Minotaur

by David Wellington

  “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.

  Time 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.

  34.

  “I don’t know how much more I can tell you,” Fiona said. Some of her confidence had fallen away. “The shipments came in by water. Through that boat launch you saw, under the house.”

  “I thought that was just Favorov’s escape route,” Chapel said.

  “You saw the panic tunnel, the one that leads from our bedroom down to the water. But there’s another tunnel that leads from the launch to the cellar. When Ygor was building the house he had some contractors build the escape route first, then he fired them and hired some new ­people to dig the tunnel through to the cellar, so no one blabbing workman could give away the plan for the whole complex.”

  “How often did shipments come in?” Chapel asked.

  “Only two or three times a year. Ygor would get very nervous around those times. His biggest fear, I think, was that someone would see the boats coming and going. It was all done in the middle of the night, and very quietly, with no lights showing at all. Ygor always thought I was asleep when it happened, but I would wake up when he crept out of bed to oversee a delivery, and I would go to my bedroom window and listen to it all happen. The boats would come in—­from Cuba, I think, the men who came on the boats always spoke Spanish—­and offload down there, then our servants would move the crates into the cellar.”

  “What about outgoing—­when the crates went to his white power friends, how was that handled?”

  “Now that was rather ingenious,” Fiona said. She looked proud of her husband for how he’d masterminded his criminal enterprise. Well, she had stayed married to him even knowing as much as she did. “We would throw a party, just a little thing with a few other ­couples and their families. A garden party, a Christmas toast, it didn’t matter. The caterers were always the same, and there were always more of them than we actually needed. They would come in a truck with all the food and wineglasses and tablecloths and such, and when they left, they would take the crates with them. No one in this part of Long Island would look twice at a catering truck.”

  Chapel supposed he was a little impressed, himself. It would have taken a truly mammoth amount of organization and discretion to make this all work for so long with nobody noticing. Though he supposed the police and the Coast Guard rarely came out to the richest part of Long Island, and then only when they were called in. Every house in the area was big enough and expensive enough to have its own private security.

  “Tell me something,” Chapel said, not because it would help his investigation but just because he had to know. “Did you know what was in those crates?”

  Fiona shot him a glance from the corner of her eye. “Not as such.”

  “But you had to know it was something illegal. You knew that these ­people, the ­people your husband sold the guns to, were dangerous ­people. And yet you never did anything to stop it. I’m not saying you could have. I’m sure Favorov would have laughed if you asked him to stop. But you never even tried. Did you?”

  Fiona inhaled deeply. “You know exactly why I said nothing. You know it, and you’re just trying to make me say it, because you think I should be ashamed. You might as well ask me if I loved my husband or not. Well?”

  Chapel opened his mouth to speak but he just couldn’t be that cruel. He couldn’t say what he really wanted to say.

  Angel could, though. “She married him for his money. She’s a total gold digger.” Chapel was glad Fiona couldn’t hear the little voice in his ear.

  “I grew up in a home where the only food on the table came from government assistance. My father spent his whole life looking for work and never found any. I vowed, when I was just a little girl, that I wouldn’t die as poor as he did. I worked hard to make that happen, to get where I am. I don’t regret the things I’ve done. You can think of me what you like, Mr. Chapel. Better ­people than you have called me a whore.” For a second she turned her head, glancing back at the boys in the backseat. Chapel wondered how much, if anything, they’d understood of the conversation he’d been having with their mother. “I’ll tell you what I told them. It’s hard work, and the hours are shit. But the benefits are amazing.”

  That was enough to shut Chapel up. For a minute, maybe. Then he felt like he had to say what he was actually thinking. “I don’t think that at all.”

  “Oh, really? You still respect me, is that what you were going to say?” Fiona lashed out.

  “I think a lot of ­people would have had a hard time jeopardizing their position as the wife of a billionaire, just on an ethical qualm. Honestly, I have no idea what I would have done in your situation. That much money must be incredibly tempting,” he admitted. “What I was going to say, though, was that I don’t think you did it for the money.”

  Fiona stared ahead at the road.

  “I saw the look on your face, when I came out of the boys’ bedroom. When you were worried they might be hurt. I saw the same look my mother used to get, when I was a kid and I fell out of a tree I had tried to climb. Maybe at first, when you first met Favorov, it was about the money. But it isn’t anymore. And that, I can definitely respect.”

  Fiona turned to stare at him. He had to nod forward, at the road, so she would keep focused on driving.

  They were silent for a long time. Finally, in a very small voice, she said, “Thank you. Thank you for that much. We’re almost there.”

  35.

  Fiona turned off the main road and wove the Bentley through a maze of streets in a small seaside town, just a few dark stores and a ­couple of modest houses, really. As she neared the water she switched off the lights and pulled quietly up outside a ramshackle marina.

  “This is it?” Chapel asked, disappointed. “I thought you really had something. But the Coast Guard already seized Favorov’s yacht. He isn’t leaving the country by sea, not tonight.”

  Fiona looked over at him with an appraising stare, as if she were trying to decide whether he was making fun of her or not. “The yacht was never the real plan,” she said. “He knew perfectly well that as soon as he called it in it would be picked up. That was just a ruse.”

  “So what are we doing here?” Chapel asked.

  “You don’t have a lot of rich friends, do you, Jim? If you have a yacht you must own a sailboat too.”

  Chapel felt his eyes going wide. “A sailboat? Where does he expect to go in a sailboat?”

  “Cuba would be my guess. From there he can go anywhere.”

  “But he would have to sail—­by himself—­across a thousands miles of the Atlantic Ocea
n,” Chapel pointed out.

  “Ygor is an excellent sailor. He always talked about competing in the Americas Cup, but he had to keep his profile low. A straight run down the coast will be nothing to him. If he runs into a storm in the middle of the ocean he could be in real trouble—­especially since he can’t afford to radio for help. But if the weather stays clear he’ll have no trouble making the crossing.”

  She gestured at the boats lined up at the water’s edge.

  “Slip thirty-­three,” she said. “Assuming he didn’t get here before us.”

  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.