“I would ask where you are now, but maybe it’s better I don’t know,” he told her.
“I only wish you could be here with me,” she told him.
He was dumbstruck by the idea. Did she have no idea how badly she’d betrayed him? No idea how he must feel about being used like this? He wanted to shout at her, to scream with frustrated rage, but he forced himself to control his voice. “Maybe we should talk some business,” he told her.
“Yes, you said your president wants to help me,” she replied. “I am a little surprised. I would have thought the alliance of your country with Russia would be too much damaged by such a thing.”
She was right there. Though it could have gone a different way. He tried to imagine that alternative history, the one where he was actually negotiating with her. Making it up on the fly was tricky, but it had to be done. “Our top people considered that. They also considered the fact that if you launch those missiles, they’re headed straight for American cities. We want to avoid that any way we can. Talk to me, Nadia. Tell me how we can get out of this with nobody pressing any big red buttons.”
She must have wanted that, and badly. She must have been desperate for any kind of international recognition she could get — anything to put pressure on Moscow and make them bow to her demands. He could hear in her voice how relieved she was to think she had friends in Washington, even if she had to hold a gun to their heads to make them smile.
“Marshal Bulgachenko and I had this all planned out,” she said. “We must obtain a United Nations resolution recognizing the sovereignty of the Siberian republics and their right to self-determination. The main barrier to this will be Russia’s seat on the Security Council, but if they can be swayed by diplomatic means…”
She droned on and on about politics. Chapel tuned most of it out — it meant little to him. He’d always been a good soldier, and good soldiers didn’t worry about how the civilians brokered peace agreements. Good soldiers just prepared themselves for when those talks inevitably broke down. The main thing was that he’d gotten Nadia talking, and every second she went on was another chance to get a fix on her location.
Not paying attention to her, though, meant he was stuck inside his own head. Lost in there with his anger at her. God, listen to her, he thought. She thinks this is all so reasonable. So possible. She betrayed me! She betrayed my country’s faith! She used us, manipulated us, and now she thinks we’ll help her finish what she started—
“Jim? Did you hear that last part?” she asked. “It’s crucial to building a lasting constitutional entity that recognizes the civil rights of all the disparate ethnic groups. Moscow won’t like it because—”
“I’ve got to admit, Nadia, this is all a little over my head,” he told her. “But keep going. This is all being recorded, of course, and I’ll pass it on to people in the State Department who will understand it much better than me. In fact—”
There was a click on the line. Angel’s voice cut in, stopping him in midsentence.
“Chapel,” she said.
He froze, unsure if Nadia could hear him or not, unsure what Angel was going to tell him.
“I’ve got her,” Angel said, her voice thick with emotion.
For a second Chapel refused to believe it.
“You have her location?” he asked. “Really?”
“Down to a resolution of about ten square yards,” Angel told him. “You must have flown right past her. The signal was incredibly strong.”
Chapel closed his eyes and said a little prayer of thanks.
“I’ve suspended your transmission to her,” Angel said, “so she can’t hear us talking. But I have her audio and she’s asking if you’re still there, if you’re going to finish that thought. Do you want me to patch you back in?”
Chapel considered it. Nadia might get spooked if their conversation just stopped there. Then again, if he had to keep talking to her, chances were he would eventually lose his cool and start telling her what he really thought.
“No. And don’t give her any sign why,” Chapel told Angel. “Let her just think we got cut off by some technical glitch or something.”
“Okay,” Angel told him.
“Give me her coordinates,” he said. “Tell me where she is, Angel. So we can finish this once and for all.”
Angel relayed the latitude and longitude, minutes and seconds down to three decimal places. Chapel read the numbers off to Kalin, who relayed them to the pilot. The helicopter slowed way down and then banked into a wide turn — they had already passed Nadia’s location, and they needed to double back.
“She’s outside of a little village called Venaya, about seventy miles northeast of Lake Baikal. The village has about sixty people total, but the house she’s at is far enough away that none of them have any reason to be out there. I’m guessing she’s alone in the house, but I can’t guarantee that. I can see smoke coming from its chimney. There’s also a small single-prop airplane nearby, sitting on an improvised landing strip.”
“A plane?”
“It’s not surprising. There are no real roads anywhere near her — which isn’t uncommon for Siberia. The permafrost devours anything less robust than a metaled highway every winter. For a lot of these villages the only way in or out is by air — or on the back of a reindeer.”
There were places in Alaska that could only be reached by aircraft, Chapel knew, and probably for the same reason. No wonder this country was so sparsely populated. How long, he wondered, would it have taken the Russians to find Nadia, just searching door-to-door throughout Siberia? Nadia must have thought she had plenty of time — time to spin out her blackmail scheme, time to make the Russians do what she wanted.
Well, she was about to find out just how little time she had left.
Kalin ordered the helicopter to set down half a kilometer away from Nadia’s location. Within another minute they were on the ground, and the soldiers started jumping out of the side hatch.
Time to go.
Chapel grabbed a stanchion and started pulling himself out through the hatch. Before he could touch his feet to the ground, though, Kalin turned and put a hand on his chest. “What do you think you are doing?” the torturer asked.
Chapel knocked Kalin’s hand away. “I’m going in with your soldiers. I’m going to find her and make things right.”
“I hardly think so. Do you honestly think I trust you around Asimova?” Kalin asked. “She has fooled you so many times already into betraying yourself. Why risk such shameful behavior again?”
“This time’s going to be different,” Chapel promised.
Kalin laughed. “You’ll stay here, with the helicopter. We will not be gone for very long.”
Chapel glanced at the soldiers already moving away through the trees. They were keeping low and staying silent, so they wouldn’t alert Nadia to their approach.
He looked back at Kalin. Then he head-butted the torturer, hard enough to knock him right out of the helicopter.
In a moment Chapel was out, too, his feet making soft thuds as he ran across a carpet of pine needles as soft as a mattress.
He was pretty sure Kalin wouldn’t shoot him. Not, at least, until Nadia was dead. Even afterward Kalin would want him alive just so he could torture him again. Nor would Kalin order his men to seize Chapel — that would be too noisy, now when quiet was an absolute necessity.