The Hydra Protocol

by David Wellington

  The Afghan strolled across the street toward a man who was sitting on a bench there, pretending to read a newspaper. The Afghan had identified this man as one of the three secret policemen working the street. The other two were sitting in a car parked about twenty yards away. Chapel was surprised he hadn’t spotted them himself—one of the men in the car was the SNB man with the shaved head who had greeted him when he arrived at the hotel.

  Chapel sifted through the bootleg DVDs on the Korean boy’s blanket, trying very hard not to show how intently he was watching events unfold. The Afghan sat down on the bench next to the secret policeman and rested one arm on the back of the bench. He spoke a few words, seemingly to himself. Then the secret policeman folded up his newspaper and got up and walked away. After a second the Afghan followed him.

  All according to plan. Chapel had paid the Afghan to say he had information on a suspicious American tourist, but he wanted money for it. The two of them headed into the back of the information kiosk, presumably to discuss terms. That would take them a few minutes.

  The trickiest part about shaking this tail was going to be convincing the SNB that Chapel, Nadia, and Bogdan were just minding their business, and that they had no intention of evading pursuit. This had to look like it all just happened naturally.

  Chapel took a few small bills from his pocket and handed them to the Korean kid. “I’ve seen all these, but thanks for the conversation,” he said. Then he moved down to the next blanket, one that sat just outside of the bicycle rental shop.

  Just as he’d hoped, Nadia had come through on her end. She and Bogdan came rolling out of the alley that ran alongside the shop, each of them riding a motor scooter. Bogdan climbed off his and onto the back of Nadia’s vehicle, leaving one idling on the sidewalk. Chapel risked a quick glance at the two secret policemen in the car. As expected they were watching him closely. The one he didn’t recognize was holding a camera.

  Nothing to be done about that—this wasn’t like in Istanbul where he could get to that camera and erase his presence. He wondered if that had been part of Nadia’s plan all along, to have their presence in Uzbekistan documented by the secret police. Then when they entered Kazakhstan, there would be a trail showing they had not entered through Russia, limiting the Russian government’s culpability.

  Nothing he could do about that, either. He swung a leg over the idling scooter. The brand name—Vyatka—was emblazoned on its front shield. It was an attractive bottle green color, but that was about all it had going for it. Much of its rear end was held together with patches, and its engine puttered away beneath him with less power than a riding lawn mower. He estimated the thing would have a top speed of about thirty miles an hour, even less than that going uphill.

  Still, scooters had their advantages.

  “You okay with this?” he asked Nadia.

  She strapped a helmet over her black hair and gave him a vampish look from beneath its brim. “Your concern is touching, but I had one of these when I was a teenager.” She handed a helmet back to Bogdan, who fussed and fumbled with the straps. She glanced back, and the look of terror on Bogdan’s face made her laugh. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Did you ever drive one before?”

  “Motorcycles and bicycles, yes. Nothing halfway in between like this. But I’ll be fine,” Chapel said. Then he hit the throttle and roared out into the street. The engine made a nasty sound as it changed gears, but it didn’t die on him as he’d feared it might. He kept accelerating as he drove right past the parked SNB car. Much as he’d expected, as he passed he heard its much more powerful engine kick into life, and in his mirrors he saw it pull away from the curb.

  The chase was on.

  TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 17, 13:42

  They headed down the wide tourist street, Nadia and Bogdan keeping close to Chapel’s tail. He pushed his scooter for all the speed he could get, but the SNB car had no trouble keeping up. There was plenty of room for the car to maneuver on the street, even when Chapel used the scooter’s small size to wind his way between the other cars. A few drivers shook their fists or shouted at him, but he couldn’t understand what they were saying so he ignored them.

  The street went on for many blocks. Chapel dropped back a hair until he was riding alongside Nadia. “Left or right up ahead?” he shouted over the mosquito whine of the scooter engines. “We need to get somewhere more crowded.”

  “Left,” she told him, and gunned her scooter forward. She took the turn without slowing down, leaning deep into the curve. Chapel nearly overshot the side street but managed to follow her by jumping up on an empty sidewalk for a second.

  Behind them the SNB car made the turn effortlessly. The man with the shaved head was driving and he always stayed a few car lengths back, not so far that Chapel lost sight of him but not so close as to make it blatant that they were being followed.

  The side street was almost empty of traffic. There were no stores on this block, just blind doorways that gave no sense of what lay beyond. No pedestrians on the sidewalks, either, which made Chapel uneasy. He had no idea why Nadia had taken this turn—until, without warning, she ducked up a long alleyway to the right. Chapel nearly lost control of his scooter as he spun around to keep up with her, but he kicked off the pavement with one foot and righted himself again.

  The alleyway sloped downhill toward a busy street beyond. Clotheslines hung like drab bunting overhead, and windows high on the buildings were propped open to catch any breeze. The alley was just wide enough for the SNB car to follow them, though the driver scraped off half his paint job on a Dumpster at the back of one building. He didn’t seem to care—in Chapel’s mirrors he could see the man with the shaved head in the driver’s seat, and he didn’t even look over to see what all the noise was.

  This guy was determined, Chapel had to give him that. He wasn’t going to let them get away with a little trick driving.

  At the end of the alleyway Nadia waved to the right, as if she was going to turn that way. Chapel wondered why she would throw such an obvious signal—then grinned to himself as she shot forward between two cars and into an identical alleyway across the busy street. Her signal had just been a feint. Chapel had to twist around and lean away from an oncoming car as he bounced and rolled across the main street, but he managed to shoot into the second alleyway without crashing. Nadia glanced back over her shoulder at him, smiling. Bogdan looked like he might start screaming at any moment, his eyes rolling under their fringe of hair. He had one arm tight around Nadia’s waist, hanging on, while with his other hand he tapped at the keys of his MP3 player. The hacker was crazy, Chapel thought—if he was that scared, why not use both arms to hold on? The key clacking seemed to comfort him, though, like an infant with a security blanket.

  Chapel glanced back and saw the SNB car slowly threading its way into traffic in the street behind him. They were gaining significant ground on the car, not least because the downward-sloping alleyways helped their struggling engines.

  Up ahead of them the alleyway descended toward a parking garage. Chapel could see flickering sunlight through the open structure. He rushed forward to catch up with Nadia, then pointed at the garage. She nodded back so he took the lead again, using his forward momentum to carry him up a ramp and through the structure, the wind making chopping noises on either side as he flashed past a long rank of parked cars. A second ramp continued up into the higher stories of the garage, but Chapel didn’t want to go that way—there would be no way down from up there and he would be trapping himself. Instead he looked for and found an exit from the structure on its far side. A low wall prevented cars from just driving straight through, but there was a gap in that wall for pedestrians who wanted to get to their parking spots. There wasn’t a lot of clearance but Chapel threaded the needle and shot through to the other side, just as a car was coming into the garage. The car’s horn blared and someone shouted a warning, but Chapel just twisted around and shot past the side of the car, out into a wide street beyond.<
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  Nadia was right on his tail as he blasted through an intersection and slipped between two lanes of traffic. Up ahead he saw that the road opened into a broad plaza with the huge curved wall of a stadium filling up half the sky down there. Traffic swirled around the stadium in a vast gyre, the cars inching forward against gridlock.

  Chapel cut some of his speed and let Nadia catch up to him so they could talk again. “Did we lose them?” he asked.

  “We must have,” she said, as they joined up with the barely moving traffic circle. “There was no way he could get through there.”

  Chapel nodded and studied the cars around him. The drivers were all staring at them, but that couldn’t be helped. An American and a woman who looked like Nadia riding scooters were bound to attract attention in Tashkent.

  “So who’s this contact we’re meeting with?” Chapel asked, as they crept forward, around the circle. They were moving so slowly they had to put their feet down so their scooters didn’t fall over. It gave them a chance to talk, though Chapel would have preferred to keep moving—he never liked feeling trapped, even in gridlock.

  “She’s trustworthy. I know that’s what you’re asking. At least,” Nadia called over to him, over the traffic noise, “we can trust her not to betray us to the SNB.”

  “That’s a big ‘at least,’” Chapel said.

  Nadia shrugged. “We need certain things for our trip into the desert. Only one person in Tashkent can get us what we need. Therefore, we must trust her. She’s a vory. You know what that means?”

  Chapel grimaced. “Russian mafia.”

  “The word means ‘thief-in-law,’ a lawful thief,” Nadia told him. “One who follows the thief’s code.”

  “A criminal. Every criminal I ever met followed the same code—do what benefits them, and everyone else can go to hell.”

  Nadia laughed. “You in the West, you will never understand. The mafiya—the gangs—do you know where they came from? The gulags. They were born in Stalin’s prison camps. They hate nothing so much as central government. The irony is, they have come to be so powerful, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, they are a kind of government in themselves. The vory—”

  “Car,” Bogdan said.

  Chapel stared at the hacker. “Yes, Bogdan, there are lots of cars here,” he said.

  The Romanian shook his head. “That car,” he said, and pointed with one very long finger.

  Chapel looked where Bogdan had indicated. “Shit,” he said.

  It was the car that had been following them, the one carrying the two SNB men, and it had just merged into the traffic circle, about ten cars behind them. Chapel was certain it was the same car because all the paint was scraped off its front quarter panel.

  “This guy’s persistent,” Chapel said.

  “Perhaps we should split up,” Nadia said. “I can go to the meeting with my vory. You can lead these men away, get them off my tail.”

  Chapel thought of when she’d suggested something similar in Bucharest—when she’d said she could go collect Bogdan on her own. “You asked for a svidetel. A witness,” he told her. “We go together or not at all.”

  “All right,” Nadia said. She scanned the road ahead. “Up there, do you see? A little street, one where we can—”

  She stopped speaking without warning, and Chapel wondered what was going on until, a half second or so later, he heard the sirens.

  Coming up the street she’d indicated, their nearest escape route, was a police car with flashing lights.

  Chapel had no doubts that it was coming for them.

  TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 17, 13:51

  “Can they arrest us for shaking our tail?” Chapel asked.

  “Not for that, no,” Nadia said. “At least—they shouldn’t. This is supposed to be a game we play, there are supposed to be informal rules . . . but if they have some other excuse, if we broke traffic laws, even—”

  “In other words, if we let that police car pull us over, we’re dead,” Chapel said. Once they were in an Uzbek police station, it wouldn’t take long at all for their cover story to fall apart. And once the authorities knew they were using false identities, it would not be a huge jump to assume they were foreign spies.

  Chapel craned his neck around, looking in every direction. The traffic was packed tightly around them. They might thread their way around the cars on their scooters, they might reach another side street with no police car on it, but it would take time, and they needed to move now.

  Of course, there was another option. “Nadia,” he said. “Follow my lead, okay?”

  He didn’t wait for confirmation. He twisted his handlebars around and curved around the front of the car on his right, wincing as the driver sounded his horn right in Chapel’s ear. He ignored the noise and gunned his throttle, sending his scooter shooting at right angles to the road. There was a nasty bump as he jumped over the curb and up onto the sidewalk beyond. Before him raised the long curved wall of the stadium, set back from the road by a broad plaza where people were lounging on benches and soaking up the sun. The plaza was lined with rough bricks that made his scooter vibrate alarmingly, but Chapel just tightened his grip on his handlebars and opened his throttle as wide as it would go.

  Ahead of him pedestrians screamed and jumped out of his way. The scooter had a pathetic little horn that made a weak tooting sound every time he slapped it. He made liberal use of it anyway as he roared across the plaza. In his mirrors he saw Nadia behind him, Bogdan’s face pressed down into her neck.

  Up ahead, a flight of broad stairs led down toward the main gates of the stadium. Chapel took them at speed, bouncing up and down on his seat, the bones of his skull feeling like they were scraping against each other every time the scooter dropped onto a new step.

  The gates ahead were closed, but a walkway led around the curve of the stadium, down at the bottom of the stairs. He leaned to one side and shot by the gates, headed roughly back the way they’d come. There were fewer people down there on the walkway, but there was less room to maneuver, too—Chapel was frankly terrified he was about to run down somebody’s decrepit grandmother inching her way along with a walker. Luckily the few people he might have hit were able to scurry out of his way.

  On the far side of the stadium was another set of stairs, leading up toward sunlight and another traffic-packed street. Chapel steered up those steps and heard his little engine whine and his wheels squeak as they tried to gain purchase on the upward grade. For a second it looked like the scooter just wouldn’t have enough power to get up those steps, but then his front wheel found traction and launched him upward, barely faster than he could have climbed the steps on foot, but it worked.

  At the top of the steps was another plaza, not quite as wide as the first one. He zoomed across it, barely aware of the people there, and into the traffic on the far side. More horns, more angry drivers, but in a second he was across the street and headed into an alleyway.

  Nadia came up beside him and gestured for him to turn left at the end of the alley. Together they burst out into a street that was nearly empty, a narrow canyon between two blocks of apartment buildings. The fronts of the buildings were painted in rainbow colors, stripes of red and orange and blue that disoriented him for a second. He dropped back and followed Nadia as she headed toward an intersection ahead.

  Even before they got there, Chapel heard sirens closing in.

  Damn. He’d really thought his little stunt was going to get them free of the pursuit. At least they’d left the SNB car behind.

  Maybe there was no other way than to split up. Maybe he should try to lead the police away, let Nadia escape and get to her meeting. Of course, on his own he wouldn’t be able to resist the police if they caught him. He could be signing his own death warrant if he split off. Still, the mission was important enough—

  Up ahead a traffic light had just turned green and the few cars on the street were surging forward. Nadia, however, pulled up to the intersection and stopped, putting h
er feet down to stabilize her scooter.

  Chapel looked back and saw a police car turn into the block behind them. Its lights flashed across the multicolored apartment blocks, making them shimmer with light.

  “What are you doing?” Chapel asked.

  Nadia took a deep breath. “Be ready,” she said.

  Bogdan tapped wildly at his MP3 player, working its controls like they were piano keys.

  Behind them the police car was maybe fifty yards behind, and gaining.

  “What do you—” Chapel began. He didn’t have time to finish his question.

  Nadia gunned her throttle and shot forward. Chapel raced after her. The police car was still accelerating, closing the gap behind them. Then the traffic light changed to red.

  It was too soon. The light had just changed to green a few seconds ago. The drivers in the busy cross-street accepted it much faster than Chapel did, however. Even before he’d cleared the intersection, they started nosing forward, filling the space behind him with a wall of metal.

  The police car didn’t have a chance to stop in time. Chapel heard a terrible crunch of metal smashing into metal. Behind him he heard the police car’s siren wail in a much higher pitch for a moment, then fall silent abruptly.

  Nadia laughed as she sailed down the nearly empty street beyond the intersection. She turned right into the forecourt of an apartment complex, a little space where the residents stored their bicycles and their trash cans. She stopped, pried Bogdan’s arm off her waist, then jumped off her scooter. She was taking off her helmet when Chapel reached her a second later.

  “Nice timing,” he told her. A little too nice, he thought.

  “Come,” she said. “From here we can go on foot. It’s not far to the meeting place.”