The Hydra Protocol

PART I

Dust motes hung in the early light streaming down through the archive’s overgrown windows, twisting slowly in the dead air. A card catalog cabinet lay overturned on the cracked linoleum, its contents gutted and spilled onto the floor so the fine handwriting on the cards was bleached to sepia by years of sun exposure. One wall of the main room was lined with stacks of periodicals held together by fraying twine — old party literature from discredited regimes, outdated factbooks and bound analyses from long-dead KGB agents, all marked STATE SECRET, all still forbidden long after the Cold War had ended.

She stooped down in the dust and picked up a photograph of Brezhnev that had been filed in with the rest. It was just a standard portrait, the kind that might have hung in every office building in Russia forty years ago. Still it had been stamped as secret, with a warning indicating the penalties for unauthorized access. Most likely the librarians here had gotten in the habit of stamping everything that came across their desks.

The Soviet Union had never had time to come to trust computers. Right up until the end hard copy had been the rule — all secret information must be printed, bound, and filed, even if by 1991 no one wanted it anymore. What she was looking for had to be here, in this old archive building on an uninhabited island on the wrong side of Russia. For years she had tracked down the information, the last piece she needed to complete her mission. Her life’s work, she thought, with a little grim humor.

So much had been lost when the coup failed and Yeltsin took the reins of the country. In the first flush of liberty the country had gone mad, like a dog chewing at its own paw. KGB installations across the country had been ransacked and set aflame, people who knew vital things had been taken away and quietly killed before they could be debriefed, computers had been smashed, archives razed. Of the seven KGB libraries in Russia that had once housed the information she needed, six had been pulled down and their records burned. This one had survived only because no one remembered it was here. Even the librarians who once worked here had disappeared, some crawling into bottles to drink themselves to death — the traditional suicide method for ex-KGB — some emigrating to breakaway republics or even nearby Japan.

Here was the last repository of the records the KGB had kept on dissidents, on foreign spies, on people who simply could not be trusted. Here was the institutional memory of a police state.

Here—

Here it was.

One of the twine-bound stacks held theater asset reports, dry technical papers listing every rifle, tank, and canteen the army possessed in a given region. Hidden among them was one marked with the sigil of the Strategic Rocket Forces. It was not only marked secret but sealed with a red band and actual wax. One glance at the title and she knew she’d found it:

After so long she could hardly believe she held the report in her hands. The last copy on Earth, and the only piece of paper that could make the world safe again. She placed it inside her coat, close to her heart, and then pulled up her zipper to keep it in place.

Hurrying to the door she almost missed the sound. A crackling, the sound of someone stepping on broken glass outside. She stopped in the doorway and tried not to breathe. She heard a man speaking, though she could not make out the words. Then someone else laughed in response. It was not a kindly sounding laugh.

She didn’t know what to do. She’d known they would follow her, that they would chase her to the ends of the world. She’d accepted the risk. But here, in this lonely place where only seabirds lived now, she’d thought she would be safe.

Evidently not.

“Will you make us come in, little friend?” someone called out, in Russian. “There is no other exit. You must come this way eventually. And we will not wait for long.”

She closed her eyes, trying to get an idea of where the voice came from. To the left of the door, she believed. But there were two of them. If they’d been trained by the KGB, one would stand directly before the doorway, the other to the side. If they were Spetsnaz — much worse — they would flank both sides, because they would expect her to come out shooting.

She was unarmed. She had not even thought to bring a gun to the island. After all, there were no people on it.

There was no solution except to march forward, into the sunny doorway. Outside, the larch trees that covered most of the island fell away to form what looked like a natural clearing, just large enough for them to land their helicopter. She saw it first, a small late Soviet model that could not be hiding too many men. At least there was that.

Next she saw the man who had called out to her. He was in front of her and a little to the left. He wore a turtleneck under a well-tailored blazer and had the dead fish eyes of a man who had killed before. He had a knife in his hand, the kind one might use to pry open an oyster. His much larger partner, who wore a denim jacket, was off to the right a little ways, watching her. His hands were in his pockets. Perhaps he wanted her to think he had a gun, but if he did, he would have already shot her.

Just knives, then.

Konyechno, she thought. Okay.

The man in the blazer came toward her, his knife held low by his thigh. He spoke softly, as if he wanted to persuade her to come quietly, though she knew his orders were to make sure she never left the island. “Did you find it?” he asked. “The thing you came to steal? It will not—”

He didn’t get to finish his sentence. She moved in fast, sweeping her leg across the back of his calf to bring him off balance. She brought her right arm across her body, protecting her torso while delivering a strong blow to his forearm. It was not enough to knock the knife out of his hand, but it left him unable to strike, his knife arm stretched out to his side. He tried to recover by shifting his footing, but her foot was already behind his leg and she kept him balancing on the other foot. With his free hand he tried to grab for her throat but she twisted away, shooting out her left hand to grab his wrist. She dug her thumb deep into the tendons there and his hand released, dropping the knife.

He had been trained in fighting, she could tell. He did not panic or try to break free — he knew she had locked his leg. Instead he brought his hands up to punch at her face and her throat. He had the advantage of mass and arm strength and one good blow to her trachea could put her down, but she was faster and managed to take his strike on the side of her head. Her ear burned with pain but she ignored it. She had too much to do, yet.

She threw her arms around his waist and pushed her head under his armpit. He was already off balance so she threw her own weight backward, letting herself fall onto her posterior. His own weight carried him over her back, head first, and she both heard and felt the moment when his skull struck the ground behind her.

KGB, she thought. He’d been trained by the KGB.

She’d been trained by Spetsnaz.

She threw his dead weight off her back and twisted around, her toes digging into the hard ground. One arm pushed up from the dirt and she was half standing, half crouching and facing the second man.

He looked surprised.

“When I was a little girl,” she told him, “I wanted to be Ecaterina Szabo. You know, the gymnast?”

He seemed to remember then that he’d been sent to kill her. He moved quickly, his hands coming out of his pockets, and both holding knives. As he came closer she saw just how big he was. The moves she’d used on his partner would be useless on such a bear — his inertia would be too great for her to counteract.

So instead she snatched up the fallen knife from the ground and threw it into his stomach.

He grunted in pain but kept coming, his eyes wild.

There was no time to get out of his way, so she didn’t. Just before he fell on her she lanced out with her foot. Her heel struck the pommel of the knife she’d lodged in his belly, driving it in deep until she felt it touch his spine. She rolled to the side as he collapsed on where she’d been, and she scuttled away as he began to scream.

“I was too tall to be a gymnast.”

For a second, no more, she let herself breathe. She let herself feel the panic she had suppressed before. Her breath made a little mist in the cold morning air.

She touched her jacket and felt the paper folder inside it. Made sure it was safe.

Then she got up and dusted herself off. Went over to their helicopter and found no one else inside. In a few minutes she was airborne, headed for Sakhalin Island. From there she could find her way into Japan, and then on to America. Where the real work would begin.

Jim Chapel leaned on the prow of the yacht and peered down into the water that foamed and churned beneath him. Ever since he’d been a kid, growing up not far from here, he’d loved the ocean. He knew no more peaceful feeling than looking out over its incredible blue expanse, watching it roll in from the far horizon. What human problem could mean anything measured against that blue infinity? Whatever was waiting for him back in New York, whatever Julia was going to tell him, for the moment, at least, he could put it in the back of his mind, tuck it neatly away and think about—

Behind him a vast rolling thump of noise shattered the peace, followed quickly by a squeal of feedback and another squeal, less loud but far more human, the sound of a woman screaming. Chapel spun around just as the beat dropped in and the DJ really got the party jumping.

The yacht was rated for fifty people — it had that many life jackets on board, anyway. Nearly two hundred men and women were crowded onto its main deck, leaping and swaying and throwing their fists in the air as the DJ asked if they were ready to tear it up and burn it down. More squeals and screams came as men in surfer shorts grabbed women and hoisted them up in the air, tossed them into the on-deck pool, poured liquor down their bodies to suck it out of their navels. Chapel had to smile and shake his head as he watched the bacchanalia unfold.

“Jimmy! Jimmy, goddamnit!” someone shouted, and a man ten years Chapel’s junior came running across the deck. “Jimmy, get away from there; can’t you see you’re in the wrong place? The party’s over heeeere!”

Chapel laughed and braced himself as Donny Melvin came rushing at him like a linebacker. The younger man barreled into him and wrapped his arms around Chapel’s torso, and for a second Chapel thought Donny was going to pick him up and bodily carry him over to the party. Donny could have done it, too — Chapel had a couple inches of height on Donny, but Donny had nearly twice his mass, and the vast majority of it was muscle.

Donny had always been a big guy. He and Chapel had gone through Ranger school together and bonded over the fact they’d both grown up in Florida. Back then, Donny had constantly complained that the life of a soldier interfered with his ability to lift weights and that he was running to flab. That had regularly elicited nothing but groans from the other grunts, who wanted to bitch about how heavy their packs were — some of them suggested Donny could carry their packs for them. When Chapel went off to Afghanistan, Donny had gone to Iraq. Flabby or not, after one particularly nasty firefight in Fallujah, Donny had ended up carrying two wounded soldiers off the battlefield, one under each arm. He’d gotten a medal for that.

Since his discharge Donny had clearly returned to working out almost full-time. Nor was he particularly modest about his body. He wore nothing but a pair of white-rimmed sunglasses, some floral print board shorts, and a neon pink pair of flip-flops. One of his massive biceps had been tattooed with a banner reading 75 RANGER RGT, while his other arm had been decorated with a multicolored banner showing he’d fought in the war on terror. Neither of those tattoos was regulation, though now that Donny was a civilian again, he was allowed to do with his skin as he pleased.

“How many times did I invite you down for a cruise, and you always said no? I don’t know how you did it, but you picked the perfect time to say yes. There is some serious action over there,” Donny told Chapel as he released him from the bear hug. “I’m talking talent, Jimmy. Normally, I call one of these boat rides, I’m looking at five or six girls I would do bad things for. Today there’s at least a dozen. At least come take a look, huh?”

“Maybe just for a look,” Chapel told Donny.

“I promise, your redhead girlfriend will not mind if you look,” Donny told him, smiling. “And anything else that happens, well, we are in international waters.”

“That doesn’t give me a get-out-of-monogamy-free card. And stop calling me Jimmy. Only my elementary school teachers and my mother ever called me that.”

“Sure thing, Jimbo,” Donny said, grabbing Chapel’s arm and pulling him back toward the deck.

Chapel couldn’t help but grin. Donny Melvin deserved a little fun after what he’d done in Iraq. If he was a little raucous about it, where was the harm?

Back on the deck a group of girls in bikinis shouted and squealed as Donny burst into their midst. One of them threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. She had a plastic cup of beer in one hand and she spilled half of it down Donny’s back by accident, but Donny just whooped at the icy touch and hugged the girl. “This is Sheila,” he shouted over the thumping music. “She’s a student at — what school was it?”

“Shelly!” she shouted back.

“What?” Donny asked her.

“My name is Shelly!” she shouted. “Shelly!”

“Seriously?” Donny spun her around and squatted to take a look at the tattoo that rode just above the top of her bikini bottom. “Oh, man! King James, meet Shelly,” he said. “You can recognize her by the butterfly back here.”

Shelly spun around with a mock scowl on her face, which prompted Donny to get a shoulder under her stomach and lift her up into the air. She screamed and giggled and spilled the rest of her beer as he carried her through the crowd toward the open air bar. Dancers and drinkers alike moved out of his way, some of them raising cups in salute as he barged through their midst. This was, after all, Donny’s party. And Donny’s boat.

Donny had not exactly signed up with the army for the GI bill. His father owned half the orange trees in Florida. One day Donny was going to have to learn how to take care of orange trees himself. But clearly that day was not today.

“Shots!” Donny shouted, and a hundred people all around him shouted it back. The two bartenders grabbed for bottles with both hands and started lining up waxed paper shot glasses on the marble top of the bar, which was already strewn with empty cups and discarded pieces of swimwear. Donny laid Shelly down on her back across the bar, and one of the bartenders poured a good measure of liquor right into her open mouth. Two other girls had already come rushing up to hang on Donny’s arms. It didn’t seem to be slowing him down any.

“Who’s your friend?” one of them asked, a blonde with elaborately plucked eyebrows. She gave Chapel a look that might have melted him on the spot if he was ten years younger. It threatened to melt him anyway, old as he was.

“A fellow soldier, I think,” another woman said, from Chapel’s right. She had a slight accent he couldn’t place, and when he turned to look at her, he saw she wasn’t like any of the bikini-clad coeds surrounding Donny. “He has the bearing. And the quiet that hides behind the eyes. Yes?”

The woman was significantly older than the coeds. Early thirties, Chapel thought. Short dark hair surrounded vaguely Asian features and instead of the orangish tan of the girls, her skin was a rich, warm shade that looked like it actually came from spending time in the sun. Shelly and the blonde and all the others were beautiful, in a sort of mass-produced girl-next-door kind of way, but this newcomer was striking, the kind of woman you would take a second look at wherever you saw her. She wasn’t wearing a bikini, either — instead she had on a short sundress that tied at the back of her neck. The dress gave just the subtlest sense of the athletic body underneath and somehow seemed more scandalous than a bikini would, since it left so much to the imagination.

“He’s got soldier hair,” the blonde said, reaching around Donny to run her fingers across the stubble on the back of Chapel’s neck. “I love that feeling! It tickles,” she said, laughing.

It did more for Chapel than just tickle. Still, he found himself turning to look at the older woman. He found he wanted to look at her very much. Nothing more, of course, not with Julia waiting back in New York. But like Donny had said, there was no harm in looking.

“Quite a lot hidden back there, I think,” she said, as if the blonde didn’t exist. “Jim here could tell us all a few things, if he let himself.”

Chapel’s mouth started to curve into a frown. How had she known his name? Nobody had introduced them. But it seemed the mystery would have to wait.

“In the pool, now,” Donny called out, lifting a pair of plastic cups over his head.

“You go ahead,” Chapel told him, smiling at his friend.

But Donny wasn’t having it. “My party, my rules. I’m getting hot and I want to cool down. With you,” he said to the blonde, “and you,” to a brunette who looked up with the wide eyes of someone who had just won the lottery, “and Sheila, of course.”

“Shelly!” the girl yelled from the bar, sitting up and knocking over the paper shot cups the bartender had been arranging on her stomach. Nobody seemed to mind. Shelly jumped off the bar onto Donny’s back and howled in laughter as he ran with her over to the pool, only a few feet away. He jumped in with Shelly still clinging to his neck, sending up a great wave of chlorinated water that splashed half a dozen dancers nearby. A general roar of excitement went up and the DJ switched to a new track, one with an even faster beat. One by one girls and men jumped in the pool after Donny, until the deck was awash with their splashing.

“Jim-meeee!” Donny shouted. “Where’s my Jim Dog? Jim-Jam, you get in here right now or I’ll have the captain throw you overboard!”

Raising his hands in protest, Chapel tried to laugh off the invitation.

Donny wouldn’t hear it. “In. The. Pool. Now!” He lunged out of the pool and grabbed Chapel’s leg. “Now!”

“Hold on,” Chapel said, suddenly alarmed. If Donny pulled him into the pool just then, it was going to be a problem. “Let me just—”

“Get that shirt off him,” Donny shouted, and a couple of coeds came giggling up to do just that. Despite his best efforts, they managed to pull Chapel’s polo shirt over his head.

Chapel knew exactly what would happen then.

The girls in the pool stopped laughing. One of them wiped hair from her eyes and stared at his left arm, and especially his left shoulder. It took a second for others to notice, but he could tell when they did because their eyes went wide too. Nobody said anything, of course. But it looked as if the water in the pool had suddenly turned twenty degrees cooler.

“Damn it, Donny,” Chapel said, under his breath.

Under the polo shirt, Chapel’s left arm looked just like his right one. It had the same skin tone and the same amount of hair. The illusion ended at the shoulder, though, where the arm flared out into a wide clamp that held it secured to his torso.

There was no point in trying to hide it anymore. Chapel reached up with his right hand and flipped back the catches to release the arm. It was a prosthesis, an exceptionally clever and well-designed replacement for the arm he’d lost in Afghanistan. When he took it off and laid it down carefully on a deck chair, it looked like something torn off a mannequin. He worried about just leaving it there, but he doubted anyone would get too close. None of these people would want to touch the thing.

The DJ didn’t scratch a record. Most of the partygoers saw nothing, and their roaring clamor of excitement didn’t drop by so much as a decibel. But around the pool the whole atmosphere of the party had changed, grown more subdued. The party was ruined.

Chapel stepped down into the pool and submerged himself until only his head was above the water. He looked over at Donny with half a grimace on his face. He wanted very much to duck his head under as well, and just disappear.

“Does it hurt?” Shelly asked.

“No,” he told her. “Not anymore.”

“How did… I mean, how—”

Donny swam over to stand next to Chapel. “Shelly,” he said, “do you remember 9/11?”

“Of course I do!” she squeaked. “I was in fifth grade when it happened. We got to go home from school for, like, three whole days.”

Donny’s face squirmed as he tried to contain a braying laugh, but he couldn’t quite manage it. Eventually he just gave in and let the laughter boom all around the pool, until somebody else picked up on it, and then everyone was laughing. Even Chapel. “This man here,” Donny said, “is an American hero!” and he grabbed Chapel’s right hand under the water and dragged it up into the air, making Chapel stand up and show his ruined left shoulder again.

The pool erupted in one huge roaring cheer, as cups everywhere lifted in the air and pointed in Chapel’s direction. The dancers jumped up and down and the bartenders grabbed new bottles and the party lurched back into full-on mode, back to exactly where it had been before Chapel’s shirt came off.

Good old Donny, he thought.

The party never really ended, but the level of alcohol consumed on board meant that by the time the sun set, a lot more people were sitting down than dancing. Dinner — catered by one of Miami’s best authentic Cuban restaurants — was served at eight o’clock and that helped alleviate the chaos a little, too.

Chapel found he had to be careful where he walked on the deck, which was strewn with abandoned cups and greasy paper plates. It would be very easy to slip and fall overboard, and he was a little surprised nobody had done so yet. He found Donny holding court in a lifeboat that hung off the starboard side. Nestled in there with him on a canvas tarp were Shelly and a couple of girls Chapel hadn’t been introduced to. A guy who looked like a surfer, maybe half Chapel’s age, was tuning an acoustic guitar while he puffed on a joint. As Chapel leaned over the side of the boat the surfer tried to hand it to him, but Chapel politely waved it away.

“Permission to come aboard?” Chapel asked.

Donny smiled. His eyes were a little hooded, and he looked like he was ready for a nap. Shelly was stroking his arms as if she couldn’t believe how muscular they were. “Granted,” he said. “Jim… Jim… I need another stupid name to call you.”

“Keep going, you’ll get there,” Chapel said, climbing into the lifeboat. It swayed a little and he mostly fell inside, right on top of a woman he hadn’t seen. Everyone seemed to think this was hysterically funny, including the woman he’d fallen on.

“Sailor Jim,” Donny said, finally. “Is that something? Is there a Sailor Jim? Lord Jim, maybe. Isn’t that a book?”

“There’s a Slim Jim,” Shelly pointed out.

“I was saving that one for later.” Donny reached over and steadied Chapel as he tried to find a seat in the crowded lifeboat.

Once Chapel was safely ensconced he turned to apologize to the woman he’d fallen on. It turned out to be the dark-haired Asian woman he’d met earlier at the bar, the one who’d pegged him as a soldier. She acknowledged his apology by closing her eyes for a second and giving him a vampish shrug.

“I’ve had worse things fall upon me,” she said. “So Donny has told us all about you.”

“He has?” Chapel asked, a little alarmed.

“Is it so strange? You are the honored guest of this voyage. And a very interesting man to hear him tell it. A man of many accomplishments. You fought in Afghanistan, he says?”

Chapel frowned. What had Donny been saying about him? Donny didn’t know anything too secret — most of Chapel’s military career was classified — but he valued his privacy. “I don’t much like to talk about the past.”

“Me either,” Donny announced. He struggled to sit up, pulling Shelly with him until she was sitting on his lap. “Especially when the present is so much more interesting. In all the years I’ve been sailing on this yacht, this is the very first time Jim Chapel has agreed to grace us with his presence. I want to know why now, after all this time.”

Chapel sighed. “I had some things I needed to think through. I thought I would get away for a few days, give myself some quiet time.”

“Exactly what you should expect from one of my world-famous party cruises. Peace and quiet!” The girls in the lifeboat all cheered and shouted at the idea. “C’mon, Jimster. Spill the beans. You said it was something to do with that girlfriend of yours. The sexy redhead.”

Chapel laughed. “You’ve never met Julia. How do you know she’s sexy?”

“Red hair. Likes soldiers. Sounds like a good start,” Donny pointed out.

“She’s… amazing. Julia.” Chapel found himself smiling without meaning too. “And she is. Very sexy, I mean. More than that, she’s beautiful. And smart. Very sharp. She and I went through some things together, tough things, and it just brought us closer together.”

“The good start is turning into a good thing. But you didn’t come all this way to tell me you think you like somebody. You’ve got a decision to make — I can see it in your face. A big decision.”

Chapel was not a man given to giggling or outward signs of joy. But he came pretty close just then. “Yeah.”

Donny nodded. A lot of people assumed when they saw him that he was just some dumb meathead, but Donny had been an Army Ranger, and you didn’t get into Ranger school without something between your ears. “Well, I accept, of course.”

Chapel’s eyes went wide. “You — what?”

“I accept the position as your best man. Because that’s obviously why you’re here. To ask me to be your best man.”

“Best… wait a minute,” Shelly said, and put a hand over her mouth.

“Hold on!” Chapel protested. “I haven’t asked her yet — maybe I should before I go looking for someone to — to—”

Donny moved Shelly next to him, then lunged across the lifeboat and grabbed Chapel up into a rib-cage-crushing bear hug. Chapel laughed and slapped his friend’s back until the big ranger released him.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” Shelly said, tears starting to form in her eyes. Despite the fact she’d never met Julia and had met Chapel only a few hours ago, it seemed she was pretty excited by the prospect of a wedding. Any wedding.

Chapel had to admit he was pretty excited himself. The idea to propose to Julia had come to him in a sudden flash of inspiration a week earlier. The two of them had been going through a rough patch, fighting a lot, and it had taken him a long time to realize why. Julia didn’t think he was serious about her, that he was just stringing her along. She needed to know that he was committed to their relationship. As soon as he’d thought of it, a proposal had seemed like a great idea. There was no hesitation in him, no doubt. He was ready to spend the rest of his life with Julia. Why not formalize it?

“It may be too early for congratulations,” the Asian woman said. Her eyes searched his for a moment though he couldn’t figure out why. “But all the same. How wonderful.”

“Wonderful? It’s awesome! Oh my God, Donny, can I be your date at the wedding?” Shelly asked.

“Hold on,” Chapel said, laughing. “Nothing’s official yet, I still—”

He stopped because he’d seen something out of the corner of his eye. He made a point of not turning to actually look but, yes, it was there. Up in the wheelhouse of the yacht, high over the deck, someone had switched on a blue light.

“I was serious about that best man thing, if you want me,” Donny said. “I know you’ve probably got someone else in mind, but let me just point out — if you go with me, your bachelor party is going to be sick. And I mean epic. I will get every stripper in South Florida together and they will march in a parade in your honor, Jam Master Jim. You know nobody throws a party like me—”

“Uh, sorry,” Chapel said. Up in the wheelhouse the blue light switched off. He heard a chain rattle somewhere up in the bows and knew the yacht had dropped its anchor. “Listen, I—”

“Most guys would go with a limo to take you to and from this bachelor party,” Donny went on. “I’m thinking helicopters. Multiple helos.”

“I, uh,” Chapel said. He hadn’t expected this to come so soon. “Talking about this,” he said. “It’s making me a little queasy.”

“Try this,” the surfer with the guitar said, and he tried to pass Chapel his joint. “It’s good for seasickness.”

“I think what our new friend is trying to say is that he’s getting an attack of cold feet,” the Asian woman said. “Perhaps he should go lie down in his cabin.”

He wanted to thank her for that — it was the perfect out — but he was too busy doing his best impression of someone about to throw up. “I’d better get out of this boat,” he said.

Donny helped him climb back down onto the deck. “You okay?” he asked, suddenly serious.

“Fine,” Chapel told him. “I just need to lie down for a second.” He patted one of Donny’s giant biceps in thanks and then headed forward, making sure to stagger a little. Behind him he heard some of the girls laughing, probably making fun of the poor guy who’d had too much to drink or who maybe was a little too afraid of commitment.

As soon as he was out of their sight, Chapel dropped the act and hurried down a ladder to the cabins in the next deck down. He passed by a few partially opened doors, beyond which revelers had broken down into smaller more private parties, then found his own cabin. The door was still locked. Good — he’d worried that some couple in need of a bed would stumble into his cabin uninvited. That would have been a problem, since all his gear was in there.

His bag was still sitting on his bed where he’d left it. He made sure the door was locked, then took off his clothes. He unzipped the bag and pulled out the drysuit and his other gear.

The blue light had been a signal meant just for him. It was time to get to work.

The first thing Chapel did was put on a hands-free radio headset. He switched it on and whispered, “Angel? Are you receiving me?”

The voice that answered him was sexy and warm, and like every time he heard it he felt his stomach do a little flip. “I’ve got you, sugar. Are you all geared up?”

“Putting on my drysuit now,” he told her. Angel was his operator, his direct connection to his boss and any information he might need to complete his mission. She had saved his life more times than he liked to think about — certainly more times than he could ever thank her for. He had never met her in person, though, only ever heard her voice — which was how it had to be. Angel knew enough secrets that if she ever fell into the wrong hands, she could devastate national security. Chapel didn’t even know where she was calling from, or anything really about her except that she was a civilian and that his boss trusted her completely, just as he did.

As he zipped up the drysuit — a form-fitting neoprene bodysuit designed for technical diving — he listened while she read off the local water temperature, the weather forecast for the next twelve hours, and the names and headings of every seagoing vessel in the local area. He adjusted a strap on his headset to make it secure, then zipped up the coif of the suit, covering most of his head. He would leave the mask and flippers for just before he went in the water. The suit was heavy and he started overheating as soon as it was on, but it was necessary. He couldn’t get his artificial arm wet, which meant he needed a closed suit. Where he was going it was going to be a lot colder, too, and he imagined he would be very glad for the suit’s insulation in a few minutes.

The suit came with a compact rebreather system that was just a little better than anything a civilian could buy. Chapel was an experienced diver, which made it feel just plain weird that there was no air tank hanging off his back. Instead the rebreather had him breathe constantly into a bag across his chest that looked like a collapsed life vest. He checked the system with ten normal breaths, in and out, in and out, just like he’d been trained. Everything about the rebreather was different from the SCUBA gear he was used to, right down to how you breathed through it. The system used a full face mask so he didn’t have to hold a regulator in his mouth. Instead of giving him a steady stream of gas from a tank, the rebreather took in his exhalations and scrubbed out the carbon dioxide, then returned the air to him rich in oxygen. A small tank of helium mounted on his stomach would be mixed in with his own oxygen and nitrogen to prevent some of the nastier physiological effects of a deep dive. The system was finicky and hard to use — you had to constantly monitor the partial pressures of the three gases, while also managing the pressurization of the drysuit — but it definitely had its advantages. Most important, it produced almost no bubbles, which was good for covert work.

He strapped on a buoyancy compensator and a dive computer and he was ready to go. “Angel, do you see anyone up on the deck right now?”

She looked down on the yacht with orbiting satellites good enough to make out what the partyers on board were drinking and told him it looked clear. “You’re good, sweetie. They’re all back around the pool. Don’t forget my transponder.”

“Got it right here.” Chapel grabbed the transponder, his mask, and his flippers and slipped out the door of his cabin. Down a short corridor he opened a door and stepped out onto to a swimming balcony built into the bows of the yacht, riding just above the waterline. He put on his mask and flippers and stepped down into the water, trying not to make too noisy a splash.

Chapel had grown up in Florida, which meant he’d spent what felt like half his youth in these waters. It felt good to be back in the ocean, like he was some kind of amphibian that had spent way too long on dry land.

Well, he thought, technically these weren’t Floridian waters. Technically they belonged to Cuba, which was why he had to go to such lengths to keep his dive a secret. The captain of the yacht had anchored in a place he wasn’t supposed to. Technically what Chapel was about to do was illegal under the law of the sea and two sovereign nations. Technically if he was caught doing it, he could be arrested, given a quick trial, and then executed.

Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

Before he went under completely, he kicked himself around the side of the swimming balcony and over to where the yacht’s thick anchor cable slanted down into the water. He clipped the transponder unit onto the cable and switched it on. The unit carried Angel’s signal and relayed it through the metal cable. Wires embedded in his gloves could pick up that signal when he touched the cable, allowing him to talk to Angel no matter how far below the water he went.

“How’s it work?” Angel asked.

“Pretty good,” he told her. “Your voice is a little distorted, but I can understand you just fine.”

“Do I still sound all breathless and sultry?” she asked.

“That comes through, no problem,” he told her.

There were benefits to working for the world’s most technologically advanced military.

He tested the mask to make sure it wouldn’t fog up with his breath. Then he ducked his head under the water, bled some air from his buoyancy compensator, and dropped down into the dark ocean like a stone.

For a second he flailed around in the dark, looking for the anchor cable. His good hand grasped it, and he pulled himself over to hug it. He waited a moment for his body to adjust to the weightlessness of the water. Then he started his descent.

There wasn’t much swimming involved. He turned himself upside down and started climbing down the cable, hand over hand. A little moonlight streamed down around him, shafts of it spearing down into the dark and occasionally lighting up the flickering shape of a passing fish. The local wildlife kept its distance, scared of this big weird shape that had invaded their domain. Sharks would be less wary, but probably wouldn’t attack him on principle — or so he hoped.

After a minute or two, the light went away, and he could see nothing through his mask but black water. There was no sound anywhere except for his own breathing and the rhythmic slap of his hands on the cable.

Down. Put one hand forward, grab the cable. Release the other hand. Move that hand down, grab the cable. Down. Nothing to see. Nothing to hear. Nothing to smell but the rubber mask. He could barely feel the cable through the thick gloves. Down.

It was funny — well, not ha-ha funny — how fast the total lack of light affected him.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in darkness this profound. Where he lived now, in New York, it never really got dark. There were streetlights outside his apartment’s windows, and the city itself gave off so much light it painted the sky no matter how cloudy it got.

This was like being at the bottom of a coal mine. This was like floating, weightless and lost, in the depths of space. This was like being blind.

Down. One hand after another. Down. He kept repeating the word to himself in his head, reminding himself that he was moving in a particular direction. He had no referents other than the cable. His body didn’t feel like it was upside down. If he let go of the cable now, if he swam away, he wouldn’t even know which direction was up, or how to get back to the surface.

Better not let go, then. Down. He checked the luminous readouts on his dive computer, made sure his oxygen mix was at the right partial pressure. If it was off, if the various safeguards and fail-safes built into the rebreather all went off-line at the same time, he could flood his lungs with oxygen and give himself oxygen toxicity. Supposedly that felt like being pleasantly drunk, but it was a great way to die underwater. Especially if you were diving alone. The first symptoms would be disorientation and giddiness.

He definitely felt disoriented. He double-checked the readouts.

His oxygen levels were fine.

Down. Release with one hand, clutch with the other. Down.

When Angel spoke in his ear, he was absurdly grateful. “You’re making good time,” she told him. “It’s going to feel longer than it actually is. Can you still hear me okay?”

“Loud and clear. Everything okay topside?”

“Yeah. So. Now that we can talk in private…”

Chapel stopped climbing down the cable for a second. “Yes?” he asked. “Something on your mind?”

“I just wondered — have you got the ring yet?”

Chapel wanted to laugh. Never a great idea on a dive, of course. Laughing used up a lot of air. He forced himself to merely grin through the plastic mask. If any fish were watching with better eyes than he had, maybe they would see the scary monster from above the surface bare its teeth.

“Yeah,” he told her. “It’s waiting for me back in New York. I just have to pick it up.” He pulled himself down another meter. Down.

“Is it nice? Julia deserves something nice.”

“I agree.” Down. One hand over the other. “It’s nice. A gold band with a single diamond. Nothing showy — you know that’s not her style. Not too big.”

“I think if it were me you were proposing to,” Angel told him, with just a trace of jealousy in her voice, “I’d be perfectly happy with something showy. And big.”

“Stop trying to make me laugh.” Down. Release with the left hand, clutch with the right. Release with the right hand, hold on with the left. Down.

“You know I’m happy for you,” Angel said. “You know that.”

“I do,” he told her. When he’d first told Angel that he was going to propose, it had felt distinctly weird. He was confiding in a woman he’d never met. He didn’t even know what Angel looked like. But it didn’t feel weird for long. She’d been whispering in his ear for so long he felt like they were old, close friends.

“I mean, I’m happy for you now. I wasn’t… convinced. At first.”

“I know,” Chapel said. Down. Angel had suggested he take his time and think about what he was doing. He and Julia had been fighting a lot, and they had both said things they couldn’t take back. Angel had suggested that maybe that wasn’t the best time to make things official. But Chapel was certain he was making the right decision.

Down. One hand. The other hand. Down.

He checked his depth gauge. Thirty meters. This was the farthest he’d ever dived before, and he was only a fifth of the way to the bottom. It had felt like no time at all. Or like he’d been doing this for hours.

“How long until I can turn my lights on?” he asked.

“A little ways, yet. I just wanted to tell you something. I know you can make her happy. You’ve never failed at a mission yet, Jim. I think if you put your mind to this, you’ll be a great husband.”

Down. He wished he could kick his way down. It would be so much faster. But he had to stay with the cable. Down.

He thought about what Angel had just said. “Is there a ‘but’ somewhere in that statement?”

Angel was quiet for a while. He started to worry there was a problem with the transponder. But apparently she was just thinking about what to say next.

“Not so much a ‘but,’” she said.

Down. Hand over hand. Down.

“More,” she said, “oh, I don’t know. A hope. I wanted to say that I hope she can make you just as happy. That you’re sure you’re making the right choice for yourself.”

He stopped again. He told himself he was resting, conserving his energy. In truth, what she’d said had just distracted him so much he couldn’t concentrate on his descent. When he realized that, he forced himself to focus. He adjusted the pressurization of the drysuit and checked over his dive computer. Then he started down again.

Angel couldn’t really be jealous, could she? Admittedly she was the woman he was closest to in the world other than Julia. And Angel flirted with him all the time — and he definitely reciprocated. But that was just the way they were, wasn’t it? It was just banter. Harmless.

At least, he’d always thought it was.

Down. Suddenly concentrating on climbing down the cable was a great distraction.

“I am sure,” he told Angel. “I definitely am.”

“Good. As long as you’re sure. Then I guess you have my blessing, though I notice you didn’t ask for it.”

He smiled inside his mask. Down. One hand, then the other. Down. “Can I turn my lights on yet?”

“Give it another ten meters.”

Down. One hand, the other. Left hand, right hand. Down.

Seventy-five meters down. Halfway to the bottom. He tapped a button on his dive computer screen. A halogen lamp the size of his pinkie finger mounted on either side of his mask flicked on, spearing light out into the darkness.

There was nothing to see, of course, not even any fish at this level. But he’d never been so glad to see anything as the cable he held in his hands. He looked down and then up along its length. It stood as straight as a pillar in the middle of the ocean.

He looked at his gloves. Put a hand to the cable. Then the other.

Down.

Lying between the Florida Keys and Cuba, the Cay Sal Bank was one of the world’s largest coral atolls. From the surface it was almost invisible, merely a handful of tiny cays — rocks too small to be called islands. Just below the waves, however, more than three thousand square miles of ground rose up from the ocean floor, in most places coming within twenty feet of the surface. Unsurprisingly it was a graveyard for shipping — dozens of oceangoing vessels had run aground there, and most lay where they’d fallen, barely covered by the lapping blue water of the Caribbean.

If you could remove all that water and look at the bank in open air, it would resemble an enormous and ludicrously high plateau, with a flat top and — almost — sheer sides. If you stepped off that hypothetical plateau, you could fall two thousand feet before hitting the ground.

But that “almost” was important. Though from a distance the sides of the bank would look sheer, up close they were rough and slightly tapered, interrupted everywhere by promontories and narrow ledges that would stop your fall long before you hit the bottom. Donny’s yacht had dropped its anchor onto one of those ledges about eighty fathoms — a hundred and fifty meters, as Chapel’s dive computer reckoned — down.

That was still very deep. It was far, far deeper than Chapel had ever dived before, even though he’d been SCUBA diving since he was old enough to get his certification. It was deeper than most professional divers went. A hundred meters down, still pulling himself along hand over hand, he could feel the water above him pressing down on him, squeezing him inside his drysuit like a tube of toothpaste. He was getting cold, too, which was always a bad thing on a dive when you couldn’t afford clumsy fingers. He’d passed through the thermocline where the water dropped fifteen degrees in the space of a couple of meters of depth. Up on the surface he’d sweated inside his suit, and now he felt like he was slicked down with a layer of clammy water.

He concentrated on breathing normally, on regularly checking the gas levels on his dive computer. On sticking to a steady pace.

At a hundred and twenty meters down he saw the rocky wall of the slope as a looming shadow, a patch of darkness that cut off his lights. A little farther he started to see towers of coral rise up around him like the fingers of some enormous beast reaching up to snatch at him. The wall of the slope kept getting closer, which perversely enough made him feel claustrophobic — he’d gotten used to the sense of floating in limitless space, so any indication that there was solid ground nearby made him worry about falling and smashing into the ground below.

Of course that was an illusion. All he had to do was turn one knob on his belt and he would fall upward instead, dragged up by his own buoyancy. His body didn’t want to be down here, and only constant effort and high-tech engineering made it possible to fight his way down through the dense ocean at all.

The water down there was murky and thick with marine snow — a constant cascade of organic debris, the bodies of dead plankton settling slowly to the seafloor. There were fish down there who lived on that snow, but he saw few of them. They had evolved to live in an environment of perfect darkness, and his lights probably confused the hell out of them.

A hundred and forty meters down he saw what he’d come for, a long, tapered shadow at the very limit of his light.

“I’ve got it,” he told Angel. They had agreed in advance not to talk about the mission during his descent, except in the vaguest of terms. The odds of anyone listening in to their frequency were remote, but you couldn’t be too careful when you were working an illegal operation. “Right where we expected.”

The yacht’s anchor had fallen not half a dozen yards away from the wreck. The satellite data was spot-on. Now that his light touched the seafloor, it was safe for him to let go of the cable, but he found himself reluctant to do so. Once he let go, he would be out of communication with Angel, for one thing. But he knew his hesitation was more psychological than practical.

He indulged himself for a few seconds, under the pretense that he was scoping out the wreck before proceeding.

What lay before him was a wrecked submarine about two hundred and twenty feet long and thirty feet wide. It lay on its side, its long sail pointing away from him, its underslung tail fin sticking up in his general direction. A Kilo class sub, one of the old workhorses of the Russian navy.

For twenty years it had rested down here undisturbed by the world above. Coral had begun to grow over its tail and up its sides, while countless barnacles broke up the curve of the hull. Mud and drifts of marine snow obscured much of its skin, but he could still see the rivets that held the hull plates together.

He couldn’t see any names or designator numbers painted on its side, but he knew what he was looking at: the B-307 Kurchatov. Maybe the last submarine in history to fly the flag of the Soviet Union.

The Kurchatov had been built in the early 1980s as an attack sub, designed to search out and destroy enemy shipping. As far as anyone knew, it had never fired one of its torpedoes, though, or seen any kind of real action. Like most of the world’s military submarines, it was more important as a deterrent than an actual weapon. It did possess one claim to fame, though — or rather, it would have if anyone had ever been allowed to know about its final mission.

In August 1991, when it became clear the Soviet Union wasn’t going to last, a bunch of Kremlin hard-liners attempted a coup d’état against Gorbachev in a last-gasp effort to hold on to power. After months of planning, they flooded Moscow with tanks and paratroopers and the world held its breath, but after only two days the coup failed. All the plotters were either arrested or committed suicide, and it was clear that the old USSR was finished.

The plotters must have known there was a chance they would fail, because they had given very special orders to the captain of the Kurchatov. He was to put in at the closest convenient port to Moscow and take on passengers, specifically the wives and children of some of the coup plotters, who might become victims of mob retribution during the coup. Originally the captain’s orders had simply been to take that human cargo out to sea and keep them safe until the coup succeeded and they could come home.

Chapel had learned all this from his boss, Rupert Hollingshead, who had it from the CIA. The information the American government possessed did not indicate what the Kurchatov’s captain was supposed to do if the coup failed. It was known that the captain was fanatically loyal to his superiors in the Kremlin, a member of the Communist Party, and a personal believer in state socialism. Perhaps when he realized that his homeland failed to share his beliefs, he decided to go somewhere where people still did. So he’d set course for Cuba, a voyage that would have strained his overcrowded vessel to the very limits of its fuel and supplies.

The captain signaled ahead of his intentions and had received an offer of asylum from the government of Fidel Castro. He’d been ordered to bring his vessel into the port of Havana where he would be welcomed as a hero of the socialist revolution. Why he failed to obey those instructions was unknown — maybe he didn’t trust Castro as much as he’d trusted his Soviet superiors, or maybe he was simply out of fuel. For one reason or another, just after Christmas in 1991, he had come to a dead stop in the water twenty miles from Cuba and ordered everyone to abandon ship.

The sub’s crew had intentionally scuttled their boat, opening all its hatches and letting it sink gracefully while they fled in lifeboats. Most likely the captain had intended for the submarine to sink to the very bottom of the ocean, but instead it had come to ground on the sloped side of the Cay Sal Bank. The crew and passengers had all disappeared into the Cuban population. And that was the last anyone had heard, or probably thought, about the Kurchatov until now.

Until Jim Chapel was ordered to disturb its decades-long sleep.

Through the murky water Chapel could only get a rough idea of how the submarine had fared after being scuttled, but it was obvious right away that it hadn’t come through unscathed. It must have struck the rocks several times as it sank, judging by the massive dents on the hull. Worse, it had been torn open toward its rear half where it had scraped up against a long spar of hard coral. A boat like the Kurchatov was built with two concentric hulls to withstand oceanic pressures. Both hulls were made of thick reinforced steel, but the coral had cut through them like a ceramic knife through a tin can, leaving the whole interior of the sub open to the seawater. That might actually be a good thing. Chapel hadn’t relished the prospect of trying to muscle open the heavy pressure hatches in the sail, normally the only way inside. The tear in the hulls might give him a better access point.

“Angel,” he said, “I’m going off radio now. Everything good up top?”

“There’s a little movement about twenty miles from you. Looks like a fishing boat. Nothing to worry about.”

“Okay. Talk to you in a few.”

“Be careful, sweetie,” she said. “I’ll be here, waiting.”

Chapel let go of the anchor cable and kicked away from it, using just his flippers to propel him toward the sub. He swam down toward the crack in its side and reached out to touch the place where the hulls had been cut through. The tear was pretty rough, and when it first happened the edges of the opening might have been razor sharp, but time and salt water had smoothed them down until he was pretty sure he wouldn’t rip his drysuit crawling through. He peered in through the rent, letting his lights play over the big boxy shape of the engines, then pushed inside.

Tiny fish darted away from Chapel’s lights as he pushed his way through the cramped engine compartment, gingerly crawling along using his hands to keep from colliding with any sharp or rusted surface. It wasn’t easy. Submarines were cramped by design, cluttered by nature, and the crushing, tearing impact that tore the Kurchatov open had crumpled much of its hull, reducing further the room he had to maneuver. It felt more like he was spelunking than diving as he had to consider each move, work out in advance where his legs and arms would fit. Everything around him was pitch-black until he looked directly at it. But this wasn’t like the darkness outside, when he’d felt like he was drifting through outer space. Chapel was constantly aware that he was surrounded on every side by metal, by ton after ton of Soviet-era military equipment, and the thought of pushing himself deeper inside the crumpled tin can was daunting.

It didn’t help that the only sound he could hear, the only noise in the world, it seemed, was a deep, rumbling groaning sound that never quite stopped. It was just the sound of the submarine settling around him, straining against its own weight as it must have been doing for twenty years. But it was distorted by the water around him and amplified by the otherwise ubiquitous silence until it sounded alien and wrong, a sustained symphony of grinding, roaring moans.

At least he didn’t have to worry about radiation. The Kurchatov, like all Kilo class submarines, ran on diesel fuel, not a nuclear reactor, and there had never been any nuclear missiles on board. There were plenty of nasty chemicals around him — the lead-based batteries that filled the lower third of the sub had probably been leaking poison into the water for twenty years — but his drysuit would protect him from the worst of that.

The biggest danger he faced was ripping his suit or hitting his head on the low ceiling. If he stunned himself down here or if he lost visibility, he could be in real trouble. But he doubted it would come to that. He’d done his homework. Chapel had trained for this mission for weeks before coming down to Miami. He’d studied every known schematic of a Kilo class sub, memorized where everything was inside, thought himself through each motion he needed to make, every inch of the submarine’s interior he would have to traverse.

Of course, the interior of the sunken boat looked nothing like the photographs he’d studied. The interior would have been painted a drab, uniform tan when the sub was operational. It had gone through a real sea change since. Every surface inside was coated in organic muck, drifts of marine snow mixed with mud and the skeletons of coral and other invertebrates. A colony of tiny white-shelled clams had taken over one of the engine housings, looking like shelf fungus on a fallen tree. Brain coral had wrapped itself around one of the big fuel pumps. He thought he saw an octopus slither underneath an oil trap as he approached, though it was gone before he could be sure.

At the fore of the engine compartment stood a massive pressure hatch with a wheel mounted on its front. It lay on its side now, and for the first time Chapel realized that the entire submarine was heeled over on its port side and that what he’d been thinking of up and down were actually port and starboard. Added to the virtual weightlessness he felt while diving he had to force himself to remember what direction was up — something he definitely needed to keep in mind if he wanted to get back out of the wreck.

The door was closed, but he searched around its edges with his fingers until he found that it had either been left open by the crew — the better to scuttle the sub — or had been knocked out of its frame by the impact with the coral spar. It swung open with just a little elbow grease and let him into the engineering decks.

The semiclosed hatch had kept most of the marine life out of the middle of the submarine, so it didn’t look quite as alien to his trained eyes. The engineering decks were just as he’d expected to find them, tight corridors where every wall was lined with electrical boxes and stowed equipment. All tilted ninety degrees from the schematics he’d pored over. Strange ropy growths hung from both walls — now the ceiling and the floor — and at first he tried to identify what animal had left them behind, but then he realized they weren’t growths at all. They were the remains of string hammocks. The VIP passengers on board must have found any space they could to bunk down in, even the hot, noisy engineering areas that would normally have been unlivable. Chapel imagined just how desperate they must have been to cram inside the submarine with the fifty men of the Kurchatov’s crew, living shoulder to shoulder for long weeks as the sub inched its way across the Atlantic. They must have been terrified, he thought — afraid to surface in case a vengeful Russian proletariat was looking for them, constantly worried about being detected by American antisubmarine patrols. And all for nothing. Though every one of the coup plotters had been arrested and sent to prison, from what Chapel had read there had been no serious retribution against the families that stayed behind. The people who made the desperate journey in the Kurchatov had suffered in the tin can in vain.

Who knew, though? Maybe they were happier now in Cuba. Winter in Havana had to have Moscow beat.

The boat was less damaged through the engineering decks, and Chapel made a little better time crawling along until he reached another pressure hatch, this one leading to the crew and command areas underneath the sail. The door opened as easily as the one in the engine room and Chapel slipped inside, letting his lights play over what had once been the Kurchatov’s bridge. There were more hammocks here, though most were stowed carefully out of the way of the sonar screens and computer stations. Chapel pulled himself over the long silver pipe of a periscope stalk and found the narrow stairway leading down to the bunkrooms and officers’ cabins below.

He was getting close. Ahead of him, in the submarine’s bows, lay the enormous torpedo tubes, but those were of no interest to him. What he needed would be in the captain’s cabin if it was there at all.

Chapel ignored the groaning roar of the submarine and pulled himself along the stair rail, resisting the urge to kick for speed. The crew deck was one of the tightest spots in the whole boat, with four tiny rooms crammed together in a space half the size of a school bus. He saw the wardroom first, little more than a closet where the crew could have taken their meals or what little leisure time they got. It comprised a single narrow table with a bench behind it and a twelve-inch television set mounted to what had been its ceiling. The crew’s bunks lay beyond, with room for maybe twenty men at a time if they were very friendly. The crew would have had to sleep in shifts, taking turns using the same bunks, catching what sleep they could under blankets that smelled like the men who’d had them before.

The captain’s cabin had its own pressure hatch, which was closed. It lay on what had become the floor of the submarine, originally its port side, so it was beneath him. Chapel expected the hatch to open like the others, but his fingers couldn’t seem to get any purchase around its seals. He tried the wheel and found that it turned freely, but when he tried to pull it open it was like attempting to lift the entire submarine with his bare hands.

Chapel tugged and pulled for a while but that made him breathe heavier, and he couldn’t afford that with the amount of breathing gas he was carrying. He forced himself to take shallower breaths and relax.

He closed his eyes. Tried to block out for a moment the sustained painful groan of the dead submarine. Tried to think about why the door wouldn’t open.

Was the damned thing jammed? Maybe the impact that tore open the engine compartment had warped the door in its seals. Chapel felt around the edges of the metal door, looking for any sign that it had crumpled or fused in place, but he found nothing. He tried the wheel again. Looked for any kind of mechanism that might have locked the door shut — nothing.

In his frustration he smacked at the door with his hand, though that was worse than useless, since in the thick water he couldn’t get much leverage, and—

“Huh,” he said to himself.

He slapped the hatch again, and this time he listened to the sound it made.

Again. Yes, definitely. It didn’t make the clanging sound he would have expected. It sounded more like he was striking a drum.

It seemed impossible, but it had to be right. The door wasn’t jammed or locked. It was being held shut by the pressure of the water on top of it, because the cabin beyond was still full of air. This one hatch must have remained sealed when the sub went down, unlike all the others. Even after twenty years it hadn’t been breached.

Chapel knew there was no way he would ever get the hatch open by main strength. He would have had to fight the entire ocean to do it. Luckily he’d come prepared. In a pouch at his belt he had a small lump of plastic explosive and an electronic detonator. He worked the plastique carefully, rolling it into a thick rope, then pressed it into place along the hatch seals. Then he swam away from the door, moving into the tiny wardroom. It had a folding door that he shut behind him. He put one arm over his mask and hit the detonator.

The explosion made a lot of noise and a huge shock wave that buffeted Chapel even through the wardroom door. He hated to think what would happen to any nearby fish. When it had passed, he shoved open the wardroom door and swam back out.

The crew deck was full of bubbles and disturbed sediment that made his lights nearly useless. A thick torrent of silver bubbles rushed up out of the place where the cabin hatch had been, the trapped air of twenty years screaming out and upward. Chapel fought through the curtain of roiling air and heard it hiss against his suit, felt it push back against him as it tried desperately to escape. He reached for the wheel to open the hatch — the pressures would equalize soon, and it would open easily once—

Then a grinning skull came flying at him and smacked him right in his mask.

Chapel sucked in a deep breath and shoved himself backward, out of the storm of bubbles, but the skull kept after him, bouncing against his face again and again. He collided painfully with something behind him and one of his flippers broke loose, and for a second he could only spin around, desperately grabbing for it as the disturbed muck of the submarine rose up around him, filling up the cone of his lights, making him half blind — and still the skull kept bobbing after him, bumping against the ceiling, its teeth lunging right for his mask.

It took all his self-control to stop thrashing and try to calm down.

It wasn’t some long dead sailor’s ghost that was after him. Just the remains of a man who had sealed himself in his cabin when the submarine went down. Chapel forced himself to reach out and take hold of it, one thumb in an eye socket. The skull wanted to float out of his hand — there must still be a bubble of air inside it, a bubble that had lifted it out of the ruptured hatch. When he had shot backward, away from the cabin hatch, he had created an eddy in the water that had sucked the skull after him. That was all.

The skull looked a lot less imposing when it wasn’t attacking him. It was just a normal human skull, fleshless and yellow. It was missing its lower jaw. There was a big ragged hole in the back of it that looked like the exit wound of a gunshot.

He got his flipper back on. The muck had started to settle again, and he could see a little better. The bubbles had all but stopped streaming from the breached door. Still holding the skull, he used the fingers of his free hand to lift the cabin door, releasing a last trapped pocket of air.

Around him the hissing roar of the escaping air slowly subsided, and once again he could hear the long, drawn-out death knell of the submarine. He ignored the noise and slipped inside the captain’s cabin.

This room hadn’t changed at all in twenty years. It had been sealed shut and full of air, not seawater, until Chapel came along. The tan paint on the walls was intact, and the captain’s meager furnishings were still in good shape — hardwood gleamed where it had been polished, brass shone in Chapel’s lights. It was a ridiculous mess now, though. Chapel had done far more to disturb the cabin than the ocean could. Letting in the seawater had sent papers floating like two-dimensional fish that swirled around him. The blankets on the single narrow bunk fluttered and frayed as he watched, stirred up by the water that had rushed inside.

Curled up in one corner of the floor — what had been the portside wall of the cabin — was most of the captain’s body minus the skull. The body was still dressed in a Soviet naval uniform. Clutched in one skeletal hand was a pistol that must have fired the fatal shot, the one that left the exit wound Chapel had found in the skull.

He could guess what had happened. His briefing hadn’t mentioned what became of the Kurchatov’s captain. At the time Chapel assumed he had just gone ashore with the rest of his crew and his passengers. Apparently not. Instead the man had elected to go down with his ship.

He must have sealed himself in his cabin and waited for the end as the submarine sank to the bottom. He must have listened to that horrible groaning, just as Chapel was now. How long had he waited until he took his own life? Had he used up all the oxygen in the room and chosen not to let himself asphyxiate? Or had it happened long before then, when he realized that his beloved nation was no more? Maybe—

Maybe, Chapel thought, he should stop trying to imagine the captain’s last moments and focus on the mission at hand.

He realized he was still holding the skull. He turned it upside down to let a last wavering silver bubble of air out of its cavity, then gently put it down with the rest of the skeleton. Then he turned and looked for the captain’s desk. It was a tiny ledge that folded up into the cabin’s wall. He pulled it down on its hinges and some of its contents drifted out — more papers, a pair of brass calipers that settled quickly to the floor. It had a compartment that could be locked but hadn’t been. He opened the compartment and found a couple of neatly folded charts inside and an envelope that probably held the captain’s orders for what to do when the coup failed.

Not what he was looking for.

Chapel turned around and found the captain’s personal locker under the bunk. He pulled open its door and reached inside to search the contents.

He drew out the contents of the locker. A spare uniform. A wooden box containing a couple of Soviet medals. A box of ammunition for the captain’s pistol. Some old photographs.

None of that was helpful to him. But he was out of places to look. The cabin was tiny, with very little in the way of storage space — the desk and the locker were pretty much it. He supposed that what he was looking for could be hidden somewhere, underneath the thin carpeting that lined the floor, maybe, or in a secret compartment built into the walls, but—

Think, Chapel, he told himself. What he was looking for wouldn’t be hidden in a secret compartment that was difficult to access. The captain would have needed it every time he used the sub’s radio. It had to be close by, and easy to get to, but secure…

Chapel spun around and looked at the skeleton. At the uniform jacket it wore. He kicked over and looked down at the skull, saying a silent apology. Then he pulled at the jacket until its buttons came loose. The rib cage underneath collapsed under his hands as he rummaged in the captain’s pockets.

There! A little book with a black leatherette cover, just as it had been described to him. It looked like an address book, but when Chapel opened it to a random page, he saw columns of numbers and Cyrillic characters in a grid. The pages had all been laminated to protect them from the water. This was what he needed.

He stowed it in a pouch at his belt and took one last look at the captain’s skeleton. He wished he could take the medals, too, or some token of the man’s passing so he could send it to the captain’s family. So they would have something of the man. But no — no one could ever know that Chapel had been inside the submarine, that anyone had touched it since it sank.

He could only offer the respectful moment of silence that one military man owed another. The recognition, something like a prayer, of those who served in secret. He saluted the skeleton, then turned to leave the cabin that would forever be the captain’s tomb.

Out on the crew deck he stopped and checked his partial pressures, then took a second to get his bearings. His head felt a little light, but not enough so to make him giddy. The long dive and the scare he’d gotten when the captain’s skull came at him had left him exhausted and sore, as if he’d been working hard for hours.

It was time for Chapel to get out of there. To head back to the surface. He knew he wouldn’t feel right again until he could take off his mask and breathe the clean air above the waves. Time to start his ascent.

Moving carefully, Chapel retraced his path and emerged from the broken tail of the submarine, back out into open water.

It was going to take a lot longer to go up than it had to come down. Diving to these kinds of depths was always a risky proposition, and he’d gone down a lot farther than anyone ever should. His tissues were suffused with gaseous nitrogen from breathing the Trimix provided by his rebreather. He was going to need hours of decompression time before he was back in real air again, to prevent the bends. The rebreather would help shorten that time, especially with the helium he’d added to his mix, but it was dangerous to breathe too much helium during an ascent as well, so he was going to need to take his time.

So he took his time looking for the cable. He swam around in circles for a bit until he found the ledge, a darker patch of shadow to one side of him. He made his way slowly up that slope, pausing for a few minutes every ten feet, paying very close attention to his depth gauge because it was the only way to tell that he was, in fact, ascending and not diving deeper into the cold water.

When he reached the ledge, he stuck close to it, reinforcing in his mind the idea that it was down, a floor from which he could make his ascent. He stumbled on the anchor almost by mistake, banging his artificial hand on one of its flukes. He yanked the hand back in surprise, then cursed himself and patted around himself carefully to find it again in the murk. Then he did something he really, really didn’t want to do — he turned off his lights. That left him blind, but at least he didn’t have to stay deaf anymore.

Groping his way up he reached for the anchor cable. The conductive wires in his glove made contact with the metal cable and he heard a very welcome hiss in his earphones. He was back in communication with Angel.

“It’s done,” he told her. “I’m starting my ascent. Should take — about two hours, now.” Saying it made his heart sink. He was more than ready for this dive to be over.

His frustration didn’t last long.

“Chapel? I’ve got you — can you hear me all right?” she asked. She sounded nervous. That was never, ever a good sign.

“You’re coming through just fine. There were some hiccups, but I’ve managed to—”

“Chapel, you need to be up top now,” she said.

“What?” He didn’t understand. “No, Angel, I need to decompress—”

“There’s no time. I wish I could have kept you apprised, but you were out of communication for so long. Chapel, start your ascent now, please.”

Chapel reached for the cable with his free hand and started hauling himself slowly upward, hand over hand. “I can reduce the number of decompression stops,” he told her. “I’m supposed to stop every ten feet and pause, but I can make it twenty—”

“No, Chapel — you don’t have that kind of time. The Cubans found the boat.”

Oh no, he thought. That was bad. That was very bad.

The Kurchatov had sunk in disputed waters, claimed by both the Bahamas and by Cuba, which made them off-limits to American vessels. When Chapel had spoken with the yacht’s captain and asked him to drop anchor here, he’d known there was a risk they would be spotted by the Cuban coast guard. The risk was low — Cuba wasn’t known to have a large number of vessels patrolling these waters — but they had tried to prepare for it anyway. Angel had been watching for any approaching vessels, and one must have appeared while he was down in the wreck.

“How much time do I have before they arrive?” Chapel asked. There was no question in his mind that the Cubans would approach and board Donny’s yacht as soon as they spotted it.

“None. They’ve already signaled the yacht that they’re coming aboard. In a few minutes they’ll be boarding and they’ll probably search the whole boat. You need to be topside right now.”

Chapel grunted in frustration. “What if I just stay down here until they’re gone?” he asked. “That’ll give me plenty of decompression time. If I come up now, I’m at real risk for decompression sickness.”

“You’re going to have to chance it. Chapel, your name is on the passenger list.”

Crap, Chapel thought. He hadn’t thought of that. When he came aboard Donny’s yacht, Donny had insisted he sign in. He would have preferred to come aboard incognito, but it hadn’t seemed like a big deal at the time.

“If you’re not present when they board the yacht, they’ll have way too many questions and they’ll be able to claim the yacht is evidence in an ongoing investigation,” Angel told him. “They’ll impound it and tow it back to Cuba to try to figure out what’s going on. You can stay down and wait for them to leave with the yacht, but then you’ll be surfacing in twenty miles of open water with no way home but to swim there.”

Worse than that, Donny and all his party guests would be arrested and thrown in a Cuban jail until they could explain what had happened to the missing man on the guest list. He couldn’t let that happen to his friends.

“All right, Angel. I’m going to have to go back into radio silence for a minute. I’ll contact you when I hit the surface.”

“Understood. The Cubans are coming in from behind and slightly to starboard of the yacht. If you’re going to make bubbles or a splash, try to use the bulk of the yacht to cover your ascent.”

“Got it.” Chapel let go of the cable and swam backward for a second. This is going to hurt, he thought. Coming up from this depth without decompression stops made it inevitable that he was going to get the bends, rebreather or no.

It couldn’t be helped. He unbuckled his weight belt and let it fall away into the murk. He shed as many of his pouches and pieces of equipment as he could, even the dive computer, then he started kicking toward the surface. His natural buoyancy started lifting him up immediately, straight toward the waves above, but even that wasn’t fast enough. He unclipped the helium tank from his abdomen and pointed its nozzle downward, then threw open its valve and used it like a miniature rocket booster.

Up. Straight up. A hell of a lot faster than he’d gone down.

As Chapel approached the surface his eyes started working again. A little moonlight was coming down to meet him, and it turned the surface of the waves into a vast rolling mirror, obscured by a large dark mass. As he got closer he saw that shadow split into two. One part was the yacht, big and square and right over his head. The other must be the Cuban coast guard ship. It was only about half the size of the yacht, but it had the sleek, streamlined curves of a warship and looked like a shark nuzzling up against a bloated sunfish.

As he got even closer he could make out a few details. The Cuban ship had tied up to the side of the yacht, which had to mean the Cubans had already boarded. Chapel was going to have to sneak back on board and hope he could mix in with the partygoers so no one noticed he hadn’t been there the whole time.

Angel could help him get a feel for how things were up there. As he neared the surface he reached for the anchor cable again. “Angel?” he asked. “What can you tell me? Am I too late?”

There was no answer except the steady hiss that meant his earphones were working. They just weren’t picking anything up.

Chapel poked his head above the water and studied the cable. The transponder unit he’d clipped to it was gone. Someone must have found it.

That could be very, very bad.

Once he’d broken the surface, though, his headset could patch into the cellular network and he could at least make contact. “Angel,” he whispered, “are you receiving me?”

“I sure am, honey,” she said back. “You’ve just got time, if you hurry.”

The mystery of the missing transponder would have to wait. Chapel climbed up onto the swimming balcony at the bow of the yacht and started tearing off his gear. The mask came first and suddenly he was breathing real, fresh air again, not his own recycled breath. It burned his lungs — there was a lot more oxygen up here than he’d been getting below — but it tasted so sweet he didn’t care. He wriggled out of the drysuit as fast as he could, careful not to get his artificial arm wet. He opened the pouch that held the little laminated book he’d salvaged from the Kurchatov, then bundled up all the rest of his gear, drysuit, rebreather, headset, all of it, and tossed it over the side. It floated for a second and then disappeared without so much as a gurgle. It was a real shame to just throw away all that expensive equipment, but Chapel knew if he was caught with technical diving gear, the Cubans would ask a lot of questions he was in no position to answer. Worst of all, it meant losing his connection to Angel as well — but that was another thing he would have a hard time explaining.

Wearing nothing but a thin pair of trunks, Chapel ran hands through his sweaty hair and stepped through the balcony’s door, into the lower deck of the yacht. He could hear someone shouting in Spanish over his head, but no one saw him as he moved quickly toward the stairs that led to the main deck.

Halfway up, a brick wall came out of nowhere and hit him full on.

At least, it felt that way. Every muscle in his body just shut down at once. A wave of fatigue and dizziness passed through him, and he felt a desperate, unbearable desire to sit down, to lean his head against the wall. To go to sleep right then and there and not even bother finding a comfortable place to lie down.

“Shit,” he breathed, because he knew where that came from. It could take hours for the first symptoms of decompression sickness to set in, he knew, or just minutes. The faster it came on, the worse it was going to get.

In all his time diving, Chapel had never gotten the bends before. He’d always been careful to decompress in stages, to read dive charts more carefully than some people read the Bible, to know his limits. He’d managed to stay clear of every diver’s worst nightmare — until now.

But he’d seen other divers go through it. It wasn’t pretty. He remembered one guy down in Mexico, off the Yucatán, curled up in the bottom of a rowboat, screaming and crying as his joints shook and spasmed. If that was what awaited him—

He couldn’t let it. He couldn’t give in to the nitrogen in his blood. Chapel forced himself to stand upright, to keep moving. He climbed the stairs one at a time, forcing himself to lift each foot, to keep himself steady.

Just a little farther. Just up a few more steps. Up ahead the main deck opened up around the pool. Chapel could just see what was going on out there. The partygoers were lined up around the edge, none of them talking. Most were looking at their feet or up at the sky, anywhere but at the soldiers who had boarded the yacht.

There were a dozen of them, all of them carrying carbines slung around their necks. They wore the green uniforms and flat-topped hats that Chapel always associated with Fidel Castro. That was strange. Those were Cuban army uniforms, not the white sailor suits that naval personnel wore.

Another mystery. Chapel had no time for mysteries. It was taking everything he had to keep climbing the stairs.

The soldiers were looking every partygoer up and down, checking names against a list. They didn’t leer at the young women in their bikinis, didn’t try to outmacho the muscle-bound guys in their Speedos. The soldiers had a job to do, and they were being consummate professionals. Not what Chapel had expected at all.

He came up to a broad archway that led to the main deck. He would walk out there, he thought, walk out calling his own name and apologizing profusely. He would claim that he’d been stuck in the head and couldn’t get up top until just now. Maybe, just maybe, the Cubans would buy it.

He took a step toward the deck, but his foot never came down.

Instead a bright blossom of pure red agony burst inside his knee, and his leg bent under him until he was standing like a flamingo. A flamingo that very much wanted to die.

“Christ,” Chapel said, biting off the word so he didn’t shout it. The pain was incredible. He’d been shot before, several times in fact, but even that didn’t hurt like this. Nothing ever had.

At least, not until his good shoulder started up, too. It felt like his arm was being cut off, like he was going to lose that one too. Like there was a knife inside his arm, ripping away at his muscles, grating against his bones. He reached over with the artificial arm to grab the flesh there, to squeeze it even though he knew that wouldn’t help at all.

Standing on one foot, suddenly off balance, he couldn’t stay upright anymore. He crashed to the floor, his head thudding on the polished wood of the deck. He could only hope the Cubans hadn’t heard him fall.

Out by the pool they were nearly done with their inspection. One of the Cubans, a young guy wearing round glasses, looked down at a piece of paper in his hand. He smacked it with the back of his fingers, and it made a noise like a snare drum.

Chapel brought his head up so he could watch. He didn’t need to — he knew what was going to happen next. The young guy was clearly the commanding officer of the Cuban patrol. He strode up to Donny and got way too close to his face.

“¿Dónde está Chapel, James?” the Cuban demanded.

Chapel curled up into a ball on the carpeted floor of the stairway landing. He couldn’t get up, could barely breathe. The pain had spread to every joint in his body, and it was only getting worse. He could hear people moving out on the deck, but his eyes were clamped tightly shut and he knew he wouldn’t be able to get away, wouldn’t be able to move from the spot where he lay. At any moment the Cubans would start searching the yacht and they would find him — there was no chance of his even rolling into the shadows, must less finding a place to hide.

Once they found him the questions would begin. They would want to know what was wrong with him. It wouldn’t take long for them to figure out that he was suffering from decompression sickness, and then they would want to know why he was diving in Cuban waters. They would find the little black book and he would be arrested, dragged back to Cuba, and thrown into a bottomless pit of a jail and never heard from again.

And there was nothing he could do to stop them. He couldn’t fight like this, and he couldn’t run. He tried desperately to move, to use his artificial arm — which at least didn’t hurt — to drag himself farther down the corridor, back to the top of the stairs. If he could push himself down those steps, and if he didn’t break his neck, maybe, just maybe—

Soft hands touched his head and shoulders. Fingers slipped under his chin and took his pulse. “You smell of brine,” a woman said. “We have to fix that somehow. Can you walk?”

He tried to open his eyes. Found he could just barely crack one eyelid. He saw dark hair and nothing else — he couldn’t turn his head to get a better look.

“I take it that means no,” the woman said.

The voice — he remembered it, the accent he couldn’t place. The woman in the sundress, the Asian woman he’d met with Donny and Shelly and the rest. She must have found him there on the carpet. But why? Why wasn’t she out with the rest of the partygoers, out on the main deck?

“I can’t lift you on my own, and there’s no one else to help. You have to get on your feet,” she whispered. “Please. So much depends on this.”

He had no idea what she was talking about. But he knew if he didn’t get up and get moving, he was doomed. Chapel reached down with his artificial arm and grabbed one of his ankles. His leg was curled up underneath him, his knee and ankle both on fire, but he could push the leg out straight if he didn’t mind some searing agony.

Well, he minded. He minded a lot. But he managed not to scream.

“Good,” she said. “You’re a strong guy, yes? A powerful guy. You can do this. You have to.”

He reached down and straightened out his other leg. He could just twist sideways until he was sitting up, though it felt like he was being torn in half. With his back against the wall he pushed upward from his knees. His feet slid away from him on the wet carpet, but he recovered before he fell again. Using every shred of willpower in his possession, Chapel was just able to push himself up until he was leaning against the wall, as little weight as possible on his feet.

“Here, on my shoulders,” she said, and pulled his good arm around her neck. Straightening out those muscles made Chapel want to pass out, but he forced himself to stay conscious. Just a little longer. Just a couple more seconds, he promised himself. “Donny’s cabin is just here,” she told him. “Move your left foot forward.”

Chapel fought to open his eyes, to see what was happening. He didn’t know this woman. Why was she helping him? Just because he was a friend of Donny’s? “You’ll get in trouble,” he said, his voice sounding weak and small even to his own ears. “Just leave me,” he told her.

“I don’t think so. Come, now, move your left foot forward. I know you can. Good. Very, very good. Now your right foot.”

She didn’t exactly carry him, but she took a lot more of his weight than he thought she could. Together they set off at a snail’s pace down the corridor.

Behind Chapel, out on the deck, someone started shouting in Spanish. Someone else shrieked in fright.

Chapel must have glanced backward.

“You’re thinking this isn’t a normal patrol, that they didn’t find us by accident, and you are right. But they don’t know who you are, only that you were missing when they demanded to see everyone on board. You can’t let them find out who you are.”

He felt his eyes widen — mostly because it hurt so much. What did she know about him? His mission was utterly secret — nobody on board even knew who he worked for, much less what he was doing here.

Questions were going to have to wait. He focused on moving his feet.

A door opened in front of him — she must have opened it. He could still barely keep his eyes open, barely see where he was. Beyond the door lay a sizable cabin, bigger than the one he had on the deck below. It had room for a little table and a couple of chairs and a widescreen television on the wall. It also had a private bathroom with a big shower stall. The Asian woman shoved Chapel into the stall and ran the water, which came out icy cold at first. Chapel shivered as the water poured down over his aching face and chest. He tried to keep his left arm out of the spray, but the rest of him was quickly soaked.

“For the salt smell,” she told him, adjusting the water temperature. “Get your trunks off. Don’t worry about modesty now. This is not the time. Get them off!”

If he hesitated, it wasn’t because he was afraid of letting her see him naked. It was because the little black book was jammed down the side of his shorts. It was the only hiding place he had.

“It hurts too much, I know,” she said. She bent down and pulled down his trunks. The little black book fell out before he could stop her. She didn’t seem surprised. Instead she shoved it into a pocket of her sundress. She wadded up his shorts and put them in a laundry hamper that was already full of wet bathing suits and towels.

“Wait,” he said. “That book—”

“Shh,” she told him. “I can hear them outside, be quiet!”

It was no use. Chapel had to focus on holding himself up and not collapsing inside the shower stall. He felt so weak that just the water pouring down on him could knock him over. He heard the Cubans out in the hall as well — he could hear them shouting, even over the roar of the blood in his ears. He heard them pounding on the door, demanding to be let in.

Then he heard the sound of wood splintering, and he knew they were breaking their way in.

The Asian woman did something then he could not have expected. She reached up and undid the strap of her sundress, then let it fall away from her body until she wore nothing but a pair of black lace panties. She balled up the dress and threw it in the laundry hamper. Then she pushed her way into the shower, sliding in under Chapel’s body, her bare breasts pressing up against his sternum.

“Put your arms around me,” she whispered.

That was when the door flew open, knocked half off its hinges. Cuban soldiers came rushing in, their guns in their hands, ready for anything. They spread out around the cabin, covering every part of it, ready to shoot anyone who moved.

Underneath Chapel, the Asian woman moaned as if she were in the throes of passion. Chapel stared at her face and saw her looking back, cool and dispassionate. She didn’t even close her eyes as she moaned again, nodding at him.

Message received. Chapel forced his arms around her, fighting the pain in his elbow and his wrist. His artificial arm wrapped around her waist, and he pulled her close. Water streamed over his silicone skin, which was bad — he was supposed to keep the arm as dry as possible — but there was nothing for it. He tried to grunt out a cry of arousal but only managed a whimper.

The door of the shower stall banged open, and a Cuban soldier stared in at them. A mischievous smile started to crack on his face, but he fought it down — the man was a professional, all right.

Behind him the young soldier with the glasses, the one in charge, peered in at the two of them. He didn’t so much as blink when he saw them like that.

For a second Chapel worried that the ruse would fail, that the man would realize the two of them were only acting as if they were aroused. But then the Asian woman turned her head to look at the Cubans and she let out a whooping screech of embarrassment that was enough to make the two soldiers step back. The Asian woman brought a hand up to her face, and her eyes went wide as saucers. And then she started giggling.

It was not a sound Chapel ever expected this woman to make. It was the sort of giggle someone like Shelly might let out if she were caught in this situation.

“Oh my God,” the Asian woman said, and her accent was gone. She sounded exactly like one of the coeds up on the deck. “Oh my God oh my God, Jimmy, there are… people here! Oh my God!”

The Cuban soldier who had discovered them turned beet red and turned his face away. The commanding officer still stared at them, and Chapel could see he wasn’t quite convinced.

“Did you two not hear us when we called everyone up to the main deck?” the officer asked, in perfect if accented English.

“I thought I did,” the Asian woman said. “Jimmy, didn’t I say something, I was like, like—”

“Hey, buddy,” Chapel said, forcing himself to sound normal despite the pain and weakness. “Can we at least finish before we get the third degree?”

The officer frowned. Then he addressed his soldier. “No need to search these two, I think,” he said, in Spanish. “Get their names and check their papers, that’s all.” He glanced back at Chapel and shook his head. “Borracho pendejo,” he muttered, and then he walked away.

The soldier, still blushing, gave them an embarrassed shrug. “May I see your passports, please?” he asked.

It was another hour at least before the Cubans finished their search of the yacht. Chapel would very much have liked to know what they were looking for, and why they had devoted so much manpower and time to investigating what was clearly just a party boat that strayed accidentally into disputed waters. He had no way of finding out, though.

It was all he could do to curl up on a bunk and try to breathe through the pain.

He only knew the Cubans had gone because Donny came into the cabin and told as much to the Asian woman. She had put her sundress back on but had sat with Chapel the whole time, stroking his back and telling him how strong he was. He appreciated the effort, but it didn’t help much. Donny came in with the news that they were headed back to Miami and that the Cubans had left them with just a stern warning. When he saw Chapel curled up on his bed, though, his eyes went wide and he grabbed the door frame as if he was having trouble balancing.

“What’s wrong with him?” Donny asked. “He didn’t drink that much.”

“He has the raptures of the deep,” the Asian woman said. “We need to get him treatment right away.”

“The raptures… you mean the bends? He’s got the bends? Jimmy, what the hell have you been up to?”

“Please,” the Asian woman said. “He’s in great pain. He may die!”

“Shit,” Donny said, and he ran over to kneel next to the bed. “Jim. Jim, come on, man, look at me. Look at me — you’re a ranger, man. You can get through this.”

“Oxygen,” Chapel managed to croak. The pain came in waves, and just then it was hitting a peak. He could barely move his lungs.

“He needs a hyperbaric chamber,” the Asian woman said. “There’s one in Miami. Call ahead and have it made ready. But in the meantime—”

“Oxygen,” Chapel said again.

“He’s right,” the Asian woman said. “He needs to breathe pure oxygen, to flush the nitrogen from his system.”

“We have some SCUBA tanks onboard,” Donny suggested. “I can get one up here right away.”

“That won’t work,” the Asian woman told him. “Those tanks hold only normal air, and that’ll just put more nitrogen in his blood.”

“There’s… there might be an oxygen tank in the medical kit — I think—”

“Go now,” the woman told Donny. “Please.”

Donny nodded and rubbed at his mouth with one hand. Then he ran off to get the tank.

Chapel turned his head to the side, to look at her face. She looked scared. He wondered just how bad he looked to make everybody so scared. “Why are you helping me?” he asked. She didn’t answer, just rubbed at his arms. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Nadezhda,” she told him. “Nadia, to my family and friends.”

A Russian name. Who was this woman? “After…” Chapel paused to let the pain in his joints reach a fiery crescendo. It got so bad he couldn’t see for a moment. “After that shower we took together—”

“Yes,” she said, and smiled at him. “You can call me Nadia.”

Chapel closed his eyes. When he opened them, she was gone. He must have blacked out for a while. Donny came running into the room and put a mask over Chapel’s face, and that was the last thing he remembered for a while. When he woke up again, he was on a stretcher being wheeled down the yacht’s gangplank. The sky was red with dawn. He heard seagulls and smelled diesel fuel and knew he must be in Miami. Donny was walking alongside the stretcher, holding Chapel’s hand.

The pain was just a shadow of what it had been. The oxygen must have done its job. The relief of it, of not hurting so much he wanted to die, washed through Chapel and was better than any surge of endorphins.

“You’re awake,” Donny said. “You had us pretty worried there, for a while.”

“Sorry about that.” Chapel could move his head again without crippling pain. He turned as far as he could and looked back at the yacht. The deck was lined with blond girls in bikinis, and they were all watching him with concerned looks on their faces.

“Listen, Jim, I have a feeling about… about what happened back there. I have a feeling my captain didn’t just accidentally wander too far south.”

“Maybe not,” Chapel said.

“I have a feeling you didn’t just come on my boat for a chance to relax and think things through.”

“Maybe that was part of the reason,” Chapel said.

“I’m starting to get another feeling. A feeling that maybe I’m not supposed to ask you too many questions.”

Chapel sighed. He would love to explain to Donny everything that had happened — why the yacht dropped anchor where it did, why he had gone diving in the middle of the night. It didn’t work that way, though. “I’d trust that feeling.”

Donny just nodded. He’d been a good soldier. He knew that good soldiers didn’t get all the answers they might want; they just got orders and followed them whether or not they understood them. Donny had never worked for military intelligence, and he’d never had to deal with real secrets, but he knew the drill.

“You saved my life,” Chapel told him. “I’m never going to forget that.”

“It was Nadia who knew what to do,” Donny said.

Nadia.

The Asian woman had saved him from the Cubans, too.

Chapel thought of something then. He got a feeling of his own — a bad one. “Where is she?” he asked.

“She went ahead to the hospital, to get things ready. Practically jumped off the boat before we reached the dock. Why? You want to thank her in person?”

“Something like that,” Chapel said. What he really wanted to know, what he was suddenly very afraid of, was whether when she left the yacht Nadia had been carrying a little black book. She hadn’t said anything about it, but she hadn’t looked surprised when she found it, either. And it was awfully convenient that when the Cubans boarded the yacht and made everybody line up on the deck, Nadia had stayed behind exactly where she needed to be to get Chapel into the shower.

But Chapel couldn’t ask Donny about the little black book. Maybe he could learn a little something, though. “Who is she?” he asked.

Donny shrugged. “Just some Miami party girl. I don’t think she’s American.”

“I kind of guessed that myself — but what was she doing on the yacht?”

Donny looked confused. “I met her in a club in Miami a couple of weeks ago. I was there with Sheila, and the two of them hit it off. I meet a lot of girls in clubs — they know about my boat, and they all want an invite on one of my cruises. Sheila said Nadia looked like fun, so we asked her to come along. I don’t think I said twenty words to her since I met her.”

Chapel had more questions — a lot more — but he didn’t get to ask them. Paramedics took him away then and drove him straight to a hospital. Nobody wasted any time. Soon they had Chapel in the hyperbaric chamber, a steel tube little bigger than a coffin with one window over his face. Doctors came and tried to talk to him, but he couldn’t communicate very well — once the chamber was sealed, its compressors made such a racket he couldn’t hear anything.

They left him alone while the chamber worked its magic, subjecting him to pressures that would scrub all the nitrogen bubbles out of his bloodstream. It took the pain away almost immediately, which was great, but the doctors managed to let him know he would have to stay in the chamber for at least twenty-four hours.

He couldn’t move around in the chamber, couldn’t make any phone calls, couldn’t do anything but lie there and think.

Think about a little black book. A little black book he’d been willing to dive to the bottom of the sea to retrieve. A little black book he’d been willing to die for.

A little black book that was probably in Nadia’s hands now.

He knew nothing about the Asian woman with the Russian name. Nobody else seemed able to help. The doctors told Chapel she had, indeed, come to them and told them what kind of treatment he needed — she’d even been able to tell them what depth he’d dived to, which was crucial information for his therapy. The doctors were quite clear that she had saved his life.

But as soon as she’d told them what they needed to know, she had disappeared. No one had seen her since.

Chapel knew when he’d been played.

Who was she? A foreign agent? His mission had been secret, the details known only to three people — Chapel, Angel, and his boss in the Defense Intelligence Agency, Rupert Hollingshead. A leak was next to impossible — but somehow Nadia must have discovered what he was up to. Had she been sent to make sure his mission failed?

A dozen scenarios ran through his head as he tried to make sense of it. None of them came up the way he’d want them to. He was sure she had known what he was after, and she had used his decompression sickness to get the book away from him. Maybe she had called in the Cubans to destabilize the situation, or maybe she had just used them to further her cause.

Even Chapel had no idea why the book was so important. Hollingshead had never told him, and he had known better than to ask. But he bet Nadia had that information. He was going to have to track her down. Find her and make her give him the book back. That, or explain to Hollingshead that he had failed.

When they let him out of the hyperbaric chamber, the first thing he did was ask for his clothes and his cell phone. The doctors told him to take it easy, and that they wanted him to stay for another twenty-four hours for observation, but he knew he wouldn’t have time for that. He turned on the phone and called Angel as soon as he was alone.

“We’ve got a problem,” he told her.

“Sugar, it sounds like you’ve had nothing but,” she replied. “I’m just so glad you made it, that you’re feeling better—”

“There’s no time, Angel,” he said, as apologetically as he could manage, given how keyed up he was. He tucked the phone into the crook of his shoulder and started pulling on his jacket. “I need you to find somebody for me, and she’s not going to make it easy. All I have is her first name, Nadezhda, but she was on Donny’s boat and she should be on the passenger list, the same one that got me in trouble. I can give you a physical description and—”

He stopped because when he put his artificial arm through the sleeve of the jacket, something hard in the inside pocket tapped against his chest. He couldn’t think of what it was — he’d had nothing in there when he went aboard the yacht.

“Chapel?” Angel asked. “Everything okay?”

“Hold on,” he told her. He reached carefully inside the pocket. Felt leatherette and laminated pages.

It was the little black book.

Nadia must have put it there. She must have put it in his jacket before she left the hospital, knowing he would find it there.

“Uh,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything more appropriate. “Huh. Angel — never mind. I made a mistake.”

They wouldn’t let Chapel fly. There was still some nitrogen dissolved in his fatty tissues, the doctors told him. Spending any length of time in the pressurized cabin of an airplane would put him at risk of forming new bubbles and suffering a total relapse. He needed to stay at sea level for a month, just to be safe. But he had to get back to work, and back to Julia, so he took the train.

The whole way up the East Coast he kept the little black book in his jacket pocket. He didn’t risk letting anybody see it, though he very much wanted to study it and try to make sense of what he’d risked so much to salvage.

He arrived in Virginia first thing in the morning. He stopped off at Fort Belvoir, the headquarters of INSCOM and the Defense Contracts Audit Agency — two groups he’d worked for before starting his present life as a covert operative. To maintain some kind of cover identity, he still kept an office at the fort. He visited it every few months for appearances’ sake. He kept a change of clothes, there, too, and it gave him a chance to shower and clean up before meeting with his boss.

From Fort Belvoir it was a short drive and a long stretch of traffic before he could reach the Pentagon. Once there he walked through security, which was actually a nice change of pace because it went so smoothly. Chapel always had a problem with metal detectors since his left arm set off alarms in every airport in the world, but the Pentagon was accustomed to being visited by amputees and they had an officer on duty trained in clearing prostheses. Chapel was inside the building in minutes. He headed back to an unexceptional office deep inside C Ring and then called for an elevator that shouldn’t be there. The armed guard whose job was to ride that elevator all day smiled when he saw Chapel and hit the button for H Ring without being asked.

The Pentagon wasn’t supposed to have an H Ring. Very few people knew that it did. The elevator dropped through two underground levels and opened on a long corridor of unmarked doors. People cleared for entrance to those doors would know which one they wanted — signs were unnecessary.

Chapel opened the door to his boss’s office without being announced. Again, it was unnecessary — Rupert Hollingshead would have known Chapel was coming as soon as he walked in the Pentagon’s front door.

As usual, the transition from the drably painted corridor to Hollingshead’s office was jarring. The door was just simple metal painted an institutional green. The office behind it, by way of contrast, was lined with immaculately polished hardwood and featured a full wet bar with brass accoutrements, overstuffed leather armchairs, and a working fountain that filled the air with a musical sound. The office looked like nothing so much as a gentlemen’s club straight out of nineteenth-century London.

When it was constructed, the office had been a common room for a suite of fallout shelters meant to be used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff during a nuclear war. The intention had been to give the Chiefs some measure of comfort in a stressful time. Now it had been appropriated as office space for a man whose life was one constant bout of stress.

Not that the man would ever let it show.

“Bit, ah, early for a drink,” Rupert Hollingshead said, coming out from behind the bar. “But if you’d like some coffee, son, it can be arranged.”

Chapel smiled. “Admiral,” he said. “It’s good to be back.”

Hollingshead’s eyes twinkled merrily behind round spectacles. The man looked like he belonged in this room. He wore a tweed jacket and a bow tie — the sort almost no one wore anymore, the kind that actually had to be tied instead of clipped on. He looked like an absentminded Ivy League academic more than anything. He even had long sideburns that were far from regulation.

The look — right down to the facial hair — was designed to put people at ease and make them think this man was a harmless old eccentric who wouldn’t hurt a fly. It completely belied the fact that Hollingshead had been a rear admiral in the navy during the first Gulf War, or that since then he had become one of the most powerful spymasters in the American intelligence apparatus. He was the director of a directorate that did not officially exist, a man who could whisper in the ear of a president in the morning and start a war by dinnertime.

Hollingshead came over and grasped Chapel’s hands. He always took the left hand as well, as if to acknowledge the artificial arm without being too obvious about it. “So very sorry, son, to hear about the, ah, bends and all that. Won’t you take a seat?”

“Yes, sir, though I don’t intend to stay very long. I have an appointment in Brooklyn to keep.”

Hollingshead’s face broke into a beaming smile that would have lit up any fallout shelter. He knew all about Julia, of course, and what Chapel hadn’t told him personally he would have heard from Angel. “You are a very lucky man, Captain Chapel. You couldn’t have picked a better helpmeet.”

“I am blessed, sir, it’s true. I know it’s premature, but I hope you’ll come to the wedding.”

“Wouldn’t miss it, son, not for rubies or pearls.”

Chapel grinned. “Just talking about it out loud like that, like it’s something that I need to put on my schedule… it still feels weird. But it should be official by tonight.” He shook his head in disbelief. “I admit, I’m a little nervous. What if she says no?”

“Then my intelligence estimates will have been proven wrong.”

Chapel started in surprise. “You didn’t — I mean, you haven’t—”

“Just a small joke, son. No, I haven’t had DIA analysts working out the likelihood of Julia Taggart becoming Mrs. Julia Chapel. Call it an intuition. Or rather, let’s say that I couldn’t think of two people I hold in higher regard, and better suited to a life of shared bliss. Maybe we should have that drink after all, to celebrate.”

“Thank you, sir,” Chapel said, his grin returning, “but I’d just as soon get this debriefing over with and get on the train to New York.” He reached in his pocket and took out the little black book. He riffled through it, seeing once more the grids of numbers and Cyrillic characters that filled each page. Then he handed it over. “I hope it’s worth the trouble it took to secure it.”

Hollingshead took the book and tucked it into a pocket of his jacket. “It’s worth more than its weight in diamonds, believe me. You know what it is, of course.”

That was a question, and maybe some kind of test. Chapel nodded. “It’s a one-time pad.” A codebook, in other words, containing the key to a cipher that theoretically couldn’t be cracked. The captain of the Kurchatov would have consulted those grids when sending secret messages back to his superiors in Russia. Each character in his plaintext message was transposed with a character from one of those grids, using basic modular addition. On the other end of the transmission, in a Kremlin basement perhaps, someone else would have an identical pad and be able to decrypt the message. If the characters in the grids were truly random, and if nobody else had access to the pad, the message could never be decrypted since the cipher was unique to that particular message.

One-time pads had been used by both sides throughout the Cold War. They had only been replaced by the advent of computer cryptography. The Kremlin and the Pentagon had relied on them for decades, but unfortunately they weren’t very practical. One problem was that the receiver of the message needed to know which page of his own pad to use when deciphering the message, or even which pad to use if more than one existed. In real-world use, the KGB had ended up using what were essentially one-day pads — the same cipher matrix being used for every coded transmission sent in a twenty-four-hour window. There was also the difficulty of making sure every submarine commander, say, received a new pad every month — a tricky bit of logistics when some submarines went on six-month-long cruises and rarely called in at friendly ports.

Because of these issues, one-time pads had fallen out of use — as far as Chapel knew, no major intelligence operation had used them in years.

Which raised the question of why Hollingshead wanted this pad.

“Completely useless, of course,” Chapel said.

“Of course,” Hollingshead said, though a mischievous grin threatened to crack his face in half.

“Even if codebooks like that were still in use — even if the Russian Federation used the same sort of codes as the Soviet Union used to, which they don’t — this pad would still be obsolete. The codes in there haven’t been used for twenty years.”

“Indeed.” Hollingshead took off his glasses and started polishing them with a silk handkerchief. “Hardly seems worth putting the life of my best agent at, um, risk, wouldn’t you say?”

“I follow my orders, sir,” Chapel replied. “I don’t question them. Usually.”

Hollingshead nodded in excitement. “I’ve got quite the plan for this little book, son. It’s a shame I can’t tell you what it is.”

Chapel smiled at his boss. “The suspense might kill me,” he joked. But he understood. The one-time pad was meant for some incredibly secret mission, something truly vital to national security. He desperately, desperately wanted to know why Hollingshead thought it was good for something.

But he was never going to find out.

Chapel wasn’t going on the next mission. He was going to get married instead. He’d already asked for, and received, a leave of absence while he went home and proposed to his girlfriend. Hollingshead had been overjoyed when he heard the news.

“She’s a lovely girl, and you’re a very lucky man,” Hollingshead said, standing up to come shake Chapel’s hands again. “I couldn’t be happier for you. Well, ah, that’s not strictly true.”

“Oh?” Chapel asked, surprised.

“Well. I have a, ah, well, not a reservation. Call it my one regret. It’s simply that I wish I could use you for this mission. It’s perfect for you. But that doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters but the joy you’re going to deliver to that wonderful woman. Have you thought about where you’re going to honeymoon? I’m partial to Barbados.”

“It’s a little premature to think about that, sir.”

“Of course, of course,” Hollingshead said. He beamed from ear to ear. “Well, take all the time you need. I’ll see you when you get back.”

“Thank you, sir,” Chapel said. He stood up and saluted.

The director saluted back. “If anyone deserves a little time off, it’s you, son. Enjoy it. Enjoy it as much as you possibly can.”

“I will,” Chapel said. He couldn’t help but burst into a smiling laugh. “I really will.”

Chapel drove to Manhattan, where he stopped off at the jeweler’s and picked up the ring. It was beautiful, gleaming in its little box. He paid the man and headed south, across the Manhattan bridge, into the heart of Brooklyn. Toward home.

Toward Julia.

He parked the car outside their little apartment building and looked up at their windows. They shared one floor of a brownstone, just a couple of rooms, tiny by the standards of anyone who’d never lived in a New York apartment. There had been some very good times in those little rooms.

He caught a flash of movement behind one of the windows. A glimpse of red hair as Julia walked past. She was up there. Good.

He realized he’d been sitting in the car for ten minutes. Was he nervous? He didn’t feel nervous. Mostly he felt a little numb.

He headed up the stairs with his good hand clutched tightly around the ring box in his pocket. He had to force himself to let go so he didn’t crush it. When he got to the door, he tried the knob and found that it was unlocked. That was a little weird — Julia, like most New Yorkers, kept her doors locked when she was home. But it didn’t mean anything. He needed to stop thinking like a spy. He turned the knob and stepped inside. There was a little end table next to the door, a place to put keys or plug in a phone. He took the ring box out of his pocket and laid it there, so that he wasn’t holding it when he first saw her. “Julia?” he called.

For a second, only silence answered him. Then he heard her call back, “In here.”

We walked back to the bedroom, where she waited for him in the doorway.

She had never looked more beautiful. Her red hair fell around her shoulders and down the back of the thin black sweater she wore. Her eyes were clear and bright. She smiled at him, though it looked like a tentative kind of smile. Well, they hadn’t left things very well when he headed down to Miami. In fact, he’d had to walk out in the middle of a pretty nasty fight. Maybe she was still angry.

“I’m back,” he said.

“I can see that. I didn’t expect you back so soon. Normally you’re gone a lot longer.”

The fight they’d had — all the fights they’d had — were about the same thing. Chapel couldn’t tell her what he did when he went to work. He couldn’t even tell her when he was leaving, or when he was coming back. He would just disappear, usually before she woke up in the morning, and reappear when everything was done. Typically he showed up with a new scar or two.

Every single time he left her sitting in this apartment, wondering if he was ever going to come back, or if he was already dead and she would never get to hear about it. He could never promise her he would be alive from one day to the next. For someone like Julia, it was unbearable. She wanted children. She wanted to grow old with him. He couldn’t promise her anything like that.

But maybe he could give her something else.

“I needed to be back here.” He took a step closer and she moved sideways, blocking the doorway to the bedroom, as if she was hiding something. He could see around her, though. He could see a suitcase lying on the bed.

She wouldn’t meet his gaze.

“Were you going out? Damn,” he said. “I was really hoping to get some time with you. There’s something I want to talk about.”

“I’m headed out, yeah.” She did look at him then, and her face fell. “Jim, you look terrible. You’re pale and your eyes are bloodshot. Are you all right?”

“Fine,” he said. The bends had left him a little weak, but the doctors had said he would make a full recovery in a few days. “Listen, I need to say—”

“No,” she said. “No, stop. I can’t do this.”

He was confused. “Do what?”

“Pretend like everything’s normal.”

Chapel’s heart sank in his chest. What was going on?

“I thought it would be easier if I just left. If I wasn’t here when you got back. I thought maybe we could do this on the phone, or… I don’t know. By e-mail.”

“Do what?”

She sighed and shrank in the doorway. “I’m going to stay with a friend for a while. Please don’t ask me which one. I need to get away. I need—”

She couldn’t seem to finish her sentence. She shook her head and ducked into the bedroom. Grabbing the handle of the suitcase, she dragged it off the bed. It looked like it was too heavy for her.

“Let me help you,” he told her. “The car’s just downstairs.”

Her eyes went wide, and she reached out to put a hand on his chest.

“Jim,” she said. “Jim.” Tears filled her eyes. “Jim, don’t you get it? I’m leaving you.”

Blood rushed in his ears. For a second the world’s worst headache burst through his skull. When he could see again, he realized she’d moved past him, dragging her suitcase into the front room.

He chased after her. “No, no, I know we were fighting, I know it was worse than usual, but—”

“I can’t do it!” she shouted at him. “I can’t talk about this. I have to go!” She turned around and stared at him as if she were daring him to say something.

“We can figure this out,” he promised. “I can — I can talk to my boss—”

“No,” she said. “Please don’t.”

“Just hear me out! I can quit my job.” When she said nothing, he nodded, eager, because he knew this would fix things. “I can quit. I can stop doing this.”

“No, you can’t,” Julia said, wiping at her tears. “You shouldn’t.”

“I can. I really can. I can go back to my old position. My desk job. Don’t you see? I’ll be home every night. You’ll always know where I am. And nobody will be shooting at me, ever again. I did this for—”

“You hated that job. You said they gave it to you because they felt bad about how you lost your arm. You said that job was killing you.”

He closed his eyes. “For you, it would be worth it,” he told her.

She stood there and wept for a while. Let big racking sobs climb up through her chest and out of her eyes and her throat. He reached for her but she pushed him away.

Eventually, when she’d recovered a little, she wiped clots of mascara off her cheeks with the balls of her thumbs. And then she shook her head.

A silence followed, as if all the air in Brooklyn had turned to ice and nothing, anywhere, moved or made a sound. Chapel thought his heart even stopped beating. He wanted to go to her, to hold her in his arms and tell her everything was going to be okay, but he didn’t dare.

“You would resent me for the rest of your life,” she said. “No. I won’t let you.”

“It’s my decision.”

“No, it isn’t. It shouldn’t be.” She grabbed the handle of the suitcase. “I called a taxi — you can keep our car, at least, for now. We’ll… we’ll talk, and figure out who gets what. But let me call you first. Okay? Don’t call me until I call you first.”

Chapel shook his head in confusion. “Are you saying you don’t love me anymore?”

Julia laughed, a thick noise with all the mucus in her throat. “If I didn’t love you, it wouldn’t destroy me when you went away. But it does, and I can’t take it anymore. I have to go.” She turned toward the doorway, the suitcase’s wheels rumbling on the hardwood floor. She put her hand on the doorknob. Turned it. Pulled the suitcase closer to her and picked it up with both hands to get it over the threshold.

He tried to think of something to say, but there was nothing. Nothing anywhere inside of him that could change her mind, and he knew it.

Before she left she glanced down at the end table by the door. He saw the moment when she saw the ring box sitting there.

She turned to look at him.

“Oh, Jim, you didn’t… you didn’t think I would…”

She made a noise then like she was gagging, like she might throw up from choking on tears. It was a horrible painful noise, and he couldn’t bear it; it made him want to curl up and die because he’d made her feel that way. He couldn’t stand up anymore but he couldn’t fall down — his knees were locked and he felt like he was nailed to the floor.

He didn’t see her close the door behind her. He only heard the doorknob turn and the latch inside it catch as it clicked shut.

Eventually it got dark.

The light on the apartment walls turned briefly orange, then blue, then faded away. It never truly got dark in Brooklyn, but with the curtains drawn the room grew dim. It was almost a relief. But Chapel got up anyway and found the lamp. It was lying on the floor, where he’d knocked it down. He switched it on where it lay, and a cone of yellow light spread across the bedroom. It lit up the sheets and pillows where he’d torn them off the bed and thrown them on the floor.

He’d used his left arm, his artificial arm. He’d felt like some kind of machine, tearing up his home, but that was exactly how he’d wanted to feel. A destructive machine that didn’t think, didn’t feel.

The light lit up the bottle of bourbon lying on the floor, making it glow with its own amber light. The bottle he’d fetched from the kitchen and then never opened because he knew it wouldn’t help. The light glinted dully from the white backs of the pictures he’d grabbed and flipped through and then turned facedown on the floor like cards because he couldn’t stand to look at what they showed. Even a hint of red hair or a corner of a lip or a single eye looking back at him from those pictures would have been too much.

The light showed him where his phone lay, after he’d thrown it at the wall. He reached out and picked it up. The screen had cracked right across, but it still lit up when he entered the passcode.

Her number was there in his contacts. He’d opened up that contact and stared at it a dozen times, come very close to pressing the call button, and then stopped himself. She’d said not to call.

Maybe that had been a trick. Maybe she expected him to call anyway, and if he did, he would pass the test and she would know she’d been wrong, that it could work, that he still loved her enough to chase after her…

Or maybe she’d been completely honest with him, which was much more like the woman he knew. Maybe if he tried calling her that would be it, the last straw. Maybe there was still a possibility of her coming back but only if he played by her rules…

Or maybe she wouldn’t even pick up. Maybe his call would go through to her voice mail, and he would have to listen to her recorded greeting, the one where she was laughing because when she recorded it he was kissing her neck…

By the time he’d finished thinking through those possibilities — for the dozenth time — the screen went black again.

She was gone. She was really gone.

Repeating that to himself didn’t make it real, no matter how many times he thought it in his head.

He tried to sleep. He didn’t bother getting up, he just grabbed a sheet from the floor and pulled it over himself.

It smelled like her.

Like Julia.

He balled up the sheet and threw it across the room. It opened up in the air like a parachute and fell slowly to the floor. It made the whole room smell like her.

He went in the kitchen and curled up on the tiles, which just smelled like floor wax.

He couldn’t sleep there, either.

He entered the passcode on the phone. The screen lit up and told him the phone was down to reserve power. It didn’t matter.

He opened the phone app and his thumb hovered over the button that would bring up all his contacts. He shook his head and pressed the button for the keypad instead. He dialed a number he knew by heart, one that he wasn’t permitted to enter into his contacts. The phone picked up before he’d entered the final digit. She must have been waiting, monitoring his phone in case he called.

“Good news, I hope,” she said.

That struck him so hard it made him want to laugh. Except it wasn’t funny at all.

“Chapel? Baby? Are you all right?”

He ground the ball of his living thumb into his eye socket, trying to push away what he was feeling. This call didn’t require the use of his emotions. “Angel,” he said. “Tell the boss that I’m available. I’ll report for duty first thing in the morning.”

“Honey, do you know what time it is? Maybe you should—”

“Just… please, Angel. Just tell him that. Okay?”

“Chapel, tell me what’s wrong,” she said.

He shook his head, even if she couldn’t see him. Then he pressed the power switch on the phone and made the screen go dark again.