The Hydra Protocol

PART IV

Abdulla Zokirov had been born in the countryside of Uzbekistan shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union. He had never known a time when orders from Moscow shaped every aspect of his life, had never lived under the yoke of atheists far to the north who wished for nothing more than to trample his religion and his ethnic heritage. He had joined the Uzbek armed forces when he was a teenager and then the SNB when he finished his tour of duty and had spent most of his life studying police reports in Tashkent, under the tutelage of the legendary Jamshid Mirza. He had never traveled farther than Bukhara in his life, had never been outside his national borders.

Still, there was inside him an abiding hatred for all ethnic Russians. It was simply part of his DNA.

So when a pale-faced man in a black suit appeared in the dawn light at the entrance to the abandoned poultry shed in the outskirts of Vobkent, Zokirov’s hackles went up right away. Here was some mindless functionary from the frozen north come putting his nose in where it did not belong.

Zokirov removed his latex gloves — he had been examining one of the dead bodies that lay rotting in the cool darkness of the shed — and strode over to tell the Russian he was not welcome, that this was a crime scene and an internal Uzbek matter and he should just go home.

Then he saw the man’s eyes, and he forgot every word he’d meant to say.

Jamshid Mirza — who was now one of those corpses in the dark — had often spoken of the KGB in tones of reverence mixed with utter loathing. He had once been an agent of that now-defunct organization, and he had talked of how they all cultivated a particular look, a stare, a piercing expression they called the Eye of the Dead Fish. It was a look that conveyed a particular message to anyone it fell upon. You are not a human being, the stare implied. You do not have any rights. You will do what I say or I will shoot you without a moment’s hesitation. Even if you do exactly as I say, I may shoot you anyway, and if you beg for your life, you will only disgust me.

It was a lot for one look to say. Abdulla Zokirov had always thought Mirza was being dramatic, when he spoke of the Eye of the Dead Fish. No man could say so much with a single glance.

But this Russian, this man who had intruded on Zokirov’s work, had the Eye. And it spoke volumes.

“These men belonged to me,” the Russian said, kicking the hand of one of corpses. Most of the dead men in the shed were, in fact, Russians. None of them had any identification on their bodies, and Zokirov had been wondering who had sent them here to die. He did not nod or express satisfaction at learning this new fact. “I am Senior Lieutenant Pavel Kalin, of Counter Intelligence,” the Russian said. “I will take over here now.”

It took a moment for Zokirov to realize that Kalin was speaking not in Uzbek but in Russian. Of course Zokirov knew the language — it was a second unofficial tongue of his country, legacy of an age of tyranny. He was a bit ashamed that when he answered, he spoke in Russian, too.

“This one,” Zokirov said, pointing to Mirza, “is ours. It’s clear that he killed some of your men. Most likely because they had no jurisdiction here, and no permits for their weapons.”

Kalin glanced around the shed. There was not much for him to see, Zokirov knew. The bodies, of course, but beyond that only a little stain of oil on the floor. It was still wet, which meant there had been a vehicle there recently, but now it was gone.

“There were three others. A Russian woman, an American, and a Romanian,” Kalin said. He did not seem to have taken the hint about jurisdiction.

“Yes, Svetlana Shulkina, Jeff—”

Kalin clucked his tongue. “Those names mean nothing. They had a vehicle — a large truck, I think.” He bent down and touched the oil stain with two fingers. “I do not know who killed whom here, and I do not care in the least. The ones I want are the ones who fled.” He looked over at one of the corpses, the one that wore spectacles. “Next time I will not send policemen to do the work of soldiers. I will take the bodies of my men. You will not put their deaths in your report. You may do with your dead man as you please, but you will not make any mention that there were Russians here. Am I understood?”

Zokirov was an agent of the SNB. He was accustomed to a certain level of respect from his peers, and from a great measure of fear and obedience from common folk. He straightened his spine and tried to think of what Mirza might have said. “This is an internal matter of the Republic of Uzbekistan. Interfering with a police investigation is an offense, and—”

Kalin stood up very suddenly and slapped Zokirov across the face.

A cold fear washed through Zokirov, a certainty that if Kalin were to kill him in the next moment, there would be no consequences, no repercussions. Zokirov had worked in state security long enough to know that some men were above the law, even international law. Such men did not need papers or clearances to get their way.

He closed his mouth.

Then he opened it again. “Forgive me,” he said. “I am happy to cooperate with your investigation. Let me tell you our theory. Our man, Mirza, confronted your agents here and killed them. The three you are looking for then killed Mirza. They departed in a large desert-going truck, and we believe they are headed for—”

“I know exactly where they are going,” Kalin said.

Zokirov did not ask him to share this information.

It was cold out there. Even in the middle of the desert, even after a long day of the sun baking the sands without relief. It was cold — nearly freezing.

It was empty, empty in an enormous way. The desert was not lifeless, not by any means. Through the windshield Chapel could see a landscape painted silver by the moon and dotted sparsely with scrub grass and tiny bushes all the way to the horizon. Once or twice the truck startled a lizard or a small mammal out of its burrow and sent it scampering for cover in the cold sand. But these exceptions only served to highlight just how little there was out there, just how much of nothing the truck rumbled through. No roads. No sign of human life at all. No trees, anywhere. No clouds overhead. No mountains, no hills, and definitely no water.

Only the dunes. The endless barchan dunes, rises where the wind had sculpted the sand into gentle soft shapes that could run for miles in either direction. Dunes furrowed by moving air, with a constant spray feathering from their tops. Dunes that looked like moving waves in the dark, like swells in an endless sea.

Chapel found himself glancing over at Nadia time and again, at her sleeping face lit a quiet green by the dashboard lights. Just to see something human, something on a scale he felt comfortable with. He was glad she was there.

In the backseat, behind Chapel, Bogdan snored and whimpered in his sleep, like a beaten dog. After a while Chapel was even glad for that noise, that human noise.

Chapel braked to a gentle stop in the dark lee between two dunes. He let the truck settle, let it slide around a little on the loose sand. Listened to its engine idling away. He rubbed at his face with his hands. Drank a little water.

He touched Nadia’s shoulder and she opened one eye. In the dark cab of the truck, she stared at him as if she didn’t recognize him, as if she had no idea where she was.

“Your turn,” he whispered.

She sat up, one side of her face obscured by the shadow of her hair. “Chto?” she asked. Then she shook her head and sat up much straighter, looking forward through the windshield. She took a deep breath and nodded. “Sorry. My turn.” She tried to stifle a yawn, but failed. She squeezed her eyes shut, hard, then opened them again.

“Never mind,” he said. “Go back to sleep. I can keep driving for a while.”

She turned to face him. “No. It is my duty. I don’t shirk.”

He started to protest but he could see in her face she fully intended to take her shift. They switched places, which involved a certain amount of awkward crawling over each other. She said nothing and didn’t act embarrassed or uncomfortable. Chapel kept his own feelings to himself.

She put the truck in gear and got them moving again. Chapel knew he ought to try to get some sleep, but he was still too dazed, too hypnotized by the desert outside the windows to close his eyes. He drank some more water and watched the dunes go by.

Traveling during the day was just too dangerous. Besides, they were all exhausted and desperately needed some sleep. Nadia parked the truck in the lee of a tall dune that would give them shade for most of the day. Chapel jumped out with a shovel and spread some sand across the dark roof of the truck. It wouldn’t pass a close inspection, but any satellites or helicopters overhead would be less likely to see them. Working with Nadia, he hung tarps across the windows of the cab and then they crawled back inside. The interior of the cab was dim, lit up only by some orange light, those few sunbeams already strong enough to pierce the thick canvas. The night’s chill lingered in the air, in the metal surfaces all around Chapel. He sank down onto the seat that had been tormenting him all night and suddenly it felt very, very comfortable.

“There’s a tent, back in the supplies,” Nadia told him. “I think I am too tired to put it up, though.”

“I’m too tired to keep talking about this,” he replied.

She made a noise that was something like a laugh, but required less energy.

Bogdan was already asleep in the back, curled up in one of the seats. “He might at least have helped with the tarps,” Nadia said.

Chapel shook his head. “He’s the talent, right? The mission specialist. We’re the grunts. When he wakes up, he’ll probably expect breakfast to be ready.”

“There is dried fruit and some canned meat back there,” Nadia said.

He waved a hand at her to make her stop talking.

Whether she did or didn’t made no difference. He was out like a light.

He dreamed of standing on the deck of a seagoing boat that rose and fell and rocked with the waves as a storm lashed its sails. A long night of going up and down and over sand dunes had left his brain still swaying, perhaps.

When he woke, it was to find himself coated in sweat. His left, artificial arm was resting on the metal door handle and when he brought it up to his face he got a good whiff of scorched silicone. The inside of the cab was oppressive with heat, like it had been stuffed full of hot packing peanuts while he slept. The air was so dry it parched his throat.

He wiped the sweat away from his face — pinpricks of moisture broke out on his forehead and his nose the second he dried them off. He looked over and saw Nadia sleeping in the passenger seat, her brow wrinkled, her shirt glued to her shoulder and back with sweat.

He couldn’t take it. He grabbed the tablet and cracked open his door. The tarp that hung over the windows pushed back against him, but he struggled through it and down the ladder, onto the sand below.

Fresh air whistled into his lungs, but even through closed eyelids the sun burned his retinas. He pushed one hand against his eyes as if to wring the sunlight out and stumbled around even as the heat cooked his back.

It had been hot in Tashkent, but nothing like this. “Angel,” he called out. “Angel, are you there?”

“I’m here, sugar,” she said.

He had no idea what the time difference was between Kazakhstan and… wherever she was. She sounded well rested, though.

“What’s the temperature here?” he asked.

“You sure you want to know?” she asked him. When he didn’t reply, she said, “It’s about a hundred and twenty.”

He couldn’t believe it. “Fahrenheit?”

Angel laughed. “A hundred and twenty Celsius would kill you.”

Chapel had heard stories about heat like that from guys he knew who fought in Iraq. Afghanistan had never been that hot — in fact, up in the mountains it had been downright chilly. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever felt heat like this. He could just crack his eyelids if he forced himself. The sunlight was still blinding, but it looked like there might be a patch of shade off to his left. He hurried toward it, staggering through the loose sand — and tripped over something and went sprawling.

In the shade he could see a little better. Still not very well — and if he turned his head even slightly and looked out at the sand where the sun beat down, stabbing pain would burn through his head. He peered into the shadows and saw Bogdan sitting there, leaning back against a pile of sand. The Romanian had his knees up near his ears, having folded himself like an insect into the small patch of shade.

“Sorry,” Chapel said, because he realized that what he’d tripped over was Bogdan’s feet.

“Is okay, yes.” Bogdan lifted a heavy canteen and waggled it. “Drink. Drink or you will dehydrate and die.”

Chapel took the canteen and sucked up a thick mouthful of warm water. He forced himself to swallow it slowly, to make it last.

“Is hot enough for you, yes?” Bogdan asked.

Chapel nearly spat out all the water in his mouth. He held it in with his hand — in a land like this water wasn’t something you could waste on a spit-take.

In point of fact, now that he was in the shade, the heat felt almost bearable. He remembered that was the secret of dry heat — moist air conveyed heat much better than dry air, so people who lived in places like Arizona could stay relatively comfortable as long as they were under a roof. The tiny patch of shade under the dune in Kazakhstan was its own miniature oasis as far as he was concerned.

He sipped at the water. Bogdan, after his initial foray into conversation, seemed uninterested in talking further, and that was fine with Chapel. A few minutes after he’d arrived in the shade he saw the canvas covering the truck shimmer and shake and then Nadia came running over toward them with a whoop. She pushed Bogdan to one side to find her own patch of shelter from the sun.

“We should move the truck,” Chapel said. “It’s just soaking up heat right now. That can’t be good for our supplies or our electronics.”

“Give me one moment, please,” Nadia said. She pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes. Shook out her hair, sending drops of sweat flying. “You could have woken me, when you stepped out,” she said, staring daggers at him.

Chapel laughed. “All I could think about at that moment was getting away from the heat. Sorry.” He handed her the canteen. “I’ll move the truck. There has to be some more shade around here somewhere.”

While Nadia drove, coaxing the engine of the truck to move while it was still overheated from sitting in the desert all day, Chapel studied a map of Kazakhstan. “I had no idea this place was so huge.” He unfolded another section of map and sighed. Judging by the scale, you could fit all of western Europe into the borders of Kazakhstan and still have some room left over. “And all of this,” he said, moving his hand in a circle over the southern central part, more than half of the country, “is desert? I can see why, if you wanted to hide something, this would make a good spot. I’m not as clear on how we’re going to find it.”

“I have the map coordinates, and our GPS will take us there. Angel will help, will she not, if we get lost? Don’t worry.” Nadia turned and looked at him. She had been cool with him ever since he’d questioned her politics, just before they crossed the border. But the prospect of reaching Perimeter soon seemed to melt some of that ice. “We’re so very close, now. This night, and then just a bit tomorrow.”

Chapel nodded. “And then we hit Perimeter and then… it’s over,” he said. “We exfiltrate and go our separate ways. What will you do with… damn. There’s no good way to circle around this. What will you do with the time you have left?”

“I have some ideas. No point in getting ahead of myself, but I’ve thought of it. I have at least six months, I think, before the pain will get too bad. I will see my home again.”

“Back to Russia? Where they want you dead?”

“I know how to stay under their radar, so to speak,” she told him. A wan smile crossed her face. “They taught me very well how to not be seen. Anyway, if they catch me, what of it? They kill me?” She watched the dunes for a while, keeping both hands on the wheel as the truck tried to slew to one side on the downward face of a dune. “What about you?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. I’m sure you cannot tell me what your next mission is. I’m sure all your movements are classified. But do you have to go back to the States right away?”

Chapel hadn’t even considered it. He’d always figured he would go back and try to find Julia and talk to her, find out why she had broken things off. Find out if maybe there was a way forward. But that was seeming increasingly unlikely. Every day that passed, and she still hadn’t called, made him feel more like that chapter of his life was over. Like he should move on, as much as he didn’t want to.

Thinking that through, actually saying it to himself if only in his head, felt like tearing a bandage off a fresh wound. It hurt.

“Jim?” Nadia said.

“Sorry. Just thinking.”

Nadia was quiet for a while, her eyes staying focused on the ground ahead. “I wondered,” she said, finally, “if maybe… if you had some time before you had to go back…”

“Nadia—”

“Just. Just listen, for now. Don’t answer. If you had some time, maybe you could come with me. Come see my Siberia.”

“You don’t want to be with your family?” he asked.

She shook her head. “My father died many years ago. My mother moved away, to Vietnam. My childhood friends… they will not remember me now. I don’t want to be alone when I go back. That’s all.”

“Nadia — you don’t even know me. Not really.”

“I don’t have time for long acquaintance now,” she said, with a bittersweet smile. “I know you’re a good man. I feel it when I stand next to you. Just think on it.” She turned her face away from him as if she was watching an intersection for oncoming traffic. Not that there was likely to be another vehicle for a hundred miles in any direction. Chapel understood that she just didn’t want him to see her eyes, just then.

They drove in silence for a long time. Maybe an hour. Nadia checked the tablet occasionally, to make sure they were still on course.

They never saw another human being, not even a light on the horizon. At one point they had to cross a major road — the local equivalent of a superhighway. Angel said it was clear in both directions, so Nadia eased the truck onto the road surface. “This is an important road. Over there,” she said, pointing through the passenger’s-side window. “About thirty kilometers, is Baikonur. The cosmodrome.”

“Where they launch the rockets,” Chapel said. “The — the Soyuz. Soyuzes. Whatever, the rockets that go to the International Space Station.”

“We won’t see a launch on this trip, I’m afraid,” she told him. Her smile was back, her enthusiasm.

“That’s too bad. I’d have liked to see something like that,” Chapel told her.

She laughed. “I’ll make a tourist of you yet. Maybe you’ll come to Siberia just for the sights.”

Within a few minutes they had left the road behind, so that Chapel couldn’t even see it in their mirrors.

“So far, sugar, your plan is working.”

Nadia was setting up the tent in the lee of a massive boulder. Bogdan had wandered off to urinate, so Chapel had figured it was an excellent time to check in. “Did the SNB find Mirza’s body?” he asked.

“They did,” Angel told him. “And they went nuts over it. They figured out very quickly that the other dead people were all Russians, but they seem to have assumed they were gangsters, not Russian agents. There’s a manhunt going on right now in Uzbekistan, every cop in the country looking for you and Nadia. They’re assuming you’ve already gotten away, but they aren’t taking chances.”

“Did you spread those false sightings I asked for?” he said.

Angel laughed. “We got lucky and I didn’t have to. Somebody blew through a border crossing into Tajikistan, just six hours after Mirza stopped reporting in. Most likely it was just smugglers, but they assumed it had to be Nadia at the wheel. They’ve got an all-points-bulletin out for you in Tajikistan, but they aren’t very hopeful. Apparently there’s no love lost between the two countries, and they don’t expect much cooperation.”

“That’s good news. What about the Russians? Have you heard any chatter from them, about Nadia?”

“Those communications are a lot better guarded than the internal stuff in Uzbekistan, I’m afraid. I’m not having a lot of luck intercepting their reports. But I do know they sent a new group of agents to Uzbekistan yesterday. They aren’t just going to give up — they’ll follow her wherever she tries to run.”

Chapel sighed. “I figured as much. Hopefully we can keep one step ahead of them until this is done. It won’t be long now — tomorrow, in fact.”

“I’ll run as much interference for you as I can,” Angel promised.

“You’re the best, Angel.”

“Darn right. Chapel — listen. I just want to go on the record here and say I don’t like this.”

“You don’t like what?”

Angel sounded more frustrated than he’d ever heard her before. “This… openness. This perestroika you’ve reached with Nadia. I don’t like the fact that she knows who I am.”

“Nobody knows who you are, Angel.”

“She shouldn’t even know I exist. How did she find out? You said she overheard you talking to me. But I know you, Chapel. You aren’t that careless. Unless you’re getting sloppy over there.”

Chapel was glad she couldn’t see him blush. “It was my own fault. If I’d kept typing instead of talking to you out loud… well. Frankly, I prefer it this way. I hated having to always run to the bathroom every time I needed to talk to you.”

“If you say so,” Angel told him. “I just wonder. She got a lot of information out of something she just happened to overhear.”

“She’s a spy,” Chapel pointed out. “We tend to be perceptive people.”

“Okay. The director seems semiokay with how things are, though he’s asking for constant updates. He wants to know everything that goes on over there, and most of what I can tell him is just what I can see from the satellites. Everything’s okay? You haven’t seen any sign of more Russian assassins?”

“No, nothing,” Chapel told her.

“And what about… the other thing. Fraternization. Anything to report there?”

Now Chapel was really glad she couldn’t see him. “I’ve rejected a few advances,” he said, which was technically true. That night on the balcony of the hotel, their last night in Tashkent… he had, in fact, stopped himself. But not before things had already gone too far. “I’m behaving myself,” he told Angel.

“Good. Good. I’m really glad to hear that. Because… there’s something I’ve been struggling with. Something I wasn’t sure I should tell you about, because I know you’re not going to like it. It’s about Julia.”

Chapel felt his heart lurch in his chest. He swallowed, painfully, as a sort of electric jolt ran through his body. “Did she call?” he managed to ask.

“She called me,” Angel said, very softly. “She… she was looking for you. Wanted to know if I could get a message to you. She knows she’s not supposed to call me unless it’s an emergency, but she said she couldn’t get hold of you any other way.”

“Was it an emergency?”

Angel seemed to have to force the words out. “No. No, it wasn’t. She called because… because she wanted to know if she could move back into the apartment, the one you shared in Brooklyn. She wanted to know if you had moved your stuff out yet. It’s been more than a month, after all.”

Chapel wanted to bang his head on the dashboard. He resisted the urge. “What are you saying, Angel? She’s evicting me?” The lease was in Julia’s name, after all. Secret agents weren’t supposed to sign legal documents if they could help it.

“It sounded like she assumed you would move out on your own,” Angel told him. “I told her you couldn’t be reached right now, and that you wouldn’t be able to move your things. She said there was no rush, but that she’d really like to move back in. Sweetie — I’m so sorry. I know how this must make you feel—”

Anger started welling up in Chapel like his blood vessels would burst with it. “You don’t, actually. You have no idea,” he said, far more curtly than he’d meant to. “You… you don’t.”

“I’m on your side,” Angel pointed out.

Chapel felt blood surge through his head, felt like he was going to explode. He reached over and grabbed the dashboard with both hands. Clung to it until he felt like the sharp metal would cut into his fingers. He felt like he might stop breathing. He felt like he might die right then and there.

He brought one leg up and kicked, hard, at the dashboard, not caring if he smashed the gauges and instruments there. Maybe wanting to do just that. But the Soviets had built the truck to take the occasional blow, and he didn’t even leave a dent. He lifted his leg to kick again, but then he stopped himself.

Tried to breathe.

“Yeah. Yeah, I know. Well. I guess.” He had no idea what to say. No idea what to do next. As he had so many times before, he forced himself to fall back on his training. When you got frantic on the battlefield, he knew, when shells were bursting around you and fear and confusion threatened to take over your brain, you started making mistakes. You stopped doing all the little things that kept you alive.

Focus on the little things, he told himself. He could take care of the logistical details. It might mean nothing, it might not change how he felt at all, but it was at least something he could accomplish. “Angel, can you arrange for someone to go and collect my things? There’s not much, just some clothes and a few boxes of papers. It should all fit in a cheap storage locker.” His whole life back in the States and it would probably fill two suitcases. He thought back to what Nadia had said, about what this job did to you, how it made you a nonperson, and he wanted to laugh. We leave no trace, no mark we were ever there. Maybe he should tell Angel to burn all his things in a trash can. Just throw everything away — how appealing was that idea? Just chuck it all. Maybe not just his things. Maybe throw everything away. Fly off to Siberia with Nadia and find out how far he could run before he had to start thinking again.

No. That wasn’t… it wasn’t possible. He knew that. Even if he was having trouble remembering why.

“Just… just move the stuff. And send me the bill.”

“I’ll do that,” Angel said.

“Yeah.”

He ended the connection on the tablet before he could say anything else. Popped the door of the truck and jumped down into the sand. Nadia had the tent set up and she stood next to it, watching his face. She was smiling when she first saw him, but maybe the look on his face scared her. It made her stop smiling, at any rate.

The sun was almost up. Chapel said nothing to anyone, he just crawled in the tent and made room for himself. Took off his artificial arm and laid it down next to him like he planned on using it as a pillow.

Nadia and Bogdan came inside after a while and settled down themselves. Bogdan and Chapel on the sides, Nadia in the middle. There was no pretense of privacy or personal space — the tent wasn’t big enough for that.

An hour later, maybe, Chapel still hadn’t fallen asleep and he was just listening to Bogdan snore, listening to any noise that would drive thoughts out of his head. The sound the sand made as it rolled down the face of the boulder behind the tent. The flutter and snap of the canvas tent in the night breeze.

Nadia breathing behind him. He could just feel her warm breath on the back of his neck. It felt good — it was cold inside the tent — but then each time it went away he shivered, chilled again until her breath washed over his skin again.

He turned over on his other side, careful not to make too much noise or shake the tent. Rolled over until he was facing her. He wanted to see her sleeping face. The tent was almost perfectly dark, the rising sun blocked by the boulder behind the tent. But there was just enough light to glint on her open eyes.

She wasn’t sleeping either.

He was too angry, too hurt, too confused to worry about social niceties. He reached over and brushed her cheek with the back of his fingers. His real fingers. She blinked — he could only tell from the way the light in her eyes vanished for a moment — but she didn’t move, not away from him, not toward him.

He leaned in and kissed her. Gently, just a touch.

It felt good. It felt natural. There was comfort there. But it was like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. It wasn’t going to be enough.

He couldn’t trust her. No matter how much he wanted to.

She reached for his hand, but he pulled it away. He rolled over on his side again, facing away from her.

Scooted over so he didn’t feel her breath on his skin anymore.

Chapel woke to find the tent shaking, its poles rattling against each other. His first thought was that he’d woken up to an earthquake.

He turned over and looked around and saw that instead it was Bogdan, wrestling with a sheet, trying to get up and onto his feet. The hacker turned and stared at Chapel. “Must pee. Now.”

“I’m not stopping you,” Chapel said.

Bogdan managed to get untangled from the sheet and stumbled forward into the flap of the tent, his long fingers running up and down the seam looking for the zipper. He eventually found it and he yanked it downward, spilling light and heat into the tent. It was enough to wake Nadia, who covered her eyes with her hands as she sat up. Bogdan stepped outside of the tent, making no attempt to close it again behind him.

“Is it time to get up, now?” Nadia asked, looking like she would much rather go back to sleep. “Is it time to—”

She didn’t finish her thought. Bogdan came racing back into the tent, as quickly as he’d left.

His eyes were wide and staring under their fringe of hair. He’d gone as white as a ghost.

“Get gun, shoot them! Do it now!” he said, his voice an octave higher than usual.

Chapel glanced at Nadia. She was wide awake now. She put one hand behind herself, reaching for a pistol. Chapel picked up his arm and clamped it onto his shoulder. “What did you see?” he asked Bogdan.

“No time! Just shoot!” the hacker exclaimed.

Chapel pushed him out of the way and peered out through the tent flap, expecting to see half the Russian army out there. What he saw instead made him jump back nearly as fast as Bogdan had.

“Giant lizards,” he said. He forced himself to look out of the tent again.

Surrounding the tent were maybe a dozen big reptiles, some of them seven feet long. Their lean bodies and long tails were striped and spotted in desert colors, for camouflage maybe, but Chapel had no trouble seeing them. Their tapered snouts were open, showing rows of vicious triangular fangs and pink, wet mouths, and they hissed angrily when Chapel poked his head out through the flap.

“Desert monitors,” Nadia said, coming up beside him to take a look for herself. “Not uncommon in the Kyzyl Kum. This rock we have been using for shelter must be their den.”

“They’re as big as I am. Their jaws are big enough to swallow my head,” Chapel said. Maybe that was an exaggeration, but not much of one. “What do they eat? Tourists?”

“Wild sheep, mostly.” Nadia put her weapon down.

“So they’re carnivorous,” Chapel said.

“Konyechno. You have seen so many plants in this desert for them to eat?”

“Great.” Chapel reached for his assault rifle, but she grabbed his arm.

“No! You can’t shoot them,” she said.

“We’re surrounded by giant carnivorous lizards. This is about as close as I’m ever going to get to being attacked by dinosaurs,” Chapel said, as if explaining himself to a child. “I am not in the mood. You want to worry about animal rights, you can—”

Nadia shook her head. “If you fire a weapon, even in the air, the entire group will attack us at once and tear their way in through the tent to get at us.”

“Uh-huh,” Chapel said.

“Also, they are venomous,” she pointed out.

“Jesus.” Chapel put his rifle down. “So what do we do?”

“I will strike the tent. Bogdan,” she said, “you gather up our things. Then the three of us will walk very slowly to the truck and drive away. I do not think they will attack if we are calm and do not overly antagonize them.”

It was probably the worst plan Chapel had ever heard. The problem was, he couldn’t think of another one. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and grabbed a pistol from the floor of the tent. They’d taken the precaution of bringing plenty of weapons with them, in case they were attacked while they were sleeping. He knew Nadia was right, that if he started shooting they would be quickly overrun, but he wasn’t about to go out there unarmed.

Behind him the tent started to collapse as Nadia unscrewed the poles that held it up. Bogdan pressed up close behind Chapel as if he was afraid of being hit by fallen canvas. Now or never, Chapel thought.

He stepped out of the tent, the pistol held loose and low in his hand. The monitors all watched him with their yellow eyes as he took a step farther into their midst. The truck was about seven yards away — directly behind the pack of lizards. He could run for it, but the way the reptiles all crouched, their legs bent taut, made him think that was a bad idea.

The nearest one — and the biggest, bigger than Chapel — closed its jaw and lifted its snout in the air, turning it one way, then the other. Its huge eye stayed locked on him. As he watched, it flicked a nictitating membrane across its pupil. Chapel knew more than he wanted to about nictitating membranes. He knew, for instance, that the monitor could see him just fine through the cloudy third eyelid.

Bogdan and Nadia were close behind him. He lifted his free hand a few inches, to tell them to stay back. Then he took another step forward.

The big monitor opened its mouth and made a noise that wasn’t so much a hiss as the sound of a steam boiler about to burst apart at the seams. Other monitors started moving, spreading out, flanking them. For solitary animals they understood just fine how to work as a pack.

“Stay calm,” Nadia said. “Do not make sudden moves.”

“Jesus,” Chapel said. “What’s that smell?” The odor wafting off the monitors was like rotten eggs, or maybe dead flesh. A deep, earthy, animal smell that made the hairs inside Chapel’s nose prickle.

“Musk,” Nadia told him. “That explains why there are so many here in one place. This must be the mating season. Animals can be so direct about these things.”

“Ha ha,” Chapel said. “Not the time for that. Okay, I’m going to start moving toward the truck. Just stay behind me, all right? If we split up, they’ll probably try to isolate the weakest of us or something. So, Bogdan, you stay very close.”

“I can tell when I am insulted,” the hacker said with a sniff.

Chapel stopped talking, then. He edged sideways a little, which the big monitor seemed to find acceptable, then took another step forward, barely inching his way ahead. The monitor started opening his mouth again.

“I heard you,” Chapel told it. “I heard you the first time. I’m just going to head this way, all right?” He took a step to the side, and the monitor closed its mouth. Jesus, he thought. This was the world’s worst game of Simon Says.

“Jim,” Nadia said.

“Hold on.” He took another step to the side. That brought him closer to another big monitor, this one maybe five feet long. It was crouching low, its jaw nearly scraping the sand. Chapel wished he knew what that meant — whether it was about to attack, or if it was showing submission. He kind of doubted it was that second thing. “Just—”

“Jim,” she said once more.

He glanced behind him. The look on her face was very serious. She was pointing upward. He followed her finger and saw the top of the boulder. There were about six more monitors up there, perched ten feet up over his head, and they were all peering down at him, flexing their back legs like they were about to jump.

“Damn,” he said. “These guys are good. We’re going to have to run for it. Bogdan, you first—”

“Jim, no,” Nadia suggested.

“—then Nadia, be ready to fight, I’ll bring up the rear — Now!”

Bogdan at least knew the score. He burst past Chapel, running as fast as his long legs would carry him. One small monitor tried to snap at him, but he vaulted over it, moving far more gracefully than Chapel would have expected.

With a sigh Nadia dropped the bundled tent and sprinted after the hacker, a pistol in either of her hands. She tracked them around to aim at the monitors as she ran, but she didn’t fire. Chapel was already moving by then, coming up close behind her, keeping an eye on the biggest of the reptiles, the one that was clearly the alpha male.

The alpha was moving, too. Coming right for him. Chapel threw an arm across his face, but the monitor slapped his legs out from under him with one big claw, its talons shredding his pant leg. It twisted its head around, and he saw its eye staring into his face as its jaws came down to disembowel him with one bite. He barely managed to get his arm down across his abdomen before the darting attack connected.

“Jim!” Nadia screamed. “Jim, the venom!”

Down on the ground Chapel stared up into the face of the thing that had his arm in a vise lock. Like an alligator — he’d seen plenty of those back in Florida — it started twisting its head back and forth, trying to tear off a piece of him. The venom, brown and thick, spread through the flesh of his arm.

Or rather, the silicone simulated flesh of his artificial arm.

He tried desperately to get up, to get at least one foot under him. It was tough to do with a hundred and fifty pounds of lizard thrashing around on top of him. His prosthetic had saved him for the moment, but he knew his time was limited — any second now the other monitors would move in for the attack, swarming him from every side. Some of them were bound to get their poisonous jaws into his living flesh.

“Come on, you son of a bitch,” Chapel shouted, yanking his arm back, trying to free it from the monitor’s grip. Those teeth wouldn’t let go, but at least he managed to get up on his feet again. He looked around and saw half a dozen of the bigger lizards coming toward him, taking their time, their tails lashing the sand into deep furrows.

He’d lost his pistol when he was knocked down. The rifle was still slung across his back, but there was no way to reach it with one hand. His only hope was to get back, closer to the truck. He shouted for Bogdan and Nadia to get in, then dug his feet into the shifting sand and danced backward, pulling the monitor along with him. The monster didn’t even try to dig its claws into the sand — it let itself be pulled along, saving all its energy to use to hold on to the arm. The other reptiles scampered after Chapel, but at least for the moment they didn’t attack.

If Nadia had been a better shot, maybe she could have driven some of them back. As it was, especially in the fading light, he was glad she didn’t try. Inch by inch, step by agonizing step he moved toward the truck, the alpha just digging his teeth deeper and deeper into the artificial arm. Chapel considered releasing the arm, just loosing the clamps that held it to his body and leaving it behind, but he couldn’t bear the thought. He staggered backward, through the stink and the hissing, and suddenly his back rammed into the side of the truck.

The monitors came after him, moving faster now. The pack knew it was in danger of letting its prey escape and they would do anything they could to stop that. Chapel reached up with his free arm, trying to find the handle of the truck door without looking.

Then Nadia reached down and grabbed him with both hands and pulled. “Drive!” she shouted to Bogdan. “The pedal on the right!”

With his free hand Chapel found the ladder on the side of the cab. He wrapped his good arm through and around one of the rungs and just held on as the truck roared to life and started moving away from the rock and the pack of lizards. The monitors tried to chase after it, but in seconds it was moving too fast for them and they fell behind.

All of them except the alpha, who hadn’t so much as loosened its death grip on Chapel’s arm. It was dragged along, its feet paddling wildly on the sand but unable to gain purchase.

On the outside of the cab Chapel clung on for dear life as Bogdan took them straight up the side of a dune and then over the top. Chapel’s legs swung free — as did the alpha, whose big eyes showed no terror at all as its body flopped through the air.

Nadia leaned out of the window of the truck, a pistol in her hand. She pointed it at the monitor’s eye, but the lizard flopped around so much she couldn’t seem to line up a shot. “I can’t risk shooting you!” she shouted over the noise of the engine.

“Hit it between the eyes!” Chapel shouted back.

Nadia twisted around until she was sitting on the windowsill. She held the pistol by its barrel and brought its grip down hard on top of the monitor’s head.

It was enough to make the monitor blink its nictitating membranes, but nothing more. Its grip didn’t loosen at all.

Chapel cursed and shouted at the monitor, but that didn’t help either. The truck crested another dune at speed and nearly threw him, his legs flying out wide from the body of the cab. One foot got tangled with the monitor’s front leg.

Maybe, he thought — just maybe—

Chapel lifted his feet and planted his boots on the monitor’s shoulders. The reptile thrashed but there was nowhere for it to go to get away from him. Chapel braced himself as best he could and then pushed down with his feet, shoving the monitor’s body away from him, using every bit of strength he had.

The alpha responded by tightening its grip still further. Its teeth tore deep into the silicone flesh of Chapel’s artificial arm and then, with a sickening slowness, tore right through it. The flesh came away in one big chunk, no longer attached to the arm at all.

For a moment the monitor seemed to float in midair, its jaw already chewing at the chunk of prosthetic arm, but then it disappeared as it fell away from the truck, rolling over and over along the sand. Chapel just had time to see it spit out a mouthful of silicone before it fell away behind them.

He looked down at his artificial arm. The silicone sleeve was just a ragged mess, still brown at the edges with venom. He tried flexing the arm and it worked — apparently the reptile hadn’t damaged any of the actuators under the skin.

Using both hands, he climbed up and through the window of the truck, landing in Nadia’s lap.

“Are they after us still?” Bogdan asked. He was hunched over the steering wheel, his eyes wide and staring.

“Just drive,” Chapel told him.

In the backseat, Chapel poured water over the torn flesh of his arm to try to wash away the last of the venom.

“One of those little sticky bandages you carry isn’t going to be enough,” Nadia said, prodding the torn skin with a pen. The motors and pistons underneath whined a little as his arm moved, even though he was trying to hold it still. “This saved your life, did it not?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.” Chapel reached one-handed for the truck’s bulky medical kit and flipped its catch. Supplies spilled out onto the seat beside him — suture kits, antihistamine tablets, a thin plastic splint. He picked up a roll of gauze and brought it toward his mouth to unspool it.

“Let me,” Nadia said. She spun out a long length of fabric and started wrapping it tightly around Chapel’s arm. The damage was all confined to the forearm and the wrist and it didn’t take long for her to wrap it all up.

He looked into the kit and found a small pair of scissors secured to the lid of the case with a nylon loop. He handed them over and she cut the gauze, then tucked the end neatly inside the wrapping and used white tape to keep it in place. She looked up at him with questioning eyes. “In America, do mothers kiss their children’s scrapes to make them better?”

“Better not,” he told her. “There might still be some venom on there.”

She shook her head and laughed. “You are infuriating, Mr. Chapel. But I will let you run hot and cold a while longer before I simply attack you out of unbearable desire. Otherwise you might think me too aggressive. I am told this is unattractive to American men.”

He knew she was fishing for a compliment, so he said nothing. There was a perverse kind of pleasure to torturing her like that, as if he could get back at Julia for all the pain she’d caused him by being cruel to Nadia. Even as he realized that he felt like a jerk, but not enough to give in to her charms.

She shrugged dramatically and then climbed back into the front passenger seat. He didn’t seem to have broken the buoyant mood that had come over her in the last few hours. Nothing could — they were getting close to Perimeter, and she could barely sit still. Ignoring him, she chattered amiably with Bogdan in Romanian. Chapel couldn’t follow the language so he didn’t bother to try.

Instead he lay back in the seat, trying to ignore the way Bogdan’s inexpert driving tossed him up and down every time they passed over a dune. Even as the night darkened, he could see the landscape beyond the windows was changing, getting rougher. Instead of an unbroken sea of sand, now when he looked outside what he often saw was rocks, big rocks — more than boulders. Small hills, then the start of big ones.

He realized with some surprise they were coming to the edge of the desert.

How long had it been since they’d left Uzbekistan? It felt like no time at all — or forever, he couldn’t decide. Maybe it was more like they’d left Earth altogether, that they’d been driving across the face of the moon. What he’d seen of Kazakhstan had been just as desolate, as uninhabited. The Kyzyl Kum seemed to belong more to the desert monitors than to people.

For Chapel, who had grown up in the suburban sprawl of Florida where he’d never been more than a mile from the nearest town, it was unimaginable that you could have all this land, this huge expanse, and not fill it up with strip malls and housing developments. Sure, it was a desert, ridiculously hot during the day and freezing cold at night — but that hadn’t stopped western expansion back in the States. Then again, the Soviet Union had been a lot bigger than America — a whole empire, with room enough for tracts of land that just went unused, like this place, like Nadia’s Siberia.

In the distance, ahead of them, part of the night sky was obscured. Above it spread a wealth of stars, a glittering abundance of the kind you never saw in America, a night sky paved with light. Below the dividing line was only darkness. It took Chapel a while to realize those were mountains ahead of them, blocking out the sky.

Nadia glanced back over her seat to look at him. “There,” she said, pointing at the shadow. “That is where we are going. That is where we find Perimeter.”

Even in the dark cab of the truck, her eyes shone.

“It will not be much longer,” she said. “The northern shore of the Aral Sea is over there,” she said, pointing west. “The coordinates I have for Perimeter suggest it is some fifty kilometers inland from there.”

Chapel moved to look between the seats and out the windshield. Bogdan’s driving was erratic, and he couldn’t seem to keep a steady speed, but it wasn’t like he was going to crash into anything — even as the landscape grew rockier and less sandy, there was still plenty of room to maneuver. The mountains ahead looked just as far away as they ever had, still off in some impossible distance.

“How will we know when we arrive?” he asked. “I doubt there’s going to be a big neon sign announcing the location.”

“Hardly,” Nadia said. “I do not actually know if we will see anything. The installation will be all underground, dug out of bedrock deep enough that it can survive a direct hit from an atomic weapon. There will be some way to enter, a cover as if for a manhole or the like, perhaps. Even that will be camouflaged, though. Perimeter was designed never to be found by the wrong people.”

Chapel nodded. “And how accurate are your map references? Are we going to have to hunt for this entrance when we get there?”

“They are accurate to one-tenth of one second of a degree,” Nadia claimed. “Do not worry. I did not come so far just to miss it now.”

As they got closer, the low hills gave way to looming pinnacles of rock, towers of limestone carved into incredible shapes by ancient oceans. They rose up ahead and blocked out the stars, and Chapel couldn’t help but see them as silent guardians, soldiers standing watch to make sure no one ever discovered the secret buried here.

The dark mass on the horizon, the mountains Chapel had been watching for hours, started to gain a little definition. Dead ahead stood a long massif of rock that lifted above the sand dunes like the curtain wall of a castle. As they drew closer still, Chapel could see the rocky barrier was broken in some places, cracked open by ravines and even winding box canyons. One of those canyons seemed darker than the others.

“Perimeter will be there,” Nadia said, consulting the GPS on the tablet. “Those shadows — I hope it is not overgrown with brush that we will have to clear away.”

A few seconds later Chapel said, “I don’t think that will be a problem.” The shadows were too regular, too blocky in shape. That wasn’t brush. It was a collection of structures definitely built by human hands. Nature didn’t build that straight or that repetitively.

Bogdan stepped on the brake, and the truck rocked to a stop a few hundred meters from the entrance to the canyon. From there it was quite easy to see that the defile was full of buildings. It looked like there was a whole town sheltered between the walls of the canyon.

For a while the three of them stared at the canyon in hushed silence, trying to make out features in the shadowy place. Moonlight lit up the sand and rocks on either side of them, but the canyon hid its secrets well, casting a pall of darkness over the sleeping buildings.

“You weren’t expecting this,” Chapel said.

“No,” Nadia said. She unlatched her door and jumped down into the sand.

“Wait,” Chapel called, and jumped down after her. No lights showed in the town, but that didn’t mean it was uninhabited — or for that matter, that it wasn’t surrounded by a minefield. He hurried after Nadia as she staggered forward, across the desert floor, toward the dark interior of the canyon. Toward the town there. As Chapel raced after her he saw a sign hung in front of the closest building. He struggled to make out the words, then to transliterate the Cyrillic characters. “Aralsk-30,” he whispered.

Nadia turned and faced him. Her hair blew across her eyes in the breeze that came down the canyon. She hugged herself, perhaps against the night’s chill, perhaps to contain some of her excitement. “A secret city,” she said. “Of course!”

Chapel knew something about the secret cities.

They had been built by Stalin, mostly back before the Space Race. Back before reconnaissance satellites, when the Soviets still believed they could keep big secrets hidden inside their borders. People had lived and worked in the secret cities, just like normal cities, but they were also secret installations — weapons laboratories, factories constructing biological weapons or atomic bombs, even farms where experimental livestock could be raised. They were constructed by slave labor, dissidents and criminals and sometimes just people who belonged to ethnic groups the politburo didn’t like. When the building was complete, the slaves would be shipped off to the next project and the city’s actual residents would move in — scientists and workers who could be trusted to tell no one, not even their families, where they lived. The cities were built far from civilization, in places where people weren’t likely to stumble on them, and they were never, ever mentioned in official documents. They didn’t appear on any maps, and they didn’t even get their own names — they just took the name of the nearest town and a number to describe how far away they were, so they had names like Arzamas-16 or Chelyabinsk-65—or Aralsk-30.

The most advanced science that the Soviets did happened in the secret cities. So did some of their worst atrocities. The NSA had compiled a list of all the cities and what was known about them, but it was believed it was incomplete — some of them had been hidden so carefully that they still hadn’t been found, decades after spy satellites had mapped every inch of the former Soviet Union. Some of the secret cities hid in deep forests or on the tops of mountains. Some were believed to be housed in enormous underground bunkers, though that might just be an urban legend.

Whatever reason the Soviets had had for building Aralsk-30, they’d hidden it very well. The walls of the box canyon would shield it from view from all but one side, the direction from which they’d approached it, and the shadows of the canyon walls might hide it even from eyes in the sky.

“Have you ever heard of this place?” Chapel asked.

Nadia shook her head. She seemed too overwhelmed to speak. Years of her life to find this place and it had still surprised her. Without a glance backward she raced down the main street of the town, deep into the canyon.

“Wait!” Chapel called after her, but she was already gone.

In the dark of night she was likely to get lost, or trip over something and break a leg. Chapel called back to Bogdan, telling him to turn on the truck’s lights. The sudden blast of illumination blinded Chapel for a second, so he had to put one hand over his eyes and look away. He hadn’t realized just how dark it was out here and how much his eyes had adapted.

He jogged back to the truck and climbed up the ladder on the driver’s side, so he could look in the window and tell Bogdan to start moving forward, slowly, into the town.

Jesus, Chapel thought. Secret cities tended to be guarded with fences and watchtowers and sentry patrols. What if Nadia ran in there and stumbled right into an ambush?

The truck rumbled forward, off the sand and onto the first paved road it had touched since they passed Baikonur. The lights swept across a row of squat, square buildings with broken windows and boarded-up doors. There was a searchlight on the roof of the cab. Chapel scrambled up on top of the truck so he could move its beam around manually. He shone it through empty, open windows and saw nothing but broken furniture and old dust.

The noise and the light seemed perverse in that dead place. It made him jumpy and anxious. He felt like at any second people should come pouring out of these old buildings, maybe the descendants of the old inhabitants, devolved into savagery after being left behind for so long. Or maybe they had all left because the place was contaminated, maybe some old experiment had gone wrong and flooded this place with radioactivity or plague germs—

He shook his head. He was letting his imagination spin out of control. This was just an old ghost town, nothing to be afraid of. He shone his light down into a guard post at the corner of two intersecting streets. Nobody there. The booth was empty.

“Nadia!” he called out. There was no answer.

Aralsk-30 wasn’t very large. There were only the two main streets, which met at the center of the town. The squat buildings near the canyon entrance must be dormitories, he decided, living quarters for the people who had worked here. Past the intersection lay big buildings that must be factories, judging by the forest of smokestacks that stuck up from their rooftops. Maybe there had been other things here once, shops and bars and places for the workers to blow off steam, but now it all just looked like decaying concrete and broken glass. Sand was everywhere, in a thin film over the streets, in great drifts up against the lee sides of the buildings. It had blown in through any open doorway and clogged some of the buildings until it poured out through second-story windows. Falling rocks from the canyon walls had crushed in some of the smaller structures. At least there was no sign of barbed wire or mass graves, and if there were mines, the truck hadn’t rolled over any of them so far.

Bogdan drove up to the intersection and stopped. “Which way?” he called out, over the noise of the truck’s engine.

“Just park it here,” Chapel shouted back. He tilted the searchlight back to illuminate the intersection. It was just wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other, but a little space in its exact center had been cleared for a bronze statue that stood twenty feet high. The light washed over the face of Vladimir Lenin, then down his chest to show that he held an oversize hammer in one hand and a sickle in the other.

There had been statues like that in every town in the Soviet Union, once, dozens of them in some places. Chapel had read recently that while the Russian Federation officials did their best to tear them all down, there had been so many they still hadn’t managed to get them all, not even twenty years after the end of communism. Well, here was one more to add to the list.

He climbed down the side of the cab, then ducked in through the passenger-side window. In the big glove compartment he found what he was looking for — a flashlight, a big model with a rubberized grip and a body that could hold an old dry cell battery. He climbed back out of the truck and shone his light around the buildings that surrounded the intersection. “Nadia!” he called out again.

There was no answer, but when he pointed his light at the ground he saw the footprints she’d left in the blown sand. They were clear enough that he could read them like a map of how she’d moved through the town, stopping to look in a window here, ducking through a sand-clogged doorway there. They ended at a side door of one of the big factory buildings. Its door had been sealed with rotten boards, but it looked like Nadia had just pulled them free with her bare hands so she could get inside. The wood was silvered and smooth with age on the outside, but where she’d broken it he could still see the yellowish grain inside, bright in his flashlight beam.

He trotted after her, though before he went inside he took one last look around. If people were hiding in the shadows, squatting in the abandoned buildings, they’d done a good job of staying hidden. He had to assume this place was deserted.

As he passed into the darkness of the factory he felt cold air wash over his face. It was frigid inside, colder even than the desert night outside. He could smell rusting metal and rotting plaster, and something else, something sharp and organic. Maybe some birds or wild sheep had gotten inside and died there.

He heard a noise ahead of him and swung his beam around. He nearly jumped when it lit up a human form, but then he saw it was just Nadia. The electric light washed out her features and turned her eyes to glass, making her look spooky and unreal.

She blinked in irritation — the light must have hurt her dark-adapted eyes — so he swung it away again, pointing it up at the rafters of the building. The factory floor seemed to be one vast open space, the ceiling held up by a spiderweb of thin steel beams, punched with regular round holes to keep them light. He brought the light down the wall, illuminating old posters showing happy workers being safe and productive. Blotchy white mold had eaten into the ancient paper.

“This is the perfect place,” Nadia said, her voice strange and disembodied in a place that must have known silence for so many years. “If you want to hide something of crucial importance, where do you put it? Underneath something that is already hidden. Even I never guessed they would put a city on top of Perimeter.”

Chapel kept his light moving. Sitting on the factory floor were dozens of big machines, what looked like hydraulic presses festooned with handles and wheels and pull-chains. He had no idea what they were for, what kind of work had been done here. Maybe the workers of Aralsk-30 had built components for the rockets that were launched at Baikonur. Maybe they’d been working on nuclear weapons.

“Is this place safe?” he asked.

Nadia laughed. “It’s the unfeeling black heart of the Russian nuclear arsenal. You’re worried there might be asbestos in the walls?”

He brought the light around to shine on her again. She didn’t blink so painfully this time.

“We must find the entrance to Perimeter,” she said. “It could be in any of these buildings.”

“Let’s get started,” he said.

They’d looked everywhere. Twice.

The entrance to the computer facility wasn’t in any of the dormitories. Well, they’d expected that, but still they’d gone over every wall looking for concealed doors, sliding panels, hollow places in walls that should have been solid. Where the sand had piled up, they’d dug it away. Chapel had found some tools, including a sledgehammer, and he smashed a hundred or so holes in all the floors and walls, finding only solid concrete beneath.

They had no better luck in the guard posts or the empty buildings whose purposes were not immediately evident. The factories took a long time to search but were in fact easier than the smaller buildings since they had fewer walls. They learned a little about Aralsk-30 in their search, for all the good it did them. From what little evidence remained it seemed that the secret city had been devoted to making white phosphorous bullets. There had been a time when those had been controversial, forbidden by international treaties, so it made sense that they would be manufactured in a secret place. They weren’t important enough, however, that enemies of Russia would bother raiding the canyon city. “They were smart when they hid Perimeter here,” Chapel said, with a sort of grudging respect. “Even if you knew this place was secret, you wouldn’t bother with it.”

Nadia wiped sweat from her forehead. It was freezing inside the buildings, but the two of them had been working hard. “I wonder if the people who lived here knew what they protected. Not the workers in the factories, of course. But there would have been a commanding officer in charge here. Someone perhaps who was given this post as a punishment. I wonder if even he knew what he was hiding.”

In the beam of the flashlight Chapel could see her face. The concern there, the worry. Maybe even doubt. “We’ll find it,” he told her, his voice soft.

“Of course we will,” she said, but there was a sigh underneath the words.

He thought of how long she’d looked for this place. How much of her dwindling life she’d sacrificed for it. Had she really done all this work just because she wanted to leave the world better than she’d found it? Maybe a grand obsession was the only thing that could keep her from really thinking about the ugly death that was coming for her.

He reached over and put a hand on her shoulder. Gave it a friendly squeeze that turned into something more, his fingers trailing across her back.

For once, though, she didn’t respond. For the first time since he’d met her, it seemed she had better things to do than flirt with him.

“It will be dawn soon,” she told him. “I had hoped to find it and dismantle it tonight. We will be stuck here all day, now — it is still too dangerous to move when the sun is up. It might be dangerous to stay, as well.”

“No one has any idea we’re here,” Chapel told her. “Look at this place — it’s been lost for decades. Even if they were looking for us, how would they find us? This place isn’t on any map. Nobody knows about it.”

She shrugged. “If I could find it… no, never mind. I was thinking we might check the canyon walls. Something could be hidden in the rocks, camouflaged to look like natural stone.”

“Good idea,” Chapel told her. He threw his sledgehammer into a corner of the room. Walking past her he stepped out into the night. The sky was turning a weird electric blue — the sun was coming up, as she’d said — but it was still dark enough out that he could barely see the truck sitting in the intersection. They’d turned off all its lights for security and to save battery power.

Bogdan was fast asleep in the driver’s seat. Chapel climbed up the side of the cab and looked in the window. “Wake up, buddy,” he said. “Come on. We need your help.”

The hacker opened one bleary eye, which rotated in Chapel’s direction. He did not look happy. Chapel laughed and patted him on the arm. “Come on. Time to earn your pay, right?”

“What do you want?” Bogdan asked.

“Nadia wants to check the canyon walls, but we can’t see a thing out here. I need you to move the truck to the end of this street and get all its lights on the rocks over there. Think you can handle that?”

“Yes, yes, is possible,” Bogdan said. “I am driver now. Tell me where to go, boss, and there I go. Good boy Bogdan, the driver man.”

“Best-paid driver man in Eurasia,” Chapel told him. He waved one finger in a circle. “Let’s get moving.”

He jumped down from the cab as Bogdan woke the engine. Nadia had come outside to stand in the road, clutching herself for warmth. Chapel started heading over to her, intending to put his arm around her. Behind him the truck started to move, its big tires moaning as they dug into the sand.

“We’ll spend all day looking, if we have to,” Chapel told Nadia, raising his voice over the noise of the truck engine. “And tomorrow, too. If that’s what it—”

“Bogdan!” Nadia cried out. “You’re in the wrong gear! Reverse! Reverse!”

Chapel whirled around to see the truck rolling steadily forward. He heard Romanian words coming from the cab that sounded pretty nasty. His eyes went wide as he saw the truck slam into the big statue of Lenin in the middle of the intersection.

The statue rang like a bell — and then made a horrible crumpling noise as the impact smashed in one side of its base. Lenin started to lean forward as if he were giving a benediction.

“Jesus, if that thing falls on the truck we’ll be stranded out here,” Chapel said. He rushed forward and grabbed for the ladder on the side of the cab, intending to shove Bogdan aside and take the wheel himself. Lenin shifted another few degrees forward as Bogdan stripped the gears, trying to move the truck. Just as Chapel reached the truck’s ladder, the bronze statue made a horrible groaning noise and then something snapped, a horrible, popping noise like a whole piece of the statue had just broken off under tension and shot off into the dark.

Somehow Bogdan managed to get the truck into reverse and move it away from the statue, back toward the canyon entrance. It turned out not to be necessary, because the statue never did fall over.

Chapel was less concerned about Lenin’s fate, though, then what had broken off the statue base. Moving around behind it, keeping a close eye on the shifting metal mass above him, he came around to the back and saw there was a large hole in the base, now. The outline of the hole was strangely regular, not what he expected at all.

It was rectangular in shape, about six feet high and three feet wide. The corners of the hole were neatly rounded.

It looked like nothing so much in Chapel’s experience as the shape of the hatches on the Kurchatov. It looked like a doorway.

“Nadia,” he called out. “Nadia! Bring the flashlight over here!”

The base, and the statue above it, were both hollow, but they weren’t empty. Inside the base was a little room, just big enough for three people to cram inside. Set into one wall was a Cyrillic keyboard and a bank of lights. All of them were dark.

Inside the statue was a pipe rising straight up into the air. A wire ran from the base of the pipe, down along the wall, and into the floor. “Konyechno,” Nadia said. “I wondered why a town of this size needed such a large monument.”

“Not just to remind Russians far from home what they were working for?” Chapel asked, though he’d guessed what she was going to say.

“It’s a shortwave antenna,” she told him. “Perimeter must listen, always, for data from its monitoring stations and for the buzz tone from Moscow. Remember? It does not activate until that buzz tone goes silent.” She played her light along the pipe, up toward the inside of Lenin’s head. “A shortwave antenna out here might be noticed, but not some grandiose statue. Clever, clever.”

“This is the lock, yes?” Bogdan said, reaching toward the keyboard.

Nadia slapped his hand away. “Yes, it is. Do not touch it, whatever you do.” She ushered them all back out into the predawn light. “We must take our time, now. Though I want to very much to get started.”

Chapel nodded, thinking of all the prep work they should do. He ran down the job assignments in his head. “Honestly, we’re all tired. It’s been a long night, and we should get some sleep. But I know that isn’t going to happen — none of us wants to wait any longer; we want to do this. First I should tell Angel what we found,” Chapel said. “She can get our escape route ready for us.” The timing would be crucial — the submarine had to appear on the coast of the Caspian Sea just when they arrived. If it was spotted in Kazakh waters, it would be fired on without warning. Angel needed as much advance warning as she could get. “We need to move the truck, too, just in case the statue falls over. We need to check all our equipment, everything we’ll need once we’re inside. That’s Bogdan’s department. As for you—”

“Yes?” she asked, looking at him. Before he answered her, though, her eyes strayed back to the door in the base of the statue. She couldn’t not look at it.

“Why don’t you just take a second and pat yourself on the back?”

When she looked at him with uncomprehending eyes, he couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

“You did it, Nadia,” he told her. “You made it happen.”

“Don’t shout hop-la before you jump,” she told him.

It was his turn to look confused.

Bogdan sneered in disgust. “Is Russian proverb. Means, not to be counting chickens before they are born.”

Chapel laughed again. He knew it was true — nothing was finished, not yet. But he couldn’t help but be excited. The mission was nearly complete. He ran all the way back to the truck.

“Jim, do you have the one-time pad?”

Chapel took it from his pocket and turned it over in his hands. When he’d went diving for the pad in the wreck of the Kurchatov, he’d had no idea it would lead him here. The little black book still smelled of an ocean on the other side of the world. He handed it to her as if it was dangerous in itself, as if it might explode.

“A code word must be enciphered, then entered very carefully into this keyboard,” she told them. “Only this will open the way.”

“So let’s get started,” Chapel told her. “You know how to work the pad?” He’d studied the matrices of numbers and Cyrillic characters in the one-time pad and never been able to make hide nor hair of it. “You know the code word?”

“I do,” she said, but raised both hands for patience. “It must be done precisely, though. One mistake and — pfft — it is over. The panel and the door will lock themselves down, and the system will know we are intruders.”

“What will it do then?” Chapel asked, looking around at the metallic walls of the statue. “Electrify this thing?”

“Worse,” Nadia replied. “It will switch Perimeter into active mode. Arm the system. Then only a special signal from Moscow will turn it off again.”

“You’re saying if you press the wrong button, we will have made this damned thing worse than it was before? More dangerous?”

“Indeed.”

Chapel shook his head. “Better let Bogdan do it, then.”

Nadia looked almost hurt.

“He has the nimblest fingers I’ve ever seen,” he told her. “You brought him along for a reason, right?”

“Yes.” She closed her eyes for a moment and pressed the one-time pad to her chest. “All right.” She opened the book to the last page, the one dated 25 December 1991. Christmas Day, the last day of the Soviet Union.

Bogdan went over to the panel. He cracked his knuckles a few times, then let his fingers hover over the keyboard. “Am ready,” he said.

Nadia inhaled deeply. She looked at the pad, matching each letter of the code word with the matching entry on the grid. Then she spoke each enciphered letter out loud, one at a time, very slowly.

“Kah. Ehr. Ah. Ehs. Ehn. Ee kratkoyeh. Ee kratkoyeh. Ehl. Oo. Cheh.”

As she spoke each letter, Bogdan dutifully typed it on the keyboard. When he was finished, he drew his hands away quickly so as not to accidentally type an additional letter.

On the row of lightbulbs above the keyboard, a single lamp lit up with a dull yellow glow.

Nothing else happened.

“Did it — was—” Chapel had no idea what to say.

Nadia looked at the two men, a growing horror writ on her face. Had they got it wrong? Had they just armed Perimeter and left the world in constant danger of nuclear annihilation?

“Does it — maybe this is just the code entry panel, the actual door is somewhere else,” Chapel said, which sounded stupid to his own ears. “Maybe—”

He stopped then because he’d heard something, very soft and far away. It came from below his feet, the sound of a machine moving on a rusty track.

Then the floor of the statue lurched and dropped half an inch. Chapel and Bogdan staggered back away from the walls, toward the door. Nadia dropped into a crouch, one hand on the floor. She looked like a cat.

The floor dropped another few inches without warning. There was a horrible grinding noise, and the rattle of a massive chain. Something broke with a snap, and then the floor started lowering, smoothly and slowly, sliding down into the earth with all three of them still on it.

It was an elevator. It was an elevator and it was going to take them to Perimeter. The code had worked.

The elevator descended through a concrete tube, its walls stained with white sediment. There was no light inside the tube except the flashlight that Chapel held. He shone it at the wall and saw some markings there — numbers, telling them how far they had descended.

— 5, he read. He imagined that meant they’d already dropped five meters below the canyon floor.

He realized he was holding his breath. He let it out noisily.

As if they’d been waiting for his example, Nadia and Bogdan exhaled, too.

— 10. Something was written on the wall in Cyrillic. He could just make out the word sekretno before it passed out of the light again. Probably some kind of dire warning about unauthorized access, and what would happen to any traitor who dared enter this place.

— 15. Bogdan sat down on the floor. Maybe he thought the elevator was taking too long.

— 20.

— 25.

— 30. A few more meters and the elevator stopped. One side of the tube was open, with just a metal folding gate blocking the way. Chapel reached out and grabbed the handle. The gate was rusted and didn’t want to open. He put a little elbow grease into it and it screeched in its track, opening wide enough to let them out.

Nadia jumped, her shoulders rising toward her ears.

“What’s wrong?” Chapel asked. His voice echoed weirdly in the underground chamber.

“Nothing. Nothing,” she said, shaking her head so her hair swung around. “We just need to be careful. Perimeter is designed to resist what we plan. The keyboard panel above was not its only safeguard. If it decides we do not belong here, it will activate itself.”

“Moving a gate might do that?” Chapel asked.

“No. No, almost certainly not.”

Chapel made a mental note not to touch anything else.

The three of them stepped out of the elevator onto a shiny concrete floor, painted battleship gray. A thunking noise sounded above their heads and lights came on, revealing a short corridor ahead of them. The walls were a dismal green, and as shiny as the floor. There was surprisingly little dust.

An archway led off to their left, into a little room with some tool cabinets and a single cot. The sheets on the cot stank of mildew — which Chapel found reassuring. It meant this place hadn’t been used in a long time. The tools were placed neatly in their racks, and they were as shiny as when they’d been made. Maybe they had never been used. “What’s all this for?” Chapel asked. “I thought this system was completely automated.”

“Every system needs maintenance, sometimes.”

Chapel shrugged and looked down the hall. There were more thunking noises, and lights came on down there, too, illuminating a spiral staircase leading downward. The steps were made of steel that had been perforated to keep them light. They didn’t look as rusted as the gate had been.

Nadia led the way down the stairs. Lights kept coming on as they advanced, anticipating what they might want to be able to see. At one point they heard the sound of a tape being rewound — Chapel might have been the only one of them old enough to remember what that sounded like — and then music started playing from speakers mounted on the ceiling. Classical, he thought.

“Tchaikovsky,” Nadia told him, as if she’d read his mind.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why does it play music for us? Do you know about Chernobyl, about the Excluded Zone?”

“Sure,” Chapel said. “All the land around the nuclear plant there is irradiated, so nobody’s allowed inside. There’s a whole city in there that’s fenced off and abandoned.”

“Pripyat,” Nadia said. “It is called Pripyat. In the early days, just after the disaster, when someone did have to go there — scientists, mostly — they would get very frightened. Not because of the radiation but because it was too silent. There were no other people for miles. No birds sang — the birds all died. So they had loudspeakers mounted throughout the zone, loudspeakers that played music all the time, all day. I’ve seen video and it is very haunting, that music. But perhaps better than nothing at all.”

“So Perimeter is playing us music so we don’t get creeped out down here?” Chapel asked. “I have to say, it’s not working.”

The spiral staircase took them down into a cave, a mostly spherical space hollowed out of the bedrock. Like a vast bubble in the stone. At the end of the staircase was a narrow catwalk that led to a circular platform that seemed to hover in empty air. Chapel shone his flashlight down and saw that the platform was mounted on huge springs, each coil as thick as one of his legs.

“Shock absorbers,” Nadia told him. “If there is an earthquake, or a nuclear strike shakes the earth, those will absorb all vibration.”

Sitting on the platform were a number of upright rectangular boxes, each about the size of a bookcase. Together they looked to Chapel like some kind of space age Stonehenge. A simple desk stood in the middle of the boxes, and sitting on the desk was a television screen and a keyboard.

The cave had not been designed for comfort or human convenience. Big klieg lights shone down from above, illuminating the platform in a harsh light that made for long, stark shadows. Heavy cables snaked across the platform and disappeared into the darkness below the springs. If you tripped over one of those, you might fall off the platform and drop twenty feet before you hit the jagged rocks below. Chapel wondered if now he knew the purpose of the cot in the tool room. Even if you didn’t plan on spending the night down here, the tool room was a human space, a place that was actually designed to be used by people. The platform certainly wasn’t.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Chapel asked. “Those boxes—”

“Yes,” Nadia whispered. “Those are the data banks. And the terminal, there on the desk, it is the only access point. This place, this cave… is Perimeter. You know, I never really believed I would see this.”

“You weren’t supposed to. Nobody was.” The three of them moved forward, onto the platform. The light streamed down all around them. On the faces of the data banks huge spools of magnetic tape turned slowly, while polling lights flashed on and off as bits of data moved through the system like red blood corpuscles drifting through arteries and veins. Chapel felt something like awe, or reverence. Like what he had felt in the Hagia Sofia, when, for the first time, Nadia had taken his hand. There was something here larger than them, bigger than human scale—

The spell broke instantly when Bogdan started laughing.

Chapel spun around to look at the Romanian. Bogdan was bent over, studying one of the data banks. There was a big, goofy smile on his face, and his eyes were sparkling. Chapel had never seen the hacker so animated, not even when he’d killed Mirza.

“What’s so funny?” he demanded.

“Is like old man’s computer!” Bogdan exclaimed. He slapped one of his long thighs. “Is what everybody so afraid of? Is end of world, here? I see more advanced calculators, in my time.”

“He’s got a point,” Nadia said. “This system was installed in the early 1980s and never upgraded. You could probably fit all its data in one little corner of a smartphone and carry it around with you.”

“That would make it the world’s most dangerous smartphone,” Chapel pointed out, “since then you would have the launch codes for every nuclear missile in Russia.” He looked around at the data banks, standing in a circle around the desk. Each had two big reels of magnetic tape on its front, behind a plastic dust cover. “Jesus. I haven’t seen a reel-to-reel system like this since I was a kid, and that was just for recording music. What happens if one of these tapes breaks? They used to do that all the time.”

“One of them has,” Nadia said, pointing at one of the data banks. A dull red light flashed on its control panel. “That’s why there are eight of them. Each one must contain the entire program and database, so that even if seven of them broke at once, the last one could still function. Remember up top, where we saw one lamp lit above the keyboard? I believe that indicated that one of the reels was reporting an error.”

“So we can just grab these tapes and go?” Chapel asked. “That would cripple this thing, right?”

“I wouldn’t recommend it. That is one of those safeguards I told you about. If you lift the covers and remove one of the tapes, Perimeter activates itself automatically, and—”

“—and it can’t be shut down again until Moscow sends the right signal,” Chapel finished.

“For the same reason we cannot blow this place up with C4 or smash the data banks with a lead pipe, even.”

He nodded. “So we can’t touch this thing without activating it, and we don’t want that. So what do we do here?”

“You and I do nothing. This is why we brought Bogdan,” Nadia said.

Both of them turned to look at the Romanian. Bogdan wove his fingers together and cracked his knuckles with a sickening pop. He took off his MP3 player and his headphones and set them down on top of one of the data banks, then went to the desk and sat down before the terminal.

“Is my turn,” he said. “Bogdan for the win, yes?”

Chapel went to stand behind the hacker and look over his shoulder. “How are you going to break in to the system?” he asked, suddenly nervous. If Bogdan did this wrong, would it activate Perimeter? Maybe it would launch the missiles out of pure paranoia. Chapel tried to remember some of the things Angel had done to computers on his behalf. “Are you going to try a brute force approach? Run a logging script? Or do you think there’s a backdoor you can exploit to get you past the firewall?”

The Romanian looked up at him with a sneer. Then he reached over and switched on the monitor. It took a second to warm up, but when it did Chapel saw nothing on the screen but a greenish-white rectangle in the top left corner of the screen.

Bogdan tapped one key on the keyboard — the Cyrillic equivalent of a D.

Instantly the screen filled up with green text, line after line of Cyrillic characters Chapel couldn’t begin to read.

“So I am in,” Bogdan said.

Nadia smiled. “Jim, you forget. This computer isn’t connected to any others. It predates even the earliest forms of the Internet. It doesn’t even have password protection — or rather, it did, but we’ve already broken that, when we turned on the elevator.”

Chapel nodded. “If you’re in here, if you’re sitting in that chair, it assumes you’re an authorized user,” he said. “Okay. So shut this thing down and we can go.”

“It’s not quite that simple,” Nadia told him. “We don’t just need to shut it down. As you know now, there are people in Russia who want Perimeter to remain functional. The same ones who tried to kill us.”

The ones who had put a price on Nadia’s head, Chapel thought — they’d only tried to kill him because he was standing next to her at the time. But he didn’t say as much.

Nadia shook her head. “If we just shut this down, they’ll figure out what we’ve done, eventually. They’ll come here and they’ll start it back up. No, we must be more subtle. Bogdan is going to cripple Perimeter — but he will leave it so it looks functional. So that it thinks it is functional, and it will tell so to anyone who comes down here to ask.”

“Yes, yes,” Bogdan said. He tapped some keys and new lines of text appeared on the screen. “This I do. And this I do much easier if he does not lean over my head this whole time.”

It took Chapel a second to realize Bogdan was asking for some space.

Maybe it was time to give the Romanian his due. This was his area of expertise. If you wanted something blown up or shot at, if you wanted to sneak in to a secure area without being seen, Chapel was your man. But now it was Bogdan’s time to shine.

“Sorry,” he said, and took a step back.

Bogdan cleared his throat. Apparently that wasn’t enough space.

“Come, Jim,” Nadia said, grabbing his hand. “We’ll let him get to it. I have something else for us to do, just now.”

From the way Nadia kept laughing, Chapel knew exactly where she was taking him. He didn’t resist.

He wanted this. He hadn’t wanted anything so much in a long time.

As she led him out of the cave, up the spiral staircase, the music from the overhead loudspeakers changed. “Rimsky-Korsakov,” she said, and laughed. He didn’t know why. He didn’t care about the music. She kept turning back and trailing her fingers across his chest. The second time she did it, he grabbed her by the hips and pulled her to him and kissed her. He wanted to pick her up and carry her. By the time they reached the little cot in the tool room, his shirt was off. He started to take off his artificial arm but she stopped him, kissing down from his shoulder to his fingertips. He pulled her shirt away from her neck and kissed the hollow of her throat, the top of her breasts.

She wasn’t laughing by that point.

He pulled her shirt over her head and bent down to put his face between her breasts, to drink in the smell of her, the smoothness of her skin, her warmth. With his right hand he cupped her breast, his thumb stroking the nipple until she shivered and curled against him. She looked up at him with wide eyes and he kissed her deeply, even as he slipped his hand down across her flat stomach and inside the waistband of her shorts. He felt lace and pushed his fingers under it, felt the sparse hair between her legs. She swiveled around, rubbing against him with her whole body until she was facing away from him. She pulled his left arm around her until he was holding her tight, then she grabbed his right hand and pushed it farther down until his fingers sank inside of her. She was already wet and he met no resistance as he slid his fingers back and forth, back and forth, slowly, rhythmically.

Her back pulsed against his chest, her body jerking every time his thumb made contact with her clitoris. At the same time her ass rubbed against his crotch, which felt maddening and amazing at the same time. She let out a trapped breath with a little moan and just when he thought he couldn’t wait any longer, that he was going to have to throw her down on the cot, her whole body shuddered and went limp and she fell away from him, tumbling gracefully around until she was sitting on the cot in front of him. She lifted his hand to her face and looked deeply into his eyes, then licked her own wetness from his fingers.

He started grabbing for her shoulders, intent on pushing her down onto the cot, but she batted his hands away with a laugh. She unzipped his shorts and pulled everything down until he stood naked before her.

She took him into her mouth and he was certain that just that would make him come, but she held him back, her tongue playing along the tip of his penis but never quite letting him thrust away.

Then she stopped. With her hand on him, she drew her head back and looked up at him. “Is it okay that we’re doing this?” she asked. “Is this—”

“Don’t ask me that yet,” he warned her. Already they’d gone too far for him to stop, even if he’d wanted to. If she was willing, and he wanted her this badly, what could be the harm? Julia had thrown him away, pushed him out of her life. He had no obligation to her now. Hollingshead and Angel never had to know about this.

She lay back on the cot, pulling down her shorts and her black lace panties. She twisted on the cot, reaching for him.

He climbed on top of her, and it was no effort at all to slip inside her. Their bodies just meshed and it was happening, he was thrusting against her hips and he knew it wouldn’t take long. Once he’d passed this border, he knew he would never look back. He would never hesitate again.

She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him toward her. She pressed her face into the crook of his shoulder and made a little whimpering sound that he knew wasn’t a cry of pain. He pushed into her, desperate with need, with lust, with anguish that had to be expressed somehow. She rose off the bed to meet him, her hips smashing against his as he pushed harder and harder into her and her whimper became a plaintive wail. And then it happened, the dam broke, and all his pain, all his frustration came rushing out of him as his muscles locked, as his face writhed in a grimace of release.

He fell on top of her, panting and spent. He would never be able to put into words what had just happened, what he’d let go, but he felt empty and light and clean for the first time in weeks. He felt like he was floating in limitless space, and he didn’t dare open his eyes.

He opened his eyes. She was stroking his hair, shushing him as he started to struggle up onto his hands. She pulled him close. “You must savor this,” she told him. “Truly feel it. Let nothing else intrude. This is what I’ve learned.”

He closed his eyes again and just lay there, letting the blood pound in his ears, letting his chest heave for air. The floating sensation came back, though not as strong as before. It slipped away from him, little by little.

He rolled off her onto his side, grabbed her with both his arms and pulled her close to him. Her lips found his and they just kissed for a while, their tongues finding each other slowly, searchingly. The emptiness he’d felt began to fill up with her, her presence, her smell, her body heat. His hands roamed across her back, grasped at her buttocks. She moved across him sinuously, with all the grace of the gymnast she’d once been, and then she was on top of him, lying across his chest, her breasts against his skin.

His hand just seemed to find her on its own, his fingers twining inside her. He felt her shake and knew she wanted more. He didn’t need to do the work this time — she moved against his hand, pressing herself against it then sliding away, pressing again, sliding away until she’d built up a rhythm that made her breath come fast. Her mouth was against his ear and he felt her wet exhalations on his skin, felt the muscles of her face and neck tense as she rubbed herself to a climax against his fingers, his palm, his wrist. As she rode it out he was surprised to find that he was hard again — he hadn’t recovered that quickly since high school.

She hooked one leg over him and twisted around until she was upright, her hands on his chest holding her above him. She reached down and guided him inside her in one quick motion, then she bent to kiss him and rose again to ride on top of him, moving up and down steadily. A thin sheen of sweat covered her face and the top of her chest and her eyes were squinted shut and he realized she was still in the throes of her orgasm, that she hadn’t stopped coming.

She surprised him again, this time by rocking up onto one leg and swinging the other one across him, then turning around so she was facing away from him but still engulfing him. She reached down and grabbed his ankles as she moved against him, rising and falling, her muscular ass grinding back and forth against him. He pushed himself up with his arms and then reached forward to hold her, his hands grabbing her hips and pulling her down hard against his body, hard enough she let out an explosive cry. “I can feel all of you,” she told him. “I can feel you inside me.” She grabbed his hands and lifted them to her breasts. Sitting on his lap like that she lifted and fell with just the muscles of her thighs and slowly, slowly drew him onward, closer and closer. He pulled his good hand away from her breast and reached down to find her clitoris, making tiny circles on it with his forefinger and she burst, her body heaving as he came inside her, as they came together, as they rocked back and forth and both cried out.

The third time was a lot slower, but no less intense.

Both of them had a lot of tension to burn off.

Chapel must have dozed off, because he woke to the smell of their sex, to Nadia wrapped around him, a rumpled sheet hanging from her shoulder—

— and Bogdan standing over them, looking down at them through his bangs.

Chapel licked his lips — they were very dry — and grunted out something like a question. He’d meant to ask what Bogdan thought he was doing there, but it mostly came out as a growl of surprise.

“Is finished,” Bogdan said.

“What?” Nadia asked, twisting around until she was sitting up, the sheet wrapped around her breasts. “What did you say, Bogdan?”

“The reprogramming work, is done, yes? Yes,” Bogdan said. “I have finished.”

“That’s… great,” Chapel managed to say. He grabbed for his shorts and found that he’d picked up Nadia’s by mistake. They were tiny in his hand. Sheepishly, he handed them to her. “Great stuff, Bogdan. Thanks for, uh, letting us know. Why don’t we meet you down in the cave and you can… show us what you did.”

Bogdan didn’t move. He wasn’t leering at Nadia’s near nakedness — nor Chapel’s — but he didn’t seem ready to go.

“Is time, I guess,” the Romanian said. Then he let out a very long, very put-upon sigh.

“Time for what?” Nadia asked him.

“Is time, my usefulness it is complete. So now is time when you shoot me, yes? So I am no witness. Yes, I know how this works.”

Nadia laughed. “Bogdan! Nobody’s going to do that.”

“Yeah,” Chapel said. “We’re the good guys.”

Bogdan just shrugged.

“If you could… just…” Chapel shook his head. “Bogdan, we need to get dressed. We’d prefer to do that without you watching us.”

The hacker nodded. For a second longer he just stood there. “You are sure you do not wish to shoot me? Only, I would prefer, if so, that is done quickly. I do not wish to draw things out, as they say.”

It was Chapel’s turn to laugh. He jumped up off the cot and clapped the hacker on his shoulder. “Nobody wants to kill you. In fact, if you’re interested in a job in America, I think maybe we could work something out.” Chapel already had Angel as his in-house hacker, but he imagined Hollingshead could find some use for the Romanian. Anybody who understood Russian computers as well as Bogdan did would find plenty of work. “You’d be safe, there, and—”

“He does not know?” Bogdan asked. He was looking at Nadia.

“Go wait in the cave,” she told him, harsher than before.

When he was gone, Nadia got off the cot and wrapped her arms around Chapel, kissing his chest and then leaning her cheek against his skin.

He pulled away. “What is it I’m supposed to know?” he asked.

She looked confused for a second. Maybe even hurt. “After all this,” she said, gesturing at the cot — which was leaning on one buckled leg and would never be the same again—”still you question me like some enemy agent?”

“When I asked why you were spying on my conversations with Angel, you said it was just part of the job. Nothing personal.” He put one hand against her cheek, and after a second she rubbed her face against his palm. “What am I supposed to know?” he demanded.

She hissed in frustration and started grabbing her clothes. “I’ll tell you. In a minute. Just let us see first what Bogdan has done.”

They dressed without another word and then hurried down the spiral staircase. Bogdan was standing next to the terminal desk. Chapel couldn’t tell if he looked bored or proud or sad that his work was done — all those expressions looked pretty much the same on Bogdan’s face.

“Show us,” Nadia said.

“Is nothing to see.” Bogdan tapped a key on Perimeter’s keyboard and the screen filled with Cyrillic text. It looked exactly the same as it had the first time Chapel had seen it. He still couldn’t understand any of it. “No change shows, as you asked. No one will know I was here. But! The system does not work now.”

Chapel frowned. “How’s that?”

Bogdan nodded. He tapped some more keys and more, but different, text appeared on the screen. Just as meaningless to Chapel. “I have put small subroutine in this program. Nothing that looks out of place. In normal times, if Perimeter activates, its first step is to query its atmospheric sensors, yes? It looks for heat, for light, for change in the barometer. If a signature is found, a specific signature for nuclear blast, then, and only then, Perimeter launches all missiles.”

“Sure,” Chapel said. “That’s what we don’t want it to do.”

Bogdan nodded. “So now, is extra step. If Perimeter checks sensors and finds such a signature, it goes to a new line in program that tells to check whether Perimeter has been activated. If is activated, it checks sensors. If sensors show signature, it checks for activation. If activated, check sensors… goes on forever, like this, but never gets to launch codes.”

“An infinite loop,” Chapel said, finally getting it. “It can never finish the program.”

Nadia clapped her hands in delight. “That’s perfect! And you hid your work?”

“Yes, yes. No one will find it unless they know exactly where to look. No sign of tampering, no obvious code insertions. No one will know system is broken, unless they make Perimeter launch, and nothing happens.”

“That’s… kind of brilliant. Bogdan, you’re a genius,” Chapel said. He fought back an urge to grab the Romanian and give him a hug. He turned to Nadia. He knew there was a big goofy grin on his face, but he didn’t care. “This is what you had planned all along, isn’t it? I thought you were going to blow Perimeter up, or just take a fire axe to those data banks. But you knew that wouldn’t work. You did it, Nadia. You did it!”

“I could not have come this far without you, my svidetel,” Nadia said, smiling at him. “My dear witness. You will tell the Americans it is done? That Perimeter is no longer a threat?”

“Absolutely. And then — who knows. This thing has been holding back any kind of nuclear disarmament talks for years. Maybe, someday we can live in a world without all these nukes. Maybe the world can finally stop worrying about the apocalypse and start getting things turned around… there’s just one last thing we need to consider.”

Nadia shook her head, but she was close to laughing with joy. “There is? What is it?”

“What did Bogdan think I was supposed to know?”

Her face fell instantly. She frowned and started to turn away, but then she stopped and looked him right in the eye. “Bogdan will not be going with you to America,” she said, “because he’s coming with me.”

“Where?” Chapel asked.

“That’s the big question.” She inhaled sharply. “There is something I have wanted to tell you. Something about my mission — something you are not cleared for, but I think, at this point, such niceties are unnecessary.”

Chapel could feel the muscles tensing up in his neck. She had lied to him once already about the mission — when she claimed she had unequivocal support from the Russian government. If there was more, if she had misled him further—

“You know I am an agent of FSTEK. At least, I was. If Marshal Bulgachenko is dead, then the bureau for which I worked is… no more. He was that office. I am an agent now with no agency.”

Chapel shook his head. “It’s not like that matters anyway. You can’t go back to Moscow. They’d shoot you the second you stepped off the plane.”

She nodded. “Konyechno. But my plan was never to return to Moscow, not even at the start. You see, the marshal and I, we had something in common. Something we believed in. It was why he chose me, why he allowed me to take on this mission, even after he knew I was dying. We thought we could make a grand play, a great leap that would carry our common dream forward, to—”

She stopped in midsentence, as if she’d been frozen in place.

Chapel frowned but just watched as she tilted her head to the side. “Bogdan,” she whispered. “What does that mean?” She pointed at the terminal desk.

Bogdan and Chapel both turned to look at the screen there. A line of Cyrillic characters had appeared in bright green. They flashed alarmingly as if demanding attention.

“Oh,” Bogdan said. “This is shit.”

“What kind of shit?” Nadia asked.

“Is saying, someone is here. Up top,” Bogdan said. He looked almost ashamed, as if it were his fault.

“It can tell that? That there’s something out of place up in Aralsk-30? Tell me it’s just picking up our truck,” Chapel demanded.

“If it makes you happy, yes, yes, I will tell you this. But is lie.”

Bogdan grabbed his MP3 player off the top of the data bank where he’d left it. Chapel checked the assault rifle he had carried down into the cave. None of them said anything. There was nothing to say, until they knew what they faced.

They came up the elevator into punishing sunlight — after the cool darkness of Perimeter’s cave, the heat and brightness of the desert above hit Chapel like a wall and it took him a second to adjust. Even with his eyes clamped shut, though, he could hear the helicopter just fine.

Shielding his eyes with his hands, he cursed when he saw it not a mile away, floating over the desert floor as if it were pinned to the air. It looked like a standard Russian military chopper — a Kamov Ka-60. Something occurred to him about it, though. “Nadia — that helicopter’s a newer Russian model. Does Kazakhstan have any of those?”

An agent of FSTEK, he knew, would have that information memorized. “No, none — they use Mil Mi-24s, only.”

Chapel nodded. “Then that’s not some random Kazakh patrol.” The idea had been unlikely, anyway. What reason would the Kazakh military have to be out here, in the middle of an uninhabited desert? There was no sign anyone had visited Aralsk-30 in years. Why would they do so now?

No, this helicopter was Russian, and the pilot didn’t care if he was seen violating Kazakh sovereignty. There was only one explanation. The assassins had come back for Nadia, and this time they weren’t foolish enough to just send a couple of thugs with pistols. This time they intended to finish the job.

“How did they find us?” Nadia asked. “We were so careful to hide our movements. They couldn’t have been following us all this time.”

Chapel shook his head. “Maybe they didn’t need to.”

The helicopter looked like it wasn’t moving at all, just slowly getting bigger, which meant it was headed directly for them. Chapel estimated they had a minute at most before it arrived.

He turned to Nadia. “Who knew you were coming to dismantle Perimeter? Besides you and the marshal, did anyone—”

“No! I can only think they tracked us by satellite, or — oh, no. They killed Marshal Bulgachenko. But they must have… questioned him first.”

Chapel wished he had time to comfort her, but there was no time left for anything but tactics. “It doesn’t matter right now. Come on — we need to get into that building over there.” He pointed at one of the buildings that had partially filled with sand. “Maybe they won’t see us. Maybe we can just wait them out.”

“You think this likely?” Bogdan asked.

“No,” Chapel said, and jogged across the intersection, away from the statue.

They crouched low under the sill of a broken window inside the shade of the building. Chapel risked a quick glance over the edge and saw the helicopter circling Aralsk-30, high enough up to avoid the walls of the canyon. He held his breath and closed his eyes and listened to the sound of its rotor chopping up the air, silently praying for that sound to diminish, to lessen, to indicate that the helicopter was moving away. That the pilot had given up his search, having found nothing.

Instead the noise got louder. The Ka-60 was coming closer, lower. He heard its noise echo off the dead faces of the buildings and knew it was coming in to land.

Beside him Nadia looked terrified. One of her hands reached for his and he took it. He would give her what comfort he could, as pointless as it might seem.

Bogdan had curled up, his knees up in front of his chin. He looked like he might be asleep, though Chapel doubted even the Romanian could relax at a moment like this.

He waited until he couldn’t stand it anymore, then took another quick peek over the windowsill.

The helicopter had landed near the mouth of the canyon, its rotor kicking up great clouds of dust that obscured much of what was going on. But dark shapes moved through that dust and Chapel knew that the chopper had off-loaded its passengers. He couldn’t get a good head count on them through the dust, but he thought there might be half a dozen. Six armed assassins, then. And no way out. The only way to escape the canyon was through its mouth, right past those men.

He whispered to Nadia, telling her what he’d seen.

“Even if we could get past them all, even if we could get the truck out of here — the helicopter could just follow us. There’s no way we could outrun it, not over the desert, and there’s no cover for us to make for. And that’s even if we could get to the truck. I have my rifle, you have a pistol. Not much firepower, considering what we’re facing.”

Nadia set her jaw, accepting the inevitable, perhaps.

“They’ll try to take you alive, for questioning,” he told her.

“I’m more worried about Bogdan,” she said.

Chapel grunted in surprise. It might have been a laugh, under different circumstances.

“If they take Bogdan, if they question him — he can tell them what he did to Perimeter. Tell them how to change the program back. All our work would be for nothing, then.”

Chapel hadn’t thought of that.

A different kind of man, the kind of agent that Hollingshead should have sent on this mission, would have been able to think about the situation without passion, without qualm. Such a man might have come to one inescapable conclusion.

The course forward was to shoot Bogdan, to make sure his information couldn’t be retrieved. And then probably shoot Nadia, and himself, for good measure. If none of them could be questioned — call it what it was, Chapel thought, tortured—then their secrets would remain safe.

If Hollingshead had picked some twenty-five-year-old Navy SEAL for this mission, or some MARSOC jarhead, some kid with no ties, no family, no obligations to anything but his country — such a man wouldn’t have hesitated.

But Chapel wasn’t one of those men. He thought of what his old trainer, Bigelow, had said about him.

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.

So shooting each other in a horrific game of round robin was just out of the question. They were going to have to live through this, or at least try. Chapel racked his brain trying to think of a plan. Anything at all.

What he came up with sounded absurd even as he outlined it to Nadia. She didn’t laugh, though. Maybe she was willing to clutch at straws just as much as he was.

“You’re going to have to take out those assassins, as best you can. You’re going to move from building to building, cover to cover, and get to the truck. There are better weapons for you there — assault rifles, anyway, and the two of you can use those to shoot your way out of the canyon.”

“And what about the helicopter?” she asked.

“That’s my job,” he told her.

Chapel headed up to the roof of the building, up where he could get a better view. The building had a flat top lined with tar paper that burned in the sun. A two-foot-high lip ran all the way around it, providing enough cover for Chapel to lie down on the scorching roof and be invisible from the street level. He could poke his head over the lip just enough to see what was going on without exposing himself unduly to enemy fire.

It would have been a great position to set up a sniper nest, if he had a sniper rifle. The AK-47 he carried just didn’t count. He could theoretically give Nadia some covering fire from up there. If he’d had enough bullets.

He didn’t, though. He had one magazine of thirty rounds, and he was going to need all of them. So as the assassins spread out through the streets, covering doorways and starting their search, Chapel could only watch and hope.

A little voice in the back of his head kept nagging at him. She’s a terrible shot, it said. She’s outgunned, and she doesn’t have any body armor. Bogdan will slow her down.

He tried to ignore that voice. He’d seen her fight before, and he knew she was dangerous. The Spetsnaz training she’d received would have to see her through.

Once they were clear of the helicopter’s rotor wash, Chapel could see that the assassins were a different breed than they’d faced before. These wore heavy kit, ballistic vests and helmets with neck protection. They carried short-barreled carbines, probably the AKS-74U variant of the rifle Chapel held. Those stumpy little weapons sacrificed a lot of range, but they made up for it by being easier to use in urban warfare scenarios — just like this one. At least one of the assassins had grenades hanging from his harness, and another one was carrying some kind of tactical shotgun.

They broke into teams of two so they could cover more ground. One group approached the statue — and the truck that was parked next to it. If they thought to shoot out the truck’s tires, or its engine block, Chapel’s plan would be ruined. Luckily the thought didn’t seem to occur to them. One of them climbed inside the truck and looked around while the other covered him. After a few seconds, the assassin climbed back out of the cab and gave a hand signal that had to mean the truck was all clear. The two of them moved on.

The second group of two headed for the dormitory buildings near the mouth of the canyon. They disappeared through a doorway and Chapel lost sight of them.

The third group headed for the factories at the end of the canyon, their weapons tracking the broken windows. They moved fast, but they didn’t leave themselves exposed — wherever they went they kept a wall at their back, or one of them twisted around to cover their rear. These guys were professionals, and they weren’t going to take any chances.

At the entrance to one of the factories, one of them readied a grenade — probably a CS tear gas grenade, by the look of it — while the other covered the intersection with his rifle. They gestured back and forth, not making a single sound, then stepped inside the factory together.

The second they were through the empty doorway, into the darkness of the factory building, Nadia appeared in the door of an administration building across the street. She glanced up at Chapel where he hid on the rooftop.

He looked around for the other groups. Both of them were inside buildings, out of sight. Chapel risked a quick wave at Nadia to let her know it was momentarily clear.

Nadia ducked low and ran across the street, to press herself up against the outside wall of the factory.

For a long, tense minute nothing happened. Chapel had an idea of what Nadia had planned, and he also knew that if either of the other two groups emerged from their buildings in that time, they would see her in a second. Nadia stood perfectly exposed to anyone watching from the street.

Then the group in the factory came back out into the light. It would take them a second for their eyes to adjust to the light, Chapel knew.

Nadia didn’t give them the chance. She swung around in one fluid motion, raising her pistol and holding it in front of her in both hands.

She was a terrible shot. The assassins were wearing body armor.

It didn’t matter.

She knew they would kill her if she didn’t kill them, so she went for the best possible shot. Her pistol was only inches from the lead assassin’s face when she fired. Even from the other side of the intersection Chapel could see the man’s eye explode in a cloud of blood.

He dropped his grenade and brought his hands up to his face, but he was already collapsing, already dying. The grenade hit the ground and bounced away from the door, and for a second Chapel thought Nadia was diving to catch it. But she had something else in mind. The dead assassin’s carbine was on a strap around his neck. It would have taken too long for her to get it loose so she just slid in under his falling body and used him as a shield, grabbing the carbine and twisting it upward to fire into the body of his partner. At that range she couldn’t miss, and the carbine was powerful enough to tear through his body armor.

It also made one hell of a racket, clearly audible all over town, even with the noise of the helicopter. Chapel saw movement in one of the dormitory buildings, a flash of dark fabric in one of the second-floor windows. The other assassins had heard Nadia’s shots, and it wouldn’t be long before they ran over to investigate.

Meanwhile the tear gas grenade went off in the street, a huge white cloud jumping out of it instantaneously. Nadia freed the carbine from its strap and cradled it to her chest as she rolled inside the factory building, away from the cloud.

Two assassins came out of an administration building that fronted on the intersection, just as the wind carried the cloud of tear gas straight at them. They wore gas masks and it didn’t affect them, but it did cut down on their visibility. They jogged toward the factory building, clearly intent on investigating what had just happened.

Surely Nadia would have expected that. Surely she would have moved on already, slipping out the back of the factory. The only way to win a fight like this was to move constantly, to maintain the element of surprise. Chapel was sure Nadia knew that — she’d been trained for this kind of fighting, just as he had.

He wanted to keep watching the factory, to see what happened next, to make sure she was okay. But he didn’t get the chance to see her next move.

Up at the mouth of the canyon, the helicopter was already lifting into the air. It was going to provide air support to the assassins on the ground. If it spotted Nadia, even for an instant, the jig was up.

Chapel had to make sure that didn’t happen.

The helicopter drifted slowly toward the center of town, toward the Lenin statue, staying low but not so low it risked colliding with any of the buildings. It moved through the air like a starving predator, hunting desperately for any sign of prey. Chapel kept his head down so the pilot wouldn’t see him, waiting for his chance.

Down in the intersection, the tear gas cloud was already beginning to disperse, shredded by the downward wash of air from the chopper’s rotor. One of the assassin teams moved through the thinning cloud toward the factory, their carbines swiveling back and forth in case Nadia showed herself.

Chapel couldn’t see the other team, the one that had gone into the dormitories. They must be holding back, as a reserve, or simply as spotters. The Russians weren’t taking any chances.

Time to give them something new to worry about. As the helicopter neared Chapel’s position, he readied himself, then jumped up and started firing. His rifle’s bullets tore through the thin metal skin of the helicopter, leaving bright holes in the dark paint of its fuselage. He didn’t hit anything vital — this was a military helicopter, and all its important equipment would be protected by armor plate — but he definitely got its attention.

Its beak-shaped nose started to swing around in slow motion, and he got a good look into the canopy. He cursed when he saw there were two people in there, a pilot and a copilot. The Ka-60 had a big rectangular front viewport, much like the windshield of a car. In Ranger school they’d taught Chapel just how difficult it was to snipe someone through a windshield — the curved glass distorted your view, and it also tended to refract the trajectory of any bullet that passed through it. He tried for a shot at the pilot anyway. That was one vital piece of equipment he could conceivably hit.

His bullets starred the viewport, sending a gentle rain of glittering glass cubes falling toward the street below. The helicopter jerked sideways and raised its nose, looking very much like a startled dragonfly. Chapel had time to see that he hadn’t hit either of the pilots, though the copilot had shed his safety webbing and was running back toward the main body of the aircraft.

Then the nose came up farther and he could only see the belly of the helicopter as it reared back and fell away from him, pulling out of range. Chapel let it go and looked down into the streets. Both members of the assassin team he could see were looking up at him, though their carbines were still aimed at street level. He desperately wanted to fire a burst into them, to make them jump, but he didn’t dare waste bullets. He’d already fired twelve rounds of his thirty into the helicopter and there was a long fight coming.

Nor, it turned out, did he need to shoot at them. Even as he watched them watching him, Nadia was sneaking up behind them, crouched so low she was nearly walking on her knees. She fired a quick salvo into their backs and then darted away, into the shadowy interior of an administration building.

Chapel wanted to cheer as he saw them dance and jump. One of them was bleeding from a wound at his hip as they ran for cover. Chapel ignored them and studied the dormitory buildings, looking for any sign of the third team. He was so intent on his search he almost missed what the helicopter was doing.

The Ka-60 had turned broadside to him, hovering over the statue fifty yards away. It bobbed slightly as it hung in the air there, then stabilized itself until it was motionless, seeming almost glued to the air.

Its side hatch slid open — the movement was enough to make Chapel look — and the copilot peered out for a moment, then ducked back inside. A second later the long narrow shape of a heavy machine gun rolled forward, four barrels sticking out through the side hatch to glint in the sunlight.

Chapel recognized the gun — a Yak-B Gatling gun that could pump out four thousand rounds every minute. Standard equipment on most Russian attack helicopters, though the Ka-60 normally didn’t carry one. The helicopter must have been modified to carry it at the expense of crew seats. It opened fire almost instantly with a grinding noise that made every muscle in Chapel’s body twitch.

He dove backward, under the short wall that screened the rooftop. His face hit the searing tar paper as bullets lanced over him, chewing up the roof only a few feet from where he lay. If the pilot ascended even a few dozen feet, the gunner would have a perfect view of Chapel, wherever he was on the roof.

It was definitely time to move.

He waited until he heard the Gatling gun start to spin down, then pushed himself up on his hands and dashed for the stairway that led down inside the building. The helicopter started firing again before he reached the stairs, but he managed to get down into cover behind thick walls, even as dust and shards of broken concrete rained down on him. Something hurt, but he didn’t have time to think about it. He hurried into the center of the building where he would be safe from the Gatling gun and pressed himself up against a wall, gaining just a little space to breathe.

Something really started to hurt by then. It didn’t matter — he could walk. And he had to find some way to deal with the helicopter. As long as it was airborne, there was no way to get away in the truck, no hope for him or for Nadia or Bogdan.

He checked his rifle, even though the pain was getting pretty intense. His clip was still half full, and everything looked in order…

Goddamnit, that hurt.

He realized he was being foolish. If he was really injured, he could bleed out in minutes. He just hadn’t wanted to acknowledge that he was wounded. He looked down, then, and saw a huge oblong gash in his leg. It was bleeding profusely, but he didn’t think any arteries were pierced, and none of the bones were broken.

Still, it had to be taken care of. He tore off his shirt and ripped it into strips. He could barely manage a quick field dressing, but at least that would slow the blood loss. While he was tying off the bandage, he heard something, and he stopped rigid in place.

He’d heard someone whisper.

He grabbed his rifle and almost fired a burst into the shadows—

— before he realized it was Nadia, and she was calling his name.

He realized that he’d lost track of her, and that she must have run into his building as she moved around the intersection. She would have known he was still there, of course — she only had to look for the building currently being demolished by the helicopter. It was a terrible risk, though, for them to be in the same building at the same time. If the assassins had a bomb or even just more tear gas grenades—

“Jim,” she breathed. “Oh, thank God you are still alive!”

She came out of the shadows and rushed over to put an arm around him. He thought she was trying to embrace him and wanted to tell her there was no time for that, but then he realized he had been falling over and she was coming to support him.

“You’re hurt,” she said.

“I’ll be fine. What’s the situation?”

“We are about to be killed,” she said.

Chapel grunted in frustration and pushed his back up against the wall. “That’s not what I meant. There were six of them on the ground. You got two over by the factories, then wounded another one when they spotted me. I’m pretty sure two of them are still holed up in the dormitories; they’re probably watching the entrance to the canyon, ready to gun us down if we try to run into the desert, and—”

“Eight,” she said.

He shut up and just stared at her.

“What?” he asked, when she didn’t elaborate.

“There were eight of them on the ground, by my count.”

Chapel wanted to close his eyes and sit down and just stop thinking then. He wanted to pretend like none of this was happening.

He couldn’t do that, of course.

“I counted six,” he told her. “I was planning on six.” But it had been hard to get an accurate count when they jumped out of the helicopter. The rotor had been kicking up so much dust, and he’d been far enough away he could have counted wrong. “Okay, there were eight. Now there are six and one is wounded. Then there’s this helicopter. The second we step out of this building, it’s going to mow us down.” He thought of something, then. Something that should have always been there, in the middle of his plans. “Where’s Bogdan?” he asked.

“In the truck,” she said. “Hiding under some crates. I got him in there while the killers were still distracted.”

Chapel forced a grin, despite the pain in his leg. Damn, but Nadia was good at this. The truck was probably the safest place for the hacker to be. The assassins had already checked the vehicle and cleared it. They would have no reason to check it again, at least not until they were sure they’d secured the area.

“It might be possible,” Nadia said. “Not likely, mind you. But possible that we could draw enough attention away from the truck that he could drive out of here alone. Of course, we would have to sacrifice both our lives to get him clear.”

“If we don’t take care of the helicopter, he won’t get very far. And do you think it would even occur to him to take that kind of initiative?”

Nadia’s shoulders swiveled around in a complicated shrug as she wrestled with her thoughts. “No,” she said, finally.

Chapel nodded. “Okay. So, slightly different plan. I go up on the roof and shoot down this helicopter — if I can, which is a big hypothetical. In the chaos you run for the truck and drive the hell out of here. Assuming these assholes don’t shoot out your tires or get a lucky shot and kill you at the wheel, you can get to the Caspian Sea and meet the submarine there; it can take you to—”

“That is the most foolish plan I have ever heard,” Nadia told him.

“You have a better one?”

“Yes,” she told him. “I go to the roof. You drive the truck.”

Chapel could guess her logic. He knew perfectly well what she was thinking. She had only a few months to live, even if she did escape from Aralsk-30. Sacrificing herself here and now wouldn’t do much to shorten her life expectancy.

He knew he couldn’t let her do it, though. He couldn’t let this woman, this incredible person, just throw her life away, no matter how short it might be. He didn’t understand his feelings for her. He didn’t know that he ever would. But they were real.

He would do everything in his power to make sure she lived, for as long as she could. To make sure she escaped.

He also knew that she would try to argue him around if he said anything like that. She would tell him he was being an idiot, an emotional idiot, and maybe she would be right. So he needed another reason why it couldn’t be her.

“You’re a lousy shot,” he said.

Her eyes flared with something similar to — but not quite the same as — anger. He could tell she knew he was right. She pressed her lips together very hard, until they turned white. She twisted her face away from his. Then she brought it back very fast and kissed him, deeply, passionately. For what they both knew was the last time.

She broke away from him and ran toward the front of the building. He headed back toward the stairs.

Even before he could reach the roof, the helicopter came for him, strafing the broken windows on the upper floor of the building. Concrete dust puffed from each of the windows in turn, and the windowsills crumbled away, rotten after years of exposure to the desert sun. Debris crunched under his feet as he ran for cover between two windows, then ducked down to keep out of sight.

The Gatling gun spun down and he took his chance, leaning out the window to fire off a quick burst at the gunner in the side hatch. He didn’t hit anything important, but the helicopter bobbed away a little — clearly the pilot didn’t want to risk a stray shot hitting a fuel line or an ammo box.

The likelihood of that was minimal, though. Chapel needed to kill the pilot if he was to have any chance of bringing the helicopter down. That was going to take a miracle. He wished he had his tablet with him, that he could talk to Angel — not just because she could give him an idea of what the battle looked like at ground level. He wanted to tell her good-bye as well.

He wasn’t going to get his miracle by hiding in cover. He ducked low under a windowsill and dashed over to another window, several yards down. If he could keep the gunner guessing where he was going to shoot from next, that might buy him a little time.

He heard shots from below, carbine rounds. That could be Nadia or it could be one of the assassins. Clearly they planned on storming this building, finishing him off if the helicopter couldn’t. He could only hope Nadia was ready for that kind of assault.

He poked his rifle barrel out of the window, then risked a quick look. The nose of the helicopter was ten yards away from him. He could see right through the viewport, could see the pilot hunched over his controls.

He was never going to get a better chance than this. He lifted his weapon, lined up the sights—

And saw the pilot glance up and see him, the Russian’s face instantly going white with fear. Chapel took his shot, firing a tight burst right into the viewport.

Glass splintered and flew, but the pilot was already moving. The third shot of Chapel’s burst didn’t even hit the viewport, instead digging into the fuselage between the canopy and the side hatch. Worthless.

Except — Chapel wasn’t sure it was even possible, but yes, he could definitely see a tinge of red on the broken glass of the viewport. The helicopter didn’t just fall out of the sky, but he knew he had struck the pilot, wounded him at least.

Not that it mattered. The helicopter was already pulling away, drawing back to a range where Chapel would be unlikely to hit the aircraft at all. He howled in frustration — then cut himself off in midgrowl as he saw the Gatling gun’s barrels moving, tracking around. In an instant it would fire again; he needed to move—

— Except the Gatling gun wasn’t turning toward him. The gunner had lowered his elevation, tilting the barrels down so they could fire into the street.

No. No, no, no, Chapel thought, the words hammering in his brain like fists on steel. Nadia was down there, moving already, dashing for safety as the Gatling gun homed in on her position. It didn’t need to be accurate. It didn’t need to conserve ammunition. It could just hose her down with bullets, chop her to pieces.

Roaring with anguish, Chapel leaned far out of the window and pointed his rifle at the gunner, barely visible behind the mass of his weapon. Chapel held down his trigger and sprayed bullets as best he could into the man, so far away, so far out of reach. His rifle clicked dry and he wanted to throw the damned thing at the gunner, as useless a gesture as it might be.

Down in the street Nadia zigged and zagged, trying to keep the gunner from drawing a bead on her. She was fast, so very fast, but in a second it wouldn’t matter, the gunner would just start painting the ground with lead—

And that was when Chapel got his miracle.

Or was it even a miracle? Maybe Nadia had planned for it to happen. Maybe she’d been that smart. Maybe Chapel had hit the helicopter pilot harder than he thought, maybe the pilot was losing blood and getting dizzy, not paying attention like he should.

Chapel would never know why it happened. But it did happen, so fast Chapel couldn’t even process the details.

The helicopter had to move back to give the gunner a good angle of fire on Nadia. It had to move back to get away from Chapel and his AK-47. It had already been flying very low, only a few dozen feet off the ground, below the level of the surrounding buildings. The pilot must have assumed he had plenty of clearance, though, because he was in the middle of the wide intersection.

He didn’t have enough clearance. The very tip of one of his rotor blades brushed, ever so gently, the bronze face of Vladimir Lenin.

The blade was made of a tough composite material, but it was thin and the statue was thick, hard bronze. The blade twisted and bent faster than any human eye could follow and knocked backward into another blade in the space of an eyeblink. Suddenly there was nothing holding the helicopter up in the air and it fell, its rotor like the crooked wings of a squashed bug. It hit the ground hard, its nose smashing into the base of the statue, its tail twisting around and around until it snapped off and flew across the intersection to collide with a building on the far side.

It brought up an incredible cloud of dust and debris, a vast wave of murk that hid everything from Chapel’s view. He saw flashes of light inside the cloud — gunfire — and knew that Nadia was making her move, running for the truck.

Something buried deep in Chapel’s brain, some survival instinct, started shouting at him then. If he could reach the truck himself, if he could run over there in the dust, when the assassins couldn’t see him, if he could get away with Nadia and Bogdan—

He didn’t let it turn into a full-fledged thought, much less a concrete plan. He just started running and hoped for the best. Down the stairs, two at a time. He missed one riser when his wounded leg went out from under him, but he was so full of adrenaline at that point he caught himself on the handrail and just kept running. Down to the ground floor, the door just in front of him. A shape appeared in the doorway, a human form in silhouette. Chapel didn’t waste time trying to make out any details. He brought his shoulder down and smashed into the shape like a linebacker, bowling over one of the assassins. He didn’t even slow down as he plunged into the debris cloud, even as things whizzed and rocketed past his head. Maybe they were bullets, maybe they were parts of the helicopter that flew off in the crash. He didn’t care. If one of them struck him, he would go down, he knew that much, but there was nothing he could do about that, no way to prevent it.

The truck was ahead of him, a big square shape slightly darker than the dust and sand blowing up around him. It was still so far away, and he heard shouting, and knew he was being chased, but if he kept running, if he kept moving — his leg hurt, bad, but — but—

He came out of the cloud gasping for breath, moving as fast as his wounded leg would carry him. The truck was no more than sixty yards away. Its taillights were lit, and he knew Nadia was in the driver seat, waiting for him, Bogdan sitting next to her; if he could just make it over there, they could be gone, laughing as they rocketed through the desert, just like before, before they’d found Perimeter—

“Ostanovis!” someone shouted. “Ya pristelu tebya!”

Another shape appeared in front of Chapel, a human shape again. He tried to swat it away, but the shape just took a step backward. Then it lifted a tactical shotgun and pointed the barrel right at Chapel’s chest.

He stared at the man, suddenly very focused, very clear. He could grab the barrel of the shotgun, push it away from him. He knew a couple different techniques to twist it out of the assassin’s hands, to get it away from him. Then it would be his shotgun.

Now that he was thinking clearly, though, he knew how stupid that idea was. In his head he could hear Bigelow’s voice, as clear as if his ranger instructor was standing next to him. “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 glanced over at the truck. Nadia hadn’t moved. She was waiting — waiting for him. She must have seen him running toward her. She must be watching right now in her mirrors.

If she hesitated even a few seconds more, the assassins would regroup and go after her and it would be over. They would shoot out her tires, leave her stranded, surround the truck and just fill it full of bullets or pump it full of tear gas and take her alive. Chapel didn’t know which would be worse.

She was waiting for him.

He looked at the assassin facing him. Looked into the man’s eyes. Then he grabbed for the barrel of the shotgun.

It went off before he even touched it. Something thudded into his chest, and he felt like he’d been hit by a hammer. It didn’t knock him over, though. He glanced down and was surprised by what he saw — a little yellow plastic box was sticking out of his ribs, anchored by two tiny barbs that had pierced his skin.

It wasn’t lead shot or a slug the assassin had fired. It was a Taser round, a self-contained electric incapacitation device. It went off in the same moment he realized what it must be.

Every muscle in Chapel’s body triggered at once. He curled in on himself, screaming in pain, as he dropped to the ground. He twitched and shook and drooled and there was nothing he could do — he stayed conscious through the whole thing; his eyes were open, but he could do nothing but look over at the truck and beg Nadia, silently, to drive away.

Just go, he told her. Just go. If she could get Bogdan to the submarine — if she could get away—

He saw the truck sit motionless for way too long. He could feel her hesitating.

Go, he urged her.

He saw the taillights flare as the engine was thrown into gear. And then the steel toe of a combat boot hit him in the head, and he didn’t see any more.

Captain Ronald Mahen walked on rubber-soled shoes from the engine compartment of his submarine, the USS Cincinnatus, up to the bridge. He placed each foot carefully, to make as little sound as possible.

The seamen he passed saluted smartly but made a point of not coming to attention — that would mean moving their feet, and their shoes might squeak on the deck plating. When he reached the bridge, he climbed up to the conning tower and saw his SEAL team exactly where he’d left them, crammed into a space too small for them, much too small when you included the mass of the inflatable boat they would use if he sent the order for them to go ashore.

He nodded at them, and they nodded back. No words were exchanged.

For nearly thirty-six hours now the Cincinnatus had been keeping station off the coast of Kazakhstan, just outside national waters. Twice in that time a vessel had passed overhead, well within passive sonar range. It was impossible to know who owned those craft — they could be fishing boats, or they could be naval ships of one country or another, equipped with hydrophones. For nearly thirty-six hours, not a word had been spoken aboard the submarine. Most of the crew remained in their quarters, passing the time as best they could without making a sound.

Captain Mahen climbed back down to the bridge and looked around at his officers. They looked to him for any sign that the wait might be over, but he had nothing to give them. They were in danger of losing their edge through sheer inactivity and loss of sleep, but he couldn’t even sigh and shake his head.

He went aft to his cabin and switched on his laptop. Even the gentle hum of its fans was a risk, but he needed to know. He waited for the machine to make contact and then typed a quick message, careful not to let his fingers click too loudly on the keys.

STANDING BY. REQUEST NEW INFORMATION.

The response came almost instantly. He had no idea who spoke to him through this particular link, but he had to admit they were diligent — he had never had to wait for more than a few seconds to get a return message.

NO NEW INFORMATION. MISSION PARAMETERS UNCHANGED.

This time the temptation to sigh was almost unbearable. The Cincinnatus had vital work to do south of here, off the coast of Iran. For the last six weeks, she and her crew had been monitoring training exercises by the Iranian navy’s newest Hendijan class missile craft, learning all they could about the boats’ capabilities, range, and armament. They had been dragged away for this secret mission on very little notice, and already it had cost them dearly.

Still, his orders came from very high up. He was to approach a certain point on the Kazakhstan coast and take aboard three individuals. They had been expected to arrive almost a full day ago, and still there was no sign of them.

Captain Mahen’s orders had come from very high up, indeed — straight from the Pentagon. But aboard his submarine the captain was one rank below God. The decision to stay and wait longer was entirely at his discretion — his duty to keep his crew safe had to come first.

The time had come.

ABORTING MISSION AS OF 00:30 LOCAL TIME, he typed.

For once the reply took longer than expected. Was the person on the other end of this connection hesitating? Was he or she waiting for instructions from a superior? An icon on the screen flashed to indicate that a new message was incoming, but for long minutes Captain Mahen could only listen to his laptop drone away and wonder if anyone up on the surface could hear it. Hydrophones were very sophisticated these days, very sensitive, and the slightest sound could betray the presence of the Cincinnatus…

REQUEST ONE MORE DAY.

Captain Mahen stared at the screen in amazement. Another twenty-four hours? His crew would be useless if he kept them at alert that long. Unthinkable. He had no idea who these people were he was supposed to pick up, but he was certain of one thing — they weren’t coming. They had to be covert operatives, if he was smuggling them out of Kazakhstan like this. People like that knew better than to be late for an exfiltration.

His hands hovered over the keyboard. He made up his mind.

ABORTING MISSION.

The reply came almost before he’d finished.

PLEASE, it said.

This time he couldn’t resist an actual grunt of frustration, though he clapped his hand over his mouth as the noise escaped him. No naval officer would ever send a message like that. Had he been talking to a civilian the whole time?

He didn’t take orders from civilians.

ABORTING MISSION. I WISH YOUR PEOPLE LUCK, BUT THAT’S ALL I CAN OFFER. COMMUNICATION ENDS.