The alleyway sloped downhill toward a busy street beyond. Clotheslines hung like drab bunting overhead, and windows high on the buildings were propped open to catch any breeze. The alley was just wide enough for the SNB car to follow them, though the driver scraped off half his paint job on a Dumpster at the back of one building. He didn’t seem to care — in Chapel’s mirrors he could see the man with the shaved head in the driver’s seat, and he didn’t even look over to see what all the noise was.
This guy was determined, Chapel had to give him that. He wasn’t going to let them get away with a little trick driving.
At the end of the alleyway Nadia waved to the right, as if she was going to turn that way. Chapel wondered why she would throw such an obvious signal — then grinned to himself as she shot forward between two cars and into an identical alleyway across the busy street. Her signal had just been a feint. Chapel had to twist around and lean away from an oncoming car as he bounced and rolled across the main street, but he managed to shoot into the second alleyway without crashing. Nadia glanced back over her shoulder at him, smiling. Bogdan looked like he might start screaming at any moment, his eyes rolling under their fringe of hair. He had one arm tight around Nadia’s waist, hanging on, while with his other hand he tapped at the keys of his MP3 player. The hacker was crazy, Chapel thought — if he was that scared, why not use both arms to hold on? The key clacking seemed to comfort him, though, like an infant with a security blanket.
Chapel glanced back and saw the SNB car slowly threading its way into traffic in the street behind him. They were gaining significant ground on the car, not least because the downward-sloping alleyways helped their struggling engines.
Up ahead of them the alleyway descended toward a parking garage. Chapel could see flickering sunlight through the open structure. He rushed forward to catch up with Nadia, then pointed at the garage. She nodded back so he took the lead again, using his forward momentum to carry him up a ramp and through the structure, the wind making chopping noises on either side as he flashed past a long rank of parked cars. A second ramp continued up into the higher stories of the garage, but Chapel didn’t want to go that way — there would be no way down from up there and he would be trapping himself. Instead he looked for and found an exit from the structure on its far side. A low wall prevented cars from just driving straight through, but there was a gap in that wall for pedestrians who wanted to get to their parking spots. There wasn’t a lot of clearance but Chapel threaded the needle and shot through to the other side, just as a car was coming into the garage. The car’s horn blared and someone shouted a warning, but Chapel just twisted around and shot past the side of the car, out into a wide street beyond.
Nadia was right on his tail as he blasted through an intersection and slipped between two lanes of traffic. Up ahead he saw that the road opened into a broad plaza with the huge curved wall of a stadium filling up half the sky down there. Traffic swirled around the stadium in a vast gyre, the cars inching forward against gridlock.
Chapel cut some of his speed and let Nadia catch up to him so they could talk again. “Did we lose them?” he asked.
“We must have,” she said, as they joined up with the barely moving traffic circle. “There was no way he could get through there.”
Chapel nodded and studied the cars around him. The drivers were all staring at them, but that couldn’t be helped. An American and a woman who looked like Nadia riding scooters were bound to attract attention in Tashkent.
“So who’s this contact we’re meeting with?” Chapel asked, as they crept forward, around the circle. They were moving so slowly they had to put their feet down so their scooters didn’t fall over. It gave them a chance to talk, though Chapel would have preferred to keep moving — he never liked feeling trapped, even in gridlock.
“She’s trustworthy. I know that’s what you’re asking. At least,” Nadia called over to him, over the traffic noise, “we can trust her not to betray us to the SNB.”
“That’s a big ‘at least,’” Chapel said.
Nadia shrugged. “We need certain things for our trip into the desert. Only one person in Tashkent can get us what we need. Therefore, we must trust her. She’s a vory. You know what that means?”
Chapel grimaced. “Russian mafia.”
“The word means ‘thief-in-law,’ a lawful thief,” Nadia told him. “One who follows the thief’s code.”
“A criminal. Every criminal I ever met followed the same code — do what benefits them, and everyone else can go to hell.”
Nadia laughed. “You in the West, you will never understand. The mafiya—the gangs — do you know where they came from? The gulags. They were born in Stalin’s prison camps. They hate nothing so much as central government. The irony is, they have come to be so powerful, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, they are a kind of government in themselves. The vory—”
“Car,” Bogdan said.
Chapel stared at the hacker. “Yes, Bogdan, there are lots of cars here,” he said.
The Romanian shook his head. “That car,” he said, and pointed with one very long finger.
Chapel looked where Bogdan had indicated. “Shit,” he said.
It was the car that had been following them, the one carrying the two SNB men, and it had just merged into the traffic circle, about ten cars behind them. Chapel was certain it was the same car because all the paint was scraped off its front quarter panel.
“This guy’s persistent,” Chapel said.
“Perhaps we should split up,” Nadia said. “I can go to the meeting with my vory. You can lead these men away, get them off my tail.”
Chapel thought of when she’d suggested something similar in Bucharest — when she’d said she could go collect Bogdan on her own. “You asked for a svidetel. A witness,” he told her. “We go together or not at all.”
“All right,” Nadia said. She scanned the road ahead. “Up there, do you see? A little street, one where we can—”
She stopped speaking without warning, and Chapel wondered what was going on until, a half second or so later, he heard the sirens.
Coming up the street she’d indicated, their nearest escape route, was a police car with flashing lights.
Chapel had no doubts that it was coming for them.
“Can they arrest us for shaking our tail?” Chapel asked.
“Not for that, no,” Nadia said. “At least — they shouldn’t. This is supposed to be a game we play, there are supposed to be informal rules… but if they have some other excuse, if we broke traffic laws, even—”
“In other words, if we let that police car pull us over, we’re dead,” Chapel said. Once they were in an Uzbek police station, it wouldn’t take long at all for their cover story to fall apart. And once the authorities knew they were using false identities, it would not be a huge jump to assume they were foreign spies.
Chapel craned his neck around, looking in every direction. The traffic was packed tightly around them. They might thread their way around the cars on their scooters, they might reach another side street with no police car on it, but it would take time, and they needed to move now.
Of course, there was another option. “Nadia,” he said. “Follow my lead, okay?”
He didn’t wait for confirmation. He twisted his handlebars around and curved around the front of the car on his right, wincing as the driver sounded his horn right in Chapel’s ear. He ignored the noise and gunned his throttle, sending his scooter shooting at right angles to the road. There was a nasty bump as he jumped over the curb and up onto the sidewalk beyond. Before him raised the long curved wall of the stadium, set back from the road by a broad plaza where people were lounging on benches and soaking up the sun. The plaza was lined with rough bricks that made his scooter vibrate alarmingly, but Chapel just tightened his grip on his handlebars and opened his throttle as wide as it would go.