“Huh. So she was loyal to her husband, and kind of smart about it,” Chapel said. “The real question is — will she show us that same kind of loyalty? I know she’s worked with Nadia before.”
“Well, my sources say she’s a real Russian gangster, not just a run-of-the-mill criminal. She’s what they call a vory v zakone, a—”
“‘Lawful thief,’” Chapel said, “yeah, I got that from Nadia. Does that really mean anything, though?”
“Probably yes,” Angel said. “The Russian gangs are what they call a Bratva, a brotherhood. They live by a very strict code. Unless they have a good reason to sell you out — if they think you’re a police informant or something — they stick by a deal. Even if they don’t care much about moral codes, they have a financial reason to honor their obligations. If they just took your money and never delivered the goods, they would lose their reputation with other vory, and that would cost them in the future. From everything I see here, Lyadova is the kind to stick to her word.”
Well, that was something, anyway. “Nadia seems to have pretty good contacts in the criminal world. She says that’s just how things work over here.” Chapel frowned. “Speaking of which — I just had a very informative conversation with your opposite number.”
“You mean Bogdan Vlaicu? He’s good, but I wouldn’t put him in my league,” Angel said, sounding a little huffy.
Chapel grinned to himself. “I don’t know. I got him to tell me how he hacked into a ring of plutonium smugglers.”
“Plutonium?”
“Apparently that was why Nadia got that medal back in 2011. I don’t know the details, but I figure the American intelligence community might be interested in knowing that the Russians let some radioactive material walk away back then.”
“I think they’d be very interested in knowing about that,” Angel said. He could almost hear her sitting up straighter in her chair. “What can you tell me?”
“I can give you a puzzle to work out,” he said.
“You always did know the way to a girl’s heart, sugar.”
Chapel tried to remember exactly what Bogdan had said. “The deal was brokered by a woman whose mother’s maiden name was Irina Costaforu. The woman was born in a town in Romania called Lugoj.”
“You’re going to make this one too easy,” Angel said.
Chapel shrugged. “Bogdan seemed to think it was a piece of cake. See what you can figure out. I don’t mind telling you — the story of how he got that information was a little chilling. It’s way too easy to find out everything about somebody these days.”
“If you give all your personal details to a company like Facebook that makes its money by selling personal information to third parties, well… maybe you don’t really have a lot of right to complain,” Angel suggested.
Chapel didn’t agree but he let it go. “It got me thinking. If he could break into this woman’s e-mail so easily, it shouldn’t be too hard to check up on somebody you were worried about. Just to make sure they were okay. You know, without them knowing about it.”
“You’re right. That would be very easy,” Angel said. Any trace of flirtation was gone from her voice, and he knew she had guessed where he was going with this.
“I’m not suggesting that I want to cyberstalk Julia—”
“You just want me to check her e-mail and find out if she’s okay,” Angel said, completing his sentence. “Think about this one pretty hard, Chapel. Think about if that’s what you really want me to do for you.”
He sighed and laid the tablet down on the bed beside him. “No,” he said.
“No?”
“No, I don’t want you to do that.”
“Good,” she told him. “Because I would have refused. That sort of thing isn’t cool. What did she say when she left?”
“She said she would call me. That I should give her some space. That was… more than a month ago.” He closed his eyes. “Do I sound as pathetic to you as I do to myself, right now?”
“Chapel, I know you miss her. But your relationship status is not a matter of national security. I’m here to help you with your mission, with—”
“I know, Angel,” he said. “I know. I just — miss her a lot. I’m only human, you know? I miss her and I wish… I wish for a lot of things.”
Angel’s voice softened. “I get it,” she said.
“Okay. Okay. Moving on,” Chapel said. “Tomorrow we’re going into the desert and—”
He stopped. Focused all his attention on what he’d just heard.
“Angel, I’ll call you back.”
“Sure, honey.”
He pulled off his earphones and hit the power switch on the tablet. Got out of the bed and padded to the door. With his ear up against the thin wood, he held his breath and just listened.
There — he heard it again. The sound of metal scraping against metal. What could it be? He waited until he heard it a third time, then slammed open the door, bursting out into the common room of the suite. If someone had come to plant more bugs — or something worse, he would—
Nadia stood in the middle of the room, wearing nothing but a thin nightgown. She was holding a fork and the lid from one of the room service trays.
“I woke up hungry,” she said.
“I see you couldn’t sleep, either,” she said, as Chapel stepped out into the common room.
He realized he was staring at her. Moonlight coming in from the balcony doors painted a swath of silver down her arm, the curve of her hip, the long straight muscle in her thigh. He forced himself to look away. “I’m sorry we didn’t wake you. Bogdan thought maybe you’d been trained to kill anyone who touched you while you slept.”
Nadia grinned around a forkful of cold lamb. “I suppose I needed the rest. The worst part about drinking during the day is that you get the hangover before you go to bed. I seem to have missed most of that, for which I am glad.”
Chapel walked over to the table and put his hands on the back of a chair. Her hair was mussed and her eyes were hooded with sleep, still. “Are you going to be able to go back to sleep after you eat that stuff?” he asked.
“Should be no problem.”
He nodded. “We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow, and—”
“Perhaps you should be sleeping yourself,” she told him, with a smile. She poured herself a glass of water and drank it down without stopping. “Wouldn’t do to be dehydrated before we even reach the desert.” She put the glass down and looked over at the balcony doors. “Come get some air with me.”
Chapel took a deep breath. Bad idea, he thought. Terrible idea. “All right,” he said.
She stepped out onto the balcony and leaned far out over the concrete railing, way out over a twenty-story drop. Chapel came up behind her, watching the way her shoulders moved under the thin straps of her nightgown.
He reached for her, because he was afraid she might fall. He almost grabbed her arm to pull her back away from the railing. Then he took a breath and dropped his hand.
“I’ve been waiting so long for this,” she said.
“What’s that?” he asked.
She smiled at him over her shoulder. Then she leaned forward across the railing, lifting her feet off the balcony floor. A good strong wind at that point might have blown her over the edge. He moved toward her, but she laughed and put her feet back down.
“For years,” she said, “I have been working toward this moment. Toward shutting down Perimeter. Now it’s finally happening. It feels…”
Chapel almost sighed in relief, but stopped himself. “Unreal?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “No. This is very real. More real than anything in a long time. The world we live in, people like you and me — that is what never feels real to me. I think you must understand what I mean. We are sent out into the field, never really knowing what we’re after. We gather intelligence, we neutralize threats.” She shrugged. “Then it is home again, or what we call home, and ‘thank you for your service.’ No one explains why we did what we did. No one acknowledges we were ever there. Even our names are secrets. We are never allowed to mean anything, in case we are lost. But tomorrow — tomorrow I’m going to do something important. Something meaningful. And at least one person in the world will know I was there, that I did it.”