The Hydra Protocol

PART II

Even as Chapel made his way through security at the Pentagon, he could tell there would be something unusual about this mission. Rupert Hollingshead was waiting for him just inside the checkpoint. The director looked completely out of place, surrounded as he was by men and women in the uniforms of the various armed forces. No one gave him a second glance, though — he was a fixture here, and even though the vast majority of people working in the aboveground rings of the Pentagon would have no idea what his job was, they knew enough to salute him as he passed by.

“Son,” Hollingshead said, when Chapel approached him. “Son, you look terrible. Are you unwell? Do you need to sit down?”

“I’m just tired, sir,” Chapel lied. “Maybe I’m not fully recovered from Miami.”

“I can imagine,” Hollingshead replied, steering Chapel toward a door that led into one of the inner rings. It was not the way Chapel would have gone to get to the elevator that took one down to H Ring, but he didn’t ask where they were headed. “When Angel told me you were, ah, coming back so soon, I… well. I didn’t know what to think. I can guess a little of it. Your homecoming yesterday didn’t go as we expected, did it?”

“No, sir. Sir, if I can ask for a favor—”

“Anything. Absolutely anything you need,” Hollingshead told him, a grave look on his face.

“I’d like to not talk about my personal life right now. If that’s all right.”

Hollingshead’s face fell, and Chapel felt bad instantly. But the last thing he could handle at that moment was talking about what had happened in Brooklyn. He suppressed a sigh. “It’s just — I’d like to get to work as quickly as possible.”

Hollingshead nodded. “Keep your mind off things, I’d imagine. Well. I suppose that’s fine for now. But, son — I’m going to need you at the very pinnacle of your game today. If you’re going to be distracted or you’re going to be on the phone all day, well, ah—”

“No, sir,” Chapel promised. “I’m ready to focus on something else.”

Hollingshead nodded again. “Then we’ll say no more. Now — as to business. We can’t meet in the usual place for a reason that will soon become apparent. I’ve reserved a briefing room for us and had it swept for listening devices. Sadly, that does not mean we’ll be able to speak with complete candor. Again, for a reason soon to be made manifest. The same reason we’re meeting in a new spot, actually. So before we go in, I need to tell you something.”

“Sir.”

Hollingshead lowered his voice. “What you’re going to hear is all true. I’ve had it verified to the best of our considerable abilities. Everything checks out. It may also be the most vital matter my office has ever concerned itself with. Furthermore, it’s one of the most sensitive. I must say, I’m glad you’re here, even if I’m not pleased with the reason you were able to come in.” The director raised his hands in protest. “Never mind, we’re not talking about that.” He walked briskly up to an unremarkable door and put his hand on the knob. “You think you’re ready for this. I’m not, and I don’t mind telling you.” He turned the knob and opened the door.

Beyond lay a small windowless conference room with a table and a dozen chairs and not much else. The walls were bare concrete — they weren’t even painted. The lighting fixtures were just uncovered fluorescent tubes, and the table was made of glass. That was probably to make it harder to plant a bug underneath it. There was no television screen available, nor any computers — not even a telephone. The back of the door was lined with noise-absorbing egg crate foam and the door itself had a rubber seal around its edges.

Chapel took out his cell phone and turned it on. It got no reception, not even a single bar, and no wireless signals were available either.

Hollingshead went to the end of the table and took a seat. When he spoke, his voice sounded oddly flat in the shielded room. “I imagine this all looks quite primitive,” he said, grinning a little.

“It looks safe,” Chapel said, putting away his phone.

Hollingshead took the little black book — the one-time pad — from his coat pocket and set it down on the glass table. Even from across the room Chapel thought it still reeked of seawater. That was probably an effect of how odorless the rest of the room was. He ran a finger along the floor and brought it up to his eyes and found no dust at all. When Hollingshead had said the room had been swept, Chapel hadn’t considered that he might have been using the term literally. “Exactly how small can they make a bug these days?” Chapel asked.

“The size of a grain of rice,” Hollingshead told him. “Even here in the Pentagon we can’t completely eliminate the possibility of being overheard. But this room is, ah, the very best we can do. Needless to say, nothing we discuss here can be spoken of outside these walls.”

“Of course,” Chapel agreed.

Hollingshead nodded. Then he glanced at his watch. “We’re waiting on a third. Someone with information we need. They’ll be here in a few minutes, but first — I need you to tell me something. Tell me everything you know about the Dead Hand.”

Chapel opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. He sat down at the table. “Well, two things, I suppose. I know what it is.”

“Go on.”

Chapel shrugged. “A computer system. The Soviets built it back in the eighties in a secret location south of Moscow. It was supposed to be one of the biggest and most complex computers in the world, at least for the time. It was wired into their nuclear arsenal, with links to every missile silo they had.”

“And its purpose?” Hollingshead asked.

Chapel nodded. “It was called the Dead Hand because it was supposed to be similar to the dead man’s switch on a train — a switch the train’s driver has to keep constantly touching or the train won’t go. If the driver has a heart attack or something, he’ll let go of that switch and the train will automatically stop. Except the Dead Hand was designed for the opposite purpose. It was designed to constantly monitor the region around Moscow. If the Kremlin were destroyed — say, by an American nuclear attack — the Dead Hand would turn itself on. And then it would launch every missile the Soviets had at the United States. It was designed so that even if we successfully decapitated the Soviet command structure, they could still have their revenge and make sure we didn’t survive World War III. A completely automated retaliation system.”

Hollingshead fiddled with the one-time pad on the table in front of him. “Like the Lernaean Hydra, wouldn’t you say? You cut off the head, and a new one grows back — it only gets more dangerous. The ultimate deterrent. We wouldn’t dare attack Moscow, knowing the price we would pay.”

“That was the theory,” Chapel said.

“You said you knew two things,” Hollingshead prompted. “What was the other?”

“I know it doesn’t really exist.” Chapel sat up straight in his chair. “It was a ruse. Nobody sane would ever build something like that — a machine that could destroy an entire country with no human input. The possibility of a computer error could never be ruled out. The Soviets floated the story of the Dead Hand as a kind of engineered urban legend. They wanted us to think it existed. But of course after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Russia became our ally, the story wasn’t necessary anymore. A number of Russian officials have denied categorically that the Dead Hand was ever more than a thought experiment — they claim it was never built, and never got past the drawing board.”

Hollingshead nodded. He wasn’t meeting Chapel’s eye, which was a bad thing, usually. “You know two things,” he said. “One of them is correct.”

“You don’t mean—”

“Son, this may come as a surprise to you, but when you say nobody sane would ever create such a thing, well, that group doesn’t include the leadership of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. They were paranoid enough to build the damn thing. It is very real, and it was designed for exactly the purpose you describe. It went online in 1983.”

Chapel felt like the temperature in the room had just dropped twenty degrees. “And if we’re sitting here talking about it—”

“It went online in 1983, and it has been functional ever since. It’s still there, still doing its job. Ready to launch every missile in the Russian arsenal at the United States, at a moment’s notice. Nobody ever turned it off.”

“You’re kidding me. This thing is still active? It’s a loaded gun pointed right at our heads, and it’s still active?”

“Yes,” Hollingshead said. “Even though the politics have changed, the launch codes have not.” The director sighed deeply. “It’s an existential threat to the United States, to the, ah, well, the entire world, actually.” He gave a wan smile. “If that many nuclear warheads exploded all at once, it really wouldn’t matter where they landed. The resulting fallout and nuclear winter would mean the end of the world.”

Chapel couldn’t speak.

Hollingshead pushed the one-time pad away from him, into the middle of the table. “Now you know everything I know about the Dead Hand. Fortunately, we have another source of intelligence available to us.” He glanced at his watch again. “She should be waiting out in the hall, if you would be good enough to get the door.”

Chapel stood up and reached for the doorknob. “She?” he asked. “It’s a woman? You don’t mean—”

He turned the knob and opened the door and there she was.

Nadia.

The Asian woman from the party yacht. The one who had saved his life.

“Jim,” she said, and gave him a warm smile. “You’re looking much better than the last time I saw you. I’m so glad.”

She held out a hand. It took him a second to collect himself enough to shake it. “Please,” he said, “come in.”

She walked into the room, and Chapel closed the door behind her.

She didn’t look exactly like he remembered her. For one thing, she wasn’t wearing a thin sundress and basically nothing else. Instead she had put on a black business suit over a white blouse. The skirt was maybe two inches shorter than would be considered conservative, but she would have passed for a civilian staffer outside in the halls of the Pentagon. She had cut her hair a little shorter. On the boat she had worn subtle but elaborate makeup, but now she had on only a dark red shade of lipstick and maybe a touch of eye shadow.

She was, though, every bit as striking as she had been the last time he saw her, when she was wearing nothing but panties and sharing a cramped shower stall with him.

She was empty-handed. No briefcase, no purse. The director indicated with a gesture that she should take a seat. That meant she had to walk past Chapel. Her perfume — very light, very clean — trailed through the air after her.

“The two of you have met, of course,” Hollingshead said. “Though I imagine you were not, ah, properly introduced.”

Chapel realized he was still standing by the door, and the two of them were looking at him expectantly. Hollingshead gestured at a chair across from Nadia, and Chapel took it. He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was until he sat down.

“Captain James Chapel, United States Military Intelligence,” Hollingshead said, “please meet Nadezhda Yaroslavovna Asimova, Federal Service for Technic and Export Control of the Russian Federation.”

“Nadia to friends,” she said, with a smile. “Which I hope already includes the both of you.”

Chapel tried to smile back. He was worried if he moved his mouth too much, his jaw might drop and hit the floor.

He forced himself to recover a little professionalism. “FSTEK,” he said. “Technic and Export Control — that’s the group that oversees information security and technology transfer. Part of the Russian intelligence community.” He sat up straighter in his chair. “Forgive me for using a loaded term — but we don’t get a lot of Russian spies here in the Pentagon.”

Nadia laughed to show she hadn’t taken offense and rolled her eyes. “You make us sound so glamorous! Boring stuff, of no interest, truly. We make sure all the Kremlin’s computers have proper antivirus software and oversee sales of Russian information technology to other countries. I am little more than a glorified file clerk back home.”

Chapel shook his head. He turned to stare at Hollingshead for a while. “Sir,” he said, “are you telling me that you had a Russian agent shadowing me on my last mission?” He couldn’t believe it.

“A Russian agent who saved your life,” Hollingshead pointed out.

“I did what I could to help, that is all,” Nadia said.

Chapel stood up out of his chair and paced around the room. “I’m sorry, I seem to have missed something here. You two are acting like this is all perfectly normal. That an agent of a foreign power was sent — without my knowledge — to accompany me on a top secret mission.” He almost asked if Angel had known — but maybe Nadia still didn’t know about Angel. Maybe that one fact had been kept from her.

On the boat she had known his name. She had known how deep he was diving, and she had known how important the one-time pad was. It seemed she’d been better informed than he was.

“Son,” Hollingshead said, his eyes flashing a warning, “please sit down.”

Chapel went to his chair, but he didn’t sit. He rested his hands on the back of the chair because he felt like he might fall down. “This is not how we do things—”

“It is today,” Hollingshead said, and the warning in his eyes was very close to turning into flinty anger. “Agent Asimova has vital intelligence to share with us. And that mission you were on — I wasn’t the one who planned it.”

Chapel was definitely about to fall down. He sat before that could happen.

“It was Agent Asimova who told us where to find that one-time pad. And why we would want to recover it.”

“Nadia, please,” she said. “Call me Nadia.”

Hollingshead was silent for a second. Then he turned to face Nadia and gave her his warmest, most grandfatherly look. It was a good one — he’d cultivated it for years. “Nadia, thank you. I believe you’re here today to brief us on the Dead Hand system. If Captain Chapel is done with his outburst, maybe you could begin.”

“Of course,” she said. “Jim?”

Chapel rested his head on one hand. “I’m listening,” he said.

Nadia fidgeted as she spoke. Chapel couldn’t really blame her for being nervous — how would he feel, after all, if he were invited to give a speech at the Kremlin? He could sense from her body language that it was more than that, however. She was excited to give this presentation. Clearly it was something she’d been involved with for a long time.

“There are three principal components of the Perimeter system. That is, what you call the Dead Hand. The Russian name for it is ‘Perimetr,’ because it guards the entire border of what was the Soviet Union.”

She got up from her chair and paced behind the table. “I was hoping I would have a whiteboard, or perhaps I could give you a PowerPoint slideshow…”

Hollingshead gave her an apologetic smile. “For security reasons we need to keep this as an oral briefing,” he said.

“Konyechno. I mean — of course,” she said. She took a deep breath and launched in.

“As I said, three parts. The first is a shortwave radio station located just outside of Moscow. Station UVB-76, or MDZhB, as it is called now. You may have heard of this station, I believe it is called ‘the Russian Buzzer’ in amateur radio circles. It broadcasts a continuous buzz tone, at a rate of twenty-five tones per minute, and it does so twenty-four hours a day, every day, as it has since the 1980s. This is in effect an ‘all-clear’ signal. Its meaning is simple: Moscow still stands. As long as this signal is broadcast, Perimeter remains dormant and is completely safe.

“The second component is an array of sensors buried throughout Russian territory. There are approximately one hundred and fifty acoustic pickups, seventy-five air pressure monitoring scoops, and fifty electric eye sensors spread across the various republics that formerly comprised the Union. They are all dedicated to one function, which is to register the particular signature of a nuclear explosion anywhere inside the former borders.”

“That sounds like some pretty delicate equipment,” Hollingshead asked. “If it was installed thirty years ago, are you sure it’s still functional?”

“The numbers I listed,” Nadia explained, “are our best estimate of how many of the sensors remain intact. Approximately ten times as many were originally built.”

“Just an estimate?” Chapel asked. “You don’t know for sure?”

A flash of deep worry passed across Nadia’s eyes. “I will… elaborate in a moment. First, I need to tell you about the third, and most vital, component of the system. This is a computer complex located in a hardened bunker south of Moscow. The computer is one hundred percent automatic, requiring no operators or maintenance to keep it running. It has its own dedicated radiothermic power plant and multiple redundancies in its circuits in case any of them ever burn out or are damaged. The system exists at a sort of minimal state, performing only self-diagnostic functions on a daily basis, as long as the shortwave signal is continuous. Only if that signal stops will Perimeter awaken. If it does, its first action will be to query the array of sensors. If there is no result, Perimeter takes no action. If, however, it detects the signature of a nuclear blast, it will automatically send a signal to every nuclear weapon in the Russian arsenal. Our weapons are hardwired to receive this signal — upon reception they can and will arm and launch themselves without human action and despite any attempt at human interference. The system was designed to resist tampering or sabotage and eliminate human error from the decision to launch.”

Hollingshead pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and rubbed at his eyes. “You can imagine how we must feel about this.”

“I imagine,” Nadia said, “that you feel frightened by it. That was the intention of its designers.”

“I think ‘outraged’ is the more, ah, appropriate term. Ms. Asimova, your leaders have built a veritable sword of Damocles and dangled it over our heads. Though it sounds like there are some basic fail-safes built in, thank God. The shortwave signal from Moscow keeps the whole thing asleep.”

Nadia sat down hard in her chair. “Except when it fails.” She put both her hands on the glass tabletop and pressed down on them, as if she were trying to keep them from shaking. “It has happened twice. Both times in 2010. Once for a full twenty-four hours, and then again for only a few minutes, the buzz tone fell silent. The cause—”

“Wait a minute,” Chapel said. “Your people let this thing lapse, the one thing preventing the end of—”

“Please,” Nadia said, holding up her hands to implore for peace. “The signal has remained active ever since that time. The failure was a human error. The problem here is that the men in charge of this buzz tone do not understand what it is they guard. They do not know about Perimeter. They did not know that when they were derelict in their duty, they put the whole world at risk.”

Chapel could feel his jaw fall open. “Nobody told them?”

Nadia looked sheepish. “It is a secret. Secrets in my country are… like a sacred thing.”

Hollingshead cleared his throat. “The sensor, ah, array,” he pointed out. “Another fail-safe there. It detects what, again?”

“Sound, light, and atmospheric overpressure,” Nadia said.

“It looks for an atomic explosion, yes,” Hollingshead said, nodding vigorously. “No real worries there, are there? No one is about to detonate a nuclear device on Russian soil. Your country doesn’t even do nuclear tests anymore, as I understand.”

Nadia bit her lip. “We cannot rule out the possibility that a rogue state would detonate a bomb inside Russia. Though the sensors are looking for a megaton-scale blast, not just the much smaller explosion of, say, a dirty bomb. We believed until recently, in fact, that an event on the scale that would trigger Perimeter was of negligible threat.”

“Something changed that?” Chapel asked. The look on her face definitely suggested as much.

She looked down at her hands. “In February of 2013, a meteor exploded in the air over the city of Chelyabinsk.”

“I remember that,” Chapel said. “The YouTube videos were pretty incredible.”

Nadia inhaled sharply. “As it burned up in the atmosphere, the meteor was large enough to light up the sky like a second sun. When it exploded, its sonic blast created an air overpressure wave that shattered windows across the city.” She looked from one man to the other. “Heat, light, overpressure.”

Chapel fell back in his chair. Looking over at Hollingshead, he saw the director’s mouth moving as if he were trying to speak but the words wouldn’t come.

“My government has wanted to take Perimeter offline for some time. We thought we had time, time enough at least to… to fix things,” Nadia said. “The last few years have convinced us otherwise. If the shortwave signal had faltered at the same time the meteor hit Chelyabinsk — if these two conditions ever happened again at the same time…” She pushed down on the table until her hands turned white. “It would be the end of the world.”

The silence in the briefing room had felt flat before, all the ambient sound soaked up by the hard concrete walls. Now it felt like it buzzed with an angry energy. Chapel knew the effect was purely psychological, but it didn’t matter. He felt a nasty headache coming on when he thought about what Nadia had just said.

“You need to turn this thing off now,” he told her. “You need to shut it down.”

Hollingshead nodded. “We’ve been asking for that for years. Every time, the Russian government has brushed us off. Most often they simply tell us that the Dead Hand — Perimeter — never existed, that it was only ever a thought experiment and it was never built. Sometimes they contradict themselves and say it was switched off years ago, before the fall of the Union. Most often they just say they won’t discuss matters of state security. But clearly the time has come, Ms. Asimova. Clearly the time has come.”

Nadia looked over at the director with a sad smile. “This feeling is one shared by my superiors. We are not insane. We know that a Perimeter launch would be the end of our country, as well. The reason it has not been done, the reason I am here today, is a matter of great national… embarrassment. I can think of no better term.”

Something occurred to Chapel. “You said earlier you could only estimate the number of functional sensors in the network,” he said.

She nodded. “That’s correct. We don’t know how many of them are still active, because we do not know exactly where they are. Until recently, we didn’t know where the Perimeter computer was located, either.”

“I beg your pardon?” Hollingshead asked.

Nadia turned to look at him directly. “On 25 December, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev officially ceded power to Boris Yeltsin. Famously, on that day he handed over the nuclear launch codes, effectively surrendering the Soviet military to what was then called the Commonwealth of Independent States, the precursor of the Russian Federation. It is unclear to my office whether Gorbachev even knew about Perimeter — it was considered then of utmost secrecy, and even Gorbachev was kept in the dark on some things by the KGB. What is known is that Gorbachev never mentioned Perimeter to Yeltsin. He did not tell him where it was, or how to turn it off.

“You must understand how strenuously they kept their secrets in the Soviet Union. No one was given information they did not immediately require. Even now the men who work at MDZhB, the shortwave station, have no idea why it is so important that the buzz tone is played night and day. The technicians who work on our nuclear missiles do not know that they can be activated without warning. Even my office, which is in charge of maintaining security around the nuclear arsenal, had no confirmation that Perimeter existed until a few years ago.”

“This keeps getting worse and worse,” Chapel said.

Nadia did not disagree. “It took me years to track down the Perimeter computer. Between August and December of 1991, the KGB knew that the Union was going to fall. They used that time to destroy every bit of secret material they could — they thought that the new regime would seek to prosecute them for their atrocities, and they wished to destroy all evidence of their crimes. There were seven secret KGB libraries in the Union at one time. Six of them were burned to the ground that year. A seventh, on an uninhabited island south of Vladivostok, was spared, but even its existence was nearly lost. I had to go there personally to find the information I needed. To find out where Perimeter is located, and how to stop it.”

“So you do have a plan,” Chapel said.

“That’s why I’m here,” she told him. “And why I am speaking to you two. It is my intention to personally end the Perimeter project. But I need your help.”

Chapel frowned. “Why?” he asked.

Hollingshead cleared his throat. “Son, we’re being given an extraordinary opportunity here. A chance to eliminate a grave threat. Let’s not, ah, examine our gift horses altogether too closely.”

Chapel shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t mean any disrespect. I just don’t see why the Russians would bring us in on this. It seems like their problem — and one I’d think they’d be happy to take care of internally, and quietly.”

“Quietly, yes,” Nadia said. “We will have no official support from my country, not even any contact with my organization once we begin. This must be done in absolute secrecy. If the world never finds out that we lost control of Perimeter, it is for the best. For the operation to be conducted internally, well, that is not possible in any case.”

Chapel raised an eyebrow.

“Most reports of the system describe it only as being located south of Moscow. When Perimeter was constructed,” Nadia said, “the designers looked for a place unlikely to be attacked in a war, conventional or nuclear. A spot of limited strategic value, and a place they knew their enemies would never occupy. Unfortunately, they did not take into account that the real threat to their power would come from within. The place is no longer inside Russian borders. It is now in foreign territory.”

“Where?” Hollingshead asked.

“Kazakhstan. Near the Aral Sea.”

“That certainly adds a, to put it mildly, wrinkle to things,” the director said. “I assume the Kazakhs don’t know what they have. And that you’d like to keep it that way.”

“Correct,” Nadia said. “It will not be easy, but we must enter the country unknown, take down Perimeter, and exfiltrate before they know we were there. Diplomatic relations between Kazakhstan and Russia are good, right now. We want to keep it that way.”

“I can think of another reason, besides diplomatic relations,” Chapel said.

Hollingshead shot him a nasty glance — but then nodded for him to continue.

Chapel’s eyes narrowed. “If you make this an American op, and something goes wrong, you won’t take the blame.”

Nadia shrugged. “If you wish to see it that way, fine. Though I imagine if the Kazakhs capture me, it will not take long for them to determine who I work for. I am not asking you to take this risk alone.”

“There’s another reason for our involvement,” Hollingshead said. He reached out and tapped the one-time pad where it sat on the table. “When Ms. Asimova first came to me, she said this was what she was after. She knew where it was and how to use it. We had the ability to retrieve it.”

“Russia does not possess the resources it once did, not in the Western theater,” Nadia explained. “Getting a Russian frogman into Cuban waters would have proved difficult. We knew you had the capacity.”

“But what do you even want that thing for? The codes in it are twenty years out of date,” Chapel said.

“So are the codes Perimeter uses,” Nadia told him. “Perimeter was given daily ciphers by the KGB. When they were driven from power, they stopped updating its clearances.”

“You mean it’s still running off that pad,” Chapel said.

“As far as Perimeter is concerned, it is still 25 December 1991, because no one told it otherwise.”

Chapel couldn’t help but grin. He nodded at this pad. “You needed this thing pretty badly, I guess.”

“Simply to enter the Perimeter bunker, one needs a code sequence. If it is entered incorrectly, the system automatically arms itself and cannot be reset locally.”

“We’d better make sure we enter the right code, then,” Chapel said.

Nadia’s eyes flashed as if she’d just caught Chapel in something. “So you agree to come with me? To do this together?”

Chapel grinned. “Wouldn’t miss it. Though I’m still not clear on why this is a joint operation. You have the one-time pad — we would give it to you even if you said you wanted to run the rest of this mission yourself. So I’ll ask again. Why do you need us? Why me?”

“As a svidetel. A… witness, if nothing else,” Nadia told him.

“A witness?”

“If I am successful, if I deactivate Perimeter, there will be no visible sign. Nothing overt will happen. I could turn it off tomorrow, but if I then came back here and told you it was done—”

“We wouldn’t believe you,” Hollingshead said. “Exactly right. The president would have to assume you were lying. Attempting to deceive us so that we would relax our guard.”

“Indeed. Trust, but verify, yes? That is the policy. Once Perimeter is defeated, Agent Chapel can vouch that it was done, and our two countries can start talking about disarmament again. We are going to make the world a safer place,” Nadia said. “Even if only the three of us in this room ever know about it.”

“When do we leave?” Chapel asked.

Nadia was escorted out of the Pentagon by a pair of marine sergeants who weren’t told who she was. On her way out, she turned and glanced back at Chapel. She gave him a hopeful smile that he tried to return. Once she’d turned a corner, he closed the door again and turned to look at Hollingshead.

“You trust her?” he asked.

“I wasn’t without my doubts when she first came to me,” the director said. He laid a hand on Chapel’s artificial shoulder. “I vetted her personally. She’s definitely an agent of FSTEK, though like you she doesn’t show up on their official payroll. Her direct superior, Marshal Bulgachenko, gave a message to our ambassador in Moscow vouching for her. Beyond that she’s a mystery.”

“Is that good enough?”

“In this business if she wasn’t mysterious, I would worry. It’s the best we’re going to get, son.”

Chapel nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Of course, I don’t want you to think I’m selling her the shop, either. Just because the Russians are our allies now doesn’t mean we don’t spy on each other. Even if, as I suspect, she’s completely on the level, she’s got perfectly functional ears. She’ll take any chance she can get to learn things she isn’t supposed to know. It’s vital you don’t give anything away — for instance, she can’t learn about Angel. I know you’re used to relying on our friend while you’re in the field. That won’t fly this time. If she sees you talking to an invisible helper, she’s going to get curious.”

“So I’m going in blind?” Chapel asked. He relied on Angel for everything during a field operation — for intelligence, for insights, just for someone watching his back. Working without her would be a severe handicap.

“No. You’ll be able to contact her. You’ll just have to be discreet about it. As in all things.”

“I am a silent warrior,” Chapel said, quoting the motto of the intelligence service.

“I know you are, son. Fair enough. Are you all right with taking Asimova’s lead? This is going to be her operation. You’ll be playing second fiddle, I’m afraid.”

“Understood.”

Hollingshead nodded and turned to go. But then he stopped. He looked back at Chapel with a questioning eye. “There’s just one more thing. It’s, ah. I suppose this isn’t my place. But if it affects your operational efficiency—”

“Sir?”

Hollingshead frowned. “Back there, in the briefing. You seemed… angry. That’s not like you. A couple of times there, you got downright confrontational.”

“You have my apologies, sir.”

Hollingshead nodded. “Chapel. Son. I said I wasn’t going to talk about your personal life, and I’ll stick to that. But I need to know you’re truly ready for this. That if I send you into the field right now, your head will be squarely in the game. I expected to find you distracted and a little dazed, given the circumstances.”

“May I ask how I seem right now, sir?”

“Focused. Maybe a little too focused. You’re blocking out everything else but your work. If that becomes a problem—”

“It won’t,” Chapel said. He sounded curt even to his own ears. He hadn’t intended that.

Hollingshead flinched a little. He blinked. Straightened his cuffs. “It’s not too late,” he said. “I can still send someone else on this.”

It wasn’t a threat. Hollingshead was asking a question, Chapel knew. He was offering a lifeline.

Maybe he wasn’t in the perfect head space for a mission like this. But he thought he could get there. And the alternative — going back to an empty apartment in New York, checking his phone every thirty seconds for a call that wasn’t going to come — was unacceptable.

“I can do the job, sir,” he said, forcing a measure of calm into his voice. “I can do it right.”

“Hmm.” Hollingshead looked him right in the eye for an uncomfortably long time. Chapel made sure not to look away. Then the director shook his head as if clearing it of unpleasant thoughts and said, “Very well. Let’s talk about how we get you to Kazakhstan.”

Chapel would have left for the mission then and there, if he could. Unfortunately, the doctors had grounded him for a month after his bout with decompression sickness, and Hollingshead wouldn’t let him fly until it was safe. The intervening time wouldn’t be wasted. Papers had to be readied, cover stories established, travel arrangements made. The hardest part was that Chapel could do so little of it himself. Most of the preparations were made by low-level functionaries in the State Department who had no idea what they were working on, only that credentials for certain people had to be readied at the shortest possible notice. Chapel would never even meet the people working on his behalf.

Chapel’s official orders were to get some sleep. The best therapy for the bends was sleep and fluids. Chapel tried to maximize the latter, keeping a water bottle with him at all times, but he knew he couldn’t just sleep away the remaining time. He checked into a hotel in Washington — it was far too tempting to go back to New York, to try to find Julia and talk to her — and spent his days haunting various military archives.

A long couple of weeks at the Military Intelligence records center, huddled over computer screens and microfiche terminals, left him with a stiff back but little wiser. He looked for anything the DoD had on the Dead Hand system and came up with nothing of consequence. The best intelligence analysts of the Cold War had determined that, yes, the system existed and, yes, it was functional, but that was it — two things he hadn’t doubted since Hollingshead told him as much at the start of his briefing. U2 spy planes, reconnaissance satellites, even human intelligence — spies on the ground — had failed for thirty years to turn up anything concrete beyond those two facts. He did discover one thing new. In the 1970s, Project Azorian had recovered part of a Soviet nuclear submarine from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The Project’s findings had been limited — the sub broke into pieces while it was being hauled up — and as far as the public knew, nothing significant had been learned. In a top secret file, though, Chapel found out that Azorian had recovered the warhead from a Soviet ICBM and that for years afterward it had been carefully dismantled and every aspect of its hardware and software studied in secret American labs. There was a great deal of technical data there that Chapel couldn’t begin to comprehend, but one piece of paper near the back of the file indicated that an unexpected module was found inside the warhead’s control bus, little more than a single computer chip designed to accept commands received by shortwave radio. The module was completely isolated from the rest of the warhead’s electronics and had the capacity to arm, direct, and launch the missile by remote command. The scientists who found it believed it was there because the Soviet leadership didn’t trust their own people to launch the missiles when the time came. To Chapel, though, the presence of that module meant something else. It meant that Nadia’s story was true. That the Dead Hand — Perimeter, as he increasingly called it in his head — was completely capable of launching a nuclear strike, even now.

Everything Nadia had said in her briefing checked out, as far as it was possible to verify such things. He’d had no reason to suspect she was lying, but he was glad to have some confirmation.

That evening he took dinner at his hotel and then retired to his room. He switched on the television, not even really caring what was on. Eventually he fell asleep.

The next day he spent talking with Angel, on his phone, asking her to look into a few things for him. She said she would get back to him as soon as possible, but that the answers he wanted would take time. He went for a very long swim, something he always did when there were too many thoughts in his head.

He ate lunch, and then dinner, lingering over the meals.

He checked his phone a couple of hundred times. Nobody was calling him.

The next day he started again, looking at records that had been stamped secret and sealed for decades — whether or not there was any new information in them.

And the day after that he did it again.

The month he spent in Washington was hell. It was unbearable. He needed to be out in the field, away from memories and regrets. Away from any place Julia had ever been.

One day he went in for a medical examination. The doctors cleared him to fly. He did not waste any more time — there was a flight from Ronald Reagan International leaving that evening.

Hollingshead bought him a beer at a bar downtown, but he didn’t even finish it. He was too keyed up. It was time to go.

Forty thousand feet above the Atlantic, in the business class section of a 777, the lights had been turned down and all was quiet. Chapel couldn’t sleep. He’d never been good at sleeping on planes, and now he had enough on his mind to keep him awake anyway. He pulled on his headphones and switched on his tablet. Launched an audio player and loaded a language file. He was never going to get fluent in another language in the time frame of this operation, but he could at least pick up a few essentials.

“Qos keldiñiz! Welcome.” The voice on the recording was flat, unaccented. He’d hoped to use the excellent audio files the army used to train its translators, but Hollingshead had nixed that. Chapel and Nadia were undercover, posing as an American businessman and his Russian assistant. If customs officials checked Chapel’s tablet and found military software on it, there would be questions, and that was unacceptable.

“Tanisqanimizğa qwaniștimin! I am pleased to meet you.” So Chapel had been limited to commercially available language products, and finding one for Kazakh in a hurry had been difficult. He was forced to make do with a digitized version of an old language tape that was mostly just a list of common phrases and their English equivalents.

“Men tüsinbeymin. Sorry, I didn’t get that.” Chapel smiled to himself. He was going to need that one a lot. He remembered when he’d had to learn Pashto, back when he was first shipping out to Afghanistan. He’d thrown himself into that language, immersed himself in it night and day. “I don’t understand” had quickly become his most commonly used phrase.

“Osini jazip bere alasiz ba? Can you write that down for me?” He’d been a different person back then. So committed to his job. So desperate for a chance to head overseas and do his part, to track down Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice after 9/11. He hadn’t been a real soldier then, not quite. Years in Ranger school and then at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, where they trained him in intelligence work, had left him feeling more like a student than a warrior. He’d had both arms back then, too.

“Keșiriñiz! I beg your pardon.” For a brief while he’d gotten to be a real soldier. A silent warrior. It hadn’t lasted long enough. What was he now? He sometimes wondered. The jobs Hollingshead found for him weren’t classical intelligence work — no dead drops or clandestine meetings in parking garages, no miniaturized cameras up his sleeves. His work didn’t follow the comfortable pattern of military life, either. He didn’t report to a commanding officer. He didn’t get direct orders from anyone wearing a uniform. Now he was an invisible warrior, not just a silent one. Now he was flying to Bucharest in preparation for sneaking into a foreign country and carrying out illegal sabotage. Now he was the kind of person Julia couldn’t love anymore—

“Sizben bïlewge bola ma? Would you care to dance?”

Chapel flinched in his seat. That wasn’t the same voice he’d been listening to. It was sultry and velvety and sent a chill down his neck.

“Sorry to break in on the lesson, sweetie,” Angel said. “I just figured now would be a good time to check up on you. Don’t say anything; just lie back and listen, okay?”

Chapel glanced over at Nadia. She was curled up in her seat with the back reclined as far as it would go. Sleeping like a baby. She was even snoring — if she was faking it, she was doing an excellent job.

“Nobody can hear me,” Angel told him. “You hear that faint hiss in the background? That’s not just because the recording quality on your language file is so cruddy. I’m pumping some pink noise into this connection so that even the little bit of sound that leaks from your headphones won’t make sense to anyone listening. We’re safe, communicating like this. The director told me how important it was that we keep things on the quiet side.”

Chapel reached for the tablet. He tapped a few keys. As he’d expected, nothing appeared on the screen. He typed SHE’S ASLEEP and hit the enter key.

“You should be, too,” Angel told him. “Still, I don’t want to take any chances. I’ve got a preliminary report on those questions you asked me, in case you’re… curious. Don’t bother answering, baby — I know you are.”

Chapel tried not to grin. Good old Angel. She could make even a dry intelligence briefing sound like a naughty innuendo. He suspected she did it just to make sure he was paying attention, but he’d never complained.

“Nadia Asimova,” Angel said, “never mind the patronymic. Russian citizenship, born in Yakutia — Siberia, in other words, the exact geographic center of nowheresville. Daughter of a metallurgist and a doctor. Age thirty-one, a little on the young side for you but not ickily so.”

I’M NOT LOOKING TO DATE HER, Chapel typed.

“If men spent more time doing background checks on the women they chased,” Angel said, ignoring Chapel’s words, “they wouldn’t get in trouble so often. Anyway, it looks like she had a pretty normal childhood, except she showed an early talent for gymnastics, which is something they take very seriously in Russia. Got her name in the paper a few times for winning competitions. But she wasn’t just a jock. She did very well in school. Top of her class every year, and she even skipped two grades. At sixteen they whisked her away to the Bauman school in Moscow, which is the Russian equivalent of MIT. She started a six-year course in nuclear engineering.”

DIDN’T FINISH?

“Disappeared off the face of the earth,” Angel told him. “There are no black marks on her record — I mean, at all. Her faculty adviser was already looking to place her in a high-powered job during her second year, which means she wasn’t exactly struggling with her course load. But then the records just stop. No incomplete credits, no notice that she had dropped out, but no degree awarded, either. I think you know what that means. Somebody in the intelligence community over there took an interest and recruited her before she could finish her studies.”

FSTEK?

“Yes. FSTEK. Though I had a heck of time proving it. She isn’t on the books with any intelligence group, which is unusual even in Russia. No payroll records, no tax forms, no health insurance forms. The only mention of her anywhere since college is when she received a medal.”

A MEDAL?

“‘For Distinction in the Protection of the State Borders.’ It’s a medal usually reserved for members of the FSB — the organization formerly known as KGB — but it can be given to anyone in intelligence, or even a private citizen. There’s no indication why she got it. She’s too young for it to be a lifetime achievement award, though. She must have done something really valuable to the Fatherland. Something nobody wants to talk about, but they’re real glad it got done. There was a brief private ceremony at FSTEK headquarters in 2011 and then… she disappears again. Nothing since.”

NOTHING AT ALL?

“Not that I can find. It wasn’t easy getting what I have,” Angel said. “It’s not exactly like I can just call up the Kremlin and ask them for the personnel dossier on one of their secret agents.”

Chapel frowned to himself. You didn’t expect to turn up much on a spy — the Russian government would go to great lengths to keep Nadia’s operations secret, of course. But there should be something more if she was what she said she was — a “glorified file clerk.” The absence of evidence in this case suggested that Nadia was something like him. Invisible, and vital to Russian state security. THANKS FOR CHECKING, he typed.

“No problem, sugar. You know I’d do anything for you. I’ll be in touch,” Angel said.

“Joliñiz bolsin. Bon voyage.” It was the same flat voice from before, the voice of the language file. Chapel shut down his tablet and took the headphones off his ears.

Without the light of the screen, the dimness of the airplane cabin felt oppressive and chilly. Chapel huddled down in his seat. Then he turned and looked at Nadia where she was curled up and snoring, still.

She had pulled a blanket up over herself minutes after takeoff, but now it had slipped down off one shoulder and fallen partially to the floor. She was still dressed for July in New York, and the scarf she wore was just a thin scrap of silk. He saw her hugging herself for warmth.

He felt a sudden wave of tenderness toward this woman. She had saved his life in Miami, which was enough to make him feel something for her, but it wasn’t just that. She really was like him, wasn’t she? Sucked up into the black hole of intelligence before she even knew there were options. A brilliant childhood and then she just fell off the map. No. She’d been intentionally vanished. Taken away from her life because she was too valuable to waste on normal things like having a family, a career, a life.

He wondered if there had been someone waiting at home for her, someone who had dreaded every second she was away, not knowing if she was alive or dead. Someone who couldn’t handle it after a while and walked away from her.

Or maybe not. Maybe she’d never had anybody. Maybe there’d been no time.

Reaching over her, he lifted the blanket and pulled it back up to her chin. He’d been very careful not to touch her, but as he sat back down in his own seat he saw one of her eyes open and peer up at him. Like any good intelligence operative she had the ability to wake very quickly from sleep.

“Sorry,” he whispered. “You looked cold.”

She smiled at him and wriggled around for a second, pulling the blanket closer around herself. A moment later she was fast asleep again.

Damn.

He couldn’t believe he’d let himself get carried away like that. It had been inappropriate, for one thing, and, worse, he’d let his emotions rule him. Always a dangerous thing on an operation.

He sighed and sat back. Tried closing his eyes for a while.

It occurred him only hours later that Angel hadn’t told him the one thing he truly wanted to know — something that had nothing to do with Russian spies. She hadn’t told him whether Julia had called his phone or not.

Which meant she hadn’t.

Angel would have told him, otherwise.

Nadia’s plan was to travel to Uzbekistan, where she knew some people who could get them across the border into Kazakhstan. First, though, they had to make a quick stop in Romania to pick up the third and last member of the team.

At the customs desk in Bucharest, Chapel handed over their fake passports — the best the U.S. military could supply. He had to remove his artificial arm and let the officials x-ray it, even though it was clear they had no idea what they were looking at. A woman in a leather jacket frowned at the arm as it lay in a plastic bin, the lifeless hand dangling over the side. She pulled on latex gloves and then took out a pocket knife. Chapel protested as she extended the blade, but she said she had to stab the arm for security reasons. “What exactly would that prove?” he demanded, but that just made the woman look more stern than before.

Nadia pulled out a hundred-dollar bill and pushed it across the desk.

The customs woman put her knife away. “Welcome to Romania, Mr. Carlson,” she said, with a very warm smile.

As they walked toward the taxi rank, Chapel whispered to Nadia, “If I’d known it was that easy, I would have brought my gun, too.”

“Oh, no,” Nadia said. “There are very strict laws here about firearms. That bribe would have been ten times as much.” She pointed at the restrooms. “I need a moment,” she said. “Can you wait here with the luggage?”

Chapel nodded and sat down on a plastic bench marred by old cigarette burns. He watched the people flow by while he sat with their two small suitcases. Nadia didn’t return for ten minutes. When she did, she had completely changed.

She had ratted out her hair and put on a lot more makeup — far more than she’d worn on the party boat. She had kept her business slacks but rolled up the cuffs to show the pair of cheap sandals she’d slipped on. Her blouse was gone in favor of a halter top and a thin gold necklace with a crucifix. She looked ten years younger.

Chapel must have been staring wide-eyed, because she laughed when she came up to him. “Where we’re going,” she said, “we need to look the part.”

“Should I change?” he asked.

“No, you’ll be fine in that jacket. Just don’t smile, whatever you do.” She smirked at him again. “Come on. We have an appointment to keep.”

They took a bus to a nearby train station, one that had lockers big enough to hold their bags. Once those were secure, they went outside and stood in a long line for private transportation. As they waited for a taxi Chapel argued again that they didn’t need to be here. “This computer tech you want to hire — he’s just a security risk,” Chapel said.

“You don’t know him yet. He’s adorable. You want to just give him a hug, he mopes so,” Nadia told him.

“I’ll buy him a stuffed animal and we’ll leave him here.” He tried to think of a way of explaining to her they didn’t need a computer tech when he had access to Angel. There was no way her guy could beat Angel’s abilities. But how to say that without giving away Angel’s existence? “I know enough about computers for this job,” he said.

“Really. You know how to reprogram a Soviet legacy system from the eighties? In the Cyrillic alphabet? Don’t worry so, Jim. I’ve worked with this man before. He can be trusted. And anyway, I’m lead on this mission, am I not?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Chapel said. He had a feeling he wouldn’t have any trouble remembering not to smile. Between the jet lag and this security risk and the fact he hadn’t gotten much sleep on the plane, he was already in a foul mood.

Bucharest didn’t help.

He’d read it was called the Paris of the East, but the city Chapel saw wasn’t exactly a glittering metropolis. Every building seemed to be the same gray-yellow color — maybe the structures had been white once, but the million cars that puffed black exhaust had stained them like a coffee drinker’s teeth. Half the buildings were enormous brutalist office blocks; the other half sprawling palaces that looked like they were about to fall down. Some of them looked like they’d been built from cardboard and then sprayed with quick-setting concrete, they were in such bad shape. Construction cranes and scaffolding covered half the façades, apparently fixing up the buildings as fast as they could fall down.

Chapel couldn’t make sense of the place. There had to be money here — all that construction was costing somebody. But on the street level the city looked depressed and decrepit. He saw piles of trash on street corners, where mangy dogs fought over choice pieces of refuse. The people didn’t seem to take much notice. There were also a lot more Western Union offices than he thought a city like this probably needed. “What’s with all the wire transfer places?” he asked.

“Cybercrime,” Nadia said. “Romania’s principal export.”

Chapel turned to stare at her.

She shrugged. “Perhaps I overstate the case. But this is the European headquarters for e-mail scams and identity theft. There are little towns out in Transylvania — that’s northwest of here — where half the population is made up of arrows.”

“Arrows?”

“People who accept money in a scam, otherwise innocent people who sign for wire transfers and then hand over the money to gangsters. It makes it difficult to trace the money to the actual criminals. Cutouts, as we might say.”

Chapel glanced at the cabdriver, but he seemed oblivious. “Cutout” was an espionage term for the people who transferred information from one party to another without knowing anything themselves. It wasn’t the kind of term you should bandy about when you were working undercover on an espionage mission.

“Relax,” Nadia said. “Are you always so nervous on business?”

“It keeps me in one piece. Well, technically, two.”

She laughed. A lot of people got uncomfortable when he joked about his artificial arm, but not Nadia. Yet another reason to like her, even if he thought her attitude was far too relaxed for the serious work they were doing. Maybe, he thought, he should relax a little.

Maybe when Perimeter was shut down and he was home again.

“You’re tired,” she told him. “You didn’t sleep.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. He would very much like, he thought, to go lie down somewhere.

“Why don’t you head back to the airport and rest?” Nadia asked him. “I’ll collect our friend and bring him to you. It’s something I can do easily on my own.”

Chapel shook his head. “No,” he told her. “You wanted a svidetel, an American witness.” He gritted his teeth. Was she trying to shake him off her trail? “That means I see everything you do. When this is done, when I vouch for you, I need to be able to say I was part of everything.”

He was blatantly saying he didn’t totally trust her, but her reaction wasn’t what he expected. “Good,” she said, smiling. “I’ll be glad to have you along.”

The taxi took them through the various sectors of Bucharest, circling around toward the Strada Lipscani, the street Nadia had asked for. Chapel thought for a second the driver was taking them on a scenic route but Nadia explained they were just avoiding a sort of perpetual traffic jam that clogged the center of town. The route took them past the old princely court of Vlad the Impaler, though Chapel couldn’t see much of it from his window. Eventually the taxi dropped them off on a long street lined with big gray-yellow buildings that Chapel did have to admit looked a little like Parisian houses. One of them had a huge mural on its side of a blue sky full of birds.

They got out and Nadia paid the driver in leis, the local currency. Nadia must have brought them with her — he hadn’t seen her exchange any money at the airport. They headed down the block, passing an endless series of bars and nightclubs that were shuttered up for the morning. Half the places seemed to have English names — the Gin Factory, the Bastards Club — and the rest had names so strewn with accent marks and diacritics that he couldn’t even guess how they were pronounced. “Here,” Nadia said, outside of what looked like an unexceptional coffee bar. They stepped through the glass doors into blaring hip-hop so loud it made the air pulse. A dozen or so patrons were lounging on couches and low chairs, while a bored-looking attendant stood behind a counter lined with samovars. Nadia went up and grabbed a cup of tea without asking or paying. She spoke to the attendant, but the girl just sneered and went back to looking out the windows.

Nadia didn’t seem bothered by the attitude. She headed for a chair and plunked herself down, throwing one long leg over an arm of the chair. She left the teacup sitting on the other arm and pulled out her phone and started texting.

Chapel saw immediately why she thought he didn’t need to change his clothes. Half the patrons in the shop looked like her, or like male equivalents in T-shirts, American jeans, and flip-flops. They lounged across the chairs like sitting up had gone out of style. Standing near or behind each of them was a guy in a suit with the same haircut Chapel wore — short and vaguely military. The men in the suits flashed gold chains and big, chunky rings, but otherwise Chapel fit right in.

Bodyguards, he thought. The men in the suits were there to protect the casually dressed kids. Some of the bodyguards drank tea. One was smoking a very nasty cigar. None of them spoke to anyone else. Instead they traded tough-guy looks that never went anywhere, while the kids ignored them, too busy working their phones.

Chapel very much wanted to sit down, but he had to maintain his cover. Maybe one of the other bodyguards would sit, he thought. Maybe that would make it okay.

“This guy knows we’re coming?” he asked.

“Konyechno,” Nadia said, her voice almost drowned out by the blaring music. “Be still. Nobody talks here.”

“I noticed. Was he supposed to be here to meet us?”

“Yes. But that’s never how things work out, is it? Just hold your horses, as you say. And be quiet.”

Chapel frowned. He stared at the posters on the walls, advertising various music events. One showed Barack Obama wearing Kanye West’s trademark louvered sunglasses. He couldn’t read the names of the bands.

As tired as he was, he came very close to falling asleep on his feet. He barely noticed when a long car pulled up in front of the tea shop and two blond men got out. When they came in through the door, he stiffened, but so did all the other bodyguards.

The two newcomers were dressed in suits, but they weren’t wearing any jewelry. One wore horn-rimmed glasses so smudged Chapel wondered if he could see anything. The other one had a neatly groomed mustache with just a hint of silver in it. He looked around the room, sizing everyone up, then came to stand in front of Nadia and Chapel. Without even glancing at her, he spoke to Chapel.

“You ask for Bogdan?” he asked. “Yes? Yes?”

Nadia sat up and smiled. “He sent you?”

“Yes, yes, he sent me, and my friend. We take him to you now, okay? Yes?”

There were a lot of things Chapel didn’t like about the situation, but he looked around for cues before he did anything. This could just be the way business was done in Bucharest. Nadia didn’t seem too concerned. But one of the bodyguards, a big guy with a dollar sign hanging from a golden chain, was watching the two blonds very carefully. His hands kept squeezing into fists, and then releasing. He knew who these newcomers were.

Chapel caught the bodyguard’s eye. Maybe he could call on professional courtesy. He raised an eyebrow.

The bodyguard shrugged and started to look away. Then he shook his head in a gesture Chapel understood immediately. These two were bad news, the kind you definitely did not want to get involved with.

Nadia was standing up, reaching for her purse. Chapel took a step out from behind her chair, and the blond with glasses moved like he was Chapel’s reflection in a mirror, curving in to intercept him. As he did so his jacket swung open just a little, just enough for Chapel to see what was underneath.

“Is okay, yes. We take you,” Mustache said. “We go now. Yes?”

“Gun,” Chapel said.

Nadia reached into her purse, but Mustache grabbed her arm. She had just been trying to put her phone away. Now it chimed and everyone froze.

Mustache tried to keep Nadia from looking at the phone, but he failed. “This is from Bogdan. He says he’s on his way.”

“Yes, is fine, he says is fine, yes,” Mustache said.

But Chapel was already moving.

In Ranger school, Chapel had an instructor named Bigelow who taught him everything he knew about unarmed fighting. For months he had trained daily, learning all the special reversals and inversions and strikes, until he thought he could take anybody alive in a fight. Then one day Bigelow showed up with a paintball gun. He’d stood at the far end of the training room and told Chapel to use everything he knew, to come right at Bigelow with every deadly technique he’d been taught, but to stop the second he was hit by a paintball.

Chapel tried twelve different techniques. He tried feints and dodges and sweeps, tried to use the room’s furniture for cover or as improvised missile weapons, tried to trick Bigelow by pretending to surrender so he could grab the paint gun away after Bigelow lowered his guard.

Each and every time, Chapel had come away with a painful blue splotch on his uniform. “We’ve got a problem,” Bigelow said, when he finally called an end to the session. “There’s no way you’re going to win this. The lesson I’m supposed to teach you today is that up against a man with a gun, you can’t win if you’re unarmed. You have to put your hands up and surrender.”

Chapel, breathing hard and itchy with sweat, was pissed off enough at that point not to say “sir” and leave it at that. “How many shots does it take most people to learn that lesson?”

“Three. And that’s the problem. You’re a smart guy, Chapel. But for some reason when you’re beat, you get dumb. You get too dumb to just give up.”

In the tea shop in Bucharest, Chapel watched the gun swing at the hip of the blond guy with the glasses and he got real dumb, real fast.

Mustache already had Nadia by the arm. He was going to force her out into the street, into his car. Chapel could worry about that later. He saw Glasses start reaching for his pistol and knew what he had to do. Glasses was reaching across his body, using his right arm to go for the pistol on his left hip. Chapel grabbed the right arm with both of his hands and forced it downward, past the gun, and at the same time he lashed out with one foot to sweep Glasses’s legs.

The blond guy was fast enough to see the sweep coming and he took a step backward, but that was exactly what Chapel wanted. It put Glasses off balance, even as Chapel was still yanking downward on his arm. Glasses had no choice but to bend at the waist, while trying to get his arm free from Chapel’s grip. Eventually he figured out he could reach for the pistol with his left hand, which was still free.

Chapel couldn’t let him do that. He danced backward, pulling Glasses with him, and the guy went down on his face, down on the floor using his left hand to try to catch himself. He recovered quickly and reached for the pistol again with his left hand, so Chapel had to stomp on his left wrist, pinning it to the floor. That left Chapel in a bad position, though, his hands and one of his legs committed to keeping Glasses from moving. There was still Mustache to contend with — if Mustache let go of Nadia, he could come at Chapel with anything, any kind of attack, and it would connect. Holding Glasses’s right arm up in the air and pinning his left arm with his foot, Chapel looked up, expecting to see a fist — or maybe a knife — come at him from the side. If Mustache had a gun, too, this was all over.

It turned out he didn’t need to worry.

Nadia had one hand on the floor, pressing down to add leverage to the kick she’d aimed at Mustache’s chin. In that position she looked like a Cossack dancer, which might have made Chapel smile if he wasn’t so busy holding Glasses down. With just a sandal on her foot her attack couldn’t do much damage — Bigelow had never thought much of kicking attacks under any circumstances — but it did have one effect, which was to make Mustache rear back, his face pointed at the ceiling, his arms out at his sides for balance.

Nadia dropped to the floor and spun around — like a break dancer now — her legs stretched out to sweep Mustache off his feet. He went backward into the chair she’d been sitting in a minute before as if he just wanted to take a seat and watch her move.

Chapel wouldn’t have blamed him. He’d never seen anyone move like Nadia just had, not outside of a Kung Fu movie.

She spun around on her shoulder and then twisted herself up into a kneeling position in front of the chair. With both hands she reached under the bottom of the chair and tilted it backward until it slammed into the floor, leaving Mustache staring at the ceiling. She vaulted over the chair and landed with one shin across Mustache’s throat. Even over the blaring hip-hop music Chapel could hear Mustache gurgle out a scream.

It had been about two seconds since Chapel saw Glasses’s gun. He was panting like a horse and he had no idea what to do next. Nadia’s hair hadn’t even moved. She gave Chapel a wicked smile.

He glanced down at the gun, still hanging on Glasses’s hip. Nadia dashed over and grabbed the gun out of its holster. She took one quick look at Mustache — who was not moving — and ran for the door.

“Crap,” Chapel said. He had no choice but to follow her. He stomped on Glasses one last time and dashed out of the shop. Behind him he heard someone scream — maybe the girl who ran the counter. He didn’t turn around to look.

Outside was bright sunlight and air that stank of diesel fumes and movement in the street. Chapel forced himself to focus, to see what was going on. A car was roaring up the street toward him, a black sedan full of men in suits. Most of them were blond.

Not that way, then. He turned to look down the street—

And saw an almost identical car coming from that direction.

“There,” Nadia said, pointing across the street. She started running again, and Chapel headed after her. The far side of the street was one long stretch of gray-yellow architecture, columns and windows and doorways but strangely no signs or glass storefronts. The building there must have been standing since before the big construction boom. Chapel saw one doorway lit up by sunlight in a way that seemed wrong, as if the sun were coming from behind the door. Nadia raced through it and disappeared. Chapel hurtled after her, having no idea if he was about to slam into a piece of plateglass or a locked door or what.

Instead, he found himself emerging into a vast open pit of reddish dirt topped by blue sky. He glanced around and saw that the building he’d passed through was nothing but a façade, a thin veneer of bricks that must have once been the front wall of a palatial building. Now it was just a free-standing wall, held up by wooden props, a mask to hide the giant construction site beyond.

Ahead of him he saw the base of a multistory crane, a couple of green construction vehicles, a row of portable toilets. The far side of the lot was dominated by a massive pile of tailings and broken bricks, whatever remained of the demolished building. Thick sections of pipe, each a yard wide, were stacked in a pyramid near the far wall.

Behind him he heard shouting and knew that the blonds were in hot pursuit. He raced after Nadia, only to collide with her as she stopped and turned to look back as well. She put one arm across Chapel’s chest to hold him back and shouted, “Get down!”

Chapel knew an order when he heard it. He dropped to a crouch and she leaned over his back, firing her pistol three times at the doorway they’d come through. Chapel twisted his head around and saw plumes of dust lift from the back of the façade, her three shots catching the empty door frame. He thought he saw someone peering through the doorway, but if he did, they were smart enough to pull back, out of view.

“I’m a crap shot,” Nadia told him. “You want this?”

He grabbed the pistol out of her hand. Slipped on the safety and shoved it in his pocket. “A shootout back here is the wrong play,” he told her, keeping his eyes on the doorway. Nobody was dumb enough to show themselves there. “If we kill someone here, even in self-defense, there’s no way we get out of Romania with the mission intact.”

“Konyechno,” she said.

“We have to move,” he told her. He straightened up and ran toward the back of the lot, hoping there would be some exit back there. There was, but it was useless. A big gate large enough to drive a truck through, chain link twenty feet high and topped with razor wire. It was also locked up tight with a massive padlock. No way he could break through there. It seemed the only way in or out of the lot was through the empty doorway back on the Strada Lipscani. Back where the entire blond suit gang was gathered, waiting for them to show themselves.

They could try to hide — but to what point? The blonds would just come into the lot and search for them, and even if Chapel was willing to shoot his way out, he would run out of bullets before they ran out of men.

“Come on,” Nadia told him, grabbing at his hand.

Well, she was the lead on this operation. He followed her as she ran toward the green construction vehicles. He ran faster when a bullet tore up the red dirt near his feet.

Apparently the suits had grown tired of waiting.

“Cover me,” Nadia called.

Chapel spun around until he was running backward — dangerous over the broken ground of the construction pit, but at least it meant he was facing the doorway. He saw a flash of blond hair and snapped off a shot that hit the base of the doorway. The blond hair disappeared again.

Behind him he heard electrical sparks jumping and then the growl of a heavy-duty diesel engine. He glanced back over his shoulder.

“Get on,” Nadia said.

She had hot-wired one of the construction vehicles, a miniature bulldozer. Chapel ran over and jumped onto the back of the thing, sitting down on its propane fuel tank and holding on to the roll cage. He fired another shot back at the doorway, barely even aiming, just to keep the men at bay.

With a lurch and a roar the bulldozer started forward, its blade coming up in front until Chapel doubted that Nadia could even see where she was going. She punched the throttle and he was nearly thrown clear, but he managed to hang on as she rolled toward the stack of giant pipes against the far wall of the lot.

“Wait, Nadia—” he had time to shout. If she heard him, she didn’t show any sign. She definitely didn’t slow down.

The dozer’s blade crashed into the pipes, the impact nearly throwing Chapel off. He did drop the gun, though he managed to grab it before he lost it completely. The pipes rang like bells and grated together.

Nadia threw the machine into reverse, backed up, and rammed the pipes again.

The pipes were held together in their stack by a thick plastic strap. It snapped with the second impact, and suddenly nothing was holding them back. They rattled and crashed together, rolling over one another, right into the gate. The gate wobbled and twisted under its own weight and started to open.

A coil of razor wire at the top of the gate came loose, then, and started to unravel and fall. Chapel looked up and saw one end come spearing toward him, the head of a silver snake striking right at his face. He rolled over to one side as the wire slashed down across his jacket sleeve, one barb tearing deep into the silicone flesh on his artificial arm.

With a great whoomp of displaced air the gate fell outward, off its posts. It crashed into the street beyond, burying parked cars. Chapel didn’t hear any screams — hopefully there’d been no pedestrians back there.

Nadia didn’t let up on the gas. She rumbled up over the fallen gate and into the street beyond, where horns blared and Chapel heard the distinctive crump of metal colliding with metal. The little bulldozer hit a curb or a buried car or who knew what. It started to turn over, capsizing in slow motion. The two of them just had time to jump clear.

Behind him, the blonds were spilling into the construction lot. A couple of them had guns up and at the ready.

“Come on,” Nadia shouted, and Chapel looked over to see her standing on the roof of a wrecked car parked by the sidewalk. The bulldozer blade was imbedded — nearly fused — with the car’s doors.

The big pipes had kept rolling into the street, knocking aside anything they touched. They had piled up against the row of shops on the far side, smashing windows and decapitating parking meters.

Already a crowd was gathering in the street. Chapel hoped the owners of the wrecked cars and shops weren’t among them. He raced after Nadia as she wove her way between cars stopped in the street, dozens of them crammed into a narrow little lane. Drivers slammed their horns and shook their fists and threw their hands in the air in impotent rage.

“Our enemies will not bring a car through this,” she said, grabbing for Chapel’s hand. “Nor will they dare shoot with so many witnesses.”

That last part sounded like wishful thinking. Chapel let her lead him down the street and around a corner. He couldn’t see their pursuers, but he was sure they were still coming. “This way,” Nadia whispered, and slipped down an alleyway between two buildings. She took a left on the next street, a right on yet another. She came to a flight of stairs and hurried down, nearly jumping onto the landing below.

In the dark of the stairs, she grabbed Chapel and pushed him through a door, then slipped in behind him and closed the door behind her. The space they were in was nothing more than a custodial closet, a narrow space lined with shelves. It was so small he could feel her pressed up against him. He was glad to see she was finally breathing hard.

“Two minutes,” she whispered. “If there’s no sign of them—”

“Who?” Chapel asked. “Who were those guys?”

“I have no idea,” Nadia said. In the dark closet he couldn’t see her face. “Bogdan is… involved with some people, some criminals, but—”

“Hold on,” Chapel said. “You said he was a computer expert. Then you said this was the capital of cybercrime. Are we hiring a crook?”

“I do not know that word,” she said, her Russian accent suddenly much thicker. It wasn’t much of a dodge. Maybe she thought she was being funny. “Please be quiet. Am listening for enemies.”

He shook his head and let it go.

“One minute,” she said. He kept quiet. “Now.”

She opened the closet door and Chapel followed her out, down another flight of stairs into what he realized was a subway station. She bought a pair of tickets from a machine and handed him one. They headed through the turnstiles and down to a platform, where a train was just coming in. Nadia stopped and watched the windows of the train cars as they rocketed by.

“Third car, second door,” she told him, and ran toward the train as it slowed to a stop. The doors pulled open and people started flooding out, swarming around them in their haste to reach the exit. Chapel saw a very tall, very thin man wearing clunky headphones start to step out of the car. Nadia pushed toward him and said something Chapel couldn’t hear, and the two of them stepped into the car.

Chapel fought his way through the people and managed to get on the train before the doors closed again. He pushed through the commuters until he found Nadia and the tall guy sitting down, whispering back and forth.

They looked up at Chapel as he approached.

“Meet Bogdan Vlaicu,” Nadia said, as Chapel leaned over them. “Our third.”

Bogdan looked like a bundle of sticks in an old gray coat. Long, mousy hair fell down over his eyes and hid much of his face. The headphones he wore were hooked up to a tiny MP3 player wrapped in layers of ancient duct tape. Over one shoulder he carried a canvas satchel.

He barely glanced at Chapel during the long subway ride, acknowledging him with a nod of his head and then turning back to his whispered conversation with Nadia.

When they reached their destination, Nadia led them out of the subway and to the train station where they’d stowed their bags. They found an empty waiting room and hunkered down. “The plan,” she said, “was to fly to Tashkent from here. But our plane tickets aren’t for another six hours. I suggest we get out of Romania as soon as possible.”

“Agreed,” Chapel said. “We drew a lot of attention back there. The police will want us for questioning, at the very least. So we go by train?”

Nadia agreed. “A train to Istanbul, in Turkey. That puts a fair amount of distance between us and this trouble, and we can get a flight to Uzbekistan from there. Bogdan,” she said, “are you ready? You made the preparations I asked you to make?”

“Yes, it is done. Yes,” Bogdan said. He sat down on a bench and stared straight ahead, one hand clicking the buttons of his MP3 player repeatedly, as if it were a nervous habit.

Chapel pulled the headphones out of Bogdan’s ears to get his attention. “Do you have a passport?” he asked.

“Some,” Bogdan replied. He reached inside his satchel and took out a handful of them. “Do you want I am Croatian, Latvian, or Czech?”

Chapel took the passports and riffled through each of them. “This one looks the most authentic. Latvian,” he said, handing the rest of them back to the Romanian. Then he unzipped his own bag and took out a bag full of shampoos and travel-sized soap. The bag had a hidden compartment where he’d put two fresh passports, one for him and one for Nadia. He leafed through them. “Your name is Svetlana Shulkina now,” he said.

Nadia wrinkled her nose. “That is the name of a mail-order bride.”

“I’m Jeff Chambers,” he said, ignoring her. He zipped the old passports, the ones they’d used entering Romania, into the hidden compartment. “I’ll go get our train tickets — in a minute. First I want to talk about what the hell just happened.”

Nadia smiled at him. “We got away,” she said.

Chapel shook his head. “There was no reason for us to draw so much attention, not this early in the mission. You think they were looking for Bogdan?” He turned to the Romanian hacker. The man had his headphones back on. Chapel removed them again, expecting Bogdan to protest, but he didn’t. “Bogdan, who’s looking for you?”

The Romanian just shrugged.

Chapel wanted to grab him by the lapels and throw him up against the wall until he gave a proper answer. He fought back that urge. “Are you in some kind of trouble?” he asked.

Bogdan shrugged again. “Usually.”

Chapel turned to Nadia with a skeptical look. “You’re sure this is the guy we want?”

“Absolutely. He and I worked together once before. Didn’t we, Bogdan?”

“Yes,” the Romanian said. He was putting his headphones back on.

“Ignore all of… this,” she said, waving at Bogdan to indicate what Chapel was looking at. “The first computers Bogdan ever saw — that a lot of Romanian kids ever saw — were looted from Soviet-era office buildings here, old Vector-06Cs and East German U880s. They were usually broken and outdated, so the kids had to teach themselves to rebuild them from parts. Bogdan was always a prodigy. He made a name for himself back in the early nineties by upgrading computers to run pirated copies of Western games. Now people hire him to port their old business software over to Western operating systems. He can write code for the ES EVM standard in his sleep.”

Chapel didn’t understand much of that, but it sounded appropriately technical. There was one problem, though. “I take it most of his clients are people who don’t want their data uploaded to Facebook.”

“Konyechno,” Nadia said. “He works for gangsters and thieves, yes. They hire him because he is very good, and because he does not talk.” She laughed. “He’s exactly who we want, ‘Jeff.’ The kind of man who will fly halfway across the world to do some computer work with no questions asked for fifty thousand U.S. dollars in cash — and never tell a soul about his adventure. Did you think I hadn’t thought this through? I’ve been planning this operation for years.”

“I’m sorry,” Chapel said. “I didn’t mean to suggest—”

He stopped because Nadia had turned her back and was pulling her halter top over her head. She grabbed a fresh shirt from her luggage and pulled it on, stuffing the halter top back inside. She ran her fingers through her hair to try to straighten it back out and then used an alcohol wipe to remove most of her makeup.

“Impressive,” Chapel said. “You look completely different, now.”

“I’m Siberian. Most people think I look Mongolian, or maybe Korean,” she said. “Around here I stand out, so I need to work the accessories. The farther east we get on this trip, the less conspicuous I’ll be and I won’t need all the costume changes.” She smiled at Chapel. “A gentleman might have turned his back.”

Chapel felt his cheeks grow hot. “I’m sorry, I, I forgot, I just—”

She gave him a forgiving smile. “Nothing you haven’t seen before, I think. Now, I believe you were going to go buy us some tickets?”

“Yeah. Yeah… I’ll do that,” Chapel said. He headed for the door of the waiting room but stopped before he went through. “By the way,” he said. “You were really something back there. Using that bulldozer to escape was inspired.” He thought about the way she’d taken down Mustache, as well. “Pretty good for a glorified file clerk.”

“There’s more than one way to deal with bureaucracy,” she told him. She reached around her neck and unhooked the crucifix she’d been wearing.

Bogdan looked up, suddenly coming back to life. “Can I have this, if you don’t want anymore?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said, handing the necklace to him.

“Are you a Christian, Bogdan?” Chapel asked.

“No,” he said. “I just want all help I can get.”

Nadia had said she’d worked with Bogdan before. Judging by what Chapel had seen so far, maybe he knew what he was getting into. Chapel was pretty sure he didn’t.

The toilet on the train to Istanbul — the first train they’d been able to catch out of Bucharest — looked like it had been made of a single piece of aluminum. It stank of bleach, and the toilet tissue had the consistency of cheap wax paper. But the door closed and latched securely, and the noise of the train meant no one would overhear Chapel’s communication with Angel.

“What exactly have you been getting up to, sugar?” she asked, as soon as the call went through.

“Don’t tell me we made the news sites,” Chapel said, his heart sinking.

“No, nothing like that — there’s nothing about it anywhere that I can find in the mass media. The Romanian police haven’t issued any alerts, either, which means you’re off their radar. But the State Department — the U.S. State Department, I mean — got a call today asking to verify your passports. They went through just fine, but we had to turn over your names and your flight itineraries.”

That could have gone much worse, Chapel decided. The names on the passports he and Nadia had used were false, and the plane tickets they weren’t using would send any pursuers off on the wrong track. It still worried him, though. “A bunch of guys tried to scoop us up in a tea shop on the Strada Lipscani,” he told Angel. “We got away. We thought they were looking for this computer tech Nadia likes so much, this Bogdan Vlaicu. He’s apparently in trouble with the local mob so I’m assuming it was organized crime. You think they might have requested that passport check?”

“Eastern European gangsters usually don’t get a direct line to the State Department,” Angel said, mirroring his own thoughts. “Though they might have people in the local government on their payroll. I’ll look into this, see who made the request. Most likely it was the local police. If it was, it’s strange they wouldn’t issue an APB for the two of you, though. Maybe they have a reason to keep this quiet.”

“Were you able to see any of what happened?” he asked.

“No. I can only see what wired security cameras see, or what our reconnaissance satellites pick up. There weren’t any sats over your horizon at the time. There were some weird traffic reports and a couple posts on Twitter about a shooting in that district, but that was it.”

“Two of the gangsters came into the tea shop, and they knew why we were there. We took them down.” Chapel was silent for a moment as he thought. “You should have seen Nadia in a fight. She was all over the place, doing high kicks and dodges I didn’t think were possible. She looked like Mary Lou Retton at her prime.”

“We know she was a gymnast when she was a kid,” Angel pointed out.

“This was… something else.” Something that kept nagging at Chapel. “I’ve seen moves like that before, somewhere, but I can’t remember where. Maybe in a movie.” He filed that question away for future consideration and moved on. “As for the men who attacked us, they were pretty well organized. I’d say a dozen men total, in three cars. They were all blond, which didn’t strike me as too weird at the time, but now that I say it out loud it makes me wonder. I don’t remember seeing a lot of blonds in Bucharest otherwise.”

He listened to Angel tap away at her keyboard as she looked something up. “It’s not a common hair color there, according to the Internet. Would you believe there’s actually maps showing what percentage of the population has what hair color?”

“It’s the Internet. There’s probably a map of what country has the most nose rings.”

Angel giggled. “I’m looking at a map of blonds right now. Eighty percent of Scandinavians are blond, did you know that?”

“These guys weren’t Scandinavian,” Chapel said. “They had Slavic accents. And judging by their grammar—” He stopped for a second, thinking. “Angel, they were speaking English.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Not well, but it was English. It didn’t occur to me at the time. But they came straight to me, speaking English.”

“So they made you for an American.”

“Yeah,” Chapel said. “Damn. I thought I was fitting in.” He thought about how easily Nadia had changed her appearance, and how she had elicited no stares or questioning looks in the tea shop. How well she’d handled the escape, even knowing exactly when Bogdan’s train would show up. “I’m out of my element here. Plunk me down in Afghanistan and nobody would mistake me for a local, but at least I would know how to act and how to not draw too much attention to myself. In Bucharest I might have jeopardized the mission.” He shook his head. “Maybe I shouldn’t have been the one to—”

“Stop thinking like that right now, sugar,” Angel said. “The director approved you for this. There’s nobody he trusts more.”

“Yeah.” Chapel sighed deeply and rubbed his face with his hands. “Okay. Well, let’s focus on what we do best. Have you found anything on Bogdan?”

“A lot more than I found on Nadia,” Angel said. “Bogdan Vlaicu, alias Aurel21. That’s his handle, the hacker nickname he uses on message boards and blog posts. He has a pretty big reputation online as somebody who can break into supposedly secure eCommerce databases. Arrested a couple of times on counts of credit card number running and for being a public nuisance — specifically, for taking over a Romanian political party website and replacing it with hard-core pornography.”

“Seriously? This is the guy Nadia thinks is so vital to our mission?”

Angel laughed. “He may be an idiot, but if he is, he’s an idiot savant. He’s never gone to jail, even when he bragged online about his crimes. The Romanian government cut him a deal each time they arrested him. If he agreed to take down some real cybercriminals — money launderers, online drug dealers — they’d let him off. Hacking the hackers, in other words.”

Angel couldn’t keep the grudging respect out of her voice. Chapel knew that her own story wasn’t that different. Though her real name, her location, and even what she looked like was kept deeply classified, even from him, she’d once told him how she’d ended up working for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Back when she was just a teenager (how long ago that had been was, again, secret), she had thought it would be fun to hack into the Pentagon’s servers. Instead of going to jail for the rest of her life, she’d ended up whispering sexily into Chapel’s ear. To her, Bogdan might seem like a fellow traveler.

“The guy has chops,” Angel said. “He shut down one of the biggest dark net pirated software operations back in 2009 with a simple denial-of-service attack. Basically he flooded the website with fake orders, hundreds of thousands of them coming in every second. That’s nothing, that’s hacking 101, but it was just a smoke screen. When the criminals shut down their servers to stop the attack, they switched to a backup server for their internal e-mail and even their phones — maybe they thought that the Romanian government couldn’t tap into their VoIP connections. Normally they would have been right about that. But Bogdan had secretly hacked the backup server even before he began the denial-of-service attack, so every word they said over the server they thought was still secure got logged and recorded. He took down dozens of cybercriminals in one day, including a guy who was on Interpol’s most wanted list.”

“That might explain why the local gangsters want him dead,” Chapel said, nodding. “And why he always looks like somebody just ran over his childhood dog.”

Angel wasn’t done, though. “In 2011, he got in trouble again, this time some pretty deep doo-doo. He anonymously posted a document online that claimed the prime minister of Romania had plagiarized his doctoral thesis back in grad school. That doesn’t sound like much, but… I won’t go into the details of Romanian politics, but there was already a feud going between two rival political parties, and it looked like this document might take down the prime minister and his party, whether it was true or not. There were riots in the street, and some people got hurt. It didn’t help when further charges of corruption kept popping up. The whole mess still hasn’t been worked out.”

“Bogdan doesn’t mind stepping on powerful toes, huh?”

“He was arrested for fomenting political unrest. They were ready to throw the book at him. I mean, send him away to prison for life and never let him touch a computer again. But then — damn. Chapel, you’re going to sense a theme here.”

“You’re about to tell me he disappeared.”

“Yeah,” Angel replied. “Yeah. Just… fell off the map. The charges were never dropped, but they were also never prosecuted. There’s no record of the case anywhere in the legal databases after a certain date, and nothing whatsoever in Bogdan’s file. He just turned into a ghost. You know, the funny thing there is—”

“The funny thing is that was the same year Nadia got her medal,” Chapel said, guessing what she was about to say.

“Uh. Yeah,” Angel said. “How did you know that?” Sometimes he could still surprise her.

“She said that she’d worked with Bogdan before. Whatever secret thing she was doing that got her that medal, he must have been part of it. She got him out of trouble in exchange for his help.”

“There’s no evidence for any of that. Nothing you could ever prove. But as a working hypothesis, it makes sense.”

Chapel nodded to himself. “Okay. Thanks, Angel. It’s good to know who I’m working with, even if that means I’m not allowed to know who they are. Is there anything else you have for me?”

Angel was silent for a while before answering. “There are no new messages on your voice mail, if that’s what you mean.” No messages from Julia, in other words. “Chapel, if you want to talk about—”

“Not right now,” he said.

Chapel walked back to the sleeper compartments where Bogdan and Nadia were, passing by a series of windows that showed the countryside rushing past. They were in Bulgaria by now, he estimated, though it was hard to say from what he saw. The sun was an hour away from setting, and it hung like a golden ball over endless fields that stretched away in every direction. In the distance he could just see the Balkan mountains like a pale smudge on the horizon, but they could have been anything. He could have been looking at the American Midwest, or the wheat fields of the Ukraine, or any of a hundred other identical views from a hundred different countries.

It was hard to remember just how far he was from home, though in another way, he couldn’t get it off his mind. He was out of his depth here. Nadia knew the local customs and manners, knew how to work a covert operation in this part of the world. But Chapel was just along for the ride. He wasn’t even her hired muscle — it was clear she could take care of herself. He really was just here to witness her operation.

He hated feeling like a fifth wheel. Third wheel in this case — Nadia needed Bogdan badly enough to risk getting shot for him.

Chapel took one last look at the fields and sighed and pushed through the automatic door to the sleeper car.

They’d taken two compartments, one for Nadia and one for Bogdan and Chapel to share. He was not surprised to find the two of them in the shared compartment. Bogdan was sitting on the floor, rocking his head back and forth. Maybe to the music in his headphones, but it made him look like he was suffering from some kind of neurological condition. He didn’t even look up as Chapel came in. He was tapping the keys of his MP3 player over and over, as if it were a nervous tic.

Nadia was sprawled out on one of the bunks, leafing through a magazine with a lot of splashy color photographs. It looked like a gossip rag, but it was written in a language Chapel didn’t recognize, much less read. She looked up at him with a big smile when he came inside.

He took his bag down from the overhead rack and rummaged around inside until he found what he needed. Then he took off his jacket and studied the tear in the left sleeve. It had been ripped during their escape from the construction site and it looked like the damage was too severe to repair with just a simple sewing kit. “I liked this jacket,” he said, glancing up to meet Nadia’s eye.

“You dress up well,” she said, giving him a sympathetic mock frown. “We can get you another one in Istanbul. We have a long layover there.”

He nodded and stuck one finger through the hole. “Yeah. I doubt there are any international alerts out for a man with a torn jacket, but you never know.” He folded the ruined jacket up and put it on the empty bunk, then started unbuttoning his shirt. “So you’re a Siberian, huh?” he asked, mostly just for something to say. To draw attention away from what he was about to do.

She tilted her head to one side. “Ya Sibiryak, da,” she confirmed. “And proud of it.”

“You said back in the train station that you were Siberian. I’ll admit, you’re not what I expected a Russian agent to look like.”

Nadia laughed. “What, I am not blond and statuesque, with big breasts and sad eyes? I get that a lot. Many people think I’m not Russian. But they forget that only a little bit of Russia is west of the Urals, and European. The vast majority of the Fatherland is in Asia, and many, many Russians look like I do.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything like—”

She waved away his protest. “I’m not offended. I would imagine that to Americans, Siberia might as well be on the far side of the moon.”

Chapel couldn’t help but grin. “Growing up, we were always taught Siberia was where they sent you if they wanted to forget you ever existed. We even use it — and I’m sorry if this sounds mean — but we use ‘siberia’ as a term to refer to, say, the worst table in a restaurant where nobody wants to sit. The table closest to the toilets.”

Nadia shook her head in resignation. “A lot of Russians might use it the same way. Many Soviets were exiled there, and many more forced to move there for work. They consider it the end of the world. But others, those born there, love the place. I was born in Yakutia — what they call the Sakha Republic, now.”

“You get back there much?”

She sighed and put down her magazine. “Let me guess. Your bosses asked you to find out everything you can about me. So they can make a dossier.”

“Just making small talk,” he told her.

She laughed. “I take no offense, even if you lie to me. We’re in the same line of work; we know the routine. We keep our eyes open and our mouths shut.”

Chapel glanced over at Bogdan.

“Don’t worry about him; he can’t hear us over his music,” she said.

Chapel wondered if that was true, but he didn’t say anything. He pulled off his shirt and then his undershirt. The barbed wire that had ruined his jacket had cut all the way through three layers of cloth and down into the silicone flesh of his artificial arm.

“You’re hurt,” Nadia said.

“Not really.” He couldn’t really see the damage so he reached under the clamp that held the arm on and released it. It went dead as it separated from his body. He used his right hand to lift it away from his shoulder and laid it across his lap.

That made Bogdan’s eyes go wide behind their fringe of hair. His repetitive tapping on his MP3 player grew more frenetic, but he said nothing.

Nadia, of course, had seen the arm come off before, back on Donny’s party yacht. She jumped down from her bunk and crossed the compartment to run one hand over the silicone prosthetic. The damage was restricted to a thin tear across the bicep. There was no blood, of course, and the wire hadn’t cut all the way through the silicone, but the tear was a couple of inches long and it gaped open like a pair of lips. If he left it like that, the damage would only get worse over time, opening a little wider every time he flexed the arm. Luckily he’d brought a repair kit. “Can you help me with this?” he asked. He opened the flat case he’d taken from his luggage and took out a silicone patch. “It’s tough to open the packaging with just one hand.”

She took the patch — it looked like a large adhesive bandage but was much stronger and more sticky — and peeled away its paper backing. With her small, nimble fingers she laid the patch across the tear and then smoothed it out. It was the same flesh color as the silicone and it was almost invisible once it was on.

“This will hold, until we can send you home?” she asked.

“It’ll do. It shouldn’t restrict my mobility, and it’ll keep the damage from spreading.”

She looked up into his eyes, and he was suddenly very aware of how close she was to him. She was beautiful, he realized. Striking—the word he’d been using — didn’t really do her justice. Her eyes were huge, and very bright and clear, and as they studied him he smelled her perfume, too. Something very subtle and slightly musky.

“I haven’t been back to Siberia in over a decade,” she said, answering the question he’d asked earlier. “I miss it, yes. If that was your next question.”

“Maybe,” he told her.

“It’s a whole other world, out there,” she said, looking out the train window. “Out in the taiga forests. Under the pines…” She shook her head. “Nothing like Moscow, or any part of Russia west of the Urals. Not nearly so crowded.”

“Some people might say not as developed,” Chapel pointed out. He was after something, but he didn’t get it, because just then their conversation was interrupted by a curse.

“What the shit?” Bogdan had risen from the floor and come over to the bunk where Chapel’s arm lay. He looked at it with wide eyes, holding his hair back maybe so he could see it better. He glanced over at Chapel, then reached out one long, thin finger as if he was going to poke the arm.

“Careful,” Chapel said. “When it’s off my shoulder, I don’t control it. It might grab you if you get too close.”

He’d meant it as a joke, but Bogdan turned to look at him with an expression of real fear. He drew his finger back. Then he nodded, once, and went to sit back down. As far away from the arm as he could get. His fingers tapped at the keys of his MP3 player so fast they seemed to blur.

Nadia and Chapel shared a laugh. Then she turned to look at Chapel. “Okay,” she said. “Your turn.”

“I’m sorry?” he asked.

“I think I will turn in now. Go back to my compartment.” She gathered up her magazine and held it against her chest. “But first — you asked me a personal question. So now I get to ask you one.”

Chapel gritted his teeth before he answered. He never liked talking about himself. Talking about himself to foreign agents was even lower on his list. But he nodded, eventually. “I guess that’s fair.”

Nadia scratched herself behind one ear. She twisted her mouth around as if she was trying to think of the best question to ask, as if she would only ever have this one chance. Her eyes narrowed, and she said, “The first day I met you, you were talking about a woman. Someone back in New York.”

Every muscle in Chapel’s body tensed. Giving away national secrets was one thing, but this—

“You were going to propose.”

“Yeah,” he said, barely moving his lips.

“Ah. I don’t even need to ask. I can see the answer already, on your face. She said no.”

“She said no,” Chapel confirmed.

Instantly Nadia’s face fell. She started to make a sound, the last sound Chapel ever wanted to hear. The sad ohhh sound that people made when they felt sorry for you.

“Don’t,” he growled. Then he shook his head and tried to push away the anger. “I’m sorry. I just — I’d rather not—”

“Of course,” she said. She pulled back. “I’m sorry I brought this up.”

“It’s all right,” he forced himself to say.

She nodded and opened the door of the compartment. “You don’t want to be comforted, I understand. You still want the pain. Okay. I’ll leave you be.” She stepped out into the hallway, but she was still looking at him, searching his face. “For now, anyway,” she said, and gave him a look he had no idea how to interpret. Then she walked away, toward her own compartment.

He reached over and closed the door. When he turned around, he found Bogdan hovering over his artificial arm, as if daring himself to touch it.

The train pulled into Sirkeci Terminal an hour or so after sunrise. Bogdan was snoring in his bunk, his headphones slipped over half his face, but Chapel was already up, doing some basic calisthenics in the narrow compartment. Outside the train he saw the city piling up around them, getting denser and smokier with each passing second. He was packed and ready to go long before the wheels stopped rolling.

Nadia came by and helped him pull Bogdan out of his bunk. The hacker looked half dead, even though he’d gotten a full night’s sleep. “Is unfair,” he moaned. “Is not right. To wake up like this, with no caffeine available.”

“We’ll get you coffee,” Nadia promised him. “Turkey is famous for its coffee!” She gave Chapel a long look. “Come on,” she said. “End of the line!”

Chapel gathered up his luggage and kept Bogdan moving, inch by inch, toward the exit from the train. The platform was thronged with people, some trying to get on board even as the passengers debarked. The air was thick with announcements and cries in a number of languages Chapel didn’t understand. A child came rushing up with hands outstretched as if he desperately needed help, his face streaked with tears, but one of the train’s conductors shouted at him and the boy stopped crying instantly and ran off. “Beggars!” the conductor said to Chapel in English. “Give them a coin, and they will never leave you alone. Be careful of pickpockets!”

Chapel nodded halfhearted thanks to the man and followed Nadia as she headed into the main terminal, a big square room with white and pink walls and arabesque arches and far more people in it than comfort would allow. Nadia steered her way through the crowd so deftly it was all Chapel could do to keep up, with Bogdan in tow. Outside the terminal she led them down a broad road called, of all things, Kennedy Avenue, through a whole new throng of people that made it impossible to see anything. Elbows and shoulders buffeted Chapel constantly and people called out to him over and over, either greeting him or warning him to keep out of their way, he couldn’t say. Finally they broke through the press and came to a railing overlooking a broad stretch of water — the Bosphorus, Chapel figured, based on what he knew of the local geography.

Morning fog covered much of the water, still, but Chapel could make out enough to be impressed. The broad ribbon of water cut the city into two halves, each rising up away from the strait on steep hills studded with towers and spires. The water was thick with boats of every imaginable description, from huge tankers and freight ships loaded down with multicolored cargo containers to towering cruise ships to square-nosed ferries to little wooden craft with triangular sails that tacked back and forth across the current.

“Look at the yalis,” Nadia said, pointing out a line of structures down at the water’s edge, crowding both sides of the strait. They were houses of elaborately carved wood that looked as if they floated on the water, giving the impression that the whole city was just one enormous raft bobbing on the current.

It was a beautiful view, Chapel had to admit. The constant roar and blare of traffic behind him, the human press, couldn’t spoil that. He found himself almost smiling. He’d always loved the water and watching the way it was in constant motion, constant change.

They found a little place where Bogdan got his coffee, while Nadia and Chapel breakfasted on sweet rolls crusted with nuts and dried fruit. It felt good to be off the train, even in the crowded little restaurant.

“We have hours still, until our plane departs,” Nadia said, wiping currant pulp from her fingers with a tiny paper napkin. “How do you wish to spend the time?”

“We should keep moving. I doubt anyone followed us this far,” Chapel said, “but we shouldn’t take any chances.” He looked over at Bogdan. The hacker was going to be a problem, if they needed to keep a low profile. With his very short hair Chapel himself could blend in with the locals, and Nadia’s Asian features weren’t going to draw much attention in Istanbul. But the tall, lanky Romanian was bound to draw stares. It would be best, Chapel knew, if they could just find some place to lie low, out of sight, but that would mean, say, checking into a hotel. Which would leave a paper trail. The second-best option was to find the biggest crowd possible and disappear inside it.

“Perhaps I may suggest something. Something that has nothing to do with our business,” Nadia said. One corner of her mouth curved upward in a sly smile. She put down her napkin and turned to face the windows at the front of the café. “The Hagia Sophia is just a little bit away. It is supposed to be amazing to see.”

“You’re suggesting we take in the local sights,” Chapel said. The idea sounded ridiculous — this wasn’t a vacation. But he glanced around at the other people in the café, mostly Turks poring over newspapers or checking their phones before they had to get in to work. There were more than a few tourists, though, recognizable by their casual clothes and the bags they all carried. “That might not be such a bad plan,” he said. Among the well-dressed business professionals of Istanbul, Bogdan stood out like a sore thumb. In a crowd of gaudily dressed tourists he might be less conspicuous.

“One must take one’s pleasures where one may, yes?” Nadia said. She pushed her chair back and stood up. “This is the last chance we’ll have to relax, before things get serious.”

They’d already been attacked by Romanian gangsters and had to flee Bucharest ahead of the police. Chapel wondered how serious she expected things to get.

“Before I go anywhere,” Bogdan announced, still firmly seated in his chair. “I finish this cup.”

The two of them stood and watched while he slurped his coffee.

They headed down Kennedy Avenue, following the curve of the strait. Soon Chapel could see a big domed structure rising above them, flanked by four needlelike minarets. Helpful signs confirmed this was the Hagia Sophia, one of Istanbul’s most important landmarks and a major tourist destination. They joined a mob of people from every country in the world flowing into its forecourt. Signs posted everywhere in a dozen languages told him about the place. “This was built in the year 360?” Chapel said aloud. “Is that… is that right?” The signs assured him it was true. They told him the Hagia Sophia had originally been a basilica of the Orthodox Christian Church, the biggest church in the world for a thousand years. For a while it had been a Roman Catholic cathedral, and then in the Middle Ages it was converted into a mosque. In the twentieth century, it had been converted into a museum.

The building was massive, a sprawling complex of domes topped with golden spikes, with broad stone walls that glowed pink in the morning sun. As they passed through its main entrance into the shadowed interior the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees, and Chapel smelled old stone and wood. When his eyes adjusted, he took in just how big the place was — the walls seemed to stretch upward forever, pierced with rows of arches and massive columns. Round panels displaying Arabic calligraphy hung overhead, so wide each character was taller than Chapel. The walls were lined with golden mosaics or cut from veined marble or rich, colorful stone that gave the place a sense of immense solidity, even as the open space between the walls felt infinite and expansive.

Chapel looked up and saw an enormous dome that stretched so high over his head he felt dwarfed, rendered insignificant. Daylight streamed in through hundreds of arched windows, filling the air under the dome with a bright presence that seemed to shimmer and twist like something trying to take form and existence.

All the noise, all the anger in his head seemed to drain away as he stood there, taking in the sheer immensity of the place. The scale, the power of it. It might well look like a mosque, it might have been packed full of tourists laughing and griping and snapping pictures, but it took Chapel back to a very different place. Strangely enough, it made him remember the little white-paneled church in Florida where, as a boy, he’d gone to services with his mother every Sunday. He had spent those hours fidgeting on the pews that stank of wood polish, bored and wondering what he was missing on TV. But now, in this place, he didn’t think about that. He thought of his mother, in her Sunday dress, kneeling with her head bowed in prayer. He thought of the times when the congregation would come together in song, their voices joined over the sound of the church’s pipe organ, and how it had felt like there was something there, something bigger than himself. Something special. The people who had built the Hagia Sophia, he knew, had been looking for the same thing. The sacred.

He realized his jaw was hanging open, and he forced himself to look down, at Nadia standing beside him. She looked up at him with a quiet smile.

“Perhaps you think me trivial,” she said, “for wanting to see this when there is so much work to be done.”

“No,” he said, softly. Inside him, something let go, something he’d been holding on to for a long time. He felt strangely at peace. “No, I don’t. I’m glad I got to see it myself.”

She nodded. “This career we choose, it does not offer us much time to ourselves, to think, to simply be people. We are kept so busy, and our lives could end at any time.” She shivered as if she were cold. “I feel I must take advantage, any compensation I can. Being able to see much of the world is one of the best.”

She reached over and took his hand. His good, living hand. It was such an innocent and affectionate gesture it didn’t occur to him to stop her. Her fingers were warm and soft in his, and after a moment he didn’t want to let go.

He closed his eyes, and just for a moment, a short span of time, he was okay. It was like having Julia there with him. Or even more basic than that — just having another human being to share the moment with, to not be alone.

“Happy honeymoon!” someone shouted, and Chapel’s eyes opened just as a flash of light dazzled him. His first instinct was to reach for a gun that wasn’t there. His second was to pull away from Nadia’s hand, as guilt flushed through him and made him want to duck his head.

Then he saw what had happened, and he growled in frustration.

A Turkish man with a camera stood in front of them, grinning from ear to ear.

“Such a handsome couple. I take your picture,” he said. “Then, if you give me your e-mail, your home address, I can send you a copy, all right? You can remember this happy moment forever.”

Damn. This was not acceptable. They couldn’t leave any trace behind, any sign they’d been here — not even a picture on some random man’s camera. Chapel forced himself to smile. “Can I see the picture? On your camera?”

“Fifty lira for the picture, printed in a lovely frame,” the man suggested. “For eighty, I will make smaller prints and send them to all your friends.”

“I just need to see the picture first,” Chapel said. “I think my eyes were closed.”

“If it’s no good, okay, I take another,” the man tried.

“Just let me see the picture,” Chapel said, taking a step closer to him. The man started to turn and move away so Chapel had to reach out and grab his arm. He tore the camera out of the man’s hands and let him go.

Instantly the photographer started shouting something in a language that Chapel didn’t know. His hand gestures and the look on his face made it very clear what he was trying to communicate.

The last thing Chapel wanted was to have the police come and ask questions. He studied the camera in his hands. The buttons were all labeled with letters and numbers he couldn’t figure out, but he managed to bring up the last picture taken. It showed him — his eyes were, in fact, closed — and Nadia, hand in hand. Bogdan was just visible in the background, though he was walking away from them.

Chapel found an icon that looked like a trash can. He deleted the picture and handed the camera back to the photographer.

“This is an outrage!” the man said, in English. “This is not—”

Nadia spoke softly to him in the same language he’d used before. She held up her left hand and pointed at it several times. When that didn’t do the trick, she handed him a couple of bank notes.

The photographer made a nasty gesture at Chapel, but he took his camera and left.

“What did you say to him?” Chapel asked.

“I said we were married, but not to each other,” she said, with a shrug and a wry smile. “Then I gave him twice what he was asking. I should have led with the money.”

Chapel nodded, only half paying attention. He was scanning the crowd, looking for Bogdan. “When was the last time you saw our third?” He raised an eyebrow at Nadia, and her face got very serious, very fast.

“We need to find him,” she said, and pushed into the crowd. Chapel went a different direction, looking for anyone tall and thin, looking for headphones.

When he spotted Bogdan, Nadia had already reached him. The hacker had discovered a rank of computerized information kiosks. Each was just a box with a screen and a trackball, designed to give tourist information in several different languages. The screen of each one was displaying pictures of the dome above and the word Welcome! in multiple alphabets. The kiosk that Bogdan was using, however, showed a black screen covered in lines of tiny, blurry text.

Even Nadia looked surprised, for once. “How did you…?”

“Is a screen for maintenance,” Bogdan explained, moving the trackball across the screen with the deftness of a champion video-game player. “In case system goes down and needs to be fixed. Easy if you know the way in, yes? Hold on.” He clicked the ball and the screen lit up with the home page for an Internet browser. “I just go to check my VKontakte page.”

Chapel frowned. “What’s VKontakte?” he asked.

Nadia looked up at him. “Russian Facebook.”

“Oh, no, no, no,” Chapel said, grabbing Bogdan’s shoulders and pulling him back from the kiosk. “No, we’re not going there.” He pressed his back up against the screen so Bogdan wouldn’t even see it. “Low profile, okay? Coming here wasn’t the best idea. We need to stay out of sight. We need to go straight to the airport.”

“Konyechno,” Nadia said, with a weary sigh. “The time to relax is over.”

Even in his sleep, Bogdan kept tapping away at his MP3 player. He lay twisted up in his seat, his long frame bent to fit into the little legroom he had. His face hung on the seat back as limp and loose as a rubber mask, his mouth open and flecked with drool. The hair that always covered his eyes obscured half his face and made him look barely human.

Another airplane, another night. Economy class this time, just to throw off anyone looking for business-class travelers matching their description. Chapel still couldn’t sleep. Nadia sat across the aisle from the two men. Chapel studied her sleeping face and wished he could be next to her, breathing in her perfume, her soft shoulder rubbing up against his. Maybe she would have laid her head against him, used him as a pillow. Maybe he could have put an arm around her for warmth.

Jesus. This had to stop.

He plugged his earbuds into his tablet and booted up his Kazakh language program. Almost as soon as the monotone voice of the vocabulary lesson began it stopped and Angel spoke to him instead.

“How are you doing, baby?” she asked.

The sexy voice speaking to him out of the ether was almost enough to get him to stop thinking about Nadia. He inhaled sharply and put his fingers on the virtual keyboard on the tablet’s screen. He wasn’t entirely sure how to answer.

“Can you talk, or is this not a good time?” Angel asked, because apparently it had taken him too long to frame his reply.

NO, IT’S FINE, he wrote.

“The director’s been pressuring me for an update. I told him you’re on your way to Tashkent now. He doesn’t like this kind of mission, where he just sends you into the field and you’re left to your own devices. I have to say I’m not crazy about it either. I wish we could talk more often, the way we usually do.”

ME TOO, Chapel typed. HAS TO BE THIS WAY, THOUGH. WE SPENT DAY IN ISTANBUL. VERY NICE PLACE.

“Glad to hear it,” Angel said, with a laugh.

ANY NEWS FROM BUCHAREST?

“If you mean, are you still being chased by blond gangsters, I don’t think so. The police eventually did put an alert out for two people matching your description, but there were no reports of sightings. And then out of nowhere the alert just… went away.”

WEIRD.

“Not necessarily. I think they just assumed you left the country when nobody could find you. Most likely they just wanted you to identify the men who tried to scoop you up. I checked, but there’s no warrant out for Bogdan Vlaicu, either. I think you got a get out of jail free card, sugar.”

GOOD NEWS, I GUESS.

“If anything changes on that front, I’ll be watching. So anything else I can do for you tonight?”

He stared at the screen for a while. It only showed the list of language files he was supposedly listening to, but it was the closest he could get to looking at Angel. He’d spent a long time trying to imagine what she looked like, but all he could ever really see in his head was a computer screen. More than once he’d wondered if she was a real human being, or just some kind of very clever artificial intelligence.

She was, he knew, his best friend in the world. The one person he could always rely on. She’d saved his life dozens of times and helped him out in a million ways. He trusted her implicitly — even more than he trusted Director Hollingshead. Maybe more than he’d ever really trusted Julia.

“Sweetie,” she said. “I can tell something’s on your mind.”

Of course she could. He wanted desperately to talk to her, just then. Not just type on a screen. HOLD ON, he tapped out. He got up from his seat and headed back to the lavatories. Inside, sitting on the toilet, he listened to the noise of the engines and the hiss of pressurized air. If he was quiet, it should be all right.

“Angel,” he said, barely more than a whisper. “Can you hear me?”

“I can, sugar. You’re somewhere secure now?”

“Yeah.” He glanced up at the lavatory door. Made sure it was locked. “Listen,” he said, “I need to tell you something. Something that’s got me worried.” He hesitated for a moment longer, but he knew that if he didn’t tell her now, he never would. “I’ve had inappropriate contact with N.”

Angel was quiet for so long he thought maybe she’d hung up on him. He should have known better — she never did that.

“Sugar,” she said, finally. “Please repeat that. Because I can’t believe you said what I think you just said.”

Chapel scrubbed at his face with his hands. “I’ve been… fraternizing with her.”

“You know that’s not okay,” Angel told him. “Are you telling me you slept with her? Because that’s definitely not okay.”

“I know. I know that,” Chapel said.

Angel’s voice got very soft then, which he knew meant she was being utterly serious. “Have you even considered the possibility that she’s a swallow?”

“A what?”

“A… you know. The woman who sets up a honey trap.”

“You think she’s trying to seduce me to learn our secrets?”

“Men will say anything after sex. They have no filters at all.” Angel cleared her throat. “At least, that’s what I’ve heard.”

“No, no,” Chapel said. “It’s nothing like that. She would have been way more forward if that was the case. This was — it wasn’t much. We just held hands.”

“O… kay,” Angel said.

“I know. I know. I sound like a teenager getting weird about his first crush. But I thought I should tell you. And you should tell the director.”

“I could do that,” Angel said. “I am required by protocol and professional ethics to do exactly that,” she told him. “And you know what would happen then. He would tell you to scrub the mission and come home.”

“Yeah. That’s why I brought it up. I don’t want to give up, but—”

“Or,” Angel said, “I could not tell him. We could keep this between us. And you could get your shit together right now.”

Angel didn’t often swear. She was one of those people who understood that when you save profanity for special occasions, it actually does lend emphasis. Chapel felt like someone had dumped cold water down his back.

“I’m not sure I can,” he told her.

Angel almost sounded angry when she replied. “You can and you will. There’s a lot depending on this mission, Chapel. Your emotions can’t come between you and completing this.”

“I know that,” he told her. “But—”

“But what? What could be more important than that? What could come close to measuring up to the fate of the entire world?”

“I’m lonely,” he said. “That’s all.”

Another long silence from her end. He thought he heard some muttering in the background, but with all the noise in the lavatory it was hard to tell.

When she came back, her voice was much softer. “I know you miss Julia,” she said. “I know what you’re going through.”

“Do you?” he asked. “You know what it’s like to be dumped by somebody you thought you would spend the rest of your life with?”

“Maybe not… exactly, but—”

“I’m human, Angel. I’m just a man. I’m supposed to be this elite soldier, this machine that fights for its country. I’m highly trained and totally professional. But sometimes — sometimes I don’t want this anymore. Sometimes I think about getting married and starting a family. This job took that away from me.”

“You chose this job.”

“I know.”

“Do you want to scrub the mission? Do you want to give up?”

“No,” Chapel said. “No.” Going home now, in disgrace — it wouldn’t solve anything. He would still be headed back to an empty apartment. An empty life. “That’s why I brought this to you, though. Because maybe I’m not the best judge of my fitness for duty right now.”

“I understand,” Angel said. “Tell me something. If you put the moves on N right now, I mean, really laid on the charm — you think she would go for it?”

“I can’t tell. She’s been very friendly. But, well, for one thing — I’m an amputee. A lot of people are nice to me because they think I’m some kind of wounded hero and that I deserve to be treated like a sick kitten or something. Not a lot of people want to… to have sex with someone like me. I think maybe she just feels sorry for me.”

“There’s such a thing as pity sex,” Angel pointed out.

Chapel grinned and shook his head. “Not as much as some people might hope. Anyway. No. I don’t think I could seduce N without a lot of effort.”

“So just don’t put in that effort. No more holding hands, right? No more fraternization. Because even if it seems innocent now — she might just be building to something more. You can’t know. And you definitely can’t trust her.”

“Understood,” Chapel said. “Angel — thank you. This was weighing on me.”

“Always here to help, honey,” she told him. “And in fact, I might have something that really does help. I’ve been doing some more digging on N. Looking for anything that wasn’t obvious, something I missed the first time around.”

“And you found something,” Chapel said, frowning. She wouldn’t have brought this up if there was nothing there.

“Yeah, though not something I can prove. N is a pretty slippery fish, and her records are very hard to turn up. But it looks like she might have a criminal record.”

“I beg your pardon?” Chapel asked.

Angel sounded almost coy as she answered. She got that way sometimes when she’d done a particularly clever thing and wanted to share but didn’t want to come off as bragging. “Oh, it’s not very serious, really. It’s not like she robbed a bank or anything.”

“Come on, Angel. Spill.”

“A woman matching N’s description — and I mean matching, height, weight, everything — was picked up by the Moscow police a couple of years ago for subversive political activity. Which probably just means she went to a protest rally and chanted louder than the person next to her. Under Putin, the Russians aren’t putting up with much in the way of dissidence.”

“What kind of a protest rally?” Chapel asked.

“It was a meeting of a number of student groups, but the focus was on self-determination for ethnic minorities. The protesters were demanding that places like Chechnya, South Ossetia, and some eastern ethnic territories be allowed to split off from the Russian Federation and become their own countries. Their plan was to get a crowd assembled in Red Square and then march across Moscow waving signs and shouting slogans. They didn’t get very far. The police moved in and, well, the official record says they ‘peacefully dispersed the illegal gathering without incidence of violence.’ Which means nobody sued them afterward. I’m guessing they used fire hoses and pepper spray to break things up. A lot of people were arrested, among them somebody who looks and sounds exactly like N. She refused to give her name, which meant she would have been taken into central processing where they could make an ID. Except there’s no indication she got there. There’s a brief mention of her particulars and her arrest, and then nothing.”

“When it comes to N, that’s starting to sound familiar,” Chapel said.

“Exactly. I figure she waited until she was alone in the police station to tell them she was a government agent, and then they sprang her. It couldn’t hurt that she had that medal. I mean, she probably wasn’t wearing it at the time, or anything. But the police — and the Putin administration — would have been embarrassed if they had to admit they had arrested a decorated citizen.”

“Interesting,” Chapel said.

“Yeah. She’s not as squeaky clean as she looks, huh?” Angel said. “I kind of like her more now, though. Makes her a little more human.”

Chapel thought of the woman he’d left sleeping in her aisle seat. He had no trouble thinking of Nadia as human. But this did change things, a little. Something occurred to him. “Angel — you said the protesters were asking for self-determination for some eastern ethnic territories.”

“That’s right.”

“Which ones?”

Angel tapped at her keyboard for a second. “You want the whole list? There are dozens of them here. Basically the protesters wanted every ethnic, religious, or language group to have its own autonomous country.”

“What about places in Siberia? I mean, specifically, anything close to where Nadia was born, near Yakutsk.”

More keys clacking. Then Angel clucked her tongue. “Right on the money. Twelve different areas in Siberia are named on the list, including Yakutia.”

“Very interesting,” Chapel said.

The plane set down on a runway near the center of the capital of Uzbekistan just as the sun was coming up. The passengers debarked onto the second floor of a small terminal where the floor was lined with oriental carpets. As Chapel, Nadia, and Bogdan headed down a wide central staircase toward customs and baggage claim a loudspeaker crackled and filled the air with the chanting of a muezzin calling the faithful to dawn prayers. Many of their fellow passengers heeded the call then and there, while less devout travelers streamed around them. It seemed like half the people in the airport were smoking all at the same time, and the air was thick with the stink of tobacco.

Chapel hadn’t slept much. He felt like a guitar string tuned too tight, like every breath made his body vibrate uncomfortably. He was going to need a nap, and soon.

There was no trouble with their passports. It took a while for the bags to come out, but it looked like no one had gone through them — something Chapel had worried about. He grabbed his black nylon bag and followed Nadia out through a pair of glass doors into the street.

The air of Tashkent shimmered with the last traces of a morning haze. A breeze swirled down the sidewalk, already warm, carrying with it the smell of a desert close by.

The smell made the hair on the back of Chapel’s neck stand straight up. He knew that smell, the ancient dusty spice of it. It smelled just like Afghanistan — like the place where he’d lost his arm.

Instantly Chapel’s muscles reacted, tensing and pulling his head down. Every day he’d been in Afghanistan, every hour, he’d been in danger. Death could have come for him at any moment. What had happened instead was maybe worse. Chapel felt the old familiar stress headache coming on, like a loop of wire was wrapped around his skull and it was constantly tightening.

Get it together, he told himself. This wasn’t Afghanistan. That was all over for him, just a memory.

It was so very hard to fight it back.

The physical therapist who had worked with Chapel after he came home from the war — a fellow amputee named Top — had once told him that the percentage of veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder was one hundred percent. And that the percentage of wounded veterans with PTSD was one hundred and fifty percent, because some of them got it twice. He’d warned Chapel that you never really left the war behind, that it lived with you and all you could do was make a place for it in your head, a place you only visited when you had to.

Chapel fought to control his emotions. Part of him wanted to run away. To run back to the plane and beg the pilot to take him away from here. Part of him wanted to curl up in a ball in the corner.

Top would have understood. He’d been to Iraq — and left behind an arm, a leg, and one eye. Maybe he’d gotten PTSD four times over.

Maybe Nadia sensed Chapel stiffen. She put a hand on the small of his back and rubbed the skin there in small circles. It was surprisingly comfortable.

“I’m okay,” he told her, and stepped away from her hand.

She didn’t reply. She just stepped up the curb and held her arm out, down and away from her body. A car pulled up right away. The driver was smoking, and when he stopped, he rolled down his window and a bluish cloud billowed out, right into Nadia’s face. She didn’t seem to mind. She leaned in through the window and spoke a few words. Handed over some dollar bills.

“I’ll take the front seat,” she told Chapel and Bogdan. “The hotel isn’t far.”

Chapel climbed into the back. Once he was safely inside with the door closed, he shut his eyes.

Nadia woke him by stroking his cheek with the back of her hand. “Come on,” she said. “Time to perform.”

Chapel nodded, still groggy, and carefully levered himself out of the back of the car. The new jacket he’d bought in Istanbul reeked of cigarette smoke — the driver of the car must have chain-smoked all the way from the airport. He brushed himself down a little and looked up at the entrance to the hotel. It was a wide portico of giant concrete blocks, broken only by a pair of glass doors and a couple potted ferns that struggled vainly to make the place look less like a Soviet-era dormitory.

A couple of other cars were pulled up out front, their engines left idling as if for a quick getaway. At the end of the drive a bald man in a white button-down shirt was feeding some pigeons from a wax paper sack of breadcrumbs. He looked up when he saw them and started ambling over, shoving his hands in his pockets.

Chapel tried walking past the man, but he changed course so that Chapel would have had to walk right through him to get to the hotel doors.

Interesting.

Trouble, maybe.

“Hello,” the man said. “Are you staying here tonight?” His English was accented but fluid, a second language but one he’d been speaking for years.

Nadia stood just behind Chapel and off to one side. As drowsy as he was, he could feel the way she moved, changing her posture the tiniest fraction of a degree, could hear the tiniest gasp of breath she took.

Something was up with this guy.

Chapel narrowed his eyes and gave the man a good once-over, looking to see if he had a weapon on him. He didn’t see one, but he saw other things. He saw the waxy skin of the man’s bald head, the carefully combed rectitude of his mustache. This was a man who was perfectly groomed at dawn — and not just so he could go feed some pigeons.

Chapel forced himself into character. He’d rehearsed his cover story for hours before leaving the States — now was the time when he needed it. Now that they were in Uzbekistan everything had to be done just so.

“Heard this was the only decent hotel in Tashkent,” he said, adding a skeptical look.

The older man nodded agreeably. He didn’t smile. Chapel couldn’t help but think the man was just as in control of his expression as Chapel was, at that moment. They were both playing parts. Maybe they both knew it. “Oh, all our hotels are excellent. All up to American standards, I think you’ll find.”

“Uh-huh,” Chapel said. “Good plumbing at this one?”

He’d thrown that out as a sort of halfhearted insult, mostly to see if he could get a rise out of the other man. It didn’t work. “Oh, yes, yes. You’ll be pleased.”

Chapel gave the man a curt nod. “Thanks for the tip. You mind?”

The older man feigned a moment of incomprehension, then a slightly longer interval of embarrassment. “Oh, I’m in your way, please, my apologies.” He stepped out of Chapel’s path and gestured for Nadia to go in first. “Enjoy your time in Uzbekistan, Mr. Chambers.”

Chapel turned to face the man, but he was already walking away. As he followed Nadia up the hotel steps, he asked under his breath, “What the hell was that about? And how did he know the name on my passport when we just got here?”

“SNB — the secret police,” she whispered back. “They would have called him from the airport so he knew we were coming.”

Chapel shook his head and walked in through the glass doors. The message was clear, he supposed. The Uzbek government knew where he was, and they would be watching him. Well, he’d never expected this job to be easy.

At the reception desk Nadia made all the arrangements. Chapel was posing as an executive of an energy conglomerate, looking to invest in natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan’s interior. Nadia was supposed to be his personal assistant. Bogdan, who was supposed to be Jeff Chambers’s tech guy, wandered around the lobby while Nadia asked about the various services their rooms provided.

Chapel leaned over the counter, interrupting her and staring at the pretty desk clerk. “Nice scarf,” he told her.

She reached up and touched it. “Thank you, Mr. Chambers.”

“Are our rooms ready? I don’t want to hear anything about how they’re still being made up. I know it’s first thing in the morning. I start work this early, and I expect not to have to sit around waiting for other people to catch up.”

The clerk’s eyes widened a fraction of an inch, but she didn’t flinch. Good for her. Chapel felt like a jerk but that was his cover, and he had to play it perfectly. “As per your request your rooms are available now. Would you like to hear about our spa and exercise rooms, or about our three excellent restaurants?”

“What I want to hear,” Chapel told her, “is that I won’t be disturbed while I’m here. Think you can handle that?”

“Of course—”

“That means no maid service. No turndown service. It especially means no visitors unless I clear them first. I don’t want this to be a problem. I don’t want to have to ask about this twice. So when I ask you in a few seconds if my instructions are clear, all I want you to do is say yes. Are my instructions clear?”

“Yes,” the clerk said.

“Good girl.” Chapel took a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and laid it on the counter. The clerk just stared at it. “That’s for not making me repeat myself.”

He grabbed up the keycards the clerk had already laid on the counter and headed for the elevators. “Svetlana,” he said, over his shoulder, “I want you ready with my schedule in twenty minutes.”

“Of course, sir,” Nadia said.

Chapel stepped into the elevator and waited for the doors to close. Only then did he let himself droop and feel tired again.

He’d been in Tashkent for less than an hour and already he could feel how things had changed. Bucharest and Istanbul had just been layovers. This was where the mission really began.