The Hydra Protocol

by David Wellington

  Hollingshead came over and grasped Chapel’s hands. He always took the left hand as well, as if to acknowledge the artificial arm without being too obvious about it. “So very sorry, son, to hear about the, ah, bends and all that. Won’t you take a seat?”

  “Yes, sir, though I don’t intend to stay very long. I have an appointment in Brooklyn to keep.”

  Hollingshead’s face broke into a beaming smile that would have lit up any fallout shelter. He knew all about Julia, of course, and what Chapel hadn’t told him personally he would have heard from Angel. “You are a very lucky man, Captain Chapel. You couldn’t have picked a better helpmeet.”

  “I am blessed, sir, it’s true. I know it’s premature, but I hope you’ll come to the wedding.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it, son, not for rubies or pearls.”

  Chapel grinned. “Just talking about it out loud like that, like it’s something that I need to put on my schedule . . . it still feels weird. But it should be official by tonight.” He shook his head in disbelief. “I admit, I’m a little nervous. What if she says no?”

  “Then my intelligence estimates will have been proven wrong.”

  Chapel started in surprise. “You didn’t—I mean, you haven’t—”

  “Just a small joke, son. No, I haven’t had DIA analysts working out the likelihood of Julia Taggart becoming Mrs. Julia Chapel. Call it an intuition. Or rather, let’s say that I couldn’t think of two people I hold in higher regard, and better suited to a life of shared bliss. Maybe we should have that drink after all, to celebrate.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Chapel said, his grin returning, “but I’d just as soon get this debriefing over with and get on the train to New York.” He reached in his pocket and took out the little black book. He riffled through it, seeing once more the grids of numbers and Cyrillic characters that filled each page. Then he handed it over. “I hope it’s worth the trouble it took to secure it.”

  Hollingshead took the book and tucked it into a pocket of his jacket. “It’s worth more than its weight in diamonds, believe me. You know what it is, of course.”

  That was a question, and maybe some kind of test. Chapel nodded. “It’s a one-time pad.” A codebook, in other words, containing the key to a cipher that theoretically couldn’t be cracked. The captain of the Kurchatov would have consulted those grids when sending secret messages back to his superiors in Russia. Each character in his plaintext message was transposed with a character from one of those grids, using basic modular addition. On the other end of the transmission, in a Kremlin basement perhaps, someone else would have an identical pad and be able to decrypt the message. If the characters in the grids were truly random, and if nobody else had access to the pad, the message could never be decrypted since the cipher was unique to that particular message.

  One-time pads had been used by both sides throughout the Cold War. They had only been replaced by the advent of computer cryptography. The Kremlin and the Pentagon had relied on them for decades, but unfortunately they weren’t very practical. One problem was that the receiver of the message needed to know which page of his own pad to use when deciphering the message, or even which pad to use if more than one existed. In real-world use, the KGB had ended up using what were essentially one-day pads—the same cipher matrix being used for every coded transmission sent in a twenty-four-hour window. There was also the difficulty of making sure every submarine commander, say, received a new pad every month—a tricky bit of logistics when some submarines went on six-month-long cruises and rarely called in at friendly ports.

  Because of these issues, one-time pads had fallen out of use—as far as Chapel knew, no major intelligence operation had used them in years.

  Which raised the question of why Hollingshead wanted this pad.

  “Completely useless, of course,” Chapel said.

  “Of course,” Hollingshead said, though a mischievous grin threatened to crack his face in half.

  “Even if codebooks like that were still in use—even if the Russian Federation used the same sort of codes as the Soviet Union used to, which they don’t—this pad would still be obsolete. The codes in there haven’t been used for twenty years.”

  “Indeed.” Hollingshead took off his glasses and started polishing them with a silk handkerchief. “Hardly seems worth putting the life of my best agent at, um, risk, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I follow my orders, sir,” Chapel replied. “I don’t question them. Usually.”

  Hollingshead nodded in excitement. “I’ve got quite the plan for this little book, son. It’s a shame I can’t tell you what it is.”

  Chapel smiled at his boss. “The suspense might kill me,” he joked. But he understood. The one-time pad was meant for some incredibly secret mission, something truly vital to national security. He desperately, desperately wanted to know why Hollingshead thought it was good for something.

  But he was never going to find out.

  Chapel wasn’t going on the next mission. He was going to get married instead. He’d already asked for, and received, a leave of absence while he went home and proposed to his girlfriend. Hollingshead had been overjoyed when he heard the news.

  “She’s a lovely girl, and you’re a very lucky man,” Hollingshead said, standing up to come shake Chapel’s hands again. “I couldn’t be happier for you. Well, ah, that’s not strictly true.”

  “Oh?” Chapel asked, surprised.

  “Well. I have a, ah, well, not a reservation. Call it my one regret. It’s simply that I wish I could use you for this mission. It’s perfect for you. But that doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters but the joy you’re going to deliver to that wonderful woman. Have you thought about where you’re going to honeymoon? I’m partial to Barbados.”

  “It’s a little premature to think about that, sir.”

  “Of course, of course,” Hollingshead said. He beamed from ear to ear. “Well, take all the time you need. I’ll see you when you get back.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Chapel said. He stood up and saluted.

  The director saluted back. “If anyone deserves a little time off, it’s you, son. Enjoy it. Enjoy it as much as you possibly can.”

  “I will,” Chapel said. He couldn’t help but burst into a smiling laugh. “I really will.”

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: JUNE 13, 15:46

  Chapel drove to Manhattan, where he stopped off at the jeweler’s and picked up the ring. It was beautiful, gleaming in its little box. He paid the man and headed south, across the Manhattan bridge, into the heart of Brooklyn. Toward home.

  Toward Julia.

  He parked the car outside their little apartment building and looked up at their windows. They shared one floor of a brownstone, just a couple of rooms, tiny by the standards of anyone who’d never lived in a New York apartment. There had been some very good times in those little rooms.

  He caught a flash of movement behind one of the windows. A glimpse of red hair as Julia walked past. She was up there. Good.

  He realized he’d been sitting in the car for ten minutes. Was he nervous? He didn’t feel nervous. Mostly he felt a little numb.

  He headed up the stairs with his good hand clutched tightly around the ring box in his pocket. He had to force himself to let go so he didn’t crush it. When he got to the door, he tried the knob and found that it was unlocked. That was a little weird—Julia, like most New Yorkers, kept her doors locked when she was home. But it didn’t mean anything. He needed to stop thinking like a spy. He turned the knob and stepped inside. There was a little end table next to the door, a place to put keys or plug in a phone. He took the ring box out of his pocket and laid it there, so that he wasn’t holding it when he first saw her. “Julia?” he called.

  For a second, only silence answered him. Then he heard her call back, “In here.”

  We walked back to the bedroom, where she waited for him in the doorway.

  She had never looked more beautiful. Her red hair fell around her shoulders and down t
he back of the thin black sweater she wore. Her eyes were clear and bright. She smiled at him, though it looked like a tentative kind of smile. Well, they hadn’t left things very well when he headed down to Miami. In fact, he’d had to walk out in the middle of a pretty nasty fight. Maybe she was still angry.

  “I’m back,” he said.

  “I can see that. I didn’t expect you back so soon. Normally you’re gone a lot longer.”

  The fight they’d had—all the fights they’d had—were about the same thing. Chapel couldn’t tell her what he did when he went to work. He couldn’t even tell her when he was leaving, or when he was coming back. He would just disappear, usually before she woke up in the morning, and reappear when everything was done. Typically he showed up with a new scar or two.

  Every single time he left her sitting in this apartment, wondering if he was ever going to come back, or if he was already dead and she would never get to hear about it. He could never promise her he would be alive from one day to the next. For someone like Julia, it was unbearable. She wanted children. She wanted to grow old with him. He couldn’t promise her anything like that.

  But maybe he could give her something else.

  “I needed to be back here.” He took a step closer and she moved sideways, blocking the doorway to the bedroom, as if she was hiding something. He could see around her, though. He could see a suitcase lying on the bed.

  She wouldn’t meet his gaze.

  “Were you going out? Damn,” he said. “I was really hoping to get some time with you. There’s something I want to talk about.”

  “I’m headed out, yeah.” She did look at him then, and her face fell. “Jim, you look terrible. You’re pale and your eyes are bloodshot. Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” he said. The bends had left him a little weak, but the doctors had said he would make a full recovery in a few days. “Listen, I need to say—”

  “No,” she said. “No, stop. I can’t do this.”

  He was confused. “Do what?”

  “Pretend like everything’s normal.”

  Chapel’s heart sank in his chest. What was going on?

  “I thought it would be easier if I just left. If I wasn’t here when you got back. I thought maybe we could do this on the phone, or . . . I don’t know. By e-mail.”

  “Do what?”

  She sighed and shrank in the doorway. “I’m going to stay with a friend for a while. Please don’t ask me which one. I need to get away. I need—”

  She couldn’t seem to finish her sentence. She shook her head and ducked into the bedroom. Grabbing the handle of the suitcase, she dragged it off the bed. It looked like it was too heavy for her.

  “Let me help you,” he told her. “The car’s just downstairs.”

  Her eyes went wide, and she reached out to put a hand on his chest.

  “Jim,” she said. “Jim.” Tears filled her eyes. “Jim, don’t you get it? I’m leaving you.”

  Blood rushed in his ears. For a second the world’s worst headache burst through his skull. When he could see again, he realized she’d moved past him, dragging her suitcase into the front room.

  He chased after her. “No, no, I know we were fighting, I know it was worse than usual, but—”

  “I can’t do it!” she shouted at him. “I can’t talk about this. I have to go!” She turned around and stared at him as if she were daring him to say something.

  “We can figure this out,” he promised. “I can—I can talk to my boss—”

  “No,” she said. “Please don’t.”

  “Just hear me out! I can quit my job.” When she said nothing, he nodded, eager, because he knew this would fix things. “I can quit. I can stop doing this.”

  “No, you can’t,” Julia said, wiping at her tears. “You shouldn’t.”

  “I can. I really can. I can go back to my old position. My desk job. Don’t you see? I’ll be home every night. You’ll always know where I am. And nobody will be shooting at me, ever again. I did this for—”

  “You hated that job. You said they gave it to you because they felt bad about how you lost your arm. You said that job was killing you.”

  He closed his eyes. “For you, it would be worth it,” he told her.

  She stood there and wept for a while. Let big racking sobs climb up through her chest and out of her eyes and her throat. He reached for her but she pushed him away.

  Eventually, when she’d recovered a little, she wiped clots of mascara off her cheeks with the balls of her thumbs. And then she shook her head.

  A silence followed, as if all the air in Brooklyn had turned to ice and nothing, anywhere, moved or made a sound. Chapel thought his heart even stopped beating. He wanted to go to her, to hold her in his arms and tell her everything was going to be okay, but he didn’t dare.

  “You would resent me for the rest of your life,” she said. “No. I won’t let you.”

  “It’s my decision.”

  “No, it isn’t. It shouldn’t be.” She grabbed the handle of the suitcase. “I called a taxi—you can keep our car, at least, for now. We’ll . . . we’ll talk, and figure out who gets what. But let me call you first. Okay? Don’t call me until I call you first.”

  Chapel shook his head in confusion. “Are you saying you don’t love me anymore?”

  Julia laughed, a thick noise with all the mucus in her throat. “If I didn’t love you, it wouldn’t destroy me when you went away. But it does, and I can’t take it anymore. I have to go.” She turned toward the doorway, the suitcase’s wheels rumbling on the hardwood floor. She put her hand on the doorknob. Turned it. Pulled the suitcase closer to her and picked it up with both hands to get it over the threshold.

  He tried to think of something to say, but there was nothing. Nothing anywhere inside of him that could change her mind, and he knew it.

  Before she left she glanced down at the end table by the door. He saw the moment when she saw the ring box sitting there.

  She turned to look at him.

  “Oh, Jim, you didn’t . . . you didn’t think I would . . .”

  She made a noise then like she was gagging, like she might throw up from choking on tears. It was a horrible painful noise, and he couldn’t bear it; it made him want to curl up and die because he’d made her feel that way. He couldn’t stand up anymore but he couldn’t fall down—his knees were locked and he felt like he was nailed to the floor.

  He didn’t see her close the door behind her. He only heard the doorknob turn and the latch inside it catch as it clicked shut.

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: JUNE 13, 21:06

  Eventually it got dark.

  The light on the apartment walls turned briefly orange, then blue, then faded away. It never truly got dark in Brooklyn, but with the curtains drawn the room grew dim. It was almost a relief. But Chapel got up anyway and found the lamp. It was lying on the floor, where he’d knocked it down. He switched it on where it lay, and a cone of yellow light spread across the bedroom. It lit up the sheets and pillows where he’d torn them off the bed and thrown them on the floor.

  He’d used his left arm, his artificial arm. He’d felt like some kind of machine, tearing up his home, but that was exactly how he’d wanted to feel. A destructive machine that didn’t think, didn’t feel.

  The light lit up the bottle of bourbon lying on the floor, making it glow with its own amber light. The bottle he’d fetched from the kitchen and then never opened because he knew it wouldn’t help. The light glinted dully from the white backs of the pictures he’d grabbed and flipped through and then turned facedown on the floor like cards because he couldn’t stand to look at what they showed. Even a hint of red hair or a corner of a lip or a single eye looking back at him from those pictures would have been too much.

  The light showed him where his phone lay, after he’d thrown it at the wall. He reached out and picked it up. The screen had cracked right across, but it still lit up when he entered the passcode.

  Her number was there in
his contacts. He’d opened up that contact and stared at it a dozen times, come very close to pressing the call button, and then stopped himself. She’d said not to call.

  Maybe that had been a trick. Maybe she expected him to call anyway, and if he did, he would pass the test and she would know she’d been wrong, that it could work, that he still loved her enough to chase after her . . .

  Or maybe she’d been completely honest with him, which was much more like the woman he knew. Maybe if he tried calling her that would be it, the last straw. Maybe there was still a possibility of her coming back but only if he played by her rules . . .

  Or maybe she wouldn’t even pick up. Maybe his call would go through to her voice mail, and he would have to listen to her recorded greeting, the one where she was laughing because when she recorded it he was kissing her neck . . .

  By the time he’d finished thinking through those possibilities—for the dozenth time—the screen went black again.

  She was gone. She was really gone.

  Repeating that to himself didn’t make it real, no matter how many times he thought it in his head.

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: JUNE 13, 23:39

  He tried to sleep. He didn’t bother getting up, he just grabbed a sheet from the floor and pulled it over himself.

  It smelled like her.

  Like Julia.

  He balled up the sheet and threw it across the room. It opened up in the air like a parachute and fell slowly to the floor. It made the whole room smell like her.

  He went in the kitchen and curled up on the tiles, which just smelled like floor wax.