In the dark of the stairs, she grabbed Chapel and pushed him through a door, then slipped in behind him and closed the door behind her. The space they were in was nothing more than a custodial closet, a narrow space lined with shelves. It was so small he could feel her pressed up against him. He was glad to see she was finally breathing hard.
“Two minutes,” she whispered. “If there’s no sign of them—”
“Who?” Chapel asked. “Who were those guys?”
“I have no idea,” Nadia said. In the dark closet he couldn’t see her face. “Bogdan is… involved with some people, some criminals, but—”
“Hold on,” Chapel said. “You said he was a computer expert. Then you said this was the capital of cybercrime. Are we hiring a crook?”
“I do not know that word,” she said, her Russian accent suddenly much thicker. It wasn’t much of a dodge. Maybe she thought she was being funny. “Please be quiet. Am listening for enemies.”
He shook his head and let it go.
“One minute,” she said. He kept quiet. “Now.”
She opened the closet door and Chapel followed her out, down another flight of stairs into what he realized was a subway station. She bought a pair of tickets from a machine and handed him one. They headed through the turnstiles and down to a platform, where a train was just coming in. Nadia stopped and watched the windows of the train cars as they rocketed by.
“Third car, second door,” she told him, and ran toward the train as it slowed to a stop. The doors pulled open and people started flooding out, swarming around them in their haste to reach the exit. Chapel saw a very tall, very thin man wearing clunky headphones start to step out of the car. Nadia pushed toward him and said something Chapel couldn’t hear, and the two of them stepped into the car.
Chapel fought his way through the people and managed to get on the train before the doors closed again. He pushed through the commuters until he found Nadia and the tall guy sitting down, whispering back and forth.
They looked up at Chapel as he approached.
“Meet Bogdan Vlaicu,” Nadia said, as Chapel leaned over them. “Our third.”
Bogdan looked like a bundle of sticks in an old gray coat. Long, mousy hair fell down over his eyes and hid much of his face. The headphones he wore were hooked up to a tiny MP3 player wrapped in layers of ancient duct tape. Over one shoulder he carried a canvas satchel.
He barely glanced at Chapel during the long subway ride, acknowledging him with a nod of his head and then turning back to his whispered conversation with Nadia.
When they reached their destination, Nadia led them out of the subway and to the train station where they’d stowed their bags. They found an empty waiting room and hunkered down. “The plan,” she said, “was to fly to Tashkent from here. But our plane tickets aren’t for another six hours. I suggest we get out of Romania as soon as possible.”
“Agreed,” Chapel said. “We drew a lot of attention back there. The police will want us for questioning, at the very least. So we go by train?”
Nadia agreed. “A train to Istanbul, in Turkey. That puts a fair amount of distance between us and this trouble, and we can get a flight to Uzbekistan from there. Bogdan,” she said, “are you ready? You made the preparations I asked you to make?”
“Yes, it is done. Yes,” Bogdan said. He sat down on a bench and stared straight ahead, one hand clicking the buttons of his MP3 player repeatedly, as if it were a nervous habit.
Chapel pulled the headphones out of Bogdan’s ears to get his attention. “Do you have a passport?” he asked.
“Some,” Bogdan replied. He reached inside his satchel and took out a handful of them. “Do you want I am Croatian, Latvian, or Czech?”
Chapel took the passports and riffled through each of them. “This one looks the most authentic. Latvian,” he said, handing the rest of them back to the Romanian. Then he unzipped his own bag and took out a bag full of shampoos and travel-sized soap. The bag had a hidden compartment where he’d put two fresh passports, one for him and one for Nadia. He leafed through them. “Your name is Svetlana Shulkina now,” he said.
Nadia wrinkled her nose. “That is the name of a mail-order bride.”
“I’m Jeff Chambers,” he said, ignoring her. He zipped the old passports, the ones they’d used entering Romania, into the hidden compartment. “I’ll go get our train tickets — in a minute. First I want to talk about what the hell just happened.”
Nadia smiled at him. “We got away,” she said.
Chapel shook his head. “There was no reason for us to draw so much attention, not this early in the mission. You think they were looking for Bogdan?” He turned to the Romanian hacker. The man had his headphones back on. Chapel removed them again, expecting Bogdan to protest, but he didn’t. “Bogdan, who’s looking for you?”
The Romanian just shrugged.
Chapel wanted to grab him by the lapels and throw him up against the wall until he gave a proper answer. He fought back that urge. “Are you in some kind of trouble?” he asked.
Bogdan shrugged again. “Usually.”
Chapel turned to Nadia with a skeptical look. “You’re sure this is the guy we want?”
“Absolutely. He and I worked together once before. Didn’t we, Bogdan?”
“Yes,” the Romanian said. He was putting his headphones back on.
“Ignore all of… this,” she said, waving at Bogdan to indicate what Chapel was looking at. “The first computers Bogdan ever saw — that a lot of Romanian kids ever saw — were looted from Soviet-era office buildings here, old Vector-06Cs and East German U880s. They were usually broken and outdated, so the kids had to teach themselves to rebuild them from parts. Bogdan was always a prodigy. He made a name for himself back in the early nineties by upgrading computers to run pirated copies of Western games. Now people hire him to port their old business software over to Western operating systems. He can write code for the ES EVM standard in his sleep.”
Chapel didn’t understand much of that, but it sounded appropriately technical. There was one problem, though. “I take it most of his clients are people who don’t want their data uploaded to Facebook.”
“Konyechno,” Nadia said. “He works for gangsters and thieves, yes. They hire him because he is very good, and because he does not talk.” She laughed. “He’s exactly who we want, ‘Jeff.’ The kind of man who will fly halfway across the world to do some computer work with no questions asked for fifty thousand U.S. dollars in cash — and never tell a soul about his adventure. Did you think I hadn’t thought this through? I’ve been planning this operation for years.”
“I’m sorry,” Chapel said. “I didn’t mean to suggest—”
He stopped because Nadia had turned her back and was pulling her halter top over her head. She grabbed a fresh shirt from her luggage and pulled it on, stuffing the halter top back inside. She ran her fingers through her hair to try to straighten it back out and then used an alcohol wipe to remove most of her makeup.
“Impressive,” Chapel said. “You look completely different, now.”
“I’m Siberian. Most people think I look Mongolian, or maybe Korean,” she said. “Around here I stand out, so I need to work the accessories. The farther east we get on this trip, the less conspicuous I’ll be and I won’t need all the costume changes.” She smiled at Chapel. “A gentleman might have turned his back.”
Chapel felt his cheeks grow hot. “I’m sorry, I, I forgot, I just—”