Minotaur (12 page)

42.

“W
e both know you’re dying,” Chapel said.

The Russian only sneered.

“I cut your femoral artery,” Chapel went on. It hurt to talk through a partially crushed windpipe, but he had to. “You’re bleeding out. If you don’t get that leg bandaged you have maybe a minute left before you pass out. And then you’ll die.”

“Plenty of time to shoot you. And I don’t trust you to just watch while I wrap up my leg.”

Chapel shook his head. “I have a better plan. You tell me what I need to know. Then I’ll bandage your leg, and radio for the Coast Guard to pick us up. We can airlift you right to a hospital. You’ll live.”

“I’ll live in prison for the rest of my life, you mean.”

Chapel shrugged. “You’ll live,” he said again.

Favorov slumped backward, pressing his shoulders against the sailboat’s high gunwale. At least he wasn’t grabbing for the pistol. “After all this, you would save my life,” he said. “You Americans. You never understood total war.”

“We understand that when you get what you’re fighting for, you stop fighting,” Chapel said. “Come on, Favorov. This is your only chance and you know it.”

Still the Russian waited. He turned his head and looked away. “I can bandage myself after you are dead. But I will lack the strength to sail. I won’t make it to Cuba, now,” he admitted. He sighed deeply. “I think, though, you do understand one thing. Secrecy . . . it gets in a man’s marrow. It becomes so ingrained. Even with my life at stake, it is so hard to tell the truth.”

“Fight that instinct,” Chapel said.

Favorov shook his head. Then he grabbed for the pistol. Chapel had time to throw his hand over his face, to try to shield himself from the bullet, but Favorov had something else in mind. He shoved the barrel of the pistol between his teeth and started to squeeze the trigger.

“No!” Chapel shouted.

Favorov stared down at the gun in his hand. He hadn’t fired it. He hadn’t pulled the trigger, not all the way. He’d made the classic mistake of attempted suicides everywhere—­he’d stopped to think, even for a moment, about what he was doing.

Slowly he removed the gun from his mouth. He lifted it again and pointed it roughly in Chapel’s direction. But Chapel was already on top of him, and he yanked the pistol out of Favorov’s hands. The Russian was too weak with blood loss to put up much resistance.

“I couldn’t do it,” Favorov said. His pale face looked haunted. “I . . . I lacked the will.”

There was something in his eye, something Chapel recognized. It chilled him to the core, but he knew exactly what Favorov was feeling. He’d felt exactly the same thing, when he’d thought he’d failed in his mission, that he hadn’t been good enough. Tough enough.

It was a terrible feeling. Despite everything that had happened—­everything Favorov had done—­Chapel couldn’t help feeling sorry for the man.

Favorov had lost, and he knew it.

43.

W
hile Chapel worked at getting a tourniquet on Favorov’s leg, the Russian explained everything. “It started in the seventies,” he said. He had one hand pressed over his eyes as he lay back on the deck, as if he couldn’t bear to look at Chapel while he confessed. Chapel just worried about getting the bandage tight. It wasn’t easy with one hand.

“It was a very different time, for both our countries. In Russia, we were still struggling with the notion we would never have a land war with you. We had destroyed our economy building up stockpiles of weapons, training and feeding a massive army, because we had always believed our destiny lay in World War III. But advances in nuclear weapons technology had demonstrated that such a thing would be . . . a joke. A superfluity. Any war between our nations would mean the destruction of both, so fast all those soldiers—­and all those AK-­47 rifles—­would be unnecessary. Yet still the factories churned away, pouring out guns day after day.

“In America, under capitalism, the answer would have been clear. Stop making rifles. Fire the workers and close down the factories. But we had one hundred percent employment, in the Worker’s Paradise. The factories stayed open. Crate after crate after shipload of rifles, and no one to shoot. I do not know who had the brilliant idea, as this was well before my time. But it must have been a KGB man. It was crazy, like all their ideas.

“In your country, your ­people were tearing each other apart. Radical groups were fighting police over whether or not your Vietnam war was a good idea. Race war seemed a distinct possibility. Maybe even another civil war, eh? Hippies versus the National Guard. Ha! Funny now but at the time it seemed we need only stand back and let you defeat yourself. We would not need to launch our missiles, after all. But soon we saw it wasn’t enough. In skirmish after skirmish, the radical groups were always crushed, because they lacked firepower. The one thing we had.

“So we started sending our surplus rifles abroad. Many to Africa, of course, and to Asia, as many as they could take. But some, just a trickle of the supply, to politicals in your country. It had to be done very quietly. It would take spies to make it happen.

“I was not the first man with the job. I was given this task only at the very end, after it was clear we would lose in Afghanistan. I was sent here with my million dollars’ worth of intelligence and put in place, given the list of contacts, supplied with the weapons.”

“Wait,” Chapel said. “You mean the Russians had you defect intentionally? What about the intel you supplied the CIA? Was that all bogus?”

“Oh, no,” Favorov said, with a weak chuckle. “It was all good, all real. It let your CIA round up a hundred spies working inside your borders. But they were all ­people the KGB found surplus to requirements anyway. They no longer needed all that manpower, not when internal concerns dominated. The Union was about to fall, and the KGB knew that. Keeping foreign agents on the payroll was a burden. This is how the KGB thought, you see. You cannot fire workers. But you can turn them over to your enemy, so they become your enemy’s problem.”

Chapel shook his head in disbelief.

“I was your golden boy, for a while,” Favorov went on. “Your CIA thought the world of me. It was so easy to sneak the guns in, right under their noses. It was a joyous time, to be frank. There was a new problem, though.”

“I imagine that around that time,” Chapel mused, “you probably had trouble finding enough radicals to take your weapons. The political mood of the country shifted and—­”

Favorov laughed. “Oh, you are part right, and part so wrong. The black power groups, the Latin separatists, the revolutionaries faded away, yes. But there are always angry men. If the leftists did not want the guns, your radical right would take them. Instead of minority groups, suddenly I was working with white supremacists.” Favorov shrugged. “I did not care either way. No, the problem was not finding ­people who wanted what I had. It was convincing them that I was their friend. The white power groups, they hated communists as much as your presidents. More, even. They did not trust me, and they certainly did not trust my suppliers.

“This was the reason I was sent to take over the program. Why a man of my skills was necessary. I had to convince them the guns had no strings attached. And this was my great insight, my great innovation. The thing that saved the program.

“I started charging.

“Before, always, the guns were given as gifts. Much needed supplies for the coming revolution! The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics stands behind your valiant struggle! Arise, comrades! This line, of course, was bullshit. And it did not fool the neo-­nazis in your country. So instead I went to them. I said, listen, you fascists, you hate us. But we have the guns you need. And I will give them to you for one half the cost anyone else can.” Favorov laughed. “That they understood! Greed!”

Chapel felt a shiver run down his spine. “So you got rich off the guns you were supposed to give away for free.”

“Sometimes it worked too well. I could not explain that income on my taxes. Not unless I made myself into a multimillionaire. Not unless I could claim my profits came from careful investments. This sacrifice I made. I became ludicrously rich, to support the cause. Of course, by then, the cause had changed. The Union was gone, and a free Russia arose, which made less difference than you might think. Yeltsin came and went and the KGB saw no real difference—­they ignored that drunk, and they kept to business as usual. Putin was another matter. He tried to shut us down. He said the Russian Federation would not undermine America like this.”

“But you kept selling guns,” Chapel said, slightly confused.

“You must understand, Putin is a very powerful man. The most powerful single man in Russia. Alone. But against an organized front, he is just another man. He cannot stop the crime syndicates. The gangsters.”

“The Russian mafia,” Chapel said.

“They saw how much money I was making. So they kept the program running. It was too lucrative to stop—­even if the governments of two superpowers wanted to crush us! The guns kept coming, stolen from supplies that had never been properly inventoried. Shipped through criminal contacts in Cuba, where before we worked directly with Castro. The ­people involved all changed, from politicians to gangsters, but the game did not change at all.”

“I need you to be very clear on this. The Russian government does not, currently, condone your operation? It tried to actively stop you?”

“They even sent a little man, Galtachenko, to tell me as much. To insist that I stop. But in Russia, you do not insist things from a rich man. You ask politely, and accept the fact he will continue to do as he likes.”

Favorov smiled up at the stars. It was a grim smile, the smile of a man whose life is over, even though what he’d just said had earned him a second chance.

“You have your answer, my friend. It was not an act of war. Simply an act of avarice. The Russian government has no desire to harm your country. But as long as there was money to be made, the guns continued to flow.”

“So that’s it,” Chapel said. “That’s it. I can take that to my boss. I can tell him we don’t need to declare war on Russia. Thank God.”

44.

C
hapel turned on all of the sailboat’s lights, then made a call on its radio. When he was done he went back out on the deck and waved his arm at the sky. Within a few minutes a light pierced the darkness, and then he heard the roar of an approaching helicopter. Its searchlight pinned the sailboat to the rolling waves, glinted off the blood on the deck.

A stretcher was lowered on cables toward the boat. Chapel helped Favorov climb onto it. The bandage on the Russian’s leg was already soaked through with blood, but Favorov would live.

“I will be dead, in a few days,” he said to Chapel as the winches activated and the Coast Guard started hauling him up into the sky.

“You’re going to be fine,” Chapel told him.

Favorov gave him a crooked smile. “My leg will be fine. My heart will stop, when some Russian gangster shivs me in the prison yard. Or some marksman shoots me on the steps of the courthouse.”

“We’ll protect you,” Chapel promised him.

“You cannot.”

The stretcher rose into the sky.

A while later a cutter came alongside the sailboat, dwarfing the little
Phaedra
. Coast Guard sailors helped Chapel up onto the cutter’s deck, and they took him home.

45.

I
t was weeks later when Chapel was finally debriefed. He’d spent the intervening time in a hospital, recovering from his injuries and wounds and head trauma and mostly just sleeping. He was still just glad to be back on his feet when a car came to take him to the Pentagon.

Director Hollingshead met him in a subbasement full of filing cabinets, a tiny room with thick concrete walls that had been swept for listening devices less than an hour before. What they had to talk about was not for general consumption.

“You did well, son,” the director said, patting Chapel on his artificial shoulder. “You did superbly well.”

“Thank you, sir. I’m just glad it turned out to just be a police matter. That we don’t need to go to war.”

“I think we’re all grateful for that,” Hollingshead said. His merry face wrinkled with a warm smile. “We would have tried a diplomatic solution, of course. But I don’t know exactly what the State Department could do to smooth over a foreign power arming a fifth column inside our borders. There’s only so much foolishness one can swallow before one needs to stand up to a bully. And I don’t need to tell you just how many men on both sides would have died in even a tiny little conflict between such large countries.”

“Sir,” Chapel said.

“As it is, we have a fair bill of work to complete—­tracking down the suppliers of all those guns, tracing the route by which they came into the country. Plugging holes and bailing water. But you needn’t concern yourself with that. The ATF will take charge of what remains. You can relax for a while. Heal properly. Until we need you again, of course.”

“Of course, sir,” Chapel said.

Hollingshead coughed discretely. He frowned for a moment, then took off his glasses and polished them with a silk handkerchief.

“Sir, if I may be candid, I sense there’s something else you want to tell me.”

Hollingshead nodded. Still he didn’t speak for a while. “It’s just a bit of information. I don’t want you to read too much into this. After all, prison is a violent place.”

Chapel looked down at the floor. “Favorov?”

“I’m afraid he’s dead,” Hollingshead said. “We had nothing to do with that, of course. Just some fool with a sharpened bed spring, in the lockup.”

“Sir,” Chapel said. “May I ask about Fiona?”

“The wife?” Hollingshead frowned as if he hadn’t expected such a question. “Why, I’ve heard nothing about her. I couldn’t even tell you where she is now, her or her boys. It’s like someone helped her just . . . vanish.”

Chapel said nothing to that. Instead he stood up and came to attention, expecting to be dismissed.

Hollingshead had never stood on ceremony. He nodded and waved one hand to tell Chapel he was free to go.

Before he went, though, he had to ask one last question. “Sir,” he said. “We’re taking a lot on faith, here.”

“I’m sorry, son?”

“We’re assuming Favorov told me the truth. Now we’ll never know if he just told me what we wanted to hear.”

Hollingshead took off his glasses and polished them with a silk handkerchief as he considered that. “If he was lying, it’s war,” he said. “I think perhaps, just this one time, a little faith might do us good.”

“Sir,” Chapel said, and headed out the door.