“You mean because of how she was arrested for attending a protest rally,” Chapel said.
“Exactly,” Kalin said, as if Chapel was finally getting the point. “Add to this that she had charmed Marshal Bulgachenko, the head of FSTEK. He would have given her the moon for a New Year’s present had she asked for it.”
“Did she—” Chapel hated to even ask, especially of an officious monster like Kalin, but he had to know. “Did they—”
“Fuck?” Kalin asked, turning the vulgarity over in his mouth like a candy. He left Chapel hanging for a long, cruel minute. Once a torturer, always a torturer, perhaps. “No,” he said, finally. “The marshal had never had children, and he saw Asimova as a surrogate daughter. He was very proud of her, especially given her Siberian upbringing.”
Chapel frowned. “You have a surprising amount of information on a dead man’s inner thoughts and feelings.”
“I was the man who killed him,” Kalin said. His smile didn’t crack or even chip. “He was a traitor to the Fatherland. He deserved to die. But he was also a hero of our military, and I felt it was worth knowing why he had become corrupted.”
Jesus, Chapel thought. How long had Kalin tortured the marshal before he killed him? The man might well have been a separatist — a terrorist, even — but nobody should ever be subject to the mercies of a man like Kalin. Nobody.
“I would have watched Bulgachenko even if he hadn’t promoted Asimova so quickly. He was a known troublemaker, from even before my time. When the Soviet Union fell, there was some interest among the Sibiryaks in splitting off from the Federation. It was a short-lived political moment, but in that time Bulgachenko added his voice to the chorus. He even petitioned Yeltsin in person for self-determination for the Siberian republics. He believed he could form a government in Vladivostok, with, of course, himself as president. Yeltsin was a drunk, but he understood that Russia could not survive without Siberia—”
“Without its resources, you mean.”
“Exactly,” Kalin said. “Yeltsin grew angry and threw Bulgachenko out of his office. Before that day Bulgachenko was well on his way to being in control of the entire state security apparatus. Afterward he was relegated to FSTEK, which at the time meant he was put in charge of ordering around a few border guards. FSTEK was a kind of very well-paid gulag. Bulgachenko, of course, was an intelligent man, and he knew better than to protest. Instead he took this as an opportunity. When plutonium started disappearing from the stockpiles, he volunteered to go after it. He only needed a field agent, someone who could actually go out and recover the stuff.
“Asimova must have seemed like a gift from Jesus. She was capable, she was brilliant, and she was beautiful. A perfect symbol of the Siberia of his dreams. She would be a — ah, I know there is an American term, for a person who is the perfect image of—”
“A poster girl,” Chapel suggested.
“Yes! That is it. She would be the poster girl for a new Siberia that was not beholden to Moscow. She doesn’t even look Russian. So of course he confided everything in her. Told her all his plans. Told her that simple political pressure, even nonviolent protest of the kind she had tried, would be useless in creating an independent Siberia. By then they had both seen what happened to Chechnya and South Ossetia under Putin. The Federation has finished giving away territory. It will fight to hold on to what it has left. If Siberia was to gain independence, it must be able to fight back. But how? There is no military presence out east that is not staffed completely by those loyal to Moscow. A coup was out of the question. Bulgachenko’s original plan was to use the confiscated plutonium to make dirty bombs. Put one in Moscow, one in St. Petersburg — perhaps a third in Nizhny Novgorod, just for good measure. Threaten to detonate them if demands were not met.”
“That’s—” Chapel shook his head. “That’s—”
“Terrorism, yes,” Kalin said. “The last resort of the politically deranged. It was Asimova who talked him out of it.”
“Nadia?”
Kalin’s eyes crept over Chapel’s face until he felt like he was covered in bugs. “It would perhaps be better if you stop calling her by that name.”
Chapel realized his mistake and shook his head. “I’ll call her what I want to,” he said. In his head the reply had been I’ll call her what I want to, asshole, but he had some sense of decorum left.
Kalin shrugged. “Yes, Asimova convinced him his dirty bomb plan was folly. Which anyone but Bulgachenko could have seen. FSTEK is not some miraculous organization that can act unobserved. The plutonium it recovered was quite carefully logged and monitored by other agencies. If it went missing again, the theft would be discovered very quickly. And the response of my group — the Counter-Intelligence Division — would have been swift, decisive, and without qualm. Beyond this, dirty bombs are notoriously dangerous to build and deploy — and she already knew far too well the danger of handling plutonium.”
“So it was her idea to hijack Perimeter?”
“They developed the plan together. But, yes, it was her brainchild. She knew, of course, that I would try to stop her. She knew that to get access to Perimeter she would need to become a rogue agent. She also knew she would be dead within the week if she did not find some protection somewhere. This, I believe, is why she went to the Americans. To you.”
“You could have shut her down then with one phone call,” Chapel pointed out. “You could have told us she was a terrorist. We would have arrested her in Washington and then held her for you.”
Kalin’s smile didn’t change, but his eyes did. They became weary suddenly, weary and resigned. “That would have meant sharing information with the Pentagon. Giving away secrets — telling you about Perimeter, for one thing. In Russia, some secrets are buried so deeply they can never be brought to light.”
Chapel nodded. “We have a few of those in America, too.”
“I was convinced,” Kalin said, “that I could run her down myself. I did, in fact, call the authorities in Cuba and tell them she was violating their national waters. Unfortunately, the photographs I sent did not make it in time and she slipped through their fingers.”
That explained the mysterious boarding of Donny’s party yacht off Cay Sal Bank, Chapel thought — and why the Cubans hadn’t arrested them then and there.
“Next I thought to catch her in Bucharest, and again in Uzbekistan, but both times you helped her get away,” Kalin pointed out. “It seems she picked her protection very well.”
“She convinced me that your agents were gangsters chasing Bogdan Vlaicu,” Chapel admitted, since it seemed there was no point keeping that from Kalin now. He did not confess that after Vobkent he’d known she was being chased by the Russians, that they wanted her dead or alive. No need to give everything away.
“Indeed. She can be very persuasive.” Kalin folded his hands in his lap. “Kapitan Chapel, I want to be clear on our roles in what is unfolding now. We need you to find her. That is all. Once we have a location, I will not permit you within earshot of the woman. I’d hate for her to charm you once more and have you switch coats again.”
Chapel bit his lip. He could hardly complain or protest. After all, she had done just that — charmed him — once.
But he had his orders, and he knew what he needed, personally. Whatever Kalin thought was going to happen, however this was going to go down, Chapel planned on looking Nadia right in the eye at the last moment. If Kalin didn’t like it, maybe he had to be taken out, too.
It wasn’t the most unattractive prospect.