Minotaur (9 page)

31.

T
here 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 didn’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—­”

“I’m not surrendering. I’m going to drive out through the gate in a second and nobody is going to arrest me.” She didn’t look like it was a suggestion.

“Really?” Chapel asked.

“Yes, really. I’m going to leave here and not come back. I don’t want to be followed, or harassed, or questioned. My boys need me, not some nice policewoman with a blanket and maybe a chocolate bar. They need their mother. I had to work very hard to get these two, and I’m not giving them up now.”

Chapel kept his mouth shut. He guessed there was more.

“I have something to offer in exchange,” she said.

“Okay, I’m listening,” Chapel said, though he doubted it would be enough. Law enforcement didn’t make the kind of deals she was asking for.

“I can tell you everything I know. It may not answer all your questions, but I assure you—­Jim—­that in the years I’ve been married to Ygor, I heard more things than he thought I did. Far more than he would have wanted me to hear. So there’s that.”

“It’s not enough,” Chapel said.

She nodded. Her hands were still on the steering wheel, as if she was going to start driving at any second and needed to be ready. It also meant they stayed in plain view so none of the police around her would think she was reaching for a weapon. Chapel had known she was smarter than Favorov gave her credit for. She stared out through the windshield at the road ahead. At freedom, and safety.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

Chapel waited patiently.

“I’ve been a loyal wife. I’ve done everything he asked of me, right from the start. I know my place in the world, Jim. I know what ­people think I am, and I tried to prove I was better than that. I’m not just a trophy wife. I was a partner to him. For years. I never betrayed him.”

“That’s admirable,” Chapel said.

“My boys, though. They come first.” Fiona wouldn’t meet his eyes. “You let us go, you give me what I asked for, and I’ll take you to him. I’ll take you right to Ygor, right now.”

33.

T
ime was of the utmost essence. If there was even the slightest chance Chapel could still catch Favorov, it was going to come down to a matter of minutes, not hours. Still, he could only think in silence for a few seconds as he considered what she was saying. “If you can’t deliver what you’re promising it could go very badly for you,” he said finally.
And your children
, he thought, but it sounded like she knew that already.

Fiona turned to look into his eyes, with all the confidence of a model on a catwalk. “I know exactly where he’s going.”

In his ear, Angel said, “Chapel, just because she’s beautiful doesn’t mean you can trust her. This could be a trap! I know you’re a guy, and guys think with their—­”

Chapel tuned her out. “Drive,” he said.

He had to lean out of his window to flag down the officer in charge of the SWAT teams, to tell the man to stand down and clear the gates. Luckily there was no argument—­Chapel had total oversight on this operation, thanks to Director Hollingshead. It had been clear from the start that his orders were to be followed without question.

They had to move a SWAT van away from the gate so the Bentley could get out. That was SOP, Chapel knew—­you blocked any exit from the perimeter, to stop any overconfident or desperate ­people from trying to make a break for it. Now it just slowed them down. Eventually, though, Fiona took the long car out onto the drive and hurried down toward the main road.

“Where are we going?” Chapel asked.

“I’ll tell you when we get closer,” Fiona answered, her eyes on the road.

Chapel bridled and started to demand that she tell him that instant, but she reached over and patted his artificial arm.

“You don’t trust me, and that’s understandable. I don’t trust you, either. When we’re well out of the way of all these policemen, I’ll talk.”

“You’ll talk right now. You don’t want to tell me where we’re going, I can’t make you. But you said you had other information. Things you’ve overheard.”

“Yes,” she said. She drove south until she reached a road that ran along the coastline, on top of a line of cliffs. The same cliffs that had sheltered Favorov’s secret boat launch. She turned west along the cliff road, picking up speed. “Ygor is a secretive man, of course, and he never told me anything directly. But it’s amazing the things men will do and say in front of their women. They treat us like we’re too stupid to understand what they’re saying. I heard phone calls, saw Ygor give orders to his servants. I saw ­people come to the house, and because I’m a good hostess I made sure I knew who they were before they arrived.”

“Russians?”

“Only once, and then in the middle of the night. About five years ago. Pavel Galtachenko. A very furtive little man. He reminded me of a mouse that thinks it’s a rat. He went into Ygor’s study but only stayed there for about fifteen minutes. I was in the process of bringing him a drink when he stormed out. I heard the tail end of their conversation.”

In Chapel’s ear Angel got excited when she heard the name. “Galtachenko’s a low-­level diplomat, a flack for the Russian delegation to the UN. He’s also a known KGB agent.”

“I’m familiar with the name,” Chapel said, though he’d never heard it before. Fiona didn’t need to know where he got his information.

“He came to put an end to things. To stop Ygor from selling any more guns. He was very worried that it was going to reflect badly on his government. In the end, though, he couldn’t stop Ygor. He didn’t have the authority. He left empty-­handed.”

“Interesting,” Chapel said.

“I’ll say,” Angel interrupted. “If whoever is supplying Favorov with guns has more authority than the KGB, that means—­”

“It doesn’t mean anything on its own,” Chapel said, because he wasn’t ready to draw any conclusions.

“No,” Fiona replied, assuming he’d been talking to her. “But Galtachenko wasn’t the only visitor he had. Most of the time he met with clients. Americans. Very polite but rather uncultured men who wore ill-­fitting suits and smelled of cheap cologne.”

“You have names for them?” Chapel asked.

“Some. Terry Belcher. Andrew Michaels. Vince Howard, those are the ones I remember.” Fiona peered forward into the halogen light coming from the Bentley’s headlamps as if she could see the names written out there on the road. “I noticed that they always kept their shirts buttoned up, both at the throat and the cuffs, even on very hot days. It took me a while to realize they were covering up tattoos.”

Angel had plenty to say on the names Fiona had provided, but Chapel had already guessed most of it. “Gang tattoos,” he said. “These were white men?” he asked. “I’m guessing they had short hair. Very short.”

“As if at some point they’d shaved it all off, and were only now letting it grow back, yes,” Fiona confirmed. “Skinheads, all of them, though these were a better class than the kind you expect. They presented themselves as businessmen. I never saw any weapons leave the house, nor any money change hands. But everyone was always in a good mood when those meetings broke up. I’ve seen enough deals made in my life to recognize when both parties are happy with arrangements.”

“So Favorov was funneling Russian guns to white supremacist groups here in the States,” Chapel said. “Only white power groups?”

Fiona shook her head. “No, there were others. African Americans, Chinese, Mexicans. Anyone who wanted guns, I gather. Recently though, the whites have had a monopoly on his business and his time. Ygor seemed to prefer dealing with them to the others. They made him more . . . comfortable.”

“The non-­whites—­are we talking about gangs? Straight-­up criminals? Or political groups?” Chapel asked, synthesizing.

“That I can actually answer,” Fiona said. “He told me as much, once. I think I’d suggested—­mind you, I could never say anything outright—­suggested that these ­people were dangerous, and that bringing them to the house was a bad idea. He laughed off the idea of moving his negotiations somewhere else. The ­people he dealt with, he told me, were strictly politicals. Separatists, splinter groups, that sort of thing. He refused to deal with what he called gangsters and thugs, because they would turn on him if they were caught. Politicals could be trusted not to report him to ­people like you.”

Chapel nodded. “Jesus. It sounds like he was arming half the domestic terror groups in the country. But I need to know. Who was supplying him? That’s the most important thing.”

“Really? It matters so much where the guns came from?” Fiona asked.

Chapel studied her profile. The answer to that question was technically classified, but if telling her made her take him more seriously, if it helped her remember anything, he didn’t care. “Yes. Because if he was getting the guns from the Russian mafia, then it’s a police matter. But if the Russian government was supplying those AK-­47s, consciously arming a fifth column inside American borders, then they were all but declaring war on us. And if my boss can’t find out the truth, he’s going to have to come down on the side of war.”

“The US would go to war with Russia over a ­couple of guns?”

“I don’t want to have to find out,” Chapel told her.