Authors: David Wellington
Minotaur (7 page)
F
or a second, just a bare second after all that chaos and noise, the cellar was quiet. Chapel was standing on his own two feet, in charge of the situation. His brain must have decided that the crisis was over, because a sudden wave of light-headedness and nausea washed through him.
He was tired. Very, very tired. Blood loss, being shot, having a concussion will do that to you. His hand, his real hand felt so weak it could barely hold his weapon.
Then someone moaned in pain, behind him. He spun around, ready to fight again. But it was only one of the men he’d wounded. “Damn,” he said. “I didn’t want this to happen. I didn’t want any of this.”
“You killed Marty,” someone said, very quietly. Not in an accusatory way. More like they couldn’t believe it.
Chapel bent to work. He found the wounded men and bandaged them as best he could, or at least showed them how to put pressure on their wounds so they wouldn’t bleed out. They stared at him as if he’d just fallen out of the moon. But despite what his bosses might think, Chapel’s job wasn’t to kill people. He wasn’t some glorified hit man wrapped in an American flag.
Sometimes he had to remind himself of that, too. So he was kind to the wounded men, even as he ignored the dead bodies and didn’t worry too much about who had killed who. He knew he wasn’t thinking clearly—again, blood loss, etc.—but sometimes you needed fuzzy logic to keep moving.
“How many more of you are there?” he asked one of the wounded.
“Wh—what?”
“How many more guards, servants, whatever—how many more people work on this estate who will be coming for me with guns?”
The man was barely conscious. He wasn’t capable of lying. He seemed like he was just able to get words out. “Just us inside . . . maybe a dozen more out on the grounds. They’re supposed to watch the . . . the gate, the fence.”
“What if they hear gunshots inside the house, think their boss is in danger?”
“Might . . . come in. Maybe.”
It was the best force estimate Chapel could expect. He asked more questions, as many as he thought he had time for, but got no answers that meant anything. None of the conscious guards in that cellar had any idea where Favorov was, or knew anything about possible escape routes from the mansion. They’d been waiting for the yacht to arrive, that was all. Michael might have known something—the guards explained that Michael and Stephen had been Favorov’s personal bodyguards and heads of staff. But Stephen had fled, and Michael was very dead.
He searched one of the dead men and came up with a cell phone and a hands-free unit. Standard equipment for an executive bodyguard. The phone still had half its charge. Chapel wiped some blood off the hands-free unit and, with only a little distaste, stuck it in his ear. He switched on the phone and dialed a number he’d memorized a long time ago.
“Chapel,” Angel said. Nobody else had that number. “Chapel—you’re alive!”
“About half dead, I’d say,” Chapel told her. Maybe he was more woozy than he thought. “Never mind. I’m alive, and armed, and I’ve neutralized about a third of the forces here. Some of them are going to need medical attention. Others can . . . wait. I’m sure this isn’t a safe line but I don’t very much care at this point. I need intel, Angel. I need you sitting on my shoulder.”
“You know you’ve got me,” she said. “I’ll always be here for you.”
“I know. And I appreciate it. I’m in the cellar right now. Do you have floor plans for this house?”
“I’m afraid not. They were never entered into the public record.”
Chapel frowned. “They should have been, right? To get the permits to build this place, Favorov would have had to file something.”
“Or he would have had to bribe a county clerk,” Angel suggested.
“Sure.” Chapel ran his good hand through his short hair. “So what do you have?”
“Satellite and thermal imaging. I can give you a rough idea of where people are in the house. But I can just tell you how close you’re getting to a human being, not who they are or what weapons they’re carrying. I can tell you, because I know it’s your next question, that Favorov is still inside. I saw him peek out of a window not three minutes ago, maybe looking for any sign that he was about to get raided by SWAT teams.”
Chapel nodded. “He’s probably wondering why it hasn’t happened already. Interesting . . .”
“What?”
“Never mind,” Chapel said. “Like I said, this isn’t a safe line. I’m going to move now. I don’t have a lot of time left. You’ve got my six, all right?”
“I’m always watching out for you.”
Well, at least that was something.
Chapel still had no idea what waited for him upstairs. He had no illusion that Favorov was as uninformed. There might be security cameras anywhere, even in the cellar. Favorov would know Chapel was still alive, and that he was armed, and that he was coming to capture him.
Chapel was absolutely certain the Russian wouldn’t go quietly. Not now.
He did one more thing before he left the cellar. He loaded up a pile of AK-47 clips and stuffed them in a sack he could tie to his belt. Slung a pair of assault rifles over his shoulder. Took two pistols—they were Glocks, pretty standard for executive security types—and all the pistol ammo he could find. It made his pockets bulge and clank but he didn’t care.
By the time he was ready to climb the stairs, he had enough firepower on him to knock over a Third World government.
Well
, he thought,
maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement.
There were places in the Third World where AK-47s outnumbered the people.
But Monaco or Luxembourg? No problem.
W
hen Chapel reentered the kitchen he found it deserted except for the cooling body of the cook, who lay slumped right where she’d died. The place was a mess, pots and pans knocked onto the floor, cabinets torn open and their contents strewn across the counters. Apparently when Michael and his men had come through, looking for Chapel, they had been careful to make sure he wasn’t hiding in any of the cupboards.
“There’s movement outside,” Angel told him. “I’m watching through the FLIR camera on a police helicopter loitering just outside the perimeter. I’ve got a dozen heat signatures streaming toward the house.”
Chapel nodded to himself. He tried to think like his enemy, like Favorov. Those heat signatures would be the security guards normally stationed around the grounds. Most likely they’d been told to stay at their posts even when the shooting started—someone needed to be on hand to repel the SWAT teams when they arrived. If they were heading inbound, that meant Favorov or someone else had called them back, which meant that whoever was running the shots didn’t care about the police anymore.
They just wanted Chapel.
“I was hoping it would take longer,” Chapel told Angel. “I guess Favorov is smarter than that. He’s been waiting to make his escape until the SWAT teams attack, probably hoping to sneak out in the confusion. Now he knows we’re holding off, which means he’ll change his plans.”
“That’s good, right?” Angel asked. “You have about thirty seconds before the first guard reaches the front door, by the way. They’re taking their time moving in, being careful. It’s good Favorov had to change his strategy. That means you’re making him sweat.”
“Maybe, but it’s bad because it means he’s capable of improvising on the fly. He was GRU, one of their best. He’s going to have some surprises for us yet.” Chapel loaded one of his AK-47s and set the fire selector to full automatic. “It’s also bad because it means he’s already started to run away. I’m going to have to make this fast.”
“ETA on the guards, fifteen seconds now,” Angel said. “They’re headed for the front door. Head left out of the kitchen, then take your first right.”
Angel and Chapel had been working together for a while now. She knew how he thought, how he would act in most situations. She knew that if the guards were headed for the front door, Chapel meant to be there to meet them.
He hurried down a narrow servants’ hallway, then around a bend and into the massive foyer where he’d first seen Fiona coming down the stairs. There wasn’t much furniture in the foyer, but he found a big ornamental table. He kicked it over and ducked behind it just as the doors exploded.
The noise and the light were intense. The guards must have had some kind of breaching explosive, either C-4 or some kind of grenade. They hadn’t wanted to take the chance that Chapel was standing right inside the doors, waiting for them to open. These weren’t just rent-a-cops from the local security temp agency. They’d been trained for combat.
Well, that could actually work in Chapel’s favor. If they were ex-military, or at least trained by somebody ex-military, they would understand the concept of suppressive fire. Chapel lifted his rifle over the top of the overturned table and fired a long burst toward the doors, not even aiming. He heard shouting and people running away from his fire. That was good. Rent-a-cops might have just stormed inside, right into his gunfire, and some of them might even have gotten hit. Chapel didn’t need any more bodies on his conscience.
Chapel moved to the edge of his improvised shield and took a quick look. He could see almost nothing through the now open front doors. It was nighttime out there, but there was enough light to show the driveway and the start of the gardens beyond. He couldn’t see any of the guards, though—yeah. There. He saw the tip of a rifle barrel just sticking out past the door frame. The guards were hanging back, standing to either side of the door.
If Chapel had possessed any grenades he might have been able to take them all out at once. But he only had his rifles and pistols, and not a lot of ammunition for either.
Come on
, he thought. He needed to get moving. He needed to find Favorov. If the guards would just come storming inside, either he would shoot them all or, far more likely, they would kill him. But as long as they stood out there waiting for him to make a move, he also had to wait for them.
Maybe that was the whole plan. Maybe they were just stalling for time. Maybe—
His train of thought was interrupted as a hand appeared in the doorway, a hand holding something small and round. Chapel could only watch as a grenade arced through the air to clatter on the marble floor, right in front of his improvised cover.
C
hapel’s breath stuck tight in his lungs as he waited for the grenade to explode, obliterating the table he hid behind and turning it into a million jagged splinters of wood that would shred his body. His brain howled at him to react, to grab the grenade and throw it back, but his muscles refused to move, to do anything in the time he had left.
Then the grenade went off and he nearly laughed in relief. It didn’t explode. A cap on one end popped open and white smoke started pouring out. It wasn’t a fragmentation grenade, after all. He’d assumed it would be the same kind of explosive they’d used to get the door open. But either they were still operating under the orders not to kill Chapel, or they just didn’t want to damage their boss’s expensive marble floor.
Chapel opened his mouth to take a breath—and nearly lost everything. Because it wasn’t a smoke grenade. It was tear gas.
He’d been so surprised by surviving the last two seconds that he hadn’t even considered that. The half of an aborted breath he’d taken burned inside his throat and his eyes began to water. His chest seized up as his lungs clamored for air, even as they spasmed in reaction to the nasty stuff they’d already inhaled.
Chapel had lost his shirt back when he was originally searched in the billiards room. He had nothing to make a bandana out of. Not that a length of cloth would even protect his eyes. He rolled away from the table, knowing he was doing exactly what the guards wanted. They’d thrown the gas grenade to flush him out, to make him leave his cover.
They waited five seconds for the tear gas to take effect, then stormed into the foyer in a tight formation, spreading out just a little as they came. They were all wearing gas masks that hid their faces but it didn’t look like they had any body armor—just immaculate black suits and silk ties. They all carried pistols, Glocks like the ones Chapel had taken from Michael’s crew.
One of them lifted three fingers in the air, then gestured forward. He followed this signal with a fist pumping in the air that meant “hurry up.” These guards were far better trained and more disciplined than the bodyguards who had worked inside the house. They probably didn’t know how to serve soup at the dinner table, but they definitely knew how to take an enemy behind cover. The guards moved around the table, flanking it from either side, their weapons up and ready. Chapel might have gotten one or two of them, but through sheer numbers they would have taken him down before he could achieve anything useful.
That is, if he had still been behind the table.
The funny thing about tear gas was that while it was great at incapacitating an unprotected enemy, it also fouled the air and reduced visibility. In the first few seconds after a tear gas grenade went off it acted like a very effective smokescreen. By the time it dissipated into the air your enemy could be gone.
Chapel had simply run up the stairs, knowing they couldn’t see him. He’d gotten above the worst of the gas and though his eyes were streaming and his throat burned, he had been able to find a new cover spot behind the balustrade at the top of the steps. It was clear right away that the guards were surprised not to find him behind the table, and they had no idea where he’d gone.
Until a coughing fit ripped through him, and they all looked up to see where the noise had come from.
T
here were too many of them. At least a dozen. Even with all of Chapel’s training, even with improvisation and the best luck he’d ever had, there were too many. In a straight-up firefight, they would overwhelm him and he would go down. He couldn’t take many more bullets, not and keep on his feet.
So as they started firing up at the second floor landing, Chapel knew exactly what he had to do. He had to keep his head down, and he had to run.
They would follow, of course. Maybe they would take their time about it, expecting him to lie in ambush. That could give him time. But maybe one of them would decide to be a hero, hoping that Favorov would reward him for initiative. It only took one of them to catch him while he was running and put a bullet in his back.
He needed a strategy and he needed it right away. “Angel—I’m moving, and I’ve got a ton of hostiles on my tail,” he whispered, as he ducked into a hallway on the second floor, away from the shooting. “I need to find Favorov
now
. If I can capture him I can make him stand down his guards.”
“There are four people on the second floor,” she told him, sounding apologetic. That was never good. If Angel couldn’t help him he was screwed. “Two groups of two. Both groups are in the east wing—not far from your position.”
“Any idea which group includes Favorov?”
“I’m sorry, Chapel. No. You’re going to have to get lucky. I saw him at a window a while back, but he’s moved since then, and my imaging just isn’t good enough to track heat sources.”
Chapel gritted his teeth. “Do you have my twenty?”
“I have you on imaging. I can always tell when it’s you I’m looking at,” she said.
“That’s sweet.”
“Not really,” she told him. “Your artificial arm shows up colder than the rest of your body, so I just look for the orange blob with the blue piece stuck on it.”
Not for the first time Chapel marveled at what she was capable of seeing on her screens, wherever she was. If she’d been there looking with human eyes she would have been as blind as him. But even though she could be anywhere in the country—the world for that matter—she still had a better idea of what was happening inside the house than he did. “What about the guards on the first floor? Are they coming up?”
“Two on the stairs, moving up, taking their time about it,” she told him. “The rest are holding position to offer covering fire.”
Chapel didn’t like what he was going to have to do next. He didn’t see a choice, though. He checked his rifle, then leaned back around the corner, exposing himself to fire from below in the foyer. He had maybe a second before someone saw him up there and took a shot.
He saw the two guards on the stairs right away. They were keeping low so he dropped his rifle a few degrees, depressing his angle of fire. That was good. Think of it as a physics problem.
He pressed the trigger of the rifle and bullets tore up the stair runner, the marble beneath, the bodies of the two guards on the stairs. They jerked wildly as the bullets tore into their flesh. One of them dropped his weapon and clutched at the ruin of his gas mask as he dropped to his knees. The other crumpled and slid down the stairs on his face.
The AK-47 ran dry before Chapel was done shooting. He tossed the empty rifle away and threw himself back around the corner, into the second-floor hallway.
He’d just killed two men to scare the others and make them take their time about following him. Hopefully it would turn out in the end to have been worth it.
The second-floor hallway was lined with doors, all of them shut. The lighting up there was more subdued than it had been on the ground floor. Chapel didn’t waste time looking at all the charming architectural details.
“Give me a door,” Chapel said. “Just pick one.”
“Two down on your left,” Angel told him.
He raced to the door she’d indicated and threw it open, a pistol up and ready in his good hand.