Chapel was not surprised at all to find a man with a shaved head and an immaculate mustache waiting in the lobby, sitting casually on a leather sofa near the reception desk. Apparently Mirza had come back here after losing them in the city. There was no way to get to the elevators without walking right past him.
“Mister Chambers!” the SNB man called out, as Chapel passed by. “Did you have a good day? See many of our wonderful sights?”
Chapel gave the man a nasty look. “We rented some scooters and took a tour. Can’t say I was much impressed.”
“It occurs to me we have not been introduced. My name is Jamshid Mirza. Perhaps you’d do me the honor of letting me show you around tomorrow,” he said, smiling. “There are some people you should meet.”
For a second Chapel was certain he was about to be arrested. He met Mirza’s gaze as steadily as he could and tried to think of what to do next. “Sorry,” he said. “We have plans. Business.”
“Of course. Perhaps you’d like to discuss that business with me? You’ll find, I think, that Tashkent can be very friendly to foreign capital. Our policies may seem harsh to you, but we can be very… lenient for foreign investors. All manner of things can be forgiven.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, buddy,” Chapel said, and headed once more toward the elevators.
He expected Mirza to stop him, or at least make some more cryptic comments, but the SNB man seemed to be done.
Back in the suite Bogdan retired sulkily to his room without a word. Nadia went and got her bug sweeper and went over the usual spots — light fixtures, under the beds and tables, the television set, the phone. She found three new microphones, each of which she destroyed. She dumped the broken circuit boards in a glass ashtray and then rubbed at her forehead with one hand. “I think I need a nap.”
“I’m not surprised, the way you were putting away that vodka,” Chapel said, smiling at her.
She smiled back. “I know Russians are famous around the world for drinking too much,” she said, “and there is some truth to this particular stereotype. I’ve never had the time to build up a proper Russian liver, though.”
“Don’t worry,” Chapel said. “I’ll stand watch while you sleep.”
She nodded and turned toward her room. Stepping inside she held the door open for a second. She said nothing, though, and after a few seconds she closed the door behind her.
Chapel didn’t want to risk going down to one of the hotel’s restaurants — it was too likely he’d find Mirza there, waiting to ask him more questions. His cover story was ironclad, and if Mirza called up the company that Jeff Chambers supposedly worked for, he would find receptionists and executives to vouch for Chapel’s bona fides, but Chapel knew any cover was only as good as one’s ability to act. That had never been his forte. If Mirza really started grilling him, Chapel knew he would eventually give himself away. He wouldn’t know enough about the geology of natural gas domes or he would forget what town Jeff Chambers was born in, and then Mirza’s promised “lenience” would disappear in a hurry.
So he ordered room service, and a few minutes later a smiling bellhop came to the door with three orders of lamb curry and a couple bottles of Baltika 3, the only beer on the menu that Chapel had heard of. Chapel tipped the bellhop to just leave the trays by the door. When the kid was gone, he went over the trays with Nadia’s bug finder. It squealed and hissed, but it didn’t find anything, so he brought the food inside. Just past the door he found Bogdan waiting, holding a pair of ice tongs over his head.
“Is all I could find,” Bogdan said, gesturing at the tongs.
“Okay,” Chapel said. “And what exactly did you want them for?”
“In case the boy was an assassin, I would fight him off,” the hacker said, putting the tongs down on a table.
Chapel kind of wished the bellhop had been a threat, just so he could have seen what the ensuing battle looked like. Bogdan was so thin he looked like an averagely built bellhop would be able to break him over his knee.
Smiling to himself, Chapel pushed past the hacker, a tray balanced on each hand. The bug finder made a high-pitched shrieking noise, and he nearly dropped the food. Putting the trays down carefully, he picked up the bug finder and waved it over the trays again, thinking maybe he’d missed something. When he got no result, he pointed it at Bogdan and heard it start to screech.
Bogdan stood very still, his eyes wide.
Chapel moved closer, sweeping the bug finder up and down the length of Bogdan’s long body. When it passed over the MP3 player, it went crazy.
Chapel looked up into Bogdan’s terrified eyes. He switched off the bug finder. “False alarm,” he said, and smiled.
Bogdan nodded and tried to smile back. It didn’t quite take.
When dinner was set up, Chapel went to Nadia’s door and found it was slightly ajar. He pushed it back and looked inside her room and saw her curled up in her bed, one arm flung wide and her small hand dangling over the edge. She was snoring like a steam engine, but her face was open and innocent and he thought—
Well. It didn’t matter what he thought.
“Do not wake her,” Bogdan whispered. The hacker had come up beside Chapel unnoticed, and Chapel nearly jumped when he spoke. “She may lash out and karate chop you in neck if you touch her now.” He pointed at his own ridiculously long neck and shook his head.
“She does look like she could use the sleep,” Chapel said. “We’ll start without her.” He closed her door and went over to the table. “It’ll give us a chance to talk. You and I have never had a proper conversation, have we, Bogdan?”
The hacker dropped himself into one of the table’s chairs and started picking apart a tray of food. He ignored the beer and drank tap water instead, but he put away an astonishing amount of curry while Chapel sat and watched him. It was clear if they were going to have a conversation, Chapel was going to have to get it rolling.
“So,” he said, trying to think of anything the two of them had in common. What he came up with wasn’t a great start. “How long have you known Nadia?”
Bogdan peered at him through his fringe of bangs. “Some years.”
“Since before 2011?” he asked. The year Nadia got her medal. The year she had worked her biggest mission, as far as Chapel knew.
“No, just then,” Bogdan said. “I am not sure this is proper for discussion.”
Chapel waved one hand in the air. “I know. It was a secret mission, and you’re not supposed to talk about it with people who don’t know what you did.” He nodded affably and sipped at his beer. “But I’m a secret agent type, too. I know about things.”
Bogdan lifted his fork as if he would defend himself with it. Chapel sat back and pretended he wasn’t extremely interested in what Nadia had done in 2011. Clearly Bogdan wasn’t going to give anything away for free. Luckily, part of Chapel’s intelligence training had included a course in cold reading — the art of tricking people into thinking you already knew their secrets, so they could talk about them freely.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me anything. I mean, I know most of the details already.” He thought of what Nadia’s mission might have been. If she’d been working for FSTEK and she’d been in Romania, it had to deal with technology transfer. If she had gotten mixed up with organized crime, that meant she had been tracing something stolen or misappropriated. And Nadia wasn’t just a low-level bureaucrat, tracing serial numbers on stolen computers. She would have been working at the very top level of FSTEK’s operations. “It was about the missing nukes,” Chapel tried, knowing if he had it wrong he would reveal his ignorance. But if he got it right—