Cross the Line: (Alex Cross 24)

by James Patterson

  “Secret panic room!” Fender said. “And who the hell took off their hoods?”

  “I did,” Hobbes said. “It was frickin’ hot and I had the security hard drive.”

  “Who else broke protocol?” Brown roared.

  Cass, looking stricken, said, “I did. It was hot and I … I thought we were good. And my hair was different. And my eyes that night.”

  On the screen, reporters were yelling questions at Mahoney. Who was the witness? Could the witness identify the killers?

  “We’re not identifying the witness for the time being,” Mahoney said. “We believe the witness can identify the killers. We’ll have more for you tomorrow.”

  The screen cut back to the standup reporter, who said, “The FBI seems confident that this is the break they needed to at last bring the vigilantes to justice.”

  Fender stared at Hobbes. Brown stared at Cass, who looked devastated.

  “This is bullshit,” Hobbes said, grabbing the remote and punching off the TV. “What are they going to get from the witness? At best, an artist’s sketch.”

  Brown was about to explode, but then his burn phone began to buzz.

  He answered, said, “You saw it?”

  “Of course, I fucking saw it,” the man on the other end of the line snapped. “The witness is Guryev’s wife.”

  “That’s not good,” Brown said.

  “No, it goddamned isn’t. Our ship has a hole. You need to plug it.”

  Brown flushed with anger. “How the hell am I supposed to do that?”

  “I have her location and a way inside.”

  “Attack an FBI safe house?” Brown said. “I don’t know if that’s such a—”

  “You want to take this to the next level or not?”

  The next level. Brown felt all doubt leave him then, and said, “You know it’s the only long-term solution. If we don’t, nothing we’ve done will really matter.”

  “Exactly. So steel yourself and get rid of Elena Guryev.”

  CHAPTER

  81

  AT EIGHT THIRTY the morning after the massacre, Ned Mahoney and I sprinted down Monroe Street in Columbia Heights. Patrol cars and an ambulance blocked the street, their lights flashing.

  We showed our badges. The patrol officer pointed at the open door of a town house. The call had come into 911 only twenty minutes before. I’d been on my way to work and came straight over. Mahoney had been heading to FBI headquarters, heard about the call, and came straight over as well.

  After putting on gloves and booties, we stepped inside and saw a dead man lying facedown in the entryway, another one beyond him.

  “Simms and Frawley,” Mahoney said angrily. “Good agents. Seasoned agents.”

  “Shot in the back,” I said.

  “They were replacing the night team,” Mahoney said. “The killers must have come in right behind them.”

  The locations of federal safe houses are some of the most secure and heavily guarded secrets in law enforcement, so it was understood that the killers had had inside intelligence. Mahoney had a traitor in his midst, and we both knew it.

  We stepped over and around the dead agents, passed a television room on our left where the carpet was smeared with blood, and went into the kitchen, where a third FBI agent lay dead. Two EMTs worked on a fourth man, George Potter, the DEA’s acting special agent for the Washington, DC, office.

  Potter’s face was covered with blood from a nasty wound to his scalp. His shirt was off, and there was a clotting patch pressed into a chest wound. The medics had him hooked up to IVs and oxygen.

  “How is he?” Mahoney asked the EMT.

  Potter opened his eyes and said, gasping, “I’ll live.”

  “How is he?” Mahoney asked again.

  The EMT said, “Took a slug through his right lung, and he has a hell of a gash on his head. But he’s lucky. He’ll live.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “We need to get him to the hospital,” the medic said.

  “Wait, they need to know,” Potter said, looking at me. “Ned asked me to come in with the replacements and start talking to Mrs. Guryev first thing.”

  I glanced at Mahoney, who nodded.

  “Everything looked fine coming through the door,” Potter said. “I was walking down the hall with Simms and Frawley behind me. Out of nowhere there were sound-suppressed shots. Three of them. Fast. I got hit by the third shot. Spun me into that TV room. Went down, hit my head on the coffee table. When I came to, I called 911. What’s happened? Has anyone gone upstairs to see?”

  “No,” Mahoney said, looking grim.

  “We’re leaving,” the EMT said forcefully. “You can talk to him at GW Medical Center.”

  “We’ll be talking to you,” I said.

  Potter gave a thumbs-up and closed his eyes as they wheeled him away.

  I could tell from the expression on Mahoney’s face that he was dreading the climb upstairs as much as I was. We found a fourth dead FBI agent on the landing, and in a bedroom, Elena Guryev, in a T-shirt and panties, lay sprawled on the floor, dead from a single gunshot wound to her forehead.

  The bathroom door was open. Empty. The only other door on the second floor was shut.

  I braced myself, turned the handle, and pushed the door open.

  Ten-year-old Dimitri Guryev was sitting up in a twin bed, a small rose circle of dried blood showing through the gauze that wrapped his head. He had an iPad in his lap and was watching a closed-captioned Harry Potter movie.

  The boy must have glimpsed my shadow because he looked up, saw me, and shrank back in fear.

  “It’s okay,” I said, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me.

  I showed him my open hands, and then my badge.

  Seeing the badge, he said in an odd, nasal voice that was difficult to understand, “What do you want? Where’s my mother? Where’s my father?”

  My stomach sank.

  I turned around and saw Mahoney, who was standing in the doorway, looking stricken at the boy’s loss.

  “Get sheets over the bodies,” I said. “And close the door to his mother’s bedroom. I don’t want him seeing any of it.”

  CHAPTER

  82

  A FEW HOURS later, Bree looked up from a memo she was writing. Alex trudged into her office, shut the door behind him, and sat down hard.

  “Sometimes I hate my job,” he said. “Sometimes it’s just too much.”

  Bree rarely saw him this upset. “What happened?” she said softly.

  “I had to tell a ten-year-old totally deaf boy that his mother and father had been murdered and that he was an orphan now,” Alex said, his eyes watering. “I don’t know if it was due to the deafness, Bree, but the grieving sounds he made were like nothing I’ve ever heard before, just gut-wrenching. I couldn’t stop thinking about Ali as I held the poor kid.”

  He sat forward and put his head in his hands. “Jesus, that was hard.”

  Bree got up, came around the desk, and hugged him. “Maybe you were meant for the hard things, Alex. Maybe you were meant to help people through these terrible moments.”

  “I couldn’t help that child,” Alex said. “I couldn’t get through to him. After I showed him the note that said his mom and dad were dead, he wouldn’t read anything I wrote. He won’t read anything anyone writes. He’s suffering in total silence, in total isolation.”

  Bree hugged him tighter. “You feel too much sometimes.”

  “Can’t help it,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “But we need you to buck up and push on.”

  Alex hugged her tight and then broke their embrace, saying, “You would have been a great cornerman in a boxing match.”

  “Clean them, patch them, and send them back out there with Vaseline on their brows,” Bree said. “That’s me.”

  He kissed her, said, “Thank you for being you.”

  Bree once again realized how much she loved him. She loved everything about him. Even when he was w
ounded, Alex filled her up.

  Her phone rang.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “This is Ned,” Mahoney said.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Bree said.

  The FBI agent sounded distraught and sad. “I appreciate that, Bree. They were four of my best.”

  “How can I help?”

  “A federal judge in Alexandria just perfected our warrants. Get to Vienna ASAP if you’re still interested. We’re searching the Phoenix Club.”

  CHAPTER

  83

  BREE, SAMPSON, AND I met Mahoney and a team of ten from the FBI in the parking lot at Wolf Trap. The heat had returned, and we were sweating as we armored up, got documents in order, and rolled toward the Phoenix Club.

  Based on an aerial view of the compound from Google Earth, Mahoney gave out assignments. Five agents would loop into the woods behind the property to stop any runners. The rest of us were going in the front gate.

  “Pretty swank neighborhood,” Bree said, seeing the mansions. “I thought where Vivian McGrath lived was big money.”

  “She’s in the millionaires’ club,” Sampson said. “This is strictly billionaires.”

  Mahoney stopped a quarter of a mile from the club and watched five FBI agents head up the driveway of a big Tudor estate and then disappear into the woods.

  “Here we go,” Mahoney said into his radio, and he put the car back in gear.

  He drove us to the entrance and up the long drive. As we caught sight of the gate, it started to swing open to let a white Range Rover exit.

  Mahoney blocked the way. The window of the luxury SUV rolled down and a guy with slicked-back hair wearing five-hundred-dollar sunglasses and a five-thousand-dollar suit yelled, “Move, for God’s sake. I’m late for a very important meeting at the Pentagon.”

  “Tell it to someone who cares,” Mahoney said, climbing out of the car, hand on his pistol.

  “I’m a goddamned founding member of this club!” the man shouted.

  “And I’m an FBI agent,” Mahoney said, and then he called back to his men, “Detain him for questioning.”

  “What? No!” the man said, no longer belligerent but terrified as the same guard Sampson and I had seen on our previous visit appeared from the shack.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I have a federal warrant to search the premises,” Mahoney said, wielding a sheaf of papers.

  “You can’t just go in there,” the guard said, agitated. “It’s private.”

  “Not anymore,” Mahoney said and he signaled his team to move forward.

  The slick-haired suit in the Range Rover used the moment to spring from his car and start running back up the hill. Sampson thundered after him and caught him by the collar halfway up the inner drive.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Sampson demanded.

  “Please,” he said in a whine. “I’ll help you. Anything you want, but my name cannot be associated with this place.”

  “If I were you, Mr. Founding Member, I’d shut the hell up,” Sampson said, cuffing him.

  Bree, Mahoney, and I kept going up the drive, past flowering gardens and trees. We rounded a corner and saw the clubhouse, a sprawling, two-story place that suggested an inn in the south of France in its design and muted colors. There were tennis courts on our right. To the left, a high whitewashed picket fence enclosed a pool and side yard. A hedge about four feet high ran out from the fence to the drive and continued on to the woods on the other side of it, effectively cutting the front yard in two, an outer manicured lawn and an inner yard of blooming gardens surrounding the clubhouse. Piano music and the sound of people laughing drifted from the pool area.

  “Looks like we may be interrupting a party,” I said, stepping through a gap in the hedge.

  Shots rang out. Bullets slapped the pavement at our feet.

  CHAPTER

  84

  I SPUN AROUND, tackled Bree, and drove her down behind the hedge before another round of shots came from the house. We landed hard. Bree had the wind knocked out of her, but we were alive. So were Sampson and Mahoney, who were returning fire from behind the hedge on the other side of the drive.

  I scrambled up to my knees and called to them, “Where are they?”

  “Second floor!” Sampson called back.

  People were screaming by the pool.

  “We have multiple runners,” an FBI agent said through our earbuds. “Women in bikinis and bare-chested guys with white towels around their waists.”

  What the hell was this place?

  “Shoot them if they’re armed, stop them if they’re not,” Mahoney said.

  Ten seconds passed. Then twenty. Bree caught her breath and sat up beside me. The panic continued in the pool yard, but no more shots were fired from the clubhouse. Why? The gunmen had to know where we were hiding. They had to have seen us take cover.

  Something felt strange. We’d been in the wide open in that gap between the hedges. If they’d wanted to kill us, they could have, and yet …

  I thought about the layout of the property and the satellite photo we’d seen of the place. I dug in my pocket and called it up on my iPhone. Only one way in, which meant only one way out. Right?

  I was about to put the phone away when I noticed something. Beyond the north security wall a good hundred feet, a stubby spur of pavement appeared out of the woods, curved, and met the driveway of the adjoining mansion. I magnified the image, looked right where the spur disappeared into the trees, and saw a thick, dark smudge about the width of the pavement.

  “It was a diversion,” I said, jumping to my feet.

  “Alex!” Bree said.

  “They’ve got an underground escape route,” I said, and I sprinted back down the driveway, Sampson, Mahoney, and Bree behind me.

  “Hey!” the suit in the cuffs said when I ran by. “I want witness protection.”

  “Lot of good it will do you,” Sampson said as I dodged by the Range Rover and Mahoney’s car.

  As I ran down the long drive, I kept peering north through the trees, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone. But I hit the street and there was no one.

  I turned to tell the others when I heard an engine revving and tires squealing, and then a black Chevy Suburban came hurtling out of the estate to the north. It skidded sideways and then accelerated right at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sampson, Mahoney, and Bree appear.

  “Driver!” I shouted when the car was less than fifty yards from me.

  All four of us opened fire on the right side of the windshield, seeing it spiderweb before we had to dive for the ditch.

  The Suburban ripped by us. Then the big SUV swerved hard, went off the road, jumped the ditch, and smashed head-on into a very large granite boulder.

  CHAPTER

  85

  BREE STONE WALKED toward a group of young women wearing terry-cloth robes and smoking cigarettes by the kidney-shaped pool. They watched her from under hooded, mistrustful eyes.

  Why should they trust me? Bree thought. Sergei Bogrov and the three other guys in the Suburban had abandoned them, made a run for it. The driver had died. Bogrov was badly injured. The other two weren’t talking, nor were the ten club members the FBI had caught trying to flee the grounds.

  That left these women.

  Bree had been all through the Phoenix Club by then. She’d seen a gourmet kitchen, a well-stocked wine cellar and bar, a complete workout facility, a steam room, a sauna, a massage room, and eight bedrooms designed to cater to a variety of perversions and fetishes.

  There was a dungeon room, a room with mirrored walls and ceiling, a room with a bathtub you could do laps in, and a room with furniture designed for gravity-defying sex positions. There was also a storage area, where Mahoney’s men found several kilos of cocaine and several kilos of crystal methamphetamine that looked remarkably similar to the high-grade stuff manufactured in the lab at the first massacre scene.

  Bree stopped in front
of the women. One of them, a woman with an attractive beauty mark just to the right of her ruby lips, lit a cigarette and said something in a language that wasn’t English. Several of the others chuckled bitterly.

  “Some of you must speak English,” Bree said. “If you do, know that you are not in danger anymore.”

  The woman with the beauty mark made a tsk noise, said, “You know nothing.”

  “I know Stavros is dead,” Bree said. “I know Bogrov is in handcuffs.”

  That set off a lot of chatter among the women.

  Bree waited for a few moments and then spoke directly to Ms. Beauty Mark. “I am DC Metro Police chief of detectives Bree Stone. I’m telling you the truth. You are no longer in danger.”

  Ms. Beauty Mark’s upper lip curled, “We know the better. You get some, maybe, but not all. I’m telling you the truth. This is so much the bigger than you think. So, smart thing for me? For us? We don’t talk to no one. A lawyer comes. They always come.”

  “I know what you’ve been through,” Bree said. “How you were told you’d have to work for four or five years to pay off your debt for being smuggled into America. I know some of you rode in refrigerated cars and saw people freeze to death and that you were brought here to be sex slaves. Am I right?”

  Many of the women would not look at her. None of them replied.

  Bree almost quit, but then she gestured at the mansion and said, “All this? That’s the FBI’s business. I’m here for other reasons, for someone who may have been a friend of yours. I’m here for Edita Kravic.”

  That caused quite a few of them, including the woman with the beauty mark, to raise their heads.

  “Why for Edita?” she said. “You see her?”

  “I’m sorry,” Bree said, seeing the yearning in her eyes and coming closer. “Edita’s dead. She was murdered.”

  The woman acted as if she’d been slapped, and then her hand flew to her mouth and she began to sob.