The Hydra Protocol (48 page)

“Jesus,” Chapel said.

“It’s bad. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but . . . it’s bad. And you know there’s not much we can do to help you. Until Colonel Valits came into the picture, we were following the standard protocol for agents captured in the field.”

Which meant that the United States government had disavowed Chapel, just as he’d thought. They’d denied all knowledge of him, or any responsibility for his actions. He nodded. He understood that. “What I don’t get is why that changed.”

“I’ll let Colonel Valits give you the details,” Angel said, “but . . . he’s got a problem. A very serious problem. I convinced him you were the only person in the world who could fix it. Whatever you do, make sure you don’t convince him otherwise.”

Chapel looked over at the colonel. The man was staring at Hobbes with open hatred. He clearly couldn’t wait for her to leave.

“There are no guarantees here, sugar,” Angel said. “No promises that you’re going to get to come home. But if you play your cards right, you might have a chance to do some good, still. To fix things.”

“Fix things?”

Angel was silent for a moment. “You know I’m on your side,” she said, softly. “You know I care about you.”

“I do,” he told her.

“But even I have to say . . . look, Chapel, you really fucked up.
We
really fucked up here. Trusting Nadia . . . I think about it now and I wonder how any of us were fooled, even for a second.”

Chapel wanted to ask what she meant, but Colonel Valits had turned to stare at him. The Russian cleared his throat noisily. Clearly he was ready to begin.

Once Natalie Hobbes had left—Chapel tried to get her to stay, but she refused—Colonel Valits went over to the television hanging from the ceiling and attached a portable DVD player. He glanced over at an orderly who was standing near the door and barked a quick command. The orderly couldn’t get out of the room fast enough.

“You are a fool,” Valits told Chapel.

Chapel had no idea what he was talking about, so he didn’t protest.

“You are an utter fool. Your country was taken in by a con artist. A terrorist who fed you a pack of lies. And you ate them up.” He waited with his jaw set, as if he expected Chapel to throw a punch or something. When that didn’t happen, he nodded and went on. “This is what your superior told me, and it is the only explanation that is acceptable. Because if I learn you knew who you were working with, then you, also, are a terrorist, and I will kill you myself.”

Chapel wished someone would tell him what was going on.

The colonel pushed a button on the DVD player and the screen lit up with a grainy black-and-white image. Chapel had trouble telling what he was looking at. It seemed to be security-camera footage showing the inside of a warehouse. A long, cylindrical shape filled most of the view. It looked like a rocket lying on its side.

Or a missile. As Chapel took in more details he realized it was, in fact, an ICBM. An intercontinental ballistic missile. A nuke.

This one was missing its warhead. The complicated electronics package was revealed, a tangle of wires and motherboards that handled the targeting and steering for the missile once it was in flight. Chapel was no expert on missiles, but he thought it looked like this one had been partially dismantled for repair or maintenance.

“You know what this is?” Valits asked.

Chapel tried to remember everything he knew about Russian nuclear weapons. In the month before he’d left for Bucharest, while he’d been researching Perimeter as best he could, he’d memorized quite a lot. “It’s an RT 2PM Topol,” he said. A kind of missile that could be loaded on a motorized crawler and launched from anywhere. The Topol system was largely obsolete, but Chapel knew the Russians still had a hundred and fifty or so of them still in service.

The colonel nodded. “So you are a fool, but an educated fool. That makes things a little easier. This film was taken in the city of Izhevsk, a little more than twenty-four hours ago. It could have happened in many places. Ever since we realized what Asimova stole, we have been attempting to remove the remote launch units from all our arsenal. At least, we were attempting to do so, until this happened.”

On the screen a couple of workers in coveralls were busy at the front of the missile, carefully untangling the exposed wires in the electronics package. There was no sound, but clearly something had happened in the warehouse, because suddenly one of the workers jumped away from the missile and ran offscreen. The other worker turned around to watch him go.

He should have run with his friend. One whole side of the screen went white, solid featureless white. At first Chapel thought it must be a glitch, that the camera was malfunctioning, but then he realized what he was seeing.

The missile’s thrusters were firing. On its side, in a warehouse, with half its guts exposed, the Topol was trying to launch.

The whole screen went white, with clouds of sparks filling up the view for a moment before the view cut to nothing but static.

“The missile attempted to carry out its programming,” Valits said. He switched off the television and removed the DVD player. He took the disc out and snapped it in half, then pocketed the pieces—clearly no one else was allowed to see this. “It was given a launch command, and it fired its engines. It even attempted to right itself, to begin a steering burn that would take it toward its intended target.”

“What was the target?” Chapel asked.

“Sacramento, California,” Valits told him, without a shred of apology in his voice. “Of course, it was impossible for the missile to reach that place. And it had no warhead—that was removed before the workers began to dismantle the electronics. Still. It carried enough fuel to level the warehouse and every building in the surrounding block. It had mostly disintegrated by that point, but still it had enough thrust to carry it one kilometer across the sky of Izhevsk and destroy an office building on the far side of the town. It happened in the middle of the night and casualties were limited. Both men you saw in this video are dead, however, and there are many injuries in Izhevsk.”

Chapel forced his jaw not to drop.

“The launch command came from the Perimeter system,” he guessed. “Via a shortwave signal, from Aralsk-30.”

Valits raised one eyebrow. “I am glad you do not feign ignorance. Or innocence. Yes, it was a Perimeter protocol command that told the missile to launch. However, you are wrong. The command did not come from Kazakhstan. In fact, we do not believe it was even carried over the shortwave band, though it mimicked such a signal perfectly. No, Perimeter did not launch this Topol. Perimeter does not have the capacity to launch a single missile at a time. It must launch them all, or none. The event in Izhevsk was an isolated launch. Thank God, it was the only missile that launched that night.”

“So,” Chapel said, “what you’re telling me is that someone . . . stole all the launch codes from the Perimeter data banks. And now they can fire any missile at your arsenal, whenever they want to.”

“Yes,” Valits said. “
She
can.”

She?

A lot of thoughts raced through Chapel’s brain at that moment. Many of them didn’t make sense, while others were just emotions—panic, confusion, anger, fear.

One rose to the surface right away, however.

Nadia is still alive.

Valits folded his hands together and watched Chapel with hooded eyes. “There was a message. It came in at the same time the missile launched in Izhevsk. It gave us some instructions. Some demands. We are not to attempt to dismantle any more of our weapons. And we are to raise a plebiscite concerning greater autonomy for the republics of the Far Eastern Federal District.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Chapel said. “When you say Far Eastern—”

“It means Siberia,” Valits said. “The eastern half, anyway. The Sakha Republic, as well as the maritime oblasts such as Amur, Primorskiy, Sakhalin Island . . . it is all worded very politically, very carefully, but it amounts to a call for secession. Now, do you know anyone who has an interest in Siberian self-determination who might also have access to the Perimeter codes?”

Chapel shook his head. “Kalin told me she was killed,” he insisted.

“Kalin is a security man, and therefore a liar by profession,” Valits told him. “Most likely he wished to convince you there would be no harm in sharing Asimova’s secrets if she was dead. She escaped, along with the Romanian, at the same time that you were captured. No sign of her was found after that, but now we know what she has been doing. What you helped her achieve.”

Chapel took a deep breath. “We didn’t steal any codes. I was there the whole time, there was no way that . . .”

But of course, Chapel hadn’t watched Bogdan the entire time the hacker had access to Perimeter’s terminal. Bogdan could have told Perimeter to read out all the codes, and then recorded them somehow.

He remembered, then, something that he had barely noticed at the time. When Bogdan went to the terminal he had placed his MP3 player on top of one of the data banks. Was it possible?

“Excuse me one moment,” Chapel said. He turned his head to the side and said, “Angel, are you still there?”

“Always, honey.”

“I need to know if something is possible. Could you build a device, a . . . a data logger of some kind, say something the size of an MP3 player. Could you make one that would copy information from a reel-to-reel data tape at a distance?” It sounded impossible, but he was consistently surprised at what they could do with computers these days.

“No problem,” Angel told him. “When the read/write head of a tape player moves across a tape it releases tiny bursts of electromagnetic radiation, and if you have a way to record those bursts and then interpret them as data, sure. You would need the tape to actually be running at the time, though you could fast-forward through it and still record all the information.”

Bogdan had made only a small change to Perimeter’s programming. He would have had plenty of time to run the whole tape. “And the data we’re talking about, all the launch codes—you could fit that on the memory of an MP3 player?”

“Absolutely. Those codes are just strings of numbers and characters, probably sixteen digits long each. There’s more data in one MP3 file than in ten thousand launch codes.”

Chapel closed his eyes. He could feel a very bad headache coming on. “So Bogdan was in on it the whole time. Everybody was in on it but me.”

He was moving toward one inescapable conclusion. He really didn’t want to get there. He had one protest left.

“When Nadia—Asimova—came to us, in Washington, we vetted her,” he told Valits. “We made sure, as much as we could, that she was real. An agent of FSTEK. She was vouched for personally by Marshal Bulgachenko.”

“Konstantin Bulgachenko was born in Vladivostok in 1951,” Valits told him. “Do you know enough geography to know where that is? It is in Siberia.”

“So you’re saying—”

“Bulgachenko and Asimova were a cabal of Siberian separatists. We do not know if they infiltrated FSTEK with the express intent of forwarding their political aims, or if they only realized their shared cause after she was recruited. It is immaterial. Bulgachenko is dead. Asimova has become a terrorist.”

He couldn’t resist it anymore. The conclusion was right there in front of him, and he couldn’t even look away.

Nadia had betrayed him.

She had used him, tricked him into joining her crusade. Unwittingly he had helped her steal the entire Russian nuclear arsenal for the cause of Siberian independence—and by so doing implicated the United States in an international incident worse than anything he’d ever heard of before.

She had betrayed him.

Nadia. The woman he had . . . the woman he had begun to . . . the woman he’d started to feel . . .

Nadia had played him like a fish on a line.

No. It couldn’t be. Nadia wasn’t a terrorist—not Nadia—not the warm, funny woman he’d fallen for. Not the cheerful, doomed woman who just wanted to make the world a little safer before she died. Not the Nadia who had sacrificed so much to track down missing plutonium, not her.

No, she’d been a patriot! They’d given her a medal, the Russians had given her a medal for her service, they had . . .

She had been a patriot, hadn’t she?
Just not to the country
, he thought.

How many times had she told him about the abuses and crimes of the Russian government? She’d framed it as criticism of the Soviets, not the current Russian government, but plenty of times she’d spoken of how unfair it was that Siberia was tied to Moscow—
ya Sibiryak
, she’d said. I am a Siberian.

The whole time. She had been lying the whole time. When they found out that the FSB was chasing her, that they wanted her dead—he should have aborted the mission then. He should have, but he’d persuaded Hollingshead into letting them continue. Because he had believed. He had believed in Nadia. Believed that she wanted the same thing he did, an end to the madness of Perimeter, of nuclear proliferation.

And the whole time all she wanted was to control the missiles herself.

She had come to Washington with the means to dismantle Perimeter and it had sounded so good, so possible. So worthwhile. She had convinced Hollingshead to send him after the one-time pad in the wreck of the
Kurchatov
. She had convinced Chapel to help her fight her way to Aralsk-30. The whole time she’d known they would never have gone along with it if they knew her true aim.

Where was she now? Was she laughing at him? Laughing at how easy it was to seduce the cripple? There had been so many signs; how had he missed them all? She had spied on him when he spoke to Angel; she’d even admitted as much. She had consorted with organized criminals. She had killed Russian agents and violated the sovereignty of three different countries.

And he’d been by her side the whole time.

He couldn’t take it. He couldn’t take the betrayal. In a rage, he jumped up and grabbed the nearest chair and threw it across the room. He kicked another chair and sent it clattering across the floor. He roared in anger, the veins in his temples throbbing until he thought they might burst.