She dropped her hand. “Then the Cold War ended. And somehow, it was no longer our destiny. Oh, we were still the best with our rockets and our space stations. But now it’s all about making money, selling space on our rockets to other countries. Funny, is it not? How politics can do that, turn destiny into commerce into… nothing.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it funny,” Chapel said.
Nadia shook her head sadly. Then she turned away and headed down another flight of stairs toward a platform. A train was coming in, but she held back until it had disgorged its passengers and left the station again. When the platform emptied out, she led Chapel and Bogdan to its far end, where the station gave way to a dark tunnel. She looked around for any sign they were being watched, then jumped down to the level of the tracks.
Chapel nodded at a camera mounted on the ceiling.
“No worries,” she said. “It’s broken.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because,” she said, “my vory friend pays to keep it broken. Come on.”
She headed into the almost perfect darkness of the tunnel, hugging the wall away from the electrified rail. Chapel and Bogdan followed, keeping close together.
The tunnel stretched on ahead of them for miles, perhaps, though it was hard to judge distances in the nearly perfect dark. They trudged along in darkness broken only by too-infrequent lamps, some of which flickered so much their light was worse than nothing. It was all Chapel could do to keep from tripping and breaking his leg.
At one point a train came through. There were shallow alcoves built into the tunnel wall, no more than twelve inches deep. As the air pushed a great belly of wind ahead of it, ruffling their clothing, they had to press themselves back into these narrow holes. The train came so close Chapel thought it would crush him, so fast he was sure its speed alone would tear him out of his hiding place and pull him along with it. He could look in through its windows, see all the people perched on its seats, none of them looking up at him. In a few seconds the train had moved on and he could breathe again.
After another ten minutes of marching through the gloom, they saw a little more light appear ahead. As they drew closer Chapel could see it came from a pair of spotlights mounted on the tunnel ceiling. His eyes had adapted to the darkness, and now they stung when he looked at the harsh bulbs. It was impossible to see anything beyond that glare, and so he was completely surprised when someone shouted out a curt order.
He understood the tone, if not the words. He was being told to halt. Presumably by someone well-enough armed to enforce the command.
He stopped where he was and held his hands out away from his body.
Nadia, on the other hand, gave the unseen voice a wave. “Smert’ suki!” she called out, presumably supplying a password.
One of the spotlights swiveled away from them. Chapel blinked away afterimages and saw that up ahead a hole had been blasted in the wall of the tunnel, a ragged portal with edges of broken brick. Beyond was a much softer light, yellow and warm. A man with a rifle — Chapel could only see him in silhouette — stood in that entrance, waving them onward.
The three of them passed through the broken entrance and into a wide, dusty room that looked like the cellar of someone’s house. At least, it looked like the cellar of the house of a black marketeer.
The walls were lined with shelves full of cartons of cigarettes and gallon bottles of vodka. At the far end of the room stood a workbench over which hung a row of tools up on pegs. There was a red stain on the workbench that Chapel did not want to investigate. He told himself it was just old paint.
There were two other people in the room, beyond the sentinel who had ushered them in. One was a young man, maybe even younger than Bogdan, in a maroon tracksuit. He held a ridiculously large pistol in each hand. He kept his weapons pointed at the floor.
The other inhabitant of the room was a woman who was maybe ten years older than Chapel. She wore a turtleneck sweater, and despite the years written on her face, her hair was black and silky and formed a great mane around her head and fell nearly to her waist. She wore a necklace with a seagull pendant, and when she saw Nadia, she came running over to kiss her on both cheeks. The two of them spoke for some time in a language that sounded mostly like Russian, though Chapel didn’t understand much of the vocabulary. He knew that Russian prison inmates had created their own language, a kind of patois of code words and slang called Fenya — handy for making deals around people who weren’t in the loop.
When they were done, they both turned to look at Chapel. “Jim,” Nadia said, “meet Varvara. She’s an old friend and she’s going to help us out.”
Chapel held out his hand and the woman shook it.
“Traditionally,” Varvara said, her English deeply accented but fluent, “in my country when we welcome someone, we offer them bread and salt. I am afraid unless you wish to smoke or drink, I cannot be so courteous.”
Chapel smiled, though he wasn’t sure how much he liked this. He wasn’t thrilled that Nadia had used his real name, not the Jeff Chambers alias — even if they were all sticking to first names. “Thank you for meeting with us,” he said. “Your country, you say — so you’re not an Uzbek. You’re Russian.”
Varvara peered at him through hooded eyes. “An observant man,” she said. “People who pay attention can be dangerous.”
“Only if they’re enemies,” Chapel told her. He glanced around at the shelves, then back at the hole in the wall. “This is an ingenious setup you have here.”
“Oh?” Varvara asked.
Chapel nodded. “This location — totally hidden, but surprisingly convenient. You pay the train conductors to stop in the middle of the tunnel, just outside your warehouse, probably late at night when the trains are mostly empty. You load your contraband onto the subway trains and they can take your goods anywhere in the city, without the police seeing anything.”
Varvara’s eyes narrowed. She reached up and touched her seagull pendant. “You are perhaps thinking of informing the police of my operation?”
From the corner of his eye Chapel could see Nadia stiffen, just a little. This wasn’t how she had expected this meeting to go.
He ignored her. “Why would I do that? I have no interest in helping such a repressive regime. And I need your friendship if our own plans are going to move forward.”
Varvara nodded. “You’re just expressing… admiration for my resourcefulness, then?”
“Sure. Anyway, even if I wanted to inform on you, I’m sure you could brick this wall back up in an hour, move the goods out of this cellar in even less time. Then you just break through another cellar wall, somewhere else in the city, and resume your operation after only a minor delay.”
Varvara went over to the workbench and opened a low cabinet. Chapel was suddenly very aware of the two armed men standing behind him. If Varvara had just decided he was a threat and she wanted to go to work on him with a power drill or a pair of pliers, he wouldn’t be able to fight his way out. Maybe he’d pushed a little too hard. He glanced over at Nadia and saw a look of surprise on her face. She hadn’t expected him to say anything during this meeting. It looked like she was wondering why he had chosen to antagonize such a dangerous woman.