“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
Chapel 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
It 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.