The Hydra Protocol (16 page)

He listened to Angel tap away at her keyboard as she looked something up. “It’s not a common hair color there, according to the Internet. Would you believe there’s actually maps showing what percentage of the population has what hair color?”

“It’s the Internet. There’s probably a map of what country has the most nose rings.”

Angel giggled. “I’m looking at a map of blonds right now. Eighty percent of Scandinavians are blond, did you know that?”

“These guys weren’t Scandinavian,” Chapel said. “They had Slavic accents. And judging by their grammar—” He stopped for a second, thinking. “Angel, they were speaking English.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Not well, but it was English. It didn’t occur to me at the time. But they came straight to me, speaking English.”

“So they made you for an American.”

“Yeah,” Chapel said. “Damn. I thought I was fitting in.” He thought about how easily Nadia had changed her appearance, and how she had elicited no stares or questioning looks in the tea shop. How well she’d handled the escape, even knowing exactly when Bogdan’s train would show up. “I’m out of my element here. Plunk me down in Afghanistan and nobody would mistake me for a local, but at least I would know how to act and how to not draw too much attention to myself. In Bucharest I might have jeopardized the mission.” He shook his head. “Maybe I shouldn’t have been the one to—”

“Stop thinking like that right now, sugar,” Angel said. “The director approved you for this. There’s nobody he trusts more.”

“Yeah.” Chapel sighed deeply and rubbed his face with his hands. “Okay. Well, let’s focus on what we do best. Have you found anything on Bogdan?”

“A lot more than I found on Nadia,” Angel said. “Bogdan Vlaicu, alias Aurel21. That’s his handle, the hacker nickname he uses on message boards and blog posts. He has a pretty big reputation online as somebody who can break into supposedly secure eCommerce databases. Arrested a couple of times on counts of credit card number running and for being a public nuisance—specifically, for taking over a Romanian political party website and replacing it with hard-core pornography.”

“Seriously? This is the guy Nadia thinks is so vital to our mission?”

Angel laughed. “He may be an idiot, but if he is, he’s an idiot savant. He’s never gone to jail, even when he bragged online about his crimes. The Romanian government cut him a deal each time they arrested him. If he agreed to take down some real cybercriminals—money launderers, online drug dealers—they’d let him off. Hacking the hackers, in other words.”

Angel couldn’t keep the grudging respect out of her voice. Chapel knew that her own story wasn’t that different. Though her real name, her location, and even what she looked like was kept deeply classified, even from him, she’d once told him how she’d ended up working for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Back when she was just a teenager (how long ago that had been was, again, secret), she had thought it would be fun to hack into the Pentagon’s servers. Instead of going to jail for the rest of her life, she’d ended up whispering sexily into Chapel’s ear. To her, Bogdan might seem like a fellow traveler.

“The guy has chops,” Angel said. “He shut down one of the biggest dark net pirated software operations back in 2009 with a simple denial-of-service attack. Basically he flooded the website with fake orders, hundreds of thousands of them coming in every second. That’s nothing, that’s hacking 101, but it was just a smoke screen. When the criminals shut down their servers to stop the attack, they switched to a backup server for their internal e-mail and even their phones—maybe they thought that the Romanian government couldn’t tap into their VoIP connections. Normally they would have been right about that. But Bogdan had secretly hacked the backup server even before he began the denial-of-service attack, so every word they said over the server they thought was still secure got logged and recorded. He took down dozens of cybercriminals in one day, including a guy who was on Interpol’s most wanted list.”

“That might explain why the local gangsters want him dead,” Chapel said, nodding. “And why he always looks like somebody just ran over his childhood dog.”

Angel wasn’t done, though. “In 2011, he got in trouble again, this time some pretty deep doo-doo. He anonymously posted a document online that claimed the prime minister of Romania had plagiarized his doctoral thesis back in grad school. That doesn’t sound like much, but . . . I won’t go into the details of Romanian politics, but there was already a feud going between two rival political parties, and it looked like this document might take down the prime minister
and
his party, whether it was true or not. There were riots in the street, and some people got hurt. It didn’t help when further charges of corruption kept popping up. The whole mess
still
hasn’t been worked out.”

“Bogdan doesn’t mind stepping on powerful toes, huh?”

“He was arrested for fomenting political unrest. They were ready to throw the book at him. I mean, send him away to prison for life and never let him touch a computer again. But then—damn. Chapel, you’re going to sense a theme here.”

“You’re about to tell me he disappeared.”

“Yeah,” Angel replied. “Yeah. Just . . . fell off the map. The charges were never dropped, but they were also never prosecuted. There’s no record of the case anywhere in the legal databases after a certain date, and nothing whatsoever in Bogdan’s file. He just turned into a ghost. You know, the funny thing there is—”

“The funny thing is that was the same year Nadia got her medal,” Chapel said, guessing what she was about to say.

“Uh. Yeah,” Angel said. “How did you know that?” Sometimes he could still surprise her.

“She said that she’d worked with Bogdan before. Whatever secret thing she was doing that got her that medal, he must have been part of it. She got him out of trouble in exchange for his help.”

“There’s no evidence for any of that. Nothing you could ever prove. But as a working hypothesis, it makes sense.”

Chapel nodded to himself. “Okay. Thanks, Angel. It’s good to know who I’m working with, even if that means I’m not allowed to know who they are. Is there anything else you have for me?”

Angel was silent for a while before answering. “There are no new messages on your voice mail, if that’s what you mean.” No messages from Julia, in other words. “Chapel, if you want to talk about—”

“Not right now,” he said.

Chapel walked back to the sleeper compartments where Bogdan and Nadia were, passing by a series of windows that showed the countryside rushing past. They were in Bulgaria by now, he estimated, though it was hard to say from what he saw. The sun was an hour away from setting, and it hung like a golden ball over endless fields that stretched away in every direction. In the distance he could just see the Balkan mountains like a pale smudge on the horizon, but they could have been anything. He could have been looking at the American Midwest, or the wheat fields of the Ukraine, or any of a hundred other identical views from a hundred different countries.

It was hard to remember just how far he was from home, though in another way, he couldn’t get it off his mind. He was out of his depth here. Nadia knew the local customs and manners, knew how to work a covert operation in this part of the world. But Chapel was just along for the ride. He wasn’t even her hired muscle—it was clear she could take care of herself. He really was just here to witness her operation.

He hated feeling like a fifth wheel. Third wheel in this case—Nadia needed Bogdan badly enough to risk getting shot for him.

Chapel took one last look at the fields and sighed and pushed through the automatic door to the sleeper car.

They’d taken two compartments, one for Nadia and one for Bogdan and Chapel to share. He was not surprised to find the two of them in the shared compartment. Bogdan was sitting on the floor, rocking his head back and forth. Maybe to the music in his headphones, but it made him look like he was suffering from some kind of neurological condition. He didn’t even look up as Chapel came in. He was tapping the keys of his MP3 player over and over, as if it were a nervous tic.

Nadia was sprawled out on one of the bunks, leafing through a magazine with a lot of splashy color photographs. It looked like a gossip rag, but it was written in a language Chapel didn’t recognize, much less read. She looked up at him with a big smile when he came inside.

He took his bag down from the overhead rack and rummaged around inside until he found what he needed. Then he took off his jacket and studied the tear in the left sleeve. It had been ripped during their escape from the construction site and it looked like the damage was too severe to repair with just a simple sewing kit. “I liked this jacket,” he said, glancing up to meet Nadia’s eye.

“You dress up well,” she said, giving him a sympathetic mock frown. “We can get you another one in Istanbul. We have a long layover there.”

He nodded and stuck one finger through the hole. “Yeah. I doubt there are any international alerts out for a man with a torn jacket, but you never know.” He folded the ruined jacket up and put it on the empty bunk, then started unbuttoning his shirt. “So you’re a Siberian, huh?” he asked, mostly just for something to say. To draw attention away from what he was about to do.

She tilted her head to one side.
“Ya Sibiryak, da,”
she confirmed. “And proud of it.”

“You said back in the train station that you were Siberian. I’ll admit, you’re not what I expected a Russian agent to look like.”

Nadia laughed. “What, I am not blond and statuesque, with big breasts and sad eyes? I get that a lot. Many people think I’m not Russian. But they forget that only a little bit of Russia is west of the Urals, and European. The vast majority of the Fatherland is in Asia, and many, many Russians look like I do.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything like—”

She waved away his protest. “I’m not offended. I would imagine that to Americans, Siberia might as well be on the far side of the moon.”

Chapel couldn’t help but grin. “Growing up, we were always taught Siberia was where they sent you if they wanted to forget you ever existed. We even use it—and I’m sorry if this sounds mean—but we use ‘siberia’ as a term to refer to, say, the worst table in a restaurant where nobody wants to sit. The table closest to the toilets.”

Nadia shook her head in resignation. “A lot of Russians might use it the same way. Many Soviets were exiled there, and many more forced to move there for work. They consider it the end of the world. But others, those born there, love the place. I was born in Yakutia—what they call the Sakha Republic, now.”

“You get back there much?”

She sighed and put down her magazine. “Let me guess. Your bosses asked you to find out everything you can about me. So they can make a dossier.”

“Just making small talk,” he told her.

She laughed. “I take no offense, even if you lie to me. We’re in the same line of work; we know the routine. We keep our eyes open and our mouths shut.”

Chapel glanced over at Bogdan.

“Don’t worry about him; he can’t hear us over his music,” she said.

Chapel wondered if that was true, but he didn’t say anything. He pulled off his shirt and then his undershirt. The barbed wire that had ruined his jacket had cut all the way through three layers of cloth and down into the silicone flesh of his artificial arm.

“You’re hurt,” Nadia said.

“Not really.” He couldn’t really see the damage so he reached under the clamp that held the arm on and released it. It went dead as it separated from his body. He used his right hand to lift it away from his shoulder and laid it across his lap.

That made Bogdan’s eyes go wide behind their fringe of hair. His repetitive tapping on his MP3 player grew more frenetic, but he said nothing.

Nadia, of course, had seen the arm come off before, back on Donny’s party yacht. She jumped down from her bunk and crossed the compartment to run one hand over the silicone prosthetic. The damage was restricted to a thin tear across the bicep. There was no blood, of course, and the wire hadn’t cut all the way through the silicone, but the tear was a couple of inches long and it gaped open like a pair of lips. If he left it like that, the damage would only get worse over time, opening a little wider every time he flexed the arm. Luckily he’d brought a repair kit. “Can you help me with this?” he asked. He opened the flat case he’d taken from his luggage and took out a silicone patch. “It’s tough to open the packaging with just one hand.”

She took the patch—it looked like a large adhesive bandage but was much stronger and more sticky—and peeled away its paper backing. With her small, nimble fingers she laid the patch across the tear and then smoothed it out. It was the same flesh color as the silicone and it was almost invisible once it was on.

“This will hold, until we can send you home?” she asked.

“It’ll do. It shouldn’t restrict my mobility, and it’ll keep the damage from spreading.”

She looked up into his eyes, and he was suddenly very aware of how close she was to him. She was beautiful, he realized.
Striking
—the word he’d been using—didn’t really do her justice. Her eyes were huge, and very bright and clear, and as they studied him he smelled her perfume, too. Something very subtle and slightly musky.

“I haven’t been back to Siberia in over a decade,” she said, answering the question he’d asked earlier. “I miss it, yes. If that was your next question.”

“Maybe,” he told her.

“It’s a whole other world, out there,” she said, looking out the train window. “Out in the taiga forests. Under the pines . . .” She shook her head. “Nothing like Moscow, or any part of Russia west of the Urals. Not nearly so crowded.”

“Some people might say not as developed,” Chapel pointed out. He was after something, but he didn’t get it, because just then their conversation was interrupted by a curse.

“What the shit?” Bogdan had risen from the floor and come over to the bunk where Chapel’s arm lay. He looked at it with wide eyes, holding his hair back maybe so he could see it better. He glanced over at Chapel, then reached out one long, thin finger as if he was going to poke the arm.