Even if her definition of the right thing and his were different.
“Now. Mirza. You saved my life, and maybe what you’re saying about Svetlana is true,” Chapel said. “If you want to save anything out of this mess, you’ll put your gun down, as well.”
The SNB man inhaled sharply. Then he dropped the machine pistol.
“All right,” Chapel said, and he nodded slowly. “Now I’m going to tell you how this ends. She and I are going to get into that truck, and we’re going to drive away. You won’t follow us.” He couldn’t read Mirza’s face. He knew he couldn’t trust the man. But he had to move forward. “You’re not going to report any of this to your superiors. We’re going to drive to Afghanistan, we’re going to leave your country as quickly as possible, and we’re never coming back. Do you understand?”
Mirza smiled. It was not a warm smile. “I understand that you believe this will happen,” he said.
“He’ll hound us,” Nadia protested. “He’ll send an army after us — Jeff—”
“I’m giving you a chance, Mirza,” Chapel said. “A chance to—”
He stopped in midsentence because he’d heard something. Someone was moving around back in the shed, back near the truck. But there wasn’t supposed to be anyone still alive back there — all four of the Russians were dead, there was no one—
Time slowed, then, as things happened very fast.
Mirza started turning, his eyes still locked on Chapel and his AK-47. His hands lifted, as if he were reaching for another weapon, or as if he wanted to surrender. Chapel would never know which.
Because suddenly Bogdan was standing in the doors of the shed, an assault rifle gripped in both of his skinny hands. His hair had blown back and his eyes were very wide, as was his mouth, showing bared teeth. The depressive hacker was gone, replaced by some vicious Romanian monster out of legend as he squeezed his trigger and fired thirty rounds on full automatic, the bullets tearing Mirza’s chest to ribbons.
The SNB man didn’t even have time to look surprised.
“Oh crap,” Chapel said, staring at what remained of Jamshid Mirza.
Nadia, without a word, bent down and picked up her pistol again.
“What?” Bogdan asked.
The hacker’s face had relaxed again, now that his enemy was dead. His bangs fell back down over his eyes, and other than the fact he was still holding an assault rifle, he looked exactly as he always had.
“Something is wrong?” he said.
“Where were you?” Nadia asked. “I went looking for you.”
“I hear people come, so I hide,” Bogdan said. He lifted his shoulders and let them sag again. “In the chicken coops, yes? Then I see men coming, with weapons, I think I am dead. The American killed those men, and later, the Uzbek killed another one. But he is our enemy, so I went in truck and found guns and kill him.”
“That… makes sense,” Nadia said.
“Was right thing to do, yes? He is our enemy?”
“He… was,” Nadia agreed. “Jim?”
Chapel wanted very much to sit down. He wanted time to figure out what had happened and where everything went wrong.
Sometimes in life you don’t get what you want.
“Okay,” he said. “We need to… we have to…”
There was a course forward, a series of steps he could take that would get them out of there and to a place of safety. He was getting stuck, though, on the first step. He couldn’t think straight, couldn’t—“We need to hide these bodies,” he said. Because that had to be the first thing they did.
His moment of doubt passed. One of the most useful things the army had ever taught him was that motion and activity were a passable substitute for a rational plan. “It may already be too late. Maybe someone in one of the buildings nearby heard something. Maybe they’ll come to look. Maybe they’ll find Mirza and report his death, and his friends in the SNB will know he was assigned to watch us. I’m sure he told them where he was headed, he would be a fool not to leave word with somebody that he was coming here, and Mirza didn’t seem like a fool.”
“He fell for your cover story,” Nadia pointed out.
“The cover was solid. Yours, on the other hand—”
That was a whole other kettle of fish. He hadn’t even begun to process what Mirza had said about Nadia. That she was wanted by the Russian government. That the blond thugs had not, in fact, been Romanian gangsters looking for Bogdan but Russian security men sent to kill her.
If he started down that path, he was going to have to question all kinds of things that so far he had comfortably taken for granted.
Later, he told himself.
“Never mind. Help me with these bodies. Bogdan, see if you can find a tarp or something. A sheet, a cloth, plastic — it doesn’t matter. We need to hide this mess as best we can and be out of here as soon as damned possible.”
He realized he was babbling, that he was talking more than he was thinking, but he didn’t care. He started hauling bodies around, then, and talking through the process helped him not think too much about what he was doing, about what he’d already done to the dead men. With Nadia’s help he got them inside the shed, where at least they wouldn’t be seen from the street. Bogdan found some old stained blankets in the pile of trash that filled the lot, and Chapel covered the bodies because that seemed more respectful than just letting them lie there on the dirty shed floor.
When it was done, he got the three of them in the truck. The driver’s seat was still wet with blood, the blood of Varvara’s man. There was still a bullet hole in the windshield. He ignored these things. He got the truck in gear and drove out of the shed. There was just room to drive the big truck around to the gates at the front of the lot, though it took a lot of maneuvering. Nadia jumped out and pushed the gates open wide enough so that Chapel could drive through them. Then she jumped back in the truck, and Chapel put it back in gear.
“Head north,” she told him. “If we can get out into the open desert, away from the main roads, we have a chance to—”
“No,” he told her.
“No?”
“No. We head southeast. To Afghanistan. Like I said.”
Nadia shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. It is exactly the wrong direction!”
“No,” Chapel said. “Afghanistan.”
“But why?”
“Because,” he told her, “we’re aborting the mission.”
Nadia was right about one thing — they needed to get into the desert before anyone came looking for them. Chapel took the truck to the edge of town and then rolled off the road, into a scrubby field of weeds. Ahead of them lay irrigation ditches and a few cultivated cotton fields and then nothing but sand as far as the eye could see. Though the truck was hardly inconspicuous, it was clearly meant for crossing rough terrain. The big tires always found something to grip, and the wide wheel base kept them from pitching about too much even when the ground rose and fell beneath them.
The seats weren’t exactly comfortable, just a thin layer of padding over flat steel, and he imagined he would get pretty sore if he tried driving the truck all day. But the Afghan border was only a hundred miles away or so, and once they were across they could simply find the nearest American troops and then they would be safe. Hollingshead would get them space on a transport plane headed back to the States and they would be home free.
All they had to do was cross that hundred miles of desert before the SNB realized that Mirza was missing and started looking for them.
Bogdan sat in the back and clicked away at his MP3 player/computer. Chapel didn’t know what he was doing with his improvised keyboard and didn’t much care at that point.