that the torture must be changed to suit the subject. That effective torture meant finding the one thing, the one breaking point, that would work for a given subject. If a man is afraid of spiders, for instance—if he has a phobia of them, then you will get more out of him by sticking his hand in a box full of the things than you would from weeks of a drug regimen. If a man loves his wife, you threaten
her
, not him. The trick, of course, is finding out just what the breaking point, the weak spot, is. Especially with a subject who won’t even tell you his name.”

They came to a section of corridor lined with long rectangular windows. Beyond the glass was only darkness. Kalin went over to one and flipped a switch, turning on lights in the room beyond.

Chapel wanted to run away. He didn’t want to know what was in that room, what Kalin thought was going to make him crack. He started to turn—it was involuntary—but the orderlies just grabbed him then. Held him in place.

“Take a look,” Kalin said.

Chapel forced himself to look through the window. His imagination, he knew, was running away from him; it couldn’t possibly be as bad as what his own mind could come up with. He looked and saw—

Nothing much. On the other side of the glass was what looked like a standard operating room. There was a slablike operating table and a couple of cabinets. A tank of anesthetic gas. Lights that could be shone directly on the table. That was it.

No box full of spiders. No Julia with a gun to her head.

Just an operating room.

“I’ve been watching you for some time now. When you first came to me, I had your prosthetic arm taken away. I thought that would leave you vulnerable, that you would have difficulty doing the most basic tasks. But I was wrong—you operate just fine with one arm. You have learned over time how to get by with only half the usual number of hands. That’s very commendable. I wonder if you could learn the same lesson all over again?”

Chapel’s eyes went wide. “No,” he said. “No. You can’t. You wouldn’t.”

“I can. I will. You are a nonperson. I can do anything to you I desire,” Kalin said. “You don’t even have a name. Tomorrow, if you do not answer all of my questions, I will bring you back here and we will cut off your right arm. And then you will have no arms at all. It will be interesting to see just how well you can adapt to
that
.”

They left him alone all day. An orderly came by with food a couple of times, but he didn’t respond to Chapel’s halting questions, even when he tried to ask them in Russian. It was clear that Kalin had given the order that Chapel be left to his own thoughts.

Which was a kind of torture all in itself.

“You hold out as long as you can,” Bigelow had told him. Every day he kept silent was another day for Hollingshead to distance himself and the DIA from Chapel’s activities. Another day for Angel to scrub his existence off the official records. Another day to make it look like the United States had never sent an agent to sabotage Perimeter.

But Bigelow had also told him there would come a time when he wouldn’t be able to hold out any longer. When the pressure was just too much.

He’d already given one arm for his country. Was he supposed to give the other one, too? Objectively he knew the answer to that question. If he was willing to give his life for America, why not an arm? He’d already proven once that he could survive that kind of loss. That he could learn to have a meaningful life as an amputee. He thought back to when he’d come home from Afghanistan, and he’d worked with a physical trainer named Top, learning how to live with one arm. Top had been a sergeant in Iraq who had lost an arm, a leg, and an eye to a roadside bomb. The man had given more than anyone could reasonably ask, but he’d never complained—and he’d never let it slow him down. With Top’s help, Chapel had learned to adjust.

Of course, part of that adjustment was getting a magic prosthetic that worked almost as well as what he’d lost. The artificial arm had made a huge difference in his life, made so many things possible for him. But that arm was gone. Kalin wouldn’t give him another one, and he certainly wouldn’t give him two. He would spend the rest of his life in this hospital—maybe years—struggling to learn to use his feet to feed himself, to clean himself.

And even that wouldn’t be the end of it. Once Kalin had taken his right arm—what would be the next step? If somehow Chapel managed to stay silent even through another amputation, Kalin wouldn’t just give up. He would find some other way to get the information he wanted.

There came a point where your country could ask no more of you, Chapel thought. There came a point where no matter how many oaths and promises you’d made, no matter how sincerely you had sworn to defend the honor of your country, you had to let go. You had to give in.

Maybe he had reached that point.

He was asleep when they came for him. Two big orderlies in white tunics picked him up and carried him out of his cell. Kalin waited for him by the elevator that led down to the surgical theaters.

Kalin had his notebook in one hand, and his pen in the other.

He was tapping the pen against the edge of the notebook. Impatient.

Somehow that was the thing that made Chapel snap. That made him try to fight.

One orderly held his arm, the other had his neck. He didn’t know if they were really hospital employees or FSB agents—but he could tell by how thoroughly, how efficiently they held him, that they’d had some training in how to restrain a violent person.

They’d never tried to hold on to an Army Ranger before, though.

Chapel’s legs were free. He stopped walking and forced them to drag him until his legs were dangling behind him, his bare feet squeaking on the slick floor. He brought one leg up and hooked it around the knee of the orderly holding his arm. The man wasn’t ready for that and he stumbled. The other orderly tried to compensate, but Chapel threw his weight to the side and all three of them went down in a heap.

The orderly who held his arm saw the floor coming toward his face and let go, using his hands to catch himself. That was all Chapel needed. He brought his arm back and delivered a nasty punch right to the kidney of the orderly holding his neck. The man’s breath exploded out of his mouth, and his grip slackened.

Chapel wrestled his way clear and scrambled to his feet. He could see Kalin reaching into his jacket pocket, maybe going for a weapon. If he went for Kalin, Chapel knew that would give the orderlies a chance to come at him from behind, so he ignored Kalin and dashed down the hall in the other direction.

He heard shouting behind him, but he ignored it. He came to the junction in the corridor, the place where it met the hallway that followed the curve of the building. Where would the stairs be? He’d seen them when he was brought here for the first time, but now he couldn’t remember—did he go left or right?

He had to pick one. He went right.

They’d made a mistake in letting him eat and sleep. He’d recovered some of his strength, and he had always been a fast runner. He dashed past a series of doorways, some of them open to show empty rooms. He remembered the bars on the windows, the impact-resistant plastic that covered them on the inside. No point entering any of those rooms. He needed to find an exit, a way out of the hospital altogether, if he had any chance of getting away.

Up ahead the curved hallway opened into a sort of lobby. There were restrooms up there, and—yes—a bank of elevators. He had no time to wait for one of those, but he knew that generally where you found elevators you found emergency stairs as well.

He got lucky. If the door to the stairs had been labeled in Russian, he would have just passed it by—he couldn’t read the Cyrillic characters. But the doorway also showed a pictogram of someone running down steps ahead of a cartoon flame. Fire stairs—perfect. He hit the door with his shoulder and found, as he’d expected, that it was locked. Fire safety was less important than not letting your inmates escape, he supposed. He hit the door again, and again.

Behind him he heard rubber shoes chirping on the linoleum floor.

He hit the door again and the lock snapped. Cheap manufacture, not meant for this kind of abuse. Chapel burst through the door and down a flight of concrete steps. It was dark in the stairwell but as he descended, taking the steps two and three at a time, automatic lights flickered on overhead.

He had no idea even what floor he was on, or how many flights down the street was, but he didn’t care. He heard people yelling at each other above him and just kept hurtling down the steps, fast enough that if he missed a riser he would probably fall and break his neck.

He didn’t fall. One flight down, dash across the landing, two flights, another landing, three flights—

He heard someone moving below him, footsteps hurrying up the stairs toward him. He heard the squawk of a portable radio and knew the hospital’s security guards had been alerted about an escape attempt. Well, he would just have to improvise.

Four flights down, five, and then he ran around a landing and saw a man below him, a man in a dark green uniform carrying a radio in one hand and a heavy wooden baton in the other. No gun.

Chapel launched himself off the landing, into the air. He came crashing down hard on top of the security guard, whose body broke his fall. The man cried out, something in Russian Chapel didn’t understand. Chapel grabbed the baton out of the man’s hand and hit him a couple of times with it, hit him until he stopped protesting.

Then he was off again. Down another flight. Another. Up ahead the stairs ended at a short corridor. At the end of that corridor was a sign covered in warnings and writing he couldn’t read. The door had a push bar and it looked like an alarm would sound if it was opened. It had to be an emergency exit to the street.

If he could get through that door, if Chapel could get out into the world, he could count on his training for what to do next. Find some clothes, get some money, find some way to contact Varvara and her
vory
friends, find a way out of Russia—

He hit the push bar at full speed, expecting the door to crash open, expecting to spill out into sunlight and chill morning air and freedom, and—

The door didn’t open.

The push bar moved under his weight. He could feel a latch inside the door retract, could feel the door shift in its jamb. But it wouldn’t open.

It must have been sealed off somehow. Maybe the security detail had a way to lock it remotely, and they’d sealed off every exit from the hospital as soon as they heard an inmate was loose. Maybe the door was just rusted into place.

Chapel hit the door with his shoulder, hit it again and again until he felt like he was going to break the bones in his one good arm. Still it wouldn’t open. He could hear people coming up behind him, hear them getting closer, and there was nowhere to go except back, right into their path. He hit the door with his left shoulder, probably damaging the sensitive electrodes implanted in his stump, but who cared, what did it matter, anything could be fixed—

A needle sank deep into his neck. He whirled around, as ferocious as a tiger, to find Kalin right next to him. He thought he would kill the man then and there, bite his throat out if need be, gouge him in the eyes, smash his trachea . . .

. . . but he suddenly . . . felt very . . . woozy. Very . . . weak.

“Only a sedative,” Kalin said.

Chapel sank down to the floor. He just wanted to sit down for a second. Then he would start fighting again.

“Not too much,” Kalin said. The FSB man squatted next to him, to look in his eyes. “Half a dose, really. I need you conscious for what comes next.”

Four orderlies, this time. Even though Chapel would have found it hard to stand under his own power. His head felt light, and even his teeth felt numb. Well. He’d won a small victory, then. A tiny, barely meaningful one.

When they cut off his arm, it wasn’t going to hurt as much. The sedative would help kill a little of the pain.

His eyes rolled around to look at Kalin, and he realized that he was being asked a question. He had floated away for a little while there. Kalin smiled and repeated his query, very slowly.

“What is your name?”

Chapel smiled back.

“You do understand, don’t you? If you have a name, that makes you a human being. That gives you certain rights. I won’t be able to amputate your arm if you have rights. But only if you have a name. What is your name?”

“Marie Antoinette,” Chapel told him.

The drug didn’t take away the fear. It didn’t keep his fight-or-flight reflex from kicking in. Inside his head Chapel was screaming, begging to be released. But he could use the drug, use how sluggish it made his muscles. He could at least pretend to be composed.

He promised himself he would hold out right until the last minute. That he wouldn’t give in until they strapped him down on the operating table. Who knew? Maybe this was all a bluff. Maybe Kalin wouldn’t go through with it.

Yeah, right
, he thought. He knew better. That wasn’t the way the world worked. Not his world, anyway.

“How did you meet the terrorist Asimova?” Kalin asked.

“She wasn’t a terrorist,” Chapel said. “She was a patriot. More of a patriot to Russia than you are, asshole.”

Kalin beamed. “So you admit you knew her. This is getting us somewhere.”

Damn
, Chapel thought. He’d slipped up. Maybe the sedative had hit him harder than he’d thought.