He had no doubt that Kalin would find a way to make his life hell, but that was in the future. Right now Chapel had his orders from the director, and the only way to carry them out was to keep moving, to run as fast as he could — and get to Nadia first. Kalin would want to take her alive, for questioning. He’d want to make sure he got every last bit if information squeezed out of her before he let her die. Chapel’s orders, on the other hand, were to kill her as quickly and as neatly as possible.
That would be tricky without a firearm, but he had learned long ago how to improvise.
He caught a look at the face of one of the soldiers as he sprinted past. The Russian looked more confused than anything else — Chapel passed him by too quickly for the man to register anger or curiosity. Chapel didn’t slow down to learn how the soldier felt about an American spy running past him toward their shared target.
Soon he was past all the soldiers. They were taking their time, watching their backs. Chapel just wanted to get to the damned house. Before long he could see it up ahead, or at least one corner of it. It looked like it had been made of logs that didn’t quite fit together, the gaps between the logs filled in with mortar. Its roof was high and peaked and covered in pieces of bark cut down to the size of shingles. He saw the smoke coming from the chimney. He saw it only had one window on the side that faced him, one narrow pane of glass.
He ducked lower until he was almost crawling, then dashed up to the corner of the house and slid along its side until he found the door. Angel hadn’t said if there was more than one door — most likely she couldn’t tell just from satellite imagery. If there were two doors and Chapel came running through the front, he would need to move very fast before Nadia could escape out the back.
Well, he’d planned on getting this over with as quickly as possible, anyway.
He got his good shoulder into the door and burst through it, shattering the cheap lock that had held it shut. Immediately he dropped his head in case Nadia was armed, in case she started shooting as soon as she saw him.
As it turned out, she had something better than a gun.
“Jim,” Nadia said. Her eyes were very wide.
Chapel took in every detail at once and had to sort through them. The house comprised a single room, with a cot on one side and a table on the other. Nadia was lying belly down on the cot, her feet up in the air behind her. She held her phone in both hands as if she’d been trying to make it reconnect to Angel’s frequency. A short-barreled submachine gun lay on the cot next to her.
On the table was a laptop computer. Bogdan sat behind the laptop, clacking away furiously at the keys.
Chapel hadn’t expected to find the Romanian here. He’d assumed the two of them would have parted ways after Aralsk-30, that Bogdan’s work was done. But of course it made sense. Nadia had been busy since then, setting up a secure line of communication and the ability to hack into the Russian nuclear arsenal. She would have needed some technical help for that.
Not that it mattered. Not in the slightest.
“Jim, I didn’t think I would see you here,” Nadia said, twisting around until she was sitting up and facing him. It was warm in the little house, and she wore nothing but a halter top and a pair of jeans. Her feet were bare. She looked good. She looked so good…
“You betrayed me,” Chapel growled. “You used my country.”
“Jim,” she said, very carefully.
“You convinced me we were doing good. That we were going to make the world a safer place. When what you really wanted was to drive us to the brink of war,” Chapel went on. He was on a roll now. “You—”
“Jim, stop,” Nadia said.
“You’ve had your chance to talk. Now’s my turn,” Chapel said.
“No, I mean, stop moving.” She carefully set down her phone and picked up the submachine gun. She didn’t point it at him, but her meaning was clear. “I think you came here to kill me. Yes?”
“You betrayed me,” he said.
“I lied to you, it’s true. And now you want to kill me for it. But right now I have the gun. So let’s all be calm.”
He grunted in inarticulate rage and took another step toward her. Let her go ahead and shoot. It would only take him a second to get close enough, to get right up next to her and—
“If you’re not afraid of this,” she said, hefting the weapon, “then maybe I can stop you by telling you that Bogdan has the Perimeter software booted up and ready to launch.”
That part of Chapel’s brain which hadn’t been overwritten by pure anger started to speak very loudly in the back of his mind, just then. It forced him to stop, for a second anyway, and turn to look at Bogdan.
“Is true, yes,” the hacker said. He shrugged. “I can send the bombs. So be chill, man, yes?”
“He’s got them on that laptop?” Chapel asked. “The codes you stole from Aralsk-30?”
“That’s right,” Nadia said. “So please, just stay calm. And don’t move.”
Chapel nodded and licked his lips.
He glanced around the room, seeing for the first time the rest of its contents. A pyramid of canned food in one corner. A wood-burning stove. A gasoline generator, its exhaust vented through the chimney, chugged away in one corner, providing power for the laptop. A thick cable ran from the generator to the laptop. If he could get close enough to pull that plug — but no, it would have battery power, still. Pulling the plug wouldn’t shut down Bogdan’s link to the missiles.
Chapel must have taken a step in that direction anyway, because Nadia jumped up and pointed the SMG at him again. “Please, Jim. Just don’t move. Don’t make me shoot you — I don’t want to.”
Through the anger that distorted his vision, Chapel could see that she meant it. She didn’t want to kill him — she still thought there was something between them. Just how deluded was she?
Deluded enough, maybe, to launch a nuclear attack if he didn’t do exactly as she said? He nodded and stepped back to the middle of the room, between her and Bogdan.
She must have caught a flash of movement outside the windows, then, because she jumped up and ran over to one and peered out. “Russian soldiers,” she said, her breath catching in her throat. “You brought them here?”
“They’ve probably surrounded this place by now,” he told her.
“Shit!”
Chapel nodded. “How exactly do you think this is supposed to end?” he asked her. “How long do you think they’ll wait before they start shooting?”
“A very long time, if they know what they’re risking,” she said, ducking below the windowsill. She moved quickly around the room, to another window, and peeked out through that one. What she saw made her bite her lip in frustration.
Maybe it was just that — frustration — that caused her not to notice that Chapel had taken a step back, toward Bogdan.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she said.
“No, I can see that.”
She looked deeply into his eyes, as if searching for something. Some sign that he could help her. Fix this somehow. She was still trying to use him. The thought made Chapel seethe.
She gave him a sad little smile. “If you call out to them, tell them I will launch if they do not fall back, perhaps—”
“Maybe,” Chapel said. “Or—”
He had no intention of finishing that thought. He had just been talking until he saw the barrel of her SMG move away from his chest. The second it did, he swung around and brought his fist down hard on the screen of the laptop, smashing it down on top of Bogdan’s hands.
The hacker screamed and pulled his hands back but too late. When he held them up, Chapel saw at least two of his long thin fingers were bent at unnatural angles. Another one twitched spasmodically. It looked like they were all broken.