“When it comes to N, that’s starting to sound familiar,” Chapel said.
“Exactly. I figure she waited until she was alone in the police station to tell them she was a government agent, and then they sprang her. It couldn’t hurt that she had that medal. I mean, she probably wasn’t wearing it at the time, or anything. But the police — and the Putin administration — would have been embarrassed if they had to admit they had arrested a decorated citizen.”
“Interesting,” Chapel said.
“Yeah. She’s not as squeaky clean as she looks, huh?” Angel said. “I kind of like her more now, though. Makes her a little more human.”
Chapel thought of the woman he’d left sleeping in her aisle seat. He had no trouble thinking of Nadia as human. But this did change things, a little. Something occurred to him. “Angel — you said the protesters were asking for self-determination for some eastern ethnic territories.”
“That’s right.”
“Which ones?”
Angel tapped at her keyboard for a second. “You want the whole list? There are dozens of them here. Basically the protesters wanted every ethnic, religious, or language group to have its own autonomous country.”
“What about places in Siberia? I mean, specifically, anything close to where Nadia was born, near Yakutsk.”
More keys clacking. Then Angel clucked her tongue. “Right on the money. Twelve different areas in Siberia are named on the list, including Yakutia.”
“Very interesting,” Chapel said.
The plane set down on a runway near the center of the capital of Uzbekistan just as the sun was coming up. The passengers debarked onto the second floor of a small terminal where the floor was lined with oriental carpets. As Chapel, Nadia, and Bogdan headed down a wide central staircase toward customs and baggage claim a loudspeaker crackled and filled the air with the chanting of a muezzin calling the faithful to dawn prayers. Many of their fellow passengers heeded the call then and there, while less devout travelers streamed around them. It seemed like half the people in the airport were smoking all at the same time, and the air was thick with the stink of tobacco.
Chapel hadn’t slept much. He felt like a guitar string tuned too tight, like every breath made his body vibrate uncomfortably. He was going to need a nap, and soon.
There was no trouble with their passports. It took a while for the bags to come out, but it looked like no one had gone through them — something Chapel had worried about. He grabbed his black nylon bag and followed Nadia out through a pair of glass doors into the street.
The air of Tashkent shimmered with the last traces of a morning haze. A breeze swirled down the sidewalk, already warm, carrying with it the smell of a desert close by.
The smell made the hair on the back of Chapel’s neck stand straight up. He knew that smell, the ancient dusty spice of it. It smelled just like Afghanistan — like the place where he’d lost his arm.
Instantly Chapel’s muscles reacted, tensing and pulling his head down. Every day he’d been in Afghanistan, every hour, he’d been in danger. Death could have come for him at any moment. What had happened instead was maybe worse. Chapel felt the old familiar stress headache coming on, like a loop of wire was wrapped around his skull and it was constantly tightening.
Get it together, he told himself. This wasn’t Afghanistan. That was all over for him, just a memory.
It was so very hard to fight it back.
The physical therapist who had worked with Chapel after he came home from the war — a fellow amputee named Top — had once told him that the percentage of veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder was one hundred percent. And that the percentage of wounded veterans with PTSD was one hundred and fifty percent, because some of them got it twice. He’d warned Chapel that you never really left the war behind, that it lived with you and all you could do was make a place for it in your head, a place you only visited when you had to.
Chapel fought to control his emotions. Part of him wanted to run away. To run back to the plane and beg the pilot to take him away from here. Part of him wanted to curl up in a ball in the corner.
Top would have understood. He’d been to Iraq — and left behind an arm, a leg, and one eye. Maybe he’d gotten PTSD four times over.
Maybe Nadia sensed Chapel stiffen. She put a hand on the small of his back and rubbed the skin there in small circles. It was surprisingly comfortable.
“I’m okay,” he told her, and stepped away from her hand.
She didn’t reply. She just stepped up the curb and held her arm out, down and away from her body. A car pulled up right away. The driver was smoking, and when he stopped, he rolled down his window and a bluish cloud billowed out, right into Nadia’s face. She didn’t seem to mind. She leaned in through the window and spoke a few words. Handed over some dollar bills.
“I’ll take the front seat,” she told Chapel and Bogdan. “The hotel isn’t far.”
Chapel climbed into the back. Once he was safely inside with the door closed, he shut his eyes.
Nadia woke him by stroking his cheek with the back of her hand. “Come on,” she said. “Time to perform.”
Chapel nodded, still groggy, and carefully levered himself out of the back of the car. The new jacket he’d bought in Istanbul reeked of cigarette smoke — the driver of the car must have chain-smoked all the way from the airport. He brushed himself down a little and looked up at the entrance to the hotel. It was a wide portico of giant concrete blocks, broken only by a pair of glass doors and a couple potted ferns that struggled vainly to make the place look less like a Soviet-era dormitory.
A couple of other cars were pulled up out front, their engines left idling as if for a quick getaway. At the end of the drive a bald man in a white button-down shirt was feeding some pigeons from a wax paper sack of breadcrumbs. He looked up when he saw them and started ambling over, shoving his hands in his pockets.
Chapel tried walking past the man, but he changed course so that Chapel would have had to walk right through him to get to the hotel doors.
Interesting.
Trouble, maybe.
“Hello,” the man said. “Are you staying here tonight?” His English was accented but fluid, a second language but one he’d been speaking for years.
Nadia stood just behind Chapel and off to one side. As drowsy as he was, he could feel the way she moved, changing her posture the tiniest fraction of a degree, could hear the tiniest gasp of breath she took.
Something was up with this guy.
Chapel narrowed his eyes and gave the man a good once-over, looking to see if he had a weapon on him. He didn’t see one, but he saw other things. He saw the waxy skin of the man’s bald head, the carefully combed rectitude of his mustache. This was a man who was perfectly groomed at dawn — and not just so he could go feed some pigeons.
Chapel forced himself into character. He’d rehearsed his cover story for hours before leaving the States — now was the time when he needed it. Now that they were in Uzbekistan everything had to be done just so.
“Heard this was the only decent hotel in Tashkent,” he said, adding a skeptical look.
The older man nodded agreeably. He didn’t smile. Chapel couldn’t help but think the man was just as in control of his expression as Chapel was, at that moment. They were both playing parts. Maybe they both knew it. “Oh, all our hotels are excellent. All up to American standards, I think you’ll find.”
“Uh-huh,” Chapel said. “Good plumbing at this one?”
He’d thrown that out as a sort of halfhearted insult, mostly to see if he could get a rise out of the other man. It didn’t work. “Oh, yes, yes. You’ll be pleased.”