“Sweetie,” she said. “I can tell something’s on your mind.”
Of course she could. He wanted desperately to talk to her, just then. Not just type on a screen. HOLD ON, he tapped out. He got up from his seat and headed back to the lavatories. Inside, sitting on the toilet, he listened to the noise of the engines and the hiss of pressurized air. If he was quiet, it should be all right.
“Angel,” he said, barely more than a whisper. “Can you hear me?”
“I can, sugar. You’re somewhere secure now?”
“Yeah.” He glanced up at the lavatory door. Made sure it was locked. “Listen,” he said, “I need to tell you something. Something that’s got me worried.” He hesitated for a moment longer, but he knew that if he didn’t tell her now, he never would. “I’ve had inappropriate contact with N.”
Angel was quiet for so long he thought maybe she’d hung up on him. He should have known better — she never did that.
“Sugar,” she said, finally. “Please repeat that. Because I can’t believe you said what I think you just said.”
Chapel scrubbed at his face with his hands. “I’ve been… fraternizing with her.”
“You know that’s not okay,” Angel told him. “Are you telling me you slept with her? Because that’s definitely not okay.”
“I know. I know that,” Chapel said.
Angel’s voice got very soft then, which he knew meant she was being utterly serious. “Have you even considered the possibility that she’s a swallow?”
“A what?”
“A… you know. The woman who sets up a honey trap.”
“You think she’s trying to seduce me to learn our secrets?”
“Men will say anything after sex. They have no filters at all.” Angel cleared her throat. “At least, that’s what I’ve heard.”
“No, no,” Chapel said. “It’s nothing like that. She would have been way more forward if that was the case. This was — it wasn’t much. We just held hands.”
“O… kay,” Angel said.
“I know. I know. I sound like a teenager getting weird about his first crush. But I thought I should tell you. And you should tell the director.”
“I could do that,” Angel said. “I am required by protocol and professional ethics to do exactly that,” she told him. “And you know what would happen then. He would tell you to scrub the mission and come home.”
“Yeah. That’s why I brought it up. I don’t want to give up, but—”
“Or,” Angel said, “I could not tell him. We could keep this between us. And you could get your shit together right now.”
Angel didn’t often swear. She was one of those people who understood that when you save profanity for special occasions, it actually does lend emphasis. Chapel felt like someone had dumped cold water down his back.
“I’m not sure I can,” he told her.
Angel almost sounded angry when she replied. “You can and you will. There’s a lot depending on this mission, Chapel. Your emotions can’t come between you and completing this.”
“I know that,” he told her. “But—”
“But what? What could be more important than that? What could come close to measuring up to the fate of the entire world?”
“I’m lonely,” he said. “That’s all.”
Another long silence from her end. He thought he heard some muttering in the background, but with all the noise in the lavatory it was hard to tell.
When she came back, her voice was much softer. “I know you miss Julia,” she said. “I know what you’re going through.”
“Do you?” he asked. “You know what it’s like to be dumped by somebody you thought you would spend the rest of your life with?”
“Maybe not… exactly, but—”
“I’m human, Angel. I’m just a man. I’m supposed to be this elite soldier, this machine that fights for its country. I’m highly trained and totally professional. But sometimes — sometimes I don’t want this anymore. Sometimes I think about getting married and starting a family. This job took that away from me.”
“You chose this job.”
“I know.”
“Do you want to scrub the mission? Do you want to give up?”
“No,” Chapel said. “No.” Going home now, in disgrace — it wouldn’t solve anything. He would still be headed back to an empty apartment. An empty life. “That’s why I brought this to you, though. Because maybe I’m not the best judge of my fitness for duty right now.”
“I understand,” Angel said. “Tell me something. If you put the moves on N right now, I mean, really laid on the charm — you think she would go for it?”
“I can’t tell. She’s been very friendly. But, well, for one thing — I’m an amputee. A lot of people are nice to me because they think I’m some kind of wounded hero and that I deserve to be treated like a sick kitten or something. Not a lot of people want to… to have sex with someone like me. I think maybe she just feels sorry for me.”
“There’s such a thing as pity sex,” Angel pointed out.
Chapel grinned and shook his head. “Not as much as some people might hope. Anyway. No. I don’t think I could seduce N without a lot of effort.”
“So just don’t put in that effort. No more holding hands, right? No more fraternization. Because even if it seems innocent now — she might just be building to something more. You can’t know. And you definitely can’t trust her.”
“Understood,” Chapel said. “Angel — thank you. This was weighing on me.”
“Always here to help, honey,” she told him. “And in fact, I might have something that really does help. I’ve been doing some more digging on N. Looking for anything that wasn’t obvious, something I missed the first time around.”
“And you found something,” Chapel said, frowning. She wouldn’t have brought this up if there was nothing there.
“Yeah, though not something I can prove. N is a pretty slippery fish, and her records are very hard to turn up. But it looks like she might have a criminal record.”
“I beg your pardon?” Chapel asked.
Angel sounded almost coy as she answered. She got that way sometimes when she’d done a particularly clever thing and wanted to share but didn’t want to come off as bragging. “Oh, it’s not very serious, really. It’s not like she robbed a bank or anything.”
“Come on, Angel. Spill.”
“A woman matching N’s description — and I mean matching, height, weight, everything — was picked up by the Moscow police a couple of years ago for subversive political activity. Which probably just means she went to a protest rally and chanted louder than the person next to her. Under Putin, the Russians aren’t putting up with much in the way of dissidence.”
“What kind of a protest rally?” Chapel asked.
“It was a meeting of a number of student groups, but the focus was on self-determination for ethnic minorities. The protesters were demanding that places like Chechnya, South Ossetia, and some eastern ethnic territories be allowed to split off from the Russian Federation and become their own countries. Their plan was to get a crowd assembled in Red Square and then march across Moscow waving signs and shouting slogans. They didn’t get very far. The police moved in and, well, the official record says they ‘peacefully dispersed the illegal gathering without incidence of violence.’ Which means nobody sued them afterward. I’m guessing they used fire hoses and pepper spray to break things up. A lot of people were arrested, among them somebody who looks and sounds exactly like N. She refused to give her name, which meant she would have been taken into central processing where they could make an ID. Except there’s no indication she got there. There’s a brief mention of her particulars and her arrest, and then nothing.”
“When it comes to N, that’s starting to sound familiar,” Chapel said.
“Exactly. I figure she waited until she was alone in the police station to tell them she was a government agent, and then they sprang her. It couldn’t hurt that she had that medal. I mean, she probably wasn’t wearing it at the time, or anything. But the police — and the Putin administration — would have been embarrassed if they had to admit they had arrested a decorated citizen.”
“Interesting,” Chapel said.
“Yeah. She’s not as squeaky clean as she looks, huh?” Angel said. “I kind of like her more now, though. Makes her a little more human.”
Chapel thought of the woman he’d left sleeping in her aisle seat. He had no trouble thinking of Nadia as human. But this did change things, a little. Something occurred to him. “Angel — you said the protesters were asking for self-determination for some eastern ethnic territories.”
“That’s right.”
“Which ones?”
Angel tapped at her keyboard for a second. “You want the whole list? There are dozens of them here. Basically the protesters wanted every ethnic, religious, or language group to have its own autonomous country.”
“What about places in Siberia? I mean, specifically, anything close to where Nadia was born, near Yakutsk.”
More keys clacking. Then Angel clucked her tongue. “Right on the money. Twelve different areas in Siberia are named on the list, including Yakutia.”
“Very interesting,” Chapel said.