Minotaur Read online

  But he wasn’t out of the woods yet. He only had a few hours before Favorov’s yacht would arrive. He had to make sure the Russian didn’t get on board. But before he could go hunting down the ex-­GRU man, he had to take care of Stephen.

  He didn’t like it. It meant lying in wait when he should be springing to action. But if Stephen came back and found Michael tied up in a chair, he would know instantly what had happened and he would alert the rest of the house staff. Every single person in the house would instantly be looking for Chapel, and probably intending him gross bodily harm.

  So he propped Michael up in a chair and went to stand by the door, just to the side of where it would open. His nerves pinged and his muscles twitched with the need to move, the need to act. His vision was still a little blurry from his concussion, and his wrist ached where it had been tied. He forced himself to keep absolutely, perfectly, still.

  After what felt like hours of waiting but could only have been minutes, he heard footsteps in the hall. They came right up to the door—­and stopped. Chapel gritted his teeth. He’d expected Stephen to just come striding in, totally unprepared for what he would find in the billiards room. It looked like that wasn’t going to happen.

  Chapel held his breath. He waited. When Stephen knocked on the door and called Michael’s name, Chapel nearly jumped out of his skin. He considered imitating Michael’s voice, but that was far too likely to backfire, so he kept quiet. Nothing for it—­but it meant that Stephen was out there now, with a gun, and he knew something was wrong. He’d be expecting an ambush.

  After a moment the door’s knob began to turn.

  Chapel would never get a better chance. As soon as the door cracked open he shoved his foot into the gap and kicked it wide open, swinging around so he stood face-­to-­face with a very surprised-­looking Stephen.

  “Did you get a gun?” Chapel asked, trying to throw the servant off balance.

  “Wh—­yeah, I—­how did you—­?”

  As soon as he knew Stephen was armed Chapel brought up one foot and kicked down hard on Stephen’s knee. By speaking to him, Chapel had made the servant look at his face, not at his hands or feet. The blow wasn’t hard enough to break Stephen’s leg, but it made him stagger forward, right into Chapel’s body, letting Chapel throw his arms around the servant in a bear hug that would keep his arms out of play.

  It should have been enough to leave Stephen at Chapel’s mercy. It should have given him plenty of time to get the servant into a sleeper hold, just as he’d done with Michael. There was one problem with hand-­to-­hand fighting, though. No matter how well trained you were, no matter how carefully you’d thought through every move and hold and grapple, the other guy could always counter your attack if he had a chance to think about it. Or if he just got lucky.

  Chapel’s kick had left Stephen falling forward. Normally an opponent would try to recover his footing, which would be a mistake. Instead, Stephen kept falling, in a trajectory that would have left him flat on his face if Chapel hadn’t been in the way to catch him. It meant his entire weight came down on Chapel all at once, nearly two hundred pounds. His forehead hit Chapel square in the chin.

  The impact was enormously loud inside Chapel’s head. He felt skull hit skull and his already bruised head rang like a bell. The hit wouldn’t seriously injure either of them, but it threw Chapel off just enough that his bear hug weakened and Stephen slipped out of his arms, sagging to the ground. Chapel took an involuntary step back, his hand moving to rub his chin.

  He recovered swiftly—­he’d been trained not to let pain or injury slow him down—­but for a split second, Chapel lost all contact with his opponent. Stephen was quick enough to make the best use he could of that brief window. The servant scampered across the floor, away from Chapel, grabbing at the corridor wall outside the billiards room and dragging himself back up to his feet. And then he ran away.

  Crap, Chapel thought, as he watched Stephen’s back receding down the hallway. Without any more hesitation, he dashed into pursuit.

  12.

  Stephen didn’t shout out as he ran. Instead he saved all his breath for sprinting. He ran like his death was after him. Chapel had no desire to kill the man—­his only mistake had been choosing the wrong employer—­but Stephen couldn’t know that.

  The servant led Chapel deeper into the house, toward a hallway lined with narrow tables on spindly legs. Silver platters holding wine bottles and pitchers of water stood atop the tables. Looking back over his shoulder, Stephen intentionally hooked one of the tables with his foot as he ran past. Cursing, Chapel dashed forward and caught a glass water pitcher before it could smash on the floor. Maybe Stephen had hoped to strew the way behind him with broken glass, or maybe he’d thought someone would hear the noise and come to investigate. Either way Chapel needed to make sure that didn’t happen.

  Up ahead a pair of swinging doors led into a space lined with white tile. Stephen dashed through the doors and disappeared. Chapel barreled after him, wondering if he was running straight into an ambush. Stephen had a gun, now, and though he hadn’t had a chance to use it yet, that could all change in a moment.

  So as he pushed through the doors Chapel brought his head down, making himself as small a target as possible. He just had time to veer to one side as he saw a middle-­aged woman in an apron and a hairnet right in front of him. She was shouting something, but he didn’t listen until he’d had a chance to straighten up and look around. It took him a second to realize she was speaking Spanish, and demanding to know why ­people were running through her kitchen. Chapel caught a flash of something metallic in her hand and he grabbed for her wrist before realizing she was holding a spatula. She had to be the cook, and she was no enemy of his.

  “Stephen,” he said, hoping he’d got the right name. He tried to think of the Spanish words, “Stephen, donde . . . vaya . . . where did he go?”

  The woman’s eyes were very wide and her face was turning red. She opened her mouth to say something.

  Then a bullet passed through the side of her neck, cutting the air just to the side of Chapel’s cheek. Blood erupted from the woman’s throat and she made a horrible gurgling noise Chapel had heard before. He knew she was already dead, she just hadn’t fallen down yet.

  “Jesus,” he breathed, as he threw himself to the floor behind a high counter. Beside him the cook dropped slowly to her knees, unable even to bring her hands up to grasp at her wound.

  A gunshot rang out and Chapel realized that in the general panic he hadn’t even heard the first one. A third shot shattered a jar of pasta on the counter and dry sticks of angel hair showered him from above.

  It seemed Stephen had decided to make his stand.

  13.

  Chapel crawled to the edge of the counter. Beyond he could see some chairs and a table. No sign of Stephen. He risked poking his head out just a little further.

  Two gunshots in quick succession dug up long runnels through the linoleum tile Chapel crouched on. He jumped back as quickly as he could, knowing if he was going to be hit there was no way he could move fast enough. He pushed his back up against the island and sat down on the floor, trying to avoid the steadily growing puddle of the cook’s blood. Strands of uncooked pasta floated in the red pool.

  Jesus, he thought. He’d really managed to compromise things in a hurry. He couldn’t have been free for more than ten minutes. And now a woman was dead . . . he hadn’t even brought a weapon to Favorov’s house. His mission had been purely about talking to the man, finding out a vital piece of information.

  Now he was a prisoner in the house, pinned down by gunfire. Even if there was some way he could overpower Stephen, everyone in the mansion had surely heard the gunshots. There would be plenty more servants coming for Chapel, not to mention Favorov himself.

  The poor cook hadn’t asked for any of this. He glanced over at her body, lying in a heap a few feet away. Immediate
ly he wished he hadn’t looked. He closed his eyes for a second and just waited, waited for Stephen to come around the side of the island and shoot him. But no—­that wasn’t good enough. He was Jim Chapel, damn it, and he didn’t just give up.

  “Stephen,” he called out. “Stephen, will you listen?”

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  At least he’d gotten the name right. It had been either Stephen or Michael and he’d chosen correctly. When his odds were one in two, it seemed he still had a little luck. “Stephen, I want to talk about how this ends.”

  “It ends with you having a big hole in your fucking face if you make a move right now.”

  “Got it,” Chapel called back. “That’s how it ends for me, sure. So I’m going to stay right here and just talk. Is that all right?”

  Chapel expected a gunshot in response. Instead he just got silence.

  “Your boss wants me alive,” Chapel tried. “If you kill me—­”

  “Shit, I’m already fired,” Stephen said. It sounded like he might start sobbing soon. Clearly he hadn’t thought any of this through. “The boss doesn’t like ­people who fail him. And I’ve already failed him—­you got away. Shit! Fired.” He chuckled.

  “Something funny?”

  “I know who he is, man. I know what he used to be. I’ll be lucky if he doesn’t strangle me with my own tie.”

  “He’s a pretty dangerous guy, yeah,” Chapel agreed. “I’m a lot nicer. I can protect you.”

  “Yeah, right. After I just took four shots at you.”

  Five, Chapel thought. He’d been counting. Judging by the sounds of the gunshots, Stephen had a revolver. Which meant, most likely, he only had one shot left.

  Assuming he hadn’t brought any reloads with him. And that he only had the one weapon. And that Chapel had, indeed, counted correctly. He’d been under stress when he was adding up shots.

  Chapel needed another way out of this. “I can be very forgiving,” he said. “Listen, Stephen, you can still walk away.” Not very far, though. As soon as the cops caught up with him Stephen would be looking at a manslaughter charge, at the very least, for what he’d done to the cook. But Chapel didn’t figure it would help him if he said that out loud. “Is there a door in this room, leading outside?”

  “There is.”

  “You can just walk right through it. I won’t follow you, I promise.”

  Another chuckle.

  “No, seriously. You’ve got the gun, Stephen. I’m helpless here. Totally defenseless. You walk away and I’d be an idiot to chase you.”

  Stephen was silent for a long time. “Stand up,” he said, finally. “Show me your hands.”

  “Come on, Stephen, I’d be a real idiot to—­”

  “Do it or I’ll shoot you in the goddamn heart!”

  Chapel slowly rose to his feet, just poking his head over the counter. Expecting the top of his skull to be blown off. He lifted his hands. His artificial hand first.

  He saw Stephen standing not three feet away. The snub-­nosed barrel of a big, nasty revolver was pointing right at Chapel’s chest. Stephen must have had some training, he realized, in how to shoot. He knew to go for center mass, rather than trying to shoot Chapel in the head.

  “Okay,” Chapel said. “I did what you asked. Now—­”

  You couldn’t dodge a bullet. No human being was fast enough. Not at that range, certainly. So when Stephen fired his sixth and final shot, Chapel had nowhere to go.

  14.

  Chapel had been shot before. More than once.

  He remembered what it felt like, knew the incredible sharp pain of it, then the wave of nauseating numbness as the pain went away (temporarily), as the body went into denial and refused to believe it was injured.

  He knew exactly what it felt like, but it still came as quite a shock. He’d been sure he could talk his way out of this, that Stephen would listen to reason. So for the first split second after the bullet entered his chest, he was mostly just surprised.

  Then—­slightly relieved.

  Stephen could have shot him through the heart, like he’d said he would. He could have killed Chapel outright. Instead he’d shot Chapel low and to the right, well clear of his heart and lungs. The pain was still going to be unbearable, and he started bleeding out instantly, but he might just survive this.

  “That’s just to slow you down,” Stephen said. “So you don’t come after me. You tell them—­you tell them I could have killed you, but I didn’t. You tell them it was basically self-­defense!”

  “Tell . . . who?” Chapel wheezed.

  “Your cop bosses, whoever.”

  Chapel pressed his hand tightly against the wound. The blood poured through his fingers like water. “Not . . . a cop.”

  But Stephen wasn’t there anymore to hear him. Chapel heard a creaking sound and felt cool air on his face. He looked up and saw a door to the outside flapping open. Stephen had run for it.

  That was when a whole fresh wave of pain hit, and for a while Chapel could do nothing but lean against the counter and clamp his eyes shut and try not to scream.

  Blood. He could hear his own blood dripping on the floor. Mixing with the blood of the cook. He had to do something about that, had to—­

  Pain interrupted anything like a clear thought. It drove everything else out of his had. God damn, it hurt. God—­

  With a shaking hand Chapel grabbed a towel off the counter and pushed it hard against the wound. The blood kept coming but it slowed. He pushed harder, using the pain, using the way every muscle in his body just wanted to tense up, the way he wanted to just curl into a ball on the floor.

  He bit back the tears that rushed into his eyes. Bit back a shout of rage and agony.

  He couldn’t let Favorov find him like this. His value as a hostage would only go up if he was wounded. Chapel pulled open drawer after drawer in the counter until he found what he was looking for—­a roll of tape. It wasn’t duct tape, which he would have preferred, but just plain transparent packing tape. It didn’t matter. He forced his hands to steady, forced his vision to clear by sheer willpower, then he wrapped the tape around and around himself, holding the towel in place.

  When that was done he gave himself a long moment to just lean against the counter and breathe. It took all the effort he had just to bring oxygen into his lungs and pump carbon dioxide back out. It helped if he closed his eyes . . .

  “No,” he told himself out loud. “No!” He slammed the countertop with his right hand, slammed it again and again until he felt like he was regaining some control. Then he slowly turned around to face the swinging doors that led back into the house. If a small army of armed servants was about to arrive and take him captive, he could at least watch them do it.

  That was when he noticed something he’d desperately wanted for a while now, ever since he’d been taken prisoner. Something that could make all the difference.

  There was a telephone mounted on the kitchen wall.

  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.”