Cross the Line

by James Patterson

  “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 wounded, 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 wa
s 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.

  Bree went over to her. “You knew Edita?”

  “I’m her sister,” she said through tears. “Her baby sister, Katya.”

  Chapter

  86

  Katya Kravic dissolved into misery. Bree stood back as her friends came over to console her. When Katya finally calmed down, her eyes puffy and bloodshot, she lit a cigarette shakily.

  “Can you help me?” Bree asked.

  “Can you help me?” Katya said. “All of us?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “They’ll throw us out of country,” Katya said. “We’re not supposed to be here. At least not on the immigration computers.”

  “A lot depends on your cooperation,” Bree said. “The more you cooperate, the more likely a judge is to look at you favorably.”

  Katya thought about that. Spoke to one of her friends, who nodded.

  “What do you want to know?” she said.

  “Tell me about Edita.”

  Katya said her older sister had come first, almost eight years ago. The agreement Edita had struck with the Russian broker was similar to the terms Alex had heard from the woman he and Sampson rescued from the refrigerated trucks at the tobacco-shed massacre site.

  In return for five years of her life, Edita got false documents and a way into the United States. She was moved up and down the East Coast for two years before finding a permanent position with the Phoenix Club.

  According to Katya, the club was not a high-volume brothel. Members paid a fifty-thousand-dollar initiation fee to join, and ten thousand a year in dues thereafter. In return, they got access to the club, its facilities, all the booze and illicit drugs they wanted, and the company of the women.

  “What happened when Edita’s five years were up?” Bree asked.

  “They gave her back her passport and even gave her a green card, and then they said she had a choice,” Katya said. “Leave, make a new life. Or become part of the management.”

  “She took management.”

  “No, Edita is…she was smart girl,” Katya said. “She found an apartment in Washington and worked here. She ran the club in the evening, and Stavros and Bogrov pay her much money. She uses the money to become a lawyer.”

  Katya said this with such pride that Bree was touched.

  “Did she ever mention a man named Tom McGrath?”

  Katya’s face clouded. “He is the one who killed her?”

  “No, he died with her. Thomas McGrath.”

  “Tommy?” Katya said, her face clouding further. “Yes, Edita tells me about Tommy. Too much about Tommy.”

  Edita had met McGra
th when he’d come to speak at her criminal law class. She was ten years older than the other students, and he was funny and handsome, and his wife had recently thrown him out of the house and said she didn’t love him anymore. Edita and McGrath had had a drink after class and dinner the next night.

  “They became lovers,” Katya said. “Edita was the happiest I have seen her. Ever. For a month, maybe.”

  “Then what happened?”

  Katya said McGrath ran a background check on Edita and discovered that the green card she had was fake, and there were no records in INS of an Edita Kravic applying for citizenship.

  “They lie,” Katya said. “Bogrov and the others. They sell to Edita a lie.”

  After discovering the forgery, Katya said, McGrath forced Edita to come clean and tell him everything. But the more she told him about the Phoenix Club, the more he wanted to know. Tommy asked Edita to break into the club’s computers and copy things for him.

  Katya stopped talking and looked up angrily. “Tommy, he says he loves Edita, but she has to prove she loves him. So he pushes and pushes, and she loves him, but she is so scared the last time I saw her. Tommy would not listen to her about Bogrov and Stavros, how they are bad men, crazy men. You ask me, Tommy got my Edita killed, and Tommy, he got himself killed too.”

  Part Five

  A Blimp Runneth

  Chapter

  87

  The sun was setting as John Brown ended his briefing with a description of that evening’s goal and the plan beyond it.

  Brown looked around at the fifteen men and women in his living room, seeing mild shock in some faces, profound concern in others. He understood. His plan was bold and audacious, so audacious that—