Minotaur

36

Chapel jumped out of the car without another word and headed for the shadowy marina. He was not surprised when he heard Fiona start the Bentley’s engine and pull away. He doubted he would ever see her again, and he was fine with that—she’d helped him enough to earn a get-out-of-jail-free card.

The marina was closed for the night, its main gates padlocked shut. Chapel jogged along the length of its chain-link fence until he found what he was looking for. The marina was exactly the kind of place bored teenagers would break into on a Saturday night. At some point in the past, someone had wormed their way through the fence. Behind a stand of potted trees he found a place where he could just lift up a section of fence—careful not to let it jingle too much—and crawl underneath.

Inside the fence the marina was full of moving darkness, the long linear shadows of the boats’ masts carving up the orange light from the parking lot. It looked like there was a sizeable restaurant and a smaller hotel on the grounds, a place where sailors could spend the night in a bed that wasn’t swaying with the breakers. Beyond those buildings lay a wide boardwalk and a station for fueling small boats and emptying waste tanks. Beyond that the boats bobbed gently in their slips, each of them tied up at a little strip of dock. They made constant soft noises like old men snoring in their beds—the sounds of lines slapping against aluminum masts, the sounds of tarpaulins ruffling in the breeze, the sounds of boats smacking rhythmically up against the old truck tires chained to the side of each dock. No sound whatsoever of a Russian spy desperately readying a sailboat for a long voyage.

Chapel stayed low, hiding behind a weathered wooden fence as he peered into the dark, looking for the numbers painted on every slip. He kept a pistol in his hand, ready to shoot the moment Favorov lifted his head.

Slip thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two—there. Chapel crouched down behind a bollard streaked with seagull droppings and tried to get a good look at the boat. It was a long, sleek craft, its white hull clean of barnacles, its deck in good order. Its sails were furled tightly against its high mast. The name of the ship was painted on the back:

PHAEDRA

SOUTHAMPTON NY

At first it looked like no one was aboard the boat, and Chapel thought maybe he’d beaten Favorov to the marina. But then he heard a low rumbling noise and saw white bubbles come streaming up from the boat’s bow. Slowly, but steadily gaining speed, the boat started to edge out of its slip on its bow thrusters, headed for open ocean.

For the second time that night Chapel was stuck on dry land, watching his quarry get away by water.

“Angel, get the Coast Guard headed for my position.”

“Most of the local units are still tied up with the yacht,” she replied. “They’re at least twenty minutes away. I’ll try to call in some police boats—”

“Yeah,” Chapel said. He was already running for the dock. “You do that.”

He couldn’t make the jump to the sailboat, he knew. The boat was already ten yards out of its slip by the time he reached the dock.

But he wasn’t going to let Favorov get away. Not this time.