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 Ocean,” 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.
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.
37
Chapel’s miraculous artificial arm had one major design flaw—it couldn’t be immersed in water. The silicone flesh over the robotics couldn’t be made watertight.
He reached up with his good arm and slipped the catches that released it from his shoulder. Automatically it powered down. He placed it gently on top of an old oil drum and then he dove into the icy water of the slip.
Before he’d lost the arm, Chapel had been an excellent swimmer. Growing up in Florida, he’d spent countless hours in the canals and swimming in the ocean until his mother had joked he was half fish. After he lost his arm in Afghanistan he’d had to learn all over again how to maneuver in the water with an asymmetrical body and only one arm with which to stroke. He would never be as fast as he was when he’d been a kid.
Add to that his recent injuries—the salt water burned his lower chest where he’d been shot, and stung his thigh where Daniel had stabbed him—and fatigue and shock and everything else.
But he would be damned if he wasn’t going to catch the sailboat. He pushed forward as hard as he could, his head breaking the water only so he could make sure he was swimming in the right direction. He felt his earpiece slip away and float off, and knew he’d lost Angel, but he didn’t slow down to try to grab the thing.
Forcing himself through the exhaustion, through the shock of the cold water, through the darkness, he watched as the boat slipped further and further out of reach. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Favorov had heard him thrashing around behind the boat and had come out to shoot him. He wouldn’t have been surprised if his overworked body just gave up, if cramps had seized him and he’d drowned on the spot. But he kept going, even though it seemed he was making no headway at all.
And then the miracle occurred. The one he’d been counting on. His hand brushed against something fibrous and he grabbed at it, praying it was what he thought it was. Instantly he felt himself tugged along, dragged through the water behind the boat. He stopped kicking his legs—he didn’t need to work so hard anymore.
When Favorov had left the slip he hadn’t bothered to stow the painter that had held the boat to the dock. He hadn’t even removed it properly—judging by the frayed end of the line Chapel now held, he’d just cut through the thin cord to save time. Now it was slack in the water, dragged along behind the boat. Now Chapel had it in his hand.