Minotaur

15

Chapel stumbled over to the phone and reached for the handset with one bloodstained hand. Before picking it up he studied the buttons, noticing there were no numbers on the keypad. The keys connected the phone with other rooms in the house, but there seemed no way to get an outside line. Maybe Favorov didn’t want his cook making expensive calls while she was working. The phone was basically just an intercom system, and it shouldn’t allow him to communicate with the outside world.

Still. In his time working for Director Hollingshead, Chapel had come to expect miracles when it came to telecommunications. And a miracle was what he needed. He picked up the handset, at first saying nothing. There was no dial tone, no hiss of an unconnected line. Someone was listening.

“Angel?” he said.

He heard a series of clicks and then the sexiest, most welcome voice in the world answered him, though the connection was fuzzy and the volume was low. “Chapel! I’ve been trying to reach you for so long now. Please tell me you’re free and you’re all right.”

Chapel looked down at the seeping wound in his abdomen. “I’m free,” he said. “For the moment. I was able to get away from the guards. How are you able to access this line?” he asked. “It’s in-house only.”

“True—you can’t call out on this line, not if you’re a person. But it’s patched electronically into the house’s security system, and it needs to be able to contact the police or the fire department if there’s a problem. I’m piggybacking on a dedicated 911 connection, duplexing the signal through the voltage line so the call monitors don’t pick us up. Real old-school phone phreaking. It would be fun if I wasn’t so worried about you, baby.”

Chapel didn’t really care about the details. He had a far more important question. “Can anyone else in the house hear us? Say, if they pick up another handset?”

“I’m afraid so. This is the best I can manage for now—I could encrypt the signal so well the NSA couldn’t listen in, but that won’t stop anyone on the same line.”

Chapel nodded to himself. “I heard clicks on the line just before you picked up. I think we have to assume everything we say is being overheard. Well, there’s nothing for it. I need to deliver a sitrep and I very, very badly need some advice. I’m sure you know by now that Favorov tried to take me hostage, but I’m at large in the house now. I can’t leave the grounds—there’s at least a dozen men outside in the yard waiting for me to poke my head out the door. I’m wounded, though for now I’m still mobile.”

“Oh, Chapel!”

Chapel shook his head. “I can see a doctor later, get patched up. That’s not important. Favorov has his yacht coming in to the dock here. That’s his escape route. Can you scramble the Coast Guard and cut him off?”

“I already have an armed cutter en route. It’ll be there in twenty minutes and it can blockade the dock. But the director has given orders for it to stand off until he personally authorizes the interception.”

That made sense. Hollingshead still thought Chapel was a hostage and was still playing along with Favorov. If Favorov managed to recapture Chapel, the deal would still be in place.

“What about land units? Do we have any ground-based assets in the area?”

“I have two local SWAT teams and a posse of ATF agents standing by just outside the gates. They’re ready to swarm on the director’s orders. We can come down on that house like the hammer of Thor, frankly, if—”

“No!” Chapel said. “No, you can’t raid this place. There are kids in this house! And at least some of the servants are strictly civilian. One of them’s already dead, a cook, just because she was standing next to me when a guard lost his cool. No, Angel, there’s too big a risk of collateral damage.”

Angel was silent for a moment. Chapel knew what that meant—she was about to tell him something he didn’t want to hear.

“Chapel, the director’s orders are clear. Favorov is a high-value target. He wouldn’t let you sacrifice yourself, but only because he thought you could probably get free and have a chance at fixing this. But if you can’t complete this mission on your own, if we need to level that house to get Favorov, we’re going to do it.”

“Understood.” Chapel bit back the protest that sat on the end of his tongue. He didn’t believe that getting Favorov was worth the life of even one innocent, much less that of a child. But he wasn’t the one making decisions at that level. “I’m still in play. Nobody moves until you’re sure I’m compromised, okay?”

“You mean until you’re dead,” she replied. “Chapel, I think this is a terrible idea. You could just exfiltrate now, I can have an ambulance standing by, and other people can finish this. People who aren’t wounded!”

Sure. Somebody else could fix Chapel’s screwup. He didn’t like that at all. But he had an even better reason to stay on mission. “People who will start shooting the moment they see a gun. That’s not how we’re supposed to operate, Angel. We’re supposed to be intelligence operatives. We’re supposed to keep things quiet. It’s me. Just me, for now. How much time do I have?”

“Just before the yacht arrives, the order will go through to blockade the dock. Then the ground units will have to move in. I’ll have to give the order, whether you like it or not. That’s… a little less than two hours from now.”

“Understood,” Chapel said again. He needed to get this situation under control and isolate Favorov, before that happened. Or a lot of people might die—people who didn’t deserve it.

Frankly, he’d be surprised if he could keep himself alive that long. But he had to try.

“Chapel, the director is playing this by the book. He doesn’t have a lot of choices. But he’s also told me something you should know. He doesn’t think Favorov is going to play fair.”

“I kind of assumed as much. Hostage taking isn’t exactly in the Geneva Convention.”

“No,” Angel said. “No, I mean… the director knows Favorov, or at least, he knows how people like Favorov think. He thinks the yacht is a ruse. That Favorov has some other way out of there—maybe an escape tunnel, maybe he’s going to be airlifted out. Even if we blockade the yacht and storm the house, the director doesn’t think it’s going to be enough. We need to find the real escape route. And you’re the only asset we have for that.”

The only man who could do the job. And he was slowly bleeding to death, concussed, most likely about to go into shock. This job kept getting better and better.

“All right, Angel, let’s talk about what I need to do that. Do you have floor plans for this house? And I’ll need a rundown on everyone here, how many guards there are likely to be, what kind of weaponry they carry, their locations if you can—”

He stopped because he was sure he’d heard something.

“Chapel?” Angel asked.

“Gotta go,” Chapel told her, and hung up the phone.

He had definitely heard people in the hall outside the kitchen—a lot of them, and their footsteps were getting closer.