The Hydra Protocol

by David Wellington

  Hollingshead took off his glasses, presumably to polish them offscreen. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Marshal Bulgachenko turned in his resignation a few days ago. And then . . . well, there’s no pleasant way to say this. His body was found the next morning, floating in the Neva River.”

  “He is . . . dead? Konstantin? Dead?” Nadia asked. She put her hands over her face and turned away from the screen. “No, please, it cannot be so. It cannot! He was . . . he was a father to me, do you understand?”

  “I’m sorry you had to hear it like this,” Hollingshead told her. “But certainly you can see how that changes things.”

  She didn’t respond. She was too busy weeping.

  Chapel fought down an urge to reach for her, to comfort her. He needed to stop thinking those kind of thoughts, and he needed to stop right now.

  “Sir,” he said, “whatever we plan on doing, we need to do it fast. Every minute we wait the SNB gets closer to finding Mirza’s body—and when they do, they’ll put every resource they have into finding us.”

  “Understood, son. Agent Asimova, how did you get into this mess?”

  “I will tell you,” she said, through her hands. “I will tell you everything.”

  SOUTHEAST OF VOBKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 18, 19:12

  Nadia fell down on her knees in the sand. When she pulled her hands away from her face, Chapel saw that her tears, at least, had been real.

  “It was Konstantin Bulgachenko who recruited me, out of college,” she said.

  She looked up at Chapel, then at the tablet. She cleared her throat noisily and wiped at her cheeks. “Forgive me. This is a long story.”

  “Make it shorter,” Chapel growled. “We need to move.”

  Nadia lifted her shoulders, then let them drop. “I will try.”

  Then she started talking.

  “I studied nuclear engineering, in the college. I thought I would return home, to Yakutia, and work there for a mining company, digging uranium out of the ground to help build nuclear power plants. Instead the marshal came to see me. He took me to lunch. He was not a charming man, but . . . endearing in his way. He wore his uniform and his flat cap and he never smiled. He looked like something from a history book, from the Soviet days, and I was young enough then to find such a thing romantic. He said he had seen my records and he was very impressed. He said he had a job for me, one that would make a real difference in the world. I was young—a student still. That idea appealed to me. I thought I had a choice, that I could accept or decline his offer, but of course there was no choice at all. I had already been recruited. Otherwise he would never have been able to talk to me like he did that day.

  “He told me that after the fall of the Soviet Union, a large amount of military hardware had gone missing—stolen by the soldiers who once guarded it, sold on the black market. This was hardly news. I was young and thought I knew everything and I laughed . . . until he told me that some of that hardware, approximately one hundred and fifty kilograms of it, was plutonium. Enough to build perhaps twenty-fire hydrogen bombs. And he had no idea where it might be. I did not laugh then.

  “His organization, FSTEK, had been given the task of quietly finding that material and returning it to Russian control. He said they had already recovered some ten kilograms. He said he needed people like me, people who understood nuclear materials, to find the rest.

  “I did not know it during that lunch, but already I had become a state secret. I did not go home to my dormitory after that. I have never been back since. The marshal spirited me away immediately and cut me off from the world I knew. I was not allowed to speak with my friends or even my family. My things were taken to a new apartment in Moscow, a place that I did not leave for another six months without an escort.

  “Perhaps I should have been terrified. Instead, I was exhilarated. I had work to do, vital work—work that could save countless lives. Work to be proud of. Before he had used police techniques to find the nuclear material. The process was slow—it required too much human intelligence. With Geiger counters and satellites, I made the work much more efficient. In my first six months, I managed to locate another fifty kilograms of the missing plutonium—often, only a few grams at a time. In Kiev, we found some in an abandoned factory. More in a garbage pit near Krasnoyarsk. The worst was when we found sixty canisters, nearly three full kilograms, in a railroad siding outside of Moscow, hidden in among general stores and supplies for the maintenance of trains. The men who worked there, the railroad men, they had seen the canisters every day, had walked past them and never even wondered what was inside. One of the canisters was not properly shielded, and it . . . leaked. Most of the men I spoke to are . . . dead now.”

  She shook her head. “This was our worst discovery. It was not, however, the most dangerous. We found two kilograms were sitting in a warehouse in Bucharest. We tracked the men who had moved the plutonium to that warehouse. We found they were gangsters, the worst kind of criminal. And that they had a buyer—a man known to have affiliations with North Korea. The material had to be recovered, at any cost.

  “We could not simply go there and take it away from them. We had no authority outside the borders of Russia. We needed someone who could infiltrate the gang and steal the material. This is when I became a true operative. I begged Marshal Bulgachenko to allow me to go, personally, to recover the material. He did not wish to agree. He thought of me as a child still, a little girl, incapable of such a thing. I did my best to persuade him I was the right one for the job. In the end I believe he relented only because I already knew all the details. Choosing another agent would mean briefing them, telling them secrets that were vital to state security.

  “I received intensive training before the mission began. I took a crash course in the Romanian language. I learned how to fire a gun, though I was never very good at that—no marksman, certainly. I was given combat training, hand-to-hand fighting techniques and the like, by a man who had been a trainer for the Spetsnaz, our special forces. That was the hardest part: day after day of exercises, of sparring and then fighting with blunted knives. Every night I would come home to my bed bruised and sore in new places, desperately tired, but I would have to stay up to read more intelligence reports, more daily updates on the Romanian gang.

  “Jim, you have heard some of the actual mission. I went to Romania, where the transfer was to take place. There I found Bogdan. He was in desperate trouble, about to be arrested for sedition. The sentence would be death. In exchange for his life—I do not know how it was arranged, someone made a deal—in exchange for immunity, he agreed to hack into the files of the gang, and of the buyers.

  “When Bogdan told me where the exchange was to be made, in a parking structure in Bucharest, I went there with twenty men, all of them highly trained soldiers. Things . . . went wrong. The gangsters were ready for us somehow; they were armed with machine guns. The buyers came with their own security. There was a firefight that lasted for nearly ten minutes, and at the end only I and two of my soldiers remained standing. All of us were wounded.

  “There was no time . . . the local police were closing in. The gangsters had reinforcements coming. I did not have time to think things through. I made . . . I made a very bad mistake. The plutonium was in a bag, a kind of duffel bag with lead shielding. I picked it up and carried it from that place. I had to make my way most carefully out of Romania, often by hitchhiking or stowing away on trains. I could not allow myself to be caught by police, you see—not with what I was carrying. For six weeks I never let that bag out of my sight, not until I was back in Russia. I took it to an FSTEK facility and there, finally, I turned it over to technicians who could dispose of it properly.

  “They opened the bag and took out the plutonium and I thought I was done, that my mission was over and a success. It was only then one of the technicians—he was dressed in a full hazard suit, and he would only touch the bag with lead-lined gloves. He looked at me with eyes that were . . . very sad. He opened th
e bag and showed me the lead lining, the shielding that had protected me from the radioactivity over those six weeks.

  “He showed me there was a hole in it. During the firefight, a bullet had pierced the bag. Cut almost clear through the lining.

  “For six weeks I had been carrying a bag full of the most toxic substance the world has ever seen. For six weeks, it had been poisoning me. And I never knew.”

  SOUTHEAST OF VOBKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 18, 19:33

  “You were—irradiated?” Chapel asked, barely able to believe her story.

  “The lining was not pierced entirely. If it had been, I would have died within hours of picking up that bag. As it was I only received a moderate dose of radiation.”

  “How much?” Chapel asked.

  She shrugged. “Perhaps twenty, maybe thirty millisieverts per day.”

  Chapel was unsure what that meant.

  Nadia looked him straight in the eye. “It was the equivalent, say, of having my whole body x-rayed once per day. For more than forty days in a row. It is a . . . significant exposure.”

  She stood up and went over to the tablet hanging in the tree. She spoke directly to Hollingshead as she went on. “I was examined by many doctors. They told me there was one immediate effect: I was now sterile. The radiation had destroyed all my eggs. I will never have children, now. But this seemed less important to them than the other effect, that I had increased my possibility of dying from cancer at an early age. I asked them for specifics, but they said with cancer there was no such thing, that one could never predict what would happen. I asked for an estimate, a guess. I said, what is the percentage chance that I will die of a cancer before I am forty?

  “They said, ninety-nine percent.”

  “Nadia,” Chapel said, though he had no idea what he would say next. How do you comfort someone who’s gotten news like that?

  She ignored his sympathy. “I went to Marshal Bulgachenko and told him all this and he wept. He had a bottle of vodka in his desk, still sealed. He said it had been given to him by Andropov. He opened it that night and we talked for a very long time, talked and drank. I could not seem to get drunk, or perhaps not drunk enough. The marshal said I should retire from FSTEK, retire and move somewhere pretty and end my days looking at water. The sea, the ocean . . . I said no. I said instead I wished to use what time remained to me to do something vital. Something useful.

  “The marshal told me he had something in mind. It was very, very secret but we had finished off his special bottle by then and I think he would have told me anything. He spoke of Perimeter that night, and it was the first time I ever heard of it. He told me what it had been designed to do. He told me of the great shame around it, that so much of it was forgotten, untouchable. He said it had long been his dream to dismantle Perimeter.

  “At first I thought nothing of it, that this was some Cold War fable, that it did not matter to us today. But when I sobered up, when I went back to work, I did some research. I found little, but enough to intrigue me. I dug deeper, and at every turn it seemed the system was more crazy, more dangerous. In the end I became obsessed. I discovered that the greatest secret, Perimeter’s forgotten location, had been kept in a certain document, a list of secret facilities known only to the KGB. This list was destroyed, no copies remained . . . but one. One in a KGB library no one had visited since the fall of the Union. I tracked it down. I held it in my hand, the map reference, and committed it to my memory. This would be the last thing I would do, the thing that would justify my sacrifice. I would destroy Perimeter.

  “I went back to the marshal and told him what I’d found. I said I was ready, that I would do this thing in the time I had. I was exultant. Only then did he tell me it was impossible. Already I had met some resistance. There were people in the FSB—this is the successor to the KGB—who felt that any change, any diminishment in the nuclear arsenal was a sign of weakness and therefore unacceptable. There were others whose reputations, whose careers, would be damaged if it were revealed how they had let Perimeter get away from them.” Nadia shrugged. “I had been threatened. I thought nothing of it. I was going to die young; why worry about some menacing fools? But the marshal knew better. He understood interdepartmental politics better than I. FSTEK is an autonomous body, on paper. In reality it is subordinate to FSB. Despite all I had done, all I had achieved, he could not get approval for this mission.”

  “I notice, young lady, that it didn’t stop you,” Hollingshead said.

  “At first, I obeyed. I was no rebel, to go against the entire intelligence community for one personal crusade. But then something changed . . . I was receiving monthly physicals. Monthly CT scans, to check my bones, my pancreas, my liver, for any sign of cancer. Six months ago one of these scans came back positive. It is in me, now. It is deep inside my organs, where it is impossible to cut out. The doctors called me in, spoke with me at great length. Before they could barely look at me. Now they found me fascinating. I would be a wonderful test subject—physically fit, perfectly healthy except for this one thing. I had a good chance of surviving some new experimental treatments. Chemotherapies untried before. New advances in, of all things, radiation therapy. Hope blossomed inside me—how could it not? I thought perhaps the last few years had all been a terrible dream. That my impending death might be averted.

  “That was when they explained. No, they could not save me. They could extend my life by a few years, perhaps, years I would spend in a bed, in constant nausea and agony, years of suffering instead of a relatively quick death.

  “I could only stare at them. They were ghouls—I could see in their eyes they were already mentally carving up my corpse to see how well their treatments had worked. I . . . assaulted one. Struck him down right there in the hospital. He was more surprised than hurt. Did I not wish to give myself to the glory of medicine, to the advancement of the healing arts? Did I not wish for my tragedy to have some meaning, some purpose?

  “I went to the marshal again, this time with a plan in my hands. A document describing how I would defeat Perimeter, what I still required—the one-time pad—how I would acquire it. I had written the plan in such a way that two or three people could make it happen, and no one need to know it was being done until it was accomplished. The same plan I presented to you, Director. The plan we have followed so far.

  “The marshal tried to stop me, but I was done with men telling me what could be accomplished. What was possible. What was politically viable. Enough, I told him. I go to Washington with or without your blessing. Maybe the Americans would laugh at me, maybe they would arrest me. But still I would go.

  “The marshal was the man who made me what I am. He understood me like no one else. He could see in my eyes that I would do this thing. Still he did not say yes—but he did not stop me from going to America. From contacting you. I had no idea if he would back me the way I hoped, even when I met with you the first time. I did not know what would happen. When you said yes, well . . .”

  She shook her head. “Here we are. You know the truth, now. You know what I have done, and why. I will go on to Kazakhstan with or without Jim. I will finish what I started. They tell me I have only months left, months of good health and then a quick decline. They tell me the end will be painful if I do not seek medical treatment, but that it will be over in a week or so.” She looked back over her shoulder at Chapel. “I will not get a second chance at this.”

  Chapel just stood there, uncertain what he should do or say.

  But that was Hollingshead’s job, after all.

  “Young lady,” the director said, “that’s quite a story. But it doesn’t change a damned thing.”

  SOUTHEAST OF VOBKENT, UZBEKISTAN: JULY 18, 19:49

  Nadia stared at the tablet, her face a mask of disbelief.

  Hollingshead had the decency to look away as he explained himself. “This has already gone too far. You’ve implicated the United States in what could turn into an international incident. You tricked us into conspiring with you
when you had no national credentials. That’s simply unconscionable. Your actions have led to the death of an Uzbek government official—”

  “A butcher of his people,” Nadia pointed out.

  Hollingshead shook his head. “I’ll lose no sleep over Mirza’s demise. But the government of Uzbekistan will not just forget about him. They’ll want to know why he died, and if they turn to me for answers, I will have none.”

  “Then I will go on alone, as I say—”

  “Not without my authorization,” Hollingshead told her. “Damnation, girl, don’t you see? They saw Chapel in Tashkent. They photographed him. If you’re caught in Kazakhstan, if the Russians catch up with you, they will get Chapel’s name from you one way or another. They will trace him back to us. So I cannot allow you to proceed alone. If necessary, I will order Chapel to detain you, by force.”

  “Sir,” Chapel said, though he wasn’t sure if he was trying to protest or acknowledging that he was ready to follow orders.

  “But what then? Will you turn me over to the FSB who hunt me, with an apology? Will you tell the whole world how you were duped by a rogue agent?” Nadia demanded, her eyes flashing.

  “If that were necessary, yes, I would do exactly that. I would hand you to them on a silver platter if I thought it would smooth things over.”

  “Knowing, as you must, what they would do? How they would torture me, until they were satisfied they knew everything? How then they would put a bullet in my brain, and bury me in an unmarked grave?” Nadia said.

  “Yes,” Hollingshead said, almost growling. “In a heartbeat.”

  Sometimes Chapel forgot that the director’s bow ties and his thick glasses and his genial manner were a carefully studied act, meant to disarm the people he spoke with, to get them to trust him. Sometimes he forgot that before Hollingshead had become a spymaster, he’d been an admiral in the United States Navy. And that you didn’t get to that rank in the armed forces without having solid titanium vertebrae. Chapel found himself standing at attention, unconsciously adopting the posture of a soldier in the midst of an old-fashioned full-on ass-chewing.