She answered immediately. “Sugar? Are you alone? I’m showing you don’t have your headphones plugged into this tablet. Is it safe to talk?”
“No,” Chapel said, “but we need to anyway. Nadia knows all about you, apparently. Though watch what you say anyway. She’s tricky.”
“I… see. Agent Asimova? Can you hear me?”
“Yes, miss,” Nadia said. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance at long last.”
Angel sounded pretty wary when she replied. “Likewise, I’m sure,” she said. “Um, I’m not really sure this is kosher. Sugar, you know what the director said about—”
“We both know what he said. Let’s not go into it now. Angel, I need you to call the director, actually. We need to discuss whether or not we’re going to scrub the mission. Things have gotten… complicated.”
Angel’s only reply to that was to switch the tablet over to its telephone screen. Digits appeared one by one there as if Chapel had typed them in: 01 00 000 000-000-0000. Chapel had seen numbers like that before — it meant Angel wasn’t taking any chances, not even letting Nadia see what American area code she was calling. The 01 at the beginning was just a country code, indicating the call was headed to the United States.
Chapel set the tablet in between two low branches on the tree, so that it faced both him and Nadia at eye level. Hollingshead answered almost immediately. It would be midmorning in Washington, and he most likely would have had a line open with Angel anyway, just to monitor the mission in Uzbekistan. His face appeared on the screen, with just a plain neutral background behind him that didn’t give away anything about where he was. He looked out of the screen with genial eyes that opened a lot wider when he saw Nadia peering back at him.
“Son?” he said. “This is a little unexpected.”
“I understand, sir, and if circumstances were different, I wouldn’t be contacting you like this. But things have gotten bad over here. Very bad.” He explained as quickly as he could how Mirza had followed them to the truck’s location, and how Bogdan had killed him. He repeated what Mirza had told him — that Nadia had a price on her head, that the Russians wanted her dead or alive. Nadia glanced away when he said that, as if she were ashamed. Well, good, he thought. She should be. “She lied to us, sir. She misrepresented her support.”
“Young lady,” Hollingshead said, blinking behind his thick glasses, “this is quite serious. You understand that? You involved the United States in this mission with the understanding that your country was fully in line.”
“I know this, sir,” she said. “You have my apology.”
“I’m going to want a bit more than that.”
She nodded. “Yes, it is true, there are Russians who… disagree with what I am doing. My country is very large, and it has many, many security agencies. I think you will understand when I say they do not always cooperate, yes?”
Hollingshead sighed. “All too well.” Chapel knew why that thought exasperated the old man. The secret directorate in the Pentagon had fought brush wars with American civilian intelligence groups in the past — one of which involved a CIA assassin sent to take Chapel’s life.
“There are men, mostly ex-KGB,” Nadia explained, “who think Perimeter should be kept intact. That it is a vital part of the Fatherland’s defenses. These men have power in the Kremlin, power enough to call for my execution — or worse. Men who would very much like to torture me for the information I possess. I have avoided their clutches this far, but I knew they would come eventually.”
“And you chose not to tell us this, when you came to us for help.”
Nadia shrugged. “You would have said no, I thought.”
Hollingshead’s frown deepened. “You’re quite right about that.” He turned to look at Chapel. “Son — what’s your plan now?”
“I’m thinking we should abort,” he told the director. “Exfiltrate immediately and return home while we still have the chance. As for Asimova—”
“No,” she said. “No, I do not agree. There is no reason to stop now. We have no reason to believe that the SNB knows of our plans, or that they are even tracing us right now. They cannot know our destination. If we move quickly, if we drive all night, we can be in Kazakhstan before dawn. This is not the time to turn back.”
“I see,” Hollingshead said. “Well, now, this is a dilemma. You’re supposed to be lead on this mission. But I gave you that courtesy because I thought I knew who you were. I have to say, I’m inclined to Jim’s way of thinking.”
Chapel nodded. “Very good, sir, I’ll—”
“No!” Nadia said again. “No, I will not accept this! Do you have any idea how long I have worked toward this goal? What I sacrificed to get this far?”
Hollingshead frowned. “Agent Asimova, who do you even work for?” he asked.
“FSTEK, as I have always said,” she told him. “Call Marshal Bulgachenko. He will vouch for me, as he already has.”
Hollingshead took off his glasses, presumably to polish them offscreen. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Marshal Bulgachenko turned in his resignation a few days ago. And then… well, there’s no pleasant way to say this. His body was found the next morning, floating in the Neva River.”
“He is… dead? Konstantin? Dead?” Nadia asked. She put her hands over her face and turned away from the screen. “No, please, it cannot be so. It cannot! He was… he was a father to me, do you understand?”
“I’m sorry you had to hear it like this,” Hollingshead told her. “But certainly you can see how that changes things.”
She didn’t respond. She was too busy weeping.
Chapel fought down an urge to reach for her, to comfort her. He needed to stop thinking those kind of thoughts, and he needed to stop right now.
“Sir,” he said, “whatever we plan on doing, we need to do it fast. Every minute we wait the SNB gets closer to finding Mirza’s body — and when they do, they’ll put every resource they have into finding us.”
“Understood, son. Agent Asimova, how did you get into this mess?”
“I will tell you,” she said, through her hands. “I will tell you everything.”
Nadia fell down on her knees in the sand. When she pulled her hands away from her face, Chapel saw that her tears, at least, had been real.
“It was Konstantin Bulgachenko who recruited me, out of college,” she said.
She looked up at Chapel, then at the tablet. She cleared her throat noisily and wiped at her cheeks. “Forgive me. This is a long story.”
“Make it shorter,” Chapel growled. “We need to move.”
Nadia lifted her shoulders, then let them drop. “I will try.”
Then she started talking.
“I studied nuclear engineering, in the college. I thought I would return home, to Yakutia, and work there for a mining company, digging uranium out of the ground to help build nuclear power plants. Instead the marshal came to see me. He took me to lunch. He was not a charming man, but… endearing in his way. He wore his uniform and his flat cap and he never smiled. He looked like something from a history book, from the Soviet days, and I was young enough then to find such a thing romantic. He said he had seen my records and he was very impressed. He said he had a job for me, one that would make a real difference in the world. I was young — a student still. That idea appealed to me. I thought I had a choice, that I could accept or decline his offer, but of course there was no choice at all. I had already been recruited. Otherwise he would never have been able to talk to me like he did that day.
“He told me that after the fall of the Soviet Union, a large amount of military hardware had gone missing — stolen by the soldiers who once guarded it, sold on the black market. This was hardly news. I was young and thought I knew everything and I laughed… until he told me that some of that hardware, approximately one hundred and fifty kilograms of it, was plutonium. Enough to build perhaps twenty-fire hydrogen bombs. And he had no idea where it might be. I did not laugh then.