Nadia, of course, didn’t like his plan. She pleaded with him constantly to turn back, to head north again.
“I’m the lead agent on this mission,” she said, staring at him from the passenger seat. “I’m ordering you to go back.”
He didn’t even turn his head to look at her.
“Jim, please,” Nadia said. “Just listen to me for one moment. I’ve spent years of my life planning this operation. If we just stop now, I’ll never get another chance.”
“You have no chance now,” Chapel told her. “If we headed for Kazakhstan, how far do you think we would get? Even if we made it across the border, the SNB would just call up their friends over there and tell them that three dangerous fugitives were headed into their territory in a vehicle that any reconnaissance plane could pick up in a second. And that’s even assuming they don’t tell the Russians about us.”
She looked away, out through her window over the endless rippling landscape of sand.
“You know, the Russians? The people who are trying to kill you?” he asked. He was angry, and he didn’t care if he was shouting. “The people you said you worked for?”
“Jim—”
“You came to us claiming to represent the Russian government. You said this mission was sanctioned by the Kremlin. You lied to us, Nadia. You lied to me.”
“It’s not how you think,” she insisted. “It’s… I admit that things have become complicated. But—”
“Who do you really work for?” he demanded.
“FSTEK. My superior is Marshal Bulgachenko.” She reached over and for a second he thought she was going to grab the wheel. Instead she reached for his arm. He shrugged her off. “I didn’t lie. I just omitted some of the truth.”
“Jesus,” he said. He smacked the steering wheel with his artificial hand. “You put me in danger, Nadia.”
“I know.”
“You tricked the government of the United States into supporting this mission.”
“Konyechno, but—”
“You saw the Russian hit squad in Bucharest and you let me think they were just local gangsters and we could run away from them.”
“This is true.”
“Stop saying that! I’m not sure you even know what the word ‘true’ means.”
She reached for him again and he shoved her away, harder than he’d meant to. She curled up in the far end of her seat, staring at him.
“Bogdan,” she said, in a soft voice.
Chapel started to ask a question, at least to vent his confusion. It took him a second to realize she wasn’t talking to him.
Bogdan tapped some keys on his MP3 player, and suddenly the truck’s engine died. It wheezed to a stop, the truck halfway up a sand dune, its nose pointed at the sky. For a second it just hung there as if it had hit a brick wall. Then it slipped backward a few yards as it lost its grip on the loose sand.
Chapel stared at the dashboard. All the controls were labeled in Cyrillic characters, but the needles on all the gauges had dropped to zero — even the fuel gauge. All power had been cut to the engine and to the displays.
“Clever,” Chapel said. “Let me guess. Antitheft controls.”
Nadia’s voice was much easier to hear without the engine noise drowning it out. “This vehicle is of Russian military manufacture. We had a problem, a few years back, with our soldiers stealing our equipment. They weren’t getting paid, you see — they were owed a great deal of back pay — and many of them figured they were then justified to simply drive their vehicles off their bases and sell them on the black market. So we installed a chip in every vehicle to make sure this could not be done. Bogdan has simply activated that chip. He can deactivate it, if I feel he should.”
“If I agree to continue with this crazy mission, you mean.”
“Konyechno. Exactly. I still need you, Jim. I need my svidetel.”
Chapel glared at her for a while. He said nothing.
Eventually, when she didn’t relent just because he looked at her funny, he gave up. He popped open the door of the truck and jumped out, landing in the soft sand. It took a second to get used to the yielding ground, but he managed. Step by halting step, he started marching, to the southeast.
Behind him Nadia leaned out of the cab door. She called after him, shouting his name over and over, as he went on, placing his feet carefully on the shifting sand.
He didn’t get very far.
“Jim,” she called, when he had taken maybe a dozen steps. “Jim, I think it is time to call your boss.”
“He’s not going to like you any more than I do right now,” he called back.
“Even so.” Her face was set, her normally jovial features very, very serious suddenly. “Jim, I think you should get Angel on the line.”
That was enough to stop him.
“I beg your pardon?” he demanded.
Nadia jumped down onto the sand and walked toward him. “You need to contact Angel and set up an immediate call with Director Hollingshead,” she said.
“Listen,” Chapel told her, “I don’t know what you think you know—”
“Did you think I never wondered why you spent so much time in bathrooms with your tablet?” she asked. “Did you think I would not listen in?”
Her face had changed in the last few seconds. The softness, the friendliness, was gone. Now she looked like a soldier. Resolute, unapologetic, and unflinching.
“You spied on me?” he asked, though it sounded lame even to his own ears.
“Of course I did. That is what we do,” she said. “And please, do not take this moral tone with me. I know you did the same — just yesterday, when you attempted to question Bogdan about my previous mission. You made some very educated guesses, didn’t you? You asked him about a plutonium theft, convinced him you knew everything so there was no harm in talking. I admire your skills, Jim.”
Chapel shook his head. “So we’re putting all our cards on the table,” he said. “Okay. Tell me what’s really going on. Tell me about the Russians hunting you.”
“I will tell Director Hollingshead. You may listen while I do.”
Chapel stared at her, unable to process the way she’d changed. Unable to reconcile the Nadia he’d seen before with this woman.
When he was done trying — and failing — he went over to the truck and climbed the ladder to the cab. He went to his bag and took out his tablet. Before climbing back out of the truck he looked over at Bogdan.
The hacker was curled up in one of the backseats, clicking away at his MP3 player. Looking bored, mostly. He didn’t look at all like a man who had slaughtered an Uzbek security agent with an assault rifle. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who could screw up a mission in the time it took to empty a clip of bullets.
It seemed like today was the day he learned who everybody really was. He reached over and grabbed the headphones off Bogdan’s head. The Romanian flinched and made a noise that might have been a halfhearted protest, but Chapel ignored it. He pulled the headphone jack out of the MP3 player and shoved the headphones into his own bag. For good measure he grabbed the MP3 player — Bogdan’s connection to the outside world — and shoved that in his pocket.
“What is the meaning?” Bogdan asked, his voice high, almost squeaky. Maybe that was how he expressed outrage.
“You get this stuff back when I’m sure you won’t get me killed with it,” Chapel told him. Bogdan had more to say, but Chapel didn’t listen. He climbed out of the cab and staggered across the sand. Nadia was waiting for him under a tree a few dozen yards away, the only shade available from the evening sun.
He stared at her for a second, gritting his teeth. Then he switched on his tablet.
“Angel,” he said.