Free The Hydra Protocol by David Wellington Page A

die for.
    A little black book that was probably in Nadia’s hands now.
    He knew nothing about the Asian woman with the Russian name. Nobody else seemed able to help. The doctors told Chapel she had, indeed, come to them and told them what kind of treatment he needed—she’d even been able to tell them what depth he’d dived to, which was crucial information for his therapy. The doctors were quite clear that she had saved his life.
    But as soon as she’d told them what they needed to know, she had disappeared. No one had seen her since.
    Chapel knew when he’d been played.
    Who was she? A foreign agent? His mission had been secret, the details known only to three people—Chapel, Angel, and his boss in the Defense Intelligence Agency, Rupert Hollingshead. A leak was next to impossible—but somehow Nadia must have discovered what he was up to. Had she been sent to make sure his mission failed?
    A dozen scenarios ran through his head as he tried to make sense of it. None of them came up the way he’d want them to. He was sure she had known what he was after, and she had used his decompression sickness to get the book away from him. Maybe she had called in the Cubans to destabilize the situation, or maybe she had just used them to further her cause.
    Even Chapel had no idea why the book was so important. Hollingshead had never told him, and he had known better than to ask. But he bet Nadia had that information. He was going to have to track her down. Find her and make her give him the book back. That, or explain to Hollingshead that he had failed.
    When they let him out of the hyperbaric chamber, the first thing he did was ask for his clothes and his cell phone. The doctors told him to take it easy, and that they wanted him to stay for another twenty-four hours for observation, but he knew he wouldn’t have time for that. He turned on the phone and called Angel as soon as he was alone.
    “We’ve got a problem,” he told her.
    “Sugar, it sounds like you’ve had nothing but,” she replied. “I’m just so glad you made it, that you’re feeling better—”
    “There’s no time, Angel,” he said, as apologetically as he could manage, given how keyed up he was. He tucked the phone into the crook of his shoulder and started pulling on his jacket. “I need you to find somebody for me, and she’s not going to make it easy. All I have is her first name, Nadezhda, but she was on Donny’s boat and she should be on the passenger list, the same one that got me in trouble. I can give you a physical description and—”
    He stopped because when he put his artificial arm through the sleeve of the jacket, something hard in the inside pocket tapped against his chest. He couldn’t think of what it was—he’d had nothing in there when he went aboard the yacht.
    “Chapel?” Angel asked. “Everything okay?”
    “Hold on,” he told her. He reached carefully inside the pocket. Felt leatherette and laminated pages.
    It was the little black book.
    Nadia must have put it there. She must have put it in his jacket before she left the hospital, knowing he would find it there.
    “Uh,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything more appropriate. “Huh. Angel—never mind. I made a mistake.”
THE PENTAGON: JUNE 13, 09:13
    They wouldn’t let Chapel fly. There was still some nitrogen dissolved in his fatty tissues, the doctors told him. Spending any length of time in the pressurized cabin of an airplane would put him at risk of forming new bubbles and suffering a total relapse. He needed to stay at sea level for a month, just to be safe. But he had to get back to work, and back to Julia, so he took the train.
    The whole way up the East Coast he kept the little black book in his jacket pocket. He didn’t risk letting anybody see it, though he very much wanted to study it and try to make sense of what he’d risked so much to salvage.
    He arrived in Virginia first thing in the morning. He stopped off at Fort Belvoir, the