“You’re assuming Chapel can subdue me,” Nadia said, baring her teeth.
“Are you really going to make me find out?” Hollingshead asked her.
Nadia had a pistol tucked into her belt.
Chapel had one, too.
If it happened — if he was given the order to detain her — it wasn’t going to be a fistfight. It would be over very quickly, and one of them was going to get shot. Maybe killed.
He didn’t know if he could do that.
Hollingshead and Nadia stared each other down, through the screen of the tablet. Maybe, Chapel thought, maybe if he moved fast enough, and quietly enough, he could anticipate the order. Maybe he could get his arm around her neck, put pressure on her carotid artery, knock her out before she could react…
Maybe it would work. But maybe not.
Spetsnaz. She said she’d been trained by the Spetsnaz, the Russian special forces, and he knew it was true. Those acrobatic moves she’d used in Bucharest and again at the shed in Vobkent, the high kicks, the twisting evasions — he knew he’d seen them before. Back in Ranger school, his trainer Bigelow had showed him videos of those moves and told him just how dangerous they were. If he tried to choke her out, she would have a dozen different ways to reverse his attack, to put him at the disadvantage—
“Wait,” he said.
Nadia turned to face him. On the tablet’s screen he saw Director Hollingshead nod, just to indicate Chapel had his attention.
“Maybe,” he said, “maybe there’s a way to still pull this off.”
Chapel scrubbed at his face. It had been a hot day and he felt grimy and very tired, but he forced himself to focus.
“Son,” Hollingshead said through the tablet, “I think we all want to—”
“Sir, just… please. Just hear me out. When Mirza tracked us down, he blew Nadia’s cover — the Russians told him who she was. But he never figured out that I wasn’t who I said I was. He still thought I was Jeff Chambers, that I was a venture capitalist looking to invest in Uzbek energy concerns. He thought he could blackmail me, holding over my head the fact that I’d somehow gotten involved with a Russian criminal. We can use that. We can make it look like Nadia kidnapped Chambers and is on the run, but still in Uzbekistan.”
He glanced over at the truck, a few yards away. “I don’t think the SNB knows about the truck. Neither do the Russians. The three of us can drive to Kazakhstan right now and get out of the country. Meanwhile Angel can plant some false information — phone in anonymous tips, saying that we’ve been sighted, getting on a train in Bukhara, say, or trying to cross into Afghanistan. You know Angel can make it sound good, make it sound like credible intelligence. Maybe… maybe she can pose as someone from Chambers’s company back in the States and demand to know where he is. The SNB will put all their resources to tracking us down in their own country. They’ll have no reason to alert the Kazakhs, and no reason to go looking for a giant desert-crossing truck. Perimeter is only a few days from the border, it won’t take us very long to get there. By the time they figure out we’re gone, we can already have completed the mission.”
“And then what? How do you get out of there? Once you leave Uzbekistan, coming back won’t be an option,” Hollingshead pointed out. That had been the original plan, to retrace their steps, but Chapel had to agree it was no longer possible. “And you can’t very well exfiltrate through Russia.”
Chapel nodded, thinking hard. “We go out through the Caspian Sea. You can send a submarine to pick us up from the Kazakhstan shore, take us to…” He went over the map of Asia in his head. “Azerbaijan.” It was the closest thing to a NATO country in the region, the nearest place where they could expect a warm welcome. “From there we can just take a commercial flight back to the States.”
“That… could work,” the director said, though he still sounded skeptical.
“Angel can arrange the whole thing. Sir — we can do this.”
Hollingshead frowned. “Son,” he said, very softly, “weren’t, ah, you the one calling to scrub the mission in the first place?”
“Yes. But only because I didn’t know the whole story.”
“Don’t let emotion cloud your judgment,” the director told him.
Chapel shook his head. “Sir, I get it. I just—” He tried to think of some way to explain why he’d changed his mind. Nothing he thought of would sway the director. But he thought he knew one argument that might. “Sir. When you first brought me into your directorate, when you gave me this job, you told me what you wanted to do. What your directorate was designed to do.”
“I remember, son.”
Chapel nodded. “You said you wanted to shake all the skeletons out of the closets of the Cold War. You wanted to find every dangerous thing left over from seventy years of fighting communism, all the obsolete secret stuff just waiting to come back and bite us when we least expected it. Well. It seems to me that Perimeter ought to be job one.”
Hollingshead watched him closely through the tablet. Chapel had the sense the director doubted that he was thinking logically. But the argument was sound. Nadia’s last operation — her life’s work — was aligned perfectly with Hollingshead’s mission statement. Turning back now, aborting the operation, thwarted both of them.
Maybe it would be enough.
“The risks you’d be taking on are, well, astronomical,” Hollingshead pointed out.
“I’ve never shied away from risk before, sir,” Chapel pointed out.
The director nodded. “True enough. That’s my job.” He shook his head. “This mission already required violating the sovereignty of Kazakhstan. Now you’re talking about running counter to the security interests of Russia. We can’t afford to antagonize the bear, son. If the Russians discover that we ran a mission behind their backs, conspired with someone they’ve declared an outlaw… the diplomatic blowback could be horrendous. Ordinarily I couldn’t even consider doing such a thing without a direct order from the president.”
“We don’t have time to run this through channels,” Chapel pointed out.
“No, we don’t. But if I were to authorize something like this and it blew up, you know who would take the blame, don’t you? You understand what this would do to me and my directorate?”
“I understand that if we fail, I’ll most likely be dead. Or left to rot in a Russian prison for the rest of my life,” Chapel pointed out. “Sir, this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. We can take down one of the biggest nuclear threats mankind was ever stupid enough to build, but we have to do it now. If we wait, the Russians will just put a fence around the thing and we’ll never be able to touch it.”
Hollingshead stared at him through the thick lenses of his glasses. If it were anyone else, any other intelligence director, Chapel knew how this would end. Any spymaster but Hollingshead would simply shut the mission down. Call for further study, or declare the whole operation untenable. Anyone else would cover his or her ass.
Hollingshead, though — the man had principles. He still had things he believed in. And more than once that had led to him doing something real, something good, for his country. It was why he still had his job, because the president needed somebody with the backbone to actually get things done.