She gave him a forgiving smile. “Nothing you haven’t seen before, I think. Now, I believe you were going to go buy us some tickets?”
“Yeah. Yeah… I’ll do that,” Chapel said. He headed for the door of the waiting room but stopped before he went through. “By the way,” he said. “You were really something back there. Using that bulldozer to escape was inspired.” He thought about the way she’d taken down Mustache, as well. “Pretty good for a glorified file clerk.”
“There’s more than one way to deal with bureaucracy,” she told him. She reached around her neck and unhooked the crucifix she’d been wearing.
Bogdan looked up, suddenly coming back to life. “Can I have this, if you don’t want anymore?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, handing the necklace to him.
“Are you a Christian, Bogdan?” Chapel asked.
“No,” he said. “I just want all help I can get.”
Nadia had said she’d worked with Bogdan before. Judging by what Chapel had seen so far, maybe he knew what he was getting into. Chapel was pretty sure he didn’t.
The toilet on the train to Istanbul — the first train they’d been able to catch out of Bucharest — looked like it had been made of a single piece of aluminum. It stank of bleach, and the toilet tissue had the consistency of cheap wax paper. But the door closed and latched securely, and the noise of the train meant no one would overhear Chapel’s communication with Angel.
“What exactly have you been getting up to, sugar?” she asked, as soon as the call went through.
“Don’t tell me we made the news sites,” Chapel said, his heart sinking.
“No, nothing like that — there’s nothing about it anywhere that I can find in the mass media. The Romanian police haven’t issued any alerts, either, which means you’re off their radar. But the State Department — the U.S. State Department, I mean — got a call today asking to verify your passports. They went through just fine, but we had to turn over your names and your flight itineraries.”
That could have gone much worse, Chapel decided. The names on the passports he and Nadia had used were false, and the plane tickets they weren’t using would send any pursuers off on the wrong track. It still worried him, though. “A bunch of guys tried to scoop us up in a tea shop on the Strada Lipscani,” he told Angel. “We got away. We thought they were looking for this computer tech Nadia likes so much, this Bogdan Vlaicu. He’s apparently in trouble with the local mob so I’m assuming it was organized crime. You think they might have requested that passport check?”
“Eastern European gangsters usually don’t get a direct line to the State Department,” Angel said, mirroring his own thoughts. “Though they might have people in the local government on their payroll. I’ll look into this, see who made the request. Most likely it was the local police. If it was, it’s strange they wouldn’t issue an APB for the two of you, though. Maybe they have a reason to keep this quiet.”
“Were you able to see any of what happened?” he asked.
“No. I can only see what wired security cameras see, or what our reconnaissance satellites pick up. There weren’t any sats over your horizon at the time. There were some weird traffic reports and a couple posts on Twitter about a shooting in that district, but that was it.”
“Two of the gangsters came into the tea shop, and they knew why we were there. We took them down.” Chapel was silent for a moment as he thought. “You should have seen Nadia in a fight. She was all over the place, doing high kicks and dodges I didn’t think were possible. She looked like Mary Lou Retton at her prime.”
“We know she was a gymnast when she was a kid,” Angel pointed out.
“This was… something else.” Something that kept nagging at Chapel. “I’ve seen moves like that before, somewhere, but I can’t remember where. Maybe in a movie.” He filed that question away for future consideration and moved on. “As for the men who attacked us, they were pretty well organized. I’d say a dozen men total, in three cars. They were all blond, which didn’t strike me as too weird at the time, but now that I say it out loud it makes me wonder. I don’t remember seeing a lot of blonds in Bucharest otherwise.”
He listened to Angel tap away at her keyboard as she looked something up. “It’s not a common hair color there, according to the Internet. Would you believe there’s actually maps showing what percentage of the population has what hair color?”
“It’s the Internet. There’s probably a map of what country has the most nose rings.”
Angel giggled. “I’m looking at a map of blonds right now. Eighty percent of Scandinavians are blond, did you know that?”
“These guys weren’t Scandinavian,” Chapel said. “They had Slavic accents. And judging by their grammar—” He stopped for a second, thinking. “Angel, they were speaking English.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Not well, but it was English. It didn’t occur to me at the time. But they came straight to me, speaking English.”
“So they made you for an American.”
“Yeah,” Chapel said. “Damn. I thought I was fitting in.” He thought about how easily Nadia had changed her appearance, and how she had elicited no stares or questioning looks in the tea shop. How well she’d handled the escape, even knowing exactly when Bogdan’s train would show up. “I’m out of my element here. Plunk me down in Afghanistan and nobody would mistake me for a local, but at least I would know how to act and how to not draw too much attention to myself. In Bucharest I might have jeopardized the mission.” He shook his head. “Maybe I shouldn’t have been the one to—”
“Stop thinking like that right now, sugar,” Angel said. “The director approved you for this. There’s nobody he trusts more.”
“Yeah.” Chapel sighed deeply and rubbed his face with his hands. “Okay. Well, let’s focus on what we do best. Have you found anything on Bogdan?”
“A lot more than I found on Nadia,” Angel said. “Bogdan Vlaicu, alias Aurel21. That’s his handle, the hacker nickname he uses on message boards and blog posts. He has a pretty big reputation online as somebody who can break into supposedly secure eCommerce databases. Arrested a couple of times on counts of credit card number running and for being a public nuisance — specifically, for taking over a Romanian political party website and replacing it with hard-core pornography.”
“Seriously? This is the guy Nadia thinks is so vital to our mission?”
Angel laughed. “He may be an idiot, but if he is, he’s an idiot savant. He’s never gone to jail, even when he bragged online about his crimes. The Romanian government cut him a deal each time they arrested him. If he agreed to take down some real cybercriminals — money launderers, online drug dealers — they’d let him off. Hacking the hackers, in other words.”
Angel couldn’t keep the grudging respect out of her voice. Chapel knew that her own story wasn’t that different. Though her real name, her location, and even what she looked like was kept deeply classified, even from him, she’d once told him how she’d ended up working for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Back when she was just a teenager (how long ago that had been was, again, secret), she had thought it would be fun to hack into the Pentagon’s servers. Instead of going to jail for the rest of her life, she’d ended up whispering sexily into Chapel’s ear. To her, Bogdan might seem like a fellow traveler.
“The guy has chops,” Angel said. “He shut down one of the biggest dark net pirated software operations back in 2009 with a simple denial-of-service attack. Basically he flooded the website with fake orders, hundreds of thousands of them coming in every second. That’s nothing, that’s hacking 101, but it was just a smoke screen. When the criminals shut down their servers to stop the attack, they switched to a backup server for their internal e-mail and even their phones — maybe they thought that the Romanian government couldn’t tap into their VoIP connections. Normally they would have been right about that. But Bogdan had secretly hacked the backup server even before he began the denial-of-service attack, so every word they said over the server they thought was still secure got logged and recorded. He took down dozens of cybercriminals in one day, including a guy who was on Interpol’s most wanted list.”