The Hydra Protocol (47 page)

“How did you make contact with her? Who was her handler? Tell me this much and I will put off your surgery for a day. Come, come, my friend. What does it matter? She’s dead—there is no need to protect her now. How did you meet her?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Kalin sighed in frustration.

Well, now. There was another little victory. Chapel was really racking them up. He’d managed to annoy the senior lieutenant.

Maybe he could force the man to raise his voice before they cut off his legs, too.

The elevator doors opened on the basement level. Tiled walls and bad lighting. Not much longer now.

“You can still save yourself. Your arm. How traumatic it must have been, when the first one came off. How you must have raged against God and your country, that they would take so much from you. Do you really want to go through this again? Answer one question and this ends, right now,” Kalin told him.

Chapel fixed him with a steely gaze. He was just about out of those. Out of defiance. He knew that when he saw the bone saw, when he heard it whine, he would lose. He would give in.

But . . . not just yet.

Every second he held out was worth it. Angel could erase a lot of data in a second. She could take his name out of a lot of databases.

“We shall go back to the beginning,” Kalin said. “Just give me your name. Your real name.”

The stress, the panic, was burning through the drug in his bloodstream. Chapel lifted his head—it felt a little easier now. “No,” he said.

They passed by a dark window. Another one. The next window was already lit up. That was their destination.

“Tell me your name,” Kalin asked, and he gave a friendly little laugh. “Just a name. Tell me your name, and I will send you back to your cell.”

Through the lit window, Chapel could see the operating table. It was draped with a sterile white cloth now. There was a tray next to it, a tray holding instruments. And there was a man standing next to the table wearing surgical scrubs. Had they brought in a real surgeon for this? What doctor would actually perform an unnecessary amputation? What about the Hippocratic oath? What about First Do No Harm?

Chapel knew perfectly well there were doctors in the world who would cut his arm off with no hesitation. He knew Kalin would have such a doctor on his payroll.

“Your name,” Kalin said.

Chapel closed his eyes.

Kalin grabbed his face and squeezed until his eyes opened again.

“Your name. Tell me your name.”

Chapel heard a bell ring. Then he heard a bunch of people walking quickly over the linoleum floor. Getting closer.

Kalin glanced backward, toward the elevator. What he saw there didn’t seem to please him. “Only one thing can help you,” he told Chapel.

Inside the surgical theater someone turned on a bone saw. Chapel would have recognized that sound anywhere.

This was it—the moment he’d promised himself he was allowed to surrender.

“What is your name?” Kalin asked, shouting in his face.

Chapel opened his mouth. He didn’t know what was going to come out—he wasn’t in control of his tongue anymore. He started making sounds, and he couldn’t fight it, couldn’t help himself.

“His name,” someone else said, someone behind him, “is James Chapel. Captain James Chapel. He’s an American agent, working under direct orders from the Washington Pentagon.”

Chapel and Kalin both turned to look.

The man who had spoken wore the long greatcoat and cap of a Russian army officer. Judging by the epaulets and all the medals on his chest he was of high rank. He did not smile as he approached them.

“He is also,” the officer said, “now under my authority.” He spoke some more, in Russian, far too fast for Chapel to make out any words. Kalin replied with surprise and anger, but then the officer held up a piece of paper and let Kalin read it.

Whatever was written there made Kalin turn white as the snow in Siberia.

He glanced over at Chapel, still being held up by the orderlies. Then he nodded, just once. The officer said something else, but Kalin didn’t respond. He put his notebook and his pen back in his pocket, and then he started walking toward the elevator.

In the surgical theater, the doctor turned off his bone saw.

It was . . . hard to believe.

It was hard to accept that this wasn’t a trick. Some subtle ruse on Kalin’s part, a way to make Chapel talk. Somehow the Russians had learned who he was. Now that his name wasn’t so important, they were going to fool him into believing that it was over, that he wasn’t going to be tortured anymore. Then he would start talking because, why not? Surely this was some kind of trick.

“I am Colonel Mikhail Valits, of the RVSN,” the soldier told him.

“The Strategic Rocket Forces,” Chapel said. That was the branch of the Russian military that controlled all the land-based nuclear missiles. “You must know why I’m here, then, so you don’t need to ask.”

Valits looked slightly confused. His English wasn’t as good as Kalin’s—Chapel could clearly see him sound out each word before he spoke it. Maybe he didn’t understand. “If you will please come with me, we have much to discuss.”

“I’m a prisoner here. You don’t have to say please,” Chapel told him.

Valits looked over at the orderlies and barked a question at them. They responded in Russian Chapel couldn’t follow, but one of them mimicked plunging a hypodermic needle into his own neck. They were telling Valits that Chapel had been drugged.

“Konyechno.”
Valits sighed, making it sound like the weariest word in the Russian language. He took Chapel’s arm and helped him walk. He led Chapel back to the elevator. They had to wait for it to return, since Kalin had already used it to leave the basement.

Valits said nothing as they rode up to the ground floor of the hospital. He took Chapel down a short corridor and into a large room with lots of windows. It looked like some kind of lounge, maybe for the patients or perhaps the doctors who had once worked there. A boxy television set hung from a bracket in the ceiling, and there were a number of tables and stuffed armchairs scattered around the room. Everything looked dusty, and Chapel remembered wondering if he was the only inmate in the entire place.

A woman was waiting for them when they entered. She was sitting at one of the tables, hunched over an expensive-looking tablet, maybe checking her e-mail. She wore a smart business suit, and her hair was piled up on top of her head. When she looked up, Chapel saw she wore tortoise-shell-rimmed glasses and had eyes the color of used dishwater. She was maybe thirty years old, but probably younger.

And she was an American.

He could tell, instantly. Something about how white her teeth were, how her hair was cut. Maybe just the corn-fed good looks or the fact that, unlike every Russian Chapel had met except Nadia, this woman didn’t look like she expected to be arrested at any second. Funny. He’d been away from his home country so long that other Americans had started to look strange to him.

She didn’t smile as she stood up, and she held her tablet in one hand as she held out the other to shake his. She glanced at his stump and visibly shuddered. “One big horror show after another,” she said, and laughed, as if she had made a funny joke.

Chapel didn’t mind. He was used to people being polite about his missing arm—too polite. They pretended like it didn’t bother them, or they tried to suppress their disgust. This woman didn’t seem to care if he knew how she felt.

That was almost enough to make him like her on the spot. Of course, the fact that she was an American—and that her presence here almost proved that this wasn’t an elaborate ruse concocted by Kalin to make him talk—made him want to hug her and weep.

“What’s your name?” he asked her. He wanted to laugh out loud. “Sorry—you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

The woman’s lips pursed in confusion. She looked over at Valits, but clearly she didn’t find any help there. She rolled her eyes and sighed theatrically. Her sigh sounded very different from Valits’s—it was the sigh of someone for whom boredom is the greatest pain imaginable.

She sat back down and tapped at the screen of her tablet. “I’m Natalie Hobbes. I’m an attaché with the office of the United States Ambassador to the Russian Federation.” She glanced up at him. “Are you going to sit down, or what?”

Chapel had been a prisoner for only a few days, but it had been long enough to make him think he needed to be asked first. He sat down, gratefully—the drug in his system still made him feel weak—and rested his hand on the table.

“I’m supposed to check you out and give you something, and then Colonel Valits is going to show you a video. Shouldn’t take long. I hope not—I’m supposed to be at a poetry reading tonight back in Moscow.” She rolled her eyes again. “Arts outreach. I hate poetry, but you have to show a pretty face every once in a while to keep everybody happy.” She looked up at Valits. “Is there any coffee?”

The colonel reared back as if she’d spit in his face. He was not the kind of man that fetched coffee for other people. “I’ll see what I can do,” he told her, and walked away.

“God, I hate this part of Russia. The smog is thicker here than in L.A., I swear,” Hobbes said. She looked up at Chapel for a moment. “You don’t look so hot. Were you mistreated while you were detained here?”

Chapel couldn’t help it anymore. He laughed—a full-body belly laugh, enough to make him double over and make tears run from his eyes.

Natalie Hobbes stood up from the table. “I really don’t need this,” she said. “I think I’ll be going, now.”

Chapel started to reach for her, to grab her and make her sit down again. She flinched away from him, though, and he held up his hand to show he meant no harm. “Please,” he said, “I apologize. I didn’t mean to—”

“To freak me out?” she asked, looking very angry.

“Right. Look, I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you’ve come for me. I thought I was going to . . . well, I thought I was going to be here for a very long time.” It was clear she had no idea what kind of hell he’d been through in the hospital. No point freaking her out more. “I know what I must look like. But, please, I’m ready to go. Right now. The sooner the better.”

She squinted at him, her nose wrinkling upward, as if she had forgotten her glasses and was having trouble seeing him clearly. He realized it must be how she expressed confusion. “They didn’t brief you, did they? I’m not here to take you home. You’re still under arrest. You’re not going anywhere unless Colonel Valits says so.”

Chapel glanced over to the door of the room, where the colonel had reappeared holding two steaming coffee cups.

“I was given two tasks here,” Hobbes told him. “One was to verify you were still alive and in no immediate danger. That’s done. The other thing was—this.” She reached into her purse and took out a small manila envelope. She threw it down on the table. “It came over this morning in the diplomatic pouch, addressed to you. Even in this stupid country, prisoners are allowed to get mail.”

Chapel could only stare at her. This wasn’t a rescue? He was still under arrest? He couldn’t bear the thought of going back to his cell, to wait for Kalin to come for him.

He picked up the envelope and turned it around in his hands, almost afraid to open it. Kalin had nearly broken him. If this was just a message from Hollingshead, telling him he was on his own . . . But the envelope was too heavy to just be a letter. It bulged from trying to hold its contents.

Only one way to find out what it meant. He tore open the envelope and spilled it out onto the table. A cheap disposable cell phone and a hands-free unit.

It might have been gold and rubies. Chapel put the hands-free unit in his ear and powered up the phone.

“Angel?” he said.

She answered him a second later. “Chapel? Is that . . . of course it’s you. Oh, sugar, I am so glad to hear your voice, you can’t even know.”

“I bet I can,” Chapel told her. He closed his eyes and tried not to weep. The sexy voice of his operator in his ear was something he had thought he would never hear again. “Angel,” he said. He couldn’t think of more words. “Angel.”

“Sweetie, there’s a lot to talk about. But you’re alive—that’s the main thing. Oh, thank God. You’re still alive.”

“First things first,” Angel said. “This signal is encrypted, and the hands-free set has noise-canceling technology. But if they have a powerful enough microphone—and I bet they do—they can still hear what I’m saying in your ear. And of course they’ll hear everything you say to me. There’s not a lot we can do about that, but we’re going to try to be discreet, right?”

“Of course,” Chapel said.

Across the table Hobbes took her coffee from Valits without a word and sipped at it. She made a face.

“You’re probably looking at Natalie Hobbes,” Angel said. “She’s the real deal. A junior staffer from the American embassy. Rich parents, went to Harvard, pretty much fell into this job—we’ve vetted her from this end and we don’t see any reason to think the Russians might have turned her. She’s on our side, in other words. As long as she’s in the room you’re safe.”

“She’s already talking about leaving,” Chapel said.

“Just make sure she sticks around until you talk to Colonel Valits. As for him—he’s not an FSB agent, I’m about eighty percent sure on that. He might shoot you, but . . . look, I don’t know what you’ve been going through there in Magnitogorsk. I think maybe I don’t want to know the details. But, sweetie, whatever he is, he’s better than the people you’ve been dealing with. He’s your best bet, so keep him happy.”

“Got it,” Chapel said.

“You’re not free. You’re still under arrest, and you’re a prisoner of the Russian legal system.”

“What am I charged with?” Chapel asked.

“They claim they picked you up just inside the Russian border, raving and disoriented. They’ve arrested you for a couple penny-ante crimes—being a public nuisance, defacing public property, whatever. That’s enough for them to hold you. They claim you’re a danger to yourself and others, and they’re working on having you committed as a mental patient. If they do, that’s the last anyone will hear of you. Ever.”