He waited — almost too long. But in the end he kicked his way out through the windscreen, kicked his way to the surface until his mouth and nose crested the water and he could suck in another breath.
Lake Baikal is one of the world’s clearest lakes. He could look down and see what remained of the airplane, slowly shrinking below him, for a very long time. He watched it go — until the very end, her svidetel. Her witness.
The crew of a fishing boat dragged the one-armed american out of the water and took him back to shore. There the fishermen wrapped him in a blanket and left him sitting on the dock, because he said he wanted to stay by the water. He was shaking with cold and bleeding from several wounds. The fishermen called in the local policeman to talk reason to this american stranger. But the policeman just threw up his hands. Of course the american did not have to go to the hospital, if he did not want to. “Konyechno,” he said.
The American looked up at him with a gaze so piercing it made the policeman flinch. “You are Siberian?” he asked, in a deplorable accent.
“Ya Russkiy,” the policeman replied, I am a Russian.
The man from the lake said nothing. He just went back to looking over the water.
Most of the people who had come to take a look at the stranger went back to work. A few children stayed down by the docks, playing on the cold shore, shooting each other with finger guns, swooping around with their arms out like the wings of airplanes.
The policeman came back a while later with a mug full of some yeasty-smelling yellow liquid. “Kvass,” he said.
“What’s it made of?” the man from the lake asked.
“Fermented bread. I put raisins and lemon in it,” the policeman told him. “It will help you regain your strength.”
The man from the lake grimaced — clearly he was no Russian — but he drank down the contents of the mug. Then he ate the raisins from the bottom. The policeman smiled. He took off his hat and ran a hand over his close-cut hair. “I have called the pertinent authorities, I thought you should know. They are sending someone.”
The man from the lake just nodded. “It will be a man in a black suit, who comes here to kill me,” he said.
The policeman started to protest — it was his job to protect people from being killed, not help the killers, but the man from the lake held up his hand in protest.
“You have done the correct thing,” he told the policeman. “I am an enemy spy. The man in the black suit is FSB.”
The policemen nodded sagely. “Ah, I see. You are crazy.” That explained a great deal. Though not, perhaps, how the man got in the lake in the first place. “You… you are a madman, yes?”
“Konyechno,” the man from the lake said, and he gave the policeman a weak smile.
But a little while later a helicopter landed on the rocky beach. It drove the children away like frightened gulls, though they did not go far — mostly they ran for the shelter of the pilings under the dock.
The helicopter took its time setting down. The pilot could not seem to find a flat surface to put his wheels to. Eventually, though, he did find the right patch of rocky ground, and the rotors spun down with a sad whine. The side hatch opened and a man stepped out, then started walking smartly toward the dock and the man from the lake. The policeman watched with his hands laced across his stomach, unsure of what he should do.
He was especially confused because the man who jumped out of the helicopter was not wearing a black suit. Instead he had on a very grand military uniform, with many medals and golden insignia, some of which identified him as being a colonel in the Strategic Rocket Forces.
Maybe, the policeman thought, the man from the lake really was a foreign spy.
The colonel took the man from the lake away. Together they boarded the helicopter and flew off. Eventually the children came out from under the dock and started to play again.
The policeman wondered if he would ever know what that had all been about. In the end, he shrugged, because he knew the answer. “Konyechno, nyet,” he said to himself. Of course not. That wasn’t how things worked.
Director Hollingshead fiddled with a loose bit of thread on one of his sleeve buttons. “My apologies, son, for, well. For your having to take the long way home.”
Chapel said nothing. There had been a lot of paperwork and rooms full of arguing people, back in Russia, before he was finally allowed to leave. Bureaucracy was the same everywhere, it seemed. Colonel Valits had made sure he didn’t slip through the cracks. He’d been a man of his word — once Nadia was dead, he made sure Chapel got to go home.
The mission was over.
“Not, altogether, ah, a glorious success,” Hollingshead said. “Would you agree?”
Chapel stood at attention, just inside the door of the converted fallout shelter that Hollingshead used as his office. The old man was sitting in a leather-covered armchair across the room. He had not, so far, ordered Chapel to be at ease, nor asked him to come any farther into the room.
“Sir, yes, sir,” Chapel said. He was back in uniform, which always made him feel a little better. One sleeve of his tunic was pinned up at his side, because he had yet to be issued a new prosthetic arm.
“The Russians, of course, won’t speak of what happened. Ever, well, again,” Hollingshead went on. “I don’t think diplomatic relations will be affected, but… you know. How these things… well.”
Rupert Hollingshead had a cast-iron spine — Chapel had seen him give orders that would make a normal man’s blood run cold. He was one of the most powerful spymasters in the American intelligence community.
When he stammered, when he hemmed and hawed and put on this absentminded professor act, it was just that — an act. Designed to either put people at their ease or fool them into thinking he was as ineffectual as he looked. He looked like a jovial old Ivy League academic, but it had been a long time since he had acted like one when he was alone with Chapel. His performing like this now worried Chapel very much.
“Sir, if you would like my resignation, I will have it for you by—”
Hollingshead took off his glasses and stared openmouthed.
“Resignation?” he asked. “Son, what exactly are you suggesting?”
“I failed you, sir,” Chapel said. He was speaking a little too candidly for protocol, but he supposed there were times when you had to be honest. “I allowed myself to be emotionally compromised by Asimova. I put my country at risk as a result.”
Hollingshead shook his head. He dropped one arm over the side of his chair and let his glasses dangle there. He cleared his throat noisily.
Only then did he speak.
“Son, if she fooled you, well… she fooled me first.”
Chapel said nothing.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Hollingshead said, jumping up from his chair. “Come inside and sit down. I’m not a dragon you need to beard in its lair. Let me fix you a drink.”
It was then that Chapel realized the jovial professor act hadn’t been for his benefit at all. It had been Hollingshead’s way of attempting to deal with his own guilt and doubt. Once the drinks were poured and handed out, Hollingshead put his glasses back on and studied the contents of a manila folder for a while. “You accomplished all the tasks I set for you. You rendered Perimeter nonfunctional, and from all our chatter analysis it looks like they don’t even know what you did — which means they won’t know the damned thing is broken, so they won’t try to fix it. They think Asimova went to Aralsk-30 only to steal the codes, not to rejigger the computer.”