Only then did he speak.
“Son, if she fooled you, well . . . she fooled me first.”
Chapel said nothing.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Hollingshead said, jumping up from his chair. “Come inside and sit down. I’m not a dragon you need to beard in its lair. Let me fix you a drink.”
It was then that Chapel realized the jovial professor act hadn’t been for his benefit at all. It had been Hollingshead’s way of attempting to deal with his own guilt and doubt. Once the drinks were poured and handed out, Hollingshead put his glasses back on and studied the contents of a manila folder for a while. “You accomplished all the tasks I set for you. You rendered Perimeter nonfunctional, and from all our chatter analysis it looks like they don’t even know what you did—which means they won’t know the damned thing is broken, so they won’t try to fix it. They think Asimova went to Aralsk-30 only to steal the codes, not to rejigger the computer.”
“So the system is really down?” Chapel had wondered about that. He only had Bogdan’s word that Perimeter had been sabotaged—the Romanian might have spent all that time at the terminal just playing Minesweeper or something.
“There’s really no way to tell, of course,” Hollingshead replied. “Ah, well, there is one way. We could nuke Moscow and see if their missiles all launch automatically.”
“Sir, with all due respect, I think that kind of testing would be counterproductive,” Chapel said.
It had been meant as a joke. Hollingshead laughed, though not very convincingly. “Asimova is also dead. I ordered that, as well, didn’t I?”
“Yes, sir.”
Hollingshead nodded. “I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. That I ordered the execution of that charming young girl. Of course, they never found her body. Baikal is the world’s deepest lake. It would take them years to search the bottom, to find her bones. I doubt they’ll make the effort.” He glanced at Chapel out of one eye, as if trying to catch him in some compromising facial expression.
There was nothing there for him to find.
“I watched the plane go down. I nearly drowned myself. There was no way for her to survive—even before the crash, she was dead, I think.”
Hollingshead nodded agreeably. “Case closed, then. The Russians don’t wish to talk about it—I suppose we do the same.”
“Very good, sir.”
“There are a couple of loose ends, of course, but we’ll just get those out of the way. There was a bit of a media to-do in Russia. A couple of Siberian journalists saw a military helicopter shoot down an unarmed civilian plane. There have been . . . inquiries. A man named Pavel Kalin, formerly a senior lieutenant of the FSB, has been stripped of his rank and forced to resign. He hasn’t been seen in nine days.”
“Is he dead, sir?” Chapel asked.
“No way to know. They may just be keeping him out of sight until the media flap blows over.” Hollingshead turned to a new page of his dossier. “Then there’s Bogdan Vlaicu, a Romanian national. He was detained by the authorities on July the twenty-eighth. Officially, he’s never mentioned again in any documents.”
Chapel closed his eyes. Bogdan hadn’t deserved what he got. Broken fingers—and the promise of a lot worse. Even if Kalin was out of the picture, somebody would have Bogdan now. Someone would be torturing him, trying to figure out what he’d done at Aralsk-30. He could still unravel the entire mission.
“We did, however, pick up a rather strange transmission from the Russian department of prisons,” Hollingshead said. “It appears a prisoner matching Vlaicu’s description was being transferred to a high-security facility outside of Magnitogorsk, under heavily armed guard. But when his transport arrived in that city . . . there was no one in the back.”
Chapel couldn’t help himself. He flinched in surprise.
“Apparently there was a computer error involved. The prisoner was put on the wrong vehicle or something . . . it’s unclear. What is known is that he’s now missing and presumed at large. Both Russia and Interpol have him on their most wanted lists, but no one’s reported a single clue as to his whereabouts. You couldn’t be any help in that investigation, could you, son?”
“Sir, I can honestly say I have no idea where he might go,” Chapel said. And for once in his life it was pure, unvarnished truth.
Go, Bogdan, go.
Hollingshead closed the folder. “Good enough. Finish your drink, then be on your way. I’ll have a new assignment for you soon—Angel will give you the details.”
Just like that.
Neat, clean, tied up in a ribbon.
Done.
Chapel finished his drink and turned to go. From behind him, before he could open the door, Hollingshead made a little noise of surprise, as if he’d just remembered something.
“Oh, son,” he said, “one thing—when Asimova handed you her phone, on the plane.”
“Sir?”
“You had all the Russian nuclear launch codes in your hand. That must have been a frightening prospect.”
“Yes, sir,” Chapel admitted.
“You know, if we had those codes now . . . well. There are a number of things we could do with them, you see. We could learn a bit from them, and in the case of an emergency they might come in handy.”
Chapel stood very still and thought for a moment. Thought about what he should say next. He had, of course, known the value of that smartphone. He’d known how much the Pentagon would like to have had it. He had known it was his duty as an officer of military intelligence to smuggle it out of Russia.
But nobody should have that power.
Nobody.
The smartphone—and its crucial SIM card—were at the bottom of Lake Baikal. The deepest lake in the world. They would stay there forever.
“When you fight a hydra, sir,” he told Hollingshead, “it may be tempting to let one of the heads grow back. But you can’t, can you?”
“No, son, no,” Hollingshead said. He shook his head and smiled, a little smile of self-deprecation. “No, you burn it down to the stump.”
“Exactly, sir,” Chapel said. And then he did leave.
EPILOGUE
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: AUGUST 19, 17:46
Julia Taggart closed up her office after her last consultation—a poodle whose nails had been clipped too short—and headed out the front door, intending to go home and . . . do something. Maybe there would be dinner involved. There would certainly be a television there. She watched a lot of TV these days, mostly just so her apartment wouldn’t sound so empty.
Before she could take a dozen steps toward the subway station, though, a man came walking up the street, waving and calling her name.
Her heart sank when she saw him. She knew him—they had met one time before.
“You’d better come inside,” she said, because she didn’t want anyone to see her talking to him in the street.
He was very tall and very thin, with short hair that managed to look messy. He wore a sweater vest and tie, even in the oppressive heat of August in New York City. He always smiled, even when it was ridiculously inappropriate.
He’d never given her his name. She knew perfectly well what that meant.
“I did what you said,” Julia told him. “I broke up with him. Why can’t you leave me alone, now? I haven’t even spoken to him in months.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, showing lots of teeth. “And your country appreciates that.”
He had said he would out Chapel. Reveal his identity to the media, release all the details of his missions to any reporter who wanted to listen.
For someone with as many enemies as Jim Chapel, that would be a death sentence.
He’d said the only way to make sure that didn’t happen was if Julia cut all ties with Chapel—refused to ever see him again.
She had demanded to know why. The little man said that her relationship with Chapel was a liability and could compromise his effectiveness. It was an obvious lie, but Julia had never gotten any mo
re out of him.
She had wrestled with whether or not to do what he said. In the end she’d decided she loved Jim enough to make the sacrifice. To keep him safe. She had walked away.
Done exactly what this man had asked.
“Well, then, what the hell do you want now?” Julia demanded, back in the office that was starting to warm up already since she’d turned off the air-conditioning. A bead of sweat started rolling down the back of her blouse. She didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be free of it all. Even before he’d come to her, she had wanted to be free, away from the web of secrets, the uncertainty, the never knowing. She might have broken up with Chapel on her own. It was the main reason she hadn’t told this little creep to go fuck himself.
She had to admit, though, she’d been scared. The kind of people Chapel worked for could do things to you. They could make you disappear, if you didn’t do what they said.
“Did Rupert Hollingshead send you?” she demanded now.
The little man’s smile just grew. “That’s kind of funny, actually. That you would think that. No, I’m with a different agency. I’m a civilian.”
“CIA?”
The little man just smiled. She wasn’t going to get an answer there.
“Listen, I just came by to show you something.” The little man took a piece of paper out of his pocket. It was folded untidily into a little, thick square. He unwrapped it fold by fold and then handed it to her. She saw it was a printout of a photograph. It was black and white and the resolution wasn’t very good, but she could make out what it showed all right.
It showed two people standing on what looked like a hotel balcony. One of them was Chapel, definitely. She didn’t know the other one—a woman with black hair, wearing a very skimpy nightgown.
In the picture Chapel was . . . touching her.
He had his hand in her panties.
Julia put a hand over her mouth, because she didn’t want the little man to see her reaction to the image.
“That was right after you dumped him,” the little man said. “Can you imagine? He couldn’t even wait for a decent interval.”
She threw the piece of paper back at him. “What the hell is your problem? Why would you show me this?”
“I just wanted you to know you made the right decision,” the little man said. Her anger seemed to surprise him. “I wanted you to see what kind of man Jim Chapel is.”
“Get out,” she said. “Get out! And never come back!”
The little man ducked his head—it wasn’t quite a nod—and headed for the door. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again,” he told her.
She just stared at him, her emotions so large they threatened to turn her inside out.
“I’ll be looking forward to it,” he said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © BY JENNIFER DIKES
DAVID WELLINGTON was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the city where George Romero shot his classic zombie films. The acclaimed author is most famous for his online zombie serial, the Monster Island trilogy, which was later published by Three Rivers Press. In 2006 he began serializing 13 Bullets, a vampire novel, at www.thirteenbullets.com. He lives in New York City.
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ALSO BY DAVID WELLINGTON
JIM CHAPEL MISSIONS
Chimera
“Minotaur”
“Myrmidon”
CREDITS
COVER DESIGN BY RICHARD L. AQUAN
COVER PHOTOGRAPHS: BACKGROUND © BY COLLABORATIONJB/ARCANGEL IMAGES;
MAN © BY STEPHEN MUCAHEY/ARCANGEL IMAGES
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE HYDRA PROTOCOL. Copyright © 2014 by David Wellington. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-224880-0
EPub Edition May 2014 ISBN 9780062248824
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