The Hydra Protocol

by David Wellington

  The driver did not answer.

  They did not go far. Bulgachenko did not recognize the street or even the district of their destination, but that did not matter. The car pulled into a warehouse full of empty shelves and a rolling door was closed behind it. The door unlocked itself, and a man in a black suit reached in to help Bulgachenko out. The man in the black suit did not speak or salute. He simply took Bulgachenko’s arm and led him deeper into the warehouse to where a chair sat in the middle of a stretch of open floor. Bulgachenko did not resist as he was forced to sit down, or as his hands and feet were tied to the chair.

  No one had bothered to show him a gun, or even a knife. It was implicit that these things were available if they were necessary. There was no line of thugs waiting to catch him if he tried to run. That would have been superfluous—Bulgachenko was an old man, now, and it was clear to everyone involved he would not get far.

  This was all very civilized, very formal. It had the stamp of the former KGB all over it. Bulgachenko found that he approved. This made him want to laugh but he resisted the urge.

  “You understand,” the man in the black suit said, “how this is done. You show no sign of panic. You did not scream for help. You did not attempt to overpower me.”

  “You sound almost disappointed,” Bulgachenko said.

  The man in the black suit shrugged. “These things are easier when the subject is afraid. Fear loosens the tongue.”

  “So you wish me to talk,” Bulgachenko said. “If it will spare me pain, I will tell you what you want to know. I understand how torture is done, yes, and I know it is pointless to resist. But you want me to be afraid? No, I am sorry, I cannot help. I was a child in Stalingrad when the Nazis came. I ate the leather soles of my shoes, even though I knew I would get frostbite and lose some of my toes. Later I lived through the purges of Stalin and the blustering of his heirs and the chaos of the second revolution.” Bulgachenko smiled. “I have had a lifetime of fear. I have used up my entire stock of it.”

  The man in the black suit nodded. “My name is Pavel Kalin.”

  “That means nothing to me,” Bulgachenko said. “Who do you work for?”

  “That is not important. Please answer my questions. Where is your agent? Where is Asimova?”

  “In Bucharest,” Bulgachenko said.

  Kalin shook his head. “She left there some time ago. Where is she now? Where is she headed?”

  Bulgachenko closed his eyes. If he could have protected poor Nadia, he would have. But there was nothing he could do. This man would get his answer one way or another. Dear, sweet Nadia. “Tashkent,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Kalin told him. “I believe you are telling me the truth.”

  “Will you release me now? I am the head of FSTEK, as I am sure you know. If I do not return home soon, there will be questions asked.”

  Kalin gave him a sad smile. “You were replaced in that position at midnight, by governmental decree. Your voluntary retirement papers have already been filed.”

  “Ah,” Bulgachenko said.

  Perhaps he had some small supply of fear left in him, after all.

  “You understand. You understand how these things work.” Kalin sighed deeply. “You do not fight. You comply with my requests, answer my questions. This is a problem in itself. Information come by this easily cannot be trusted. I’m sure you understand this as well.” He reached into his jacket pocket and brought something out.

  A pair of rusty pliers.

  “I apologize, Marshal,” the man in the black suit said. “You are a hero of our country. You deserve better than this. But sometimes even heroes lie.”

  TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 17, 09:42

  Chapel woke to the sensation of something poking him in the back, and to a weird unearthly sound, an electronic warbling that rose and fell and occasionally squealed.

  He opened his eyes.

  He was lying on a bed in a spacious, quite comfortable hotel room. They had taken the largest of the hotel’s available suites, one with three bedrooms and a common area as well as a wide balcony that looked out over the center of Tashkent. The rooms were, in fact, quite nice, maybe even better and cleaner than Chapel’s apartment back in Brooklyn. Certainly larger. For a thousand dollars a night it looked like you could find real luxury in Uzbekistan.

  Chapel had paid little attention to the rooms once he found a bed. He’d dropped into it without so much as taking his shoes off and fallen asleep instantly.

  That explained the pain in his back. He hadn’t taken off his artificial arm. The clamps that held it on his shoulder weren’t designed to be laid on for very long.

  He rolled over on his side and found Nadia standing by the bed. She had changed into a simple sleeveless dress, and she held something about the size of a cigarette lighter with a collapsible antenna mounted on one end. She waved it over the telephone on the bedside table, and it squealed in distress.

  She placed one finger across her lips to tell him to stay quiet. She switched off the bug sensor and put it down, then unscrewed the mouthpiece of the telephone. With her fingernails she pried out a tiny circuit board with a microphone mounted on it. She snapped the listening device in half.

  “That’s the last of them,” she said. She jumped onto the bed and sat down next to him, her legs tucked up underneath her. “Good morning, again,” she told him. “You played your part very well downstairs.”

  “I’ve met enough rich assholes in my life to fake it,” he said. He wanted to sit up—felt that would be more appropriate—but he was still tired. “How many bugs did you find?”

  “Five. One in each room, including the bathroom, and this one in your phone.”

  “That seems like a lot,” Chapel said, frowning. “You think they doubled up because they knew we were coming?”

  “No, I think they just know that anyone staying in these rooms is someone they’re going to want to listen to,” she told him. She shrugged. “Uzbekistan. It’s about as close as you can get these days to how things used to be under the Soviets. There is no conception of civil rights in this country.”

  Chapel closed his eyes for a second. He tried to force himself to sit up. It didn’t quite work. “What will happen when they realize we’ve deactivated their bugs?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  He opened his eyes again to look at her. She had shifted closer to him, until her knees were almost touching him.

  She shrugged. “If they said something, that would be admitting there were microphones here in the first place, and they don’t want to do that. This is just part of doing business in this part of the world. They try to listen to us. We sweep for their bugs. One reason to have so many is that they hope I will miss one.” She smiled. “I didn’t. But tomorrow when we are out, they will plant some more, and I’ll have to sweep again.” She wriggled a little closer, until her knees touched his leg.

  Chapel tried to focus. It was hard, with her so close. “How long are we here? How many days, I mean?”

  “I will schedule a meeting with my contact here today. This afternoon, most likely, we’ll make the arrangements. Then we can head out into the desert, once we have vehicles, equipment, supplies,” she said, and put one hand on his arm. His artificial arm. Most people, when they touched it, felt that it was colder than it should be, or they sensed that the skin didn’t feel like real human skin. Most people pulled their hand away. They flinched. Not Nadia.

  “I should get up,” he said. “We have things to do.”

  “Hmm,” she said. Gently she stroked his arm, up and down.

  Wrong. So wrong. Not like this, not now—not with Nadia. Not when Julia—

  She shifted again, releasing his arm, and he thought he must have misread the signals. Read something into what was happening that wasn’t there. She was just curling up on the bed with him—she must be as tired as he was.

  She sat up, still very close to him. Looked down into his face. Gave him a tentative little smile. H
er mouth a question. He could feel the air prickle between them, feel the hair on his real arm stand on end. He couldn’t move, paralyzed by not knowing what was happening here, what was going to happen.

  She leaned in close and brushed his lips with hers, just the tiniest suggestion of a kiss. Her lips were so soft, so delicate, barely grazing his own. He could reach up, put an arm around her shoulders, pull her in close . . .

  “Wait,” he said.

  It took all his energy, all his strength to say it, but he managed.

  “We can’t,” he told her.

  She slapped the bedcovers beside his head. Then she lowered her forehead to touch his. She was almost on top of him and he felt like if she grabbed his shoulders and pushed him back on the bed, if she straddled him right then and there, he would not be able to resist, he would just have to give in. She was so close. He could just grab her hips, he could—

  “Konyechno. Of course we can’t,” she said. She roared in frustration and pulled away. Jumped off the bed and headed for the door to the common room. Her hand hesitated, though, when it touched the knob. “We can’t?” she asked, her back to him.

  It wasn’t too late. One word and she would turn around, come back to the bed, and—

  “We can’t,” he told her.

  She opened the door and stepped through. Closed it behind her with a click.

  TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 17, 13:17

  By lunchtime it was ninety degrees outside. In a shady restaurant at the ground level of the hotel, the three of them ate some plov, a local dish of rice and mutton. Chapel didn’t have much of an appetite—he mostly just picked at a piece of bread and drank some water. He couldn’t meet Nadia’s eye throughout the meal. He assumed that the waitstaff would be listening to their conversation, so he kept talking to the bare minimum.

  Bogdan ate two plates of rice and asked for more, but Nadia cut him off. “Don’t get over full,” she told him. “There will be a lot of walking today, in the heat.”

  The hacker’s face fell like a petulant child’s. He’d been pouting all morning since he found out there was free Wi-Fi in their suite but he wasn’t allowed to use it. “You hire me for computer stuff,” he said, “and I cannot so much as check e-mail? Now I cannot eat what I like? Very well, Mother.”

  Nadia laughed and tried to catch Chapel’s eye, but he just turned his face away.

  When they were done, they headed out into the streets. Their meeting with Nadia’s local connection wasn’t scheduled for another hour, but she felt they needed the time to shake anyone who might be following them.

  “You make anybody?” Chapel asked, as they headed through a strip of parkland. Sprinklers were running nonstop to keep the grass green.

  “I don’t understand,” Nadia said.

  Chapel shook his head. Her English was fluent enough that he sometimes forgot she wouldn’t know every obscure American idiom. “I mean, did you actually see anyone follow us from the hotel?”

  “No,” she told him. “Which simply means they’re good at it.”

  “You think we’re in danger? I was told the Uzbek government hates Americans.”

  Nadia sighed and lifted her hands in exasperation. “I think, right now, the secret police are following you—for protection. Yes, they hate Americans, because they’re always asking so many uncomfortable questions. About human rights, about the way the government shells its own people out in the countryside. But they love American money. This is a country desperately in need of funds for development. So you—the American plutocrat—they will do anything to keep safe.”

  “That’s good to know,” Chapel said.

  “Don’t allow yourself to get complacent. Let me tell you a story. The president of this country has a nephew, a journalist. About ten years ago he disappeared off the street with no explanation. When your Hillary Clinton came here in 2011, she demanded to see him. He was produced and claimed it was all a misunderstanding, that he had been treated well. But a doctor examined him and saw that he had been starved and kept on psychotropic drugs for years at a time.”

  “Jesus,” Chapel said. “At least we got him released.”

  That elicited a bitter laugh from Nadia. “A few months after Hillary Clinton left, this journalist called up a friend of his and said he planned on writing a book about his uncle, the president. Even before he finished the phone call, the line went dead and he has not been seen since.”

  Despite the heat of the day, Chapel felt a chill run down his spine.

  “That was the nephew of the president,” Nadia pointed out. “A close family member. If your cover is blown while we’re here, well . . . imagine what they will do to a foreign spy?”

  Chapel gave that some time to sink in. Her story was hard to bring into concordance with what he was seeing with his own eyes. Tashkent as seen from the sidewalks didn’t look much like the totalitarian hellhole she made it out to be. The streets were clean and full of cars and trucks and people going about their business. Stores were open and well stocked, full of customers, while the park was crowded with people out enjoying the sun. Every sign in every shop window was printed in two alphabets—Cyrillic and the Latin characters he was used to. “What I see here, though—it looks more like Montreal than Kabul.”

  “You’d see it if you spent more time here, actually talking to the locals,” she told him, keeping her voice low but not whispering—whispering might seem suspicious. “You’d realize that no one here talks about politics. Ever. If you were to ask them about human rights abuses, about the way the government massacres its own people out in the countryside, they would run away from you as if you had started coughing up blood. Politics is never a safe topic in Tashkent, and everything is political. In 2009, the president decided to chop down some historic trees here. Trees the city was famous for. To this day no one knows why he did it. If they asked, they were taken away. This—for trees.”

  They headed down a crowded shopping street, clearly one of the main thoroughfares of the city. A tourist information kiosk stood on one corner, with a very bored-looking middle-aged women stationed inside. She fanned herself casually, as if she were too bored to even keep cool. On the opposite side of the street was a shop that rented bicycles and mopeds for daily use. Out on the sidewalk were a small number of street vendors. They had hookah pipes and leather-bound books laid out on threadbare blankets, and their eyes moved around constantly. Maybe sizing up potential customers—or maybe keeping an eye out for something else.

  “We need to lose our followers,” Nadia said. “My contact will not wish to be seen speaking with us.”

  “It would help if we knew who our followers were,” Chapel pointed out. Then he saw something and had an idea. He walked away from Nadia and Bogdan and stooped down over one of the blankets, one selling sticks and cones of incense. The man who ran this impromptu store was wearing a pakol, the traditional soft round hat of an Afghan. Unlike most of the men Chapel had seen in Tashkent, he had a long, thick beard. “Aya ta pa pashto khabarey kawalai shey?” he said, asking if the man spoke Pashto.

  The man looked up, surprised, and raised his hands in joy. “God is great!” he answered, in that language. “And full of surprises. A white man who speaks my language, and I am sure, has money to buy my wares, yes?”

  Chapel got the point. A shared tongue wasn’t going to get him anything for free. “You’re from Afghanistan?” he asked. Not entirely surprising—Uzbekistan shared a border with Afghanistan, and the Taliban had driven a lot of refugees out of their country with nothing but what they could carry on their backs.

  “I have the honor of being born in Waziristan, yes,” the vendor replied.

  Chapel nodded. Waziristan was where he lost his arm, but he didn’t think it would help his case to mention that. “I imagine the local police are no friends of yours,” he said, trying hard to remember the correct grammar. “I’m being followed right now.”

  “Sir, this is Tashkent, and we are foreigners both. We are all being
followed. At night, I think they follow me through my dreams.”

  Chapel picked up an ornate brass incense burner, the most expensive-looking thing on the blanket, and set it down in front of the man. It would probably fetch five dollars back on Canal Street in New York. He took seven twenty-dollar bills from his wallet, keeping them carefully folded, and used them to tap the incense burner. “Would you be so kind as to point out to me all the . . . special police on this street?” He couldn’t remember the word for “secret.” He knew the word for “security forces,” but that meant something very different in Afghanistan.

  A few seconds later, a hundred and forty dollars lighter, and a little bit wiser, Chapel walked back over to Nadia. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got a plan.”

  TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 17, 13:38

  Nadia and Bogdan headed across the street, into the bicycle rental shop, while Chapel worked his way down the sidewalk, bending low to speak to each of the street vendors. It didn’t matter what he said to them, which was good since he didn’t share any languages with most of them. Only one spoke English—a teenage boy who looked more Asian than any of the others Chapel met.

  “I’m from Russia originally, I mean, my grandparents were Russian,” the kid said, shrugging. “Before that, they were Korean. Stalin moved people all over, back in the 1930s, and this is where we ended up.”

  Chapel nodded. “How did you learn English?” he asked.

  The kid shrugged. “Watching your American movies, mostly. And talking to tourists like you. You going to buy something, or were you just so surprised to see a Korean sitting here you needed to ask?”

  Chapel looked down at the wares the kid had on offer, a collection of bootleg videos on cheap DVDs. He didn’t really register any of the titles—he just pretended to study them while he actually watched what was going on at the far corner of the street. The Afghan merchant he’d paid off was rising from his blanket, speaking to the vendors on either side of him—most likely asking them to watch his stuff. One of them nodded distractedly, and that seemed to be good enough.