Minotaur

by David Wellington

  Chapel stepped carefully toward the bathroom, expecting to be lit up by assault rifle fire at any second. Favorov was a smart guy, but he was also cornered, and even brilliant ­people did stupid things when they thought their liberty was in danger.

  “All right, Favorov,” Chapel said. “You made a good try at it, but this is over. You can come quietly and I promise you won’t be hurt. A guy like you can afford an excellent lawyer, right? Maybe you won’t even do jail time.” Though if Chapel had anything to say about it the Russian would rot in prison for the rest of his life.

  There was no response from the bathroom. Chapel thought he heard something, like a piece of wood being dragged across a tile floor. Then nothing.

  “Angel?” he whispered.

  “You’re facing him, no more than ten feet away—­he’s low, down on the ground, he . . .”

  She went silent, which always worried Chapel. It meant something had happened that she hadn’t expected. And Angel’s job was to always be one step ahead of everybody else.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “His heat signature . . . it just disappeared. He vanished. Chapel, I’ll admit I’m mystified here—­”

  Chapel didn’t wait for her to finish her sentence. He rushed forward into the bathroom. Nobody was in there. He threw open the shower door but it was empty. Only then did he notice that one of the cabinet doors under the two sinks was slightly ajar.

  He kicked it open and jumped back, expecting to find Favorov curled around a U-­bend. Instead what he saw made him swear out loud.

  The usual shaving cream and spare toothbrushes and rolls of toilet paper you expected to find under a sink were all shoved to one side. Favorov had gone under the sinks, all right, but he hadn’t stopped there. Bending low Chapel could see that the back of the cabinet was actually a hidden door. It led into a crawl space behind the bathroom wall. He could see the top rungs of a ladder leading down.

  Favorov had been smart enough to know that one day he might be trapped in his own house. So he’d built in a secret passage, one that might lead anywhere.

  28.

  Sticking your head down an escape tunnel that has just been used by a paranoid ex-­GRU agent is never a good idea.

  Chapel did it anyway. He peered down into utter darkness. Judging by the movement of the air around his face he could only guess the tunnel went down for some distance. He could hear nothing—­not the sound of Favorov climbing down the rungs, not even breathing.

  The worst idea Chapel could think of was climbing down after his quarry. No. Scratch that. He could think of one equally terrible idea—­going back out into the hallway and facing nearly a dozen armed guards. Either way he was very, very likely to get shot. He hadn’t forgotten he was seriously wounded, either. Adrenaline and determination had carried him so far but he was going to need to collapse, soon, and probably sleep for days.

  He had no choice, though. Favorov had betrayed his adopted country, the country Chapel had sworn to defend.

  The tunnel opening was narrow enough he would need to squeeze through, scraping his shoulders in the process. The remaining AK-­47 he carried was too unwieldy to take with him, so he just threw it away. He shoved his various pistols into his pockets as best he could, then shoved his legs into the opening and started to wriggle in.

  He could hear ­people in the hallway. A lot of them. They would storm the master bedroom in short order. He doubted any of them knew about the tunnel. As he slipped down onto the top rungs of the ladder he pulled the cabinet door closed behind him, leaving himself in pitch darkness. He would just have to climb down by feel.

  “Angel,” he whispered. “Angel, can you hear me?”

  There was no response. Her signal was blocked by the walls of the mansion, just as Favorov’s heat signature had been blocked when he seemed to disappear. He was on his own.

  He climbed down for what seemed far too long, until he was sure he was below the level of the house and even the cellar where Favorov had kept his rifles. He heard nothing from above or below. Hand over hand, foot over foot, he kept going down, wondering the whole time if Favorov had been smart enough to leave booby traps behind to dissuade any pursuit. Hopefully the Russian hadn’t had time to arm anything particularly nasty.

  As he climbed in the darkness his eyes were useless and his other senses had to fill in. He could hear nothing but the sound of his own feet on the rungs, feel little except how close the tunnel walls were on every side of him. He could feel the wall behind him scraping against his back and he knew the tunnel had been carved out of the bedrock under the house.

  Visions of an entire subterranean labyrinth down there, of some kind of medieval dungeon packed with horrors and the skeletons of Favorov’s previous enemies came to him, almost making Chapel smile. Most likely he would reach the bottom and find nothing but a panic room, or a fallout shelter—­and Favorov waiting for him, of course, armed to the teeth.

  Except that didn’t make sense. Why would Favorov retreat to a spider hole with no way out? The man was far too smart for that.

  Then Chapel reached the bottom—­his foot striking solid ground beneath him, the wall behind him opening out into a larger space. He dropped down from the ladder and twisted around, already reaching for a pistol, senses tuned to any stimulation at all. Still, he heard nothing. But one thing did reach him—­he smelled the ocean.

  “No,” he whispered, because he knew, finally, where the tunnel led.

  29.

  A little gray light leaked down the horizontal tunnel, enough for Chapel to move toward. He loped along the rough floor, all the time feeling an ocean breeze on his face, smelling the salt of the waves.

  He hurried as fast as he could, even though his injuries were catching up with him. Even though he knew he’d probably already lost.

  There had been three passports sitting on Favorov’s bed. Though Chapel hadn’t bothered to check them, he was pretty sure he knew already whose they were. One for Fiona and one each for the boys. Favorov had taken his own passport with him.

  Up ahead at the end of the tunnel lay a natural cave, the ceiling thick with stalactites, the floor crunchy with an accumulation of salt. Big round shapes loomed around Chapel as he burst through into the starlit cave, shapes which resolved themselves into barrels. Fuel barrels. The far end of the cave let out onto a silvery beach under a looming seaside cliff. A deep channel had been dug through the sand and a metal dock erected there so a small watercraft could be brought in where no one could see it from above. Only the boat wasn’t there at the moment.

  Chapel dashed forward toward the breakers, his dress shoes sinking into wet sand. Out on the water he could just make out the shape of a speedboat, sleek and shark-­like in its lines. A single human figure, no doubt Favorov himself, was hunched over the controls. Even as Chapel watched in utter desolation the boat’s engines spun up a great flume of water and it raced for the horizon.

  Favorov had made good his escape.

  He lifted his pistol and took a shot at the retreating vessel, but he knew he would never hit a moving target in the dark like that. He didn’t even see where his bullet struck the water. It was over.

  30.

  “He’s in a small boat, headed west by southwest,” Chapel told Angel. Now that he was out of the tunnels he was getting reception again. “Could be going anywhere. Please make my night and tell me you can track him.”

  Angel didn’t answer for a while. Maybe she was busy consulting satellite data and surveillance footage and all the other arcane sources of information she was privy to. Maybe she just didn’t want to admit defeat any more than Chapel.

  “I’ll do what I can,” she said, finally. “Don’t get your hopes up.” A small boat, no lights on a moonless night. There was only so much satellites could see.

  Chapel hung his head. He was trudging acro
ss the sand, looking for a way back up the cliff. He estimated he was right below the house, or at least underneath some part of its extensive grounds. He had no desire to climb back up the ladder into the master bedroom, especially given how tired he was. There was no real point in hurrying, either.

  “The SWAT teams and the ATF task force are ready to converge on the house,” Angel told him. “They can mop up the guards in there.”

  “Are Fiona and the boys clear of the mansion?” he asked.

  “I saw three heat signatures climb out of the window of the boys’ bedroom and down to the ground. It looked like they made a rope out of tied-­together bedsheets. They moved away from the house at speed, but I figured I had more important ­people to track. There are no heat signatures in the boys’ room right now.”

  Chapel nodded to himself. “See if you can get a better twenty on them. I just want to make sure that if the guards inside decide to go down shooting we won’t catch them in the crossfire. There’s no rush now.”

  “Favorov might have left something behind—­a computer, an address book . . . something.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” Except Chapel knew perfectly well that the Russian had never left any written account of his gunrunning. All of the pertinent information would be locked up in just one place: Favorov’s head. They would never know, now, whether he had been acting as a triple agent working for the Russian government or if he was just the middleman for the Russian mafia, stealing guns from his former employers to sell to homegrown American terrorists.

  Chapel had failed in his mission.

  At least he was still alive.

  Another hundred yards down the beach he found a narrow staircase of old and weathered wood that led up to the mansion’s gardens. It was covered in signs saying that this was a private beach and that trespassers would be shot. Chapel ignored the warnings and climbed up to the ground level, just as the SWAT teams made their big entrance.

  31.

  There was a lot of shouting. A lot of men running around, back and forth, into the mansion with guns in their hands, out of it with computers and filing cabinets and loose bundles of paper. The guards inside, at least, had known when they were beat. They surrendered without a single further shot fired, and none of them were injured in the raid. At least, none of them who weren’t already dead.

  Police vehicles drove all over Favorov’s immaculately tended gardens and lawns, crushing flower beds, knocking down topiary bushes. Red, blue, and white lights flashed everywhere, dazzling Chapel’s eyes. An ATF truck pulled right up to the kitchen door, where men in navy blue windbreakers hauled up crate after crate of AK-­47s.

  A white ambulance pulled through the main gates and parked just outside the front door. EMTs carrying wound kits came rushing out. One of them dashed over to Chapel and started plucking at the packing tape holding his abdomen together. Chapel pushed the man away. Perhaps after noticing the various pistols stuffed in Chapel’s pockets, the EMT took the hint. There were ­people inside who needed his talents a lot more desperately than Chapel did.

  “Chapel, you need to sit down,” Angel said in his ear. “Frankly, you need to be airlifted out of there to the nearest ER.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Angel actually laughed at that one. “You have a real habit of getting yourself beaten up, don’t you? We can’t even send you to a dinner party without you ending up with broken ribs and a punctured lung.”

  Chapel really wanted to laugh along. He really wanted to put all this behind him, to go home and go to bed at the very least. He sighed deeply. What more could he accomplish here? What skills did he even have to bring to this party? He couldn’t break the encryption on a hard drive. He couldn’t pore over Favorov’s papers looking for dodgy entries in a ledger book—­he was no accountant. The mansion and its grounds were secure, everything else now was just mopping up.

  “I have Director Hollingshead on the line,” Angel told him. “Do you want to talk to him?”

  Chapel could imagine few things he’d rather do less. But he was a working man, and working men have bosses, and they know how to treat their bosses. “Put him through,” Chapel said.

  “Son? Son, I just heard from the Coast Guard. They’ve seized Favorov’s yacht.”

  “Sir,” Chapel said. “I assume he wasn’t on it.”

  “You’d be correct in that. He got away. Chapel, I don’t want you beating yourself up over this. You did your level best, there’s no question.”

  It would have been easier to bear if Hollingshead had chewed his ass, Chapel thought. Hollingshead had the same ability Chapel’s father had had, the ability to make you feel guilty while still sounding supportive. The ability to let you know just how badly you’d screwed up without actually saying so.

  “Thank you, sir. I’m sorry. I’m . . . just . . .”

  “I won’t listen to your apology. Angel tells me you’re hurt. I want you to go get some medical attention, son. I want you healed up. There’s going to be plenty of work for both of us now, cleaning this up.”

  “Sir. I understand. There’s just one thing.”

  “Oh?”

  “Just a question, sir. If you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not,” Hollingshead said. “I never mind listening to a question. As long as you don’t mind if I can’t answer it because it’s a secret.”

  “Understood, sir. But I think this one will be okay. I just need to know. When Favorov tried to take me hostage, I fully expected you to sacrifice me. To let him kill me rather than allowing him to get away. But you didn’t. You seemed to think I was too valuable to let die.”

  “Is that so hard to believe?”

  Chapel closed his eyes. In some ways it would be easier to work for a boss who he didn’t like so much. Especially in this business. “I’m an intelligence operative, sir. A soldier, too. I expect to be expendable. That’s how our kind of work goes.”

  Hollingshead didn’t speak for quite a while. “Chapel, you must have guessed—­there was no way I was going to let Favorov go. If he tried to walk out of that place with a gun to your head, I was going to have a marksman take him down. Whatever he thought was going to happen, it wasn’t going to end with him as a free man. But I played along because I trusted you. I knew you would get free, and I hoped you would get him. It didn’t work out that way.”

  “Maybe if you had sent somebody else, somebody better at negotiation,” Chapel suggested.

  Hollingshead wouldn’t hear of it. “I have plenty of ­people who know how to eat soup, Jim. I had a feeling this would come to blows. If anybody had a chance of going into that lion’s den and bringing back what we needed, I knew it would be you.”

  Chapel grabbed the bridge of his nose and squeezed. “Maybe I could have . . . I don’t know. If I had just played along, too, let him use me as a human shield—­”

  “You can’t start second-­guessing how this might have ended.”

  Which was the one thing Chapel couldn’t not do, of course.

  “Sir. Director Hollingshead. I’d like to—­”

  He didn’t get to finish his sentence. A car horn blared off to Chapel’s left, and he turned involuntarily to look. SWAT troopers started shouting over there and grabbing for weapons they’d already secured, because a car was racing toward them at speed, making no attempt to turn aside. Chapel looked up and saw it wasn’t a police car.

  The silver Bentley pulled up next to Chapel in a spray of gravel.

  “Get in,” Fiona said.

  32.

  “I’ll have to get back to you, sir,” Chapel said. He heard the director signing off, and Angel coming back on the line, but all of his attention was focused on Favorov’s wife.

  Chapel didn’t think Fiona was armed. She wasn’t going to get anywhere in that car, either. At the least she was a witness to crimes committed in the house, at worst an accessory—­and that d
idn’t even include the fact she’d struck a federal agent (assault and battery with a potentially deadly weapon, to wit, a bottle of wine to the back of the head). There were way too many ­people who still wanted to talk to her, who would want her in a cell where they could keep an eye on her.

  “Get in,” she said again. “We don’t have much time.”

  Even while she sat there gunning her engine, waiting for Chapel to respond, a legion of cops were descending on the Bentley, weapons drawn. Overhead a helicopter chewed up the air, its spotlight drooping toward the stopped car. When the light bounced off the shining hood it was enough to make Chapel wince and cover his eyes. No, Fiona wasn’t going anywhere. She was lucky she wasn’t in handcuffs already.

  Chapel ducked around the front of the car and opened the passenger side door. Climbing in, he heard something move behind him. Expecting an assassin to come lurching out of the backseat, he spun around and started to draw a weapon.

  But it was just the boys, Daniel and Ryan. They were curled up in the backseat, holding each other. They looked terrified.

  “I’m sorry,” he told them. Daniel—­who had stabbed Chapel twice with a pocketknife—­met his eye with a glare of defiance that didn’t quite cover up the way he was shivering in fear. It was enough to make Chapel’s heart throb with guilt. The kids didn’t deserve what had happened to them, to their family, their life.

  Chapel turned to look at Fiona. “If you surrender to me right now I can try to help, a little. I can at least make sure they get wherever you want them to go,” he said, nodding at the boys. “Do you have any family in the area, or—­”