Minotaur

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.