The Hydra Protocol (22 page)

Chapel looked where Bogdan had indicated. “Shit,” he said.

It was the car that had been following them, the one carrying the two SNB men, and it had just merged into the traffic circle, about ten cars behind them. Chapel was certain it was the same car because all the paint was scraped off its front quarter panel.

“This guy’s persistent,” Chapel said.

“Perhaps we should split up,” Nadia said. “I can go to the meeting with my
vory
. You can lead these men away, get them off my tail.”

Chapel thought of when she’d suggested something similar in Bucharest—when she’d said she could go collect Bogdan on her own. “You asked for a
svidetel
. A witness,” he told her. “We go together or not at all.”

“All right,” Nadia said. She scanned the road ahead. “Up there, do you see? A little street, one where we can—”

She stopped speaking without warning, and Chapel wondered what was going on until, a half second or so later, he heard the sirens.

Coming up the street she’d indicated, their nearest escape route, was a police car with flashing lights.

Chapel had no doubts that it was coming for them.

“Can they arrest us for shaking our tail?” Chapel asked.

“Not for that, no,” Nadia said. “At least—they shouldn’t. This is supposed to be a game we play, there are supposed to be informal rules . . . but if they have some other excuse, if we broke traffic laws, even—”

“In other words, if we let that police car pull us over, we’re dead,” Chapel said. Once they were in an Uzbek police station, it wouldn’t take long at all for their cover story to fall apart. And once the authorities knew they were using false identities, it would not be a huge jump to assume they were foreign spies.

Chapel craned his neck around, looking in every direction. The traffic was packed tightly around them. They might thread their way around the cars on their scooters, they might reach another side street with no police car on it, but it would take time, and they needed to move now.

Of course, there was another option. “Nadia,” he said. “Follow my lead, okay?”

He didn’t wait for confirmation. He twisted his handlebars around and curved around the front of the car on his right, wincing as the driver sounded his horn right in Chapel’s ear. He ignored the noise and gunned his throttle, sending his scooter shooting at right angles to the road. There was a nasty bump as he jumped over the curb and up onto the sidewalk beyond. Before him raised the long curved wall of the stadium, set back from the road by a broad plaza where people were lounging on benches and soaking up the sun. The plaza was lined with rough bricks that made his scooter vibrate alarmingly, but Chapel just tightened his grip on his handlebars and opened his throttle as wide as it would go.

Ahead of him pedestrians screamed and jumped out of his way. The scooter had a pathetic little horn that made a weak tooting sound every time he slapped it. He made liberal use of it anyway as he roared across the plaza. In his mirrors he saw Nadia behind him, Bogdan’s face pressed down into her neck.

Up ahead, a flight of broad stairs led down toward the main gates of the stadium. Chapel took them at speed, bouncing up and down on his seat, the bones of his skull feeling like they were scraping against each other every time the scooter dropped onto a new step.

The gates ahead were closed, but a walkway led around the curve of the stadium, down at the bottom of the stairs. He leaned to one side and shot by the gates, headed roughly back the way they’d come. There were fewer people down there on the walkway, but there was less room to maneuver, too—Chapel was frankly terrified he was about to run down somebody’s decrepit grandmother inching her way along with a walker. Luckily the few people he might have hit were able to scurry out of his way.

On the far side of the stadium was another set of stairs, leading up toward sunlight and another traffic-packed street. Chapel steered up those steps and heard his little engine whine and his wheels squeak as they tried to gain purchase on the upward grade. For a second it looked like the scooter just wouldn’t have enough power to get up those steps, but then his front wheel found traction and launched him upward, barely faster than he could have climbed the steps on foot, but it worked.

At the top of the steps was another plaza, not quite as wide as the first one. He zoomed across it, barely aware of the people there, and into the traffic on the far side. More horns, more angry drivers, but in a second he was across the street and headed into an alleyway.

Nadia came up beside him and gestured for him to turn left at the end of the alley. Together they burst out into a street that was nearly empty, a narrow canyon between two blocks of apartment buildings. The fronts of the buildings were painted in rainbow colors, stripes of red and orange and blue that disoriented him for a second. He dropped back and followed Nadia as she headed toward an intersection ahead.

Even before they got there, Chapel heard sirens closing in.

Damn. He’d really thought his little stunt was going to get them free of the pursuit. At least they’d left the SNB car behind.

Maybe there was no other way than to split up. Maybe he should try to lead the police away, let Nadia escape and get to her meeting. Of course, on his own he wouldn’t be able to resist the police if they caught him. He could be signing his own death warrant if he split off. Still, the mission was important enough—

Up ahead a traffic light had just turned green and the few cars on the street were surging forward. Nadia, however, pulled up to the intersection and stopped, putting her feet down to stabilize her scooter.

Chapel looked back and saw a police car turn into the block behind them. Its lights flashed across the multicolored apartment blocks, making them shimmer with light.

“What are you doing?” Chapel asked.

Nadia took a deep breath. “Be ready,” she said.

Bogdan tapped wildly at his MP3 player, working its controls like they were piano keys.

Behind them the police car was maybe fifty yards behind, and gaining.

“What do you—” Chapel began. He didn’t have time to finish his question.

Nadia gunned her throttle and shot forward. Chapel raced after her. The police car was still accelerating, closing the gap behind them. Then the traffic light changed to red.

It was too soon. The light had just changed to green a few seconds ago. The drivers in the busy cross-street accepted it much faster than Chapel did, however. Even before he’d cleared the intersection, they started nosing forward, filling the space behind him with a wall of metal.

The police car didn’t have a chance to stop in time. Chapel heard a terrible crunch of metal smashing into metal. Behind him he heard the police car’s siren wail in a much higher pitch for a moment, then fall silent abruptly.

Nadia laughed as she sailed down the nearly empty street beyond the intersection. She turned right into the forecourt of an apartment complex, a little space where the residents stored their bicycles and their trash cans. She stopped, pried Bogdan’s arm off her waist, then jumped off her scooter. She was taking off her helmet when Chapel reached her a second later.

“Nice timing,” he told her.
A little too nice
, he thought.

“Come,” she said. “From here we can go on foot. It’s not far to the meeting place.”

The three of them hurried through the streets on foot, stopping now and again to duck into the shadowy vestibule of an apartment building and listen for the sounds of pursuit. They heard no more sirens, saw no more obvious SNB agents. It looked like they’d finally lost their shadows.

The sun was high overhead and it prickled the back of Chapel’s neck as they walked out into a broad, open area where the light glared off spotlessly clean concrete. Only a few trees stuck up around the broad plaza to offer any shade. Ahead of them stood a building Chapel immediately assumed was a mosque. It was made of concrete slabs piled up around a massive gothic arch, and at each corner of the building stood a tall, tapering column with a turquoise dome at its top. As he got closer he realized those weren’t minarets. The columns looked more like missiles with festively painted warheads.

“Rockets,” Nadia explained, when he asked what the columns were. “At least, they are supposed to resemble rockets.”

They were far more elaborately decorated than any rocket Chapel had ever seen. But as he got closer he supposed he could see what she meant. The building, it turned out, was just a very ostentatious subway entrance, the main portal into the Kosmonavtlar Station.

They headed down a broad flight of steps into a cool, slightly dim hallway. The pseudo-arabesque exterior gave way to a space-age interior that was no less ornate. The columns that held up the ceiling were a glittering black, while the walls were striped in an elegant blue, more intense near the bottom, fading nearly to white at the top. Set into the walls were round bas-reliefs depicting men in space suits surrounded by swirling stars and planets. Each of them wore the same dead-eyed, resolute expression, except one—Yuri Gagarin, who wore a wide, mischievous grin. Chapel thought back, trying to remember a photo of Gagarin where he wasn’t showing that same toothy smile. He couldn’t think of one.

Beneath them, under the floor, trains rumbled and sighed and hissed. The station was busy with commuters, people walking quickly in one direction or another, totally ignoring the opulent surroundings.

Chapel couldn’t help himself. Despite the danger they were in, despite the nature of the meeting that lay ahead of them, he drank in the bas-reliefs and the wide murals showing the history of space flight, from the earliest astronomers with their clunky telescopes to space stations orbiting the earth.

“You have an interest in cosmonautics?” Nadia asked.

Chapel nodded his head. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. I thought about it a lot. Dreamed about it, I guess. What about you?”

Nadia’s smile was a trace bittersweet. “I did not want to be a cosmonaut.” She tilted her head to one side and reached out to touch Gagarin’s sculpted cheek. “I knew I would be one.” She looked over at Chapel. “Every day in our classes, we would be reminded. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was at the forefront of space science. We were taught that all our futures lay up there, in the cosmos. That we would live on space stations as big as cities and get all our power from the sun. That we would fly to Mars before the millennium was out.”

She dropped her hand. “Then the Cold War ended. And somehow, it was no longer our destiny. Oh, we were still the best with our rockets and our space stations. But now it’s all about making money, selling space on our rockets to other countries. Funny, is it not? How politics can do that, turn destiny into commerce into . . . nothing.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it funny,” Chapel said.

Nadia shook her head sadly. Then she turned away and headed down another flight of stairs toward a platform. A train was coming in, but she held back until it had disgorged its passengers and left the station again. When the platform emptied out, she led Chapel and Bogdan to its far end, where the station gave way to a dark tunnel. She looked around for any sign they were being watched, then jumped down to the level of the tracks.

Chapel nodded at a camera mounted on the ceiling.

“No worries,” she said. “It’s broken.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because,” she said, “my
vory
friend pays to keep it broken. Come on.”

She headed into the almost perfect darkness of the tunnel, hugging the wall away from the electrified rail. Chapel and Bogdan followed, keeping close together.

The tunnel stretched on ahead of them for miles, perhaps, though it was hard to judge distances in the nearly perfect dark. They trudged along in darkness broken only by too-infrequent lamps, some of which flickered so much their light was worse than nothing. It was all Chapel could do to keep from tripping and breaking his leg.

At one point a train came through. There were shallow alcoves built into the tunnel wall, no more than twelve inches deep. As the air pushed a great belly of wind ahead of it, ruffling their clothing, they had to press themselves back into these narrow holes. The train came so close Chapel thought it would crush him, so fast he was sure its speed alone would tear him out of his hiding place and pull him along with it. He could look in through its windows, see all the people perched on its seats, none of them looking up at him. In a few seconds the train had moved on and he could breathe again.

After another ten minutes of marching through the gloom, they saw a little more light appear ahead. As they drew closer Chapel could see it came from a pair of spotlights mounted on the tunnel ceiling. His eyes had adapted to the darkness, and now they stung when he looked at the harsh bulbs. It was impossible to see anything beyond that glare, and so he was completely surprised when someone shouted out a curt order.

He understood the tone, if not the words. He was being told to halt. Presumably by someone well-enough armed to enforce the command.

He stopped where he was and held his hands out away from his body.

Nadia, on the other hand, gave the unseen voice a wave.
“Smert’ suki!”
she called out, presumably supplying a password.

One of the spotlights swiveled away from them. Chapel blinked away afterimages and saw that up ahead a hole had been blasted in the wall of the tunnel, a ragged portal with edges of broken brick. Beyond was a much softer light, yellow and warm. A man with a rifle—Chapel could only see him in silhouette—stood in that entrance, waving them onward.

The three of them passed through the broken entrance and into a wide, dusty room that looked like the cellar of someone’s house. At least, it looked like the cellar of the house of a black marketeer.

The walls were lined with shelves full of cartons of cigarettes and gallon bottles of vodka. At the far end of the room stood a workbench over which hung a row of tools up on pegs. There was a red stain on the workbench that Chapel did not want to investigate. He told himself it was just old paint.