“No problem,” Angel told him. “When the read/write head of a tape player moves across a tape it releases tiny bursts of electromagnetic radiation, and if you have a way to record those bursts and then interpret them as data, sure. You would need the tape to actually be running at the time, though you could fast-forward through it and still record all the information.”
Bogdan had made only a small change to Perimeter’s programming. He would have had plenty of time to run the whole tape. “And the data we’re talking about, all the launch codes — you could fit that on the memory of an MP3 player?”
“Absolutely. Those codes are just strings of numbers and characters, probably sixteen digits long each. There’s more data in one MP3 file than in ten thousand launch codes.”
Chapel closed his eyes. He could feel a very bad headache coming on. “So Bogdan was in on it the whole time. Everybody was in on it but me.”
He was moving toward one inescapable conclusion. He really didn’t want to get there. He had one protest left.
“When Nadia — Asimova — came to us, in Washington, we vetted her,” he told Valits. “We made sure, as much as we could, that she was real. An agent of FSTEK. She was vouched for personally by Marshal Bulgachenko.”
“Konstantin Bulgachenko was born in Vladivostok in 1951,” Valits told him. “Do you know enough geography to know where that is? It is in Siberia.”
“So you’re saying—”
“Bulgachenko and Asimova were a cabal of Siberian separatists. We do not know if they infiltrated FSTEK with the express intent of forwarding their political aims, or if they only realized their shared cause after she was recruited. It is immaterial. Bulgachenko is dead. Asimova has become a terrorist.”
He couldn’t resist it anymore. The conclusion was right there in front of him, and he couldn’t even look away.
Nadia had betrayed him.
She had used him, tricked him into joining her crusade. Unwittingly he had helped her steal the entire Russian nuclear arsenal for the cause of Siberian independence — and by so doing implicated the United States in an international incident worse than anything he’d ever heard of before.
She had betrayed him.
Nadia. The woman he had… the woman he had begun to… the woman he’d started to feel…
Nadia had played him like a fish on a line.
No. It couldn’t be. Nadia wasn’t a terrorist — not Nadia — not the warm, funny woman he’d fallen for. Not the cheerful, doomed woman who just wanted to make the world a little safer before she died. Not the Nadia who had sacrificed so much to track down missing plutonium, not her.
No, she’d been a patriot! They’d given her a medal, the Russians had given her a medal for her service, they had…
She had been a patriot, hadn’t she? Just not to the country, he thought.
How many times had she told him about the abuses and crimes of the Russian government? She’d framed it as criticism of the Soviets, not the current Russian government, but plenty of times she’d spoken of how unfair it was that Siberia was tied to Moscow—ya Sibiryak, she’d said. I am a Siberian.
The whole time. She had been lying the whole time. When they found out that the FSB was chasing her, that they wanted her dead — he should have aborted the mission then. He should have, but he’d persuaded Hollingshead into letting them continue. Because he had believed. He had believed in Nadia. Believed that she wanted the same thing he did, an end to the madness of Perimeter, of nuclear proliferation.
And the whole time all she wanted was to control the missiles herself.
She had come to Washington with the means to dismantle Perimeter and it had sounded so good, so possible. So worthwhile. She had convinced Hollingshead to send him after the one-time pad in the wreck of the Kurchatov. She had convinced Chapel to help her fight her way to Aralsk-30. The whole time she’d known they would never have gone along with it if they knew her true aim.
Where was she now? Was she laughing at him? Laughing at how easy it was to seduce the cripple? There had been so many signs; how had he missed them all? She had spied on him when he spoke to Angel; she’d even admitted as much. She had consorted with organized criminals. She had killed Russian agents and violated the sovereignty of three different countries.
And he’d been by her side the whole time.
He couldn’t take it. He couldn’t take the betrayal. In a rage, he jumped up and grabbed the nearest chair and threw it across the room. He kicked another chair and sent it clattering across the floor. He roared in anger, the veins in his temples throbbing until he thought they might burst.
“I had no idea,” he told Valits. “The whole time — I had no idea.”
The colonel hadn’t moved, hadn’t flinched, throughout Chapel’s rampage. He nodded just once now. “Surprisingly,” he said, “I believe you.”
Chapel dropped his head. He was breathing hard, and every muscle in his body was tense, but the anger was already draining from him. He was already starting to move on to self-loathing.
Valits rose and straightened his uniform tunic. “Unfortunately, Moscow has no choice. We must see your actions as an act of espionage, if not of war.”
“We have more to lose than you do,” Chapel pointed out. “If she launches those missiles, they’ll head straight for my country. For New York. For Chicago. For Washington.”
Valits shrugged. Konyechno, he was saying. “It would seem, then, that we have a mutual problem.”
“Yeah,” Chapel told him. “And one solution. We get Asimova before she can press the button. But how exactly do we do that?”
“This,” Valits said, “is why I am talking to you now, instead of leaving you to the devices of Senior Lieutenant Kalin. Because I have been led to believe that you are the only man in the world who can find her.”
“Of course,” Valits explained, “we have attempted to track her location. We find that the signal she is using, however — the one that sent the launch signal to Izhevsk, and the one that carried her demands — is untraceable. It was not a shortwave signal, though it had similar characteristics. We were able to determine it was bounced off a satellite. That means she could be anywhere in the world right now. If she is smart, she will be very far from any Russian holdings. She might be in your country, even.
“It is possible she was not that smart. We have teams of soldiers out looking for her everywhere from St. Petersburg to the farthest eastern islands. We do not have enough manpower to cover the entire Russian Federation, but we have been concentrating on major cities — places where she could have access to high-end signal equipment.”
“I’m guessing you haven’t turned up anything yet,” Chapel said.
“Nothing. There is no trace of her anywhere. We sent envoys to speak with the top leaders of the vory—when you wish to disappear in this country, they are who you turn to. They say she made no attempt to contact them.”
“And you believed them? Asimova has friends in those circles. They could be protecting her.”
Valits smiled. It wasn’t a warm smile. It wasn’t a smirk. It was a smile of resignation. “Not at the top levels. It is a fact of my nation, a sad fact, that there is very little distance between our elected officials and the gangsters. They are all heavily invested in the Federation, and they would not protect her, not after we showed them the video you just saw. They have as much to lose as any of us.”