The Hydra Protocol (31 page)

“I could only stare at them. They were ghouls—I could see in their eyes they were already mentally carving up my corpse to see how well their treatments had worked. I . . . assaulted one. Struck him down right there in the hospital. He was more surprised than hurt. Did I not wish to give myself to the glory of medicine, to the advancement of the healing arts? Did I not wish for my tragedy to have some meaning, some purpose?

“I went to the marshal again, this time with a plan in my hands. A document describing how I would defeat Perimeter, what I still required—the one-time pad—how I would acquire it. I had written the plan in such a way that two or three people could make it happen, and no one need to know it was being done until it was accomplished. The same plan I presented to you, Director. The plan we have followed so far.

“The marshal tried to stop me, but I was done with men telling me what could be accomplished. What was
possible
. What was
politically viable
. Enough, I told him. I go to Washington with or without your blessing. Maybe the Americans would laugh at me, maybe they would arrest me. But still I would go.

“The marshal was the man who made me what I am. He understood me like no one else. He could see in my eyes that I would do this thing. Still he did not say yes—but he did not stop me from going to America. From contacting you. I had no idea if he would back me the way I hoped, even when I met with you the first time. I did not know what would happen. When you said yes, well . . .”

She shook her head. “Here we are. You know the truth, now. You know what I have done, and why. I will go on to Kazakhstan with or without Jim. I will finish what I started. They tell me I have only months left, months of good health and then a quick decline. They tell me the end will be painful if I do not seek medical treatment, but that it will be over in a week or so.” She looked back over her shoulder at Chapel. “I will not get a second chance at this.”

Chapel just stood there, uncertain what he should do or say.

But that was Hollingshead’s job, after all.

“Young lady,” the director said, “that’s quite a story. But it doesn’t change a damned thing.”

Nadia stared at the tablet, her face a mask of disbelief.

Hollingshead had the decency to look away as he explained himself. “This has already gone too far. You’ve implicated the United States in what could turn into an international incident. You tricked us into conspiring with you when you had no national credentials. That’s simply unconscionable. Your actions have led to the death of an Uzbek government official—”

“A butcher of his people,” Nadia pointed out.

Hollingshead shook his head. “I’ll lose no sleep over Mirza’s demise. But the government of Uzbekistan will not just forget about him. They’ll want to know why he died, and if they turn to me for answers, I will have none.”

“Then I will go on alone, as I say—”

“Not without my authorization,” Hollingshead told her. “Damnation, girl, don’t you see? They saw Chapel in Tashkent. They photographed him. If you’re caught in Kazakhstan, if the Russians catch up with you, they will get Chapel’s name from you one way or another. They will trace him back to us. So I cannot allow you to proceed alone. If necessary, I will order Chapel to detain you, by force.”

“Sir,” Chapel said, though he wasn’t sure if he was trying to protest or acknowledging that he was ready to follow orders.

“But what then? Will you turn me over to the FSB who hunt me, with an apology? Will you tell the whole world how you were duped by a rogue agent?” Nadia demanded, her eyes flashing.

“If that were necessary, yes, I would do exactly that. I would hand you to them on a silver platter if I thought it would smooth things over.”

“Knowing, as you must, what they would do? How they would torture me, until they were satisfied they knew everything? How then they would put a bullet in my brain, and bury me in an unmarked grave?” Nadia said.

“Yes,” Hollingshead said, almost growling. “In a heartbeat.”

Sometimes Chapel forgot that the director’s bow ties and his thick glasses and his genial manner were a carefully studied act, meant to disarm the people he spoke with, to get them to trust him. Sometimes he forgot that before Hollingshead had become a spymaster, he’d been an admiral in the United States Navy. And that you didn’t get to that rank in the armed forces without having solid titanium vertebrae. Chapel found himself standing at attention, unconsciously adopting the posture of a soldier in the midst of an old-fashioned full-on ass-chewing.

“Fortunately—for you at least, young lady,” Hollingshead went on, his voice softening by the narrowest degree, “it needn’t come to that. Chapel can escort you back to the United States. Once you’re here we will protect you from the FSB. We will strive to make the remainder of your life comfortable. Of course, you’ll have to sing for your supper. You’ll be questioned, and while I do not torture those who fall under my microscope, I can assure you that we will be thorough. You will tell us everything you know, every tiny detail, every name, place, and date before we’re done with you. But you won’t be hunted down like a dog. That, Agent Asimova, is the very best you can hope for right now.”

“You’re assuming Chapel can subdue me,” Nadia said, baring her teeth.

“Are you really going to make me find out?” Hollingshead asked her.

Nadia had a pistol tucked into her belt.

Chapel had one, too.

If it happened—if he was given the order to detain her—it wasn’t going to be a fistfight. It would be over very quickly, and one of them was going to get shot. Maybe killed.

He didn’t know if he could do that.

Hollingshead and Nadia stared each other down, through the screen of the tablet. Maybe, Chapel thought, maybe if he moved fast enough, and quietly enough, he could anticipate the order. Maybe he could get his arm around her neck, put pressure on her carotid artery, knock her out before she could react . . .

Maybe it would work. But maybe not.

Spetsnaz. She said she’d been trained by the Spetsnaz, the Russian special forces, and he knew it was true. Those acrobatic moves she’d used in Bucharest and again at the shed in Vobkent, the high kicks, the twisting evasions—he knew he’d seen them before. Back in Ranger school, his trainer Bigelow had showed him videos of those moves and told him just how dangerous they were. If he tried to choke her out, she would have a dozen different ways to reverse his attack, to put him at the disadvantage—

“Wait,” he said.

Nadia turned to face him. On the tablet’s screen he saw Director Hollingshead nod, just to indicate Chapel had his attention.

“Maybe,” he said, “maybe there’s a way to still pull this off.”

Chapel scrubbed at his face. It had been a hot day and he felt grimy and very tired, but he forced himself to focus.

“Son,” Hollingshead said through the tablet, “I think we all want to—”

“Sir, just . . . please. Just hear me out. When Mirza tracked us down, he blew Nadia’s cover—the Russians told him who she was. But he never figured out that I wasn’t who I said I was. He still thought I was Jeff Chambers, that I was a venture capitalist looking to invest in Uzbek energy concerns. He thought he could blackmail me, holding over my head the fact that I’d somehow gotten involved with a Russian criminal. We can use that. We can make it look like Nadia kidnapped Chambers and is on the run, but still in Uzbekistan.”

He glanced over at the truck, a few yards away. “I don’t think the SNB knows about the truck. Neither do the Russians. The three of us can drive to Kazakhstan right now and get out of the country. Meanwhile Angel can plant some false information—phone in anonymous tips, saying that we’ve been sighted, getting on a train in Bukhara, say, or trying to cross into Afghanistan. You know Angel can make it sound good, make it sound like credible intelligence. Maybe . . . maybe she can pose as someone from Chambers’s company back in the States and demand to know where he is. The SNB will put all their resources to tracking us down in their own country. They’ll have no reason to alert the Kazakhs, and no reason to go looking for a giant desert-crossing truck. Perimeter is only a few days from the border, it won’t take us very long to get there. By the time they figure out we’re gone, we can already have completed the mission.”

“And then what? How do you get out of there? Once you leave Uzbekistan, coming back won’t be an option,” Hollingshead pointed out. That had been the original plan, to retrace their steps, but Chapel had to agree it was no longer possible. “And you can’t very well exfiltrate through Russia.”

Chapel nodded, thinking hard. “We go out through the Caspian Sea. You can send a submarine to pick us up from the Kazakhstan shore, take us to . . .” He went over the map of Asia in his head. “Azerbaijan.” It was the closest thing to a NATO country in the region, the nearest place where they could expect a warm welcome. “From there we can just take a commercial flight back to the States.”

“That . . . could work,” the director said, though he still sounded skeptical.

“Angel can arrange the whole thing. Sir—we can do this.”

Hollingshead frowned. “Son,” he said, very softly, “weren’t, ah, you the one calling to scrub the mission in the first place?”

“Yes. But only because I didn’t know the whole story.”

“Don’t let emotion cloud your judgment,” the director told him.

Chapel shook his head. “Sir, I get it. I just—” He tried to think of some way to explain why he’d changed his mind. Nothing he thought of would sway the director. But he thought he knew one argument that might. “Sir. When you first brought me into your directorate, when you gave me this job, you told me what you wanted to do. What your directorate was designed to do.”

“I remember, son.”

Chapel nodded. “You said you wanted to shake all the skeletons out of the closets of the Cold War. You wanted to find every dangerous thing left over from seventy years of fighting communism, all the obsolete secret stuff just waiting to come back and bite us when we least expected it. Well. It seems to me that Perimeter ought to be job one.”

Hollingshead watched him closely through the tablet. Chapel had the sense the director doubted that he was thinking logically. But the argument was sound. Nadia’s last operation—her life’s work—was aligned perfectly with Hollingshead’s mission statement. Turning back now, aborting the operation, thwarted both of them.

Maybe it would be enough.

“The risks you’d be taking on are, well, astronomical,” Hollingshead pointed out.

“I’ve never shied away from risk before, sir,” Chapel pointed out.

The director nodded. “True enough. That’s my job.” He shook his head. “This mission already required violating the sovereignty of Kazakhstan. Now you’re talking about running counter to the security interests of Russia. We can’t afford to antagonize the bear, son. If the Russians discover that we ran a mission behind their backs, conspired with someone they’ve declared an outlaw . . . the diplomatic blowback could be horrendous. Ordinarily I couldn’t even consider doing such a thing without a direct order from the president.”

“We don’t have time to run this through channels,” Chapel pointed out.

“No, we don’t. But if I were to authorize something like this and it blew up, you know who would take the blame, don’t you? You understand what this would do to me and my directorate?”

“I understand that if we fail, I’ll most likely be dead. Or left to rot in a Russian prison for the rest of my life,” Chapel pointed out. “Sir, this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. We can take down one of the biggest nuclear threats mankind was ever stupid enough to build, but we have to do it now. If we wait, the Russians will just put a fence around the thing and we’ll never be able to touch it.”

Hollingshead stared at him through the thick lenses of his glasses. If it were anyone else, any other intelligence director, Chapel knew how this would end. Any spymaster but Hollingshead would simply shut the mission down. Call for further study, or declare the whole operation untenable. Anyone else would cover his or her ass.

Hollingshead, though—the man had principles. He still had things he believed in. And more than once that had led to him doing something real, something good, for his country. It was why he still had his job, because the president needed somebody with the backbone to actually get things done.

“Jim, you’re asking for a lot. Make it worth my while,” Hollingshead said. “Agent Asimova,” he called.

Nadia looked up at the screen. She’d been silent since finishing her story, as if it had taken all the wind out of her sails to relive all that. “Yes, sir?” she asked.

Hollingshead cleared his throat. “You are absolutely certain you can dismantle Perimeter? If you can get to it, you can shut it down for good?”

“Konyechno,”
she said.

“Don’t just say ‘of course’ as if this were something easy. You convince me this is worth putting so much at jeopardy.”

“Sir, it will be done. It is all I have left in my life to do,” she told him.

Hollingshead was silent for a long while. On the screen Chapel could see the wheels turning behind his eyes, the calculations being worked through, the numbers crunched. It was the kind of decision he was glad he didn’t have to make himself.

“All right,” the director said, finally. “Get moving, don’t stop for anything—and let me make this very clear
: do not get caught
. No matter what.”

“Understood,” Chapel said, and grabbed the tablet off the tree before the screen even went dark.

Night fell before they’d gotten very far. At the wheel of the big truck Chapel felt a little relief once they were out of the sun—he was an intelligence operative and the shadows were always more comfortable for him—but even so he was keyed up enough to hunch forward in his seat, every nerve strained as he wondered where the next threat would come from.

Angel kept a very close ear on the police band chatter in Uzbekistan, listening for any sign that they were being pursued. No one had reported Mirza’s death, yet, nor was there any sign that the SNB was worried. That gave them a little breathing room.