Bogdan wasn’t going to be typing with those hands anytime soon. He definitely wasn’t going to launch any missiles.
“Ogon’!” Chapel shouted, to the soldiers outside — the command to open fire.
He had believed, when he ordered the Russians to attack the house, that he was willing to die in the cross fire as long as they took Nadia down as well. That he would give his life to make sure he got his revenge.
It appeared that some part of him disagreed with that calculation. He dropped to the floor, throwing his arm over his head, bracing himself for the noise and the chaos of a fusillade.
Just before he hit the floorboards, he saw Nadia staring down at him, a look of horror distorting her features. Horror and something else — disappointment?
Maybe she really had thought he would try to help her.
The cross fire he’d expected didn’t come — but all hell did break loose.
Someone smashed a window and shoved a rifle barrel through. The door swung back hard enough to crack against its frame as soldiers rushed inside, weapons up and pointing in every direction. They were all shouting at once, and as Chapel peeled his arm back from his face he saw one of them grab Bogdan and throw him to the floor while another pair advanced on Nadia, weapons up, barrels pointed right at her face.
Kalin came rushing in, looking a little out of breath. He pointed at Nadia and barked out a rasping command Chapel couldn’t follow. Nadia dropped her SMG, and one of the soldiers snatched it up.
“The codes,” Kalin said. “Where are the codes?”
It took Chapel a second to realize that the torturer had spoken in English, that the question was directed at him. “On the laptop,” he said. “It’s all there.”
Kalin nodded at one of the soldiers, and he grabbed the laptop off the table, yanking out its power cord. Bogdan moaned something in what Chapel thought was Romanian.
A smile appeared on Kalin’s face. Chapel was surprised the man didn’t start laughing maniacally. “You,” he said, in Russian now. “Asimova. You will come with me. I have some questions I’d like you to answer.”
Chapel, still down on the floor, looked up at her face.
He could tell that she knew what Kalin was, and how he questioned people. A nasty pang of guilt cut right through Chapel — he had just delivered her into a fate worse than death.
She was a terrorist. She had betrayed him. Lied to him.
But nobody deserved what Kalin was going to do to her.
She must have decided she would rather go down in a hail of bullets, because before any of the soldiers could touch her, she spun around on one foot and delivered a perfect high kick to the chimney of the wood-stove.
It came apart in pieces and sprayed soot all over the room. Smoke from the stove and the generator billowed out right in Kalin’s direction and the torturer flinched. The soldiers all drew back, maybe thinking she’d set off a grenade.
The smoke filled the tiny room in an instant, making the soldiers choke and cough. Down on the floor Chapel had better air, but he couldn’t see anything for a second as the powdery soot fell all around him. He heard the unmistakable sound of glass shattering and then, from outside, the staccato noise of assault rifles firing.
Even if he couldn’t see anything, Chapel knew — she had made a break for it.
Chapel scrambled forward on his hand and knees and got over to the cot. The window above it had been smashed out of its frame, just as he’d expected. He put his hand on the cot and levered himself back up to his feet, even as the dust cleared and Kalin came storming across the room, waving one hand in front of his face. Chapel started to reach for the windowsill, intending to chase after her, but then he thought of something and looked down again.
The cell phone was gone. He remembered clearly how she’d set it down, very carefully, before picking up the submachine gun.
The gun was gone, too — she must have scooped it up before she burst through the window. That made sense — she knew there would be more soldiers outside, that she would have to fight her way clear. But the phone — she had had only a fraction of a second to escape. Why had she wasted time picking up the phone?
Something nagged at him, some memory that wouldn’t quite rise to the surface. Maybe she had wanted the phone so she could contact Varvara and beg for help, for some means of escape. But she must have known that even Varvara wouldn’t help a wanted terrorist — Valits had told him as much, that the top level vory in Moscow had turned their backs on Nadia. She didn’t have a friend left in the world — so who did she want to call?
It wasn’t like she’d felt some desperate need to play Angry Birds on her smartphone, or something—
Kalin peered out the window. “She won’t get far,” he said, in English. “And we have the codes on the laptop. The world is safe, yes? But until she is captured, this is still an embarrassment. And it is your fault, you know. Had you not attacked me and come running in here without—”
“Quiet!” Chapel said. He was too busy thinking to deal with Kalin.
Smartphone.
The world’s most dangerous smartphone. He had it now. She’d told him, once, that all the data in Perimeter’s tape banks, every bit of it, would fit in one small corner of a smartphone’s memory.
You could put all the launch codes on a phone, and—
And Bogdan could easily have built an app that would let her launch the missiles with just a few swipes on her touchscreen.
“Shit,” Chapel said. “Shit!”
“What is it?” Kalin demanded.
Chapel shook his head and pushed himself through the window. He caught himself with his hand on the far side, then pulled himself up to his feet and started running.
Much as he’d expected, there were wounded soldiers everywhere. Nadia might be a terrible shot, but with an SMG you could just spray bullets in a wide arc — you didn’t need to aim. He saw one man lying on the ground, clutching his side, and without even being asked, the soldier pointed into the woods. Chapel dashed in that direction — just in time to hear a whirring noise like an angry lawn mower.
“No,” he said, “no — Kalin, you didn’t even bother to secure the—”
He stopped wasting breath on words, then, because he had staggered out into a clearing in the trees, a narrow lane cut through the woods that ran straight for about two hundred yards.
At the far end of that strip, Nadia was already lifting into the air in her little airplane. He saw the wings glimmer as she crested the trees and shot into the clear air, and then she was gone, out of sight.
Behind him Kalin came pushing through the trees, a look of utter annoyance on his face. “I think you have failed,” the senior lieutenant said. “I think your mission, as Colonel Valits described it, was to capture her. And you did not. Now, you will return with me — to Magnitogorsk. To our hospital.”
Chapel whirled on him, and every watt of frustrated, pent-up rage he’d ever felt burned from his eyes. “You fucking idiot,” he said. “She has her phone.”
“I fail to understand—”
“The codes are on that phone, and the means to launch the missiles. She still has the codes — and she’s getting away!”
The helicopter swung by to pick them up from Nadia’s airstrip, its wheels not even touching the grass as they jumped in through the side hatch. Kalin ordered the wounded to stay behind and wait for medical evac. He seemed annoyed that he even had to waste the time it took to let his uninjured soldiers on board. He stared at Chapel for a very long time before permitting him to climb in.
“It would be wise, I think, to leave you here,” the torturer told him. “But I am afraid you would find some way past my injured men so you could run off. No, I will keep you with me, Kapitan, but only so I can watch your every move.”