Empire

by Lili St. Germain

  Lindsay’s colleague and fellow FBI officer, Peter Morgan, stood up at the desk he was occupying and made his way to the front of the room. Standing next to Lindsay, he addressed the twenty-odd federal agents who were assembled, ready to jump into action as soon as they were given the command.

  Another officer handed out clipboards with photos and vital information while Morgan elaborated. ‘There’s a shipment of young girls coming from Mexico,’ he said, his expression grave. ‘There are babies, people. We have to take these bastards down before we end up with a shipping container full of dead Mexican children.’

  The room was deathly quiet. Mentioning children and trafficking tended to have that effect.

  Their raid had been scheduled for Sunday, but intel suggested that the Gypsy Brothers members and their overlord, Emilio Ross, had brought the meeting forward to Friday – and today was Friday. Lindsay had scrambled to grab as many bodies as he could to help pull off such a raid, and so long as the LAPD sent over a couple of officers for manpower if things got ugly, they’d be fine. He could have waited until the following Sunday, but something in his gut told Lindsay not to give Mariana Rodriguez a week to rethink her agreement to testify, or for Emilio Ross to be tipped off by someone inside the Bureau and hightail it to Colombia.

  Morgan finished his briefing and Lindsay took charge once again, detailing floor plans of the Gypsy Brothers clubhouse and the surrounding areas. No exit left uncovered. No stone left unturned. No member of the Ross family left uncuffed.

  And then, after he’d finished talking, it was just a matter of waiting the morning out. This was always the hardest part. Sitting on your hands and waiting for the bad guys to be in the right place at the right time, when all you wanted to do was go in, guns blazing, and drag them out of whatever hole they were currently hiding in.

  ‘This’ll be good,’ Morgan remarked after the briefing had ended.

  Lindsay smiled. ‘Like shooting fish in a barrel.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  DORNAN

  It was 11:43. Church was due to start in seventeen minutes, and Viper wanted to talk?

  ‘It’d better be fucking urgent,’ Dornan muttered, showing Viper into the office where his father was already sitting, flicking through the newspaper. He didn’t even look up to acknowledge Viper’s presence.

  ‘It can’t wait,’ Viper said, and something about his expression made Dornan baulk.

  ‘Shit, did somebody die?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Viper said. ‘Somebody did die. We’ll get to that.’

  Emilio looked mildly interested.

  Viper pulled several folded pieces of paper from inside his leather jacket and placed them on the desk. Dornan went to reach for them, but Emilio was faster. ‘The fuck am I looking at here?’ he asked impatiently.

  ‘If I’m right,’ Viper said, ‘you’re looking at sixteen years’ worth of money being wired from John to Stephanie.’

  Dornan felt like he’d been punched in the heart. ‘Come again?’

  Viper looked deeply troubled. He was implicating the man who, until this week, had been his club president, the man he’d sworn loyalty to.

  ‘John knew where Stephanie was the whole time. He sent her money every single month. Plus extras. Doctors’ bills from her pregnancy. From Jason’s birth. School fees.’

  Dornan snatched the papers from his father, who scowled but didn’t say anything. Heart racing, fire in his veins, Dornan swept his eyes down the columns that didn’t really mean anything – until he started to focus on the titles of each column. There were dates and times and . . . Holy shit, John had really kept Stephanie from him for the better part of two decades. John had kept his son’s existence from him.

  Dornan made a growling sound in the back of his throat, charging for the door. Viper cut him off. ‘Move or I will rip your head off,’ he strained.

  ‘There’s more,’ Viper said, blocking Dornan’s path. ‘It’s about your wife.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  MARIANA

  It was weird going to our weekly meeting on a Friday instead of a Sunday. Sunday was ‘church’, after all, even if the Gypsy Brothers’ church had nothing to do with God or religion. It was a tradition, one they never broke. I was betting that the new president was keen to get his hands dirty, and he sure as shit didn’t want to wait until Sunday to start throwing his weight around.

  John and I had a plan: as soon as the meeting finished we were going to head back to the strip club, grab the money he’d hidden there, collect Juliette and Jason from John’s house, and get the hell out of town. John assured me he’d organised a car for us, a Chevy Tahoe. He’d arranged for it to be parked outside the clubhouse, down the block a few hundred metres, the key to be taped behind the licence plate.

  Once we got out of town, there was a car switch, several states to pass through, and then a private jet that would take us the last part of our journey. Colombia beckoned with open arms and the promise of my Luis. And once we had my son safely in our custody . . . we could literally go anywhere in the world.

  All we had to do was get through our respective meetings – John with his fellow club members, and me with Emilio and Dornan. We did this every week. We could do it one more time. Right?

  I was on edge. Jittery. My stomach was tied in knots and I kept feeling like I might throw up. But I could act. I could poker-face my way through anything. I’d been acting my way through the last ten years of my life without ever getting caught.

  We were going to make it.

  Only we were screwed before we even got a chance to head into our meetings.

  We arrived at the clubhouse early, as was custom. I arrived with Dornan, as usual, and John strolled in at 11:47 a.m. Thirteen excruciating minutes until we could get this over and done with and then disappear into the wind. Our new life taunted me relentlessly. I wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life.

  Dornan had already peeled off somewhere, and Emilio was nowhere to be seen. John was talking to another Gypsy Brother, and I leaned against the wall and tried not to attract any attention – easier said than done when you were the only woman in a club full of men. It didn’t matter at any rate, because while I was trying to remain inconspicuous, the doors to the club burst open, and FBI officers started streaming in. I saw Lindsay across the room, before he could see me. I acted on autopilot. I locked eyes with John, gestured to the fire escape at the back of the club, and we ran.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  DORNAN

  Dornan backed up and let Viper speak.

  ‘After I found these transactions, I decided to take a look at John’s house . . .’ he trailed off.

  ‘Don’t get shy now,’ Emilio said. He seemed intrigued, but it wasn’t his money. It was John taking pity on some girl and sending her some of his cash. Dornan could tell that his father thought this was no big deal.

  Viper placed a cellphone on the desk. He looked like he was about to have a damned heart attack.

  ‘Whose is it?’ Dornan asked. His head was throbbing. He almost didn’t want to know. He definitely didn’t want to be blindsided while his father was standing beside him.

  ‘I found this phone in John’s garden shed,’ Viper said. ‘It was hidden thoroughly. When I unearthed it and turned it on, guess which number was first on the call list?’

  Dornan closed his eyes briefly, pinching the bridge of his nose. He already knew the answer. The phone in front of him was a cheap burner phone. He’d seen one exactly the same.

  ‘He’s been calling your wife,’ Viper said, his eyes darting around as if he didn’t know where to look. ‘Or rather, they’ve been calling each other.’

  Dornan’s resolve shattered. It made perfect sense. Of course! He knew she’d been seeing somebody else, even when she tried to deny it. Of course it would be John – the man who was everything Dornan had never quite been able to emulate. The good one. The kind one. The one who didn’t beat you until you miscarried. Or, for that
matter, the one who didn’t beat you at all, because he was just a fucking stand-up guy.

  ‘There’s more,’ Viper said.

  Emilio was openly entertained now, apparently having forgotten the time and their impending meeting. Seemed this juicy news was reason enough to be late.

  ‘Please, by all means, go on,’ Emilio said, steepling his fingers and leaning his chin on them. ‘You’re really very good at setting the scene. Very thorough.’

  Viper glanced at Dornan. ‘Once I figured out they’d been talking, I decided it was worth looking into something that’s been bothering me ever since you told me about it, Mr Ross. The ashes you mentioned to me. You asked me to track down where she had the kid cremated at such short notice and I found it – Budget Funerals. We’ve already talked about this, but after I told you I decided to do some more digging. I asked the guy if I could look at his security tapes from the week Agent Murphy went missing.’

  Emilio drew a sharp breath. There was nothing playful about his attention now.

  ‘John took a body to be disposed of the same day Murphy disappeared,’ Viper said. ‘I asked the guy about it, convinced him that John had sent me to make sure any personal effects had been destroyed along with the body.’

  He dug into his pocket and pulled out an ID badge, with Murphy’s face staring out next to the letters DEA.

  He slid it across the table for Emilio to see. ‘I rechecked the tapes. Mariana was waiting in the car while John loaded Murphy’s body for burning.’

  Emilio stood, pounding his fist on the desk. ‘That fucking cunt!’ he roared, his eyes so big Dornan thought they might explode out of his head and roll along the floor. Dornan didn’t know what to do. His wife was a traitor. His wife wasn’t loyal to him. She was loyal to John. She was in love with John.

  And they were both standing five feet away, separated only by the soundproof walls this office boasted; thank God for small miracles in a sea of shitty news.

  ‘I’ll kill them both,’ Dornan decided out loud, reaching for his gun.

  ‘Stop,’ Viper said. ‘There’s more. I checked the accounts after I found all of this. She’s been skimming your money. I didn’t have time to put it all together, but the amount so far is over seven figures.’

  Emilio looked like he was about to cut Viper’s skull open and rip out his brain, just to see if he could get the answers faster than Viper was relaying them.

  ‘But seven figures is–’

  ‘Millions,’ Viper confirmed.

  Dornan and Emilio both moved for the door at the same time.

  But they never reached it. It exploded open, a stream of FBI agents yelling commands at the three of them, and then Dornan was on the floor, hands behind his back and his face pressed into the rough carpet as the bony knee of an FBI agent dug into the small of his back.

  Emilio was cursing in Italian, the same sentence, over and over again. ‘I will cut her fucking head off. I will saw their fucking heads off!’

  No, he wouldn’t. Dornan would beat him to it. And he wouldn’t need a blade. No. Dornan would rip his pretty wife’s head from her body simply with the force of his rage, and then he would do the same to his best friend, the man he’d trusted more than anyone else in his entire life.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  MARIANA

  I’d like to say we escaped, that our plan was brilliant, but our plan was hasty and panicked. John went first, sliding down the fire escape to the back alley below, hidden from street view. This was even better, I surmised, as I felt John’s hand on my ankle, guiding me down so I didn’t fall and break my neck in these ridiculous high heels Dornan insisted I wear to meetings. We could make a clean break while the others languished in police cells. We’d be in Colombia before some of them even made bail.

  But that’s where the illusion shattered. Because I looked down, and the man holding my ankle wasn’t John. It was Lindsay.

  ‘Mariana.’ He smiled, pulling me down to the ground and then pushing me up against the wall, cold handcuffs wrapping around my wrists and clicking shut. ‘How nice of you to join us.’

  In my peripheral vision I saw John, handcuffed and gagged, as he was dragged away. He hadn’t even been able to yell out to warn me of the danger below. Lindsay wrenched me away from the wall and pushed me forward. I moved awkwardly in my heels as he propelled me around to the front of the clubhouse, following in John’s footsteps, where at least fifteen police cars sat waiting to be filled. I looked on in horror as I saw John being wrestled into one car, Dornan into another, and Emilio into a third. Cuffs firmly in place, Lindsay spun me around to face him. He smiled again, and Christ almighty if he didn’t look like some Hollywood movie star who’d been plucked off the street and handed a gun and a badge. His bright white teeth were dazzling, and he looked clean. Too clean. Even his navy blue suit jacket looked freshly pressed.

  We, on the other hand, we were all dirty, even if we didn’t look it on the surface. Emilio’s dirt was the poison that ran through his veins, the beady look in his dark eyes, the bit of phlegm that always seemed to be trapped in his chest, that rumbled when he spoke and made me want to scream at him to clear his damn throat every time he opened his mouth.

  Dornan and John were dirty anyway, with their beard scruff, the tattoos that covered their skin in various stages of bright and dull colouring, the leather vests they never, ever washed, their palms stained with engine oil and probably blood.

  We were all dirty, dishevelled, less than.

  Lindsay, though, was resplendent. He had us now, and he knew it.

  And he beamed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  LINDSAY

  Divide and conquer – that was the key to getting people to turn on each other. Lindsay was well versed in this technique, and it was perfect for today’s situation: a group of highly paranoid criminals with shady moral codes who would just as soon rat on someone as take a bullet for them. It was the law of averages. Eventually, one of them would turn on the rest.

  Speaking of. In front of him sat Mariana Rodrig– no, it was Ross now, wasn’t it? Mariana Ross. Didn’t roll off the tongue as nicely as Rodriguez, but Lindsay suspected that she’d roll off his tongue nicely no matter what her name was. He tried not to think about how beautiful she was, though. It had already made him go softer on her than he should have, when he gave her the gun back in Vegas. It was a dumb move. He knew the second she got out of that car that she wasn’t going to testify for him.

  He’d been questioning her for at least thirty minutes but the woman was like a vault. She wasn’t saying anything, and she looked bereft. Lindsay suspected he’d interrupted her escape plans. Well, he had literally interrupted her shimmying down the fire escape in heels and a pencil skirt, but he suspected she’d planned to be on her way to some exotic locale by now, instead of sitting chained to an interrogation table inside the LAPD’s downtown station. As much as Lindsay loathed this place, the FBI headquarters simply couldn’t handle this volume of arrests at one time.

  ‘This is your last chance at getting immunity,’ he reminded her. ‘I mean it. Just because I feel sorry for you doesn’t mean I can make the murder charge go away.’ He slid a piece of paper over to her side of the table. ‘We know you killed Allie Baxter. You’re going away, for twenty-five to life. Not that you’ll survive that long. The cartels run the prisons. You’ll be dead before you get to dinner on your first day.’

  It was only then that she started to communicate.

  ‘You’ll never get immunity approved for a cop killer,’ Mariana said to him. ‘Why would you offer such a thing?’

  Lindsay smiled. ‘Killing a dirty cop isn’t quite the same as killing, say, a cop like me.’

  Mariana raised one eyebrow. ‘A cop like you?’

  ‘Exemplary. Unblemished record. Solid cases. You definitely don’t want to get caught for killing a cop like me.’

  She didn’t look convinced.

  ‘Your testimony could bring an entire cartel to its k
nees,’ Lindsay said. ‘It could dismantle their drug operations. Their arms deals. Their human trafficking.’ He saw her flinch. ‘You want to help the women and children Emilio is selling, don’t you? The babies? The babies he sells while they’re still in their mothers’ wombs? Mariana, don’t you want to stop those children from being sold to porn rings and paedophiles?’

  ‘Stop,’ she said, covering her ears. ‘Please stop.’

  ‘Do you think anyone stops when those children beg them to stop?’

  Mariana glared at him. ‘John and I are a package deal,’ she said. ‘We both get immunity, then I testify.’

  Lindsay laughed. ‘What? You’re kidding, right? Immunity for the president of the club who was running the trafficking in the first place? I don’t think so.’

  ‘He didn’t have anything to do with it,’ she said forcefully.

  ‘Guess you can tell that to your buddies in your prison cell.’

  ‘Do you really think I’m afraid of prison,’ she shot back, ‘after the life I’ve lived? Prison would be a walk in the park compared to that. You can either give us both immunity, or you can process me, because I’m not saying another word without John.’

  Lindsay realised that she didn’t care what happened to her. She was in love with this guy, and she was never going to cooperate unless he was part of the deal.

  Mariana sat back in her metal chair and smiled at Lindsay smugly. ‘You should see the things I could get for you,’ she teased. ‘I think the word “damning” ought to cover it.’

  Lindsay was finding it harder to smile at her. She was asking him to do the impossible.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said.

  ***

  Fifteen minutes later, Lindsay marched John Portland into Mariana’s interrogation room. Her eyes practically popped out of her skull, she looked so surprised. She covered her reaction quickly, though, with a smile. ‘See, that wasn’t so hard,’ she said to Lindsay.

  He just made a noise at the back of his throat. He could technically lose his job for this, but if an entire cartel was taken down through his efforts, then all would be forgiven. Probably.