The Hydra Protocol

by David Wellington

  Chapel wrestled his way clear and scrambled to his feet. He could see Kalin reaching into his jacket pocket, maybe going for a weapon. If he went for Kalin, Chapel knew that would give the orderlies a chance to come at him from behind, so he ignored Kalin and dashed down the hall in the other direction.

  He heard shouting behind him, but he ignored it. He came to the junction in the corridor, the place where it met the hallway that followed the curve of the building. Where would the stairs be? He’d seen them when he was brought here for the first time, but now he couldn’t remember—did he go left or right?

  He had to pick one. He went right.

  They’d made a mistake in letting him eat and sleep. He’d recovered some of his strength, and he had always been a fast runner. He dashed past a series of doorways, some of them open to show empty rooms. He remembered the bars on the windows, the impact-resistant plastic that covered them on the inside. No point entering any of those rooms. He needed to find an exit, a way out of the hospital altogether, if he had any chance of getting away.

  Up ahead the curved hallway opened into a sort of lobby. There were restrooms up there, and—yes—a bank of elevators. He had no time to wait for one of those, but he knew that generally where you found elevators you found emergency stairs as well.

  He got lucky. If the door to the stairs had been labeled in Russian, he would have just passed it by—he couldn’t read the Cyrillic characters. But the doorway also showed a pictogram of someone running down steps ahead of a cartoon flame. Fire stairs—perfect. He hit the door with his shoulder and found, as he’d expected, that it was locked. Fire safety was less important than not letting your inmates escape, he supposed. He hit the door again, and again.

  Behind him he heard rubber shoes chirping on the linoleum floor.

  He hit the door again and the lock snapped. Cheap manufacture, not meant for this kind of abuse. Chapel burst through the door and down a flight of concrete steps. It was dark in the stairwell but as he descended, taking the steps two and three at a time, automatic lights flickered on overhead.

  He had no idea even what floor he was on, or how many flights down the street was, but he didn’t care. He heard people yelling at each other above him and just kept hurtling down the steps, fast enough that if he missed a riser he would probably fall and break his neck.

  He didn’t fall. One flight down, dash across the landing, two flights, another landing, three flights—

  He heard someone moving below him, footsteps hurrying up the stairs toward him. He heard the squawk of a portable radio and knew the hospital’s security guards had been alerted about an escape attempt. Well, he would just have to improvise.

  Four flights down, five, and then he ran around a landing and saw a man below him, a man in a dark green uniform carrying a radio in one hand and a heavy wooden baton in the other. No gun.

  Chapel launched himself off the landing, into the air. He came crashing down hard on top of the security guard, whose body broke his fall. The man cried out, something in Russian Chapel didn’t understand. Chapel grabbed the baton out of the man’s hand and hit him a couple of times with it, hit him until he stopped protesting.

  Then he was off again. Down another flight. Another. Up ahead the stairs ended at a short corridor. At the end of that corridor was a sign covered in warnings and writing he couldn’t read. The door had a push bar and it looked like an alarm would sound if it was opened. It had to be an emergency exit to the street.

  If he could get through that door, if Chapel could get out into the world, he could count on his training for what to do next. Find some clothes, get some money, find some way to contact Varvara and her vory friends, find a way out of Russia—

  He hit the push bar at full speed, expecting the door to crash open, expecting to spill out into sunlight and chill morning air and freedom, and—

  The door didn’t open.

  The push bar moved under his weight. He could feel a latch inside the door retract, could feel the door shift in its jamb. But it wouldn’t open.

  It must have been sealed off somehow. Maybe the security detail had a way to lock it remotely, and they’d sealed off every exit from the hospital as soon as they heard an inmate was loose. Maybe the door was just rusted into place.

  Chapel hit the door with his shoulder, hit it again and again until he felt like he was going to break the bones in his one good arm. Still it wouldn’t open. He could hear people coming up behind him, hear them getting closer, and there was nowhere to go except back, right into their path. He hit the door with his left shoulder, probably damaging the sensitive electrodes implanted in his stump, but who cared, what did it matter, anything could be fixed—

  A needle sank deep into his neck. He whirled around, as ferocious as a tiger, to find Kalin right next to him. He thought he would kill the man then and there, bite his throat out if need be, gouge him in the eyes, smash his trachea . . .

  . . . but he suddenly . . . felt very . . . woozy. Very . . . weak.

  “Only a sedative,” Kalin said.

  Chapel sank down to the floor. He just wanted to sit down for a second. Then he would start fighting again.

  “Not too much,” Kalin said. The FSB man squatted next to him, to look in his eyes. “Half a dose, really. I need you conscious for what comes next.”

  MAGNITOGORSK, RUSSIA: JULY 27, 07:13

  Four orderlies, this time. Even though Chapel would have found it hard to stand under his own power. His head felt light, and even his teeth felt numb. Well. He’d won a small victory, then. A tiny, barely meaningful one.

  When they cut off his arm, it wasn’t going to hurt as much. The sedative would help kill a little of the pain.

  His eyes rolled around to look at Kalin, and he realized that he was being asked a question. He had floated away for a little while there. Kalin smiled and repeated his query, very slowly.

  “What is your name?”

  Chapel smiled back.

  “You do understand, don’t you? If you have a name, that makes you a human being. That gives you certain rights. I won’t be able to amputate your arm if you have rights. But only if you have a name. What is your name?”

  “Marie Antoinette,” Chapel told him.

  The drug didn’t take away the fear. It didn’t keep his fight-or-flight reflex from kicking in. Inside his head Chapel was screaming, begging to be released. But he could use the drug, use how sluggish it made his muscles. He could at least pretend to be composed.

  He promised himself he would hold out right until the last minute. That he wouldn’t give in until they strapped him down on the operating table. Who knew? Maybe this was all a bluff. Maybe Kalin wouldn’t go through with it.

  Yeah, right, he thought. He knew better. That wasn’t the way the world worked. Not his world, anyway.

  “How did you meet the terrorist Asimova?” Kalin asked.

  “She wasn’t a terrorist,” Chapel said. “She was a patriot. More of a patriot to Russia than you are, asshole.”

  Kalin beamed. “So you admit you knew her. This is getting us somewhere.”

  Damn, Chapel thought. He’d slipped up. Maybe the sedative had hit him harder than he’d thought.

  “How did you make contact with her? Who was her handler? Tell me this much and I will put off your surgery for a day. Come, come, my friend. What does it matter? She’s dead—there is no need to protect her now. How did you meet her?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  Kalin sighed in frustration.

  Well, now. There was another little victory. Chapel was really racking them up. He’d managed to annoy the senior lieutenant.

  Maybe he could force the man to raise his voice before they cut off his legs, too.

  The elevator doors opened on the basement level. Tiled walls and bad lighting. Not much longer now.

  “You can still save yourself. Your arm. How traumatic it must have been, when the first one came off. How you must have raged against God and your country, tha
t they would take so much from you. Do you really want to go through this again? Answer one question and this ends, right now,” Kalin told him.

  Chapel fixed him with a steely gaze. He was just about out of those. Out of defiance. He knew that when he saw the bone saw, when he heard it whine, he would lose. He would give in.

  But . . . not just yet.

  Every second he held out was worth it. Angel could erase a lot of data in a second. She could take his name out of a lot of databases.

  “We shall go back to the beginning,” Kalin said. “Just give me your name. Your real name.”

  The stress, the panic, was burning through the drug in his bloodstream. Chapel lifted his head—it felt a little easier now. “No,” he said.

  They passed by a dark window. Another one. The next window was already lit up. That was their destination.

  “Tell me your name,” Kalin asked, and he gave a friendly little laugh. “Just a name. Tell me your name, and I will send you back to your cell.”

  Through the lit window, Chapel could see the operating table. It was draped with a sterile white cloth now. There was a tray next to it, a tray holding instruments. And there was a man standing next to the table wearing surgical scrubs. Had they brought in a real surgeon for this? What doctor would actually perform an unnecessary amputation? What about the Hippocratic oath? What about First Do No Harm?

  Chapel knew perfectly well there were doctors in the world who would cut his arm off with no hesitation. He knew Kalin would have such a doctor on his payroll.

  “Your name,” Kalin said.

  Chapel closed his eyes.

  Kalin grabbed his face and squeezed until his eyes opened again.

  “Your name. Tell me your name.”

  Chapel heard a bell ring. Then he heard a bunch of people walking quickly over the linoleum floor. Getting closer.

  Kalin glanced backward, toward the elevator. What he saw there didn’t seem to please him. “Only one thing can help you,” he told Chapel.

  Inside the surgical theater someone turned on a bone saw. Chapel would have recognized that sound anywhere.

  This was it—the moment he’d promised himself he was allowed to surrender.

  “What is your name?” Kalin asked, shouting in his face.

  Chapel opened his mouth. He didn’t know what was going to come out—he wasn’t in control of his tongue anymore. He started making sounds, and he couldn’t fight it, couldn’t help himself.

  “His name,” someone else said, someone behind him, “is James Chapel. Captain James Chapel. He’s an American agent, working under direct orders from the Washington Pentagon.”

  Chapel and Kalin both turned to look.

  The man who had spoken wore the long greatcoat and cap of a Russian army officer. Judging by the epaulets and all the medals on his chest he was of high rank. He did not smile as he approached them.

  “He is also,” the officer said, “now under my authority.” He spoke some more, in Russian, far too fast for Chapel to make out any words. Kalin replied with surprise and anger, but then the officer held up a piece of paper and let Kalin read it.

  Whatever was written there made Kalin turn white as the snow in Siberia.

  He glanced over at Chapel, still being held up by the orderlies. Then he nodded, just once. The officer said something else, but Kalin didn’t respond. He put his notebook and his pen back in his pocket, and then he started walking toward the elevator.

  In the surgical theater, the doctor turned off his bone saw.

  MAGNITOGORSK, RUSSIA: JULY 27, 08:20

  It was . . . hard to believe.

  It was hard to accept that this wasn’t a trick. Some subtle ruse on Kalin’s part, a way to make Chapel talk. Somehow the Russians had learned who he was. Now that his name wasn’t so important, they were going to fool him into believing that it was over, that he wasn’t going to be tortured anymore. Then he would start talking because, why not? Surely this was some kind of trick.

  “I am Colonel Mikhail Valits, of the RVSN,” the soldier told him.

  “The Strategic Rocket Forces,” Chapel said. That was the branch of the Russian military that controlled all the land-based nuclear missiles. “You must know why I’m here, then, so you don’t need to ask.”

  Valits looked slightly confused. His English wasn’t as good as Kalin’s—Chapel could clearly see him sound out each word before he spoke it. Maybe he didn’t understand. “If you will please come with me, we have much to discuss.”

  “I’m a prisoner here. You don’t have to say please,” Chapel told him.

  Valits looked over at the orderlies and barked a question at them. They responded in Russian Chapel couldn’t follow, but one of them mimicked plunging a hypodermic needle into his own neck. They were telling Valits that Chapel had been drugged.

  “Konyechno.” Valits sighed, making it sound like the weariest word in the Russian language. He took Chapel’s arm and helped him walk. He led Chapel back to the elevator. They had to wait for it to return, since Kalin had already used it to leave the basement.

  Valits said nothing as they rode up to the ground floor of the hospital. He took Chapel down a short corridor and into a large room with lots of windows. It looked like some kind of lounge, maybe for the patients or perhaps the doctors who had once worked there. A boxy television set hung from a bracket in the ceiling, and there were a number of tables and stuffed armchairs scattered around the room. Everything looked dusty, and Chapel remembered wondering if he was the only inmate in the entire place.

  A woman was waiting for them when they entered. She was sitting at one of the tables, hunched over an expensive-looking tablet, maybe checking her e-mail. She wore a smart business suit, and her hair was piled up on top of her head. When she looked up, Chapel saw she wore tortoise-shell-rimmed glasses and had eyes the color of used dishwater. She was maybe thirty years old, but probably younger.

  And she was an American.

  He could tell, instantly. Something about how white her teeth were, how her hair was cut. Maybe just the corn-fed good looks or the fact that, unlike every Russian Chapel had met except Nadia, this woman didn’t look like she expected to be arrested at any second. Funny. He’d been away from his home country so long that other Americans had started to look strange to him.

  She didn’t smile as she stood up, and she held her tablet in one hand as she held out the other to shake his. She glanced at his stump and visibly shuddered. “One big horror show after another,” she said, and laughed, as if she had made a funny joke.

  Chapel didn’t mind. He was used to people being polite about his missing arm—too polite. They pretended like it didn’t bother them, or they tried to suppress their disgust. This woman didn’t seem to care if he knew how she felt.

  That was almost enough to make him like her on the spot. Of course, the fact that she was an American—and that her presence here almost proved that this wasn’t an elaborate ruse concocted by Kalin to make him talk—made him want to hug her and weep.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her. He wanted to laugh out loud. “Sorry—you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  The woman’s lips pursed in confusion. She looked over at Valits, but clearly she didn’t find any help there. She rolled her eyes and sighed theatrically. Her sigh sounded very different from Valits’s—it was the sigh of someone for whom boredom is the greatest pain imaginable.

  She sat back down and tapped at the screen of her tablet. “I’m Natalie Hobbes. I’m an attaché with the office of the United States Ambassador to the Russian Federation.” She glanced up at him. “Are you going to sit down, or what?”

  Chapel had been a prisoner for only a few days, but it had been long enough to make him think he needed to be asked first. He sat down, gratefully—the drug in his system still made him feel weak—and rested his hand on the table.

  “I’m supposed to check you out and give you something, and then Colonel Valits is going to show you a vid
eo. Shouldn’t take long. I hope not—I’m supposed to be at a poetry reading tonight back in Moscow.” She rolled her eyes again. “Arts outreach. I hate poetry, but you have to show a pretty face every once in a while to keep everybody happy.” She looked up at Valits. “Is there any coffee?”

  The colonel reared back as if she’d spit in his face. He was not the kind of man that fetched coffee for other people. “I’ll see what I can do,” he told her, and walked away.

  “God, I hate this part of Russia. The smog is thicker here than in L.A., I swear,” Hobbes said. She looked up at Chapel for a moment. “You don’t look so hot. Were you mistreated while you were detained here?”

  Chapel couldn’t help it anymore. He laughed—a full-body belly laugh, enough to make him double over and make tears run from his eyes.

  MAGNITOGORSK, RUSSIA: JULY 27, 08:47

  Natalie Hobbes stood up from the table. “I really don’t need this,” she said. “I think I’ll be going, now.”

  Chapel started to reach for her, to grab her and make her sit down again. She flinched away from him, though, and he held up his hand to show he meant no harm. “Please,” he said, “I apologize. I didn’t mean to—”

  “To freak me out?” she asked, looking very angry.

  “Right. Look, I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you’ve come for me. I thought I was going to . . . well, I thought I was going to be here for a very long time.” It was clear she had no idea what kind of hell he’d been through in the hospital. No point freaking her out more. “I know what I must look like. But, please, I’m ready to go. Right now. The sooner the better.”

  She squinted at him, her nose wrinkling upward, as if she had forgotten her glasses and was having trouble seeing him clearly. He realized it must be how she expressed confusion. “They didn’t brief you, did they? I’m not here to take you home. You’re still under arrest. You’re not going anywhere unless Colonel Valits says so.”