Minotaur (8 page)

26.

T
he room beyond was dark, save for a strange green glow coming down from the ceiling. Chapel didn’t have time to wonder what that meant. He slipped inside and shut the door behind him. He considered locking it, but he knew that would only delay his pursuers a few seconds—­the door was made of soft wood, and anyone could kick it down—­while it would also mean trapping him inside a room with no other exits. That was always a bad idea.

“Favorov,” he called out. “Favorov, it’s over. You can’t get away now. You waited too long.”

There was no response. As Chapel’s eyes started to adjust to the strange glow in the room he started to make out details—­a pair of single beds on the far side of the room, a dresser, a desk with two laptop computers sitting on top of it.

Toys.

The floor was strewn with toys—­action figures, toy trucks, a ­couple of robots.

No. No
, Chapel thought,
oh no, I’ve picked the wrong room
.

He looked up and saw that the ceiling was covered in stars. Decals of stars that glowed in the dark. That was the source of the dim lighting. This was the room where Favorov’s boys lived. He could even see one of them—­Ryan, the younger of the two, he thought—­huddled in his bed. He wasn’t asleep. One eye glinted with terror as it looked at Chapel over bunched-­up blankets.

He put a finger to his lips and tried to think of something reassuring to say. He couldn’t think of anything. The best he could do for the kid would be to get out of the room immediately and lead the guards as far away from his part of the house as possible. The mansion’s walls were sturdy and thick, but there was no telling where stray bullets could end up. Chapel knew that if one of the kids was hurt in the firefight he would never forgive himself.

He turned to go, putting his free hand out to reach for the doorknob.

That was when the closet door flew open and banged against the wall, startling Chapel so much he barely noticed when something small and fast moving charged right at him and sank the inch-­long blade of a pocketknife into his thigh.

“Jesus!” Chapel gasped, as the pain reached him.

He stared down at Daniel, who must have been hiding in the closet the whole time. Smart kid. He had what looked like a Cub Scout knife in his hand and he was bringing it back to strike at Chapel’s leg again.

“We never did anything to you!” the boy shouted. “Leave us alone!”

Chapel was so surprised he couldn’t stop the boy from stabbing him a second time. The wounds weren’t deep enough to seriously injure him but he could feel blood running down inside his dress pants.

“Kid, kid,” Chapel said, trying to grab at the knife without getting his hand slashed. “Kid, come on! Stop it!” He felt absurd—­he’d just fought his way through a cadre of bodyguards, and here he couldn’t do more than ask a child politely to stop trying to kill him. But he couldn’t risk hurting the child, even in self-­defense. His training had focused on debilitating and crippling attackers, not calming them down.

But then a female voice called out from another room, calling Daniel’s name. It was Fiona, the boy’s mother. “Daniel! Run away! Just run, baby!”

Chapel had no choice. He brought his left hand down just as the boy was going to stab him a third time. The knife blade sank deep into the silicone flesh of Chapel’s artificial hand. With a good hard yank Chapel pulled his hand back and the knife came with it.

“Daniel!” Fiona called again.

Chapel folded up the knife and put it in his pocket, just to keep it away from the child. Daniel’s eyes had gone very wide and he looked like he expected to be shot at any second. Silently Chapel cursed Favorov for putting his children at risk like this.

“Daniel! Run away!”

The boy turned and screamed and ran back into the closet. “You,” Chapel said to Ryan, who was still curled up in a ball on his bed. “Get in there with him. It’s the safest place.”

He expected the younger boy to scream, or throw a tantrum, or just freeze in place, paralyzed by fear. Instead he jumped up and ran for the closet, dragging a stuffed dog in after him.

Maybe Favorov had trained his sons at the same time he’d trained his bodyguards. Or maybe the kid was just smarter than he looked.

“Daniel! Ryan!” Fiona wailed. It sounded like she was just outside in the hall.

27.

C
hapel yanked the door open and found himself looking Fiona right in the face. Her features were writhing with panic. “My boys,” she whispered.

Behind her, the door across the hall was open. It looked like a master bedroom lay beyond.

“If you hurt my boys—­”

“They’re fine,” Chapel said. He grabbed her arm and hauled her to one side. Through the door of the master bedroom he was sure he saw someone moving. It had to be Favorov. “They’re in the closet. You need to get them out of here, as fast as possible,” Chapel whispered. He checked the pistol in his hand. “I’m going in there. Do
not
call out or try to warn him.”

Fiona’s eyes snapped to his. “Who?” she asked.

There was definitely movement down the hall. The guards from the first floor were coming and they were moving faster now. Chapel had no time left. He pushed past Fiona and dove into the master bedroom, locking the door behind him.

The room was well lit. Chapel saw a king-­size bed flanked by low tables, a larger table off to one side, a ­couple of chairs. Expensive-­looking paintings hung on the wall. A second door led to what he presumed was a bathroom.

“Angel,” he whispered.

“One heat source in there with you. You’re close,” she told him.

Chapel lifted his pistol. He saw no sign of Favorov. No movement at all. Clothing and papers were piled up on the bed. Stacks of hundred-­dollar bills, neatly banded. Looked like fifty thousand dollars or so. Three passports. A revolver. Chapel picked that up and stuffed it in his pocket, keeping his own weapon leveled on the bathroom door. On the far side of the room from the bed stood a massive dresser, but the drawers were too small to hide a human being. Over by the bathroom door stood an upright wardrobe—­Favorov could easily be hiding in there, but the door hung open revealing nothing inside but shirts and dresses on hangers. It looked like someone had torn through the wardrobe in a hurry. Favorov had been packing, getting ready to make his escape on his yacht. Except Hollingshead was sure the yacht was just a ruse.

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.

S
ticking 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.

“H
e’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 across 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.