Chapel nodded. “Okay. What about other political groups? Other terrorist organizations. I’m sure there are plenty that would love to help her give Moscow a black eye.” Valits looked confused by the idiom. “To embarrass your government,” Chapel explained.
“Absolutely. But we have ways of getting information from those groups — we watch them very closely — and we have heard nothing, not even chatter. She has not made alliance even with the other Siberian nationalist and ethnic groups. She seems to be working completely on her own.”
Probably, Chapel thought, because you’ve already killed off everyone she could count on—he doubted Bulgachenko was the only casualty of Nadia’s mission.
“So that leaves us with nothing to go on,” Chapel said.
“Not quite. In our… desperation, we made one last attempt to seek aid. We turned to your government.”
Chapel’s eyes went wide. For Russia to ask Washington for help with an internal political problem was unheard of. Moscow must be even more frightened than he’d thought.
“We contacted your superior, Rupert Hollingshead. We wished to know if Asimova had said anything to him, given away any clue as to her plans. He was not useful on that front. However, he did discover one thing that could aid us. While he could not track the signal she is using, he did recognize its signature. I believe your friend on the telephone can tell you what I mean.”
Angel chirped in on cue. “That’s right, sweetie. I’m the one who recognized the signature, of course.”
“Yeah?” Chapel asked her. “How?”
“Easy. Because it was the same kind of signal I use.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Angel sounded sheepish as she answered. “I didn’t believe it at first. I use a cutting-edge signal profile that lets me contact you anywhere on earth and make sure nobody can listen in to what I’m saying. It’s all pretty technical, but basically I use packet switching and channel hopping algorithms to spread my frequency out over a broad band of—”
“Still too technical,” Chapel told her.
“Probably best if I don’t explain over this line, anyway. I was confused when I saw she was using the same technology. I was especially confused when I looked back over my notes for this mission. Remember when you asked me if I could listen in to Bogdan’s computer?”
“Sure,” Chapel said. That was on the train to Vobkent. Just after he’d realized that Bogdan even had a computer.
“I said I couldn’t hack in directly, but maybe there was something I could do. I started building up a profile of the signal he was using. It’s a match, Chapel. It’s exactly the same. The message she sent, and the launch signal, came from Bogdan’s computer. Or one using the same signal tech. The same tech I use.”
“You’re saying he just figured out your tech on his own?” Chapel asked, confused.
Angel snorted in derision. “Hardly. He stole it. Or rather, she did. It took me a long time to realize how. She would need access to my hardware to even begin to reverse engineer my tech. And when did she have access like that?”
“I’m afraid you’re about to tell me.”
“Yeah.” The sheepish tone came back. “You remember Donny’s yacht? When you came back up to the surface too fast? You remember anything unusual about that?”
Chapel cast his mind back. He had come up at speed, and he’d been unable to reach Angel during the ascent. When he broke the surface, the first thing he did was contact her again. He should have been able to reach her just by touching the anchor cable, because of the transponder he’d clipped to it, but—
The transponder had been missing.
He’d been too concerned with decompression sickness to think about what that meant. Somebody had unclipped it while he’d been surfacing, he knew that much. But he hadn’t thought to look for it later. Even after he’d been taken to Miami, and the hyperbaric chamber there, his major concern had been for the one-time pad. When he found that Nadia could have stolen it, but hadn’t… well, that was when he’d begun to trust her.
“Your transponder,” he said to Angel. “She had it the whole time?”
“And she gave it to Bogdan, who adopted the tech for his ingenious little computer. You got it, sweetie.”
“Okay, yet another way I screwed up,” Chapel said. “But it might turn out in our favor. I’m guessing you can trace the signal, right? You can trace your own signal?”
“Uh,” Angel said. “Well. Kind of.”
“What does that mean?”
“My signal is designed to be untraceable. But — look, I’ll skip the technical stuff this time. If you could triangulate the signal, if both you and I were looking for it at the same time, we could find it. But one of us would need to be pretty close, say, within fifty miles of the originating source.”
“So we already need to know roughly where she is before we can hope to find her.”
“I’m afraid you’ve got it.”
Chapel nodded slowly to himself. With the best technology in the world, with the best computers and data analysis, it was going to come down to him. He was the one who was going to have to guess where Nadia had gone.
He thought back, trying to remember any clue she’d given him. Any idea at all.
This time, he didn’t miss what was right under his nose. Or under hers, anyway. Assuming, of course, that anything she’d told him was the truth.
He turned to Valits, and he could hear the steel in his own voice. “How soon can we leave?”
Valits’s eyes opened very wide. “You know where she is?”
“I can find her.” He could take her down. He could get back at her for everything she’d done to him, all the lies she’d told him. He could get revenge.
“If you do this, if you lead us to her — I will make sure you go home. That you will be allowed to return to America, safely,” Valits promised.
Oh, right. He hadn’t thought of that. But it was nice, too.
As long as he made Nadia pay, first.
They sent a helicopter down from the nearest air base to pick Chapel up. His clothes from the desert were long gone — no one had expected him to need real clothing ever again, so they’d burned what he had on when he was captured. Colonel Valits offered him an army uniform with no insignia, but it was the wrong army. Chapel had been a soldier too long to ever wear the uniform of another nation. In the end, one of the orderlies had to run into town and buy Chapel civilian clothes.
The helicopter came down in the courtyard of the hospital. Chapel watched it land through doubly sealed windows. He couldn’t hear the rotors, just see the vast plume of dust the helicopter kicked up. It was an unarmed little machine, but that didn’t matter; it was just there to take him back to the air base so he could get on a plane.
He had a very long way to go. Lots of time zones to cross.
“You truly think she is in Siberia?” Colonel Valits asked, coming up behind him.
“If it was anyone else… I might doubt it.” It was the first place they would look for her. But Nadia was running out of time — assuming she hadn’t lied about that, too. He had to believe that she really was dying, that she had only months left, maybe less, and that she would want to die where she’d been born.
Of course, if he was wrong, he would end up right back here with Kalin. So she had to be in Siberia. “She’s sentimental. She wants to go home.”
Valits shook his head. “I’ve already had troops turn the city of Yakutsk upside down looking for her. Not a single person has entered that place in the last week that I don’t know about. And it’s the only municipality large enough to have the kind of Internet connection and signal technology she needs.”