“You weren’t supposed to. Nobody was.” The three of them moved forward, onto the platform. The light streamed down all around them. On the faces of the data banks huge spools of magnetic tape turned slowly, while polling lights flashed on and off as bits of data moved through the system like red blood corpuscles drifting through arteries and veins. Chapel felt something like awe, or reverence. Like what he had felt in the Hagia Sofia, when, for the first time, Nadia had taken his hand. There was something here larger than them, bigger than human scale—
The spell broke instantly when Bogdan started laughing.
Chapel spun around to look at the Romanian. Bogdan was bent over, studying one of the data banks. There was a big, goofy smile on his face, and his eyes were sparkling. Chapel had never seen the hacker so animated, not even when he’d killed Mirza.
“What’s so funny?” he demanded.
“Is like old man’s computer!” Bogdan exclaimed. He slapped one of his long thighs. “Is what everybody so afraid of? Is end of world, here? I see more advanced calculators, in my time.”
“He’s got a point,” Nadia said. “This system was installed in the early 1980s and never upgraded. You could probably fit all its data in one little corner of a smartphone and carry it around with you.”
“That would make it the world’s most dangerous smartphone,” Chapel pointed out, “since then you would have the launch codes for every nuclear missile in Russia.” He looked around at the data banks, standing in a circle around the desk. Each had two big reels of magnetic tape on its front, behind a plastic dust cover. “Jesus. I haven’t seen a reel-to-reel system like this since I was a kid, and that was just for recording music. What happens if one of these tapes breaks? They used to do that all the time.”
“One of them has,” Nadia said, pointing at one of the data banks. A dull red light flashed on its control panel. “That’s why there are eight of them. Each one must contain the entire program and database, so that even if seven of them broke at once, the last one could still function. Remember up top, where we saw one lamp lit above the keyboard? I believe that indicated that one of the reels was reporting an error.”
“So we can just grab these tapes and go?” Chapel asked. “That would cripple this thing, right?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it. That is one of those safeguards I told you about. If you lift the covers and remove one of the tapes, Perimeter activates itself automatically, and—”
“—and it can’t be shut down again until Moscow sends the right signal,” Chapel finished.
“For the same reason we cannot blow this place up with C4 or smash the data banks with a lead pipe, even.”
He nodded. “So we can’t touch this thing without activating it, and we don’t want that. So what do we do here?”
“You and I do nothing. This is why we brought Bogdan,” Nadia said.
Both of them turned to look at the Romanian. Bogdan wove his fingers together and cracked his knuckles with a sickening pop. He took off his MP3 player and his headphones and set them down on top of one of the data banks, then went to the desk and sat down before the terminal.
“Is my turn,” he said. “Bogdan for the win, yes?”
Chapel went to stand behind the hacker and look over his shoulder. “How are you going to break in to the system?” he asked, suddenly nervous. If Bogdan did this wrong, would it activate Perimeter? Maybe it would launch the missiles out of pure paranoia. Chapel tried to remember some of the things Angel had done to computers on his behalf. “Are you going to try a brute force approach? Run a logging script? Or do you think there’s a backdoor you can exploit to get you past the firewall?”
The Romanian looked up at him with a sneer. Then he reached over and switched on the monitor. It took a second to warm up, but when it did Chapel saw nothing on the screen but a greenish-white rectangle in the top left corner of the screen.
Bogdan tapped one key on the keyboard — the Cyrillic equivalent of a D.
Instantly the screen filled up with green text, line after line of Cyrillic characters Chapel couldn’t begin to read.
“So I am in,” Bogdan said.
Nadia smiled. “Jim, you forget. This computer isn’t connected to any others. It predates even the earliest forms of the Internet. It doesn’t even have password protection — or rather, it did, but we’ve already broken that, when we turned on the elevator.”
Chapel nodded. “If you’re in here, if you’re sitting in that chair, it assumes you’re an authorized user,” he said. “Okay. So shut this thing down and we can go.”
“It’s not quite that simple,” Nadia told him. “We don’t just need to shut it down. As you know now, there are people in Russia who want Perimeter to remain functional. The same ones who tried to kill us.”
The ones who had put a price on Nadia’s head, Chapel thought — they’d only tried to kill him because he was standing next to her at the time. But he didn’t say as much.
Nadia shook her head. “If we just shut this down, they’ll figure out what we’ve done, eventually. They’ll come here and they’ll start it back up. No, we must be more subtle. Bogdan is going to cripple Perimeter — but he will leave it so it looks functional. So that it thinks it is functional, and it will tell so to anyone who comes down here to ask.”
“Yes, yes,” Bogdan said. He tapped some keys and new lines of text appeared on the screen. “This I do. And this I do much easier if he does not lean over my head this whole time.”
It took Chapel a second to realize Bogdan was asking for some space.
Maybe it was time to give the Romanian his due. This was his area of expertise. If you wanted something blown up or shot at, if you wanted to sneak in to a secure area without being seen, Chapel was your man. But now it was Bogdan’s time to shine.
“Sorry,” he said, and took a step back.
Bogdan cleared his throat. Apparently that wasn’t enough space.
“Come, Jim,” Nadia said, grabbing his hand. “We’ll let him get to it. I have something else for us to do, just now.”
From the way Nadia kept laughing, Chapel knew exactly where she was taking him. He didn’t resist.
He wanted this. He hadn’t wanted anything so much in a long time.
As she led him out of the cave, up the spiral staircase, the music from the overhead loudspeakers changed. “Rimsky-Korsakov,” she said, and laughed. He didn’t know why. He didn’t care about the music. She kept turning back and trailing her fingers across his chest. The second time she did it, he grabbed her by the hips and pulled her to him and kissed her. He wanted to pick her up and carry her. By the time they reached the little cot in the tool room, his shirt was off. He started to take off his artificial arm but she stopped him, kissing down from his shoulder to his fingertips. He pulled her shirt away from her neck and kissed the hollow of her throat, the top of her breasts.
She wasn’t laughing by that point.
He pulled her shirt over her head and bent down to put his face between her breasts, to drink in the smell of her, the smoothness of her skin, her warmth. With his right hand he cupped her breast, his thumb stroking the nipple until she shivered and curled against him. She looked up at him with wide eyes and he kissed her deeply, even as he slipped his hand down across her flat stomach and inside the waistband of her shorts. He felt lace and pushed his fingers under it, felt the sparse hair between her legs. She swiveled around, rubbing against him with her whole body until she was facing away from him. She pulled his left arm around her until he was holding her tight, then she grabbed his right hand and pushed it farther down until his fingers sank inside of her. She was already wet and he met no resistance as he slid his fingers back and forth, back and forth, slowly, rhythmically.