They made it to the metro without incident. Boarded the first train to come along. Changed at the next station, took the next train, changed again. They got a few looks from early commuters, but the people of Tashkent were used to minding their own business and no one spoke to them.
Finally they took one last metro line to Tashkent Central Station in Mirabad, where Nadia bought three tickets with cash. She bought the tickets for the 8:30 train to Bukhara, though they had no intention of going that far. “It’s a shame. Bukhara’s lovely,” she said. “It’s one of the stops on the old Silk Road, and a UNESCO World Heritage site for its historic central—”
“Please,” Chapel said, shaking his overcaffeinated, sleep-deprived head. “Don’t play tour guide today.”
She laughed and tried to meet his eye, but he looked away. That simple.
The train was right on time. There were SNB people on the platform. Anyone could have made them out for secret police the way they scanned everyone’s face and asked random passengers for their tickets and papers. They didn’t seem to be looking for anyone in particular. Chapel gave them a wide berth and herded Bogdan and Nadia into the first car on the train. It set off on time, and within fifteen minutes they watched Tashkent fade away from the car’s windows, its dense streets thinning out to residential neighborhoods, to wide, open green spaces full of trees, and finally to cultivated fields.
No one came bustling into the car demanding papers. No men with shaved heads and mustaches appeared on the local platforms they stopped at. Nobody even called Jeff Chambers on his cell phone to ask when he was coming down from his room.
Eventually, Chapel let himself relax. A little. He exhaled deeply and plopped back in his seat and let the waves of exhaustion crash through him, driving all thoughts from his head.
Nadia smiled from the seat across from his. Tried to catch his eye.
He turned his head to the side to watch the dusty-looking crops stream by, the sun glinting on irrigation ditches and the occasional stream.
It was that simple. He just had to never meet her eye again, and he would be fine.
The train passed through the city of Samarkand, Uzbekistan’s second biggest. Chapel was sure it was important historically, and the name conjured up visions of a glittering past, of caravans of camels and spice merchants and dancing girls in veils, but the train didn’t stop long enough for him to even get a decent look at it.
Nor was he awake enough to pay much attention. He kept slipping into a doze, a sort of half-sleeping state where he was only minimally aware of his surroundings. He slipped in and out of dreams of swirling cigarette smoke — the car was full of it, even with the windows open — of brown landscape rushing by him, of the constant swaying of the train, of Nadia’s perfume, of Bogdan’s incessant clicking.
He blinked his eyes to try to clear them, but he was having trouble focusing. He could hear Bogdan’s fingers moving, make out a fluttering motion when he looked over at the hacker sitting next to him, but that was all. He fought through it, fought for consciousness, and saw Bogdan clicking away at his MP3 player, like he always did.
This time, though, something about it bothered him.
Bogdan was facing away from him, looking up the aisle between the rows of seats. He had his big headphones on, as always. His fingers were moving over the keys on the MP3 player the way a clarinetist might work the keys of his instrument. It looked like there were more keys on the MP3 player than Chapel would have expected — more than enough to pause or stop the music, fast-forward or reverse. The main body of the player was wrapped in duct tape, and it looked like Bogdan had modified a commercial unit to his own specifications.
Something else bothered Chapel about the setup, as well. Though he had rarely seen Bogdan without the headphones on, he’d never heard any music coming from them. They might just be very well insulated, but Chapel had never seen a pair of headphones that didn’t leak at least a little sound.
Chapel turned away, wanting to shake his head and just let it go. So the kid was obsessed with his music, so what? Plenty of people his age spent their whole lives with headphones on. Bogdan was exactly the sort of person who would want to block out the real world as much as possible. The constant clicking at the keys was just a nervous tic. Chapel had no idea if he was constantly zooming back and forward within a given track, or just adjusting the volume up and down, up and down.
He should just go back to sleep, he thought. He should just—
Inside his head something came together, a pair of jigsaw puzzle pieces fitting perfectly to each other and showing a glimpse of a bigger picture.
He forced himself to sit up, to stretch for a moment. Blood rushed back into his head and his extremities and he breathed deeply, pushing oxygen into his tired tissues. He stood up and reached for his small travel bag, pulling it down from the overhead bin. Across from him Nadia stirred and opened one eye — it looked like she’d been fully asleep.
“Just going to freshen up,” he told her.
She turned her head to the side and fell asleep again, instantly.
He pushed his way through the men in the aisle who were smoking and laughing at jokes in languages he couldn’t understand. In the tiny lavatory of the train car he opened his travel bag and took out his tablet and his own earphones. As soon as they were in place Angel greeted him.
“We weren’t supposed to talk again until tonight, sweetie,” she said. “Everything okay?”
“Fine, probably. I just thought of something I wanted to talk to you about. It concerns our young Romanian friend.”
“Vlaicu? What’s he up to now?”
“I’m not sure.” Chapel tried to figure out how to express his intuition. “We’ve been keeping him away from computers this whole time, anything with a screen and a keyboard.”
“Probably wise,” Angel said, “though if he’s anything like me, that’s got to smart. It would be like being hopelessly nearsighted and the people around you won’t let you have your glasses.”
“I’m sure he’ll survive a few days without the Internet. The thing is, I’m not sure he has to — I mean, I think he might have found a way to get online anyway.”
Angel suddenly sounded very excited. “You think he’s hiding something on his person? Well, maybe. A smartphone, or a tablet—”
“Nothing like that.” He described the MP3 player to her. “Last night when I was sweeping our rooms for bugs, the player made the bug finder go through the roof. I don’t know. It seems unlikely. There’s no screen, and maybe about ten keys total. Could you even make a computer like that? I know it sounds impossible—”
“Not at all, actually. The original computers didn’t have screens or keyboards — they used punch cards.”
“Yeah, but I’m talking about something a little more sophisticated,” Chapel said.
“Well,” Angel said, “Maybe. There was a famous case of a bunch of computer science guys from the University of California, back in the eighties. They built computers into their shoes, using their toes to work the controls.”
“Shoe computers? Did they do anything useful?”
Angel laughed. “They took Las Vegas for a bundle, actually. They worked out a way to predict where a roulette ball was going to land and rigged the game.”
“Jesus. I think Bogdan might have been hacking this whole time. When we were trying to lose our tail in Tashkent yesterday, I think he changed a traffic light, or at least made it change faster. And he — and Nadia — always seem to know when subway trains are about to arrive.”
“That’s pretty easy stuff. Let me think about this,” Angel said. She sounded almost breathless. “I mean, you could reduce your inputs down to a small number of keystrokes if you used modal shifts, you know, like holding down a shift or control key to change the character you type on a normal keyboard. Say you have two mode keys, and eight input keys; that gives you twenty-four basic key combinations, which is almost enough for a complete alphabetic input, and that doesn’t even include multimode inputs, conditional mode inputs—”