Chapel knew better. Angel had told him that the necessary tech could fit inside a smartphone. At least, a brand-new, state-of-the-art smartphone. Nadia didn’t need to be in Yakutsk — and the city wasn’t where she wanted to be.
“I’ll find her,” he told Valits.
They shook hands and then Chapel headed down to the courtyard, toward the helicopter. A couple of Valits’s soldiers followed him at a discreet distance. He wasn’t going to ever be out of their sight, he knew, until this was over.
“Chapel,” Angel said, when he had stepped outside and the noise of the rotors made it almost impossible to hear her. That might be the point — maybe she didn’t want anyone listening in.
“Go ahead,” he told her, as the dust blew past him in the artificial windstorm, as his empty sleeve snapped and fluttered behind him like a flag.
“The director has been briefed on what you’re doing. He had one message to give you. Quote, ‘Remember how Hercules defeated the hydra,’ unquote. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Yeah,” Chapel said, but he wouldn’t explain, not to Angel. “Message received.”
If you cut the head off a hydra, it just grew another one. Hollingshead had described Perimeter as being like that. Now he was talking about this mission. The objective kept changing, every time Chapel thought he’d gotten close to being done.
Hercules had figured out you didn’t just need to cut the hydra’s head off. You had to burn it at the stump. Make it impossible for the head to grow back.
Hollingshead was telling him to make sure Nadia never stung them again. He was telling Chapel to make sure she really was dead this time.
He was giving Chapel an order to execute her.
Chapel and the soldiers who made up his guard detail transferred to a transport plane at the nearest airport. It was a military jet, with little in the way of accommodations — even the seats were simply bolted to rails on the cabin floor, designed so they could be removed quickly in case the plane needed to haul cargo instead of people. Chapel picked a window seat, and his soldiers took the row behind him. He strapped himself in and let his head fall back against the seat. Closed his eyes. Sleep wasn’t an option — he could do nothing but review his own thoughts, over and over.
They were dark thoughts and barely coherent. Mostly he just kept thinking how he’d been manipulated, how Nadia had used him, and how badly he wanted to make her pay for that.
But there was one small voice in the back of his head, one little pleading thought that just wouldn’t go away. It kept telling him there was something wrong here. Not so much an argument, not even really a doubt. Just a memory — a memory of Nadia in the tent in the desert, lying there next to him. He remembered how he’d leaned over and kissed her and the look on her face, the surprise and the hope, then the confusion and frustration. She had seduced him, of course. She had known he was hurt and vulnerable after what happened with Julia and she had used that. Preyed on it.
But that look — it hadn’t been the expression of a con artist whose game wasn’t proceeding fast enough. She had looked genuinely hurt, like she had held something out to him, something real, and he was toying with her heart, not the other way around…
Of course, a good actress could fake that look. If that were the case, Nadia should have been up for an Academy Award.
It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. He had his orders. He knew where things stood, finally. It was time to end this mission, and there was only one way to conclude it. He was just going to have to push down that nagging little question in his head, push it down until it stopped popping back up.
He writhed in frustration against his seat. It was taking way too long for the plane to get moving. He needed to be airborne, headed toward his final meeting with her; he needed to—
Someone climbed in through the rear hatch of the plane and started walking up the aisle. Chapel didn’t even bother to look to see who it was. This must be what was delaying them — they’d had to wait for some VIP of the Russian military who had insisted on being on this plane. Chapel sneered in frustration and turned his head to look out the window. When the newcomer dropped down into the seat next to him, Chapel tried to remember the Russian words for “occupied” and “go away.”
He turned to face the newcomer and forgot all the Russian he knew. The VIP was, in fact, Senior Lieutenant Pavel Kalin. His erstwhile torturer.
“Good afternoon, Kapitan,” the bastard said. His smile was broad and genuine. He was thrilled to see Chapel here.
“Get away from me,” Chapel growled, in English.
“I don’t think so. I think I will be staying very close to you now.” Kalin leaned into the aisle and waved at someone. A moment later the plane’s hatch closed and its engines started to drone. Clearly the plane had only been waiting for Kalin’s arrival. “It took a great deal of persuasion to get myself assigned to this mission,” he told Chapel.
“You had to torture somebody for your spot?”
Kalin’s smile broadened. “Very droll. No, I called in some favors. But believe me, I would have moved heaven and earth.”
Chapel clenched his teeth and looked away. This was the last thing he needed.
The plane lifted away from the airstrip with only a few jolts. Soon they were up in the sky, up where there was nothing to see through the window but clouds. Better, anyway, than looking at Kalin’s face. It was taking pretty much all Chapel’s resolve not to reach over and strangle the man in his seat. Of course, if he did, the plane would have to put down prematurely, and that would delay Chapel in the course of his revenge against Nadia. He supposed you had to pick your battles in this life.
“It looks like we’ll be working together,” Kalin said. “My orders are to keep a close watch on you but to follow your lead until I am told this is no longer appropriate.”
“Let’s get one thing straight, Kalin,” Chapel said. “We are not partners. I’m not working with you. I’m working for Colonel Valits on behalf of my government. If you catch on fire during this operation, I won’t spit on you to put you out.”
“I could say much the same,” Kalin told him. “I advised strongly against this madness — this foolish notion of sending you to catch her. This is an internal Russian matter, and bringing you in is folly. You should never have been briefed about what happened at Izhevsk. But Valits is a frightened man, just now. He thinks we need every resource available to catch Asimova.”
“Maybe he’s right. Considering that if we don’t, she could start World War III any time she wanted to. And that she’s got nothing to lose.”
“There’s no need to lecture me on her capabilities. I’ve been chasing the terrorist Asimova for longer than you knew she existed,” Kalin explained. “I’ve gone to incredible lengths to find her and stop her. I will not waste all that time and effort.”
Chapel found that he needed to know, more than he needed to get away from Kalin. “How long have you known what she was up to?”
Kalin studied his face for a while, as if trying to decide how much to tell him. Finally he shrugged and said, “It doesn’t matter now. I’ll tell you everything. It started as a matter of routine. Any agent of FSTEK working on recovering lost plutonium is, of course, carefully screened. There are so many temptations in that mission — one must consort with criminals and foreign agents, any of whom would gladly pay a king’s ransom for even a small quantity of fissile material. Plutonium is, gram for gram, the most precious metal on earth. More than one of our agents has succumbed to making a deal with someone he should have arrested instead. So we keep a close eye on them. Asimova was especially worth watching, because she was a known political.”