Chapel must have been staring wide-eyed, because she laughed when she came up to him. “Where we’re going,” she said, “we need to look the part.”
“Should I change?” he asked.
“No, you’ll be fine in that jacket. Just don’t smile, whatever you do.” She smirked at him again. “Come on. We have an appointment to keep.”
They took a bus to a nearby train station, one that had lockers big enough to hold their bags. Once those were secure, they went outside and stood in a long line for private transportation. As they waited for a taxi Chapel argued again that they didn’t need to be here. “This computer tech you want to hire — he’s just a security risk,” Chapel said.
“You don’t know him yet. He’s adorable. You want to just give him a hug, he mopes so,” Nadia told him.
“I’ll buy him a stuffed animal and we’ll leave him here.” He tried to think of a way of explaining to her they didn’t need a computer tech when he had access to Angel. There was no way her guy could beat Angel’s abilities. But how to say that without giving away Angel’s existence? “I know enough about computers for this job,” he said.
“Really. You know how to reprogram a Soviet legacy system from the eighties? In the Cyrillic alphabet? Don’t worry so, Jim. I’ve worked with this man before. He can be trusted. And anyway, I’m lead on this mission, am I not?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Chapel said. He had a feeling he wouldn’t have any trouble remembering not to smile. Between the jet lag and this security risk and the fact he hadn’t gotten much sleep on the plane, he was already in a foul mood.
Bucharest didn’t help.
He’d read it was called the Paris of the East, but the city Chapel saw wasn’t exactly a glittering metropolis. Every building seemed to be the same gray-yellow color — maybe the structures had been white once, but the million cars that puffed black exhaust had stained them like a coffee drinker’s teeth. Half the buildings were enormous brutalist office blocks; the other half sprawling palaces that looked like they were about to fall down. Some of them looked like they’d been built from cardboard and then sprayed with quick-setting concrete, they were in such bad shape. Construction cranes and scaffolding covered half the façades, apparently fixing up the buildings as fast as they could fall down.
Chapel couldn’t make sense of the place. There had to be money here — all that construction was costing somebody. But on the street level the city looked depressed and decrepit. He saw piles of trash on street corners, where mangy dogs fought over choice pieces of refuse. The people didn’t seem to take much notice. There were also a lot more Western Union offices than he thought a city like this probably needed. “What’s with all the wire transfer places?” he asked.
“Cybercrime,” Nadia said. “Romania’s principal export.”
Chapel turned to stare at her.
She shrugged. “Perhaps I overstate the case. But this is the European headquarters for e-mail scams and identity theft. There are little towns out in Transylvania — that’s northwest of here — where half the population is made up of arrows.”
“Arrows?”
“People who accept money in a scam, otherwise innocent people who sign for wire transfers and then hand over the money to gangsters. It makes it difficult to trace the money to the actual criminals. Cutouts, as we might say.”
Chapel glanced at the cabdriver, but he seemed oblivious. “Cutout” was an espionage term for the people who transferred information from one party to another without knowing anything themselves. It wasn’t the kind of term you should bandy about when you were working undercover on an espionage mission.
“Relax,” Nadia said. “Are you always so nervous on business?”
“It keeps me in one piece. Well, technically, two.”
She laughed. A lot of people got uncomfortable when he joked about his artificial arm, but not Nadia. Yet another reason to like her, even if he thought her attitude was far too relaxed for the serious work they were doing. Maybe, he thought, he should relax a little.
Maybe when Perimeter was shut down and he was home again.
“You’re tired,” she told him. “You didn’t sleep.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. He would very much like, he thought, to go lie down somewhere.
“Why don’t you head back to the airport and rest?” Nadia asked him. “I’ll collect our friend and bring him to you. It’s something I can do easily on my own.”
Chapel shook his head. “No,” he told her. “You wanted a svidetel, an American witness.” He gritted his teeth. Was she trying to shake him off her trail? “That means I see everything you do. When this is done, when I vouch for you, I need to be able to say I was part of everything.”
He was blatantly saying he didn’t totally trust her, but her reaction wasn’t what he expected. “Good,” she said, smiling. “I’ll be glad to have you along.”
The taxi took them through the various sectors of Bucharest, circling around toward the Strada Lipscani, the street Nadia had asked for. Chapel thought for a second the driver was taking them on a scenic route but Nadia explained they were just avoiding a sort of perpetual traffic jam that clogged the center of town. The route took them past the old princely court of Vlad the Impaler, though Chapel couldn’t see much of it from his window. Eventually the taxi dropped them off on a long street lined with big gray-yellow buildings that Chapel did have to admit looked a little like Parisian houses. One of them had a huge mural on its side of a blue sky full of birds.
They got out and Nadia paid the driver in leis, the local currency. Nadia must have brought them with her — he hadn’t seen her exchange any money at the airport. They headed down the block, passing an endless series of bars and nightclubs that were shuttered up for the morning. Half the places seemed to have English names — the Gin Factory, the Bastards Club — and the rest had names so strewn with accent marks and diacritics that he couldn’t even guess how they were pronounced. “Here,” Nadia said, outside of what looked like an unexceptional coffee bar. They stepped through the glass doors into blaring hip-hop so loud it made the air pulse. A dozen or so patrons were lounging on couches and low chairs, while a bored-looking attendant stood behind a counter lined with samovars. Nadia went up and grabbed a cup of tea without asking or paying. She spoke to the attendant, but the girl just sneered and went back to looking out the windows.
Nadia didn’t seem bothered by the attitude. She headed for a chair and plunked herself down, throwing one long leg over an arm of the chair. She left the teacup sitting on the other arm and pulled out her phone and started texting.
Chapel saw immediately why she thought he didn’t need to change his clothes. Half the patrons in the shop looked like her, or like male equivalents in T-shirts, American jeans, and flip-flops. They lounged across the chairs like sitting up had gone out of style. Standing near or behind each of them was a guy in a suit with the same haircut Chapel wore — short and vaguely military. The men in the suits flashed gold chains and big, chunky rings, but otherwise Chapel fit right in.
Bodyguards, he thought. The men in the suits were there to protect the casually dressed kids. Some of the bodyguards drank tea. One was smoking a very nasty cigar. None of them spoke to anyone else. Instead they traded tough-guy looks that never went anywhere, while the kids ignored them, too busy working their phones.
Chapel very much wanted to sit down, but he had to maintain his cover. Maybe one of the other bodyguards would sit, he thought. Maybe that would make it okay.
“This guy knows we’re coming?” he asked.
“Konyechno,” Nadia said, her voice almost drowned out by the blaring music. “Be still. Nobody talks here.”