The Hydra Protocol

by David Wellington

  “Cybercrime,” Nadia said. “Romania’s principal export.”

  Chapel turned to stare at her.

  She shrugged. “Perhaps I overstate the case. But this is the European headquarters for e-mail scams and identity theft. There are little towns out in Transylvania—that’s northwest of here—where half the population is made up of arrows.”

  “Arrows?”

  “People who accept money in a scam, otherwise innocent people who sign for wire transfers and then hand over the money to gangsters. It makes it difficult to trace the money to the actual criminals. Cutouts, as we might say.”

  Chapel glanced at the cabdriver, but he seemed oblivious. “Cutout” was an espionage term for the people who transferred information from one party to another without knowing anything themselves. It wasn’t the kind of term you should bandy about when you were working undercover on an espionage mission.

  “Relax,” Nadia said. “Are you always so nervous on business?”

  “It keeps me in one piece. Well, technically, two.”

  She laughed. A lot of people got uncomfortable when he joked about his artificial arm, but not Nadia. Yet another reason to like her, even if he thought her attitude was far too relaxed for the serious work they were doing. Maybe, he thought, he should relax a little.

  Maybe when Perimeter was shut down and he was home again.

  “You’re tired,” she told him. “You didn’t sleep.”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. He would very much like, he thought, to go lie down somewhere.

  “Why don’t you head back to the airport and rest?” Nadia asked him. “I’ll collect our friend and bring him to you. It’s something I can do easily on my own.”

  Chapel shook his head. “No,” he told her. “You wanted a svidetel, an American witness.” He gritted his teeth. Was she trying to shake him off her trail? “That means I see everything you do. When this is done, when I vouch for you, I need to be able to say I was part of everything.”

  He was blatantly saying he didn’t totally trust her, but her reaction wasn’t what he expected. “Good,” she said, smiling. “I’ll be glad to have you along.”

  The taxi took them through the various sectors of Bucharest, circling around toward the Strada Lipscani, the street Nadia had asked for. Chapel thought for a second the driver was taking them on a scenic route but Nadia explained they were just avoiding a sort of perpetual traffic jam that clogged the center of town. The route took them past the old princely court of Vlad the Impaler, though Chapel couldn’t see much of it from his window. Eventually the taxi dropped them off on a long street lined with big gray-yellow buildings that Chapel did have to admit looked a little like Parisian houses. One of them had a huge mural on its side of a blue sky full of birds.

  They got out and Nadia paid the driver in leis, the local currency. Nadia must have brought them with her—he hadn’t seen her exchange any money at the airport. They headed down the block, passing an endless series of bars and nightclubs that were shuttered up for the morning. Half the places seemed to have English names—the Gin Factory, the Bastards Club—and the rest had names so strewn with accent marks and diacritics that he couldn’t even guess how they were pronounced. “Here,” Nadia said, outside of what looked like an unexceptional coffee bar. They stepped through the glass doors into blaring hip-hop so loud it made the air pulse. A dozen or so patrons were lounging on couches and low chairs, while a bored-looking attendant stood behind a counter lined with samovars. Nadia went up and grabbed a cup of tea without asking or paying. She spoke to the attendant, but the girl just sneered and went back to looking out the windows.

  Nadia didn’t seem bothered by the attitude. She headed for a chair and plunked herself down, throwing one long leg over an arm of the chair. She left the teacup sitting on the other arm and pulled out her phone and started texting.

  Chapel saw immediately why she thought he didn’t need to change his clothes. Half the patrons in the shop looked like her, or like male equivalents in T-shirts, American jeans, and flip-flops. They lounged across the chairs like sitting up had gone out of style. Standing near or behind each of them was a guy in a suit with the same haircut Chapel wore—short and vaguely military. The men in the suits flashed gold chains and big, chunky rings, but otherwise Chapel fit right in.

  Bodyguards, he thought. The men in the suits were there to protect the casually dressed kids. Some of the bodyguards drank tea. One was smoking a very nasty cigar. None of them spoke to anyone else. Instead they traded tough-guy looks that never went anywhere, while the kids ignored them, too busy working their phones.

  Chapel very much wanted to sit down, but he had to maintain his cover. Maybe one of the other bodyguards would sit, he thought. Maybe that would make it okay.

  “This guy knows we’re coming?” he asked.

  “Konyechno,” Nadia said, her voice almost drowned out by the blaring music. “Be still. Nobody talks here.”

  “I noticed. Was he supposed to be here to meet us?”

  “Yes. But that’s never how things work out, is it? Just hold your horses, as you say. And be quiet.”

  Chapel frowned. He stared at the posters on the walls, advertising various music events. One showed Barack Obama wearing Kanye West’s trademark louvered sunglasses. He couldn’t read the names of the bands.

  As tired as he was, he came very close to falling asleep on his feet. He barely noticed when a long car pulled up in front of the tea shop and two blond men got out. When they came in through the door, he stiffened, but so did all the other bodyguards.

  The two newcomers were dressed in suits, but they weren’t wearing any jewelry. One wore horn-rimmed glasses so smudged Chapel wondered if he could see anything. The other one had a neatly groomed mustache with just a hint of silver in it. He looked around the room, sizing everyone up, then came to stand in front of Nadia and Chapel. Without even glancing at her, he spoke to Chapel.

  “You ask for Bogdan?” he asked. “Yes? Yes?”

  Nadia sat up and smiled. “He sent you?”

  “Yes, yes, he sent me, and my friend. We take him to you now, okay? Yes?”

  There were a lot of things Chapel didn’t like about the situation, but he looked around for cues before he did anything. This could just be the way business was done in Bucharest. Nadia didn’t seem too concerned. But one of the bodyguards, a big guy with a dollar sign hanging from a golden chain, was watching the two blonds very carefully. His hands kept squeezing into fists, and then releasing. He knew who these newcomers were.

  Chapel caught the bodyguard’s eye. Maybe he could call on professional courtesy. He raised an eyebrow.

  The bodyguard shrugged and started to look away. Then he shook his head in a gesture Chapel understood immediately. These two were bad news, the kind you definitely did not want to get involved with.

  Nadia was standing up, reaching for her purse. Chapel took a step out from behind her chair, and the blond with glasses moved like he was Chapel’s reflection in a mirror, curving in to intercept him. As he did so his jacket swung open just a little, just enough for Chapel to see what was underneath.

  “Is okay, yes. We take you,” Mustache said. “We go now. Yes?”

  “Gun,” Chapel said.

  Nadia reached into her purse, but Mustache grabbed her arm. She had just been trying to put her phone away. Now it chimed and everyone froze.

  Mustache tried to keep Nadia from looking at the phone, but he failed. “This is from Bogdan. He says he’s on his way.”

  “Yes, is fine, he says is fine, yes,” Mustache said.

  But Chapel was already moving.

  BUCHAREST, ROMANIA: JULY 15, 11:44

  In Ranger school, Chapel had an instructor named Bigelow who taught him everything he knew about unarmed fighting. For months he had trained daily, learning all the special reversals and inversions and strikes, until he thought he could take anybody alive in a fight. Then one day Bigelow showed up with a paintball gun. He’d stood at
the far end of the training room and told Chapel to use everything he knew, to come right at Bigelow with every deadly technique he’d been taught, but to stop the second he was hit by a paintball.

  Chapel tried twelve different techniques. He tried feints and dodges and sweeps, tried to use the room’s furniture for cover or as improvised missile weapons, tried to trick Bigelow by pretending to surrender so he could grab the paint gun away after Bigelow lowered his guard.

  Each and every time, Chapel had come away with a painful blue splotch on his uniform. “We’ve got a problem,” Bigelow said, when he finally called an end to the session. “There’s no way you’re going to win this. The lesson I’m supposed to teach you today is that up against a man with a gun, you can’t win if you’re unarmed. You have to put your hands up and surrender.”

  Chapel, breathing hard and itchy with sweat, was pissed off enough at that point not to say “sir” and leave it at that. “How many shots does it take most people to learn that lesson?”

  “Three. And that’s the problem. You’re a smart guy, Chapel. But for some reason when you’re beat, you get dumb. You get too dumb to just give up.”

  In the tea shop in Bucharest, Chapel watched the gun swing at the hip of the blond guy with the glasses and he got real dumb, real fast.

  Mustache already had Nadia by the arm. He was going to force her out into the street, into his car. Chapel could worry about that later. He saw Glasses start reaching for his pistol and knew what he had to do. Glasses was reaching across his body, using his right arm to go for the pistol on his left hip. Chapel grabbed the right arm with both of his hands and forced it downward, past the gun, and at the same time he lashed out with one foot to sweep Glasses’s legs.

  The blond guy was fast enough to see the sweep coming and he took a step backward, but that was exactly what Chapel wanted. It put Glasses off balance, even as Chapel was still yanking downward on his arm. Glasses had no choice but to bend at the waist, while trying to get his arm free from Chapel’s grip. Eventually he figured out he could reach for the pistol with his left hand, which was still free.

  Chapel couldn’t let him do that. He danced backward, pulling Glasses with him, and the guy went down on his face, down on the floor using his left hand to try to catch himself. He recovered quickly and reached for the pistol again with his left hand, so Chapel had to stomp on his left wrist, pinning it to the floor. That left Chapel in a bad position, though, his hands and one of his legs committed to keeping Glasses from moving. There was still Mustache to contend with—if Mustache let go of Nadia, he could come at Chapel with anything, any kind of attack, and it would connect. Holding Glasses’s right arm up in the air and pinning his left arm with his foot, Chapel looked up, expecting to see a fist—or maybe a knife—come at him from the side. If Mustache had a gun, too, this was all over.

  It turned out he didn’t need to worry.

  Nadia had one hand on the floor, pressing down to add leverage to the kick she’d aimed at Mustache’s chin. In that position she looked like a Cossack dancer, which might have made Chapel smile if he wasn’t so busy holding Glasses down. With just a sandal on her foot her attack couldn’t do much damage—Bigelow had never thought much of kicking attacks under any circumstances—but it did have one effect, which was to make Mustache rear back, his face pointed at the ceiling, his arms out at his sides for balance.

  Nadia dropped to the floor and spun around—like a break dancer now—her legs stretched out to sweep Mustache off his feet. He went backward into the chair she’d been sitting in a minute before as if he just wanted to take a seat and watch her move.

  Chapel wouldn’t have blamed him. He’d never seen anyone move like Nadia just had, not outside of a Kung Fu movie.

  She spun around on her shoulder and then twisted herself up into a kneeling position in front of the chair. With both hands she reached under the bottom of the chair and tilted it backward until it slammed into the floor, leaving Mustache staring at the ceiling. She vaulted over the chair and landed with one shin across Mustache’s throat. Even over the blaring hip-hop music Chapel could hear Mustache gurgle out a scream.

  It had been about two seconds since Chapel saw Glasses’s gun. He was panting like a horse and he had no idea what to do next. Nadia’s hair hadn’t even moved. She gave Chapel a wicked smile.

  He glanced down at the gun, still hanging on Glasses’s hip. Nadia dashed over and grabbed the gun out of its holster. She took one quick look at Mustache—who was not moving—and ran for the door.

  “Crap,” Chapel said. He had no choice but to follow her. He stomped on Glasses one last time and dashed out of the shop. Behind him he heard someone scream—maybe the girl who ran the counter. He didn’t turn around to look.

  Outside was bright sunlight and air that stank of diesel fumes and movement in the street. Chapel forced himself to focus, to see what was going on. A car was roaring up the street toward him, a black sedan full of men in suits. Most of them were blond.

  Not that way, then. He turned to look down the street—

  And saw an almost identical car coming from that direction.

  BUCHAREST, ROMANIA: JULY 15, 11:46

  “There,” Nadia said, pointing across the street. She started running again, and Chapel headed after her. The far side of the street was one long stretch of gray-yellow architecture, columns and windows and doorways but strangely no signs or glass storefronts. The building there must have been standing since before the big construction boom. Chapel saw one doorway lit up by sunlight in a way that seemed wrong, as if the sun were coming from behind the door. Nadia raced through it and disappeared. Chapel hurtled after her, having no idea if he was about to slam into a piece of plateglass or a locked door or what.

  Instead, he found himself emerging into a vast open pit of reddish dirt topped by blue sky. He glanced around and saw that the building he’d passed through was nothing but a façade, a thin veneer of bricks that must have once been the front wall of a palatial building. Now it was just a free-standing wall, held up by wooden props, a mask to hide the giant construction site beyond.

  Ahead of him he saw the base of a multistory crane, a couple of green construction vehicles, a row of portable toilets. The far side of the lot was dominated by a massive pile of tailings and broken bricks, whatever remained of the demolished building. Thick sections of pipe, each a yard wide, were stacked in a pyramid near the far wall.

  Behind him he heard shouting and knew that the blonds were in hot pursuit. He raced after Nadia, only to collide with her as she stopped and turned to look back as well. She put one arm across Chapel’s chest to hold him back and shouted, “Get down!”

  Chapel knew an order when he heard it. He dropped to a crouch and she leaned over his back, firing her pistol three times at the doorway they’d come through. Chapel twisted his head around and saw plumes of dust lift from the back of the façade, her three shots catching the empty door frame. He thought he saw someone peering through the doorway, but if he did, they were smart enough to pull back, out of view.

  “I’m a crap shot,” Nadia told him. “You want this?”

  He grabbed the pistol out of her hand. Slipped on the safety and shoved it in his pocket. “A shootout back here is the wrong play,” he told her, keeping his eyes on the doorway. Nobody was dumb enough to show themselves there. “If we kill someone here, even in self-defense, there’s no way we get out of Romania with the mission intact.”

  “Konyechno,” she said.

  “We have to move,” he told her. He straightened up and ran toward the back of the lot, hoping there would be some exit back there. There was, but it was useless. A big gate large enough to drive a truck through, chain link twenty feet high and topped with razor wire. It was also locked up tight with a massive padlock. No way he could break through there. It seemed the only way in or out of the lot was through the empty doorway back on the Strada Lipscani. Back where the entire blond suit gang was gathered, waiting for them to show thems
elves.

  They could try to hide—but to what point? The blonds would just come into the lot and search for them, and even if Chapel was willing to shoot his way out, he would run out of bullets before they ran out of men.

  “Come on,” Nadia told him, grabbing at his hand.

  Well, she was the lead on this operation. He followed her as she ran toward the green construction vehicles. He ran faster when a bullet tore up the red dirt near his feet.

  Apparently the suits had grown tired of waiting.

  “Cover me,” Nadia called.

  Chapel spun around until he was running backward—dangerous over the broken ground of the construction pit, but at least it meant he was facing the doorway. He saw a flash of blond hair and snapped off a shot that hit the base of the doorway. The blond hair disappeared again.

  Behind him he heard electrical sparks jumping and then the growl of a heavy-duty diesel engine. He glanced back over his shoulder.

  “Get on,” Nadia said.

  She had hot-wired one of the construction vehicles, a miniature bulldozer. Chapel ran over and jumped onto the back of the thing, sitting down on its propane fuel tank and holding on to the roll cage. He fired another shot back at the doorway, barely even aiming, just to keep the men at bay.

  With a lurch and a roar the bulldozer started forward, its blade coming up in front until Chapel doubted that Nadia could even see where she was going. She punched the throttle and he was nearly thrown clear, but he managed to hang on as she rolled toward the stack of giant pipes against the far wall of the lot.

  “Wait, Nadia—” he had time to shout. If she heard him, she didn’t show any sign. She definitely didn’t slow down.