The Hydra Protocol

PART V

Everything hurt.

Chapel had experienced enough physical pain in his life to know the difference between sore muscles and actual tissue damage. He knew what it felt like to wake up after having been beaten while one was unconscious. He knew what gunshot wounds felt like, and how to tell if he had broken bones.

He’d also had enough training to know that internal damage was tricky. You might feel a little achy for a day or two and then drop dead because of bruising on your liver. You might feel horrible agony, racking, excruciating pain, and be just fine after a few days resting in a soft bed.

He tried to assess how badly he’d been injured and realized he just couldn’t be sure. He might be dying, or he might just have been hit by a freight train. He knew that the idea of sitting up was laughable. The way his torso felt he would be lucky to open his eyes and see that he was still in one piece.

He opened his eyes.

Eye, anyway. He opened one of them. The other was too swollen to budge. His good eye gave him a very blurry image of a lot of sunlight and a sky so blue it looked like you could just step into it and fall forever, fall upward until you hit outer space.

Opening the eye had been a bad idea. The light buzzed around in his head, chasing any rational thoughts around. There were multicolored halos around every object he looked at — not that he could focus enough to make out what those objects were. He knew what that meant: a concussion. And a bad one, definitely.

Which meant that, as much as he wanted to close his eye again and go back to sleep, he absolutely shouldn’t. You could go to sleep with a concussion and never wake up. He forced himself to keep the eye open. Fought back each wave of exhaustion as it came for him, pushed back until it was gone and he could brace for the next one.

Damn, everything really hurt.

He tried to concentrate on piecing together what had happened to him. There had been a helicopter — no — two helicopters, there had been — there had—

He felt the desperate need to throw up, and a certainty that he shouldn’t, that throwing up was another bad idea, just like falling asleep. He was lying on his back, he thought. He could drown in his own vomit if he threw up now.

Concentrate, he told himself. What happened? How many helicopters?

One, at first. He had not quite shot it down, but it crashed. Nadia and Bogdan had — had they gotten away or not? Had they—

That thought brought on a new wave, one of panic. A desperate need to move, to run, to do something. Yet another bad idea. If his neck was broken, or if—

Concentrate.

The helicopter had crashed. He’d been Tased, then kicked. He had blacked out for a while. Most likely he’d been beaten while he was unconscious, because he couldn’t remember hurting this much when he blacked out.

When he came to, another helicopter was on its way. Descending, getting bigger as it came down from the sky. It looked like it was going to land on top of him. He had seen a flag painted on its side and for a second he’d been excited, thrilled, because he saw red, white, and blue.

Wrong flag, though. The colors had been horizontal stripes, white, blue, and red.

Shit, he thought. That was the Russian flag. The Russians had him.

Now he was here under this incredibly blue sky. There were people around him, people who weren’t paying any attention to him. He couldn’t make out their faces. He heard them talking, heard at least one word he understood. Glas. That was the Russian word for eye, or for sight. They had noticed that his eye was open.

He didn’t think that was a good thing.

The people around him started moving faster. He couldn’t see what they were doing. One of them was above him, another beneath, and then he felt himself moving, being moved. He tried to warn them, tried to tell them his neck might be broken, but either they weren’t listening or they couldn’t hear him. He wasn’t sure his throat was working right. Wasn’t sure he was making a sound.

They moved him for a long time. Occasionally someone else would loom over him, another human shape. A few words would be spoken and then he would start moving again.

They took him into a dark place. That was a little better — the light had really been hurting his eye. But the darkness was going to make it hard to stay awake. The dark place stank, enough to make him gag. It smelled of something foul and… rusted metal? Maybe. Maybe that was the smell of blood.

His eye adjusted to the darkness, though it took a very long time.

A shape appeared above him, in the dark. A human face. He could see it more clearly this time, without all the sunlight blasting his vision. He could tell this new person had a long, thin face, and that he wore a black suit with a white shirt and a black tie. The high contrast helped. The person in the black suit studied him for a very long time.

“Who are you?” Chapel asked. He could hear the noise he’d made, at least. He was certain he’d said something, though whether or not he’d actually formed words was debatable.

He must have made himself understood on some level, because the person in the black suit answered him. In English. “I am Senior Lieutenant Pavel Kalin. I’m going to be doing your interview. I’ll get you something for the pain in a moment, but first I need you to answer some basic questions.”

Name, rank, and serial number, Chapel thought — the three things you were supposed to provide to your captors when you were taken prisoner. Except he couldn’t even provide that much. Announcing that he had a serial number would be the same as saying he was an American serviceman and therefore a spy. “I can’t… can’t…”

“Are you allergic to codeine or any other painkilling medications? What about penicillin, erythromycin, sulfa drugs? I’m sorry, I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Where… where am I?”

“The sooner you provide us with your medical information, the quicker we can get moving,” Kalin told him. “No? You don’t wish to cooperate with your treatment personnel?” Kalin took something from his pocket. A little notebook. He jotted down a quick entry and then put the notebook away. He waved someone over, someone in a white coat who put a hypodermic needle in Chapel’s neck. He was too beat up to fight them off.

“Can’t… sleep,” he managed to rasp out. “Concussion…”

“Don’t worry,” Kalin told him. “If your heart stops, we’ll resuscitate you. As many times as necessary.”

When Chapel woke next, he was moving. The room he was in was moving. He could feel it swaying back and forth, bouncing up and down. He had no idea what was going on.

He was naked. His left arm was gone — just missing, nowhere to be found. He was lying on a pile of blankets that hadn’t been washed in a while, or maybe it was him that stank. It was unbearably hot in the room, and sweat crawled across his skin like prickling ants.

He wasn’t dead. He was groggy and weak, but he wasn’t dead. He could move, crawl even, if he was careful. His body still ached everywhere, and standing up was impossible in the moving room, but he could just about get around. There was a tiny bit of light coming in from one side of the room. He moved over there as best he could and found that the source of the light was a crack in the wall. He pressed his eye up against it and for a second saw nothing but dazzling light. Even though it hurt his eye, it felt good after the near total darkness of the moving room.

When his eye had adjusted to the light, he saw a dashed white line streaming away from him. A road, then — a highway. The “room” he was in must be a shipping container mounted on a flatbed truck. He was being taken somewhere. They had simply stuffed him in the back of a cargo container and then shipped him off. He had no idea where he was going or what would happen there, no idea if they were going to—

Best to focus on what he could know.

The light was coming in through a crack between two doors at the back of the container. He pushed against the doors, tried lifting them with his hand, but they wouldn’t budge. They were locked from the outside, and he was too weak to do much but strain against them.

Crawling around the inside of the container, he defined his world very quickly. There were only two things in the container beyond himself: a pile of blankets he’d been using as a bed, and a bucket in one corner. The bucket was the source of the terrible smell in the container. It had been used before Chapel arrived, and no one had bothered to clean it out.

He sat down and watched the bucket for a while. It rattled and bounced and constantly threatened to fall over and spill its contents all over the floor. Somehow it never did.

He might have slept again. Without anything to do but watch the bucket, it was hard to tell.

Time passed.

A lot of time.

Eventually the container stopped moving. He heard the squeal of the truck’s brakes. He heard someone talking outside, but he couldn’t understand the words.

The doors at the back of the container opened and he was blinded again. Men in uniforms came inside and grabbed him, hauling him to his feet. They pulled a thin gown over his head and then he was dragged out of the container and along the side of a building. They came around a corner and Senior Lieutenant Kalin was there, waiting for them.

Kalin took a quick look at Chapel and nodded. The soldiers carrying him started moving again.

They marched him through an alleyway between two brick buildings, neither of which had windows, just blank walls. He let his head fall back and looked up and saw a sky grimy with smog, streaked with trails of smoke.

Up ahead, the alleyway ended in a broad courtyard. At its far side was a big building with curved walls, so that it looked like a drum. It was made of concrete stained black in places. It had a lot of windows, but all of them were covered with bars. An ambulance stood out in front of the building, with Cyrillic lettering on its sides.

“Where am I?” he asked.

Surprisingly, Kalin answered. “Magnitogorsk,” he said. “A municipal asylum for the mentally ill.”

Chapel stared up at the round building. He was marched toward its front doors, wide glass doors that looked like the entrance to a hospital emergency room. Inside a team of doctors and nurses waited, staring out at him. Ready for him to rant and rave or grow violent or just start screaming. Ready for anything he might try.

So this is where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.

He could only hope it wasn’t going to be a long one.

They threw him in a little empty room — a cell, no point in giving it a prettier name — and locked the door behind him. They left him there in the dark, and no matter how many times he pounded on the door and shouted, nobody came.

They left him to think about what had happened.

He’d been taken captive by the Russians, by the FSB — the security service. The KGB, for all intents and purposes, just with a brand-new name. There was no chance of escape, now. They would see to that. There was definitely no chance of a rescue. If Pavel Kalin had personally flown to Washington and asked Rupert Hollingshead if he wanted Chapel back, Hollingshead would have no choice but to say he’d never heard of a Jim Chapel. He would disavow the mission. What else could the director do? Admit he’d sent an American agent to sabotage a Russian military installation?

Chapel had known that going in. He’d known it when he’d joined the Rangers, and when he’d started working for military intelligence. It was how the game was played. Once he was in the field he was on his own, responsible for his own fate.

Well. He’d screwed that up pretty well.

Back in Ranger school, his instructor Bigelow had told him about what might happen if he was captured by the enemy. “Don’t expect humane treatment. Don’t expect them to treat you like a normal POW,” he’d warned. “Spies don’t go to country club prisons. They’ll want to know all your secrets, and they won’t ask politely. Now, if they start asking you for classified information, what do you give them?”

“Name, rank, and serial number, right?” Chapel had asked. “I just keep my mouth shut. If they put a gun to my head and threaten to kill me if I don’t talk, well, I guess I let them shoot me.”

Bigelow had sighed and shook his head. “They’re not going to make it that easy. They’ll torture you. You’re a tough guy. You can take a lot of punishment, I’ve seen to that. But they’ll have all the time in the world, and it doesn’t take much more than a pair of pliers to make even a tough guy talk. Believe me, you won’t be able to hold out forever. They’ll get what they want, sooner or later. One way or another.”

“So what do I do? Just spill the beans at the first possible opportunity? Save myself from being tortured?”

“Absolutely not. You hold out as long as you can. Every day you resist, every hour, you give your handlers back home more time to minimize the damage your information can do. You give us time to change our codes, or move our troops to a new location, or set up new covers for your fellow agents. Any little crumb of time you can give us is useful. So you hold out. You bear the pain the best you can, and you hold out as long as you possibly can. When you finally do break, well, that’s natural, that’s human. But you think of your country and your duty, and you make the enemy work for it.”

Alone in the dark cell Chapel nodded to himself, promising himself he would fight. That he wouldn’t go down easy.

He had to admit, though, if only to himself — he was scared.

“Are you ready? Let us begin.” Kalin took out his notebook and a silver pen.

He sat on a chair that was the only piece of furniture in the room. The place they’d stuck Chapel was not quite a padded cell — its walls were actually lined with ceramic tile — but it was designed so that an inmate would find nothing inside with which to hurt himself. There was no way to commit suicide there. The windows were covered in thick, impact-resistant plastic. The room’s sole lighting fixture was recessed into the ceiling, well out of reach. There was no knob on the inside of the door. Kalin had to bring the chair in with him, and presumably he would take it with him when he left.

Chapel supposed you could bash your head against the wall until one of the tiles cracked. Use that to cut your own throat. You would need a lot of determination, though. You would need more strength than Chapel had.

“Where’s my arm?” Chapel asked. “When I was detained, I had a prosthetic left arm. What did you do with it?”

“We had to make sure it wasn’t a weapon,” Kalin said. He shrugged. “I’m afraid that in the process of analyzing it, the arm was destroyed. You won’t see it again.”

Chapel inhaled sharply. Then he nodded. He’d gotten by in the past with one arm. He knew how to live like that; he could do it again. There were other, more pressing concerns. “Are you going to feed me?”

“Subject has requested food,” Kalin announced, and made a note of it. “Do you have any dietary requirements? Perhaps religious in nature?”

Chapel stared at Kalin. Did he think Chapel was a Muslim? Or maybe an agent of Mossad? “I haven’t been given any food for more than twenty-four hours. That’s a violation of the Geneva Convention.”

“Which applies only to soldiers taken as prisoners of war. Are you a soldier?”

Chapel said nothing. He wanted to sit down but that meant sitting on the floor, and he wouldn’t give Kalin the psychological advantage.

“At the moment, we don’t even know your name. Are you willing to tell us your name? Once we have that, we can begin to process you correctly,” Kalin told him. “We’ll know how to move forward.”

Chapel turned his face away. If he admitted to being a soldier, then his presence at Aralsk-30 might be construed as an act of war. He could, instead, fall back on his cover and claim to be Jeff Chambers. But even if the cover held up, that would make him a criminal, a trespasser, and that would give Kalin the right to charge him and put him into the Russian court system. He did not have any faith that would improve his situation.

“All right,” Kalin said. “You aren’t interested in answering questions, I can see that.” He put his notebook away and stood up. “I’m in no rush. We’re really just filling in a few blanks here. Once I have a statement from you, I can file a report, but honestly, it doesn’t matter. Asimova and Vlaicu are dead, and you’re in custody, so there’s no need for alacrity.”

Dead?

Nadia and Bogdan were dead?

That got Chapel’s attention. He whirled around to study Kalin’s face, looking for any sign the man was lying.

If he was, it was impossible to tell. Kalin might have been carved from a block of marble. “You didn’t know, did you? Perhaps you thought they got away. Of course we couldn’t let that happen. We picked up the truck less than an hour after it left Aralsk-30. They were unwilling to surrender, and we had already sustained some casualties, so the order was given to fire rockets on the vehicle. There wasn’t much left of them, just enough to identify the bodies.”

Chapel dropped his head. Nadia was dead. After all he’d done to try to get her and Bogdan safely away, after everything—

“So you see, this is just a formality. But I do like to be thorough. We’ll see how you feel tomorrow, after you’ve spent the night with us.”

“Just let me sleep!” Chapel howled, as they held him down and poured energy shots down his throat. The orderlies laughed and shouted in his face — the words were in Russian, but it didn’t matter that he couldn’t understand; the meaning was clear. Loud music blared from speakers in the ceiling and the light kept getting brighter — then they were throwing ice water on him, dousing him in it until he shivered and cried out, and still they were laughing, laughing—

Sleep deprivation.

It was a kind of torture. Chapel’s head was reeling, and his eyes wouldn’t focus properly. He felt like hell, felt like he wanted to throw up but that wasn’t it, it wasn’t his stomach; his brain wanted to purge, to — to just stop, to — to—

Kalin came in, dragging his chair. The way its legs squeaked on the tiles made Chapel want to cringe in the corner and wrap his arm around his head. He forced himself to stand still, up against one wall, with an expression of stoic indifference on his face.

“Good morning,” Kalin said. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” Chapel insisted.

Kalin didn’t laugh. He sat down in his chair and took out his notebook.

“Are you ready to tell me your name?” he asked.

Chapel bit back a profanity.

“Perhaps you’d like to tell me how you met the terrorist Asimova?”

Chapel scowled. “She was no—”

Kalin waited, pen poised over his notebook. “Yes?” he said.

Chapel screwed his eyes shut. Bit his tongue to keep it from moving. He’d come very close to giving himself away, there. Far too close. Sleep deprivation took away your filters, made you say things without thinking about them first.

He had to be very, very careful now. He took the time, let the pounding in his head recede. Waited until he was totally in control again before speaking.

“I have no idea who you’re talking about,” he said. A small, pointless act of defiance. But it helped him straighten out his back and stand taller.

“That’s interesting. Especially given what we found when we tested your clothing. Forgive me if this is a bit… tasteless, but it’s germane to our conversation. We found traces of semen in your underwear. We also found her DNA — hairs, skin cells. Do you understand what that suggests?”

“That you’re some kind of underwear pervert?” Chapel asked. Childish, he knew. He could have done better if he could just think. Just think straight.

Kalin pursed his lips. “You do understand that you’re under investigation? Anything you say will be subject to verification.”

Chapel looked out the window. Or rather, he looked at the thick plastic that covered the window, and the bars beyond. He could see very little through those barriers. Just a sky the color of rotten tin.

Kalin waited patiently for a while before proceeding. “Subject does not acknowledge that he is under investigation,” he noted, eventually. “Exhibits signs of mental disorganization. Does not appear to follow logical questions.”

“That sounds like a psychological profile,” Chapel said. “I guess I am in an asylum, so it makes sense. What was that last night, a therapy session?”

“A method of persuasion,” Kalin said. “We have several at our disposal.”

“Sure. The KGB were always the experts in torture and interrogation,” Chapel said.

“I’m not KGB. The KGB doesn’t exist anymore.”

“You’re FSB, then,” Chapel pointed out. An organization that had been created, instituted, and staffed almost exclusively by former KGB agents.

“There is a difference, you know. The FSB is committed to human rights. We don’t hook up anyone to car batteries or pull out their fingernails with pliers. We won’t stick you in a cage full of rats.” Kalin laughed as if such things were quaint, old-fashioned practices, like writing with quill pens or traveling in horse-drawn buggies. “We won’t take you out in the courtyard and just shoot you.”

“Too messy,” Chapel said. “So how will you do it?”

“Do what?”

Chapel forced himself to grin. “Maybe you’ll inject me with polonium. That’s one of your techniques, right? Or maybe you’ll just let me starve.”

Kalin started writing in his notebook again. “Subject indulges paranoid fantasies. Believes he is to be killed. Believes he is important enough to be executed in violation of the rule of law.”

Chapel wanted to rip the notebook out of the bastard’s hand. “We both know how this ends,” he shouted.

“Do we? If I were to kill you, that would make it impossible for me to get the information I need. It would mean I couldn’t finish my report. No, no. I’m going to keep you healthy for as long as it takes.”

A little voice started screaming inside Chapel’s head, then. A voice of panic. It threatened to overwhelm him.

He fought it back.

“Let’s try to get back on course, all right?” Kalin asked. “Tell me your name.”

“You haven’t figured that out, yet? In your investigation?”

Kalin favored him with a cold smile. “I know that a man named Jack Carlson is wanted in Romania for destruction of property and discharging a firearm in public. I know that a man named Jeff Chambers is wanted for questioning in Uzbekistan. Since both of those men fit your description, and both were seen in the company of the terrorist Asimova, I think we can safely assume neither of those men really exist. I would like your real name. The one you use in America.”

Chapel turned away from Kalin. He started pacing back and forth, trying to get his blood moving so he could think more clearly. He hadn’t told Kalin he was an American. It wasn’t exactly hard to figure that one out, but if Kalin knew that much, then he must have already figured out that Chapel was a spy, that—

“Tell me your name. That’s all. Then I’ll let you sleep.”

“My name,” Chapel said. Oh, God. If Kalin knew so much already, what would it hurt? And to sleep — even if it was just a nap, just a catnap, a little sleep—

“Yes,” Kalin said. He held his pen over his notebook.

“My name is Napoleon Bonaparte. Put that in your psych profile.”

That night they took him out to the courtyard and made him walk in circles. Every time he flagged, every time he tried to stop in place and close his eyes, even for a second, an orderly would hit him with a baton. Not hard. Just enough to get him moving again. They had a knack for finding the bruises he already had and prodding those. They seemed to think it was funny when he jumped away from them. They started brandishing their batons at him even when he was moving, just to see him flinch.

In Ranger school, his trainer Bigelow had told him that a soldier needed to be able to sleep anywhere, anytime, under any conditions. “Sometimes you’ll be in the field for days on end. Behind enemy lines, or just in the middle of a battle that goes on and on. Your inclination will be to keep going, to just not sleep. Don’t do it. Even one night without sleep has the same effect as drinking three shots of tequila. It’s like being too drunk to drive. Your reaction time slows way down. You stop thinking about what you’re doing and you go on autopilot. You know what happens to a soldier who stops thinking on the battlefield?”

“He gets killed, sir,” Chapel had replied.

Bigelow had nodded. “That’s right. So you’re going to learn to sleep in a foxhole with artillery going off right next to you. You’re going to learn to sleep in a puddle of mud — to sleep standing up, if need be. You’ll learn to sleep for twenty minutes and feel as fresh as a daisy. You’ll—”

His reverie was interrupted by a quick blow to the bullet wound on his leg. Chapel shouted in pain and hopped forward on his other foot, while an orderly in a white coat laughed in his face. The man’s breath stank of meat.

For hours they kept him moving. He couldn’t keep up the pace, so the blows came more and more often. Eventually even the pain and the jeers couldn’t keep him from just shuffling his feet, stumbling along as they pulled his arm and dragged him. He fell down on his knees, and they dragged him back up to his feet. His chin dropped to his chest, and someone grabbed his hair and pulled it back.

He kept moving, as best he could. It got to the point where he wanted it, wanted to keep walking, because the alternative was so hellish. It got to the point where he wanted to please the orderlies, make them happy — if he could just walk, if he could walk a few more steps, maybe they would stop laughing—

He must have blacked out. He must have just collapsed. Because suddenly his face hurt like he’d scraped it on the pavement, and when he opened his eyes, he saw feet all around him, shoes — and then Kalin, who was squatting down next to him. Squatting and holding an empty hypodermic needle.

Chapel reared up like a startled bull, whooping for breath. His eyes snapped wide open, and he could feel his heart jumping around in his chest like it was trying to break free of his rib cage. Every muscle in his body twitched and shook, and he had a desperate need to urinate.

“What — did — you — give — me?” he demanded, through chattering teeth.

Kalin flicked the end of his needle. “Adrenaline,” he said. “Not quite enough to give you a heart attack, but enough to keep you awake. Now. Back on your feet.”

“Are you ready to tell me your name?” Kalin asked, pen poised.

Chapel couldn’t stop blinking. His eyes hurt, a deep, dull ache. He moved his head to try to get away from it. It didn’t work. His eyes hurt. He — he had already — he’d already — his eyes hurt.

He was pretty sure there had been more in the last needle than just adrenaline.

“Drugging me. You’re… you’re drugging me, that’s — that’s illegal, it’s — you’re giving me medical treatment without my consent. You can’t — it’s illegal.”

“What is your name?” Kalin asked.

“I know my rights!” Chapel shouted. He tried to grab for the notebook, but Kalin was too fast for him, yanking it out of the way. Chapel turned around and went to the wall and pressed his face against it. He scratched at his scalp. “You have to let me shower. You have to feed me. You have to let me sleep. You can’t drug me like this. I have rights!”

“Human beings have rights,” Kalin pointed out.

“Exactly. Yes. Human beings have rights,” Chapel said. He knew how he sounded. He knew how he was acting. He couldn’t help it. He needed to sleep. But he couldn’t sleep, not with the drugs they’d given him. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t sit down, couldn’t stand still.

His eyes hurt. A deep, profound ache. His eyes wanted to sleep. They wanted to close, but they couldn’t. He could only blink, over and over and over again.

“You don’t seem to have a name.”

“I have a name! You can’t have it,” Chapel insisted.

“If you don’t have a name,” Kalin said, as if Chapel hadn’t spoken, “that makes you a nonperson. Nonpersons don’t have any rights.”

Chapel turned and stared at him. Staring was easy. His eyes wouldn’t close. I’m a person, he thought. I am a person. I am a person.

“If you tell me your name, you can sleep. You can eat. We’ll even hose you down,” Kalin said, with a smile.

“I–I have a name,” Chapel insisted.

“I know. Just tell me what it is. Really, what’s the worst that can happen?”

Chapel tried to remember. He tried to remember why he couldn’t give this man his name. He was sure there was a good reason. He just had it. He just had the reason, he just had to remember. Remember why—

Kalin clicked his pen. Got ready to write something down.

“In your own time,” he said.

Chapel stared and stared and stared. He opened his mouth. He felt like something was going to come out. Words. Two words. A name.

“Indira Gandhi,” he said.

The look on Kalin’s face made him laugh. And laugh and laugh.

“David Cameron,” he tried, which was even funnier. Then he thought of the funniest name of all.

“My name is Senior Lieutenant Pavel Kalin, and I’ll be conducting your interview,” he said. And that was just hysterical.

He was still laughing when Kalin got up and picked up his chair. The notebook was nowhere to be seen.

“I apologize,” Kalin said.

Chapel stopped laughing instantly.

“I underestimated you,” Kalin told him. “It’s clear you’ve been trained to counter this kind of persuasion. Sleep deprivation isn’t going to work on you.”

“It’s — not?”

“We find it highly effective with most people. But there are limits to what can be done this way. Sleep deprivation can even be fatal if it’s taken too far. The first queen Elizabeth of England died of insomnia, did you know that?”

“That’s my name,” Chapel tried. “Queen Elizabeth.”

Kalin shook his head. “I could keep you awake longer, but then you would die. And that wouldn’t help me finish my report. So go ahead and sleep.” He shrugged and headed for the door. “The drugs will wear off in a few hours, and then I imagine you’ll sleep very well indeed. That’s good. I’ll want you clear-headed tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? What happens then?”

“That’s when we take things to the next level.”

Chapel woke up on the tiled floor of his room, his eyes slowly opening. He stretched out his arm, his legs, luxuriating in how rested he felt. He was sore from lying all night on the hard tiles, but he didn’t care. He felt a million times better than he had the day before.

He was considering his options — most of which involved rolling over and taking a nap — when there was a knock at the door. It opened before he could even realize he should say something, and an orderly came in, bearing a tray of food. Dry toast and some water. Chapel didn’t protest how plain it was. His stomach had shrunk from going without for so long, and he probably couldn’t have handled anything more complex. The orderly left again without a word, before Chapel could ask for more.

A little while later a different orderly came in and took the tray away. Then Kalin came in, carrying two chairs. He set them down facing each other and gestured for Chapel to sit in one of them.

“You look well,” Kalin told him, with a smile that showed some actual warmth. “I’m glad. You know I don’t want to cause you pain, don’t you? I hope you understand that. That I don’t take any pleasure in what we’ve done to you.”

Chapel considered sneering, but he didn’t want to give Kalin the satisfaction.

“You don’t want to give me your name, we’ve established that,” Kalin told him. He made a dismissive gesture, as if he were shooing away a pesky insect. “Okay. Konyechno, as we say in Russia.”

Chapel forced himself not to flinch, hearing Nadia’s favorite word out of this man’s mouth.

“You know the term? It means more than just ‘okay’ or ‘of course.’ There’s no exact translation into English. Perhaps you have heard of our famous Slavic fatalism. The way we simply accept that the world is not made for our pleasure, to our desires. We say ‘konyechno’ to mean this. Perhaps the best English equivalent would be, ‘What are you going to do?’”

“So you’ve given up? You’re going to release me with an official apology?”

Kalin smiled again. “American optimism. Perhaps that’s what won the Cold War. Okay. All right. Konyechno. I give up… at least, I will stop asking for your name. There are other questions that I’d like answers to. I’d like to know how you met the terrorist Asimova.” He took his pen and his notebook out. “I’d like to know what you were doing at Aralsk-30. I’d like to know what her plan was. She was in charge, yes? She was giving the orders? We’ve established that much, but I’d like confirmation.”

“For your report.”

“Yes. Exactly. For my report. Where should we start?”

“Sorry,” Chapel said. “I don’t have the answers you want.”

“You mean you won’t give them to me,” Kalin suggested.

“Believe what you want,” Chapel said. He draped his arm over the back of his chair. It was immensely comforting to have furniture at his disposal again. “So where I’m from—”

“Which is?” Kalin asked, his pen coming up.

“—the police have this tactic they use during interrogations,” Chapel went on, “called Good Cop Bad Cop. Two police officers enter the interrogation room and the first one threatens the suspect with jail. He shouts and demands answers and slams the wall and gets right up in the suspect’s face. The suspect, naturally, refuses to answer anything. He’s afraid of the bad cop, you see.”

“Understandably.”

Chapel nodded. “Eventually, the bad cop gets so frustrated he says he has to leave the room. That he’s going to hurt the suspect if he has to look at him for one more second. The other cop, the good cop, closes the door behind him and tells the suspect how sorry he is, that the bad cop is a hothead and dangerous and he wishes he didn’t have to work with him. He tells the suspect that things aren’t actually so bad, that he understands why the suspect did what he did. He promises him all kinds of favors. He gets the suspect coffee or food. He makes friends with the suspect. Of course, it’s all an act. Both cops know it. But it’s surprisingly effective. Given the chance to talk to a friendly face, many suspects will just give themselves away.”

“Interesting,” Kalin said. “But I don’t see the point. There’s only one of me.”

“Exactly,” Chapel said. “That’s why this isn’t going to work. I’ll never think of you as a friend, Kalin. And I’ll never answer your questions.”

The senior lieutenant nodded in understanding and tapped his pen on the edge of his notebook. “You have been trained to resist interrogation, haven’t you? Very impressive. Very good. But you’re wrong about one thing — I’m not trying to fool you here. I harbor no illusions that you’re going to start to like me. I am not trying to instill Stockholm syndrome in you, no, nothing like that.”

“Okay,” Chapel said.

“No, no. You see, I wasn’t trained by American policemen. I was trained by the KGB. You understand, of course, that the old men I learned from were experts at this sort of thing. Masters of getting at secrets. They had their own technique. One of them, one of the most simple, one of the most effective was based on the idea of operant conditioning. Do you know the term? No? Let me tell you how it works. I begin with something bad, something unpleasant. Say, I keep a man awake for days until he begins to break down psychologically. Then — out of nowhere — I stop. I let him sleep. I give him food. I let him feel good again, safe again. I let him remember what it was like to be warm and comfortable. I let him remember how much he has lost. Because — and this is the effective part — it makes what comes next so very, very much worse.”

Chapel froze in his chair. He forced himself not to give anything away.

Kalin rose from his chair. “Come,” he said. “Let’s take a walk. I want you to see the next step.”

Kalin led him out into a wide hallway that curved gently as it followed the round shape of the hospital. They passed by a number of doors, some of which were ajar, though Chapel could see nothing in the rooms beyond. He wondered for the first time if he were the only inmate here.

One door opened, and a pair of big orderlies stepped out. They nodded respectfully to Kalin and then fell in behind him and Chapel. They said nothing, and they didn’t meet Chapel’s eye.

“Torture,” Kalin told Chapel as they walked, “has a rather long history. As soon as there were kings and priests, I imagine, there was a need for torturers. As long as there were heretics and dissidents. Think of all the ways it used to be done — the rack, the iron maiden, the thumbscrews. An enormous amount of human ingenuity has gone into finding ways to make people talk. But in ancient times it was always looked on as a craft. Perhaps an art form. It took the KGB to bring torture into the modern era. To bring science to the problem of persuasion. To make a technology out of it.”

They reached a junction in the corridor, and Kalin gestured for them to walk deeper into the building, away from the windows.

“For seventy years they worked at it, testing out new techniques, new drugs, new methods of causing pain. They studied how their subjects responded to each tactic. They made charts and graphs of how long human beings could withstand, say, having hot irons placed against the soles of their feet, or how long they could go without food before they would begin raving. They tested all the famous truth serums — scopolamine, sodium pentathol, amobarbital — measuring each dosage so carefully, compiling lists of control questions and polygraph results. For decades they honed and refined their methods, always looking for the new way, the best way to reach the truth.”

They came to a bank of elevators. Kalin summoned one with the press of a button and they all stepped inside, the orderlies flanking Chapel on either side. Maybe they thought he was going to attack Kalin. Try to kill him.

He’d thought about it. But he knew that no matter how much satisfaction he might get from strangling his interrogator, it would make no difference. Moscow would just send another one straightaway.

As the elevator descended, Kalin continued his lecture. “After seventy years of this, most of what they had learned was what didn’t work. How useless most torture really was. Cause enough pain and a man will tell you anything — but you can never know if what he tells you is true or simply what he thinks you want to hear. Testimony given under the influence of drugs is as likely to be fabricated — pure fantasy — as it is to reflect reality. But they did learn one basic principle about torture. One thing they could be sure of: every subject is different.”

The elevator doors opened, and they stepped out. Chapel thought they might be in the basement of the hospital. The air was much cooler down there, and a little clammy. The walls were all tiled, and drains were set at periodic intervals in the floor, as if this level needed to be hosed down frequently. Even the lighting was different — harsher, more direct. Instead of the recessed bulbs on the higher floors, here the light came from hanging lamps, each of them inside its own steel cage.

It was not a good place. Combined with the subject of Kalin’s speech, it was enough to make Chapel’s skin crawl.

“Some men resist pain better than others. Some can go longer without food. The same dosage of a truth drug might open one man up and kill another.” Kalin shrugged. “All very frustrating. But some agent of the KGB, some man who will be forever nameless, took this problem and saw that it was actually an opportunity in disguise. If every subject responded to torture differently, then it was clear to him that the torture must be changed to suit the subject. That effective torture meant finding the one thing, the one breaking point, that would work for a given subject. If a man is afraid of spiders, for instance — if he has a phobia of them, then you will get more out of him by sticking his hand in a box full of the things than you would from weeks of a drug regimen. If a man loves his wife, you threaten her, not him. The trick, of course, is finding out just what the breaking point, the weak spot, is. Especially with a subject who won’t even tell you his name.”

They came to a section of corridor lined with long rectangular windows. Beyond the glass was only darkness. Kalin went over to one and flipped a switch, turning on lights in the room beyond.

Chapel wanted to run away. He didn’t want to know what was in that room, what Kalin thought was going to make him crack. He started to turn — it was involuntary — but the orderlies just grabbed him then. Held him in place.

“Take a look,” Kalin said.

Chapel forced himself to look through the window. His imagination, he knew, was running away from him; it couldn’t possibly be as bad as what his own mind could come up with. He looked and saw—

Nothing much. On the other side of the glass was what looked like a standard operating room. There was a slablike operating table and a couple of cabinets. A tank of anesthetic gas. Lights that could be shone directly on the table. That was it.

No box full of spiders. No Julia with a gun to her head.

Just an operating room.

“I’ve been watching you for some time now. When you first came to me, I had your prosthetic arm taken away. I thought that would leave you vulnerable, that you would have difficulty doing the most basic tasks. But I was wrong — you operate just fine with one arm. You have learned over time how to get by with only half the usual number of hands. That’s very commendable. I wonder if you could learn the same lesson all over again?”

Chapel’s eyes went wide. “No,” he said. “No. You can’t. You wouldn’t.”

“I can. I will. You are a nonperson. I can do anything to you I desire,” Kalin said. “You don’t even have a name. Tomorrow, if you do not answer all of my questions, I will bring you back here and we will cut off your right arm. And then you will have no arms at all. It will be interesting to see just how well you can adapt to that.”

They left him alone all day. An orderly came by with food a couple of times, but he didn’t respond to Chapel’s halting questions, even when he tried to ask them in Russian. It was clear that Kalin had given the order that Chapel be left to his own thoughts.

Which was a kind of torture all in itself.

“You hold out as long as you can,” Bigelow had told him. Every day he kept silent was another day for Hollingshead to distance himself and the DIA from Chapel’s activities. Another day for Angel to scrub his existence off the official records. Another day to make it look like the United States had never sent an agent to sabotage Perimeter.

But Bigelow had also told him there would come a time when he wouldn’t be able to hold out any longer. When the pressure was just too much.

He’d already given one arm for his country. Was he supposed to give the other one, too? Objectively he knew the answer to that question. If he was willing to give his life for America, why not an arm? He’d already proven once that he could survive that kind of loss. That he could learn to have a meaningful life as an amputee. He thought back to when he’d come home from Afghanistan, and he’d worked with a physical trainer named Top, learning how to live with one arm. Top had been a sergeant in Iraq who had lost an arm, a leg, and an eye to a roadside bomb. The man had given more than anyone could reasonably ask, but he’d never complained — and he’d never let it slow him down. With Top’s help, Chapel had learned to adjust.

Of course, part of that adjustment was getting a magic prosthetic that worked almost as well as what he’d lost. The artificial arm had made a huge difference in his life, made so many things possible for him. But that arm was gone. Kalin wouldn’t give him another one, and he certainly wouldn’t give him two. He would spend the rest of his life in this hospital — maybe years — struggling to learn to use his feet to feed himself, to clean himself.

And even that wouldn’t be the end of it. Once Kalin had taken his right arm — what would be the next step? If somehow Chapel managed to stay silent even through another amputation, Kalin wouldn’t just give up. He would find some other way to get the information he wanted.

There came a point where your country could ask no more of you, Chapel thought. There came a point where no matter how many oaths and promises you’d made, no matter how sincerely you had sworn to defend the honor of your country, you had to let go. You had to give in.

Maybe he had reached that point.

He was asleep when they came for him. Two big orderlies in white tunics picked him up and carried him out of his cell. Kalin waited for him by the elevator that led down to the surgical theaters.

Kalin had his notebook in one hand, and his pen in the other.

He was tapping the pen against the edge of the notebook. Impatient.

Somehow that was the thing that made Chapel snap. That made him try to fight.

One orderly held his arm, the other had his neck. He didn’t know if they were really hospital employees or FSB agents — but he could tell by how thoroughly, how efficiently they held him, that they’d had some training in how to restrain a violent person.

They’d never tried to hold on to an Army Ranger before, though.

Chapel’s legs were free. He stopped walking and forced them to drag him until his legs were dangling behind him, his bare feet squeaking on the slick floor. He brought one leg up and hooked it around the knee of the orderly holding his arm. The man wasn’t ready for that and he stumbled. The other orderly tried to compensate, but Chapel threw his weight to the side and all three of them went down in a heap.

The orderly who held his arm saw the floor coming toward his face and let go, using his hands to catch himself. That was all Chapel needed. He brought his arm back and delivered a nasty punch right to the kidney of the orderly holding his neck. The man’s breath exploded out of his mouth, and his grip slackened.

Chapel wrestled his way clear and scrambled to his feet. He could see Kalin reaching into his jacket pocket, maybe going for a weapon. If he went for Kalin, Chapel knew that would give the orderlies a chance to come at him from behind, so he ignored Kalin and dashed down the hall in the other direction.

He heard shouting behind him, but he ignored it. He came to the junction in the corridor, the place where it met the hallway that followed the curve of the building. Where would the stairs be? He’d seen them when he was brought here for the first time, but now he couldn’t remember — did he go left or right?

He had to pick one. He went right.

They’d made a mistake in letting him eat and sleep. He’d recovered some of his strength, and he had always been a fast runner. He dashed past a series of doorways, some of them open to show empty rooms. He remembered the bars on the windows, the impact-resistant plastic that covered them on the inside. No point entering any of those rooms. He needed to find an exit, a way out of the hospital altogether, if he had any chance of getting away.

Up ahead the curved hallway opened into a sort of lobby. There were restrooms up there, and — yes — a bank of elevators. He had no time to wait for one of those, but he knew that generally where you found elevators you found emergency stairs as well.

He got lucky. If the door to the stairs had been labeled in Russian, he would have just passed it by — he couldn’t read the Cyrillic characters. But the doorway also showed a pictogram of someone running down steps ahead of a cartoon flame. Fire stairs — perfect. He hit the door with his shoulder and found, as he’d expected, that it was locked. Fire safety was less important than not letting your inmates escape, he supposed. He hit the door again, and again.

Behind him he heard rubber shoes chirping on the linoleum floor.

He hit the door again and the lock snapped. Cheap manufacture, not meant for this kind of abuse. Chapel burst through the door and down a flight of concrete steps. It was dark in the stairwell but as he descended, taking the steps two and three at a time, automatic lights flickered on overhead.

He had no idea even what floor he was on, or how many flights down the street was, but he didn’t care. He heard people yelling at each other above him and just kept hurtling down the steps, fast enough that if he missed a riser he would probably fall and break his neck.

He didn’t fall. One flight down, dash across the landing, two flights, another landing, three flights—

He heard someone moving below him, footsteps hurrying up the stairs toward him. He heard the squawk of a portable radio and knew the hospital’s security guards had been alerted about an escape attempt. Well, he would just have to improvise.

Four flights down, five, and then he ran around a landing and saw a man below him, a man in a dark green uniform carrying a radio in one hand and a heavy wooden baton in the other. No gun.

Chapel launched himself off the landing, into the air. He came crashing down hard on top of the security guard, whose body broke his fall. The man cried out, something in Russian Chapel didn’t understand. Chapel grabbed the baton out of the man’s hand and hit him a couple of times with it, hit him until he stopped protesting.

Then he was off again. Down another flight. Another. Up ahead the stairs ended at a short corridor. At the end of that corridor was a sign covered in warnings and writing he couldn’t read. The door had a push bar and it looked like an alarm would sound if it was opened. It had to be an emergency exit to the street.

If he could get through that door, if Chapel could get out into the world, he could count on his training for what to do next. Find some clothes, get some money, find some way to contact Varvara and her vory friends, find a way out of Russia—

He hit the push bar at full speed, expecting the door to crash open, expecting to spill out into sunlight and chill morning air and freedom, and—

The door didn’t open.

The push bar moved under his weight. He could feel a latch inside the door retract, could feel the door shift in its jamb. But it wouldn’t open.

It must have been sealed off somehow. Maybe the security detail had a way to lock it remotely, and they’d sealed off every exit from the hospital as soon as they heard an inmate was loose. Maybe the door was just rusted into place.

Chapel hit the door with his shoulder, hit it again and again until he felt like he was going to break the bones in his one good arm. Still it wouldn’t open. He could hear people coming up behind him, hear them getting closer, and there was nowhere to go except back, right into their path. He hit the door with his left shoulder, probably damaging the sensitive electrodes implanted in his stump, but who cared, what did it matter, anything could be fixed—

A needle sank deep into his neck. He whirled around, as ferocious as a tiger, to find Kalin right next to him. He thought he would kill the man then and there, bite his throat out if need be, gouge him in the eyes, smash his trachea…

… but he suddenly… felt very… woozy. Very… weak.

“Only a sedative,” Kalin said.

Chapel sank down to the floor. He just wanted to sit down for a second. Then he would start fighting again.

“Not too much,” Kalin said. The FSB man squatted next to him, to look in his eyes. “Half a dose, really. I need you conscious for what comes next.”

Four orderlies, this time. Even though Chapel would have found it hard to stand under his own power. His head felt light, and even his teeth felt numb. Well. He’d won a small victory, then. A tiny, barely meaningful one.

When they cut off his arm, it wasn’t going to hurt as much. The sedative would help kill a little of the pain.

His eyes rolled around to look at Kalin, and he realized that he was being asked a question. He had floated away for a little while there. Kalin smiled and repeated his query, very slowly.

“What is your name?”

Chapel smiled back.

“You do understand, don’t you? If you have a name, that makes you a human being. That gives you certain rights. I won’t be able to amputate your arm if you have rights. But only if you have a name. What is your name?”

“Marie Antoinette,” Chapel told him.

The drug didn’t take away the fear. It didn’t keep his fight-or-flight reflex from kicking in. Inside his head Chapel was screaming, begging to be released. But he could use the drug, use how sluggish it made his muscles. He could at least pretend to be composed.

He promised himself he would hold out right until the last minute. That he wouldn’t give in until they strapped him down on the operating table. Who knew? Maybe this was all a bluff. Maybe Kalin wouldn’t go through with it.

Yeah, right, he thought. He knew better. That wasn’t the way the world worked. Not his world, anyway.

“How did you meet the terrorist Asimova?” Kalin asked.

“She wasn’t a terrorist,” Chapel said. “She was a patriot. More of a patriot to Russia than you are, asshole.”

Kalin beamed. “So you admit you knew her. This is getting us somewhere.”

Damn, Chapel thought. He’d slipped up. Maybe the sedative had hit him harder than he’d thought.

“How did you make contact with her? Who was her handler? Tell me this much and I will put off your surgery for a day. Come, come, my friend. What does it matter? She’s dead — there is no need to protect her now. How did you meet her?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Kalin sighed in frustration.

Well, now. There was another little victory. Chapel was really racking them up. He’d managed to annoy the senior lieutenant.

Maybe he could force the man to raise his voice before they cut off his legs, too.

The elevator doors opened on the basement level. Tiled walls and bad lighting. Not much longer now.

“You can still save yourself. Your arm. How traumatic it must have been, when the first one came off. How you must have raged against God and your country, that they would take so much from you. Do you really want to go through this again? Answer one question and this ends, right now,” Kalin told him.

Chapel fixed him with a steely gaze. He was just about out of those. Out of defiance. He knew that when he saw the bone saw, when he heard it whine, he would lose. He would give in.

But… not just yet.

Every second he held out was worth it. Angel could erase a lot of data in a second. She could take his name out of a lot of databases.

“We shall go back to the beginning,” Kalin said. “Just give me your name. Your real name.”

The stress, the panic, was burning through the drug in his bloodstream. Chapel lifted his head — it felt a little easier now. “No,” he said.

They passed by a dark window. Another one. The next window was already lit up. That was their destination.

“Tell me your name,” Kalin asked, and he gave a friendly little laugh. “Just a name. Tell me your name, and I will send you back to your cell.”

Through the lit window, Chapel could see the operating table. It was draped with a sterile white cloth now. There was a tray next to it, a tray holding instruments. And there was a man standing next to the table wearing surgical scrubs. Had they brought in a real surgeon for this? What doctor would actually perform an unnecessary amputation? What about the Hippocratic oath? What about First Do No Harm?

Chapel knew perfectly well there were doctors in the world who would cut his arm off with no hesitation. He knew Kalin would have such a doctor on his payroll.

“Your name,” Kalin said.

Chapel closed his eyes.

Kalin grabbed his face and squeezed until his eyes opened again.

“Your name. Tell me your name.”

Chapel heard a bell ring. Then he heard a bunch of people walking quickly over the linoleum floor. Getting closer.

Kalin glanced backward, toward the elevator. What he saw there didn’t seem to please him. “Only one thing can help you,” he told Chapel.

Inside the surgical theater someone turned on a bone saw. Chapel would have recognized that sound anywhere.

This was it — the moment he’d promised himself he was allowed to surrender.

“What is your name?” Kalin asked, shouting in his face.

Chapel opened his mouth. He didn’t know what was going to come out — he wasn’t in control of his tongue anymore. He started making sounds, and he couldn’t fight it, couldn’t help himself.

“His name,” someone else said, someone behind him, “is James Chapel. Captain James Chapel. He’s an American agent, working under direct orders from the Washington Pentagon.”

Chapel and Kalin both turned to look.

The man who had spoken wore the long greatcoat and cap of a Russian army officer. Judging by the epaulets and all the medals on his chest he was of high rank. He did not smile as he approached them.

“He is also,” the officer said, “now under my authority.” He spoke some more, in Russian, far too fast for Chapel to make out any words. Kalin replied with surprise and anger, but then the officer held up a piece of paper and let Kalin read it.

Whatever was written there made Kalin turn white as the snow in Siberia.

He glanced over at Chapel, still being held up by the orderlies. Then he nodded, just once. The officer said something else, but Kalin didn’t respond. He put his notebook and his pen back in his pocket, and then he started walking toward the elevator.

In the surgical theater, the doctor turned off his bone saw.

It was… hard to believe.

It was hard to accept that this wasn’t a trick. Some subtle ruse on Kalin’s part, a way to make Chapel talk. Somehow the Russians had learned who he was. Now that his name wasn’t so important, they were going to fool him into believing that it was over, that he wasn’t going to be tortured anymore. Then he would start talking because, why not? Surely this was some kind of trick.

“I am Colonel Mikhail Valits, of the RVSN,” the soldier told him.

“The Strategic Rocket Forces,” Chapel said. That was the branch of the Russian military that controlled all the land-based nuclear missiles. “You must know why I’m here, then, so you don’t need to ask.”

Valits looked slightly confused. His English wasn’t as good as Kalin’s — Chapel could clearly see him sound out each word before he spoke it. Maybe he didn’t understand. “If you will please come with me, we have much to discuss.”

“I’m a prisoner here. You don’t have to say please,” Chapel told him.

Valits looked over at the orderlies and barked a question at them. They responded in Russian Chapel couldn’t follow, but one of them mimicked plunging a hypodermic needle into his own neck. They were telling Valits that Chapel had been drugged.

“Konyechno.” Valits sighed, making it sound like the weariest word in the Russian language. He took Chapel’s arm and helped him walk. He led Chapel back to the elevator. They had to wait for it to return, since Kalin had already used it to leave the basement.

Valits said nothing as they rode up to the ground floor of the hospital. He took Chapel down a short corridor and into a large room with lots of windows. It looked like some kind of lounge, maybe for the patients or perhaps the doctors who had once worked there. A boxy television set hung from a bracket in the ceiling, and there were a number of tables and stuffed armchairs scattered around the room. Everything looked dusty, and Chapel remembered wondering if he was the only inmate in the entire place.

A woman was waiting for them when they entered. She was sitting at one of the tables, hunched over an expensive-looking tablet, maybe checking her e-mail. She wore a smart business suit, and her hair was piled up on top of her head. When she looked up, Chapel saw she wore tortoise-shell-rimmed glasses and had eyes the color of used dishwater. She was maybe thirty years old, but probably younger.

And she was an American.

He could tell, instantly. Something about how white her teeth were, how her hair was cut. Maybe just the corn-fed good looks or the fact that, unlike every Russian Chapel had met except Nadia, this woman didn’t look like she expected to be arrested at any second. Funny. He’d been away from his home country so long that other Americans had started to look strange to him.

She didn’t smile as she stood up, and she held her tablet in one hand as she held out the other to shake his. She glanced at his stump and visibly shuddered. “One big horror show after another,” she said, and laughed, as if she had made a funny joke.

Chapel didn’t mind. He was used to people being polite about his missing arm — too polite. They pretended like it didn’t bother them, or they tried to suppress their disgust. This woman didn’t seem to care if he knew how she felt.

That was almost enough to make him like her on the spot. Of course, the fact that she was an American — and that her presence here almost proved that this wasn’t an elaborate ruse concocted by Kalin to make him talk — made him want to hug her and weep.

“What’s your name?” he asked her. He wanted to laugh out loud. “Sorry — you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

The woman’s lips pursed in confusion. She looked over at Valits, but clearly she didn’t find any help there. She rolled her eyes and sighed theatrically. Her sigh sounded very different from Valits’s — it was the sigh of someone for whom boredom is the greatest pain imaginable.

She sat back down and tapped at the screen of her tablet. “I’m Natalie Hobbes. I’m an attaché with the office of the United States Ambassador to the Russian Federation.” She glanced up at him. “Are you going to sit down, or what?”

Chapel had been a prisoner for only a few days, but it had been long enough to make him think he needed to be asked first. He sat down, gratefully — the drug in his system still made him feel weak — and rested his hand on the table.

“I’m supposed to check you out and give you something, and then Colonel Valits is going to show you a video. Shouldn’t take long. I hope not — I’m supposed to be at a poetry reading tonight back in Moscow.” She rolled her eyes again. “Arts outreach. I hate poetry, but you have to show a pretty face every once in a while to keep everybody happy.” She looked up at Valits. “Is there any coffee?”

The colonel reared back as if she’d spit in his face. He was not the kind of man that fetched coffee for other people. “I’ll see what I can do,” he told her, and walked away.

“God, I hate this part of Russia. The smog is thicker here than in L.A., I swear,” Hobbes said. She looked up at Chapel for a moment. “You don’t look so hot. Were you mistreated while you were detained here?”

Chapel couldn’t help it anymore. He laughed — a full-body belly laugh, enough to make him double over and make tears run from his eyes.

Natalie Hobbes stood up from the table. “I really don’t need this,” she said. “I think I’ll be going, now.”

Chapel started to reach for her, to grab her and make her sit down again. She flinched away from him, though, and he held up his hand to show he meant no harm. “Please,” he said, “I apologize. I didn’t mean to—”

“To freak me out?” she asked, looking very angry.

“Right. Look, I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you’ve come for me. I thought I was going to… well, I thought I was going to be here for a very long time.” It was clear she had no idea what kind of hell he’d been through in the hospital. No point freaking her out more. “I know what I must look like. But, please, I’m ready to go. Right now. The sooner the better.”

She squinted at him, her nose wrinkling upward, as if she had forgotten her glasses and was having trouble seeing him clearly. He realized it must be how she expressed confusion. “They didn’t brief you, did they? I’m not here to take you home. You’re still under arrest. You’re not going anywhere unless Colonel Valits says so.”

Chapel glanced over to the door of the room, where the colonel had reappeared holding two steaming coffee cups.

“I was given two tasks here,” Hobbes told him. “One was to verify you were still alive and in no immediate danger. That’s done. The other thing was — this.” She reached into her purse and took out a small manila envelope. She threw it down on the table. “It came over this morning in the diplomatic pouch, addressed to you. Even in this stupid country, prisoners are allowed to get mail.”

Chapel could only stare at her. This wasn’t a rescue? He was still under arrest? He couldn’t bear the thought of going back to his cell, to wait for Kalin to come for him.

He picked up the envelope and turned it around in his hands, almost afraid to open it. Kalin had nearly broken him. If this was just a message from Hollingshead, telling him he was on his own… But the envelope was too heavy to just be a letter. It bulged from trying to hold its contents.

Only one way to find out what it meant. He tore open the envelope and spilled it out onto the table. A cheap disposable cell phone and a hands-free unit.

It might have been gold and rubies. Chapel put the hands-free unit in his ear and powered up the phone.

“Angel?” he said.

She answered him a second later. “Chapel? Is that… of course it’s you. Oh, sugar, I am so glad to hear your voice, you can’t even know.”

“I bet I can,” Chapel told her. He closed his eyes and tried not to weep. The sexy voice of his operator in his ear was something he had thought he would never hear again. “Angel,” he said. He couldn’t think of more words. “Angel.”

“Sweetie, there’s a lot to talk about. But you’re alive — that’s the main thing. Oh, thank God. You’re still alive.”

“First things first,” Angel said. “This signal is encrypted, and the hands-free set has noise-canceling technology. But if they have a powerful enough microphone — and I bet they do — they can still hear what I’m saying in your ear. And of course they’ll hear everything you say to me. There’s not a lot we can do about that, but we’re going to try to be discreet, right?”

“Of course,” Chapel said.

Across the table Hobbes took her coffee from Valits without a word and sipped at it. She made a face.

“You’re probably looking at Natalie Hobbes,” Angel said. “She’s the real deal. A junior staffer from the American embassy. Rich parents, went to Harvard, pretty much fell into this job — we’ve vetted her from this end and we don’t see any reason to think the Russians might have turned her. She’s on our side, in other words. As long as she’s in the room you’re safe.”

“She’s already talking about leaving,” Chapel said.

“Just make sure she sticks around until you talk to Colonel Valits. As for him — he’s not an FSB agent, I’m about eighty percent sure on that. He might shoot you, but… look, I don’t know what you’ve been going through there in Magnitogorsk. I think maybe I don’t want to know the details. But, sweetie, whatever he is, he’s better than the people you’ve been dealing with. He’s your best bet, so keep him happy.”

“Got it,” Chapel said.

“You’re not free. You’re still under arrest, and you’re a prisoner of the Russian legal system.”

“What am I charged with?” Chapel asked.

“They claim they picked you up just inside the Russian border, raving and disoriented. They’ve arrested you for a couple penny-ante crimes — being a public nuisance, defacing public property, whatever. That’s enough for them to hold you. They claim you’re a danger to yourself and others, and they’re working on having you committed as a mental patient. If they do, that’s the last anyone will hear of you. Ever.”

“Jesus,” Chapel said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Fix things?”

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

“I do,” he told her.

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

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

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

“You are a fool,” Valits told Chapel.

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

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

Chapel wished someone would tell him what was going on.

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

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

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

“You know what this is?” Valits asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What was the target?” Chapel asked.

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

Chapel forced his jaw not to drop.

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

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

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

“Yes,” Valits said. “She can.”

She?

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

One rose to the surface right away, however.

Nadia is still alive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Always, honey.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So you’re saying—”

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

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

Nadia had betrayed him.

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

She had betrayed him.

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

Nadia had played him like a fish on a line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I had no idea,” he told Valits. “The whole time — I had no idea.”

The colonel hadn’t moved, hadn’t flinched, throughout Chapel’s rampage. He nodded just once now. “Surprisingly,” he said, “I believe you.”

Chapel dropped his head. He was breathing hard, and every muscle in his body was tense, but the anger was already draining from him. He was already starting to move on to self-loathing.

Valits rose and straightened his uniform tunic. “Unfortunately, Moscow has no choice. We must see your actions as an act of espionage, if not of war.”

“We have more to lose than you do,” Chapel pointed out. “If she launches those missiles, they’ll head straight for my country. For New York. For Chicago. For Washington.”

Valits shrugged. Konyechno, he was saying. “It would seem, then, that we have a mutual problem.”

“Yeah,” Chapel told him. “And one solution. We get Asimova before she can press the button. But how exactly do we do that?”

“This,” Valits said, “is why I am talking to you now, instead of leaving you to the devices of Senior Lieutenant Kalin. Because I have been led to believe that you are the only man in the world who can find her.”

“Of course,” Valits explained, “we have attempted to track her location. We find that the signal she is using, however — the one that sent the launch signal to Izhevsk, and the one that carried her demands — is untraceable. It was not a shortwave signal, though it had similar characteristics. We were able to determine it was bounced off a satellite. That means she could be anywhere in the world right now. If she is smart, she will be very far from any Russian holdings. She might be in your country, even.

“It is possible she was not that smart. We have teams of soldiers out looking for her everywhere from St. Petersburg to the farthest eastern islands. We do not have enough manpower to cover the entire Russian Federation, but we have been concentrating on major cities — places where she could have access to high-end signal equipment.”

“I’m guessing you haven’t turned up anything yet,” Chapel said.

“Nothing. There is no trace of her anywhere. We sent envoys to speak with the top leaders of the vory—when you wish to disappear in this country, they are who you turn to. They say she made no attempt to contact them.”

“And you believed them? Asimova has friends in those circles. They could be protecting her.”

Valits smiled. It wasn’t a warm smile. It wasn’t a smirk. It was a smile of resignation. “Not at the top levels. It is a fact of my nation, a sad fact, that there is very little distance between our elected officials and the gangsters. They are all heavily invested in the Federation, and they would not protect her, not after we showed them the video you just saw. They have as much to lose as any of us.”

Chapel nodded. “Okay. What about other political groups? Other terrorist organizations. I’m sure there are plenty that would love to help her give Moscow a black eye.” Valits looked confused by the idiom. “To embarrass your government,” Chapel explained.

“Absolutely. But we have ways of getting information from those groups — we watch them very closely — and we have heard nothing, not even chatter. She has not made alliance even with the other Siberian nationalist and ethnic groups. She seems to be working completely on her own.”

Probably, Chapel thought, because you’ve already killed off everyone she could count on—he doubted Bulgachenko was the only casualty of Nadia’s mission.

“So that leaves us with nothing to go on,” Chapel said.

“Not quite. In our… desperation, we made one last attempt to seek aid. We turned to your government.”

Chapel’s eyes went wide. For Russia to ask Washington for help with an internal political problem was unheard of. Moscow must be even more frightened than he’d thought.

“We contacted your superior, Rupert Hollingshead. We wished to know if Asimova had said anything to him, given away any clue as to her plans. He was not useful on that front. However, he did discover one thing that could aid us. While he could not track the signal she is using, he did recognize its signature. I believe your friend on the telephone can tell you what I mean.”

Angel chirped in on cue. “That’s right, sweetie. I’m the one who recognized the signature, of course.”

“Yeah?” Chapel asked her. “How?”

“Easy. Because it was the same kind of signal I use.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Angel sounded sheepish as she answered. “I didn’t believe it at first. I use a cutting-edge signal profile that lets me contact you anywhere on earth and make sure nobody can listen in to what I’m saying. It’s all pretty technical, but basically I use packet switching and channel hopping algorithms to spread my frequency out over a broad band of—”

“Still too technical,” Chapel told her.

“Probably best if I don’t explain over this line, anyway. I was confused when I saw she was using the same technology. I was especially confused when I looked back over my notes for this mission. Remember when you asked me if I could listen in to Bogdan’s computer?”

“Sure,” Chapel said. That was on the train to Vobkent. Just after he’d realized that Bogdan even had a computer.

“I said I couldn’t hack in directly, but maybe there was something I could do. I started building up a profile of the signal he was using. It’s a match, Chapel. It’s exactly the same. The message she sent, and the launch signal, came from Bogdan’s computer. Or one using the same signal tech. The same tech I use.”

“You’re saying he just figured out your tech on his own?” Chapel asked, confused.

Angel snorted in derision. “Hardly. He stole it. Or rather, she did. It took me a long time to realize how. She would need access to my hardware to even begin to reverse engineer my tech. And when did she have access like that?”

“I’m afraid you’re about to tell me.”

“Yeah.” The sheepish tone came back. “You remember Donny’s yacht? When you came back up to the surface too fast? You remember anything unusual about that?”

Chapel cast his mind back. He had come up at speed, and he’d been unable to reach Angel during the ascent. When he broke the surface, the first thing he did was contact her again. He should have been able to reach her just by touching the anchor cable, because of the transponder he’d clipped to it, but—

The transponder had been missing.

He’d been too concerned with decompression sickness to think about what that meant. Somebody had unclipped it while he’d been surfacing, he knew that much. But he hadn’t thought to look for it later. Even after he’d been taken to Miami, and the hyperbaric chamber there, his major concern had been for the one-time pad. When he found that Nadia could have stolen it, but hadn’t… well, that was when he’d begun to trust her.

“Your transponder,” he said to Angel. “She had it the whole time?”

“And she gave it to Bogdan, who adopted the tech for his ingenious little computer. You got it, sweetie.”

“Okay, yet another way I screwed up,” Chapel said. “But it might turn out in our favor. I’m guessing you can trace the signal, right? You can trace your own signal?”

“Uh,” Angel said. “Well. Kind of.”

“What does that mean?”

“My signal is designed to be untraceable. But — look, I’ll skip the technical stuff this time. If you could triangulate the signal, if both you and I were looking for it at the same time, we could find it. But one of us would need to be pretty close, say, within fifty miles of the originating source.”

“So we already need to know roughly where she is before we can hope to find her.”

“I’m afraid you’ve got it.”

Chapel nodded slowly to himself. With the best technology in the world, with the best computers and data analysis, it was going to come down to him. He was the one who was going to have to guess where Nadia had gone.

He thought back, trying to remember any clue she’d given him. Any idea at all.

This time, he didn’t miss what was right under his nose. Or under hers, anyway. Assuming, of course, that anything she’d told him was the truth.

He turned to Valits, and he could hear the steel in his own voice. “How soon can we leave?”

Valits’s eyes opened very wide. “You know where she is?”

“I can find her.” He could take her down. He could get back at her for everything she’d done to him, all the lies she’d told him. He could get revenge.

“If you do this, if you lead us to her — I will make sure you go home. That you will be allowed to return to America, safely,” Valits promised.

Oh, right. He hadn’t thought of that. But it was nice, too.

As long as he made Nadia pay, first.

They sent a helicopter down from the nearest air base to pick Chapel up. His clothes from the desert were long gone — no one had expected him to need real clothing ever again, so they’d burned what he had on when he was captured. Colonel Valits offered him an army uniform with no insignia, but it was the wrong army. Chapel had been a soldier too long to ever wear the uniform of another nation. In the end, one of the orderlies had to run into town and buy Chapel civilian clothes.

The helicopter came down in the courtyard of the hospital. Chapel watched it land through doubly sealed windows. He couldn’t hear the rotors, just see the vast plume of dust the helicopter kicked up. It was an unarmed little machine, but that didn’t matter; it was just there to take him back to the air base so he could get on a plane.

He had a very long way to go. Lots of time zones to cross.

“You truly think she is in Siberia?” Colonel Valits asked, coming up behind him.

“If it was anyone else… I might doubt it.” It was the first place they would look for her. But Nadia was running out of time — assuming she hadn’t lied about that, too. He had to believe that she really was dying, that she had only months left, maybe less, and that she would want to die where she’d been born.

Of course, if he was wrong, he would end up right back here with Kalin. So she had to be in Siberia. “She’s sentimental. She wants to go home.”

Valits shook his head. “I’ve already had troops turn the city of Yakutsk upside down looking for her. Not a single person has entered that place in the last week that I don’t know about. And it’s the only municipality large enough to have the kind of Internet connection and signal technology she needs.”

Chapel knew better. Angel had told him that the necessary tech could fit inside a smartphone. At least, a brand-new, state-of-the-art smartphone. Nadia didn’t need to be in Yakutsk — and the city wasn’t where she wanted to be.

“I’ll find her,” he told Valits.

They shook hands and then Chapel headed down to the courtyard, toward the helicopter. A couple of Valits’s soldiers followed him at a discreet distance. He wasn’t going to ever be out of their sight, he knew, until this was over.

“Chapel,” Angel said, when he had stepped outside and the noise of the rotors made it almost impossible to hear her. That might be the point — maybe she didn’t want anyone listening in.

“Go ahead,” he told her, as the dust blew past him in the artificial windstorm, as his empty sleeve snapped and fluttered behind him like a flag.

“The director has been briefed on what you’re doing. He had one message to give you. Quote, ‘Remember how Hercules defeated the hydra,’ unquote. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Yeah,” Chapel said, but he wouldn’t explain, not to Angel. “Message received.”

If you cut the head off a hydra, it just grew another one. Hollingshead had described Perimeter as being like that. Now he was talking about this mission. The objective kept changing, every time Chapel thought he’d gotten close to being done.

Hercules had figured out you didn’t just need to cut the hydra’s head off. You had to burn it at the stump. Make it impossible for the head to grow back.

Hollingshead was telling him to make sure Nadia never stung them again. He was telling Chapel to make sure she really was dead this time.

He was giving Chapel an order to execute her.

Chapel and the soldiers who made up his guard detail transferred to a transport plane at the nearest airport. It was a military jet, with little in the way of accommodations — even the seats were simply bolted to rails on the cabin floor, designed so they could be removed quickly in case the plane needed to haul cargo instead of people. Chapel picked a window seat, and his soldiers took the row behind him. He strapped himself in and let his head fall back against the seat. Closed his eyes. Sleep wasn’t an option — he could do nothing but review his own thoughts, over and over.

They were dark thoughts and barely coherent. Mostly he just kept thinking how he’d been manipulated, how Nadia had used him, and how badly he wanted to make her pay for that.

But there was one small voice in the back of his head, one little pleading thought that just wouldn’t go away. It kept telling him there was something wrong here. Not so much an argument, not even really a doubt. Just a memory — a memory of Nadia in the tent in the desert, lying there next to him. He remembered how he’d leaned over and kissed her and the look on her face, the surprise and the hope, then the confusion and frustration. She had seduced him, of course. She had known he was hurt and vulnerable after what happened with Julia and she had used that. Preyed on it.

But that look — it hadn’t been the expression of a con artist whose game wasn’t proceeding fast enough. She had looked genuinely hurt, like she had held something out to him, something real, and he was toying with her heart, not the other way around…

Of course, a good actress could fake that look. If that were the case, Nadia should have been up for an Academy Award.

It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. He had his orders. He knew where things stood, finally. It was time to end this mission, and there was only one way to conclude it. He was just going to have to push down that nagging little question in his head, push it down until it stopped popping back up.

He writhed in frustration against his seat. It was taking way too long for the plane to get moving. He needed to be airborne, headed toward his final meeting with her; he needed to—

Someone climbed in through the rear hatch of the plane and started walking up the aisle. Chapel didn’t even bother to look to see who it was. This must be what was delaying them — they’d had to wait for some VIP of the Russian military who had insisted on being on this plane. Chapel sneered in frustration and turned his head to look out the window. When the newcomer dropped down into the seat next to him, Chapel tried to remember the Russian words for “occupied” and “go away.”

He turned to face the newcomer and forgot all the Russian he knew. The VIP was, in fact, Senior Lieutenant Pavel Kalin. His erstwhile torturer.

“Good afternoon, Kapitan,” the bastard said. His smile was broad and genuine. He was thrilled to see Chapel here.

“Get away from me,” Chapel growled, in English.

“I don’t think so. I think I will be staying very close to you now.” Kalin leaned into the aisle and waved at someone. A moment later the plane’s hatch closed and its engines started to drone. Clearly the plane had only been waiting for Kalin’s arrival. “It took a great deal of persuasion to get myself assigned to this mission,” he told Chapel.

“You had to torture somebody for your spot?”

Kalin’s smile broadened. “Very droll. No, I called in some favors. But believe me, I would have moved heaven and earth.”

Chapel clenched his teeth and looked away. This was the last thing he needed.

The plane lifted away from the airstrip with only a few jolts. Soon they were up in the sky, up where there was nothing to see through the window but clouds. Better, anyway, than looking at Kalin’s face. It was taking pretty much all Chapel’s resolve not to reach over and strangle the man in his seat. Of course, if he did, the plane would have to put down prematurely, and that would delay Chapel in the course of his revenge against Nadia. He supposed you had to pick your battles in this life.

“It looks like we’ll be working together,” Kalin said. “My orders are to keep a close watch on you but to follow your lead until I am told this is no longer appropriate.”

“Let’s get one thing straight, Kalin,” Chapel said. “We are not partners. I’m not working with you. I’m working for Colonel Valits on behalf of my government. If you catch on fire during this operation, I won’t spit on you to put you out.”

“I could say much the same,” Kalin told him. “I advised strongly against this madness — this foolish notion of sending you to catch her. This is an internal Russian matter, and bringing you in is folly. You should never have been briefed about what happened at Izhevsk. But Valits is a frightened man, just now. He thinks we need every resource available to catch Asimova.”

“Maybe he’s right. Considering that if we don’t, she could start World War III any time she wanted to. And that she’s got nothing to lose.”

“There’s no need to lecture me on her capabilities. I’ve been chasing the terrorist Asimova for longer than you knew she existed,” Kalin explained. “I’ve gone to incredible lengths to find her and stop her. I will not waste all that time and effort.”

Chapel found that he needed to know, more than he needed to get away from Kalin. “How long have you known what she was up to?”

Kalin studied his face for a while, as if trying to decide how much to tell him. Finally he shrugged and said, “It doesn’t matter now. I’ll tell you everything. It started as a matter of routine. Any agent of FSTEK working on recovering lost plutonium is, of course, carefully screened. There are so many temptations in that mission — one must consort with criminals and foreign agents, any of whom would gladly pay a king’s ransom for even a small quantity of fissile material. Plutonium is, gram for gram, the most precious metal on earth. More than one of our agents has succumbed to making a deal with someone he should have arrested instead. So we keep a close eye on them. Asimova was especially worth watching, because she was a known political.”

“You mean because of how she was arrested for attending a protest rally,” Chapel said.

“Exactly,” Kalin said, as if Chapel was finally getting the point. “Add to this that she had charmed Marshal Bulgachenko, the head of FSTEK. He would have given her the moon for a New Year’s present had she asked for it.”

“Did she—” Chapel hated to even ask, especially of an officious monster like Kalin, but he had to know. “Did they—”

“Fuck?” Kalin asked, turning the vulgarity over in his mouth like a candy. He left Chapel hanging for a long, cruel minute. Once a torturer, always a torturer, perhaps. “No,” he said, finally. “The marshal had never had children, and he saw Asimova as a surrogate daughter. He was very proud of her, especially given her Siberian upbringing.”

Chapel frowned. “You have a surprising amount of information on a dead man’s inner thoughts and feelings.”

“I was the man who killed him,” Kalin said. His smile didn’t crack or even chip. “He was a traitor to the Fatherland. He deserved to die. But he was also a hero of our military, and I felt it was worth knowing why he had become corrupted.”

Jesus, Chapel thought. How long had Kalin tortured the marshal before he killed him? The man might well have been a separatist — a terrorist, even — but nobody should ever be subject to the mercies of a man like Kalin. Nobody.

“I would have watched Bulgachenko even if he hadn’t promoted Asimova so quickly. He was a known troublemaker, from even before my time. When the Soviet Union fell, there was some interest among the Sibiryaks in splitting off from the Federation. It was a short-lived political moment, but in that time Bulgachenko added his voice to the chorus. He even petitioned Yeltsin in person for self-determination for the Siberian republics. He believed he could form a government in Vladivostok, with, of course, himself as president. Yeltsin was a drunk, but he understood that Russia could not survive without Siberia—”

“Without its resources, you mean.”

“Exactly,” Kalin said. “Yeltsin grew angry and threw Bulgachenko out of his office. Before that day Bulgachenko was well on his way to being in control of the entire state security apparatus. Afterward he was relegated to FSTEK, which at the time meant he was put in charge of ordering around a few border guards. FSTEK was a kind of very well-paid gulag. Bulgachenko, of course, was an intelligent man, and he knew better than to protest. Instead he took this as an opportunity. When plutonium started disappearing from the stockpiles, he volunteered to go after it. He only needed a field agent, someone who could actually go out and recover the stuff.

“Asimova must have seemed like a gift from Jesus. She was capable, she was brilliant, and she was beautiful. A perfect symbol of the Siberia of his dreams. She would be a — ah, I know there is an American term, for a person who is the perfect image of—”

“A poster girl,” Chapel suggested.

“Yes! That is it. She would be the poster girl for a new Siberia that was not beholden to Moscow. She doesn’t even look Russian. So of course he confided everything in her. Told her all his plans. Told her that simple political pressure, even nonviolent protest of the kind she had tried, would be useless in creating an independent Siberia. By then they had both seen what happened to Chechnya and South Ossetia under Putin. The Federation has finished giving away territory. It will fight to hold on to what it has left. If Siberia was to gain independence, it must be able to fight back. But how? There is no military presence out east that is not staffed completely by those loyal to Moscow. A coup was out of the question. Bulgachenko’s original plan was to use the confiscated plutonium to make dirty bombs. Put one in Moscow, one in St. Petersburg — perhaps a third in Nizhny Novgorod, just for good measure. Threaten to detonate them if demands were not met.”

“That’s—” Chapel shook his head. “That’s—”

“Terrorism, yes,” Kalin said. “The last resort of the politically deranged. It was Asimova who talked him out of it.”

“Nadia?”

Kalin’s eyes crept over Chapel’s face until he felt like he was covered in bugs. “It would perhaps be better if you stop calling her by that name.”

Chapel realized his mistake and shook his head. “I’ll call her what I want to,” he said. In his head the reply had been I’ll call her what I want to, asshole, but he had some sense of decorum left.

Kalin shrugged. “Yes, Asimova convinced him his dirty bomb plan was folly. Which anyone but Bulgachenko could have seen. FSTEK is not some miraculous organization that can act unobserved. The plutonium it recovered was quite carefully logged and monitored by other agencies. If it went missing again, the theft would be discovered very quickly. And the response of my group — the Counter-Intelligence Division — would have been swift, decisive, and without qualm. Beyond this, dirty bombs are notoriously dangerous to build and deploy — and she already knew far too well the danger of handling plutonium.”

“So it was her idea to hijack Perimeter?”

“They developed the plan together. But, yes, it was her brainchild. She knew, of course, that I would try to stop her. She knew that to get access to Perimeter she would need to become a rogue agent. She also knew she would be dead within the week if she did not find some protection somewhere. This, I believe, is why she went to the Americans. To you.”

“You could have shut her down then with one phone call,” Chapel pointed out. “You could have told us she was a terrorist. We would have arrested her in Washington and then held her for you.”

Kalin’s smile didn’t change, but his eyes did. They became weary suddenly, weary and resigned. “That would have meant sharing information with the Pentagon. Giving away secrets — telling you about Perimeter, for one thing. In Russia, some secrets are buried so deeply they can never be brought to light.”

Chapel nodded. “We have a few of those in America, too.”

“I was convinced,” Kalin said, “that I could run her down myself. I did, in fact, call the authorities in Cuba and tell them she was violating their national waters. Unfortunately, the photographs I sent did not make it in time and she slipped through their fingers.”

That explained the mysterious boarding of Donny’s party yacht off Cay Sal Bank, Chapel thought — and why the Cubans hadn’t arrested them then and there.

“Next I thought to catch her in Bucharest, and again in Uzbekistan, but both times you helped her get away,” Kalin pointed out. “It seems she picked her protection very well.”

“She convinced me that your agents were gangsters chasing Bogdan Vlaicu,” Chapel admitted, since it seemed there was no point keeping that from Kalin now. He did not confess that after Vobkent he’d known she was being chased by the Russians, that they wanted her dead or alive. No need to give everything away.

“Indeed. She can be very persuasive.” Kalin folded his hands in his lap. “Kapitan Chapel, I want to be clear on our roles in what is unfolding now. We need you to find her. That is all. Once we have a location, I will not permit you within earshot of the woman. I’d hate for her to charm you once more and have you switch coats again.”

Chapel bit his lip. He could hardly complain or protest. After all, she had done just that — charmed him — once.

But he had his orders, and he knew what he needed, personally. Whatever Kalin thought was going to happen, however this was going to go down, Chapel planned on looking Nadia right in the eye at the last moment. If Kalin didn’t like it, maybe he had to be taken out, too.

It wasn’t the most unattractive prospect.

It was a clear night over Siberia, and as the plane swung north toward its destination, Chapel got to see the sun set, then peek back over the horizon and set again. Yakutsk was close enough to the Arctic Circle that its nights were only six hours long this time of year. When they landed, the sun was rising again and the first pink tinge of dawn was still lining one side of all the airport buildings.

It was enough to give his jet lag jet lag. Chapel hobbled out of the plane, his legs cramped from the flight and still sore, bruised, and lacerated from the beating he’d taken at Aralsk-30. He stepped down a short flight of stairs to the tarmac and thought he could feel the world turning under his feet.

His guard detail emerged behind him, weapons in their hands. Kalin came down last, looking fresh and ready for whatever happened next. If Chapel hadn’t already hated the man with an undying passion, that would probably have been reason enough to start.

They were met by a Russian army officer in a long greatcoat with fur trim around the collar. He looked overdressed. Yakutsk was the coldest city of its size in the world, Chapel knew, but this was the height of summer and it couldn’t be less than fifty-five degrees out. Windbreaker weather, as far as Chapel was concerned.

The officer looked confused as to whom he should salute. He finally settled on Kalin, who returned the gesture with a perfunctory touch of his forehead. The two of them spoke in Russian. Chapel could follow most of what Kalin said, but the officer’s accent was so thick he might have been speaking ancient Etruscan.

They’d been expected, of course, and the officer had a car waiting to take them to an army base where they would be quartered. Kalin replied that wasn’t necessary, that they needed to get to work right away. He ordered that the local troops ready a long-range helicopter at once.

The officer seemed a little put out that his offer of hospitality was rejected. He relayed the order, though, then waved for his troops to come over. There were about fifty of them, and they looked tired. Chapel gathered that they had been part of the detail that was turning the city of Yakutsk upside down looking for Nadia — for the terrorist Asimova. They had searched about a third of the entire city, going door-to-door and checking every house and place of business. They’d gone into cellars and up into attics and found no trace of her, but they were sure that with a little more time—

“She’s not here,” Chapel said, in Russian.

The officer turned to look at him with genuine curiosity. Chapel wasn’t surprised. His presence here was a state secret, not the kind of thing Valits would have passed on to his low-ranking officers. Beyond that, a foreigner in civilian clothes with one arm was always going to stand out on an army base.

“She’s not stupid enough to come to Yakutsk,” Chapel went on, carefully sounding out the words in his head before he said them. “She knows you will look here first.”

The officer opened his mouth to ask a question, but Kalin cut him off. He spoke slowly, perhaps for Chapel’s benefit, but his words had the sound of true command. “This man is an American who specializes in advanced signal technology. His role is to help us find the terrorist Asimova. However, he does not possess a security clearance. Your men will not speak to him unless it is absolutely necessary, and under no circumstances are they to accept any order he tries to give.”

The officer nodded in understanding. He looked distinctly relieved. Chapel had been a soldier long enough to understand why. No matter what rank you held in the military, someone was always your boss, and someone else probably took orders from you. You had to answer to the former for the mistakes of the latter. You always needed to know where everyone around you fit in, what category they belonged to. Now that Chapel was squared away, the officer could just write him off.

The officer led them to a nearby building where there was coffee and a simple meal of coarse bread and pickled fish. For about fifteen minutes they waited there until the helicopter was ready to receive them. Nobody spoke a word to him the whole time.

The helicopter turned out to be an Mi-8, recognizable by the twin turboprop power plants mounted over its canopy. It was a beast of a machine, a huge fuselage with the tail assembly sticking out the back like the tail of a tadpole. Drop tanks full of fuel studded its sides. Kalin led his troops onboard — twenty men in full body armor, each of them carrying a carbine and enough grenades to make them jangle as they jumped on board. He waved Chapel in last, putting him close to the hatch where he would at least get a good view of the ground. It occurred to Chapel that placing him there would make it convenient for Kalin to throw him out of the helicopter at altitude, if the need arose.

Kalin bellowed some orders over the noise of the screaming engines, but Chapel didn’t bother translating in his head. He knew what his job was here.

From the air, from the crew compartment of the helicopter, Yakutsk was an island of concrete buildings huddling around the Lena River, surrounded on every side by close ranks of high pine trees that stretched away to the horizon. Here and there Chapel caught the reflection of moonlight on water glinting through the trees, but the pines were tall enough he couldn’t ever figure out where the ponds and rivers were. He put his hand over his left ear and spoke to Angel through the hands-free unit in his right.

“Did you find it?” he asked.

“Sweetie, I’m a miracle worker, but some miracles are harder than others,” she told him, sounding apologetic. His heart sank. If she hadn’t found the information he needed, he was going to have a lot of explaining to do. “You asked me to find anything on Nadia’s grandfather, but you couldn’t even give me his name.”

“He was a shaman who rode around on a reindeer,” Chapel said. He forced himself to make a joke to cover how nervous he felt. “Did you try looking up Santa Claus?” He glanced north, over the endless landscape of trees. “I know he lives at the North Pole, and we’re close here.”

“Cute. But weirdly appropriate. Where you are now, they call Santa by the name Ded Moroz and he lives east of Finland. Believe it or not, his name basically means Grandfather Frost, and he’s always accompanied by his granddaughter, the Snow Maiden.”

“You’re kidding me. You don’t think she made the whole thing up—”

“I’d hardly put it past her,” Angel said. “But at least this time, no, I don’t think she was lying. I don’t think she gave you a children’s legend as her cover story. I looked back through her genealogical records. She had a grandfather on her father’s side who was an accountant in Novosibirsk — there’s lots of information on him; you have to love accountants for the way they keep such nice, tidy records. As far as her maternal grandfather goes, there’s basically nothing. No national identification in the databases, no tax records, no death certificate, even. Not surprising if he really was a tribal shaman. Communications and transportation in Siberia were very spotty up until recently, and there’s never been an accurate census for the more northern settlements. There are probably whole ethnic groups out there in the woods that don’t even know that they’re Russians yet, because nobody from Moscow has found them to tell them.”

Chapel closed his eyes. “So you couldn’t find what I need.”

“I didn’t say that. I did find something, but it’s thin. I started poking around Nadia’s parents’ records. There was a lot more there. Her mother was a metallurgist, but she didn’t start out that way. She was born in a village somewhere southwest of Yakutsk, an Evenk village where her stated occupation was ‘herder.’ She ran away from home when she was fourteen and ended up in Yakutsk — it’s the only decent-sized city in a thousand square miles. That’s where she got her training and where she met Nadia’s father. She doesn’t have a birth certificate, so I don’t even know what the name of her village was—”

“That’s starting to sound familiar.”

Angel tsked him. “I’m working with obsolete database software in a language and even an alphabet I don’t know. You’re lucky I was able to find anything. Now, as I was saying, Nadia’s mother doesn’t have a birth certificate. But she does have a marriage certificate. And that certificate lists her father’s name, Nadia’s grandfather’s name, and his place of residence.”

“That’s — that’s amazing, Angel.”

“Hold your applause. We know he was an itinerant shaman, that he moved around a lot. The village name on the marriage certificate might just be the last place he came from. But it’s something. The name of the village was Gurangri. It’s closest to a little town called Aldan, in the southernmost part of the Sakha Republic.”

“Gurangri,” Chapel repeated. He shouted over the noise of the helicopter’s engines to Senior Lieutenant Kalin — the only person on board he was supposed to talk to directly. “We’re headed for a village called Gurangri, near Aldan.”

Kalin nodded and headed forward to tell the pilot.

Angel wasn’t finished, though. “There is one problem. Gurangri isn’t really there anymore.”

“It’s not?”

“In the nineties it was bulldozed, and then the land was strip-mined. It’s a diamond mine, now. The native people were all relocated, a lot of them shipped south to Mongolia. Even if Gurangri was Nadia’s grandfather’s hometown, there won’t be anything left there to connect her to him. No ancestral home, no relatives to visit, nothing.”

Chapel shook his head. “That’s not good. But you said that might just be the last place he came from.”

He could almost hear Angel shrugging. “There are a bunch of other villages in the area. He could have been born in any of them, and anyway, when we talked about what to look for, we said that it might not be one specific place. You have some place to start, now, but that’s the best I can do, I’m afraid.”

“As usual,” Chapel said, “you’ve been more helpful than I deserve.”

“Just doing my job, sugar.” Angel was quiet for a moment. “Chapel, if she’s not there, if she’s not within fifty miles when we triangulate her signal, you know this won’t work, right? This is our only chance to find her.”

“I know,” he said.

“What makes you think she would go looking for her grandfather’s village, anyway? She could carry out this blackmail plan from anywhere in the world.”

“Sure. But she’s a Sibiryak, a Siberian separatist. And when she told me she wanted to see her homeland again before she died, I think she was being sincere.”

“You’re saying she basically told you what her next move was, right before you were captured by her enemies,” Angel pointed out. “We know she’s lied about a lot of things.”

“And maybe she did lie about this one,” Chapel told her. “But I have to think otherwise. You didn’t see the way her face lit up when she talked about her grandfather, about how he used to carry her with him on the back of his reindeer.” Chapel shook his head. “I have to believe in this, Angel.” He glanced around to make sure Kalin wasn’t within earshot. “Because otherwise I’m all out of ideas.”

Midmorning, according to his watch. Chapel’s body barely knew what day it was, much less whether it was natural that it should be morning now. He’d moved through so many time zones since leaving Washington that his internal clock had broken a spring.

“We should see the Gurangri facility soon,” Kalin said, coming up behind his shoulder. Chapel had been glued to one of the helicopter’s side viewports for hours, as if he was going to see Nadia down there in a clearing in the trees, waving up at him. As fast as they were moving and as thick as the tree cover was, he would have been lucky to see her if she had set out road flares to make an impromptu helipad.

They had followed a river for a while, a thin stripe of water the color of white wine that had twisted through the rough terrain of Siberia. After they’d left the river behind, the view hadn’t changed much at all. Trees and more trees. Siberia seemed in some ways as desolate at the Kyzyl Kum, just more green. It didn’t seem real; it couldn’t be as big and as empty as it looked. He started to feel like he was flying over a miniature on a sound stage, as if those trees could be no bigger than ferns, and that Siberia was no bigger than a backyard garden.

Then he saw Gurangri, and the scale came back to him in a hurry. Angel had said the old village had been bulldozed and the land strip-mined. Chapel still hadn’t expected this. Gurangri was a massive brown pit in the earth, easily two miles across. Its sides were terraced in concentric circles, the walls sharply rectilinear except where old mud slides had created meandering ramps down toward the bottom. Rusted digging machines stood on the various levels, dwarfed by the sheer size of the hole they’d gouged out of the earth. The lowest level was flooded and glared with an angry white light as the sun filled it.

It looked like a bruise on the side of the earth. Like a hole dug by a massive worm in a giant green fruit. It looked like Dante’s Inferno, more than anything else. As the helicopter cut right across the middle of the pit, it was hard not to think that the pit was a giant maw about to swallow them whole. They wouldn’t even make a fitting morsel for such a giant mouth.

All around the pit the excavators had cut short lengths of road, places where metal sheds and concrete buildings had once stood. Now these were all collapsed, their roofs fallen in and their walls crumbled down to debris.

“It looks like this place was saturation bombed,” Chapel said.

He knew Angel would be able to see it even better than he could, through her eyes on the satellites. “It was abandoned around the turn of the century, when the diamonds ran out. The damage you see is just Siberia reclaiming its own — permafrost makes it impossible to build anything that lasts on this soil.”

“Diamonds? They dug diamonds out of this hole?”

“There are diamond and gold deposits all over this forest,” Angel told him. “Nadia wasn’t kidding when she told you this was where Russia kept all its natural resources. There’s probably oil and natural gas nearby as well — there’s so much here, and so much land to cover they haven’t even had a chance to survey it all.”

Nadia would hate the pit mine, Chapel knew. It would be yet another symbol of Moscow despoiling her homeland and taking all the profits. A village that might have meant something to her once had been completely wiped from the face of the earth to build this obscenity. She would never have come to a place like this. But beyond, on the other side of the pit, there were plenty more trees. Lots of forest to block your view of the gaping wound in your native soil.

“This is the place,” Chapel shouted to Kalin. “This is where we start looking. Tell the pilot to take up station.” It was time to lay the bait.

The helicopter pinned itself to the air, hanging motionless over the center of the pit. Angel came on the line to tell Chapel she’d finished her satellite survey and there were three villages and over a hundred solitary houses within a fifty-mile radius of the pit. Nadia could be hiding in any of them.

The plan was to send a message over Angel’s special frequency band, the same one Nadia had used to make her demands after firing the missile at Izhevsk. That signal couldn’t be traced by normal means — it would be bounced around several satellites before it reached the Kremlin or Angel or anyone who could intercept it, and there was no way to trace it back through the electromagnetic labyrinth.

It had to be broadcast from the ground, though, beamed up to the satellites from somewhere. If Chapel was close enough to Nadia when she transmitted, his equipment could pick up the signal direct from the source. The signal would be faint when it came from the ground — it wasn’t meant to be picked up by ground-based receivers — but it would be clear enough that it could be used to home in on her location.

Assuming, of course, that Chapel had picked the right spot. He needed a very strong signal to make the plan work, which meant he had to be within fifty miles of Nadia when she broadcasted. If he’d chosen the wrong spot, if she was more than fifty miles away from Gurangri, she might as well be on the moon. They would never find her.

“You all set, Angel?” he asked, staring out at the trees to the west of the pit mine.

“Go ahead. The next thing you say will go out on my band.”

Chapel licked his lips. He’d considered very carefully what he could say — what would make Nadia respond. He knew that just calling to say hello wouldn’t make her break radio silence. He had to give her something she wanted to talk about.

“Nadia,” he said, “this is Jim Chapel. I know you can hear me on this band. I’m calling on behalf of the United States government. We know what you have, and the threat it represents. We’d like to discuss how we can help you. Please respond.”

Chapel closed his eyes and waited to hear what came next.

Nadia had no way of knowing whether the Russian government would agree to her demands. The weapon she possessed — the Perimeter launch codes — made her incredibly dangerous to Moscow. But the danger was even greater for America, since all those missiles were pointed at American cities.

If Nadia did launch, if she pushed the button, the death toll in America would mount to the tens of millions. Maybe the hundreds of millions. There was no way for America or Russia to stop all those missiles once they were in the air.

It was not out of the realm of possibility that the president might reach out to her, to try to find some way to defuse this situation. Hollingshead had actually gone to the White House to brief the president and see what he chose to do.

The president had responded that America refused to negotiate with terrorists. Judging by what Hollingshead had told Chapel, the commander in chief didn’t believe that Nadia would actually launch. And he was willing to call her bluff.

So Chapel couldn’t really offer Nadia anything of value. But he didn’t need to negotiate with her, not really. He just needed to get her talking.

Chapel waited five minutes. The chop of the helicopter rotor sounded like an echo of his own heartbeat as the time ticked away.

When nothing happened after five minutes, Chapel nodded to himself. Then he repeated his message. “Nadia,” he said, “this is Jim Chapel—”

The reply came before he could finish.

“Jim? Is that really you? You woke me up. If it is you, I don’t mind. But I need to know it is you. I was certain you were dead. Tell me,” Nadia said, “what was the worst part of our journey through the Kyzyl Kum?”

Chapel’s eyes went wide.

He heard a click on the line. That, he knew, would be Angel shutting down the signal. She came back on a different frequency — he could hear the difference in audio quality. “Okay, sugar — give me a minute to crunch the numbers. It’s better if you don’t respond to her, just in case she has some way of tracking where you are.”

“Understood,” Chapel said.

He turned around and saw Senior Lieutenant Kalin staring at him. The man looked as patient but as insidious as a spider. As the seconds went by and Chapel said nothing, Kalin slowly raised one eyebrow.

He was ready, Chapel knew. There was no doubt in Kalin’s mind what to do when word came in with Nadia’s location. Chapel glanced around at the soldiers crouching in the helicopter’s troop compartment. They’d been briefed. They knew what to do as well.

Just as soon as that location came in.

Chapel fought the urge to ask Angel how it was going. When she had something, she would let him know.

Maybe a minute passed. Maybe two.

When Angel came back on the line, Chapel nearly jumped out of his seat.

“Sweetie,” she said, and he could hear it in the tone of her voice. He didn’t need to hear what came next.

“Sweetie, I’m sorry. You’re not close enough. I’ve got nothing.”

No.

No.

“No!” Chapel howled. He beat on the metal fuselage of the helicopter with his hand. He couldn’t believe it — he’d been so sure. He’d been certain.

No. He’d wanted to be certain. He’d had one chance, and he’d convinced himself he knew how to finish this. But it had always been a crapshoot.

And now Nadia was going to get away. She had betrayed him, used him — seduced him — and now he would never get to her, never be able to look her in the eye and tell her—

“I take it,” Kalin said, “that you were unsuccessful.”

Chapel looked up at the man with burning eyes. “We weren’t able to get a location on the signal, no,” he said.

A playful little smile crossed Kalin’s face. The man was enjoying this — enjoying watching Chapel rage in his moment of failure. Kalin had once had Chapel in his clutches, had been completely in control of Chapel, body and soul. Then Colonel Valits had come in and taken that away.

Now, that smile on Kalin’s face said, things would return to their natural order. Chapel would be taken back to the hospital in Magnitogorsk. Kalin would use every method available to him to find out what Chapel knew. To break him down completely.

Chapel didn’t care about that, though he knew he should. He knew what was in store for him. But his rage, his need for revenge, towered over any mere concern for his survival, any fear of what Kalin could do.

He’d been so close. He had screwed up, royally, by trusting Nadia, but he’d been given one chance at turning that around and now… now…

“Honey,” Angel said in his ear, “maybe we can still get something out of this. I was able to track the signal enough to know that you were kind of right.”

Chapel barely heard her. Kalin was barking orders at the pilots of the helicopter, telling them to turn around, to head back to Yakutsk.

“I picked up… something. Just an echo, really. But I can track her to an area of about a couple of thousand square miles, just based on that,” Angel went on, whether anyone was listening or not. “I know she’s no farther away from you than that.”

Chapel looked down at his hand. It was balled into a fist. Maybe he could push open the side door of the helicopter. Maybe he could use that hand to grab Kalin, throw him down into the pit mine below—

“Sugar, did you hear me?” Angel asked. “She is in Siberia. I can verify that much.”

The soldiers would open fire the second he grabbed Kalin. They would tear him to shreds with high velocity rounds. But if he was quick, if he moved now—

Wait.

“Angel? Say again?”

“She’s definitely in Siberia. Somewhere near you, though near is kind of a relative term—”

“She’s here?” he asked.

“Somewhere there, yes,” Angel confirmed.

“Kalin!” Chapel shouted.

The torturer turned around to face him. “Yes?”

“She’s here. Asimova is here, in Siberia. We just weren’t quite close enough. But maybe — we can move the helicopter, and try for a second fix.”

Kalin pursed his lips. He looked like he was weighing something in his head. Maybe the relative merits of avoiding nuclear war versus the pleasure he would take in turning Chapel into a sniveling, broken wreck of a man.

“You have failed us once,” Kalin said. “Why should I think you would succeed a second time?”

Chapel shook his head. “We can find her. Still. We just need to get closer.”

“And in which direction does this ‘closer’ lie?” Kalin asked.

It was a good question. A very good question. If Nadia was to the south, and Chapel ordered the helicopter to the north, he would waste this second chance. He needed more information. He needed to know roughly where she was, before he could find exactly where she was. Just like before, except this time he needed to be absolutely right.

“We are already nearing the operational range of the aircraft,” Kalin pointed out. “We cannot stay airborne for more than an hour more.”

“Then give me that hour,” Chapel said. He couldn’t bring himself to beg the man, but maybe logic would work. “One hour so we can save both our countries from burning up in nuclear fire. Do you really want to go down in history as the man who threw away the world just because he hated the man who could have saved it?”

“Please,” Kalin said, sneering. “Such melodrama.”

“If I’m wrong, one hour more won’t make a difference. I’ll be just as wrong then. I’ll lose the protection of Colonel Valits, and you’ll have me. But if I’m right—”

Kalin lifted his hands in resignation. “Konyechno. One hour.”

One hour to figure it out.

Less than that. A lot less. An hour in which to figure out the puzzle, get to the right location, and convince Nadia to come back on the line.

There wasn’t enough time to get clever. He had to go back to his original intuition, the guess that had brought him this far. Nadia had returned to Siberia because she wanted to see it again before she died. She wasn’t looking for pit mines or overcrowded cities, though. She would be looking for the land where she’d spent summers with her grandfather, riding around on the back of his reindeer.

He’d been an Evenk, one of the traditional ethnic groups of Siberia. Chapel turned to Kalin. “Where do the Evenks live?” he asked. “Do they have their own territory?”

“They do,” Kalin said, lifting his shoulders. “The Evenkiysky District. It’s west of here, over the border of Sakha.”

Chapel nodded and touched the hands-free unit in his ear. “Angel, are there any villages in the Evenkiysky District? Any places that might have been there thirty years ago, where Nadia’s grandfather might have been born?”

“More than a few, but they’re spread pretty thin. That’s an area of three hundred thousand square miles and less than twenty thousand people live there.”

Talk about finding a needle in a haystack. “We know he lived in Gurangri once, back when it was an actual village. He can’t have gotten very far from there if his chief method of transport was riding on a reindeer.”

“You’re probably right,” Angel told him. He could hear her clacking away at a keyboard and imagined her fingers flying along as her screens showed one database after another, as she zoomed in on maps and then clicked away, zoomed in further on satellite pictures…

“Head west by southwest,” she said, finally. “There’s a cluster of villages about sixty miles that way — most of them just collections of tents, though some have permanent buildings. It’s a little more densely populated there, north of Lake Baikal. But Chapel — even if she’s somewhere in that cluster, you still need to get within fifty miles of her actual location. The cluster’s spread over hundreds of square miles of terrain. She could be there and you still might miss her.”

“Damn,” Chapel said. He was running out of time and out of options at an alarming rate. “Angel,” he said, “do we need to be stationary for you to get a fix on her transmission?”

“No,” Angel said, and he could hear breathless excitement in her voice. “No — even if your helicopter was moving at top speed, I could still capture the signal. All I need is one packet of the direct transmission.”

“So if we fly over this area, if we cover it from end to end and I can keep her talking long enough—”

“It might work,” Angel confirmed. “It just might.”

Chapel relayed his plan to Senior Lieutenant Kalin. The torturer didn’t like it — already the helicopter was in danger of not having enough fuel to make it back to base, and flying at high speed would only drain the tanks faster. But he seemed to have accepted that this was the only way he would ever find Nadia.

The aircraft lurched as the pilot leaned on the throttle, and Chapel had to grab on to a stanchion or be thrown from his seat. Below he could see the forest hurtling by, just a green blur. After a few minutes, he had Angel set him up on Nadia’s frequency again.

He took a couple of deep breaths. Forced himself to get into character. If his voice betrayed how much he wanted to catch Nadia, to avenge himself, she might shut down the broadcast immediately. He had to sound like he had the last time they’d spoken, in Aralsk-30. Like a man talking to his lover.

“Nadia,” he said into his microphone, “you asked me a question. You asked me what was the worst part of crossing the Kyzyl Kum. I don’t know what the worst part for you was,” he said, “but for me it was probably having a giant lizard chomp my arm.”

He heard a click and knew that Angel had muted his microphone. The helicopter’s engines were screaming now — if Nadia heard that sound on the line, there was a small chance she might guess where Chapel was, and that he was close enough to be a threat.

Still, even with the mike muted, he made no sound. He held his breath while he waited for her to reply. Maybe he had waited too long before answering her. Maybe she already suspected this was a trap. If she was smart, she wouldn’t transmit more than she absolutely needed to.

But no, he thought. She would think she was safe. Having stolen Angel’s special frequency-hopping packet-switching whatever-it-was signal technology, she would know the Russians had no way of tracing her. She would know that only Angel, out of everyone in the world, had even the slightest clue how she was communicating.

Still, she took her time about it. Chapel had to let go of his trapped breath. He sagged against the fuselage of the helicopter, suddenly feeling very, very tired.

Then there was a click in his ear, and he heard Nadia speak.

Or laugh, rather. He remembered that laugh — it had always come to her so easily. “Jim, it is you,” she said. “I’m so very glad you’re still alive.”

“That makes two of us,” he told her.

“Jim,” Nadia said, “how did you get out of there? The last time I saw you, you were down on the ground, and a Russian soldier was standing over you with a shotgun.” She laughed again. He used to like that laugh. “I wept for you, because I was certain you were dead.”

“They had orders to take us alive,” Chapel told her. He tried to think of a cunning lie, something close enough to the truth she might actually believe it. “That shotgun was loaded with Taser rounds. One of them hit me in my artificial arm, and the silicone flesh protected me from the worst of the shock. I dropped to the ground and the soldier thought I was down, that he’d incapacitated me. I let him believe that. Once I took him down, there wasn’t much left of the Russians to deal with.”

“You’re saying if Bogdan and I had come back for you — if we had doubled back — but instead we left you there, stranded…”

“Don’t worry about that,” Chapel told her. “Angel was able to get me some transport to the submarine.” Maybe it could have gone down that way, if the Taser had hit him in his artificial arm instead of his chest. “But what about you — how did you get out of Kazakhstan?”

“Bogdan and I drove north, away from Aralsk-30. We were panicked. We thought that if you were not with us, your friends wouldn’t pick us up. So we drove to a little oasis not far away and ditched the truck. I called Varvara and she had some of her friends come and get us and help us cross the Russian border — on camels, of all things. It was a frightening voyage but we made it.”

“I would ask where you are now, but maybe it’s better I don’t know,” he told her.

“I only wish you could be here with me,” she told him.

He was dumbstruck by the idea. Did she have no idea how badly she’d betrayed him? No idea how he must feel about being used like this? He wanted to shout at her, to scream with frustrated rage, but he forced himself to control his voice. “Maybe we should talk some business,” he told her.

“Yes, you said your president wants to help me,” she replied. “I am a little surprised. I would have thought the alliance of your country with Russia would be too much damaged by such a thing.”

She was right there. Though it could have gone a different way. He tried to imagine that alternative history, the one where he was actually negotiating with her. Making it up on the fly was tricky, but it had to be done. “Our top people considered that. They also considered the fact that if you launch those missiles, they’re headed straight for American cities. We want to avoid that any way we can. Talk to me, Nadia. Tell me how we can get out of this with nobody pressing any big red buttons.”

She must have wanted that, and badly. She must have been desperate for any kind of international recognition she could get — anything to put pressure on Moscow and make them bow to her demands. He could hear in her voice how relieved she was to think she had friends in Washington, even if she had to hold a gun to their heads to make them smile.

“Marshal Bulgachenko and I had this all planned out,” she said. “We must obtain a United Nations resolution recognizing the sovereignty of the Siberian republics and their right to self-determination. The main barrier to this will be Russia’s seat on the Security Council, but if they can be swayed by diplomatic means…”

She droned on and on about politics. Chapel tuned most of it out — it meant little to him. He’d always been a good soldier, and good soldiers didn’t worry about how the civilians brokered peace agreements. Good soldiers just prepared themselves for when those talks inevitably broke down. The main thing was that he’d gotten Nadia talking, and every second she went on was another chance to get a fix on her location.

Not paying attention to her, though, meant he was stuck inside his own head. Lost in there with his anger at her. God, listen to her, he thought. She thinks this is all so reasonable. So possible. She betrayed me! She betrayed my country’s faith! She used us, manipulated us, and now she thinks we’ll help her finish what she started—

“Jim? Did you hear that last part?” she asked. “It’s crucial to building a lasting constitutional entity that recognizes the civil rights of all the disparate ethnic groups. Moscow won’t like it because—”

“I’ve got to admit, Nadia, this is all a little over my head,” he told her. “But keep going. This is all being recorded, of course, and I’ll pass it on to people in the State Department who will understand it much better than me. In fact—”

There was a click on the line. Angel’s voice cut in, stopping him in midsentence.

“Chapel,” she said.

He froze, unsure if Nadia could hear him or not, unsure what Angel was going to tell him.

“I’ve got her,” Angel said, her voice thick with emotion.

For a second Chapel refused to believe it.

“You have her location?” he asked. “Really?”

“Down to a resolution of about ten square yards,” Angel told him. “You must have flown right past her. The signal was incredibly strong.”

Chapel closed his eyes and said a little prayer of thanks.

“I’ve suspended your transmission to her,” Angel said, “so she can’t hear us talking. But I have her audio and she’s asking if you’re still there, if you’re going to finish that thought. Do you want me to patch you back in?”

Chapel considered it. Nadia might get spooked if their conversation just stopped there. Then again, if he had to keep talking to her, chances were he would eventually lose his cool and start telling her what he really thought.

“No. And don’t give her any sign why,” Chapel told Angel. “Let her just think we got cut off by some technical glitch or something.”

“Okay,” Angel told him.

“Give me her coordinates,” he said. “Tell me where she is, Angel. So we can finish this once and for all.”

Angel relayed the latitude and longitude, minutes and seconds down to three decimal places. Chapel read the numbers off to Kalin, who relayed them to the pilot. The helicopter slowed way down and then banked into a wide turn — they had already passed Nadia’s location, and they needed to double back.

“She’s outside of a little village called Venaya, about seventy miles northeast of Lake Baikal. The village has about sixty people total, but the house she’s at is far enough away that none of them have any reason to be out there. I’m guessing she’s alone in the house, but I can’t guarantee that. I can see smoke coming from its chimney. There’s also a small single-prop airplane nearby, sitting on an improvised landing strip.”

“A plane?”

“It’s not surprising. There are no real roads anywhere near her — which isn’t uncommon for Siberia. The permafrost devours anything less robust than a metaled highway every winter. For a lot of these villages the only way in or out is by air — or on the back of a reindeer.”

There were places in Alaska that could only be reached by aircraft, Chapel knew, and probably for the same reason. No wonder this country was so sparsely populated. How long, he wondered, would it have taken the Russians to find Nadia, just searching door-to-door throughout Siberia? Nadia must have thought she had plenty of time — time to spin out her blackmail scheme, time to make the Russians do what she wanted.

Well, she was about to find out just how little time she had left.

Kalin ordered the helicopter to set down half a kilometer away from Nadia’s location. Within another minute they were on the ground, and the soldiers started jumping out of the side hatch.

Time to go.

Chapel grabbed a stanchion and started pulling himself out through the hatch. Before he could touch his feet to the ground, though, Kalin turned and put a hand on his chest. “What do you think you are doing?” the torturer asked.

Chapel knocked Kalin’s hand away. “I’m going in with your soldiers. I’m going to find her and make things right.”

“I hardly think so. Do you honestly think I trust you around Asimova?” Kalin asked. “She has fooled you so many times already into betraying yourself. Why risk such shameful behavior again?”

“This time’s going to be different,” Chapel promised.

Kalin laughed. “You’ll stay here, with the helicopter. We will not be gone for very long.”

Chapel glanced at the soldiers already moving away through the trees. They were keeping low and staying silent, so they wouldn’t alert Nadia to their approach.

He looked back at Kalin. Then he head-butted the torturer, hard enough to knock him right out of the helicopter.

In a moment Chapel was out, too, his feet making soft thuds as he ran across a carpet of pine needles as soft as a mattress.

He was pretty sure Kalin wouldn’t shoot him. Not, at least, until Nadia was dead. Even afterward Kalin would want him alive just so he could torture him again. Nor would Kalin order his men to seize Chapel — that would be too noisy, now when quiet was an absolute necessity.

He had no doubt that Kalin would find a way to make his life hell, but that was in the future. Right now Chapel had his orders from the director, and the only way to carry them out was to keep moving, to run as fast as he could — and get to Nadia first. Kalin would want to take her alive, for questioning. He’d want to make sure he got every last bit if information squeezed out of her before he let her die. Chapel’s orders, on the other hand, were to kill her as quickly and as neatly as possible.

That would be tricky without a firearm, but he had learned long ago how to improvise.

He caught a look at the face of one of the soldiers as he sprinted past. The Russian looked more confused than anything else — Chapel passed him by too quickly for the man to register anger or curiosity. Chapel didn’t slow down to learn how the soldier felt about an American spy running past him toward their shared target.

Soon he was past all the soldiers. They were taking their time, watching their backs. Chapel just wanted to get to the damned house. Before long he could see it up ahead, or at least one corner of it. It looked like it had been made of logs that didn’t quite fit together, the gaps between the logs filled in with mortar. Its roof was high and peaked and covered in pieces of bark cut down to the size of shingles. He saw the smoke coming from the chimney. He saw it only had one window on the side that faced him, one narrow pane of glass.

He ducked lower until he was almost crawling, then dashed up to the corner of the house and slid along its side until he found the door. Angel hadn’t said if there was more than one door — most likely she couldn’t tell just from satellite imagery. If there were two doors and Chapel came running through the front, he would need to move very fast before Nadia could escape out the back.

Well, he’d planned on getting this over with as quickly as possible, anyway.

He got his good shoulder into the door and burst through it, shattering the cheap lock that had held it shut. Immediately he dropped his head in case Nadia was armed, in case she started shooting as soon as she saw him.

As it turned out, she had something better than a gun.

“Jim,” Nadia said. Her eyes were very wide.

Chapel took in every detail at once and had to sort through them. The house comprised a single room, with a cot on one side and a table on the other. Nadia was lying belly down on the cot, her feet up in the air behind her. She held her phone in both hands as if she’d been trying to make it reconnect to Angel’s frequency. A short-barreled submachine gun lay on the cot next to her.

On the table was a laptop computer. Bogdan sat behind the laptop, clacking away furiously at the keys.

Chapel hadn’t expected to find the Romanian here. He’d assumed the two of them would have parted ways after Aralsk-30, that Bogdan’s work was done. But of course it made sense. Nadia had been busy since then, setting up a secure line of communication and the ability to hack into the Russian nuclear arsenal. She would have needed some technical help for that.

Not that it mattered. Not in the slightest.

“Jim, I didn’t think I would see you here,” Nadia said, twisting around until she was sitting up and facing him. It was warm in the little house, and she wore nothing but a halter top and a pair of jeans. Her feet were bare. She looked good. She looked so good…

“You betrayed me,” Chapel growled. “You used my country.”

“Jim,” she said, very carefully.

“You convinced me we were doing good. That we were going to make the world a safer place. When what you really wanted was to drive us to the brink of war,” Chapel went on. He was on a roll now. “You—”

“Jim, stop,” Nadia said.

“You’ve had your chance to talk. Now’s my turn,” Chapel said.

“No, I mean, stop moving.” She carefully set down her phone and picked up the submachine gun. She didn’t point it at him, but her meaning was clear. “I think you came here to kill me. Yes?”

“You betrayed me,” he said.

“I lied to you, it’s true. And now you want to kill me for it. But right now I have the gun. So let’s all be calm.”

He grunted in inarticulate rage and took another step toward her. Let her go ahead and shoot. It would only take him a second to get close enough, to get right up next to her and—

“If you’re not afraid of this,” she said, hefting the weapon, “then maybe I can stop you by telling you that Bogdan has the Perimeter software booted up and ready to launch.”

That part of Chapel’s brain which hadn’t been overwritten by pure anger started to speak very loudly in the back of his mind, just then. It forced him to stop, for a second anyway, and turn to look at Bogdan.

“Is true, yes,” the hacker said. He shrugged. “I can send the bombs. So be chill, man, yes?”

“He’s got them on that laptop?” Chapel asked. “The codes you stole from Aralsk-30?”

“That’s right,” Nadia said. “So please, just stay calm. And don’t move.”

Chapel nodded and licked his lips.

He glanced around the room, seeing for the first time the rest of its contents. A pyramid of canned food in one corner. A wood-burning stove. A gasoline generator, its exhaust vented through the chimney, chugged away in one corner, providing power for the laptop. A thick cable ran from the generator to the laptop. If he could get close enough to pull that plug — but no, it would have battery power, still. Pulling the plug wouldn’t shut down Bogdan’s link to the missiles.

Chapel must have taken a step in that direction anyway, because Nadia jumped up and pointed the SMG at him again. “Please, Jim. Just don’t move. Don’t make me shoot you — I don’t want to.”

Through the anger that distorted his vision, Chapel could see that she meant it. She didn’t want to kill him — she still thought there was something between them. Just how deluded was she?

Deluded enough, maybe, to launch a nuclear attack if he didn’t do exactly as she said? He nodded and stepped back to the middle of the room, between her and Bogdan.

She must have caught a flash of movement outside the windows, then, because she jumped up and ran over to one and peered out. “Russian soldiers,” she said, her breath catching in her throat. “You brought them here?”

“They’ve probably surrounded this place by now,” he told her.

“Shit!”

Chapel nodded. “How exactly do you think this is supposed to end?” he asked her. “How long do you think they’ll wait before they start shooting?”

“A very long time, if they know what they’re risking,” she said, ducking below the windowsill. She moved quickly around the room, to another window, and peeked out through that one. What she saw made her bite her lip in frustration.

Maybe it was just that — frustration — that caused her not to notice that Chapel had taken a step back, toward Bogdan.

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

“No, I can see that.”

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

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

“Maybe,” Chapel said. “Or—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smartphone.

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

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

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

“Shit,” Chapel said. “Shit!”

“What is it?” Kalin demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I fail to understand—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go ahead, sugar.”

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

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

“How long before we catch up?”

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

“She has nowhere else to go.”

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

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

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

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

“Oh, boy.”

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

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

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

He had to find a way to make sure she didn’t have to make that choice.

“You’re about a minute from catching up to her,” Angel reported.

“And she still isn’t answering her phone?” Chapel had asked Angel to open a line to Nadia, but so far without success.

“She might be too busy flying the plane to pick up,” Angel pointed out.

Chapel shook his head. Across the helicopter’s cabin, Kalin looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

“Her only chance is to talk… come on, Nadia. Come on!” He struck the fuselage with his hand. “She’s got to have a plan.”

“Are you sure? She wasn’t expecting you to find her at that house in the woods. She wasn’t expecting you to break Bogdan’s hands. You seem pretty good at wrecking her schemes, now that you’re not on her side.”

“What are you saying, Angel? That I’ve betrayed her, like she did me?”

“Not at all,” Angel said. “I was just pointing out that she had a plan, a solid one, but now it’s messed up. Maybe she just panicked and ran.”

Chapel almost started to say that this was Nadia, that she would always have a plan, but hadn’t he just said a few minutes earlier he had no idea what she was capable of?

But he did know her, at least a little. He’d known where she would go to hide out and hatch her master plan. And he knew now that she would improvise something, come up with some wild, final scheme to achieve something before she died.

A sharp point of guilt stabbed him right through the chest. He thought of Bogdan, standing sullen and unsurprised amid his guards. What had he delivered Bogdan into? Kalin would take him back to Magnitogorsk, when this was done. The Romanian was hardly innocent, but he didn’t deserve that.

And what of Nadia? She deserved something, some punishment for betraying Chapel, for holding the world hostage. But was it right to shoot her down just hours from the border, from freedom? At the very least she should be given a trial, a chance to speak for herself. Kalin was going to make sure that didn’t happen.

Chapel couldn’t let guilt get in the way of his mission. Director Hollingshead had ordered him to kill Nadia, to make sure this was truly over, with no loose ends.

Kalin cleared his throat. “We will begin negotiations,” he said. “If she does not wish to speak, so be it.” He picked up a microphone handset and nodded at the helicopter’s copilot. There was a painfully loud squawk as the helicopter’s loudspeaker system switched on.

“Asimova,” Kalin said, and the name echoed like a thunderclap from the helicopter’s undercarriage. “Set down immediately,” the torturer said, in Russian. “This is your only chance for survival.”

“That’s your idea of negotiation?” Chapel demanded. “What about the launch codes on her phone?”

Kalin gave him a look of utter disdain, but then he spoke into the microphone again. “If you have demands, they will be passed on to the authorities, but only after you set down at the nearest landing strip.” He switched off the microphone. “Kapitan, you know nothing of dealing with terrorists. It is my entire line of work. Perhaps you will let the expert perform, now?” When Chapel started to protest, Kalin added, “I will not put ideas into her head. If she intends to threaten her way across the border, she must be the one to say so.”

Chapel shook his head and looked down at the floor. He counted to a hundred in his head. Only when he’d finished did he speak to Angel.

“Any reply?” he asked her.

“None,” Angel said, just as he’d known she would.

Chapel nodded. Then he stood up and went to the viewport in the side hatch. He couldn’t see anything but trees, far below. He wrestled with the handle — it wasn’t easy with only one arm — and shoved open the hatch, letting cold air rush inside the cabin. Some of the soldiers protested, but Chapel was already sticking his head out — he needed to see. He needed to see Nadia, or at least her plane, one more time before they shot her down.

Looking straight ahead he saw her tail assembly instantly. The helicopter pilot had moved up behind Nadia so close he felt like he could almost reach out and touch the plane. Neither aircraft seemed to be moving — it was like they were both hanging motionless in the sky, separated by just a short gap of air, while the world moved beneath them.

Chapel had a sudden idea. It was crazy, of course. No, more than that. It was stupid. But maybe it was better than just sitting in the helicopter and waiting for Kalin to open fire.

The copilot shouted something back at Kalin, and the torturer nodded. “We have enough fuel for another twenty minutes of flight. After that we must set down at Irkutsk,” he told Chapel. “To be safe I will give her another fifteen minutes before I open fire. Though I think we both know already that she will not set down or speak to us. She must think I do not have the will to kill her.”

“I guess she doesn’t know you that well,” Chapel said.

It was now or never, then.

“Kalin,” he said, “does this helicopter have any rappelling equipment on board? Even just a hoist I can hang a line from so I could hot rope?”

Kalin almost smiled. “Nothing of the sort.”

Damn. That would make things a lot harder. Still…

“Tell me you are not thinking—” Kalin began.

“If I can get on her plane, if I can get inside, I can talk to her. I can talk her down, I’m sure of it,” Chapel said, even though he wasn’t sure of anything. Expressing his doubts wouldn’t help him make his case. “Look, if we could just get above her, get as close as possible, I could jump over.”

“Utter folly,” Kalin said. “You would fall.”

“Maybe,” Chapel admitted.

“You will fall and die for nothing.”

“Or maybe I stop her from launching.”

“Moving closer to her aircraft might be seen as an aggressive move,” Kalin pointed out. His smile was getting wider by the second. Apparently Chapel’s idea amused him. “She might launch if we approached like that.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a risk I’m going to have to take. Not to mention the risk of jumping out of this helicopter. I don’t suppose you have any parachutes?”

Kalin laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. “Oh, Kapitan, you are not just a fool, you’re a maniac as well. I admit I am impressed that you refuse to give up, even now.”

Too dumb to just give up. Maybe they would write that on Chapel’s tombstone. After he fell a couple of hundred feet into all those pine trees down there.

“It’s a chance. It’s worth doing. It—”

Kalin raised a hand for peace. “I will allow you to try,” he said. Of course, that had been the real obstacle all along. Chapel was more or less Kalin’s prisoner, and he couldn’t take any action now without Kalin’s say-so. Chapel was a little surprised Kalin had agreed to his plan. “I will allow it because it would amuse me to see you die. Either falling through the air, or on board the plane when I shoot it down.”

Chapel glanced around at the soldiers in the cabin — but of course, none of them spoke English. “Just get me as close as you can,” he said.

Kalin gave the pilot an order. He had to confirm it — the pilot didn’t refuse, but clearly he thought the idea was insane. But eventually the helicopter started moving closer to the plane and lifted above it. Chapel watched the plane get bigger. When he’d come up with this idea, the plane had looked motionless in the sky, as if it were just hanging there. As they drew near, however, he saw it was moving quite a bit, side to side, up and down. It didn’t matter how good a pilot Nadia might be, currents in the air would keep the plane from holding to a smooth course.

He tried not to look at the ground, at the endless expanse of trees. That wasn’t where he was headed, he told himself. Looking forward, he could see the blue stretch of Lake Baikal, and then the plane came close enough it blocked out the view.

He studied the top of the plane as they approached. The wings were mounted high up on the fuselage, above the cabin, which gave him a good, broad surface to land on, but they were also made of metal smoothed down to reduce wind resistance. There was a radio antenna he might grab onto, though he wasn’t sure it would hold his weight. He was just going to have to get lucky.

The helicopter pilot brought them closer, and closer still, until they were right on top of the plane, maybe ten feet above it. Chapel could have just stepped out of the side hatch and fallen onto Nadia’s wings. If he slipped, though, it wasn’t like he would get a second chance. “Closer,” he called out. “As close as you can get!”

The helicopter sank a few feet in the air.

Kalin leaned out the side hatch to look down with Chapel. It occurred to Chapel that he could just grab the torturer and toss him out in that moment. But doing that, as satisfying as it might be, wouldn’t help him convince Nadia not to launch.

“Twelve minutes, Kapitan,” Kalin said. “Best to go now, and not hesitate.”

The wind that buffeted Chapel was cold enough to freeze the water in his eyes, if he didn’t keep blinking. He would have to jump forward, ahead of the plane, or the wind would tear him off into empty space.

He went through all the motions in his head, all the different ways this could go wrong and how to avoid them. There was a lot he couldn’t account for, though, plenty of variables he couldn’t know in advance.

He braced his legs against the fuselage of the helicopter. Took a deep breath. Released his grip and—

Jumped.

The free fall seemed to last far too long, time stretching out as adrenaline flooded his veins, every neuron in his brain firing at once with one single message: what the hell did you just do? He hung there in the air with his legs and arm outstretched and the wing surface of the plane came looming toward him, a white cross like the X that marked the spot where he was going to die, the spot where he pushed his luck just a little too hard—

And then he hit, much harder than he’d thought he would, his whole body slamming against the top of the plane, his chin striking a rivet in the white metal that made him feel like he’d loosened his teeth. The hands-free unit in his ear popped loose and disappeared behind him, torn away by the wind. All the breath exploded out of him in a single burst, and spots swam before his eyes.

And then, over the whirr of the plane’s propeller and the rhythmic thumping of the helicopter’s rotor he heard a horrible, soul-crushing sound, a squeaking, squealing noise of rubber being dragged across metal.

His feet were sliding across the wing top, the soles of his shoes trying desperately to grip as the wind tried to push them off.

Chapel shot his hand out, trying to grab for the radio antenna.

It was too far away. He couldn’t reach.

Desperately he tried to extend his fingers, to get even the slightest grip on the thing, but even as he strained and pushed he was sliding backward, his belt buckle grinding against the wing. He was going to slip off, he was going to fall—

Forgetting about the radio antenna, he looked desperately around him for anything else he could grab. One of his feet slipped over the back of the wing and there was nothing there — he brought his knee up, tried to get his shoe back on the wing, tried to push himself forward but only managed to speed up his slide, and then both his legs were hanging off the back of the wing. He splayed his fingers out, tried to hold on to the wing with just friction, knowing it was a losing battle, knowing—

He swiveled himself around, trying to get more of his body up onto the wing, and his hand went underneath, under the back of the wing surface. And touched something — yes, there! On either side of the plane a diagonal strut stuck up at an angle to support the weight of the wings, a thick bar of steel exactly the right diameter to be used as a handhold. He could just brush it with his fingertips, but if he shoved himself backward a little more, gave up a little more of his hold on the wing… yes! He grabbed it solidly in his hand, just as his body started to slip over the edge, faster and faster. If he fell from the wing, he knew his own momentum would tear him from the strut, so he rolled off carefully, getting his legs down, swinging them toward the plane. He couldn’t see the landing gear but he kicked around until he got one foot on the wheel and pushed himself against the side of the plane.

His hand couldn’t hold on to the strut for much longer. It was holding up almost all of his weight — his foot on the landing wheel couldn’t get a stable hold. He brought his other foot up and wrapped his leg around the strut. That would hold a lot better than his hand. It gave him a chance to breathe, a chance to think of what to do next.

Looking around, he found the hatch on the side of the plane that would let him inside. It looked like it was miles away, but maybe, if he really extended his arm he could just reach it…

His fingertips brushed the latch, and the hatch popped open, torn backward by the wind. It bounced back and forth on its hinges, threatening to slam closed again. He was going to have to jump for the hatch, and there was nothing beneath him this time, nothing to catch him if he fell.

He knew there was no other option. He pushed himself off the strut, launching himself toward the hatch just as it flapped open again. His hand shot out and found something to grab onto and he pulled himself inside the plane, just as the hatch flapped shut and latched itself behind him.

He lay on the carpeted floor of the plane, in the leg well between two rows of seats, and just focused on breathing. It was quiet and warm there, so quiet and warm after the freezing sky of Siberia. He would just give himself a second, just rest for half a second before—

“Jim?” Nadia asked.

Chapel scrambled up onto his feet. He lifted his hand to show it was empty, then took a step forward between the two rows of seats.

Up ahead of him, Nadia sat strapped into the pilot’s seat, looking at him over her shoulder. One of her hands was on the steering yoke. The other held her phone.

“Please,” he said. “Don’t do anything rash. I just came to talk.”

“You jumped out of a helicopter and onto my plane to talk? Jim, that was… that was insane.”

“That’s my job. Doing stupid things for America.”

She gave him a smile. It wasn’t a match for the warm, excited smiles she used to give him, back when… before she…

He fought down his anger, his need for revenge. There were bigger things at stake here than getting back at her. “Nadia, you’ve really painted yourself into a corner here. The Russians are going to shoot you down in about ten minutes if you don’t start talking to them. You have to give them something.”

“Do I?” she asked. She glanced back through the windscreen. “They seem to be backing off. I thought for a moment they intended to ram this plane.”

“They’re holding back right now. But they don’t need to ram you. They’ve got a machine gun that can cut the wings off this thing.”

She sighed. “Come forward. I can’t talk to you over my shoulder like this and fly at the same time.”

He made his way to the front of the plane and sat down next to her. There was no copilot’s position, no controls in front of him. He wouldn’t be able to fight her over who got to fly. Not that he even knew how, though he supposed Angel could talk him through it… damn. He’d lost his hands-free unit when he jumped. He could still call Angel on the phone in his pocket, but for all practical purposes he was on his own.

“Just — just put down the phone, for now,” he told her. “Please? I know what you can do with that thing.”

“If I put down the phone, you’ll have no reason not to kill me.”

“The thought had occurred to me,” he said, before he could stop himself. “But I won’t. I plan on living through this. If I tried something, you would lose control of the plane, and then we’d both die.”

“Perhaps you think it would be worth it, after everything I did.”

He closed his eyes and rubbed his face with his hand. Then he looked over at her and met her eyes. And realized he had no idea what to say next.

She kept the phone in her hand.

“Anyway,” he said, “I’ve seen you fight. You could probably take me.”

That made her smile again. There was a little more light in her smile this time. “Count on it.” But still she didn’t put down the phone.

“Okay,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. He had to think of this like a hostage negotiation — with three hundred and fifty million people, the population of America, as the hostages. “All right. You don’t want to put down the phone. So tell me what you do want. Tell me where we go from here.”

“You know what I want.” She glanced through the windscreen at the helicopter, which was keeping station just clear of her wing tip. “It looks like I’m not going to get it.”

“So what’s your plan?” he asked.

“My plan?”

“You have one, don’t you?” he said, as gently as he could.

“Oh, certainly.” She laughed. “I did. But as usual, you came along and made it impossible.”

“I — what? As far as I can tell I’ve just been along for the ride this whole time. I was there to help you make things this desperate.”

“Come now,” she said. “I won’t believe that. You knew right away when you met me — you knew I was up to something. That’s why you spied on me, isn’t it? That’s why you kept looking for the gaps in my story. It’s why you seduced me.”

“I didn’t — wait, what?” Chapel asked, blinking rapidly. “I did what?”

“I didn’t seduce you — you seduced me,” Chapel said, very slowly, as if he was working out a complicated math problem. “You led me on, you used the fact that Julia had just dumped me — you knew I was weak, vulnerable—”

“You knew I was attracted to you,” she said, “and you played hard to get, driving me crazy.”

“You made the first move!”

“Only after you made me want you. And what about in the desert, in the tent, when you woke me to kiss me, then turned away?” She shook her head. “You were trying to weaken my resolve, and it worked.”

“It… did?”

She looked over at him. “I would have told you everything. I would have brought you in on my scheme, even if it meant wrecking everything the marshal and I had worked to attain. Back in Aralsk-30, just before the soldiers arrived — I was going to tell you about Siberian independence, and stealing the launch codes. I was going to give you a chance to join me — or stop me.”

Chapel’s eyes went wide.

“I thought,” she said, and clearly it took some effort to dredge up the words, “that I could go it alone. When I left Marshal Bulgachenko for the last time, when I went rogue, I thought I could live the rest of my life without any human comfort or warmth. It wasn’t going to be very long, was it? But I had no idea what people need when they must face up to their own mortality. The loneliness was incredible. It was like winter had come and I knew the sun would never rise again. And then you came along. Jim, we were never going to be happy marrieds. We were never going to have children or a nice little house with a lawn you would mow every weekend. I knew that. But the thought of just having someone there, someone to stand beside me, someone to be with me at the very end… I suppose it is easiest just to say that I did not want to die alone.”

Chapel forced himself to blink his eyes. It made him realize he’d been staring at her, unable to believe what he heard.

“When you called me, when you told me America wished to help me,” she said, softly, “I knew it was a ruse.” She shook her head. “It was just so good to hear your voice.”

“Seriously?” he asked.

“When I thought you were dead… it was almost too much to bear.”

Chapel couldn’t believe it. Her feelings for him had been real? He’d been running on rage for so long, convinced she had seduced him to keep him in line, to keep him moving in the direction she wanted to go. But this changed everything—

He shook his head.

She had still betrayed him. Lied to him. Used him to forward her political cause. That hadn’t changed.

“No. No. You lied to me from the start,” he said. “You used me.”

“I know you hate me, Jim. I understand why.”

“Because you used me and my country to steal a weapon of mass destruction?”

“Yes,” she said. “I won’t deny it. I will say I did it for the best of reasons. To free my people from Moscow.”

“Through an act of terror,” he insisted.

“After all we’ve been through, you can’t even call me a freedom fighter?”

“That’s just semantics. What you did was wrong, Nadia. You put my entire country in jeopardy. And if you launch those missiles, the United States will be forced to retaliate — it’s just the way things are. You’ll destroy Russia as well. Some of our missiles are aimed at Siberia, you know.”

“It’s that clear, is it? There is no moral quandary in your mind. I’m one of the bad guys.”

“As long as you’re holding that phone, yes,” he said.

She turned to face him. Looked deeply into his eyes. What would she find there? He didn’t even know himself, anymore. Despite what he’d said, this situation was anything but clear. Would she find hatred still burning in him, or something else? Maybe just a wish that things could have been different?

She pursed her lips and looked back through the windscreen. Lake Baikal filled most of the view, now, as big as a sea, an ocean. Mongolia lay just a few dozen miles from its southern shore.

“I wanted to see this,” she said. “This lake — it’s the heart of Siberia. It is the deepest lake in the world, did you know that?”

“No,” he said.

“Perhaps the oldest lake, as well. We — the Sibiryak—we sing folk songs about the ‘glorious Baikal sea.’ We tell the story of a fugitive from the gulags who rowed across Baikal in a lard barrel, to return to his family.”

“It’s beautiful,” Chapel said.

“Moscow wants to build a nuclear plant here. They’ll have to relocate all the Buryat people, who have lived a traditional life along the shore for ten thousand years. Moving them is a small price to pay for development of the region, Moscow says.”

“Nadia,” he sighed, “we don’t have time for—”

She reached over and handed him the phone.

Chapel closed his eyes and clutched the phone in his hand. For a second he just breathed deeply, releasing some of his pent-up tension. Then he ejected the SIM card from the phone and shoved it in his pocket. He took the battery out for good measure.

Only then did he consider the fact this wasn’t over.

He took out his own phone and lifted it to his ear.

“What are you doing?” Nadia asked, staring at him.

“I’m going to tell Kalin that he doesn’t need to shoot us down,” he told her.

“Don’t.”

“Look, Nadia — we have to figure out some way to end this where nobody gets hurt.”

“Unlikely,” she pointed out. “Even if I were to put down at Irkutsk and surrender myself, do you think they would just let me go?”

He knew perfectly well that if Kalin took her alive, he would ship her to Magnitogorsk and make every day she had left a new kind of hell. He couldn’t let that happen to her, not now… no. He wouldn’t do that to his worst enemy.

Director Hollingshead had ordered him to kill Nadia. That would be cleaner than what would happen if she lived.

But he was still Jim Chapel. He was still too dumb to just give up. “There has to be a way — there has to be some way we can get you out of the country — you were headed for Mongolia, right? To the Evenk community there?”

She laughed. “That’s an interesting idea. I wish I’d thought of it.”

He stared at her with wide eyes. “That wasn’t your plan? But then what did you think you were going to do?”

“Fly until they stopped me,” she told him.

He shook his head. “No. No, I won’t let you kill yourself.” He switched on his phone. “Angel, do you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, sugar,” the sexy voice said.

“I have the phone,” he told her. “It’s over — this can end now.”

Nadia looked over at him with an expression of pure regret. He knew what he was doing to her — taking away her last, romantic gesture — but he refused to accept that she had to die. Not now, knowing what he knew.

“I’ll connect you to the helicopter,” Angel said.

He waited while she routed the call. In the silence he looked over at Nadia and wondered what he could have done differently. How this could have worked out, in a more perfect world. But what would that even mean? If she had come to the Pentagon, back at the beginning, and asked for his help, asked him to help her free her people — he would have declined. He would have said it wasn’t in America’s interest. That it wasn’t his job.

Maybe, back in Uzbekistan, when she had told him she was a rogue agent, when he had tried to abort the mission — maybe if he’d stuck to his guns, he could have gotten her out of there, taken her to the States and gotten her asylum.

But she wouldn’t have accepted that. She would have pressed on toward Aralsk-30 without him. She would have walked into the desert on foot if she had to.

Maybe if they hadn’t gotten separated after they shut down Perimeter—

“Kapitan?”

On the phone Kalin sounded annoyed. As if Chapel was distracting him from important work.

“Senior Lieutenant,” Chapel said, “I’ve recovered the phone. Asimova is no longer a threat. I want to talk about—”

“I’m sorry, Kapitan,” Kalin interrupted, “this line is not very clear. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Kalin, don’t be an ass,” Chapel said. “I have the codes! This doesn’t have to end badly for any of us!”

“Perhaps you should call back later,” Kalin told him.

And then the connection went dead.

Nadia looked over at him with frightened eyes. “What did he say?” she asked. “What is he going to—”

Chapel jumped out of his seat, grabbing her to pull her down to the floor of the plane, as if that would make any difference.

At that same moment, the helicopter opened fire.

The Russian PKT machine gun could fire eight hundred rounds of 7.62 x 54 mm R ammunition every minute. Each of those bullets, which were as big as Chapel’s index finger, left the barrel traveling 2,700 feet per second and carried more than 3,500 joules of energy. The PKT had been designed to chew through armored vehicles at a range of nearly half a mile.

Nadia’s airplane, which was a civilian model made mostly of wood and very thin sheets of aluminum, had no armor whatsoever.

Kalin fired an entire belt of ammunition into the plane — two hundred fifty rounds — over the course of roughly nineteen seconds. The gunner was a soldier trained in airborne fighting, and the range was very short. All but a handful of the rounds struck the plane.

The majority of them struck the tail assembly, which was deformed by the impacts. Parts of it fell away completely as debris. Some of the bullets struck the wings, boring deep holes through the aluminum and breaching the plane’s fuel tanks. Others entered the engine compartment and destroyed delicate and vital components.

One bullet struck the propeller, which was a carefully constructed piece of laminated strips of wood, hand carved and painstakingly shaped by a master craftsman in a factory in Volgograd. The propeller cracked and disintegrated instantly.

Seventy-three rounds found their way inside the cabin of the aircraft. These were able to smash out every piece of glass in the cockpit and destroy some of the plane’s instrumentation. Other rounds lodged in the three rows of seats, which were actually some of the sturdiest components of the plane. Others were absorbed by the walls, floor, and ceiling of the cabin, and some passed through the plane and out its front end without meeting serious resistance.

Six rounds entered the volume of space where Nadia and Chapel lay in a heap in the leg well of the front row of seats.

Three passed close enough to Chapel that he felt them pass him by and heard them buzz like bees. One of them grazed his back, digging a trench through his skin and muscle tissue and causing blood to trickle down his side. One passed directly through the place where his artificial arm would have been, if Kalin hadn’t taken it away.

One bullet entered Nadia’s left side just above her navel, passed through her chest cavity and emerged from her right shoulder, at a substantially slower rate than when it had emerged from the machine gun’s barrel.

The bullet went through one of her lungs. It missed her heart by a fraction of an inch, instead nicking her aorta, the main vessel that brings blood to the heart. Blood immediately began to leak into her chest cavity and found its way through the hole in her lung. There was additional trauma from hydrostatic shock and from broken fragments of her ribs, which moved around inside her chest like shrapnel.

It was not the kind of injury the human body was designed to survive.

The wind howled through holes in the fuselage. The temperature in the cabin had dropped twenty degrees. Chapel opened his eyes.

He saw Nadia’s face, her eyes looking into his.

Blood speckled her lips.

“Nadia,” he said. “Nadia, are you hit?”

“I think so,” she said. Her voice was very small.

“Hold on,” Chapel begged. “You’re going to be okay — just stay with me.”

There was blood on Nadia’s face, but her eyes were still clear. They looked around at the devastation of the plane, then up at Chapel.

“Help me up,” she coughed. Her breathing didn’t sound good, but her voice was firm and strong.

“We shouldn’t move you — there could be damage to—”

“Jim,” she said, “we are falling out of the sky.”

He got his arm around her and helped her slide back into the pilot’s seat, not without a few screams of agony. Red bubbles popped inside her shirt and he knew that couldn’t be good, but when she was sitting up, she gave him a smile.

Chapel forced himself to look forward, through the void where the windscreen had been. He could see nothing but blue water. It was impossible to tell how quickly it was coming toward him, but he imagined it would be faster than he might wish.

Nadia reached out and tapped some of the controls — those that hadn’t been smashed to pieces. She grabbed the steering yoke. “No power,” she said. “No response from the rudder. I think the ailerons still work, but the elevators…” She pulled back on the yoke. The effort made her scream again. “Jim — help me.”

He moved behind her, then reached around and grabbed the yoke in the middle, pulling it toward her. “You think you can still land this thing?”

Laughing clearly caused her pain, but she couldn’t help herself.

“What I can do,” she said, pausing now and again to cough up blood, “is allow us to crash at a slightly more shallow angle than nature had planned.” She looked up at him. “Jim, you know how to swim, don’t you?” She closed her eyes. “What am I saying? When I met you, you were about to go diving.”

“You’re going to try a crash landing on the lake?”

“There is no choice in that,” she told him.

“But this isn’t a seaplane — it’ll sink like a rock.”

“Yes.”

Chapel shook his head. “There has to be — there must be another—”

“Jim, you should learn a little Slavic fatalism. What goes up must come down, yes? Konyechno.”

She wrestled with the yoke in silence for a while. A band of sky appeared over the water ahead of them, but only the merest line of light blue.

“The water will be very cold,” she told him. “You must be careful of hypothermia.”

“We’ll hold on to each other, to share our body heat,” Chapel promised her.

“I wonder,” she said, “if in a hundred years, will the Sibiryak sing folk songs about the woman who flew into Baikal? I wonder if they will be free, then.”

“Nadia, I’m going to get you to shore, we’ll find a doctor—”

“Jim,” she said, “this is what I wanted from you. Not professions of love, not poems and flowers. Just that you would be with me at the end. Holding my hand. You must strap yourself in — the landing will be very rough.”

He started to protest, but he knew she was right. He strapped himself into the seat beside her. Then he reached over and took her hand.

They hit the water fast enough that the wings tore off the plane. Water flooded in through the broken windscreen, a great wave of it smashing over Chapel, almost cold enough to stop his heart. It filled his mouth, crushed him back in his seat. Water filled the cabin almost instantly, and he clamped his mouth shut to hold on to a desperate breath. His hand was yanked free of hers by the wave. He wrestled with his straps, got loose somehow. He reached for her, found her face.

There was nothing left in her eyes.

He waited — almost too long. But in the end he kicked his way out through the windscreen, kicked his way to the surface until his mouth and nose crested the water and he could suck in another breath.

Lake Baikal is one of the world’s clearest lakes. He could look down and see what remained of the airplane, slowly shrinking below him, for a very long time. He watched it go — until the very end, her svidetel. Her witness.

The crew of a fishing boat dragged the one-armed american out of the water and took him back to shore. There the fishermen wrapped him in a blanket and left him sitting on the dock, because he said he wanted to stay by the water. He was shaking with cold and bleeding from several wounds. The fishermen called in the local policeman to talk reason to this american stranger. But the policeman just threw up his hands. Of course the american did not have to go to the hospital, if he did not want to. “Konyechno,” he said.

The American looked up at him with a gaze so piercing it made the policeman flinch. “You are Siberian?” he asked, in a deplorable accent.

“Ya Russkiy,” the policeman replied, I am a Russian.

The man from the lake said nothing. He just went back to looking over the water.

Most of the people who had come to take a look at the stranger went back to work. A few children stayed down by the docks, playing on the cold shore, shooting each other with finger guns, swooping around with their arms out like the wings of airplanes.

The policeman came back a while later with a mug full of some yeasty-smelling yellow liquid. “Kvass,” he said.

“What’s it made of?” the man from the lake asked.

“Fermented bread. I put raisins and lemon in it,” the policeman told him. “It will help you regain your strength.”

The man from the lake grimaced — clearly he was no Russian — but he drank down the contents of the mug. Then he ate the raisins from the bottom. The policeman smiled. He took off his hat and ran a hand over his close-cut hair. “I have called the pertinent authorities, I thought you should know. They are sending someone.”

The man from the lake just nodded. “It will be a man in a black suit, who comes here to kill me,” he said.

The policeman started to protest — it was his job to protect people from being killed, not help the killers, but the man from the lake held up his hand in protest.

“You have done the correct thing,” he told the policeman. “I am an enemy spy. The man in the black suit is FSB.”

The policemen nodded sagely. “Ah, I see. You are crazy.” That explained a great deal. Though not, perhaps, how the man got in the lake in the first place. “You… you are a madman, yes?”

“Konyechno,” the man from the lake said, and he gave the policeman a weak smile.

But a little while later a helicopter landed on the rocky beach. It drove the children away like frightened gulls, though they did not go far — mostly they ran for the shelter of the pilings under the dock.

The helicopter took its time setting down. The pilot could not seem to find a flat surface to put his wheels to. Eventually, though, he did find the right patch of rocky ground, and the rotors spun down with a sad whine. The side hatch opened and a man stepped out, then started walking smartly toward the dock and the man from the lake. The policeman watched with his hands laced across his stomach, unsure of what he should do.

He was especially confused because the man who jumped out of the helicopter was not wearing a black suit. Instead he had on a very grand military uniform, with many medals and golden insignia, some of which identified him as being a colonel in the Strategic Rocket Forces.

Maybe, the policeman thought, the man from the lake really was a foreign spy.

The colonel took the man from the lake away. Together they boarded the helicopter and flew off. Eventually the children came out from under the dock and started to play again.

The policeman wondered if he would ever know what that had all been about. In the end, he shrugged, because he knew the answer. “Konyechno, nyet,” he said to himself. Of course not. That wasn’t how things worked.

Director Hollingshead fiddled with a loose bit of thread on one of his sleeve buttons. “My apologies, son, for, well. For your having to take the long way home.”

Chapel said nothing. There had been a lot of paperwork and rooms full of arguing people, back in Russia, before he was finally allowed to leave. Bureaucracy was the same everywhere, it seemed. Colonel Valits had made sure he didn’t slip through the cracks. He’d been a man of his word — once Nadia was dead, he made sure Chapel got to go home.

The mission was over.

“Not, altogether, ah, a glorious success,” Hollingshead said. “Would you agree?”

Chapel stood at attention, just inside the door of the converted fallout shelter that Hollingshead used as his office. The old man was sitting in a leather-covered armchair across the room. He had not, so far, ordered Chapel to be at ease, nor asked him to come any farther into the room.

“Sir, yes, sir,” Chapel said. He was back in uniform, which always made him feel a little better. One sleeve of his tunic was pinned up at his side, because he had yet to be issued a new prosthetic arm.

“The Russians, of course, won’t speak of what happened. Ever, well, again,” Hollingshead went on. “I don’t think diplomatic relations will be affected, but… you know. How these things… well.”

Rupert Hollingshead had a cast-iron spine — Chapel had seen him give orders that would make a normal man’s blood run cold. He was one of the most powerful spymasters in the American intelligence community.

When he stammered, when he hemmed and hawed and put on this absentminded professor act, it was just that — an act. Designed to either put people at their ease or fool them into thinking he was as ineffectual as he looked. He looked like a jovial old Ivy League academic, but it had been a long time since he had acted like one when he was alone with Chapel. His performing like this now worried Chapel very much.

“Sir, if you would like my resignation, I will have it for you by—”

Hollingshead took off his glasses and stared openmouthed.

“Resignation?” he asked. “Son, what exactly are you suggesting?”

“I failed you, sir,” Chapel said. He was speaking a little too candidly for protocol, but he supposed there were times when you had to be honest. “I allowed myself to be emotionally compromised by Asimova. I put my country at risk as a result.”

Hollingshead shook his head. He dropped one arm over the side of his chair and let his glasses dangle there. He cleared his throat noisily.

Only then did he speak.

“Son, if she fooled you, well… she fooled me first.”

Chapel said nothing.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Hollingshead said, jumping up from his chair. “Come inside and sit down. I’m not a dragon you need to beard in its lair. Let me fix you a drink.”

It was then that Chapel realized the jovial professor act hadn’t been for his benefit at all. It had been Hollingshead’s way of attempting to deal with his own guilt and doubt. Once the drinks were poured and handed out, Hollingshead put his glasses back on and studied the contents of a manila folder for a while. “You accomplished all the tasks I set for you. You rendered Perimeter nonfunctional, and from all our chatter analysis it looks like they don’t even know what you did — which means they won’t know the damned thing is broken, so they won’t try to fix it. They think Asimova went to Aralsk-30 only to steal the codes, not to rejigger the computer.”

“So the system is really down?” Chapel had wondered about that. He only had Bogdan’s word that Perimeter had been sabotaged — the Romanian might have spent all that time at the terminal just playing Minesweeper or something.

“There’s really no way to tell, of course,” Hollingshead replied. “Ah, well, there is one way. We could nuke Moscow and see if their missiles all launch automatically.”

“Sir, with all due respect, I think that kind of testing would be counterproductive,” Chapel said.

It had been meant as a joke. Hollingshead laughed, though not very convincingly. “Asimova is also dead. I ordered that, as well, didn’t I?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hollingshead nodded. “I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. That I ordered the execution of that charming young girl. Of course, they never found her body. Baikal is the world’s deepest lake. It would take them years to search the bottom, to find her bones. I doubt they’ll make the effort.” He glanced at Chapel out of one eye, as if trying to catch him in some compromising facial expression.

There was nothing there for him to find.

“I watched the plane go down. I nearly drowned myself. There was no way for her to survive — even before the crash, she was dead, I think.”

Hollingshead nodded agreeably. “Case closed, then. The Russians don’t wish to talk about it — I suppose we do the same.”

“Very good, sir.”

“There are a couple of loose ends, of course, but we’ll just get those out of the way. There was a bit of a media to-do in Russia. A couple of Siberian journalists saw a military helicopter shoot down an unarmed civilian plane. There have been… inquiries. A man named Pavel Kalin, formerly a senior lieutenant of the FSB, has been stripped of his rank and forced to resign. He hasn’t been seen in nine days.”

“Is he dead, sir?” Chapel asked.

“No way to know. They may just be keeping him out of sight until the media flap blows over.” Hollingshead turned to a new page of his dossier. “Then there’s Bogdan Vlaicu, a Romanian national. He was detained by the authorities on July the twenty-eighth. Officially, he’s never mentioned again in any documents.”

Chapel closed his eyes. Bogdan hadn’t deserved what he got. Broken fingers — and the promise of a lot worse. Even if Kalin was out of the picture, somebody would have Bogdan now. Someone would be torturing him, trying to figure out what he’d done at Aralsk-30. He could still unravel the entire mission.

“We did, however, pick up a rather strange transmission from the Russian department of prisons,” Hollingshead said. “It appears a prisoner matching Vlaicu’s description was being transferred to a high-security facility outside of Magnitogorsk, under heavily armed guard. But when his transport arrived in that city… there was no one in the back.”

Chapel couldn’t help himself. He flinched in surprise.

“Apparently there was a computer error involved. The prisoner was put on the wrong vehicle or something… it’s unclear. What is known is that he’s now missing and presumed at large. Both Russia and Interpol have him on their most wanted lists, but no one’s reported a single clue as to his whereabouts. You couldn’t be any help in that investigation, could you, son?”

“Sir, I can honestly say I have no idea where he might go,” Chapel said. And for once in his life it was pure, unvarnished truth.

Go, Bogdan, go.

Hollingshead closed the folder. “Good enough. Finish your drink, then be on your way. I’ll have a new assignment for you soon — Angel will give you the details.”

Just like that.

Neat, clean, tied up in a ribbon.

Done.

Chapel finished his drink and turned to go. From behind him, before he could open the door, Hollingshead made a little noise of surprise, as if he’d just remembered something.

“Oh, son,” he said, “one thing — when Asimova handed you her phone, on the plane.”

“Sir?”

“You had all the Russian nuclear launch codes in your hand. That must have been a frightening prospect.”

“Yes, sir,” Chapel admitted.

“You know, if we had those codes now… well. There are a number of things we could do with them, you see. We could learn a bit from them, and in the case of an emergency they might come in handy.”

Chapel stood very still and thought for a moment. Thought about what he should say next. He had, of course, known the value of that smartphone. He’d known how much the Pentagon would like to have had it. He had known it was his duty as an officer of military intelligence to smuggle it out of Russia.

But nobody should have that power.

Nobody.

The smartphone — and its crucial SIM card — were at the bottom of Lake Baikal. The deepest lake in the world. They would stay there forever.

“When you fight a hydra, sir,” he told Hollingshead, “it may be tempting to let one of the heads grow back. But you can’t, can you?”

“No, son, no,” Hollingshead said. He shook his head and smiled, a little smile of self-deprecation. “No, you burn it down to the stump.”

“Exactly, sir,” Chapel said. And then he did leave.