The Hydra Protocol

PART III

Marshal Konstantin Bulgachenko spent the last night of his life at an exceptionally tasteless party.

There had been many of those, since the fall of the Union. The Soviets had possessed, at least, a sense of decorum — a certain restraint. Oh, the members of the Politburo had had their sprawling dachas on the Black Sea, their Italian mistresses and their fine cars, but in public, in Moscow where the world was watching they had favored cheap suits and proletarian tastes in food, and if they smoked Cuban cigars, they did so behind closed doors.

Nowadays, of course, the world was turned upside down. The power elite of Moscow — the oil executives, the top-end gangsters, the political machinists — lived their lives in the newspapers, on the gossip sites, and their duty was to show their fellow Russians just what wonders and new pleasures capitalism had wrought. Excess had become patriotic, decadence a virtue.

So when one arrived at the door of this particular party in the suburbs of Moscow, one was handed a little spoon carved from bone. Inside the house where camera flashes exploded nonstop, half-naked models walked from room to room with bowls of beluga caviar nestled between their breasts, and they would coo and laugh as fat men dug into their bounty for a taste. In the middle of the house, in its spacious living room, a Japanese sports car had been parked, its tinted windows continuously steamed up from whatever was going on inside. Bulgachenko had not bothered to find out. He had come to the party to speak to one particular person, the American ambassador. Finding the man had taken hours as Bulgachenko was harangued by one notable citizen after another, carried off course by the enforced jollity. He was dragged into rooms where drugs were being ingested openly, where only profuse and eloquent excuses had gotten him free. He was spirited onto a dance floor by an heiress of less than twenty years who did not even know who he was, only that there were medals on his uniform and that he looked like her grandfather. He was ushered with a crooked finger into tense, quiet discussions with small and greasy men who wanted to know just what it would take to corrupt him, men who seemed to want to bribe him simply to prove that he was not above such things.

In the end he had found the ambassador on a back deck, out in the clear night air. The American was a long, thin man with a cloud of white hair on the top of his head. If he’d had a mustache, Bulgachenko thought he might look like the writer Mark Twain. He looked every bit as disgusted as Bulgachenko felt, but as soon as he realized he was not alone on the deck, his manner changed utterly. Like an actor stepping out into a spotlight he came alive, his arms unfolding, his face opening into a wide and benevolent grin.

The expression did not change when Bulgachenko walked up to him and uttered a few simple words: “It was very warm inside, but out here the air is clear and refreshing.” The words were chosen carefully, as banal as they sounded, and the message they conveyed was that while there had been difficulties, they had been taken care of, that Russia still had the highest confidence in the mission. The ambassador responded with a similar pleasantry, this one meaningless in itself: “I like to come out here and look at the lights.” Had there been a problem the ambassador would have spoken about the weather.

With that it was done. Bulgachenko made his way back through the party with as much grace as he could muster and headed to his car, an inconspicuous black sedan. He stepped into the back and fastened his seat belt. “I am very tired,” he told the driver. “Please take me home.”

He must have accidentally inhaled some narcotic smoke, or perhaps simply the perfume of the young heiress had clouded his head — it had certainly been strong enough. It took him some time to realize that the driver of the car was not the usual man, and that he was not driving back toward Moscow, but farther out, into the country.

Even then Bulgachenko did not panic. Though the car was moving in excess of seventy kilometers an hour, still he tried to open his door and jump out. The door was, of course, locked and could not be opened. He had expected no less. He considered reaching over the front seat and strangling the driver, though this would likely end in death for both of them. Even if he did escape, though, he knew that he would simply be picked up at some later time, that he would only be delaying the inevitable. “Will you tell me where we are going, or who it is you work for?” Bulgachenko asked.

The driver did not answer.

They did not go far. Bulgachenko did not recognize the street or even the district of their destination, but that did not matter. The car pulled into a warehouse full of empty shelves and a rolling door was closed behind it. The door unlocked itself, and a man in a black suit reached in to help Bulgachenko out. The man in the black suit did not speak or salute. He simply took Bulgachenko’s arm and led him deeper into the warehouse to where a chair sat in the middle of a stretch of open floor. Bulgachenko did not resist as he was forced to sit down, or as his hands and feet were tied to the chair.

No one had bothered to show him a gun, or even a knife. It was implicit that these things were available if they were necessary. There was no line of thugs waiting to catch him if he tried to run. That would have been superfluous — Bulgachenko was an old man, now, and it was clear to everyone involved he would not get far.

This was all very civilized, very formal. It had the stamp of the former KGB all over it. Bulgachenko found that he approved. This made him want to laugh but he resisted the urge.

“You understand,” the man in the black suit said, “how this is done. You show no sign of panic. You did not scream for help. You did not attempt to overpower me.”

“You sound almost disappointed,” Bulgachenko said.

The man in the black suit shrugged. “These things are easier when the subject is afraid. Fear loosens the tongue.”

“So you wish me to talk,” Bulgachenko said. “If it will spare me pain, I will tell you what you want to know. I understand how torture is done, yes, and I know it is pointless to resist. But you want me to be afraid? No, I am sorry, I cannot help. I was a child in Stalingrad when the Nazis came. I ate the leather soles of my shoes, even though I knew I would get frostbite and lose some of my toes. Later I lived through the purges of Stalin and the blustering of his heirs and the chaos of the second revolution.” Bulgachenko smiled. “I have had a lifetime of fear. I have used up my entire stock of it.”

The man in the black suit nodded. “My name is Pavel Kalin.”

“That means nothing to me,” Bulgachenko said. “Who do you work for?”

“That is not important. Please answer my questions. Where is your agent? Where is Asimova?”

“In Bucharest,” Bulgachenko said.

Kalin shook his head. “She left there some time ago. Where is she now? Where is she headed?”

Bulgachenko closed his eyes. If he could have protected poor Nadia, he would have. But there was nothing he could do. This man would get his answer one way or another. Dear, sweet Nadia. “Tashkent,” he said.

“Thank you,” Kalin told him. “I believe you are telling me the truth.”

“Will you release me now? I am the head of FSTEK, as I am sure you know. If I do not return home soon, there will be questions asked.”

Kalin gave him a sad smile. “You were replaced in that position at midnight, by governmental decree. Your voluntary retirement papers have already been filed.”

“Ah,” Bulgachenko said.

Perhaps he had some small supply of fear left in him, after all.

“You understand. You understand how these things work.” Kalin sighed deeply. “You do not fight. You comply with my requests, answer my questions. This is a problem in itself. Information come by this easily cannot be trusted. I’m sure you understand this as well.” He reached into his jacket pocket and brought something out.

A pair of rusty pliers.

“I apologize, Marshal,” the man in the black suit said. “You are a hero of our country. You deserve better than this. But sometimes even heroes lie.”

Chapel woke to the sensation of something poking him in the back, and to a weird unearthly sound, an electronic warbling that rose and fell and occasionally squealed.

He opened his eyes.

He was lying on a bed in a spacious, quite comfortable hotel room. They had taken the largest of the hotel’s available suites, one with three bedrooms and a common area as well as a wide balcony that looked out over the center of Tashkent. The rooms were, in fact, quite nice, maybe even better and cleaner than Chapel’s apartment back in Brooklyn. Certainly larger. For a thousand dollars a night it looked like you could find real luxury in Uzbekistan.

Chapel had paid little attention to the rooms once he found a bed. He’d dropped into it without so much as taking his shoes off and fallen asleep instantly.

That explained the pain in his back. He hadn’t taken off his artificial arm. The clamps that held it on his shoulder weren’t designed to be laid on for very long.

He rolled over on his side and found Nadia standing by the bed. She had changed into a simple sleeveless dress, and she held something about the size of a cigarette lighter with a collapsible antenna mounted on one end. She waved it over the telephone on the bedside table, and it squealed in distress.

She placed one finger across her lips to tell him to stay quiet. She switched off the bug sensor and put it down, then unscrewed the mouthpiece of the telephone. With her fingernails she pried out a tiny circuit board with a microphone mounted on it. She snapped the listening device in half.

“That’s the last of them,” she said. She jumped onto the bed and sat down next to him, her legs tucked up underneath her. “Good morning, again,” she told him. “You played your part very well downstairs.”

“I’ve met enough rich assholes in my life to fake it,” he said. He wanted to sit up — felt that would be more appropriate — but he was still tired. “How many bugs did you find?”

“Five. One in each room, including the bathroom, and this one in your phone.”

“That seems like a lot,” Chapel said, frowning. “You think they doubled up because they knew we were coming?”

“No, I think they just know that anyone staying in these rooms is someone they’re going to want to listen to,” she told him. She shrugged. “Uzbekistan. It’s about as close as you can get these days to how things used to be under the Soviets. There is no conception of civil rights in this country.”

Chapel closed his eyes for a second. He tried to force himself to sit up. It didn’t quite work. “What will happen when they realize we’ve deactivated their bugs?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

He opened his eyes again to look at her. She had shifted closer to him, until her knees were almost touching him.

She shrugged. “If they said something, that would be admitting there were microphones here in the first place, and they don’t want to do that. This is just part of doing business in this part of the world. They try to listen to us. We sweep for their bugs. One reason to have so many is that they hope I will miss one.” She smiled. “I didn’t. But tomorrow when we are out, they will plant some more, and I’ll have to sweep again.” She wriggled a little closer, until her knees touched his leg.

Chapel tried to focus. It was hard, with her so close. “How long are we here? How many days, I mean?”

“I will schedule a meeting with my contact here today. This afternoon, most likely, we’ll make the arrangements. Then we can head out into the desert, once we have vehicles, equipment, supplies,” she said, and put one hand on his arm. His artificial arm. Most people, when they touched it, felt that it was colder than it should be, or they sensed that the skin didn’t feel like real human skin. Most people pulled their hand away. They flinched. Not Nadia.

“I should get up,” he said. “We have things to do.”

“Hmm,” she said. Gently she stroked his arm, up and down.

Wrong. So wrong. Not like this, not now — not with Nadia. Not when Julia—

She shifted again, releasing his arm, and he thought he must have misread the signals. Read something into what was happening that wasn’t there. She was just curling up on the bed with him — she must be as tired as he was.

She sat up, still very close to him. Looked down into his face. Gave him a tentative little smile. Her mouth a question. He could feel the air prickle between them, feel the hair on his real arm stand on end. He couldn’t move, paralyzed by not knowing what was happening here, what was going to happen.

She leaned in close and brushed his lips with hers, just the tiniest suggestion of a kiss. Her lips were so soft, so delicate, barely grazing his own. He could reach up, put an arm around her shoulders, pull her in close…

“Wait,” he said.

It took all his energy, all his strength to say it, but he managed.

“We can’t,” he told her.

She slapped the bedcovers beside his head. Then she lowered her forehead to touch his. She was almost on top of him and he felt like if she grabbed his shoulders and pushed him back on the bed, if she straddled him right then and there, he would not be able to resist, he would just have to give in. She was so close. He could just grab her hips, he could—

“Konyechno. Of course we can’t,” she said. She roared in frustration and pulled away. Jumped off the bed and headed for the door to the common room. Her hand hesitated, though, when it touched the knob. “We can’t?” she asked, her back to him.

It wasn’t too late. One word and she would turn around, come back to the bed, and—

“We can’t,” he told her.

She opened the door and stepped through. Closed it behind her with a click.

By lunchtime it was ninety degrees outside. In a shady restaurant at the ground level of the hotel, the three of them ate some plov, a local dish of rice and mutton. Chapel didn’t have much of an appetite — he mostly just picked at a piece of bread and drank some water. He couldn’t meet Nadia’s eye throughout the meal. He assumed that the waitstaff would be listening to their conversation, so he kept talking to the bare minimum.

Bogdan ate two plates of rice and asked for more, but Nadia cut him off. “Don’t get over full,” she told him. “There will be a lot of walking today, in the heat.”

The hacker’s face fell like a petulant child’s. He’d been pouting all morning since he found out there was free Wi-Fi in their suite but he wasn’t allowed to use it. “You hire me for computer stuff,” he said, “and I cannot so much as check e-mail? Now I cannot eat what I like? Very well, Mother.”

Nadia laughed and tried to catch Chapel’s eye, but he just turned his face away.

When they were done, they headed out into the streets. Their meeting with Nadia’s local connection wasn’t scheduled for another hour, but she felt they needed the time to shake anyone who might be following them.

“You make anybody?” Chapel asked, as they headed through a strip of parkland. Sprinklers were running nonstop to keep the grass green.

“I don’t understand,” Nadia said.

Chapel shook his head. Her English was fluent enough that he sometimes forgot she wouldn’t know every obscure American idiom. “I mean, did you actually see anyone follow us from the hotel?”

“No,” she told him. “Which simply means they’re good at it.”

“You think we’re in danger? I was told the Uzbek government hates Americans.”

Nadia sighed and lifted her hands in exasperation. “I think, right now, the secret police are following you — for protection. Yes, they hate Americans, because they’re always asking so many uncomfortable questions. About human rights, about the way the government shells its own people out in the countryside. But they love American money. This is a country desperately in need of funds for development. So you — the American plutocrat — they will do anything to keep safe.”

“That’s good to know,” Chapel said.

“Don’t allow yourself to get complacent. Let me tell you a story. The president of this country has a nephew, a journalist. About ten years ago he disappeared off the street with no explanation. When your Hillary Clinton came here in 2011, she demanded to see him. He was produced and claimed it was all a misunderstanding, that he had been treated well. But a doctor examined him and saw that he had been starved and kept on psychotropic drugs for years at a time.”

“Jesus,” Chapel said. “At least we got him released.”

That elicited a bitter laugh from Nadia. “A few months after Hillary Clinton left, this journalist called up a friend of his and said he planned on writing a book about his uncle, the president. Even before he finished the phone call, the line went dead and he has not been seen since.”

Despite the heat of the day, Chapel felt a chill run down his spine.

“That was the nephew of the president,” Nadia pointed out. “A close family member. If your cover is blown while we’re here, well… imagine what they will do to a foreign spy?”

Chapel gave that some time to sink in. Her story was hard to bring into concordance with what he was seeing with his own eyes. Tashkent as seen from the sidewalks didn’t look much like the totalitarian hellhole she made it out to be. The streets were clean and full of cars and trucks and people going about their business. Stores were open and well stocked, full of customers, while the park was crowded with people out enjoying the sun. Every sign in every shop window was printed in two alphabets — Cyrillic and the Latin characters he was used to. “What I see here, though — it looks more like Montreal than Kabul.”

“You’d see it if you spent more time here, actually talking to the locals,” she told him, keeping her voice low but not whispering — whispering might seem suspicious. “You’d realize that no one here talks about politics. Ever. If you were to ask them about human rights abuses, about the way the government massacres its own people out in the countryside, they would run away from you as if you had started coughing up blood. Politics is never a safe topic in Tashkent, and everything is political. In 2009, the president decided to chop down some historic trees here. Trees the city was famous for. To this day no one knows why he did it. If they asked, they were taken away. This — for trees.”

They headed down a crowded shopping street, clearly one of the main thoroughfares of the city. A tourist information kiosk stood on one corner, with a very bored-looking middle-aged women stationed inside. She fanned herself casually, as if she were too bored to even keep cool. On the opposite side of the street was a shop that rented bicycles and mopeds for daily use. Out on the sidewalk were a small number of street vendors. They had hookah pipes and leather-bound books laid out on threadbare blankets, and their eyes moved around constantly. Maybe sizing up potential customers — or maybe keeping an eye out for something else.

“We need to lose our followers,” Nadia said. “My contact will not wish to be seen speaking with us.”

“It would help if we knew who our followers were,” Chapel pointed out. Then he saw something and had an idea. He walked away from Nadia and Bogdan and stooped down over one of the blankets, one selling sticks and cones of incense. The man who ran this impromptu store was wearing a pakol, the traditional soft round hat of an Afghan. Unlike most of the men Chapel had seen in Tashkent, he had a long, thick beard. “Aya ta pa pashto khabarey kawalai shey?” he said, asking if the man spoke Pashto.

The man looked up, surprised, and raised his hands in joy. “God is great!” he answered, in that language. “And full of surprises. A white man who speaks my language, and I am sure, has money to buy my wares, yes?”

Chapel got the point. A shared tongue wasn’t going to get him anything for free. “You’re from Afghanistan?” he asked. Not entirely surprising — Uzbekistan shared a border with Afghanistan, and the Taliban had driven a lot of refugees out of their country with nothing but what they could carry on their backs.

“I have the honor of being born in Waziristan, yes,” the vendor replied.

Chapel nodded. Waziristan was where he lost his arm, but he didn’t think it would help his case to mention that. “I imagine the local police are no friends of yours,” he said, trying hard to remember the correct grammar. “I’m being followed right now.”

“Sir, this is Tashkent, and we are foreigners both. We are all being followed. At night, I think they follow me through my dreams.”

Chapel picked up an ornate brass incense burner, the most expensive-looking thing on the blanket, and set it down in front of the man. It would probably fetch five dollars back on Canal Street in New York. He took seven twenty-dollar bills from his wallet, keeping them carefully folded, and used them to tap the incense burner. “Would you be so kind as to point out to me all the… special police on this street?” He couldn’t remember the word for “secret.” He knew the word for “security forces,” but that meant something very different in Afghanistan.

A few seconds later, a hundred and forty dollars lighter, and a little bit wiser, Chapel walked back over to Nadia. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got a plan.”

Nadia and Bogdan headed across the street, into the bicycle rental shop, while Chapel worked his way down the sidewalk, bending low to speak to each of the street vendors. It didn’t matter what he said to them, which was good since he didn’t share any languages with most of them. Only one spoke English — a teenage boy who looked more Asian than any of the others Chapel met.

“I’m from Russia originally, I mean, my grandparents were Russian,” the kid said, shrugging. “Before that, they were Korean. Stalin moved people all over, back in the 1930s, and this is where we ended up.”

Chapel nodded. “How did you learn English?” he asked.

The kid shrugged. “Watching your American movies, mostly. And talking to tourists like you. You going to buy something, or were you just so surprised to see a Korean sitting here you needed to ask?”

Chapel looked down at the wares the kid had on offer, a collection of bootleg videos on cheap DVDs. He didn’t really register any of the titles — he just pretended to study them while he actually watched what was going on at the far corner of the street. The Afghan merchant he’d paid off was rising from his blanket, speaking to the vendors on either side of him — most likely asking them to watch his stuff. One of them nodded distractedly, and that seemed to be good enough.

The Afghan strolled across the street toward a man who was sitting on a bench there, pretending to read a newspaper. The Afghan had identified this man as one of the three secret policemen working the street. The other two were sitting in a car parked about twenty yards away. Chapel was surprised he hadn’t spotted them himself — one of the men in the car was the SNB man with the shaved head who had greeted him when he arrived at the hotel.

Chapel sifted through the bootleg DVDs on the Korean boy’s blanket, trying very hard not to show how intently he was watching events unfold. The Afghan sat down on the bench next to the secret policeman and rested one arm on the back of the bench. He spoke a few words, seemingly to himself. Then the secret policeman folded up his newspaper and got up and walked away. After a second the Afghan followed him.

All according to plan. Chapel had paid the Afghan to say he had information on a suspicious American tourist, but he wanted money for it. The two of them headed into the back of the information kiosk, presumably to discuss terms. That would take them a few minutes.

The trickiest part about shaking this tail was going to be convincing the SNB that Chapel, Nadia, and Bogdan were just minding their business, and that they had no intention of evading pursuit. This had to look like it all just happened naturally.

Chapel took a few small bills from his pocket and handed them to the Korean kid. “I’ve seen all these, but thanks for the conversation,” he said. Then he moved down to the next blanket, one that sat just outside of the bicycle rental shop.

Just as he’d hoped, Nadia had come through on her end. She and Bogdan came rolling out of the alley that ran alongside the shop, each of them riding a motor scooter. Bogdan climbed off his and onto the back of Nadia’s vehicle, leaving one idling on the sidewalk. Chapel risked a quick glance at the two secret policemen in the car. As expected they were watching him closely. The one he didn’t recognize was holding a camera.

Nothing to be done about that — this wasn’t like in Istanbul where he could get to that camera and erase his presence. He wondered if that had been part of Nadia’s plan all along, to have their presence in Uzbekistan documented by the secret police. Then when they entered Kazakhstan, there would be a trail showing they had not entered through Russia, limiting the Russian government’s culpability.

Nothing he could do about that, either. He swung a leg over the idling scooter. The brand name — Vyatka — was emblazoned on its front shield. It was an attractive bottle green color, but that was about all it had going for it. Much of its rear end was held together with patches, and its engine puttered away beneath him with less power than a riding lawn mower. He estimated the thing would have a top speed of about thirty miles an hour, even less than that going uphill.

Still, scooters had their advantages.

“You okay with this?” he asked Nadia.

She strapped a helmet over her black hair and gave him a vampish look from beneath its brim. “Your concern is touching, but I had one of these when I was a teenager.” She handed a helmet back to Bogdan, who fussed and fumbled with the straps. She glanced back, and the look of terror on Bogdan’s face made her laugh. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Did you ever drive one before?”

“Motorcycles and bicycles, yes. Nothing halfway in between like this. But I’ll be fine,” Chapel said. Then he hit the throttle and roared out into the street. The engine made a nasty sound as it changed gears, but it didn’t die on him as he’d feared it might. He kept accelerating as he drove right past the parked SNB car. Much as he’d expected, as he passed he heard its much more powerful engine kick into life, and in his mirrors he saw it pull away from the curb.

The chase was on.

They headed down the wide tourist street, Nadia and Bogdan keeping close to Chapel’s tail. He pushed his scooter for all the speed he could get, but the SNB car had no trouble keeping up. There was plenty of room for the car to maneuver on the street, even when Chapel used the scooter’s small size to wind his way between the other cars. A few drivers shook their fists or shouted at him, but he couldn’t understand what they were saying so he ignored them.

The street went on for many blocks. Chapel dropped back a hair until he was riding alongside Nadia. “Left or right up ahead?” he shouted over the mosquito whine of the scooter engines. “We need to get somewhere more crowded.”

“Left,” she told him, and gunned her scooter forward. She took the turn without slowing down, leaning deep into the curve. Chapel nearly overshot the side street but managed to follow her by jumping up on an empty sidewalk for a second.

Behind them the SNB car made the turn effortlessly. The man with the shaved head was driving and he always stayed a few car lengths back, not so far that Chapel lost sight of him but not so close as to make it blatant that they were being followed.

The side street was almost empty of traffic. There were no stores on this block, just blind doorways that gave no sense of what lay beyond. No pedestrians on the sidewalks, either, which made Chapel uneasy. He had no idea why Nadia had taken this turn — until, without warning, she ducked up a long alleyway to the right. Chapel nearly lost control of his scooter as he spun around to keep up with her, but he kicked off the pavement with one foot and righted himself again.

The alleyway sloped downhill toward a busy street beyond. Clotheslines hung like drab bunting overhead, and windows high on the buildings were propped open to catch any breeze. The alley was just wide enough for the SNB car to follow them, though the driver scraped off half his paint job on a Dumpster at the back of one building. He didn’t seem to care — in Chapel’s mirrors he could see the man with the shaved head in the driver’s seat, and he didn’t even look over to see what all the noise was.

This guy was determined, Chapel had to give him that. He wasn’t going to let them get away with a little trick driving.

At the end of the alleyway Nadia waved to the right, as if she was going to turn that way. Chapel wondered why she would throw such an obvious signal — then grinned to himself as she shot forward between two cars and into an identical alleyway across the busy street. Her signal had just been a feint. Chapel had to twist around and lean away from an oncoming car as he bounced and rolled across the main street, but he managed to shoot into the second alleyway without crashing. Nadia glanced back over her shoulder at him, smiling. Bogdan looked like he might start screaming at any moment, his eyes rolling under their fringe of hair. He had one arm tight around Nadia’s waist, hanging on, while with his other hand he tapped at the keys of his MP3 player. The hacker was crazy, Chapel thought — if he was that scared, why not use both arms to hold on? The key clacking seemed to comfort him, though, like an infant with a security blanket.

Chapel glanced back and saw the SNB car slowly threading its way into traffic in the street behind him. They were gaining significant ground on the car, not least because the downward-sloping alleyways helped their struggling engines.

Up ahead of them the alleyway descended toward a parking garage. Chapel could see flickering sunlight through the open structure. He rushed forward to catch up with Nadia, then pointed at the garage. She nodded back so he took the lead again, using his forward momentum to carry him up a ramp and through the structure, the wind making chopping noises on either side as he flashed past a long rank of parked cars. A second ramp continued up into the higher stories of the garage, but Chapel didn’t want to go that way — there would be no way down from up there and he would be trapping himself. Instead he looked for and found an exit from the structure on its far side. A low wall prevented cars from just driving straight through, but there was a gap in that wall for pedestrians who wanted to get to their parking spots. There wasn’t a lot of clearance but Chapel threaded the needle and shot through to the other side, just as a car was coming into the garage. The car’s horn blared and someone shouted a warning, but Chapel just twisted around and shot past the side of the car, out into a wide street beyond.

Nadia was right on his tail as he blasted through an intersection and slipped between two lanes of traffic. Up ahead he saw that the road opened into a broad plaza with the huge curved wall of a stadium filling up half the sky down there. Traffic swirled around the stadium in a vast gyre, the cars inching forward against gridlock.

Chapel cut some of his speed and let Nadia catch up to him so they could talk again. “Did we lose them?” he asked.

“We must have,” she said, as they joined up with the barely moving traffic circle. “There was no way he could get through there.”

Chapel nodded and studied the cars around him. The drivers were all staring at them, but that couldn’t be helped. An American and a woman who looked like Nadia riding scooters were bound to attract attention in Tashkent.

“So who’s this contact we’re meeting with?” Chapel asked, as they crept forward, around the circle. They were moving so slowly they had to put their feet down so their scooters didn’t fall over. It gave them a chance to talk, though Chapel would have preferred to keep moving — he never liked feeling trapped, even in gridlock.

“She’s trustworthy. I know that’s what you’re asking. At least,” Nadia called over to him, over the traffic noise, “we can trust her not to betray us to the SNB.”

“That’s a big ‘at least,’” Chapel said.

Nadia shrugged. “We need certain things for our trip into the desert. Only one person in Tashkent can get us what we need. Therefore, we must trust her. She’s a vory. You know what that means?”

Chapel grimaced. “Russian mafia.”

“The word means ‘thief-in-law,’ a lawful thief,” Nadia told him. “One who follows the thief’s code.”

“A criminal. Every criminal I ever met followed the same code — do what benefits them, and everyone else can go to hell.”

Nadia laughed. “You in the West, you will never understand. The mafiya—the gangs — do you know where they came from? The gulags. They were born in Stalin’s prison camps. They hate nothing so much as central government. The irony is, they have come to be so powerful, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, they are a kind of government in themselves. The vory—”

“Car,” Bogdan said.

Chapel stared at the hacker. “Yes, Bogdan, there are lots of cars here,” he said.

The Romanian shook his head. “That car,” he said, and pointed with one very long finger.

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.

There were two other people in the room, beyond the sentinel who had ushered them in. One was a young man, maybe even younger than Bogdan, in a maroon tracksuit. He held a ridiculously large pistol in each hand. He kept his weapons pointed at the floor.

The other inhabitant of the room was a woman who was maybe ten years older than Chapel. She wore a turtleneck sweater, and despite the years written on her face, her hair was black and silky and formed a great mane around her head and fell nearly to her waist. She wore a necklace with a seagull pendant, and when she saw Nadia, she came running over to kiss her on both cheeks. The two of them spoke for some time in a language that sounded mostly like Russian, though Chapel didn’t understand much of the vocabulary. He knew that Russian prison inmates had created their own language, a kind of patois of code words and slang called Fenya — handy for making deals around people who weren’t in the loop.

When they were done, they both turned to look at Chapel. “Jim,” Nadia said, “meet Varvara. She’s an old friend and she’s going to help us out.”

Chapel held out his hand and the woman shook it.

“Traditionally,” Varvara said, her English deeply accented but fluent, “in my country when we welcome someone, we offer them bread and salt. I am afraid unless you wish to smoke or drink, I cannot be so courteous.”

Chapel smiled, though he wasn’t sure how much he liked this. He wasn’t thrilled that Nadia had used his real name, not the Jeff Chambers alias — even if they were all sticking to first names. “Thank you for meeting with us,” he said. “Your country, you say — so you’re not an Uzbek. You’re Russian.”

Varvara peered at him through hooded eyes. “An observant man,” she said. “People who pay attention can be dangerous.”

“Only if they’re enemies,” Chapel told her. He glanced around at the shelves, then back at the hole in the wall. “This is an ingenious setup you have here.”

“Oh?” Varvara asked.

Chapel nodded. “This location — totally hidden, but surprisingly convenient. You pay the train conductors to stop in the middle of the tunnel, just outside your warehouse, probably late at night when the trains are mostly empty. You load your contraband onto the subway trains and they can take your goods anywhere in the city, without the police seeing anything.”

Varvara’s eyes narrowed. She reached up and touched her seagull pendant. “You are perhaps thinking of informing the police of my operation?”

From the corner of his eye Chapel could see Nadia stiffen, just a little. This wasn’t how she had expected this meeting to go.

He ignored her. “Why would I do that? I have no interest in helping such a repressive regime. And I need your friendship if our own plans are going to move forward.”

Varvara nodded. “You’re just expressing… admiration for my resourcefulness, then?”

“Sure. Anyway, even if I wanted to inform on you, I’m sure you could brick this wall back up in an hour, move the goods out of this cellar in even less time. Then you just break through another cellar wall, somewhere else in the city, and resume your operation after only a minor delay.”

Varvara went over to the workbench and opened a low cabinet. Chapel was suddenly very aware of the two armed men standing behind him. If Varvara had just decided he was a threat and she wanted to go to work on him with a power drill or a pair of pliers, he wouldn’t be able to fight his way out. Maybe he’d pushed a little too hard. He glanced over at Nadia and saw a look of surprise on her face. She hadn’t expected him to say anything during this meeting. It looked like she was wondering why he had chosen to antagonize such a dangerous woman.

When Varvara lifted four crystal pony glasses from the cabinet, though, he knew he’d made the right decision. She slammed the glasses down on top of the workbench and reached for a bottle of vodka. Cracking it open, she said, “This one, Nadia dear, this American you should keep.” She laughed and poured three generous shots. “You see what he does? He shows he knows my business, that he’s two steps ahead of me, just in case I was thinking of betraying him. But he is also clear in that he knows he can’t truly hurt me. Very subtle, very sharp.” She handed one of the glasses to Chapel. “Are you looking for work, young man? I can always use smart fellows.”

“Sorry, I’ve got my own business to attend to,” Chapel told her.

“Then let us discuss it, eh? To mutual trust.” She raised her glass high. “You, Jim. You drink first.”

Chapel studied the liquor in his glass. He didn’t see any sign it had been poisoned or drugged, but then, he wouldn’t, would he?

Here goes nothing, he thought, and knocked back the drink. It was harsh, very strong stuff, more like moonshine than the vodka he was used to, but it didn’t make his throat close up or his heart stop.

Varvara laughed. “Brave, too. Now. To business. What do you need, Nadia darling, and where do you want it delivered?”

Three shots of vodka later, Chapel was starting to feel a little off his game, so he refused a fourth. Bogdan sat on the floor, staring morosely at his first shot. He’d been sipping at it for a while, much to the sneering disdain of the two gunmen.

Nadia and Varvara, however, had polished off half of a liter bottle already and were still coming up with things to toast — they were down to local football teams and the glorious memory of some gangster Chapel had never heard of, and they seemed in no hurry to stop. Between drinks they’d hammered out prices for a truck that could cross the desert, a large quantity of purified water, tents, camp stoves, preserved foods, fuel. At one point Varvara had suggested she could get them a very good deal on some camels, which she said would be even better for crossing the desert than the truck. Nadia’s eyes lit up at the idea, but Chapel was still sober enough to say no.

“This is how business is done, in this part of the world,” Nadia announced, when Chapel suggested that she might slow down on the drinking. Her cheeks were a little red and her eyes a little glazed. “You don’t know this because you are—” She stopped herself before announcing to the room that he was an American spy. “You are not used to it,” she finished, a little lamely.

Varvara didn’t seem impaired at all. She gave Chapel a sly look. “We’re almost done. Can I interest you in some Soviet-era maps of the desert? A bit out of date, but they show many things that history has forgotten. Perhaps if I knew what you were looking for, I could help you better.”

“What you don’t know, the SNB can’t beat out of you,” Chapel replied. Nadia seemed to find that uproariously funny. She laughed and sputtered and reached for the bottle to pour herself another drink. “Speaking of the local authorities,” Chapel said, putting his own glass down on the workbench, “what can you tell us about one who has a shaved head and a bristly mustache?”

“You’ll have to be more specific,” Varvara said. “That describes half the old men in Uzbekistan.”

Nadia laughed at that, too.

“He’s definitely ex-military,” Chapel said, remembering what he could about the man who’d been following them. “Very disciplined. The first time I met him he was feeding some pigeons.”

Varvara nodded her great mane of hair. “Konyechno, I figured it was him you meant. Jamshid Mirza. Interesting. You have drawn some very distinguished attention, there. Mirza was a colonel in the old Soviet army, and of course, a KGB man. He’s one of the top men in the SNB. You say he’s following you personally?”

“Everywhere we go,” Chapel confirmed.

Varvara shook her head. “If I hadn’t already promised to help you… Mirza might scare even me away. If he has taken an interest, he must think you are very important to his country. When you checked in at your hotel, what did you say you were doing in Tashkent?”

Chapel appreciated that she hadn’t asked the direct question — what his cover story was. “I told them I was an American venture capitalist looking into energy development.”

Varvara smiled. “This explains it. Mirza is also head of security for Uzbekneftegaz, the state energy concern. Uzbekistan has a number of very productive natural gas fields, up near what is left of the Aral Sea. So far mostly Korean companies have buzzed around these fields, but the government would be very interested in drawing American flies as well. He will be very disappointed when you don’t buy up half his country for exploitation.”

“In honor of mother earth!” Nadia said, lifting her glass. Varvara lifted her own and they drank. “Source of all Russian wealth, she gives so much and we are so bad to her.”

Chapel shook his head. He had no idea what she was on about. “There’s one last thing I want to talk about. More equipment.”

“Oh?” Varvara asked.

“Guns,” Chapel said. “Can you get us some weapons?”

Varvara lifted an eyebrow. “Now I definitely don’t want to know what you’re doing out in the desert. But yes, yes, of course. All the guns you desire.”

“In honor of guns!” Nadia said, and lifted her glass. “If you have enough of them, you don’t need politics.”

The negotiations stretched on a while longer. Varvara named an absurdly high price, which Nadia haggled with for a while before getting the total down to a number that was only barely ludicrous. They completed things with one last shot of vodka and a great deal of hugging and cheek-kissing. Varvara even grabbed at Bogdan and kissed him, though he tried to squirm out of her arms the whole time, which she seemed to find endearing rather than insulting.

Varvara made a phone call, and a few minutes later Chapel heard a loud rushing noise and a squeal of brakes as a subway train pulled up at the hole in the wall. The train’s doors opened and revealed an empty car. Chapel, Nadia, and Bogdan got on board and took the train back to Kosmonavtlar Station. Once off the train, Nadia almost ran up the stairs. She didn’t seem nearly as drunk as she had back in the contraband warehouse, and Chapel wondered how much of that had been for show.

While they were still underground, Chapel leaned in close and asked, “You’re certain we can trust Varvara?”

Nadia snorted out a laugh. “Always with you, the trust issues.” She smiled and grabbed his arm playfully. “Occupational hazard, yes? If we can trust anyone, it is my friend. She was the wife of a very famous vory, a man of impeccable honor. After he died, she took over his operation, something almost unheard of here, but no one can doubt her position now. To be accepted by other thieves she has been ruthless in her time. But she and I get along very well, and she has helped me in the past. It’s nice dealing with a woman. All the men, the male vory, they just want to fuck me. To prove they can.” She gave Chapel a sly look. “I think they watched too many James Bond movies, with the ice queen Russian spies who melt in the arms of the right man.”

Chapel ignored the flirtation. “You seem to know a lot of criminals,” he said, glancing over at Bogdan, who was lost in his headphones.

“Kleptocracy,” Nadia shrugged. “It is how things work here. You want information, you want more than the local government is willing to give, you go underground. In this case, literally.”

They headed up the stairs and then had a long walk back to where they’d left the scooters. Nadia turned them in and got her deposit back, and then they returned to the hotel, taking their time, trying to look like innocent tourists.

Chapel was not surprised at all to find a man with a shaved head and an immaculate mustache waiting in the lobby, sitting casually on a leather sofa near the reception desk. Apparently Mirza had come back here after losing them in the city. There was no way to get to the elevators without walking right past him.

“Mister Chambers!” the SNB man called out, as Chapel passed by. “Did you have a good day? See many of our wonderful sights?”

Chapel gave the man a nasty look. “We rented some scooters and took a tour. Can’t say I was much impressed.”

“It occurs to me we have not been introduced. My name is Jamshid Mirza. Perhaps you’d do me the honor of letting me show you around tomorrow,” he said, smiling. “There are some people you should meet.”

For a second Chapel was certain he was about to be arrested. He met Mirza’s gaze as steadily as he could and tried to think of what to do next. “Sorry,” he said. “We have plans. Business.”

“Of course. Perhaps you’d like to discuss that business with me? You’ll find, I think, that Tashkent can be very friendly to foreign capital. Our policies may seem harsh to you, but we can be very… lenient for foreign investors. All manner of things can be forgiven.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, buddy,” Chapel said, and headed once more toward the elevators.

He expected Mirza to stop him, or at least make some more cryptic comments, but the SNB man seemed to be done.

Back in the suite Bogdan retired sulkily to his room without a word. Nadia went and got her bug sweeper and went over the usual spots — light fixtures, under the beds and tables, the television set, the phone. She found three new microphones, each of which she destroyed. She dumped the broken circuit boards in a glass ashtray and then rubbed at her forehead with one hand. “I think I need a nap.”

“I’m not surprised, the way you were putting away that vodka,” Chapel said, smiling at her.

She smiled back. “I know Russians are famous around the world for drinking too much,” she said, “and there is some truth to this particular stereotype. I’ve never had the time to build up a proper Russian liver, though.”

“Don’t worry,” Chapel said. “I’ll stand watch while you sleep.”

She nodded and turned toward her room. Stepping inside she held the door open for a second. She said nothing, though, and after a few seconds she closed the door behind her.

Chapel didn’t want to risk going down to one of the hotel’s restaurants — it was too likely he’d find Mirza there, waiting to ask him more questions. His cover story was ironclad, and if Mirza called up the company that Jeff Chambers supposedly worked for, he would find receptionists and executives to vouch for Chapel’s bona fides, but Chapel knew any cover was only as good as one’s ability to act. That had never been his forte. If Mirza really started grilling him, Chapel knew he would eventually give himself away. He wouldn’t know enough about the geology of natural gas domes or he would forget what town Jeff Chambers was born in, and then Mirza’s promised “lenience” would disappear in a hurry.

So he ordered room service, and a few minutes later a smiling bellhop came to the door with three orders of lamb curry and a couple bottles of Baltika 3, the only beer on the menu that Chapel had heard of. Chapel tipped the bellhop to just leave the trays by the door. When the kid was gone, he went over the trays with Nadia’s bug finder. It squealed and hissed, but it didn’t find anything, so he brought the food inside. Just past the door he found Bogdan waiting, holding a pair of ice tongs over his head.

“Is all I could find,” Bogdan said, gesturing at the tongs.

“Okay,” Chapel said. “And what exactly did you want them for?”

“In case the boy was an assassin, I would fight him off,” the hacker said, putting the tongs down on a table.

Chapel kind of wished the bellhop had been a threat, just so he could have seen what the ensuing battle looked like. Bogdan was so thin he looked like an averagely built bellhop would be able to break him over his knee.

Smiling to himself, Chapel pushed past the hacker, a tray balanced on each hand. The bug finder made a high-pitched shrieking noise, and he nearly dropped the food. Putting the trays down carefully, he picked up the bug finder and waved it over the trays again, thinking maybe he’d missed something. When he got no result, he pointed it at Bogdan and heard it start to screech.

Bogdan stood very still, his eyes wide.

Chapel moved closer, sweeping the bug finder up and down the length of Bogdan’s long body. When it passed over the MP3 player, it went crazy.

Chapel looked up into Bogdan’s terrified eyes. He switched off the bug finder. “False alarm,” he said, and smiled.

Bogdan nodded and tried to smile back. It didn’t quite take.

When dinner was set up, Chapel went to Nadia’s door and found it was slightly ajar. He pushed it back and looked inside her room and saw her curled up in her bed, one arm flung wide and her small hand dangling over the edge. She was snoring like a steam engine, but her face was open and innocent and he thought—

Well. It didn’t matter what he thought.

“Do not wake her,” Bogdan whispered. The hacker had come up beside Chapel unnoticed, and Chapel nearly jumped when he spoke. “She may lash out and karate chop you in neck if you touch her now.” He pointed at his own ridiculously long neck and shook his head.

“She does look like she could use the sleep,” Chapel said. “We’ll start without her.” He closed her door and went over to the table. “It’ll give us a chance to talk. You and I have never had a proper conversation, have we, Bogdan?”

The hacker dropped himself into one of the table’s chairs and started picking apart a tray of food. He ignored the beer and drank tap water instead, but he put away an astonishing amount of curry while Chapel sat and watched him. It was clear if they were going to have a conversation, Chapel was going to have to get it rolling.

“So,” he said, trying to think of anything the two of them had in common. What he came up with wasn’t a great start. “How long have you known Nadia?”

Bogdan peered at him through his fringe of bangs. “Some years.”

“Since before 2011?” he asked. The year Nadia got her medal. The year she had worked her biggest mission, as far as Chapel knew.

“No, just then,” Bogdan said. “I am not sure this is proper for discussion.”

Chapel waved one hand in the air. “I know. It was a secret mission, and you’re not supposed to talk about it with people who don’t know what you did.” He nodded affably and sipped at his beer. “But I’m a secret agent type, too. I know about things.”

Bogdan lifted his fork as if he would defend himself with it. Chapel sat back and pretended he wasn’t extremely interested in what Nadia had done in 2011. Clearly Bogdan wasn’t going to give anything away for free. Luckily, part of Chapel’s intelligence training had included a course in cold reading — the art of tricking people into thinking you already knew their secrets, so they could talk about them freely.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me anything. I mean, I know most of the details already.” He thought of what Nadia’s mission might have been. If she’d been working for FSTEK and she’d been in Romania, it had to deal with technology transfer. If she had gotten mixed up with organized crime, that meant she had been tracing something stolen or misappropriated. And Nadia wasn’t just a low-level bureaucrat, tracing serial numbers on stolen computers. She would have been working at the very top level of FSTEK’s operations. “It was about the missing nukes,” Chapel tried, knowing if he had it wrong he would reveal his ignorance. But if he got it right—

Bogdan put his fork down on the table, very carefully. “May I have one of the beers?” he asked, in a very tentative voice.

Chapel popped the cap off the remaining beer and handed it over. Bogdan sucked deeply at the bottle, drinking half of it in one gulp.

Gotcha, Chapel thought.

“I can see why you’re so paranoid,” he told Bogdan. “No. That’s harsh. Let’s say — reasonably cautious. You must have pissed off some very powerful people when you took away their radioactive toys. A lot of guys wouldn’t have done what you did. They would have been too scared. But you—”

“It was a challenge, yes,” Bogdan said. “The bigger the challenge, the harder to resist, sometimes.”

Chapel nodded. “And you worked a pretty sweet hack on them.”

“The sweetest.” Bogdan’s eyes were getting brighter, and not just because of the alcohol he’d consumed. People like Bogdan — loners, reclusive intellectual types — had a desperate need to brag when they were in the real world. They worked miracles in the virtual world, in cyberspace, but nobody was there with them to congratulate them on their successes. They told themselves that didn’t matter, but it did.

Chapel thought of Angel and the various methods she used to break into encrypted systems. “What did you use? A keystroke logger? Packet sniffer? Or just brute force decryption?” Chapel had no idea what most of those words meant, but he was certain Bogdan would.

“Not even,” Bogdan said, looking down at his plate. He was starting to smile, for real this time. “Social engineering,” he whispered. “Is always the best way.”

“Social engineering?”

Bogdan nodded and put his hands on the table, fanning his fingers. “Computers, you will see, are very, very good at holding to secrets. They are designed this way. But information is useless if it cannot be accessed by human beings. Someone always knows the passwords. Someone can always get in. You find that someone, you can work them. Hack them, instead of machine. In this case, it was a woman. It was she who made arrangements. You know, meetings between the seller and the buyer. She introduced the parties but had no knowledge of what they sold or how much they paid.”

“A cutout,” Chapel said. “That’s what we call it.”

Bogdan nodded. “Did not matter — she was the link, the one at center of deal. Knows everybody, e-mails everybody. Middle-aged woman, single, no babies, yes? Is a common enough problem, in postfeminist world.”

“Sure,” Chapel said, having no idea what he was getting at.

“She had online dating page. So I seduce her.”

Chapel’s eyes went wide. The idea of the lanky hacker seducing someone — anyone — was pretty hard to imagine. “What, you bought her flowers, took her for drinks—”

“Online. I created a profile with a fake picture, fake statistics. Same height as me, but that was all. Said I was a banker in Ploiesti — this is a town just north of Bucharest — with a dead wife. Wanted children in a hurry, wanted someone to travel with, grow old with. Best sales pitch possible. She responded and we go to chatting. I looked up love poetry, romantic comedies online, looking for code words. I found the words most often used in successful dating profiles. My e-mails to her are peppered with these words. She never stood a chance.”

“Jesus, I feel sorry for her now,” Chapel said.

Bogdan shrugged. “To be fair, she was setting up this deal to sell stolen plutonium to a rogue state.”

“Yeah, I guess there’s that,” Chapel replied.

Bogdan had warmed to his topic and didn’t want to stop talking. “She responded very quickly, wanted to set up a date. I said my schedule is too hectic, me being a banker, you see? So she gives me her telephone number so we can text, and her private e-mail she checks always.”

“And then she started talking about the deal?” Chapel asked.

“No, of course not! If I ask about that, she sees through me in an instant. No. I just want her contact information. As soon as I get it, I delete my profile, and this fabled banker man, he just disappears from the earth. I had her e-mail address, now I need her password. From her VKontakte page I learned the town where she was born — Lugoj; mother’s name — Irina Costaforu; favorite movies, everything. I call up the e-mail host service and say I have forgotten my password, can they help? They ask security questions, and I know the answers.”

“Her mother’s maiden name, the town where she was born—”

“What secondary school she went to, yes, what is her favorite color… I am in. They help me change her password, and now I control her e-mail. I download all her contacts and e-mail folders. Then I change this password back to what it was before, so she does not know I have been there.”

“You mean she never even suspected what happened?”

“Whole thing, from online profile to download, takes six hours,” Bogdan said, really smiling now. “I did it in middle of the night, when she sleeps. I turn this information over to Nadia and my part, it is done.”

“Wow,” Chapel said. “That’s incredible. You stole her e-mail that easily? Remind me never to piss you off!”

Bogdan actually laughed, then, a kind of wheezing, halting noise that made him sound like he was choking. It was the laugh of somebody who hadn’t heard a good joke in his entire life and had no practice at laughing. “I am good, yes. The best, maybe.”

“I’ll say. So this woman you duped, what was her name?”

Instantly Bogdan’s face fell. He picked up his fork and speared another piece of lamb. Chapel could tell he’d pushed too hard.

“Sorry,” he said. “I forgot myself for a second. You can’t talk about this.”

“It was a secret mission,” Bogdan said. “I take very serious. Nadia would not like if I told you anything, any small detail.”

“I understand,” Chapel said. “We won’t talk about it again.”

“Thank you,” Bogdan said, and stuffed the lamb in his mouth.

“These once-a-day phone calls are driving me crazy, sugar,” Angel said.

Chapel smiled in the dark of his room. “Me, too. But I have to wait until I’m sure we won’t be overheard.” Through the thin walls of the hotel suite he could hear Bogdan snoring in the room next door. The one beer the hacker had drunk with dinner seemed to be enough to put him down for the night. As for Nadia, she’d never woken up for dinner, and the last time he’d checked on her she was still sprawled across her own bed. He needed to get to sleep himself — tomorrow was going to be a big day, the day they illegally crossed the border into Kazakhstan, if everything went right. But first he needed to check in. “We met with a Russian gangster today,” he told Angel. “She’s the one providing our equipment. Her first name was Varvara.”

“Let me check the Interpol database,” Angel said. He listened to her click away at her keyboard. It was one of the most reassuring sounds he knew — it meant she was looking out for him. “Here we go. Varvara Nikolaevich Lyadova. Wanted in four countries, that’s impressive. Arrested on a dozen different charges, actually did jail time on one of them — wow. Murder.”

“Yeah?” Chapel asked, suddenly worried.

“Let’s look at the case files… okay, actually it was conspiracy murder. That’s why she only did three years. Looks like her husband killed a rival gangster back in the midnineties and Varvara helped destroy some evidence. A bloody shirt… when the police came for her husband, she jammed it in the oven and baked it for thirty minutes at four seventy-five degrees. They pulled it out before it was good and crispy, but at that point it was tainted. They couldn’t get any DNA from the blood.”

“Huh. So she was loyal to her husband, and kind of smart about it,” Chapel said. “The real question is — will she show us that same kind of loyalty? I know she’s worked with Nadia before.”

“Well, my sources say she’s a real Russian gangster, not just a run-of-the-mill criminal. She’s what they call a vory v zakone, a—”

“‘Lawful thief,’” Chapel said, “yeah, I got that from Nadia. Does that really mean anything, though?”

“Probably yes,” Angel said. “The Russian gangs are what they call a Bratva, a brotherhood. They live by a very strict code. Unless they have a good reason to sell you out — if they think you’re a police informant or something — they stick by a deal. Even if they don’t care much about moral codes, they have a financial reason to honor their obligations. If they just took your money and never delivered the goods, they would lose their reputation with other vory, and that would cost them in the future. From everything I see here, Lyadova is the kind to stick to her word.”

Well, that was something, anyway. “Nadia seems to have pretty good contacts in the criminal world. She says that’s just how things work over here.” Chapel frowned. “Speaking of which — I just had a very informative conversation with your opposite number.”

“You mean Bogdan Vlaicu? He’s good, but I wouldn’t put him in my league,” Angel said, sounding a little huffy.

Chapel grinned to himself. “I don’t know. I got him to tell me how he hacked into a ring of plutonium smugglers.”

“Plutonium?”

“Apparently that was why Nadia got that medal back in 2011. I don’t know the details, but I figure the American intelligence community might be interested in knowing that the Russians let some radioactive material walk away back then.”

“I think they’d be very interested in knowing about that,” Angel said. He could almost hear her sitting up straighter in her chair. “What can you tell me?”

“I can give you a puzzle to work out,” he said.

“You always did know the way to a girl’s heart, sugar.”

Chapel tried to remember exactly what Bogdan had said. “The deal was brokered by a woman whose mother’s maiden name was Irina Costaforu. The woman was born in a town in Romania called Lugoj.”

“You’re going to make this one too easy,” Angel said.

Chapel shrugged. “Bogdan seemed to think it was a piece of cake. See what you can figure out. I don’t mind telling you — the story of how he got that information was a little chilling. It’s way too easy to find out everything about somebody these days.”

“If you give all your personal details to a company like Facebook that makes its money by selling personal information to third parties, well… maybe you don’t really have a lot of right to complain,” Angel suggested.

Chapel didn’t agree but he let it go. “It got me thinking. If he could break into this woman’s e-mail so easily, it shouldn’t be too hard to check up on somebody you were worried about. Just to make sure they were okay. You know, without them knowing about it.”

“You’re right. That would be very easy,” Angel said. Any trace of flirtation was gone from her voice, and he knew she had guessed where he was going with this.

“I’m not suggesting that I want to cyberstalk Julia—”

“You just want me to check her e-mail and find out if she’s okay,” Angel said, completing his sentence. “Think about this one pretty hard, Chapel. Think about if that’s what you really want me to do for you.”

He sighed and laid the tablet down on the bed beside him. “No,” he said.

“No?”

“No, I don’t want you to do that.”

“Good,” she told him. “Because I would have refused. That sort of thing isn’t cool. What did she say when she left?”

“She said she would call me. That I should give her some space. That was… more than a month ago.” He closed his eyes. “Do I sound as pathetic to you as I do to myself, right now?”

“Chapel, I know you miss her. But your relationship status is not a matter of national security. I’m here to help you with your mission, with—”

“I know, Angel,” he said. “I know. I just — miss her a lot. I’m only human, you know? I miss her and I wish… I wish for a lot of things.”

Angel’s voice softened. “I get it,” she said.

“Okay. Okay. Moving on,” Chapel said. “Tomorrow we’re going into the desert and—”

He stopped. Focused all his attention on what he’d just heard.

“Angel, I’ll call you back.”

“Sure, honey.”

He pulled off his earphones and hit the power switch on the tablet. Got out of the bed and padded to the door. With his ear up against the thin wood, he held his breath and just listened.

There — he heard it again. The sound of metal scraping against metal. What could it be? He waited until he heard it a third time, then slammed open the door, bursting out into the common room of the suite. If someone had come to plant more bugs — or something worse, he would—

Nadia stood in the middle of the room, wearing nothing but a thin nightgown. She was holding a fork and the lid from one of the room service trays.

“I woke up hungry,” she said.

“I see you couldn’t sleep, either,” she said, as Chapel stepped out into the common room.

He realized he was staring at her. Moonlight coming in from the balcony doors painted a swath of silver down her arm, the curve of her hip, the long straight muscle in her thigh. He forced himself to look away. “I’m sorry we didn’t wake you. Bogdan thought maybe you’d been trained to kill anyone who touched you while you slept.”

Nadia grinned around a forkful of cold lamb. “I suppose I needed the rest. The worst part about drinking during the day is that you get the hangover before you go to bed. I seem to have missed most of that, for which I am glad.”

Chapel walked over to the table and put his hands on the back of a chair. Her hair was mussed and her eyes were hooded with sleep, still. “Are you going to be able to go back to sleep after you eat that stuff?” he asked.

“Should be no problem.”

He nodded. “We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow, and—”

“Perhaps you should be sleeping yourself,” she told him, with a smile. She poured herself a glass of water and drank it down without stopping. “Wouldn’t do to be dehydrated before we even reach the desert.” She put the glass down and looked over at the balcony doors. “Come get some air with me.”

Chapel took a deep breath. Bad idea, he thought. Terrible idea. “All right,” he said.

She stepped out onto the balcony and leaned far out over the concrete railing, way out over a twenty-story drop. Chapel came up behind her, watching the way her shoulders moved under the thin straps of her nightgown.

He reached for her, because he was afraid she might fall. He almost grabbed her arm to pull her back away from the railing. Then he took a breath and dropped his hand.

“I’ve been waiting so long for this,” she said.

“What’s that?” he asked.

She smiled at him over her shoulder. Then she leaned forward across the railing, lifting her feet off the balcony floor. A good strong wind at that point might have blown her over the edge. He moved toward her, but she laughed and put her feet back down.

“For years,” she said, “I have been working toward this moment. Toward shutting down Perimeter. Now it’s finally happening. It feels…”

Chapel almost sighed in relief, but stopped himself. “Unreal?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “No. This is very real. More real than anything in a long time. The world we live in, people like you and me — that is what never feels real to me. I think you must understand what I mean. We are sent out into the field, never really knowing what we’re after. We gather intelligence, we neutralize threats.” She shrugged. “Then it is home again, or what we call home, and ‘thank you for your service.’ No one explains why we did what we did. No one acknowledges we were ever there. Even our names are secrets. We are never allowed to mean anything, in case we are lost. But tomorrow — tomorrow I’m going to do something important. Something meaningful. And at least one person in the world will know I was there, that I did it.”

She turned to look at him. She reached for his hand, and he took it without a thought. Her small fingers stroked the hair on his artificial knuckles. “You will know, Jim. You’ll be my svidetel. You won’t forget me, as soon as I disappear.”

She lifted his hand to her lips, kissed it.

“Nadia,” he said, breathing out her name in a soft warning.

She shook her head. Kissed his hand again. He tried to pull it away, but she clutched at his fingers.

She brought the hand up to her face and made it cup her cheek. “Do you feel this?” she asked, rubbing her cheek against his silicone skin.

“Yes,” he told her. “Not as much as with the other one.” He could feel basic textures with the artificial hand, some temperature differences. He could definitely feel how soft her skin was.

“And this?” she asked, moving his hand. Pressing it against her breast. Through the thin fabric of her nightgown he could feel her nipple hardening.

“Nadia—”

“Shh. Just a moment,” she said. Her eyes were closed. She lifted his hand away from her body but didn’t let go of it.

It wasn’t his real hand. It wasn’t him that had touched her like that, it was a machine. It wasn’t him. That was an utter lie, but lies can be useful things. If this ended now, if she stopped, he could forgive himself, he could—

She brought the hand down past her waist. Turned a little so she could maneuver it inside her panties, press it against her soft and yielding flesh. One finger slipped inside her effortlessly and he felt her warmth, felt how wet she was.

He tried to pull back, pull away, but his fingers brushed her clitoris and she trembled, her body as tight and as tense as a violin string. He stroked her there and her shoulders jumped. Her eyes were closed and her mouth slightly open, her breath deeper and stronger than before.

This isn’t me, he tried to tell himself. It’s the fake arm, it’s not me.

He started to take his hand away, but she brought both of hers down, covering his hand, pressing it back into place. He felt like this was inevitable, that it couldn’t be stopped now, not when it had already gone too far. He made a small circle with his fingertip and she sagged, as if her knees were getting weak. He touched her again and felt the heat of her body between them, filling the thin sliver of air between her and his real body, his own flesh. He could put his other arm around her, draw her closer, but, no, he didn’t dare, this was wrong; he couldn’t keep doing this, he thought, even as his fingers found her clitoris again. His thumb and index finger held it from either side in the softest grasp, moving up and down the tiniest distance. He released her and she gasped; touched her again and she made a sound like a bird inside a cage that’s just been unlocked.

“Yes,” she whispered, as he moved his hand, such tiny, precise movements, “Please,” she said, and he increased the speed, the pressure, but just by the smallest amount. “Don’t stop,” she said. “Jim, please, don’t… don’t stop… don’t…”

She was hunched over his arm, her head down, only an inch from crashing into his chest. If any part of her touched him, he knew he would have to stop, but she was agile enough to balance herself there as if she knew, as if she knew that was the only way this could keep happening. He could feel her gasping breath on his skin, but even as her hair slid down across her face it didn’t touch him. Only his hand was in contact with her body at all, only his fingertips.

He felt her start to shake, felt her body squeeze under his hand. And then with one convulsive noise like a sob she was there, the cage was open, the bird was free, its wings thrashing and taking flight…

She lifted her hands toward his shoulders as she came, reached for his actual flesh, his body, and he knew if she touched him once, he would not be able to resist, that he would scoop her up in his arms and carry her back to his bed and he would make love to her — no, at this point, the way he was feeling, he would fuck her. If she touched him. If she touched him at all.

He drew his artificial hand back, out of her panties, away from her. She stopped reaching for him. She let him go.

At the door leading back into the suite, he turned and looked at her there, in the moonlight. Her head was bowed and her hands gripped the railing and she was still trembling. “It’s all right,” she said. “You did nothing wrong. Try to get some sleep.”

He hurried back to his room and locked the door behind him. Sat down on his bed and reached up and unlatched the artificial arm, felt the clamps release and the arm fall away from him. He caught it with his good hand and wondered what to do with it. He wanted to throw it across the room. Smash it into pieces.

It hadn’t been long enough. For all he knew, Julia was trying to call him right then, trying to get back in touch and tell him she’d made a mistake.

No, he told himself. No, she hasn’t called. She’s not going to call. And Nadia is right here. Just waiting for me to get over myself.

Of course — there was the other reason this couldn’t happen. The fact that she was a foreign agent and that she might have orders to seduce him, to pump him for information.

He shook his head. He couldn’t resolve this. Couldn’t figure it out at all.

He cleaned and plugged the arm into a wall socket so it could recharge. Then he went back and sat on the bed and scrubbed at his face with his good hand, covered his eyes as if to keep anyone else from seeing what was happening there, behind them.

He did not sleep at all that night.

Nadia ordered down for breakfast the next morning, so they wouldn’t have to go down to the lobby and maybe run into Mirza. A huge platter of fruit and nuts and coffee and rolls came up to the room. Bogdan ate heartily, but Chapel and Nadia both just picked at the meal. Chapel drank a cup of coffee and announced he was ready to go.

Nadia looked at him and he looked away, as simple as that. Neither of them said anything, neither of them did anything to indicate that something had changed. “We’ll head down the back stairwell,” Nadia said. “There’s a service entrance at the back of the hotel. It will be monitored by cameras, but I doubt there will be anyone waiting for us there.”

Chapel nodded and hefted his bag. He led the way out into the hall, checking both ways to make sure it was clear before gesturing for the others to follow him. They weren’t expecting any trouble, but they wanted very much to get out of Tashkent without being followed.

It was a long walk down the stairs and then a short bustle through the kitchens of the hotel. A chef looked up and scowled at them, but he was too busy to say anything or chase them out of his stainless steel domain. The service entrance was unlocked and unguarded, and soon they were out into the alleyway behind the hotel, the early morning air already thick with exhaust fumes and the tape-recorded chant of a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer.

It wasn’t far to the metro station, just a few blocks, but it took far longer because they had to stay in the alleyways and back courts the whole way, sticking to where the night’s shadows still hadn’t been eroded by the rising sun. They never crossed a street or turned a corner without checking for watchers, for any sign of a tail.

They made it to the metro without incident. Boarded the first train to come along. Changed at the next station, took the next train, changed again. They got a few looks from early commuters, but the people of Tashkent were used to minding their own business and no one spoke to them.

Finally they took one last metro line to Tashkent Central Station in Mirabad, where Nadia bought three tickets with cash. She bought the tickets for the 8:30 train to Bukhara, though they had no intention of going that far. “It’s a shame. Bukhara’s lovely,” she said. “It’s one of the stops on the old Silk Road, and a UNESCO World Heritage site for its historic central—”

“Please,” Chapel said, shaking his overcaffeinated, sleep-deprived head. “Don’t play tour guide today.”

She laughed and tried to meet his eye, but he looked away. That simple.

The train was right on time. There were SNB people on the platform. Anyone could have made them out for secret police the way they scanned everyone’s face and asked random passengers for their tickets and papers. They didn’t seem to be looking for anyone in particular. Chapel gave them a wide berth and herded Bogdan and Nadia into the first car on the train. It set off on time, and within fifteen minutes they watched Tashkent fade away from the car’s windows, its dense streets thinning out to residential neighborhoods, to wide, open green spaces full of trees, and finally to cultivated fields.

No one came bustling into the car demanding papers. No men with shaved heads and mustaches appeared on the local platforms they stopped at. Nobody even called Jeff Chambers on his cell phone to ask when he was coming down from his room.

Eventually, Chapel let himself relax. A little. He exhaled deeply and plopped back in his seat and let the waves of exhaustion crash through him, driving all thoughts from his head.

Nadia smiled from the seat across from his. Tried to catch his eye.

He turned his head to the side to watch the dusty-looking crops stream by, the sun glinting on irrigation ditches and the occasional stream.

It was that simple. He just had to never meet her eye again, and he would be fine.

The train passed through the city of Samarkand, Uzbekistan’s second biggest. Chapel was sure it was important historically, and the name conjured up visions of a glittering past, of caravans of camels and spice merchants and dancing girls in veils, but the train didn’t stop long enough for him to even get a decent look at it.

Nor was he awake enough to pay much attention. He kept slipping into a doze, a sort of half-sleeping state where he was only minimally aware of his surroundings. He slipped in and out of dreams of swirling cigarette smoke — the car was full of it, even with the windows open — of brown landscape rushing by him, of the constant swaying of the train, of Nadia’s perfume, of Bogdan’s incessant clicking.

He blinked his eyes to try to clear them, but he was having trouble focusing. He could hear Bogdan’s fingers moving, make out a fluttering motion when he looked over at the hacker sitting next to him, but that was all. He fought through it, fought for consciousness, and saw Bogdan clicking away at his MP3 player, like he always did.

This time, though, something about it bothered him.

Bogdan was facing away from him, looking up the aisle between the rows of seats. He had his big headphones on, as always. His fingers were moving over the keys on the MP3 player the way a clarinetist might work the keys of his instrument. It looked like there were more keys on the MP3 player than Chapel would have expected — more than enough to pause or stop the music, fast-forward or reverse. The main body of the player was wrapped in duct tape, and it looked like Bogdan had modified a commercial unit to his own specifications.

Something else bothered Chapel about the setup, as well. Though he had rarely seen Bogdan without the headphones on, he’d never heard any music coming from them. They might just be very well insulated, but Chapel had never seen a pair of headphones that didn’t leak at least a little sound.

Chapel turned away, wanting to shake his head and just let it go. So the kid was obsessed with his music, so what? Plenty of people his age spent their whole lives with headphones on. Bogdan was exactly the sort of person who would want to block out the real world as much as possible. The constant clicking at the keys was just a nervous tic. Chapel had no idea if he was constantly zooming back and forward within a given track, or just adjusting the volume up and down, up and down.

He should just go back to sleep, he thought. He should just—

Inside his head something came together, a pair of jigsaw puzzle pieces fitting perfectly to each other and showing a glimpse of a bigger picture.

He forced himself to sit up, to stretch for a moment. Blood rushed back into his head and his extremities and he breathed deeply, pushing oxygen into his tired tissues. He stood up and reached for his small travel bag, pulling it down from the overhead bin. Across from him Nadia stirred and opened one eye — it looked like she’d been fully asleep.

“Just going to freshen up,” he told her.

She turned her head to the side and fell asleep again, instantly.

He pushed his way through the men in the aisle who were smoking and laughing at jokes in languages he couldn’t understand. In the tiny lavatory of the train car he opened his travel bag and took out his tablet and his own earphones. As soon as they were in place Angel greeted him.

“We weren’t supposed to talk again until tonight, sweetie,” she said. “Everything okay?”

“Fine, probably. I just thought of something I wanted to talk to you about. It concerns our young Romanian friend.”

“Vlaicu? What’s he up to now?”

“I’m not sure.” Chapel tried to figure out how to express his intuition. “We’ve been keeping him away from computers this whole time, anything with a screen and a keyboard.”

“Probably wise,” Angel said, “though if he’s anything like me, that’s got to smart. It would be like being hopelessly nearsighted and the people around you won’t let you have your glasses.”

“I’m sure he’ll survive a few days without the Internet. The thing is, I’m not sure he has to — I mean, I think he might have found a way to get online anyway.”

Angel suddenly sounded very excited. “You think he’s hiding something on his person? Well, maybe. A smartphone, or a tablet—”

“Nothing like that.” He described the MP3 player to her. “Last night when I was sweeping our rooms for bugs, the player made the bug finder go through the roof. I don’t know. It seems unlikely. There’s no screen, and maybe about ten keys total. Could you even make a computer like that? I know it sounds impossible—”

“Not at all, actually. The original computers didn’t have screens or keyboards — they used punch cards.”

“Yeah, but I’m talking about something a little more sophisticated,” Chapel said.

“Well,” Angel said, “Maybe. There was a famous case of a bunch of computer science guys from the University of California, back in the eighties. They built computers into their shoes, using their toes to work the controls.”

“Shoe computers? Did they do anything useful?”

Angel laughed. “They took Las Vegas for a bundle, actually. They worked out a way to predict where a roulette ball was going to land and rigged the game.”

“Jesus. I think Bogdan might have been hacking this whole time. When we were trying to lose our tail in Tashkent yesterday, I think he changed a traffic light, or at least made it change faster. And he — and Nadia — always seem to know when subway trains are about to arrive.”

“That’s pretty easy stuff. Let me think about this,” Angel said. She sounded almost breathless. “I mean, you could reduce your inputs down to a small number of keystrokes if you used modal shifts, you know, like holding down a shift or control key to change the character you type on a normal keyboard. Say you have two mode keys, and eight input keys; that gives you twenty-four basic key combinations, which is almost enough for a complete alphabetic input, and that doesn’t even include multimode inputs, conditional mode inputs—”

“You’re saying it could be done,” Chapel said. “But how would he remember all those combinations?”

“Just by practice,” Angel replied. “You do anything long enough and it becomes second nature. Do you remember exactly where, on a standard keyboard, the H key is? But I imagine you could type the word ‘hello’ without having to think about it.”

“And let me guess, he doesn’t need a screen, because—”

“The headphones!” Angel actually laughed in excitement. “This guy’s brilliant! He probably just used a normal text-to-speech module, the kind that blind people use. They can’t see a screen, so the computer just reads everything on the screen aloud for them. Those headphones tell him where he is on the net, and he uses the keys to move from page to page, to enter form data, to—”

“This is all guesswork,” Chapel said.

“True,” Angel said, disappointed. “Except… maybe we can find out for sure.”

“You have some way to scan for computers?” Chapel asked, incredulous. “By satellite?”

“No. But the tablet you’re using now does. It has a Wi-Fi transponder built into it. It can scan for wireless networks. That’s just standard equipment on any wireless device. I can use it to triangulate a specific network. Let me ping it… there. There are a couple of dozen wireless networks in your local area right now.”

“Really? In the middle of rural Uzbekistan?”

Angel laughed. “Don’t start expecting to freeload off somebody else’s wireless so you can download a bunch of YouTube videos. The signals I’m getting are way too weak for you to access — they might be miles away — but I can still detect them. They get stronger the closer you get to them. Go back to your seat now but leave your tablet turned on. When you’re sitting next to Vlaicu, touch the screen so I know you’re close. If one of the signals ramps up superhigh at that moment, I’ll know it’s his.”

“And you’ll be able to tell me what he’s looking at on the Internet?”

Angel sounded apologetic when she answered. “Well… no. The signal will still be locked and encrypted, and even I can’t beat 256-bit encryption. But at least you’ll know your hunch was right. What will you do then? Confront him? Confront Nadia?”

He thought about that. “Telling her I know about Bogdan’s computer won’t get me very far. Even if she admits she’s had him hacking away this whole time, so what? I’ve had you doing the same thing. It’s not like she’ll give me Bogdan’s password and we all get to share information, especially since I’m not letting her know about you. If you had enough time, do you think there’s any way you could break through his encryption? Maybe figure out his password?”

“Not directly. Not with a brute force hack. But maybe I can do something. I don’t know. Let me think about it. For now, let’s just find out if you’re right. If he even has a working computer.”

“Okay. Talk to you soon.”

Chapel slipped the tablet into his pocket, his earphones still in place, and stepped out of the lavatory. When he got back to his seat, he climbed over Bogdan’s long legs and sat back down, not even looking at the hacker, just watching the world blur past the windows. He settled himself in, then reached into his pocket and tapped the screen of the tablet.

For a second nothing happened. But then, in a very quiet voice, Angel whispered in his ear: “Gotcha.”

The train only stopped for a minute in the town of Vobkent, as if it were in a hurry to finish the last leg of its voyage to Bukhara. They had to rush to get their bags down and struggle through all the people standing in the aisle, but they managed to get down to the platform before the train chugged away again, leaving them behind.

On the map Vobkent had looked like little more than a flyspeck, but from the ground it was a vibrant, if sleepy little place, full of shops selling chicken feed and textiles. There was even a bit of tourist business — they saw a couple of European backpackers headed toward a minaret in the center of town. Its main attraction for Nadia, however, was that it was far enough away from Tashkent that it didn’t merit a significant SNB presence.

“Varvara said the truck and the supplies would be waiting on the north edge of town, in an abandoned battery farm,” she told Chapel.

Chapel nodded and folded up the map he’d been staring at, trying to get some sense of where they were headed. He scanned the street for taxis but found none. “I guess we’re walking,” he said.

“It’s only about a mile,” Nadia said, and started off at a brisk pace, her bag swinging from her arm.

It had been a hot day, and the late afternoon was showing no signs of cooling off. Before long Chapel had to wipe his brow. The streets of Vobkent were wide and open to the sun, and the smell of the desert was everywhere — everywhere, at least, that didn’t smell of chickens. They passed through the center of the town, through a zone of little shops selling phone cards and soft drinks, and then into a more residential neighborhood where old women sat in the shade of their doorways, fanning themselves with beautiful little pieces of cloth. Chapel tried to smile a lot and look at the architecture so he would seem like a lost tourist, though he supposed he wasn’t dressed for the part. He’d taken off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves, but he still looked like American energy executive Jeff Chambers. He’d brought clothes more appropriate for the desert, but he hadn’t had a chance to change since they left Tashkent that morning.

As they headed up a dusty avenue where the only shade came from the occasional tree, Nadia dropped back to walk alongside him. He didn’t move away from her, but he didn’t glance her way, either.

“We will not speak of what happened last night, apparently,” she said, her voice low. She didn’t look at him when she spoke, as if they were trading vital secrets. “I understand that you need some time to think.”

“Yeah,” Chapel said. He considered adding something, then decided against it. If he didn’t talk about what had happened, he didn’t need to think about it either. Instead he could focus on wondering what Bogdan was doing with his makeshift computer. The hacker was walking ahead of them, his long legs barely shuffling along but still managing to eat up the distance. As he walked he tapped at his MP3 player, as he always did.

“You will not even look at me now, it seems,” Nadia said.

Chapel shrugged. He adjusted his bag on his shoulder and made a point of turning to face her, still walking the whole time. He forced himself to look at her eyes.

What he saw there made him turn away again.

She didn’t look angry. She wasn’t winking or throwing suggestive looks his way either. She just looked sad. Like she understood, perfectly, how complex things were for him but she just wished they were… different. Simpler.

He imagined he probably looked much the same way.

“I’m not sure,” she said, when they were safely looking in different directions again, “what you thought was going to happen between us. We’re not the kind of people whose lives move toward oaths and ceremonies in little white churches. I wasn’t looking for a golden ring.”

Chapel had to squeeze his eyes shut for a second when he thought of the little jewelry box that was probably still sitting on the hall table back in Brooklyn.

“Our lives are not our own,” Nadia said. “We don’t get to make long-term plans.”

Chapel grunted in frustration. “I know that better than anyone,” he told her. “And I thought we weren’t going to talk about this.”

“Forgive me,” Nadia said. “But I really need to. She left you, Jim. She set you free.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Of course it does.” Nadia moved toward him, as if she would grab his arm. He took a step in the opposite direction, and from the corner of his eye he saw her drop her hands in frustration. “You have no obligation to a woman who—”

“Nadia!” he said, loud enough to make Bogdan turn around and look. Much louder than he’d intended to. “Look,” he said, lowering his voice. “I think in some weird way you’re actually trying to help. That you think I need to hear this. But everything you say is just making it worse.”

He was pretty sure she stared at him then, stared at him with wide eyes. He wouldn’t know because he refused to look in her direction. He turned his face away until he couldn’t even see her shadow.

Eventually she gave up on him and hurried forward to catch up with Bogdan. The two of them carried on some light conversation in what sounded to Chapel like Romanian. He couldn’t have followed it if he wanted to.

The road they were on petered out after another half mile or so. The shops and houses gave way to larger structures — warehouses, factory farms, and light industrial workshops. No one was on the street out there, and judging by the boarded-up doors and the broken windows it looked like the district had seen better days. It wasn’t much farther to their destination, a nondescript shed of a building maybe a hundred yards long but only one story high. Like many of the buildings they’d passed it was surrounded by a high chain-link fence, but the gate of this one was ajar.

Nadia dropped back to point it out to Chapel. “Come on,” she said. “We still have a job to do, and we must do it together. Whether you like it or not.”

“Fine,” Chapel said. “We can be professionals, at least.”

Nadia shook her head and sighed. Then she strode forward, toward the open gate. Chapel and Bogdan followed close on her heels.

It was clear right away that the shed had not been used in a long time. Its walls were made of corrugated tin that had turned white in the sun and rotted away in some places, big holes in the structure that showed only darkness and swirling dust. The ground around the shed was strewn with old litter — plastic shopping bags that skittered across the concrete like insects, old tractor tires full of stagnant water, broken wooden pallets. Climbing over all the debris took some work, since Chapel didn’t want to accidentally step on a rusty nail and give himself tetanus. Nadia scampered over it like a mountain goat, of course, while Bogdan carefully and painstakingly navigated around the trash, moving each foot carefully before setting it down as if he would be contaminated just by touching anything.

The front of the shed ended in a tall doorway wide enough to drive a car through. It was locked up tight, with a massive rusted padlock hanging from a chain with links as thick as Nadia’s wrists. She rattled the chain for a second then let it drop back with a bang. “There must be a side entrance,” she said.

Chapel scanned the street behind them. This wasn’t the kind of place tourists should be investigating. Anyone who saw them now might remember the strange foreigners wandering around the abandoned battery farm — and if they remembered them, they could tell the SNB what they’d seen. Luckily the street was deserted.

Nadia made her way around the shed, climbing over a pile of blown-out old tires so high she could have climbed up onto the roof from its top. When she came down on the other side she was out of view, so Chapel hurried to follow as best he could. He heard her call out, and when he finally caught up with her, he saw she’d found a doorway that wasn’t locked.

He followed her inside, into the low, dim interior of the place. The far end of the shed was wide open and let in enough sunlight to dazzle him. He could only make out the rough outlines of what he saw. The walls were lined on both sides with hundreds of chicken coops, tiny cages made of thin wire. Narrow conveyor belts ran along beneath the coops, perhaps to catch the eggs the chickens had once laid. There didn’t seem to be anything alive inside the shed now except some ants that crawled over his hand when he touched the door frame. He shook them off and walked farther inside.

At the far end, near the open doors, he could make out the silhouette of the truck. It was bigger than he’d expected, a high square-cabined thing with a shovel-shaped nose that made it look more like a troop carrier than a commercial vehicle. It sat on eight massive fat tires, each with its own elaborate suspension. He supposed it needed all those tires to gain purchase on sand, but he could imagine less conspicuous vehicles to use on a covert mission.

“Hello?” Nadia called out, her voice echoing off the steel rafters of the shed.

There was no answer.

Chapel came up beside her, wondering why this felt wrong.

“Someone was supposed to be here to show us how the truck works,” Nadia said. “Varvara told me that someone would be here.”

Chapel nodded and walked ahead of her, toward the truck. He tried to keep his ears open to any sound, but his shoes crunched on the old dust and debris that covered the shed’s floor.

His eyes were slowly adjusting to the weird light in the shed. He thought he saw something inside the cab of the truck — maybe their contact had fallen asleep in there and hadn’t woken when Nadia called. Chapel hurried over to the driver’s-side door. It was five feet up off the ground, reached by a short folding ladder. He climbed up, holding on to the door’s handle, and tried to peer inside through the smudged glass of the window.

That was when he saw the bullet hole.

The glass of the truck’s windshield had been punctured by a small-caliber round — he guessed a rifle shot — leaving the familiar cobweb-shaped cracks in the glass. Their contact was inside but he wasn’t moving. Chapel pulled open the door and reached inside, barely catching the man as he slumped out of the cab and started falling toward the floor of the shed.

Chapel let the body fall the rest of the way, then jumped down to examine it.

“Someone beat us here,” he whispered, and gestured for Nadia to get down. If the shooter was still somewhere nearby, if the rifle was trained on anyone who approached the truck—

But the gunshot Chapel expected never came.

He ducked low and studied the body. The man had been about Bogdan’s age, just a kid. He had dark hair and a sad little excuse for a goatee, and the expression on his face was one of surprise. The shot had gone in through his left eye, probably killing him instantly. “Jesus,” Chapel breathed.

Nadia came up behind him, ducking low to use one of the truck’s tires for cover.

“Who did this?” Chapel asked her, keeping his voice down.

“How would I know that?”

“Those gangsters who were chasing Bogdan? Would they come this far? Or maybe Varvara has some enemies? Think, Nadia.”

She shook her head, but even in the half-light he could tell from her face that she knew something. He started to demand more answers, but he was interrupted as Bogdan shouted for them.

“I’ll get him,” Nadia said.

Chapel nodded. “There should be guns in the truck — I’ll look for them.” He climbed back up the side of the truck, feeling very exposed. If the sniper was still out there somewhere… but he got inside the cab without being shot. There were four seats inside, big bucket seats that looked like they belonged in an airplane instead of a land vehicle. The driver’s seat was covered in sticky blood that hadn’t had a chance to dry, even in the stuffy cab. Their contact must have been killed recently.

There was a hatch set into the back of the cab, between the rear two seats, which led to the cargo compartment at the rear of the truck. Keeping his head down Chapel moved back there and opened the narrow hatch, then slipped back into darkness. Light streaming in from the cab showed him there was a lamp set into the ceiling of the cargo compartment, but he couldn’t see how to switch it on — and wouldn’t have if he could, since that would have given any hypothetical sniper a great target to work with.

Slowly Chapel’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. The cargo compartment was packed full of supplies. Most of the room was taken up by fuel and water tanks and huge spare tires. There were some crates toward the back, next to the rear doors. The guns had to be there. He climbed in over the spare tires and started making his way over to the crates, then stopped in place when he heard a sound.

A series of sounds — a repetitive banging noise, like someone hitting metal with a hammer. The sound a sledgehammer might make as it pounded on a rusty padlock.

Someone was trying to get into the shed.

Chapel moved to the back doors of the truck and felt around until he found the latch that opened them. He eased one of the doors open just a crack so he could see outside.

The locked doors of the shed rattled and banged, and he could see dust sifting down across them. They hadn’t been opened in a long time, and they screeched as the lock broke and they sagged open. He heard someone shout, and then the doors flew open all at once and four men came rushing through, each of them carrying a pistol. Three of them were blond, and one wore glasses.

It was the same man he’d fought back in Bucharest, one of the gangsters who’d come for them when they were picking up Bogdan.

Had the Romanian gangsters followed them all this way? It seemed unlikely but Chapel definitely recognized the man’s face. Glasses even had a bandage on his left wrist — where Chapel had stomped on it.

The four men moved quickly into the shed, spreading out, their pistols covering the decrepit chicken coops, the rafters overhead, the dead body of Varvara’s driver. They weren’t trying to be subtle, this time — they looked like they expected a fight.

Well, Chapel aimed to give them one.

With the back door of the truck cracked open, a little light spilled into the cargo compartment. Just enough for Chapel to make out the various boxes and crates stowed there. One looked very familiar to him, a long, narrow wooden crate. He reached for its lid and found that it wasn’t — thank God — nailed shut. Inside he found a bunch of torn-up newspapers that stank of gun oil. He reached in and felt around to see what kind of weapons Varvara had provided.

She hadn’t stinted on the firepower. He felt a couple of pistols in there and the long wooden stock of an AK-47 assault rifle. There were clips for each of the firearms, already loaded with bullets.

Outside of the truck the four men moved step by step through the shed, their guns up and ready. Chapel had no idea where Nadia or Bogdan might be. He had to assume he was on his own for this. He pulled out the AK-47 and one of its curved clips.

Now came the tricky part. He slotted the clip and drove it home, as gently as he could. It made a sharp click as it locked into place, a sound the whole world was probably familiar with from hearing it in so many movies.

Outside the truck someone spoke, but he couldn’t catch the words. They must have heard the click.

He couldn’t give them a chance to figure out where it came from. He slid the firing selector on the rifle all the way down, to semiauto, and kicked open the truck doors, then jumped backward out of the truck and down onto the floor of the shed.

The four gunmen must have split up, two on either side of the truck. On the left side, one had climbed up the ladder to look inside the cab. Another had bent to look under the truck in case anyone was hiding there.

Chapel didn’t waste time looking for the other two. He brought the rifle up and squeezed the trigger, releasing a burst of three rounds into the body of the one hanging on the side of the cab. The man fell away from the truck instantly, and Chapel swiveled around even as the one looking under the truck started to stand back up.

The man had time to look over at Chapel, time for his features to take on an expression of surprise. Chapel’s second burst caught him in the chest and knocked him sprawling backward, onto the floor.

The noise of his firing echoed loud enough in the shed to drive any thoughts out of Chapel’s head. He moved on instinct, dodging left around the side of the truck, keeping his body behind one of the huge tires. He heard movement on the other side of the vehicle — the two men who had gone to the right, moving to react to the sudden attack.

They were smart enough, or disciplined enough, not to just come running around the side of the truck and straight into Chapel’s line of fire. He heard them shout back and forth, and though he couldn’t understand their words, he was sure they were making a plan to flank him. One would come around the front of the truck, the other around the back. He wouldn’t be able to fend them both off at once.

He had to move. He looked toward the open end of the shed, the same direction the truck was pointed. There might still be a sniper back there, the one who had killed Varvara’s driver. He glanced to the other side, toward the doors the gunmen had come through. There could be more of them out there, waiting for anyone foolish enough to come running out of the shed. The noise of the rifle fire would have alerted them, and they would be ready if Chapel showed his face.

The truck was too high to climb. He considered ducking underneath it, but if either of the remaining gunmen even glanced down there, he would be a sitting duck.

It was while he was thinking about what to do that he heard gunshots outside the shed, out front — pistol fire, and then someone screaming. He glanced out and saw a blur of movement, something fast bouncing around the piles of decayed wooden pallets. It took him a moment to realize it was a human being. He saw it drop to the ground and roll on its shoulder, then spring back up to its feet.

It was Nadia, he realized. She had found another gunman hiding in a pile of tires. The killer brought up his pistol to shoot her, but she was already striking, her hands clenched together for a blow that knocked the pistol right out of the gunman’s grip. He tried to recover, but she was just too fast for him, her knee coming up to catch him in the groin. As he bent forward she struck the back of his neck and put him down.

Behind her, another gunman was climbing up on a rusted water heater, lifting his pistol to aim at her head. She would never see him in time.

Chapel didn’t think about what he did next. He didn’t have time. Roaring like a bull to draw attention, he dashed toward the open front doors of the shed, not even bothering to keep his head down. The gunman who had aimed at Nadia turned a few degrees to the side.

Chapel lifted his rifle and fired a burst into the gunman’s midsection, making him twist and fall backward off the water heater. His pistol spun up into the air.

Nadia darted across the open space in front of the doors and dove for the pistol, sliding across the trash on her side. She didn’t quite catch the gun before it hit the ground, but Chapel could have sworn it was still spinning when she snatched it up.

He started to ask if she was all right, but then she lifted the pistol and pointed it right at him. He ducked to the side, and she fired twice, one shot, a beat, a second shot, neat as that.

Behind him he heard someone gasp in pain. Of course — he’d left two gunmen back there, Glasses and the dark-haired one. Chapel ducked down and turned to look. The dark-haired one was on the ground, clutching a wound on his neck. Blood streamed down his shirt inside his suit jacket.

“There’s another one in there,” Chapel told Nadia.

“I know,” she said. She fired again, but she must not have hit Glasses because she shook her head. “I told you, I am a crap shot.”

Chapel wanted to laugh. He figured the dark-haired gunman would disagree. He grabbed her arm and pulled her into the cover of a pile of rotten tires.

“Any more of them out here?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I saw three. All accounted for.”

“You saw three, or there were three?”

Nadia scowled. “There are no guarantees in this life.”

Chapel checked his weapon. There was still half a clip left in the AK-47. “Where’s Bogdan?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I came out to look for him and that is when I saw these men. Jim — he is almost certainly dead, or captured. The latter case is very bad, because—”

Chapel shook his head. “Not now. I can’t think about the future. There’s still at least one guy in that shed with a pistol, not to mention the sniper who took out Varvara’s driver—”

He jumped when he heard a gun go off inside the shed. There was a bloodcurdling scream and then another gunshot, and then nothing. The second shot had stopped the screaming, presumably for good.

“What the… was that the sniper?” Chapel asked, even though it was clear Nadia couldn’t answer.

Instead, someone else did. “The marksman is dead,” someone called from inside the shed. “Though he did not die easily. He told me many things first, Mr. Chambers.”

Chapel knew that voice, though it took him a second to be sure of it.

“Mirza?” he shouted, when he’d put it together.

“The very same. I am going to come out now. Please hold your fire. We have matters to discuss.”

Chapel pointed his rifle at the doors of the shed. Nadia lifted her pistol.

The SNB man walked out into the light. He wore a thin Windbreaker over his button-down shirt. His mustache was as neatly combed as ever, and his head shone like a cue ball in the sunlight. He was smiling. He also held a boxy machine pistol in his hands, the barrel of it pointed at them.

Chapel could have taken him out then and there, but there was no guarantee Mirza wouldn’t shoot back at the same time. The machine pistol was more than capable of killing both Chapel and Nadia before Mirza died. It looked like a stalemate.

“I have taken care of a problem for you, Mister Chambers,” Mirza said. “The fellow back there with the spectacles will not bother you again.”

“These guys weren’t working for you?” Chapel asked.

“Indeed, no,” Mirza said. “May I approach you, do you think?”

“You’re fine right there.” Chapel wanted to look over at Nadia, see if she could make any sense out of this. He had no idea what his next move should be. “I will say thanks. These assholes were following us for a while.”

“Yes,” Mirza confirmed. “They arrived in Tashkent last night. When I learned they were looking for you, I followed them all the way here. Just one of the many ways I have sought to be useful to you, Mr. Chambers. I think perhaps it is time you reciprocated. Perhaps by putting down your weapon.”

“Sure,” Chapel said. “Just let me make sure of a couple of things first. These guys were Romanian gangsters, looking for my computer geek. You seen him around here anywhere?”

Mirza laughed. “Do you know the most difficult part of my job, Mister Chambers? People give me false information all the time. The difficult part is knowing when people are simply ignorant, or mistaken, or when they are intentionally lying. These men were not Romanian.”

“They weren’t?” Chapel asked.

“Ah, that sounds like a man who has been misinformed. No. They were Russians. And they were not looking for your computer specialist. They were looking for Nadia Asimova.”

“They… what?” Chapel asked.

“Oh, did you think her name was actually Svetlana Shulkina? You see how difficult it becomes when people lie to us? I really think it is time for us to talk man-to-man. So put down your weapons, please.”

“And what happens then?” Chapel asked, though mostly just to stall for time to think. Mirza had blown Nadia’s cover but far worse than that — the gunmen were Russians, and they were chasing Nadia, which meant…

“You and I will return to Tashkent. You will explain to me how you came to be involved with a Russian criminal. Not that I particularly care — however, it will be useful information when I negotiate with your company. I will schedule meetings with the top men in the Interior Ministry. You and I will find a way for your company to work with Uzbekistan.”

“You’re going to blackmail me into making a bad deal, huh?” Apparently Mirza still thought he was Jeff Chambers, energy executive. So part of the cover story remained intact.

“You’ll still make money here, Chambers,” Mirza said. “But perhaps you will not rob my country as mercilessly as you’d hoped.”

Chapel shook his head. “What about my assistant?”

“Asimova? Well.” He shrugged, though not so much that his aim wavered. “I will kill her, of course. She is wanted alive or dead, and she has already shown she is a fighter. She will be much easier to ship home in a crate.”

Chapel didn’t even need to think about the deal. “It’s not going to happen, Mirza. Put down your gun, and we’ll talk about what happens next.”

Mirza didn’t flinch. “That would seem foolish. There would be no reason for Asimova not to shoot me, then.”

Chapel sighed in frustration. “We all need to calm down and think. We need to find a way to make sure nobody gets shot.”

“Are you sleeping with her, Mr. Chambers? Has she seduced you? I think you are not realizing that this is a rescue mission. I am here to protect you from her, first and foremost. I have also protected you from the Russian spies who were sent to retrieve her. I assure you, they had orders to kill you as well. Their plan was to have their sniper pick the two of you off. When that did not happen — thanks to me, alone — they stormed into this place to finish the job. I admire your ability to survive that attack, but you could not have done so without my help. I am your only friend here, Mr. Chambers, whether you believe it or not.”

Chapel frowned in thought. “If she puts down her weapon—”

“This is not a matter for discussion,” Mirza said.

“Goddamnit, it is! This is your only chance of getting out of here alive, Mirza,” Chapel said.

Nadia did not turn away from the SNB man as she spoke. She was too smart to drop her guard even for an instant. “Jeff,” she said, because apparently she’d figured out as well that his cover wasn’t compromised, “this man is a butcher. He works for a government that routinely slaughters its own people, just to maintain political control—”

“I’m not going to kill a man in cold blood,” Chapel told her. “I don’t care if he deserves it or not. Put down your gun.”

She stared at him with questioning eyes. She was trying to decide, he thought, if he was speaking truthfully — or if he only intended to disarm Mirza so that he could be killed safely.

It was the kind of business they were in, where that kind of moral calculus was acceptable. Chapel had no doubt that if Rupert Hollingshead were there just then, the old man would advise him that killing Mirza was the only way forward.

But Hollingshead wasn’t there. And despite what people consistently seemed to believe, Jim Chapel was no murderer. He killed only in self-defense.

Eventually, Nadia dropped her pistol and raised her hands above her head. She was trusting him to do the right thing here.

Even if her definition of the right thing and his were different.

“Now. Mirza. You saved my life, and maybe what you’re saying about Svetlana is true,” Chapel said. “If you want to save anything out of this mess, you’ll put your gun down, as well.”

The SNB man inhaled sharply. Then he dropped the machine pistol.

“All right,” Chapel said, and he nodded slowly. “Now I’m going to tell you how this ends. She and I are going to get into that truck, and we’re going to drive away. You won’t follow us.” He couldn’t read Mirza’s face. He knew he couldn’t trust the man. But he had to move forward. “You’re not going to report any of this to your superiors. We’re going to drive to Afghanistan, we’re going to leave your country as quickly as possible, and we’re never coming back. Do you understand?”

Mirza smiled. It was not a warm smile. “I understand that you believe this will happen,” he said.

“He’ll hound us,” Nadia protested. “He’ll send an army after us — Jeff—”

“I’m giving you a chance, Mirza,” Chapel said. “A chance to—”

He stopped in midsentence because he’d heard something. Someone was moving around back in the shed, back near the truck. But there wasn’t supposed to be anyone still alive back there — all four of the Russians were dead, there was no one—

Time slowed, then, as things happened very fast.

Mirza started turning, his eyes still locked on Chapel and his AK-47. His hands lifted, as if he were reaching for another weapon, or as if he wanted to surrender. Chapel would never know which.

Because suddenly Bogdan was standing in the doors of the shed, an assault rifle gripped in both of his skinny hands. His hair had blown back and his eyes were very wide, as was his mouth, showing bared teeth. The depressive hacker was gone, replaced by some vicious Romanian monster out of legend as he squeezed his trigger and fired thirty rounds on full automatic, the bullets tearing Mirza’s chest to ribbons.

The SNB man didn’t even have time to look surprised.

“Oh crap,” Chapel said, staring at what remained of Jamshid Mirza.

Nadia, without a word, bent down and picked up her pistol again.

“What?” Bogdan asked.

The hacker’s face had relaxed again, now that his enemy was dead. His bangs fell back down over his eyes, and other than the fact he was still holding an assault rifle, he looked exactly as he always had.

“Something is wrong?” he said.

“Where were you?” Nadia asked. “I went looking for you.”

“I hear people come, so I hide,” Bogdan said. He lifted his shoulders and let them sag again. “In the chicken coops, yes? Then I see men coming, with weapons, I think I am dead. The American killed those men, and later, the Uzbek killed another one. But he is our enemy, so I went in truck and found guns and kill him.”

“That… makes sense,” Nadia said.

“Was right thing to do, yes? He is our enemy?”

“He… was,” Nadia agreed. “Jim?”

Chapel wanted very much to sit down. He wanted time to figure out what had happened and where everything went wrong.

Sometimes in life you don’t get what you want.

“Okay,” he said. “We need to… we have to…”

There was a course forward, a series of steps he could take that would get them out of there and to a place of safety. He was getting stuck, though, on the first step. He couldn’t think straight, couldn’t—“We need to hide these bodies,” he said. Because that had to be the first thing they did.

His moment of doubt passed. One of the most useful things the army had ever taught him was that motion and activity were a passable substitute for a rational plan. “It may already be too late. Maybe someone in one of the buildings nearby heard something. Maybe they’ll come to look. Maybe they’ll find Mirza and report his death, and his friends in the SNB will know he was assigned to watch us. I’m sure he told them where he was headed, he would be a fool not to leave word with somebody that he was coming here, and Mirza didn’t seem like a fool.”

“He fell for your cover story,” Nadia pointed out.

“The cover was solid. Yours, on the other hand—”

That was a whole other kettle of fish. He hadn’t even begun to process what Mirza had said about Nadia. That she was wanted by the Russian government. That the blond thugs had not, in fact, been Romanian gangsters looking for Bogdan but Russian security men sent to kill her.

If he started down that path, he was going to have to question all kinds of things that so far he had comfortably taken for granted.

Later, he told himself.

“Never mind. Help me with these bodies. Bogdan, see if you can find a tarp or something. A sheet, a cloth, plastic — it doesn’t matter. We need to hide this mess as best we can and be out of here as soon as damned possible.”

He realized he was babbling, that he was talking more than he was thinking, but he didn’t care. He started hauling bodies around, then, and talking through the process helped him not think too much about what he was doing, about what he’d already done to the dead men. With Nadia’s help he got them inside the shed, where at least they wouldn’t be seen from the street. Bogdan found some old stained blankets in the pile of trash that filled the lot, and Chapel covered the bodies because that seemed more respectful than just letting them lie there on the dirty shed floor.

When it was done, he got the three of them in the truck. The driver’s seat was still wet with blood, the blood of Varvara’s man. There was still a bullet hole in the windshield. He ignored these things. He got the truck in gear and drove out of the shed. There was just room to drive the big truck around to the gates at the front of the lot, though it took a lot of maneuvering. Nadia jumped out and pushed the gates open wide enough so that Chapel could drive through them. Then she jumped back in the truck, and Chapel put it back in gear.

“Head north,” she told him. “If we can get out into the open desert, away from the main roads, we have a chance to—”

“No,” he told her.

“No?”

“No. We head southeast. To Afghanistan. Like I said.”

Nadia shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. It is exactly the wrong direction!”

“No,” Chapel said. “Afghanistan.”

“But why?”

“Because,” he told her, “we’re aborting the mission.”

Nadia was right about one thing — they needed to get into the desert before anyone came looking for them. Chapel took the truck to the edge of town and then rolled off the road, into a scrubby field of weeds. Ahead of them lay irrigation ditches and a few cultivated cotton fields and then nothing but sand as far as the eye could see. Though the truck was hardly inconspicuous, it was clearly meant for crossing rough terrain. The big tires always found something to grip, and the wide wheel base kept them from pitching about too much even when the ground rose and fell beneath them.

The seats weren’t exactly comfortable, just a thin layer of padding over flat steel, and he imagined he would get pretty sore if he tried driving the truck all day. But the Afghan border was only a hundred miles away or so, and once they were across they could simply find the nearest American troops and then they would be safe. Hollingshead would get them space on a transport plane headed back to the States and they would be home free.

All they had to do was cross that hundred miles of desert before the SNB realized that Mirza was missing and started looking for them.

Bogdan sat in the back and clicked away at his MP3 player/computer. Chapel didn’t know what he was doing with his improvised keyboard and didn’t much care at that point.

Nadia, of course, didn’t like his plan. She pleaded with him constantly to turn back, to head north again.

“I’m the lead agent on this mission,” she said, staring at him from the passenger seat. “I’m ordering you to go back.”

He didn’t even turn his head to look at her.

“Jim, please,” Nadia said. “Just listen to me for one moment. I’ve spent years of my life planning this operation. If we just stop now, I’ll never get another chance.”

“You have no chance now,” Chapel told her. “If we headed for Kazakhstan, how far do you think we would get? Even if we made it across the border, the SNB would just call up their friends over there and tell them that three dangerous fugitives were headed into their territory in a vehicle that any reconnaissance plane could pick up in a second. And that’s even assuming they don’t tell the Russians about us.”

She looked away, out through her window over the endless rippling landscape of sand.

“You know, the Russians? The people who are trying to kill you?” he asked. He was angry, and he didn’t care if he was shouting. “The people you said you worked for?”

“Jim—”

“You came to us claiming to represent the Russian government. You said this mission was sanctioned by the Kremlin. You lied to us, Nadia. You lied to me.”

“It’s not how you think,” she insisted. “It’s… I admit that things have become complicated. But—”

“Who do you really work for?” he demanded.

“FSTEK. My superior is Marshal Bulgachenko.” She reached over and for a second he thought she was going to grab the wheel. Instead she reached for his arm. He shrugged her off. “I didn’t lie. I just omitted some of the truth.”

“Jesus,” he said. He smacked the steering wheel with his artificial hand. “You put me in danger, Nadia.”

“I know.”

“You tricked the government of the United States into supporting this mission.”

“Konyechno, but—”

“You saw the Russian hit squad in Bucharest and you let me think they were just local gangsters and we could run away from them.”

“This is true.”

“Stop saying that! I’m not sure you even know what the word ‘true’ means.”

She reached for him again and he shoved her away, harder than he’d meant to. She curled up in the far end of her seat, staring at him.

“Bogdan,” she said, in a soft voice.

Chapel started to ask a question, at least to vent his confusion. It took him a second to realize she wasn’t talking to him.

Bogdan tapped some keys on his MP3 player, and suddenly the truck’s engine died. It wheezed to a stop, the truck halfway up a sand dune, its nose pointed at the sky. For a second it just hung there as if it had hit a brick wall. Then it slipped backward a few yards as it lost its grip on the loose sand.

Chapel stared at the dashboard. All the controls were labeled in Cyrillic characters, but the needles on all the gauges had dropped to zero — even the fuel gauge. All power had been cut to the engine and to the displays.

“Clever,” Chapel said. “Let me guess. Antitheft controls.”

Nadia’s voice was much easier to hear without the engine noise drowning it out. “This vehicle is of Russian military manufacture. We had a problem, a few years back, with our soldiers stealing our equipment. They weren’t getting paid, you see — they were owed a great deal of back pay — and many of them figured they were then justified to simply drive their vehicles off their bases and sell them on the black market. So we installed a chip in every vehicle to make sure this could not be done. Bogdan has simply activated that chip. He can deactivate it, if I feel he should.”

“If I agree to continue with this crazy mission, you mean.”

“Konyechno. Exactly. I still need you, Jim. I need my svidetel.”

Chapel glared at her for a while. He said nothing.

Eventually, when she didn’t relent just because he looked at her funny, he gave up. He popped open the door of the truck and jumped out, landing in the soft sand. It took a second to get used to the yielding ground, but he managed. Step by halting step, he started marching, to the southeast.

Behind him Nadia leaned out of the cab door. She called after him, shouting his name over and over, as he went on, placing his feet carefully on the shifting sand.

He didn’t get very far.

“Jim,” she called, when he had taken maybe a dozen steps. “Jim, I think it is time to call your boss.”

“He’s not going to like you any more than I do right now,” he called back.

“Even so.” Her face was set, her normally jovial features very, very serious suddenly. “Jim, I think you should get Angel on the line.”

That was enough to stop him.

“I beg your pardon?” he demanded.

Nadia jumped down onto the sand and walked toward him. “You need to contact Angel and set up an immediate call with Director Hollingshead,” she said.

“Listen,” Chapel told her, “I don’t know what you think you know—”

“Did you think I never wondered why you spent so much time in bathrooms with your tablet?” she asked. “Did you think I would not listen in?”

Her face had changed in the last few seconds. The softness, the friendliness, was gone. Now she looked like a soldier. Resolute, unapologetic, and unflinching.

“You spied on me?” he asked, though it sounded lame even to his own ears.

“Of course I did. That is what we do,” she said. “And please, do not take this moral tone with me. I know you did the same — just yesterday, when you attempted to question Bogdan about my previous mission. You made some very educated guesses, didn’t you? You asked him about a plutonium theft, convinced him you knew everything so there was no harm in talking. I admire your skills, Jim.”

Chapel shook his head. “So we’re putting all our cards on the table,” he said. “Okay. Tell me what’s really going on. Tell me about the Russians hunting you.”

“I will tell Director Hollingshead. You may listen while I do.”

Chapel stared at her, unable to process the way she’d changed. Unable to reconcile the Nadia he’d seen before with this woman.

When he was done trying — and failing — he went over to the truck and climbed the ladder to the cab. He went to his bag and took out his tablet. Before climbing back out of the truck he looked over at Bogdan.

The hacker was curled up in one of the backseats, clicking away at his MP3 player. Looking bored, mostly. He didn’t look at all like a man who had slaughtered an Uzbek security agent with an assault rifle. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who could screw up a mission in the time it took to empty a clip of bullets.

It seemed like today was the day he learned who everybody really was. He reached over and grabbed the headphones off Bogdan’s head. The Romanian flinched and made a noise that might have been a halfhearted protest, but Chapel ignored it. He pulled the headphone jack out of the MP3 player and shoved the headphones into his own bag. For good measure he grabbed the MP3 player — Bogdan’s connection to the outside world — and shoved that in his pocket.

“What is the meaning?” Bogdan asked, his voice high, almost squeaky. Maybe that was how he expressed outrage.

“You get this stuff back when I’m sure you won’t get me killed with it,” Chapel told him. Bogdan had more to say, but Chapel didn’t listen. He climbed out of the cab and staggered across the sand. Nadia was waiting for him under a tree a few dozen yards away, the only shade available from the evening sun.

He stared at her for a second, gritting his teeth. Then he switched on his tablet.

“Angel,” he said.

She answered immediately. “Sugar? Are you alone? I’m showing you don’t have your headphones plugged into this tablet. Is it safe to talk?”

“No,” Chapel said, “but we need to anyway. Nadia knows all about you, apparently. Though watch what you say anyway. She’s tricky.”

“I… see. Agent Asimova? Can you hear me?”

“Yes, miss,” Nadia said. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance at long last.”

Angel sounded pretty wary when she replied. “Likewise, I’m sure,” she said. “Um, I’m not really sure this is kosher. Sugar, you know what the director said about—”

“We both know what he said. Let’s not go into it now. Angel, I need you to call the director, actually. We need to discuss whether or not we’re going to scrub the mission. Things have gotten… complicated.”

Angel’s only reply to that was to switch the tablet over to its telephone screen. Digits appeared one by one there as if Chapel had typed them in: 01 00 000 000-000-0000. Chapel had seen numbers like that before — it meant Angel wasn’t taking any chances, not even letting Nadia see what American area code she was calling. The 01 at the beginning was just a country code, indicating the call was headed to the United States.

Chapel set the tablet in between two low branches on the tree, so that it faced both him and Nadia at eye level. Hollingshead answered almost immediately. It would be midmorning in Washington, and he most likely would have had a line open with Angel anyway, just to monitor the mission in Uzbekistan. His face appeared on the screen, with just a plain neutral background behind him that didn’t give away anything about where he was. He looked out of the screen with genial eyes that opened a lot wider when he saw Nadia peering back at him.

“Son?” he said. “This is a little unexpected.”

“I understand, sir, and if circumstances were different, I wouldn’t be contacting you like this. But things have gotten bad over here. Very bad.” He explained as quickly as he could how Mirza had followed them to the truck’s location, and how Bogdan had killed him. He repeated what Mirza had told him — that Nadia had a price on her head, that the Russians wanted her dead or alive. Nadia glanced away when he said that, as if she were ashamed. Well, good, he thought. She should be. “She lied to us, sir. She misrepresented her support.”

“Young lady,” Hollingshead said, blinking behind his thick glasses, “this is quite serious. You understand that? You involved the United States in this mission with the understanding that your country was fully in line.”

“I know this, sir,” she said. “You have my apology.”

“I’m going to want a bit more than that.”

She nodded. “Yes, it is true, there are Russians who… disagree with what I am doing. My country is very large, and it has many, many security agencies. I think you will understand when I say they do not always cooperate, yes?”

Hollingshead sighed. “All too well.” Chapel knew why that thought exasperated the old man. The secret directorate in the Pentagon had fought brush wars with American civilian intelligence groups in the past — one of which involved a CIA assassin sent to take Chapel’s life.

“There are men, mostly ex-KGB,” Nadia explained, “who think Perimeter should be kept intact. That it is a vital part of the Fatherland’s defenses. These men have power in the Kremlin, power enough to call for my execution — or worse. Men who would very much like to torture me for the information I possess. I have avoided their clutches this far, but I knew they would come eventually.”

“And you chose not to tell us this, when you came to us for help.”

Nadia shrugged. “You would have said no, I thought.”

Hollingshead’s frown deepened. “You’re quite right about that.” He turned to look at Chapel. “Son — what’s your plan now?”

“I’m thinking we should abort,” he told the director. “Exfiltrate immediately and return home while we still have the chance. As for Asimova—”

“No,” she said. “No, I do not agree. There is no reason to stop now. We have no reason to believe that the SNB knows of our plans, or that they are even tracing us right now. They cannot know our destination. If we move quickly, if we drive all night, we can be in Kazakhstan before dawn. This is not the time to turn back.”

“I see,” Hollingshead said. “Well, now, this is a dilemma. You’re supposed to be lead on this mission. But I gave you that courtesy because I thought I knew who you were. I have to say, I’m inclined to Jim’s way of thinking.”

Chapel nodded. “Very good, sir, I’ll—”

“No!” Nadia said again. “No, I will not accept this! Do you have any idea how long I have worked toward this goal? What I sacrificed to get this far?”

Hollingshead frowned. “Agent Asimova, who do you even work for?” he asked.

“FSTEK, as I have always said,” she told him. “Call Marshal Bulgachenko. He will vouch for me, as he already has.”

Hollingshead took off his glasses, presumably to polish them offscreen. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Marshal Bulgachenko turned in his resignation a few days ago. And then… well, there’s no pleasant way to say this. His body was found the next morning, floating in the Neva River.”

“He is… dead? Konstantin? Dead?” Nadia asked. She put her hands over her face and turned away from the screen. “No, please, it cannot be so. It cannot! He was… he was a father to me, do you understand?”

“I’m sorry you had to hear it like this,” Hollingshead told her. “But certainly you can see how that changes things.”

She didn’t respond. She was too busy weeping.

Chapel fought down an urge to reach for her, to comfort her. He needed to stop thinking those kind of thoughts, and he needed to stop right now.

“Sir,” he said, “whatever we plan on doing, we need to do it fast. Every minute we wait the SNB gets closer to finding Mirza’s body — and when they do, they’ll put every resource they have into finding us.”

“Understood, son. Agent Asimova, how did you get into this mess?”

“I will tell you,” she said, through her hands. “I will tell you everything.”

Nadia fell down on her knees in the sand. When she pulled her hands away from her face, Chapel saw that her tears, at least, had been real.

“It was Konstantin Bulgachenko who recruited me, out of college,” she said.

She looked up at Chapel, then at the tablet. She cleared her throat noisily and wiped at her cheeks. “Forgive me. This is a long story.”

“Make it shorter,” Chapel growled. “We need to move.”

Nadia lifted her shoulders, then let them drop. “I will try.”

Then she started talking.

“I studied nuclear engineering, in the college. I thought I would return home, to Yakutia, and work there for a mining company, digging uranium out of the ground to help build nuclear power plants. Instead the marshal came to see me. He took me to lunch. He was not a charming man, but… endearing in his way. He wore his uniform and his flat cap and he never smiled. He looked like something from a history book, from the Soviet days, and I was young enough then to find such a thing romantic. He said he had seen my records and he was very impressed. He said he had a job for me, one that would make a real difference in the world. I was young — a student still. That idea appealed to me. I thought I had a choice, that I could accept or decline his offer, but of course there was no choice at all. I had already been recruited. Otherwise he would never have been able to talk to me like he did that day.

“He told me that after the fall of the Soviet Union, a large amount of military hardware had gone missing — stolen by the soldiers who once guarded it, sold on the black market. This was hardly news. I was young and thought I knew everything and I laughed… until he told me that some of that hardware, approximately one hundred and fifty kilograms of it, was plutonium. Enough to build perhaps twenty-fire hydrogen bombs. And he had no idea where it might be. I did not laugh then.

“His organization, FSTEK, had been given the task of quietly finding that material and returning it to Russian control. He said they had already recovered some ten kilograms. He said he needed people like me, people who understood nuclear materials, to find the rest.

“I did not know it during that lunch, but already I had become a state secret. I did not go home to my dormitory after that. I have never been back since. The marshal spirited me away immediately and cut me off from the world I knew. I was not allowed to speak with my friends or even my family. My things were taken to a new apartment in Moscow, a place that I did not leave for another six months without an escort.

“Perhaps I should have been terrified. Instead, I was exhilarated. I had work to do, vital work — work that could save countless lives. Work to be proud of. Before he had used police techniques to find the nuclear material. The process was slow — it required too much human intelligence. With Geiger counters and satellites, I made the work much more efficient. In my first six months, I managed to locate another fifty kilograms of the missing plutonium — often, only a few grams at a time. In Kiev, we found some in an abandoned factory. More in a garbage pit near Krasnoyarsk. The worst was when we found sixty canisters, nearly three full kilograms, in a railroad siding outside of Moscow, hidden in among general stores and supplies for the maintenance of trains. The men who worked there, the railroad men, they had seen the canisters every day, had walked past them and never even wondered what was inside. One of the canisters was not properly shielded, and it… leaked. Most of the men I spoke to are… dead now.”

She shook her head. “This was our worst discovery. It was not, however, the most dangerous. We found two kilograms were sitting in a warehouse in Bucharest. We tracked the men who had moved the plutonium to that warehouse. We found they were gangsters, the worst kind of criminal. And that they had a buyer — a man known to have affiliations with North Korea. The material had to be recovered, at any cost.

“We could not simply go there and take it away from them. We had no authority outside the borders of Russia. We needed someone who could infiltrate the gang and steal the material. This is when I became a true operative. I begged Marshal Bulgachenko to allow me to go, personally, to recover the material. He did not wish to agree. He thought of me as a child still, a little girl, incapable of such a thing. I did my best to persuade him I was the right one for the job. In the end I believe he relented only because I already knew all the details. Choosing another agent would mean briefing them, telling them secrets that were vital to state security.

“I received intensive training before the mission began. I took a crash course in the Romanian language. I learned how to fire a gun, though I was never very good at that — no marksman, certainly. I was given combat training, hand-to-hand fighting techniques and the like, by a man who had been a trainer for the Spetsnaz, our special forces. That was the hardest part: day after day of exercises, of sparring and then fighting with blunted knives. Every night I would come home to my bed bruised and sore in new places, desperately tired, but I would have to stay up to read more intelligence reports, more daily updates on the Romanian gang.

“Jim, you have heard some of the actual mission. I went to Romania, where the transfer was to take place. There I found Bogdan. He was in desperate trouble, about to be arrested for sedition. The sentence would be death. In exchange for his life — I do not know how it was arranged, someone made a deal — in exchange for immunity, he agreed to hack into the files of the gang, and of the buyers.

“When Bogdan told me where the exchange was to be made, in a parking structure in Bucharest, I went there with twenty men, all of them highly trained soldiers. Things… went wrong. The gangsters were ready for us somehow; they were armed with machine guns. The buyers came with their own security. There was a firefight that lasted for nearly ten minutes, and at the end only I and two of my soldiers remained standing. All of us were wounded.

“There was no time… the local police were closing in. The gangsters had reinforcements coming. I did not have time to think things through. I made… I made a very bad mistake. The plutonium was in a bag, a kind of duffel bag with lead shielding. I picked it up and carried it from that place. I had to make my way most carefully out of Romania, often by hitchhiking or stowing away on trains. I could not allow myself to be caught by police, you see — not with what I was carrying. For six weeks I never let that bag out of my sight, not until I was back in Russia. I took it to an FSTEK facility and there, finally, I turned it over to technicians who could dispose of it properly.

“They opened the bag and took out the plutonium and I thought I was done, that my mission was over and a success. It was only then one of the technicians — he was dressed in a full hazard suit, and he would only touch the bag with lead-lined gloves. He looked at me with eyes that were… very sad. He opened the bag and showed me the lead lining, the shielding that had protected me from the radioactivity over those six weeks.

“He showed me there was a hole in it. During the firefight, a bullet had pierced the bag. Cut almost clear through the lining.

“For six weeks I had been carrying a bag full of the most toxic substance the world has ever seen. For six weeks, it had been poisoning me. And I never knew.”

“You were — irradiated?” Chapel asked, barely able to believe her story.

“The lining was not pierced entirely. If it had been, I would have died within hours of picking up that bag. As it was I only received a moderate dose of radiation.”

“How much?” Chapel asked.

She shrugged. “Perhaps twenty, maybe thirty millisieverts per day.”

Chapel was unsure what that meant.

Nadia looked him straight in the eye. “It was the equivalent, say, of having my whole body x-rayed once per day. For more than forty days in a row. It is a… significant exposure.”

She stood up and went over to the tablet hanging in the tree. She spoke directly to Hollingshead as she went on. “I was examined by many doctors. They told me there was one immediate effect: I was now sterile. The radiation had destroyed all my eggs. I will never have children, now. But this seemed less important to them than the other effect, that I had increased my possibility of dying from cancer at an early age. I asked them for specifics, but they said with cancer there was no such thing, that one could never predict what would happen. I asked for an estimate, a guess. I said, what is the percentage chance that I will die of a cancer before I am forty?

“They said, ninety-nine percent.”

“Nadia,” Chapel said, though he had no idea what he would say next. How do you comfort someone who’s gotten news like that?

She ignored his sympathy. “I went to Marshal Bulgachenko and told him all this and he wept. He had a bottle of vodka in his desk, still sealed. He said it had been given to him by Andropov. He opened it that night and we talked for a very long time, talked and drank. I could not seem to get drunk, or perhaps not drunk enough. The marshal said I should retire from FSTEK, retire and move somewhere pretty and end my days looking at water. The sea, the ocean… I said no. I said instead I wished to use what time remained to me to do something vital. Something useful.

“The marshal told me he had something in mind. It was very, very secret but we had finished off his special bottle by then and I think he would have told me anything. He spoke of Perimeter that night, and it was the first time I ever heard of it. He told me what it had been designed to do. He told me of the great shame around it, that so much of it was forgotten, untouchable. He said it had long been his dream to dismantle Perimeter.

“At first I thought nothing of it, that this was some Cold War fable, that it did not matter to us today. But when I sobered up, when I went back to work, I did some research. I found little, but enough to intrigue me. I dug deeper, and at every turn it seemed the system was more crazy, more dangerous. In the end I became obsessed. I discovered that the greatest secret, Perimeter’s forgotten location, had been kept in a certain document, a list of secret facilities known only to the KGB. This list was destroyed, no copies remained… but one. One in a KGB library no one had visited since the fall of the Union. I tracked it down. I held it in my hand, the map reference, and committed it to my memory. This would be the last thing I would do, the thing that would justify my sacrifice. I would destroy Perimeter.

“I went back to the marshal and told him what I’d found. I said I was ready, that I would do this thing in the time I had. I was exultant. Only then did he tell me it was impossible. Already I had met some resistance. There were people in the FSB — this is the successor to the KGB — who felt that any change, any diminishment in the nuclear arsenal was a sign of weakness and therefore unacceptable. There were others whose reputations, whose careers, would be damaged if it were revealed how they had let Perimeter get away from them.” Nadia shrugged. “I had been threatened. I thought nothing of it. I was going to die young; why worry about some menacing fools? But the marshal knew better. He understood interdepartmental politics better than I. FSTEK is an autonomous body, on paper. In reality it is subordinate to FSB. Despite all I had done, all I had achieved, he could not get approval for this mission.”

“I notice, young lady, that it didn’t stop you,” Hollingshead said.

“At first, I obeyed. I was no rebel, to go against the entire intelligence community for one personal crusade. But then something changed… I was receiving monthly physicals. Monthly CT scans, to check my bones, my pancreas, my liver, for any sign of cancer. Six months ago one of these scans came back positive. It is in me, now. It is deep inside my organs, where it is impossible to cut out. The doctors called me in, spoke with me at great length. Before they could barely look at me. Now they found me fascinating. I would be a wonderful test subject — physically fit, perfectly healthy except for this one thing. I had a good chance of surviving some new experimental treatments. Chemotherapies untried before. New advances in, of all things, radiation therapy. Hope blossomed inside me — how could it not? I thought perhaps the last few years had all been a terrible dream. That my impending death might be averted.

“That was when they explained. No, they could not save me. They could extend my life by a few years, perhaps, years I would spend in a bed, in constant nausea and agony, years of suffering instead of a relatively quick death.

“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.

The quickest route to Kazakhstan would have been to drive straight north, through the desert, but that way lay danger. To curb drug trafficking, the Kazakhs had built a high fence with barbed wire and floodlights along the border. Patrols swept the area every night, focusing on the main roads from Tashkent to Astana, the Kazakh capital. To the west, however, where there were no roads and only a few farms, the border was much more porous.

So they took the truck northwest, past Vobkent, using the best roads they could find. As long as they weren’t being actively pursued, they wanted to make the best time they could, and that meant sticking to graded surfaces. The truck was designed to cross sand and slickrock, but it was still a lot faster on a highway.

Chapel worried at first that the truck was going to give them away, that it was just too conspicuous with its eight wheels and its high cab. It turned out that wasn’t a problem. North of Vobkent the roads were almost deserted, and what little traffic they did see was all construction vehicles and big segmented trucks hauling goods back toward Tashkent. The desert-crossing truck didn’t stand out at all — if they’d been driving a late-model sedan, that would have drawn more attention.

“The northern half of Uzbekistan is all desert,” Nadia explained. “The Kyzyl Kum, three hundred thousand square kilometers of nothing but sand. Almost no one lives there, other than a few herders. The people who come there come for work, to dig for gold, uranium, natural gas, live back in the cities. They are all headed home now for their dinners, tired and uninterested in us.”

“Fine,” Chapel said. “I won’t feel comfortable until we’re out of anyone’s sight, though.” He still wasn’t sure he’d made the right decision. How much had Nadia’s story affected him? He thought of himself as a logical person, a smart guy who at least tried not to make dumb mistakes. But her revelation, the fact that she was dying — he wasn’t heartless, after all. Had he allowed himself to be swayed?

He supposed it didn’t matter now. In for a penny, in for a pound.

He glanced at the tablet sitting between them, wedged under the emergency brake. Angel would be sending their pursuers in the wrong direction, he knew. She was too busy to talk, and now was hardly the right time, with Nadia sitting next to him, but he desperately wanted to know what she thought.

In the backseat Bogdan was busy, too. Chapel had returned his makeshift computer, and the hacker was raiding the SNB’s archives, looking for anything they thought they knew about Jeff Chambers and his mysterious assistant Svetlana. So far Bogdan had turned up nothing to worry them, but if Mirza had left some case notes behind, or even a voice mail to his superiors telling them where he was headed before he disappeared—

“Jim,” Nadia said. “I want to thank you.”

He glanced over at her. “For changing my mind?”

“For allowing me to finish my mission,” she said. “It means… a great deal that you trust me. That you believe in me.”

“I believe in what we’re doing,” he told her, and left it at that.

This woman had lied to him. She could do it again. Maybe there was more to her story she wasn’t sharing, maybe—

“Sugar,” Angel said, “you’re going to see the town of Zarafshan coming up in a few miles. You might want to detour around it.”

“Understood,” he told the tablet.

Diverting around the population center took enough of his attention to keep his doubts and fears in the back of his mind for a while. The town wasn’t very big, but there weren’t a lot of roads around it, either, so he had to go off-road for a while. He had to admit he was impressed when the big tires grabbed at the sandy soil and they barely lost any speed. Varvara had done right by them.

Beyond Zarafshan the road turned into little more than a gravelly track that stretched on for many more miles, slowly but steadily turning into nothing more than a ribbon of slightly paler dirt in the midst of the desert. At one point they saw the lights of a village up ahead and had to go off-road for a few miles to stay clear. Eventually the road disappeared altogether, and they entered the Kyzyl Kum proper. To either side there was nothing to see but sand dunes, no oases or rivers or even many trees to break up the horizon.

There was no turning back. Chapel might have his doubts, but it was time to put them aside.

They took turns, one of them driving through the night while the other rested. Both of them were too alert to really sleep, though, and driving through the desert was never going to be a restful experience.

The truck was an old military vehicle designed by the Soviet Union for prospecting work in the open desert, and it had been built extraordinarily well. It had special filters in its air intakes to keep out blown sand. It had a doubly redundant coolant system to cope with the heat of the desert sun, and special heating filaments wrapped around the fuel lines to handle the bitterly cold night. Even the groove pattern on its massive tires had been designed to offer the best possible grip on the sand.

After driving for nearly four hours, Chapel cursed the designers anyway, cursed them for not considering what a thinly padded seat could do to a human tailbone.

Nadia shrugged when he told her how sore his ass was. “The Soviets, they were brilliant in their way. They understood machines, basic engineering, so much better than anyone else,” she told him, “because they had to. They had such a large country to conquer. But they never built a car seat that a human being would want to sit on, and their chocolate is terrible.”

“Got to have your priorities, I guess,” Chapel said, shifting on what felt like a bare metal bench. The rivets in the steel dug into him no matter how he held himself.

It didn’t help that the damned landscape wouldn’t just lie flat. The desert was a great rumpled sheet of long crescent-shaped barchan dunes, giant mounds of sand that moved grain by grain as the wind carried them along. There was no way to drive around the dunes, so the truck had to constantly climb the face of each one, powering its way up the face, then scramble down the far side with the engine almost idling. It was like riding the world’s most boring roller coaster, and at the bottom of every dune the truck came down with a jolt no matter how carefully Chapel steered into the impact, launching him into the air. He thought Bogdan had the right idea. After moaning for nearly an hour about the rough ride, the Romanian had wedged himself down into the leg well between the front and back seats. Maybe the carpeting on the floorboards was thicker than the seat upholstery.

Chapel peered out through the windshield, anticipating the next dune. They had gotten lucky in that the moon was new, and only starlight lit up the landscape. With the truck’s banks of lights turned off, that would make them hard to spot, even by satellites. It gave them a fighting chance. “You really hate the Soviets, don’t you?” he asked. “Ever since we started this mission, all you’ve done is tell me how awful they were.”

Nadia shrugged. “It is a national pastime. We all live in their shadow now. We live with their mistakes every day.” She clutched her arms around herself. Even in the heated cab it was cold — outside the night winds would be truly bitter, despite the warmth of the day.

“And the Russians, now? The Russian Federation? How do you feel about them? They’re trying to kill you, after all.”

Nadia looked over at him with guarded eyes. He’d touched something, but he wasn’t sure what. “You doubt my patriotism? Tell me, do you support everything your government does? Every member of your Congress, every elected official?”

Chapel frowned as he peered ahead into the endless waves of sand. “My government tried to kill me, once,” he said. “Well, one of its organizations did, anyway. Governments, even good ones, aren’t ever really of one mind. As for Congress, well, I guess hating Congress is our national pastime. Sometimes I think we elect our politicians just so we’ll have something to be angry about. Yeah, there are things about America I don’t like. It doesn’t stop me loving my country. Fighting for it. I guess I’m asking how you feel about your country, not its leaders.”

“My country,” she said, a little bitterness in her voice. “This is the problem with Russia, calling it one country.” She shivered a little. “Strange that I feel so cold now, when in Siberia this might be a pleasant day in spring. I’ve been away so long. Siberia is my country. I hope to see it again before… well. Before I die.”

“Nadia, I didn’t mean to—” he began.

She shook her head to stop him. “I do not want your pity. Moscow, where I have lived for many years… it is very nice, in its own way; you can buy nice clothes any time of the day or night. You can see all the foreign movies there. But the people throw their trash into the street. The river stinks. My people would never let that happen. My grandfather was an Evenki shaman. Do you know what that is?”

“Not even a clue.”

Nadia never turned to look at him. Whatever she saw through the windshield, he was pretty sure it wasn’t the desert. “He went from village to village in the forest, healing the sick, fighting with ghosts. He rode around on a reindeer. When I was an infant, he would hold me on his lap, on the back of his reindeer. I can almost remember that. I can definitely remember how it smelled.”

She smiled at the thought. Closed her eyes and lay back in her seat.

“That is my country, the back of that reindeer. The trees of the taiga. The people of the forest. I will fight and die for them, to keep them safe. Whether Moscow approves or not.”

“I believe you,” Chapel said.

She opened her eyes. Turned and looked at him.

“That was what got you arrested, wasn’t it?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Chapel thought back to what Angel had told him. “You were arrested a few years ago at a protest rally in Moscow. One that was calling for Siberian independence, among other things. You didn’t give your name, and you were released right away. But you were there, weren’t you?”

“Angel is very, very good at what she does,” Nadia said. She shifted away from him in her seat, as if she might throw open her door and jump out of the truck.

He’d definitely hit a nerve. “Yeah,” he said. “She is.”

“If you have a question to ask, then ask it,” Nadia told him.

Chapel was careful not to push too hard. What he was getting at was a tricky thing to talk about, even now. “You say that Siberia is your country, not Moscow. That makes me wonder something. Why is Siberia still part of Russia?”

“Now you’re asking me riddles.”

He shook his head. “No. Listen, I’m curious about this. When the Soviet Union fell, just about everybody jumped ship. Everybody from Belarus to Tajikistan decided they wanted nothing to do with Russia anymore. But not Siberia.”

“It’s true,” Nadia said.

“Why is that?”

“When the Union fell, every ethnic group in the Union was given a choice to declare for self-determination. But Moscow wished to hold as much territory as possible. Some groups were… urged more strongly than others to stay. The truth is, Russia could not afford to lose Siberia. All the country’s wealth is there.”

“Oil, you mean,” Chapel said.

“Yes, definitely there is oil in Siberia. Not to mention gold, and diamonds, and rare metals. And of course there is Vladivostok, which is the only way Russia has to reach Asian markets, and one of its very few port cities that does not freeze over every winter. No, Yeltsin was very much interested in holding on to Siberian territory, and Putin agrees. At the time of the breakup, perhaps, something could have been done. There was political momentum, then. But now — Putin has made it very clear that Moscow will not give up any more territory. Look at what he has done to Chechnya.”

“But you think it would be a good thing, if Siberia split with Moscow?”

Nadia sighed and wrapped her arms around herself as if she were cold. “The Soviets plundered Siberia for its resources, without much compunction. Putin has been, if anything, worse. The land is being strip-mined, the trees cleared in great swaths. No one seems to care if the forest is poisoned, as long as they get what lies beneath. Do I think the people who actually live there would make better stewards of the land? Yes. Konyechno.”

“You feel strongly enough to get arrested for saying so,” Chapel pointed out.

“What is this?” Nadia demanded. “What are you asking?”

He turned and gave her a hard look. “You lied to me once. When you said that you had the blessing of Moscow for this operation. I want all the cards on the table. You don’t work for FSTEK anymore. You’ve shown political leanings in the past. Who are you working for now?”

“You’ll never really trust me again. I see that,” Nadia told him. “But you already know the answer to that question. I work for Marshal Bulgachenko.”

“Who’s dead,” Chapel pointed out.

“Yes. I work for his memory. And I work to make the world safer for everyone. Jim, I have very little time left. I have dedicated all of it to bringing down Perimeter. Is that so hard to believe?”

Chapel started to answer, but he stopped when his tablet chimed and the screen lit up with a map.

Talk about timing, he thought.

“You’re almost there,” Angel told him. “The border’s just a few miles up ahead. Time to get careful.”

“I’m getting the live feed from a weather satellite that’s about to break your horizon,” Angel told him. Chapel nodded, even though he knew she couldn’t see him. “You’re still clear of the border, though if you get too much closer, you’ll definitely draw some attention.”

Ahead of the truck was nothing but sand — endless dunes of it, a slightly paler black than the night sky. There were no posted warnings, no signs telling him where the border was. He only had Angel’s word for where the dividing line fell. She was being very careful with that — she didn’t trust Google maps, which could be off by whole miles in places, so she had downloaded some very, very detailed maps from the CIA’s databases. Using the GPS in the tablet, she was able to tell where the truck was within a few yards.

“Okay, satellite’s up. I see… I see a couple of things, actually,” she said. He heard her clacking away at a keyboard. “Stand by.”

Chapel dropped the truck into neutral. They were down in the shadow between two dunes, and he could see nothing at all.

The border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan was long and much of it ran through trackless desert. Until recently no one had ever bothered to patrol the dividing line at all. But one of the main drug pipelines that brought opium poppies and refined heroin into Russia ran across this border, in almost a straight shot from Afghanistan. The fence and the border checkpoints north of Tashkent had been built to stop that flow, but of course the drug runners had simply diverted around the obstruction and now they moved most of their product through the Kyzyl Kum. In recent years the Russians had started paying the Kazakhs to keep an eye on their desert frontier to stem that tide. There had been problems — a few farmers who had never even known which country they lived in had been shot while herding their sheep. And plenty of drugs still got through — coverage was still spotty. It was a lot of ground to cover for Kazakhstan’s small military.

But if even one drug interdiction helicopter spotted Chapel’s team, if they fell afoul of even a single man working border patrol, their whole mission would fall apart.

“Okay,” Angel said. “Still working. But you can creep forward a little. The nearest helicopter is twenty miles away from you and heading west.”

Chapel goosed the engine, trying and failing to keep it from roaring as the wheels bit into the dune ahead and started pulling the truck up the long, sweeping face. They were in the most danger at the crests of the dunes, where starlight might glitter on their windows. Chapel hit the top of the dune and raced back down to its bottom.

“Head east for a minute,” Angel said. “Okay, stop. Wait there.”

In the dark Chapel gritted his teeth and waited. He couldn’t see what Angel saw. He couldn’t see anything. He was already exhausted from driving all night, and this anxious game of hide-and-seek made him feel like the bones of his skull were grinding against each other. He glanced over at Nadia and saw her staring out her window, as if she could help by keeping an eye out. The problem was, if they so much as saw the lights of a border patrol unit or heard the chopping noise of a helicopter, they were already dead.

“North. Go now,” Angel said. “Now! Okay, slow down, slower. Head northwest… stop. Stop, stop, stop!”

Chapel drove down into the shelter between two dunes and cut his engine.

“Hang tight,” Angel whispered. “There’s a helicopter about three kilometers to your north. That’s just inside their range of vision. Just… don’t move. Try not to make any noise, in case they have long-range microphones.”

Chapel all but held his breath. With the engine off, the cab of the truck started to get very cold, very quickly. He looked over and saw Nadia shivering, her lips pressed tightly together.

She was trying to keep her teeth from chattering.

Chapel took his hands off the wheel, as if he might accidentally switch the engine back on and give them away. He held his hands up in the air, almost afraid to put them down in case they made a noise when they hit the upholstery.

He could hear the engine ticking, pinging as it cooled. He could hear a drift of sand come tumbling down the dune in front of him, stirred by the wind. He could hear his own heart beating.

No. No, that tiny sound, softer even than the noise the sand made, that wasn’t his heartbeat. As fast as his pulse was racing, it wasn’t going fast enough to make that sound. It had to be something else. It had to be the sound of the helicopter. Was it getting closer? Was it getting louder, or was he just imagining that?

In the shadow of the dune, the truck’s roof was nearly invisible, but if anyone thought to look at it, it would seem wrong. It was too square, in this country of curving dunes. Someone could see them, someone with night-vision goggles could have spotted them, called for the helicopter to investigate… as the helo got closer, its FLIR sensors would pick up their body heat inside the cab, so much warmer than the surrounding sand. Maybe, just maybe there was a chance the helo crew would think they were animals, camels or wild pigs or whatever else lived out here, maybe they would shrug off the heat signature, but more likely they would come closer still, get a better look, and then…

“Okay,” Angel said, her voice startlingly loud in the enclosed cab. Even Bogdan jumped, lifting his long neck in the backseat and staring at Chapel and Nadia.

“Okay, give it another minute. Then head due north, and keep going,” Angel told them. “I think you’re clear.”