The Hydra Protocol (49 page)

“I had no idea,” he told Valits. “The whole time—I had no idea.”

The colonel hadn’t moved, hadn’t flinched, throughout Chapel’s rampage. He nodded just once now. “Surprisingly,” he said, “I believe you.”

Chapel dropped his head. He was breathing hard, and every muscle in his body was tense, but the anger was already draining from him. He was already starting to move on to self-loathing.

Valits rose and straightened his uniform tunic. “Unfortunately, Moscow has no choice. We must see your actions as an act of espionage, if not of war.”

“We have more to lose than you do,” Chapel pointed out. “If she launches those missiles, they’ll head straight for my country. For New York. For Chicago. For Washington.”

Valits shrugged.
Konyechno
, he was saying. “It would seem, then, that we have a mutual problem.”

“Yeah,” Chapel told him. “And one solution. We get Asimova before she can press the button. But how exactly do we do that?”

“This,” Valits said, “is why I am talking to you now, instead of leaving you to the devices of Senior Lieutenant Kalin. Because I have been led to believe that you are the only man in the world who can find her.”

“Of course,” Valits explained, “we have attempted to track her location. We find that the signal she is using, however—the one that sent the launch signal to Izhevsk, and the one that carried her demands—is untraceable. It was not a shortwave signal, though it had similar characteristics. We were able to determine it was bounced off a satellite. That means she could be anywhere in the world right now. If she is smart, she will be very far from any Russian holdings. She might be in your country, even.

“It is possible she was not that smart. We have teams of soldiers out looking for her everywhere from St. Petersburg to the farthest eastern islands. We do not have enough manpower to cover the entire Russian Federation, but we have been concentrating on major cities—places where she could have access to high-end signal equipment.”

“I’m guessing you haven’t turned up anything yet,” Chapel said.

“Nothing. There is no trace of her anywhere. We sent envoys to speak with the top leaders of the
vory
—when you wish to disappear in this country, they are who you turn to. They say she made no attempt to contact them.”

“And you believed them? Asimova has friends in those circles. They could be protecting her.”

Valits smiled. It wasn’t a warm smile. It wasn’t a smirk. It was a smile of resignation. “Not at the top levels. It is a fact of my nation, a sad fact, that there is very little distance between our elected officials and the gangsters. They are all heavily invested in the Federation, and they would not protect her, not after we showed them the video you just saw. They have as much to lose as any of us.”

Chapel nodded. “Okay. What about other political groups? Other terrorist organizations. I’m sure there are plenty that would love to help her give Moscow a black eye.” Valits looked confused by the idiom. “To embarrass your government,” Chapel explained.

“Absolutely. But we have ways of getting information from those groups—we watch them very closely—and we have heard nothing, not even chatter. She has not made alliance even with the other Siberian nationalist and ethnic groups. She seems to be working completely on her own.”

Probably
, Chapel thought,
because you’ve already killed off everyone she could count on
—he doubted Bulgachenko was the only casualty of Nadia’s mission.

“So that leaves us with nothing to go on,” Chapel said.

“Not quite. In our . . . desperation, we made one last attempt to seek aid. We turned to your government.”

Chapel’s eyes went wide. For Russia to ask Washington for help with an internal political problem was unheard of. Moscow must be even more frightened than he’d thought.

“We contacted your superior, Rupert Hollingshead. We wished to know if Asimova had said anything to him, given away any clue as to her plans. He was not useful on that front. However, he did discover one thing that could aid us. While he could not track the signal she is using, he did recognize its signature. I believe your friend on the telephone can tell you what I mean.”

Angel chirped in on cue. “That’s right, sweetie. I’m the one who recognized the signature, of course.”

“Yeah?” Chapel asked her. “How?”

“Easy. Because it was the same kind of signal I use.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Angel sounded sheepish as she answered. “I didn’t believe it at first. I use a cutting-edge signal profile that lets me contact you anywhere on earth and make sure nobody can listen in to what I’m saying. It’s all pretty technical, but basically I use packet switching and channel hopping algorithms to spread my frequency out over a broad band of—”

“Still too technical,” Chapel told her.

“Probably best if I don’t explain over this line, anyway. I was confused when I saw she was using the same technology. I was especially confused when I looked back over my notes for this mission. Remember when you asked me if I could listen in to Bogdan’s computer?”

“Sure,” Chapel said. That was on the train to Vobkent. Just after he’d realized that Bogdan even
had
a computer.

“I said I couldn’t hack in directly, but maybe there was something I could do. I started building up a profile of the signal he was using. It’s a match, Chapel. It’s exactly the same. The message she sent, and the launch signal, came from Bogdan’s computer. Or one using the same signal tech. The same tech I use.”

“You’re saying he just figured out your tech on his own?” Chapel asked, confused.

Angel snorted in derision. “Hardly. He stole it. Or rather, she did. It took me a long time to realize how. She would need access to my hardware to even begin to reverse engineer my tech. And when did she have access like that?”

“I’m afraid you’re about to tell me.”

“Yeah.” The sheepish tone came back. “You remember Donny’s yacht? When you came back up to the surface too fast? You remember anything unusual about that?”

Chapel cast his mind back. He had come up at speed, and he’d been unable to reach Angel during the ascent. When he broke the surface, the first thing he did was contact her again. He should have been able to reach her just by touching the anchor cable, because of the transponder he’d clipped to it, but—

The transponder had been missing.

He’d been too concerned with decompression sickness to think about what that meant. Somebody had unclipped it while he’d been surfacing, he knew that much. But he hadn’t thought to look for it later. Even after he’d been taken to Miami, and the hyperbaric chamber there, his major concern had been for the one-time pad. When he found that Nadia could have stolen it, but hadn’t . . . well, that was when he’d begun to trust her.

“Your transponder,” he said to Angel. “She had it the whole time?”

“And she gave it to Bogdan, who adopted the tech for his ingenious little computer. You got it, sweetie.”

“Okay, yet another way I screwed up,” Chapel said. “But it might turn out in our favor. I’m guessing you can trace the signal, right? You can trace your own signal?”

“Uh,” Angel said. “Well. Kind of.”

“What does that mean?”

“My signal is designed to be untraceable. But—look, I’ll skip the technical stuff this time. If you could triangulate the signal, if both you and I were looking for it at the same time, we could find it. But one of us would need to be pretty close, say, within fifty miles of the originating source.”

“So we already need to know roughly where she is before we can hope to find her.”

“I’m afraid you’ve got it.”

Chapel nodded slowly to himself. With the best technology in the world, with the best computers and data analysis, it was going to come down to him. He was the one who was going to have to guess where Nadia had gone.

He thought back, trying to remember any clue she’d given him. Any idea at all.

This time, he didn’t miss what was right under his nose. Or under hers, anyway. Assuming, of course, that anything she’d told him was the truth.

He turned to Valits, and he could hear the steel in his own voice. “How soon can we leave?”

Valits’s eyes opened very wide. “You know where she is?”

“I can find her.” He could take her down. He could get back at her for everything she’d done to him, all the lies she’d told him. He could get revenge.

“If you do this, if you lead us to her—I will make sure you go home. That you will be allowed to return to America, safely,” Valits promised.

Oh, right. He hadn’t thought of that. But it was nice, too.

As long as he made Nadia pay, first.

They sent a helicopter down from the nearest air base to pick Chapel up. His clothes from the desert were long gone—no one had expected him to need real clothing ever again, so they’d burned what he had on when he was captured. Colonel Valits offered him an army uniform with no insignia, but it was the wrong army. Chapel had been a soldier too long to ever wear the uniform of another nation. In the end, one of the orderlies had to run into town and buy Chapel civilian clothes.

The helicopter came down in the courtyard of the hospital. Chapel watched it land through doubly sealed windows. He couldn’t hear the rotors, just see the vast plume of dust the helicopter kicked up. It was an unarmed little machine, but that didn’t matter; it was just there to take him back to the air base so he could get on a plane.

He had a very long way to go. Lots of time zones to cross.

“You truly think she is in Siberia?” Colonel Valits asked, coming up behind him.

“If it was anyone else . . . I might doubt it.” It was the first place they would look for her. But Nadia was running out of time—assuming she hadn’t lied about that, too. He had to believe that she really was dying, that she had only months left, maybe less, and that she would want to die where she’d been born.

Of course, if he was wrong, he would end up right back here with Kalin. So she
had
to be in Siberia. “She’s sentimental. She wants to go home.”

Valits shook his head. “I’ve already had troops turn the city of Yakutsk upside down looking for her. Not a single person has entered that place in the last week that I don’t know about. And it’s the only municipality large enough to have the kind of Internet connection and signal technology she needs.”

Chapel knew better. Angel had told him that the necessary tech could fit inside a smartphone. At least, a brand-new, state-of-the-art smartphone. Nadia didn’t need to be in Yakutsk—and the city wasn’t where she wanted to be.

“I’ll find her,” he told Valits.

They shook hands and then Chapel headed down to the courtyard, toward the helicopter. A couple of Valits’s soldiers followed him at a discreet distance. He wasn’t going to ever be out of their sight, he knew, until this was over.

“Chapel,” Angel said, when he had stepped outside and the noise of the rotors made it almost impossible to hear her. That might be the point—maybe she didn’t want anyone listening in.

“Go ahead,” he told her, as the dust blew past him in the artificial windstorm, as his empty sleeve snapped and fluttered behind him like a flag.

“The director has been briefed on what you’re doing. He had one message to give you. Quote, ‘Remember how Hercules defeated the hydra,’ unquote. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Yeah,” Chapel said, but he wouldn’t explain, not to Angel. “Message received.”

If you cut the head off a hydra, it just grew another one. Hollingshead had described Perimeter as being like that. Now he was talking about this mission. The objective kept changing, every time Chapel thought he’d gotten close to being done.

Hercules had figured out you didn’t just need to cut the hydra’s head off. You had to burn it at the stump. Make it impossible for the head to grow back.

Hollingshead was telling him to make sure Nadia never stung them again. He was telling Chapel to make sure she really was dead this time.

He was giving Chapel an order to execute her.

Chapel and the soldiers who made up his guard detail transferred to a transport plane at the nearest airport. It was a military jet, with little in the way of accommodations—even the seats were simply bolted to rails on the cabin floor, designed so they could be removed quickly in case the plane needed to haul cargo instead of people. Chapel picked a window seat, and his soldiers took the row behind him. He strapped himself in and let his head fall back against the seat. Closed his eyes. Sleep wasn’t an option—he could do nothing but review his own thoughts, over and over.

They were dark thoughts and barely coherent. Mostly he just kept thinking how he’d been manipulated, how Nadia had used him, and how badly he wanted to make her pay for that.

But there was one small voice in the back of his head, one little pleading thought that just wouldn’t go away. It kept telling him there was something wrong here. Not so much an argument, not even really a doubt. Just a memory—a memory of Nadia in the tent in the desert, lying there next to him. He remembered how he’d leaned over and kissed her and the look on her face, the surprise and the hope, then the confusion and frustration. She had seduced him, of course. She had known he was hurt and vulnerable after what happened with Julia and she had used that. Preyed on it.

But that look—it hadn’t been the expression of a con artist whose game wasn’t proceeding fast enough. She had looked genuinely hurt, like she had held something out to him, something real, and he was toying with
her
heart, not the other way around . . .

Of course, a good actress could fake that look. If that were the case, Nadia should have been up for an Academy Award.

It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. He had his orders. He knew where things stood, finally. It was time to end this mission, and there was only one way to conclude it. He was just going to have to push down that nagging little question in his head, push it down until it stopped popping back up.