“Jim, you’re asking for a lot. Make it worth my while,” Hollingshead said. “Agent Asimova,” he called.
Nadia looked up at the screen. She’d been silent since finishing her story, as if it had taken all the wind out of her sails to relive all that. “Yes, sir?” she asked.
Hollingshead cleared his throat. “You are absolutely certain you can dismantle Perimeter? If you can get to it, you can shut it down for good?”
“Konyechno,” she said.
“Don’t just say ‘of course’ as if this were something easy. You convince me this is worth putting so much at jeopardy.”
“Sir, it will be done. It is all I have left in my life to do,” she told him.
Hollingshead was silent for a long while. On the screen Chapel could see the wheels turning behind his eyes, the calculations being worked through, the numbers crunched. It was the kind of decision he was glad he didn’t have to make himself.
“All right,” the director said, finally. “Get moving, don’t stop for anything — and let me make this very clear: do not get caught. No matter what.”
“Understood,” Chapel said, and grabbed the tablet off the tree before the screen even went dark.
Night fell before they’d gotten very far. At the wheel of the big truck Chapel felt a little relief once they were out of the sun — he was an intelligence operative and the shadows were always more comfortable for him — but even so he was keyed up enough to hunch forward in his seat, every nerve strained as he wondered where the next threat would come from.
Angel kept a very close ear on the police band chatter in Uzbekistan, listening for any sign that they were being pursued. No one had reported Mirza’s death, yet, nor was there any sign that the SNB was worried. That gave them a little breathing room.
The quickest route to Kazakhstan would have been to drive straight north, through the desert, but that way lay danger. To curb drug trafficking, the Kazakhs had built a high fence with barbed wire and floodlights along the border. Patrols swept the area every night, focusing on the main roads from Tashkent to Astana, the Kazakh capital. To the west, however, where there were no roads and only a few farms, the border was much more porous.
So they took the truck northwest, past Vobkent, using the best roads they could find. As long as they weren’t being actively pursued, they wanted to make the best time they could, and that meant sticking to graded surfaces. The truck was designed to cross sand and slickrock, but it was still a lot faster on a highway.
Chapel worried at first that the truck was going to give them away, that it was just too conspicuous with its eight wheels and its high cab. It turned out that wasn’t a problem. North of Vobkent the roads were almost deserted, and what little traffic they did see was all construction vehicles and big segmented trucks hauling goods back toward Tashkent. The desert-crossing truck didn’t stand out at all — if they’d been driving a late-model sedan, that would have drawn more attention.
“The northern half of Uzbekistan is all desert,” Nadia explained. “The Kyzyl Kum, three hundred thousand square kilometers of nothing but sand. Almost no one lives there, other than a few herders. The people who come there come for work, to dig for gold, uranium, natural gas, live back in the cities. They are all headed home now for their dinners, tired and uninterested in us.”
“Fine,” Chapel said. “I won’t feel comfortable until we’re out of anyone’s sight, though.” He still wasn’t sure he’d made the right decision. How much had Nadia’s story affected him? He thought of himself as a logical person, a smart guy who at least tried not to make dumb mistakes. But her revelation, the fact that she was dying — he wasn’t heartless, after all. Had he allowed himself to be swayed?
He supposed it didn’t matter now. In for a penny, in for a pound.
He glanced at the tablet sitting between them, wedged under the emergency brake. Angel would be sending their pursuers in the wrong direction, he knew. She was too busy to talk, and now was hardly the right time, with Nadia sitting next to him, but he desperately wanted to know what she thought.
In the backseat Bogdan was busy, too. Chapel had returned his makeshift computer, and the hacker was raiding the SNB’s archives, looking for anything they thought they knew about Jeff Chambers and his mysterious assistant Svetlana. So far Bogdan had turned up nothing to worry them, but if Mirza had left some case notes behind, or even a voice mail to his superiors telling them where he was headed before he disappeared—
“Jim,” Nadia said. “I want to thank you.”
He glanced over at her. “For changing my mind?”
“For allowing me to finish my mission,” she said. “It means… a great deal that you trust me. That you believe in me.”
“I believe in what we’re doing,” he told her, and left it at that.
This woman had lied to him. She could do it again. Maybe there was more to her story she wasn’t sharing, maybe—
“Sugar,” Angel said, “you’re going to see the town of Zarafshan coming up in a few miles. You might want to detour around it.”
“Understood,” he told the tablet.
Diverting around the population center took enough of his attention to keep his doubts and fears in the back of his mind for a while. The town wasn’t very big, but there weren’t a lot of roads around it, either, so he had to go off-road for a while. He had to admit he was impressed when the big tires grabbed at the sandy soil and they barely lost any speed. Varvara had done right by them.
Beyond Zarafshan the road turned into little more than a gravelly track that stretched on for many more miles, slowly but steadily turning into nothing more than a ribbon of slightly paler dirt in the midst of the desert. At one point they saw the lights of a village up ahead and had to go off-road for a few miles to stay clear. Eventually the road disappeared altogether, and they entered the Kyzyl Kum proper. To either side there was nothing to see but sand dunes, no oases or rivers or even many trees to break up the horizon.
There was no turning back. Chapel might have his doubts, but it was time to put them aside.
They took turns, one of them driving through the night while the other rested. Both of them were too alert to really sleep, though, and driving through the desert was never going to be a restful experience.
The truck was an old military vehicle designed by the Soviet Union for prospecting work in the open desert, and it had been built extraordinarily well. It had special filters in its air intakes to keep out blown sand. It had a doubly redundant coolant system to cope with the heat of the desert sun, and special heating filaments wrapped around the fuel lines to handle the bitterly cold night. Even the groove pattern on its massive tires had been designed to offer the best possible grip on the sand.
After driving for nearly four hours, Chapel cursed the designers anyway, cursed them for not considering what a thinly padded seat could do to a human tailbone.
Nadia shrugged when he told her how sore his ass was. “The Soviets, they were brilliant in their way. They understood machines, basic engineering, so much better than anyone else,” she told him, “because they had to. They had such a large country to conquer. But they never built a car seat that a human being would want to sit on, and their chocolate is terrible.”
“Got to have your priorities, I guess,” Chapel said, shifting on what felt like a bare metal bench. The rivets in the steel dug into him no matter how he held himself.