“Happy honeymoon!” someone shouted, and Chapel’s eyes opened just as a flash of light dazzled him. His first instinct was to reach for a gun that wasn’t there. His second was to pull away from Nadia’s hand, as guilt flushed through him and made him want to duck his head.
Then he saw what had happened, and he growled in frustration.
A Turkish man with a camera stood in front of them, grinning from ear to ear.
“Such a handsome couple. I take your picture,” he said. “Then, if you give me your e-mail, your home address, I can send you a copy, all right? You can remember this happy moment forever.”
Damn. This was not acceptable. They couldn’t leave any trace behind, any sign they’d been here — not even a picture on some random man’s camera. Chapel forced himself to smile. “Can I see the picture? On your camera?”
“Fifty lira for the picture, printed in a lovely frame,” the man suggested. “For eighty, I will make smaller prints and send them to all your friends.”
“I just need to see the picture first,” Chapel said. “I think my eyes were closed.”
“If it’s no good, okay, I take another,” the man tried.
“Just let me see the picture,” Chapel said, taking a step closer to him. The man started to turn and move away so Chapel had to reach out and grab his arm. He tore the camera out of the man’s hands and let him go.
Instantly the photographer started shouting something in a language that Chapel didn’t know. His hand gestures and the look on his face made it very clear what he was trying to communicate.
The last thing Chapel wanted was to have the police come and ask questions. He studied the camera in his hands. The buttons were all labeled with letters and numbers he couldn’t figure out, but he managed to bring up the last picture taken. It showed him — his eyes were, in fact, closed — and Nadia, hand in hand. Bogdan was just visible in the background, though he was walking away from them.
Chapel found an icon that looked like a trash can. He deleted the picture and handed the camera back to the photographer.
“This is an outrage!” the man said, in English. “This is not—”
Nadia spoke softly to him in the same language he’d used before. She held up her left hand and pointed at it several times. When that didn’t do the trick, she handed him a couple of bank notes.
The photographer made a nasty gesture at Chapel, but he took his camera and left.
“What did you say to him?” Chapel asked.
“I said we were married, but not to each other,” she said, with a shrug and a wry smile. “Then I gave him twice what he was asking. I should have led with the money.”
Chapel nodded, only half paying attention. He was scanning the crowd, looking for Bogdan. “When was the last time you saw our third?” He raised an eyebrow at Nadia, and her face got very serious, very fast.
“We need to find him,” she said, and pushed into the crowd. Chapel went a different direction, looking for anyone tall and thin, looking for headphones.
When he spotted Bogdan, Nadia had already reached him. The hacker had discovered a rank of computerized information kiosks. Each was just a box with a screen and a trackball, designed to give tourist information in several different languages. The screen of each one was displaying pictures of the dome above and the word Welcome! in multiple alphabets. The kiosk that Bogdan was using, however, showed a black screen covered in lines of tiny, blurry text.
Even Nadia looked surprised, for once. “How did you…?”
“Is a screen for maintenance,” Bogdan explained, moving the trackball across the screen with the deftness of a champion video-game player. “In case system goes down and needs to be fixed. Easy if you know the way in, yes? Hold on.” He clicked the ball and the screen lit up with the home page for an Internet browser. “I just go to check my VKontakte page.”
Chapel frowned. “What’s VKontakte?” he asked.
Nadia looked up at him. “Russian Facebook.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” Chapel said, grabbing Bogdan’s shoulders and pulling him back from the kiosk. “No, we’re not going there.” He pressed his back up against the screen so Bogdan wouldn’t even see it. “Low profile, okay? Coming here wasn’t the best idea. We need to stay out of sight. We need to go straight to the airport.”
“Konyechno,” Nadia said, with a weary sigh. “The time to relax is over.”
Even in his sleep, Bogdan kept tapping away at his MP3 player. He lay twisted up in his seat, his long frame bent to fit into the little legroom he had. His face hung on the seat back as limp and loose as a rubber mask, his mouth open and flecked with drool. The hair that always covered his eyes obscured half his face and made him look barely human.
Another airplane, another night. Economy class this time, just to throw off anyone looking for business-class travelers matching their description. Chapel still couldn’t sleep. Nadia sat across the aisle from the two men. Chapel studied her sleeping face and wished he could be next to her, breathing in her perfume, her soft shoulder rubbing up against his. Maybe she would have laid her head against him, used him as a pillow. Maybe he could have put an arm around her for warmth.
Jesus. This had to stop.
He plugged his earbuds into his tablet and booted up his Kazakh language program. Almost as soon as the monotone voice of the vocabulary lesson began it stopped and Angel spoke to him instead.
“How are you doing, baby?” she asked.
The sexy voice speaking to him out of the ether was almost enough to get him to stop thinking about Nadia. He inhaled sharply and put his fingers on the virtual keyboard on the tablet’s screen. He wasn’t entirely sure how to answer.
“Can you talk, or is this not a good time?” Angel asked, because apparently it had taken him too long to frame his reply.
NO, IT’S FINE, he wrote.
“The director’s been pressuring me for an update. I told him you’re on your way to Tashkent now. He doesn’t like this kind of mission, where he just sends you into the field and you’re left to your own devices. I have to say I’m not crazy about it either. I wish we could talk more often, the way we usually do.”
ME TOO, Chapel typed. HAS TO BE THIS WAY, THOUGH. WE SPENT DAY IN ISTANBUL. VERY NICE PLACE.
“Glad to hear it,” Angel said, with a laugh.
ANY NEWS FROM BUCHAREST?
“If you mean, are you still being chased by blond gangsters, I don’t think so. The police eventually did put an alert out for two people matching your description, but there were no reports of sightings. And then out of nowhere the alert just… went away.”
WEIRD.
“Not necessarily. I think they just assumed you left the country when nobody could find you. Most likely they just wanted you to identify the men who tried to scoop you up. I checked, but there’s no warrant out for Bogdan Vlaicu, either. I think you got a get out of jail free card, sugar.”
GOOD NEWS, I GUESS.
“If anything changes on that front, I’ll be watching. So anything else I can do for you tonight?”
He stared at the screen for a while. It only showed the list of language files he was supposedly listening to, but it was the closest he could get to looking at Angel. He’d spent a long time trying to imagine what she looked like, but all he could ever really see in his head was a computer screen. More than once he’d wondered if she was a real human being, or just some kind of very clever artificial intelligence.
She was, he knew, his best friend in the world. The one person he could always rely on. She’d saved his life dozens of times and helped him out in a million ways. He trusted her implicitly — even more than he trusted Director Hollingshead. Maybe more than he’d ever really trusted Julia.