The Hydra Protocol (54 page)

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she said.

“No, I can see that.”

She looked deeply into his eyes, as if searching for something. Some sign that he could help her. Fix this somehow. She was still trying to use him. The thought made Chapel seethe.

She gave him a sad little smile. “If you call out to them, tell them I will launch if they do not fall back, perhaps—”

“Maybe,” Chapel said. “Or—”

He had no intention of finishing that thought. He had just been talking until he saw the barrel of her SMG move away from his chest. The second it did, he swung around and brought his fist down hard on the screen of the laptop, smashing it down on top of Bogdan’s hands.

The hacker screamed and pulled his hands back but too late. When he held them up, Chapel saw at least two of his long thin fingers were bent at unnatural angles. Another one twitched spasmodically. It looked like they were all broken.

Bogdan wasn’t going to be typing with those hands anytime soon. He definitely wasn’t going to launch any missiles.

“Ogon’!”
Chapel shouted, to the soldiers outside—the command to open fire.

He had believed, when he ordered the Russians to attack the house, that he was willing to die in the cross fire as long as they took Nadia down as well. That he would give his life to make sure he got his revenge.

It appeared that some part of him disagreed with that calculation. He dropped to the floor, throwing his arm over his head, bracing himself for the noise and the chaos of a fusillade.

Just before he hit the floorboards, he saw Nadia staring down at him, a look of horror distorting her features. Horror and something else—disappointment?

Maybe she really had thought he would try to help her.

The cross fire he’d expected didn’t come—but all hell did break loose.

Someone smashed a window and shoved a rifle barrel through. The door swung back hard enough to crack against its frame as soldiers rushed inside, weapons up and pointing in every direction. They were all shouting at once, and as Chapel peeled his arm back from his face he saw one of them grab Bogdan and throw him to the floor while another pair advanced on Nadia, weapons up, barrels pointed right at her face.

Kalin came rushing in, looking a little out of breath. He pointed at Nadia and barked out a rasping command Chapel couldn’t follow. Nadia dropped her SMG, and one of the soldiers snatched it up.

“The codes,” Kalin said. “Where are the codes?”

It took Chapel a second to realize that the torturer had spoken in English, that the question was directed at him. “On the laptop,” he said. “It’s all there.”

Kalin nodded at one of the soldiers, and he grabbed the laptop off the table, yanking out its power cord. Bogdan moaned something in what Chapel thought was Romanian.

A smile appeared on Kalin’s face. Chapel was surprised the man didn’t start laughing maniacally. “You,” he said, in Russian now. “Asimova. You will come with me. I have some questions I’d like you to answer.”

Chapel, still down on the floor, looked up at her face.

He could tell that she knew what Kalin was, and how he questioned people. A nasty pang of guilt cut right through Chapel—he had just delivered her into a fate worse than death.

She was a terrorist. She had betrayed him. Lied to him.

But nobody deserved what Kalin was going to do to her.

She must have decided she would rather go down in a hail of bullets, because before any of the soldiers could touch her, she spun around on one foot and delivered a perfect high kick to the chimney of the wood-stove.

It came apart in pieces and sprayed soot all over the room. Smoke from the stove and the generator billowed out right in Kalin’s direction and the torturer flinched. The soldiers all drew back, maybe thinking she’d set off a grenade.

The smoke filled the tiny room in an instant, making the soldiers choke and cough. Down on the floor Chapel had better air, but he couldn’t see anything for a second as the powdery soot fell all around him. He heard the unmistakable sound of glass shattering and then, from outside, the staccato noise of assault rifles firing.

Even if he couldn’t see anything, Chapel knew—she had made a break for it.

Chapel scrambled forward on his hand and knees and got over to the cot. The window above it had been smashed out of its frame, just as he’d expected. He put his hand on the cot and levered himself back up to his feet, even as the dust cleared and Kalin came storming across the room, waving one hand in front of his face. Chapel started to reach for the windowsill, intending to chase after her, but then he thought of something and looked down again.

The cell phone was gone. He remembered clearly how she’d set it down, very carefully, before picking up the submachine gun.

The gun was gone, too—she must have scooped it up before she burst through the window. That made sense—she knew there would be more soldiers outside, that she would have to fight her way clear. But the phone—she had had only a fraction of a second to escape. Why had she wasted time picking up the phone?

Something nagged at him, some memory that wouldn’t quite rise to the surface. Maybe she had wanted the phone so she could contact Varvara and beg for help, for some means of escape. But she must have known that even Varvara wouldn’t help a wanted terrorist—Valits had told him as much, that the top level
vory
in Moscow had turned their backs on Nadia. She didn’t have a friend left in the world—so who did she want to call?

It wasn’t like she’d felt some desperate need to play Angry Birds on her smartphone, or something—

Kalin peered out the window. “She won’t get far,” he said, in English. “And we have the codes on the laptop. The world is safe, yes? But until she is captured, this is still an embarrassment. And it is your fault, you know. Had you not attacked me and come running in here without—”

“Quiet!” Chapel said. He was too busy thinking to deal with Kalin.

Smartphone.

The world’s most dangerous smartphone. He had it now. She’d told him, once, that all the data in Perimeter’s tape banks, every bit of it, would fit in one small corner of a smartphone’s memory.

You could put all the launch codes on a phone, and—

And Bogdan could easily have built an app that would let her launch the missiles with just a few swipes on her touchscreen.

“Shit,” Chapel said. “Shit!”

“What is it?” Kalin demanded.

Chapel shook his head and pushed himself through the window. He caught himself with his hand on the far side, then pulled himself up to his feet and started running.

Much as he’d expected, there were wounded soldiers everywhere. Nadia might be a terrible shot, but with an SMG you could just spray bullets in a wide arc—you didn’t need to aim. He saw one man lying on the ground, clutching his side, and without even being asked, the soldier pointed into the woods. Chapel dashed in that direction—just in time to hear a whirring noise like an angry lawn mower.

“No,” he said, “no—Kalin, you didn’t even bother to secure the—”

He stopped wasting breath on words, then, because he had staggered out into a clearing in the trees, a narrow lane cut through the woods that ran straight for about two hundred yards.

At the far end of that strip, Nadia was already lifting into the air in her little airplane. He saw the wings glimmer as she crested the trees and shot into the clear air, and then she was gone, out of sight.

Behind him Kalin came pushing through the trees, a look of utter annoyance on his face. “I think you have failed,” the senior lieutenant said. “I think your mission, as Colonel Valits described it, was to capture her. And you did not. Now, you will return with me—to Magnitogorsk. To our hospital.”

Chapel whirled on him, and every watt of frustrated, pent-up rage he’d ever felt burned from his eyes. “You fucking idiot,” he said. “She has her phone.”

“I fail to understand—”

“The codes are on that phone, and the means to launch the missiles. She still has the codes—and she’s getting away!”

The helicopter swung by to pick them up from Nadia’s airstrip, its wheels not even touching the grass as they jumped in through the side hatch. Kalin ordered the wounded to stay behind and wait for medical evac. He seemed annoyed that he even had to waste the time it took to let his uninjured soldiers on board. He stared at Chapel for a very long time before permitting him to climb in.

“It would be wise, I think, to leave you here,” the torturer told him. “But I am afraid you would find some way past my injured men so you could run off. No, I will keep you with me, Kapitan, but only so I can watch your every move.”

From the belly of the helicopter Chapel looked back at the wounded soldiers on the ground below. Those who could were standing, holding their weapons still so they could guard Bogdan. The hacker looked up, and for a moment Chapel met his eye. There was no rancor there, no accusation, even if Chapel had nearly crippled him. Bogdan looked like he’d expected things to end this way.

Chapel pulled the side hatch shut, and the helicopter lifted into the air without wasting another moment. “Neither of us is going anywhere until this is done,” Chapel told Kalin. “What direction did she head?”

“South. I imagine she is attempting to flee to Mongolia,” Kalin said. “There are Evenks there, a few of them, and they would certainly take her in. She knows we will not be able to send a major force after her there, for fear of angering the Chinese.”

Chapel couldn’t worry about the politics or what Nadia had planned. He just wanted to know how they were going to reach her. “Is this helicopter fast enough to catch up with her?”

Kalin sneered. “That old crate she is flying? We can spin circles around it,” Kalin told him.

“Good—then this won’t take long,” Chapel said.

“It had better not. Thanks to how long it took you to find her, we are running low on fuel. Already we are down to our reserves. We can force her down, then fly to Irkutsk to refuel, but only if we catch her in, say, the next hour.”

Chapel shook her head. “We can’t afford to antagonize her. We have to talk to her, get her to surrender peacefully. Don’t forget what she’s capable of. She could start World War III at any moment. If she feels she has nothing left to lose—”

Kalin inhaled sharply. “I wish to bring her in alive, if possible. But this situation is straining the bounds of possibility. We will attempt to negotiate a surrender. If she does not agree, I fully intend to shoot her down. This craft carries a heavy machine gun that could shred her plane in less than a second.”

“That might be all the time she needs to launch.”

“A risk I’m willing to accept. I have specific orders—she is not, under any circumstances, to be allowed to leave Russian territory. No matter the cost.”

Chapel stared at the man. “If she does launch,” Chapel said, “if all those missiles fire at my country—you really think America won’t shoot back?”

“Konyechno,”
Kalin said. “But it will not come to that. She is bluffing.”

Chapel turned away in frustration. “You’re crazy,” he said.

“I wonder, Kapitan . . . I have been chasing Asimova for many months. You knew her a few weeks. Which of us came to know her better? The real woman?”

“It doesn’t matter what either of us knows. The risk is just too great.”

“That is not your decision to make. Your part in this is already done. You brought me to her—now I will determine her fate.”

Chapel moved to one of the round viewports on the other side of the fuselage. He couldn’t get a good look forward, not without barging his way into the cockpit, and he doubted Kalin would stand for that. He desperately wanted to look where they were going, but . . . maybe he could get the next best thing. “Angel,” he said, “I need some intel.”

“Go ahead, sugar.”

“Nadia just took off in a small civilian plane, a six-seater, it looked like. She’s headed south. Toward Mongolia, we think. Can you pick her up on the satellites?”

“Give me a sec . . . something that small’s going to be hard to zoom in on while it’s moving . . . okay, I see her. And there you are, in your helicopter. She’s got a good head start on you, but you’re gaining quickly.”

“How long before we catch up?”

“I’d estimate nine minutes,” Angel said. “Sweetie, you said she’s headed for Mongolia? If she is, she’s got a long flight ahead of her. The border’s about five hundred miles away.”

“She has nowhere else to go.”

“I get that. But it’ll take her hours to reach the border, and that gives the Russians a lot of time to bring her down.”

Chapel frowned. “The problem is, we’re running low on fuel. She might still get away from us if we’re not careful.”

“You’re not the only aircraft in Siberia,” Angel told him. “Let me check something. Okay, sure. There’s an air force base at Irkutsk, not that far from your location. There are three fighter jets being wheeled out onto a runway right now. Sweetie, the Russians are not going to let her get away. Those jets are designed to take down heavy bombers. They’ll have no trouble shooting down a little plane like hers.”

Chapel knew she was trying to be helpful. She was telling him that he could just sit back and let the Russians take care of his problem—finish his mission for him. She didn’t know. “Angel—she has the codes. On her smartphone. She could launch at any time.”

“Oh, boy.”

“Yeah,” Chapel said. “I’m willing to bet we hear from her very soon. I think she’ll threaten to launch if they don’t let her cross the border. And I know for a fact that my partner Kalin here won’t give his bosses time to negotiate. We need to find a way to contact her, to start talking to her, right now.”

“You don’t think—I mean,” Angel said. “If.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard her at a loss for words. Finally she asked him, in a very small voice, “You think she’ll do it?”

“I have no idea,” Chapel said. She had lied to him about so many things. Lied about who she was, what she wanted. He had no way of knowing what she might actually do, when the time came.