Cross the Line

66

AN HOUR AFTER sunrise, Ned Mahoney, John Sampson, and I were looking into an open saddlebag attached to Nicholas Condon’s Harley-Davidson. There was a rectangular package inside, wrapped in dark cloth.

“What’s in it?” Mahoney asked.

“Haven’t looked,” Condon said. “Soon as I saw it, I called Dr. Cross.”

“Before or after someone shot at you?” Mahoney said.

“You mean before or after someone head-shot my dummy,” Condon said. “That’s exactly why I’ve got a little winch on a timer in there. Makes the mannequin move every four or five minutes throughout the night. Handy gadget.”

I didn’t comment on the fact that the sniper had to have a decoy in order to sleep soundly; I just focused on the package.

“No indication of a bomb?” Sampson asked.

“No,” Condon said. “After Azore woke up, I had him sniff it.”

“Could the lingering effects of the drug throw off the dog’s sense of smell?” I asked.

“I’d be glad to take the package out for you if you’re not up to the job.”

“I’ll do it,” Mahoney said, and he stuck a gloved hand into the saddlebag and came out with the package. “Heavy.”

He set it down and started to work at the knot that held the fabric together.

“You said they were scared off by a woman screaming,” Sampson said.

“I said they were scared off by a woman’s scream,” Condon said. “An app on my iPhone. Goes to Bluetooth and my speakers. You’d swear she was right there, screaming her head off.”

“How’s the other dog?” I asked. “The one you said bit one of them?”

“Denni. She’s resting inside.”

“We didn’t find any blood out on the road yet,” Mahoney said, finally getting the knot undone.

“There’s blood there somewhere,” Condon said. “I could hear the guy yelling. She got into him good before he knocked her out.”

“You wash her?”

“No, but I caught Azore licking her muzzle, so I don’t know what you’ll get from her.”

“Okay,” Mahoney said, folding back the fabric, revealing something silkscreened on the other side and a cardboard box.

He lifted the box up. We could see now that the fabric was a piece of a T-shirt featuring artwork for Reggae Sunsplash, a Jamaican music festival.

“I wondered where that went,” Condon said.

“Stolen?”

“Or I left it at the gym. Either way, my DNA will be all over it.”

Mahoney opened the cardboard box. There was a large envelope inside and a.45-caliber Remington model 1911.

“That yours?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Nice gun, though I prefer a Glock in a forty caliber.”

“Me too, actually,” Mahoney said, opening the envelope.

He pulled out several pages of architectural drawings and diagrams.

“Yours?” Sampson asked.

Condon looked them over and shook his head. “No. What are they?”

Mahoney shrugged and gave them to me. I studied them and almost handed them off to Sampson before it dawned on me what they were.

“These are drawings of the attack locations,” I said. “This one’s the factory where they killed the meth makers. And this one shows an aerial view of the tobacco-drying sheds and the road coming down the middle.”

Condon said, “Before you say anything, there is no way those are mine. This was supposed to be a diversion. Kill me and plant evidence. Keep you guys off the trail of the real vigilante crew.”

The more I thought about it, the more I thought Condon was right-unless, of course, he’d shot his dummy-on-a-rope and put the evidence in his saddlebag to keep us from suspecting he was part of the vigilante group.

For the time being, however, I was going to trust him.

“So whoever they are, they think you’re dead,” Sampson said.

“A fair assumption,” Condon said.

“Let’s let them think it,” I said.

Mahoney looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “What for?”

“Make them believe that they’ve succeeded and the investigation has shifted to looking at Condon’s circle of mercenary friends.”

“And we start quietly looking for a victim of a dog bite,” Sampson said.

“Among other things,” I said, trying to wrap my head around this entire incident. Why implicate Condon? Why not someone else? Why attempt to kill him?

The only solid answer I came up with was that they knew of Condon’s past and had decided he would be the perfect fall guy.

“I thought of that while I was waiting for you to get here,” Condon replied. “But maybe it was more than that. Maybe they were trying to kill me because I do know something about your vigilantes. Two of them, anyway.”

67

THAT MORNING, AS Alex, Sampson, and Mahoney were talking to Condon, Bree was struggling to make connections between the late chief of detectives Tom McGrath, Edita Kravic, and a competition pistol shooter.

She had the late Terry Howard’s service records up on her computer screen. Four times during Howard’s career, he’d failed his annual shooting qualification test. On his best day, he was evaluated as an average shot.

Hardly the competitor, Bree thought and shut the file.

But lots of police officers did compete. It kept their marks-manship sharp. So she couldn’t discount the possibility of a cop or a former cop or a former military guy, perhaps someone McGrath and Howard knew, being the shooter.

Her desk phone rang.

“Stone,” she said.

“Michaels,” the police chief said. “I’m not happy.”

“Chief?”

“I’m hearing rumors that you’ve reopened the McGrath case.”

“True,” she said, her heart starting to race.

“Goddamn it, Stone, I’m going to get crucified over this. Howard’s our guy. You said so yourself.”

“I believed it then, Chief,” she said. “But not now.”

She recounted her visit to the FBI lab and finished by saying, “So I think the way we look at this is, we take some lumps for jumping to the wrong conclusion, but we’ll get applauded when it comes out we were dogged enough to recognize our mistake and find the real killer.”

Chief Michaels sighed, said, “I can live with that. Any suspects?”

“Not yet.”

“We’re at square one on a dead cop?”

“Definitely not,” she said. “We’ve got new leads we’re actively working.”

“Keep me posted, will you please?”

“You’ll be the first to know everything, Chief,” she said, and he hung up.

Bree set her phone down, thinking that that had gone smoother than she’d expected. Maybe she was getting better at the job, not as rattled by every crisis.

After Sampson and I got back from talking to Condon, I stuck my head into Bree’s office. “We’ve had a couple of breaks you need to know about.”

Bree smiled. “I could use some good news.”

“Oh, we’ve got lots of news,” Sampson said, coming in behind me. “Can’t figure out if it’s good or bad.”

As we told her about our trip to Nicholas Condon’s place, the planted evidence, and the possibility that the sniper knew two of the vigilantes, I sent two pictures to a screen on Bree’s wall.

One photograph showed a wiry man in a nice suit with a face that was a fusion of Asia and Africa. He had a quarter-inch of beard and was leaning against a car, smoking a cigarette- he looked like the kind of guy who would fit in anywhere. The other picture showed a U.S. Army Green Beret officer with pale skin and a battle-gaunt face.

“The suit is Lester Hobbes, ex-CIA,” Sampson said. “The soldier turned mercenary is Charles Fender.”

Both men had contracted with international security firms operating in Afghanistan early on in Condon’s time there. They hadn’t worked directly with the sniper, but they all knew one another well enough to have a drink or two occasionally. Both Fender and Hobbes were hard-liners who thought the U.S. was bungling foreign policy in the Middle East and going to hell in a handbasket back home.

“Condon says he didn’t see Hobbes or Fender for years,” I said. “Then, after the death of his fiancée, the investigation in Afghanistan, and his exile on the Eastern Shore, Condon gets a call one day from Lester Hobbes.”

Hobbes told Condon he thought he’d gotten a raw deal and offered his condolences. He asked the sniper if he’d be interested in having lunch sometime. Condon agreed. They met one day at a restaurant in Annapolis.

Charles Fender was there too. They all had a few too many beers as they recalled old times, and the talk turned to what was wrong with the U.S.A. Hobbes and Fender had said that people’s lack of conviction and action had allowed new forms of slavery to take hold in the country.

“Slavery?” Bree said.

“‘People harnessed by other people in a criminal manner’ was how they put it, evidently,” Sampson said. “As in a drug user is enslaved by the drug cartels or a prostitute enslaved by her handlers. Or ordinary U.S. citizens enslaved by corrupt politicians.”

I said, “Hobbes and Fender told Condon they were part of a growing group of people who thought this way. They compared themselves to John Brown and the men he led in an armed uprising against slavery.”

“Violent abolitionists,” Sampson said. “Willing to kill and die to free others.”

“Jesus,” Bree said.

“Right?” I said. “They’re calling themselves the Regulators, and they asked Condon to join them. Condon declined, said he was looking to lead a quieter life, and they left it at that.”

“Why didn’t he tell you this the first time you talked to him?” Bree asked.

“He claims he didn’t put it together until after the second attack. Even then, he couldn’t see the harm in having fewer drug cartels and human traffickers in the world.”

“Until Fender and Hobbes decided to frame and kill him,” Bree said.

“Correct,” Sampson said.

Bree sat there a few moments, absorbing it, before she leaned forward and said, “They’ve killed drug dealers and human traffickers, but no corrupt politicians.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Which is why we need to find Lester Hobbes and Charles Fender sooner rather than later.”

68

JOHN BROWN SAT with several others at his home, his arm throbbing from the dog bite. He tried to ignore the pain as he watched the footage on the local evening news of the medical examiner’s wagon rolling through the gate of Nicholas Condon’s place in Denton.

A young female reporter came on in standup and gushed, “WBAL-TV Channel Eleven brings you this exclusive report. FBI and local law enforcement officials are telling us that evidence gathered at the scene of the gangland-style murder indicates a connection between the victim, former SEAL Team 6 sniper Nicholas Condon, and the massacres of drug dealers and human traffickers in the past month.

“The FBI also says the evidence has pushed the multistate investigation in a new direction, and all of Condon’s known and former associates will be coming under increased scrutiny in the days ahead,” the reporter said.

“It worked,” Cass said, shutting off the TV with a remote. “I have to admit, I had my doubts.”

“Not me,” Hobbes said. “Well played.”

Fender and the rest of the eleven people gathered in Brown’s living room applauded.

“We do have some breathing room now,” Brown said. “Which will help us with our next target.”

The group focused on Brown as he laid it all out. One by one, their faces turned somber and then skeptical.

“I don’t know,” Fender said when Brown finished. “Looks like a fortress.”

Hobbes said, “There won’t be small-timers guarding the place. We’ll be facing pros with talent.”

“Likely,” Brown said. “But if you want to chop off a snake’s head, you have to get close to the fangs.”

Fender said, “How is our friend so sure this is the snake’s head?”

“He says it’s the snake’s head for the East Coast, anyway. We chop it off, we leave their organization in total destruction. We chop it off, we’ll be clear to move to the next phase of the cleanup.”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Cass said. “Our friend’s intel on the compound is solid?”

“World-class,” Brown replied. “The place has been under satellite and drone surveillance for the past ten days.”

“So what’s the plan?” Hobbes asked. “You’re the strategist.”

Brown showed satellite photographs and diagrams of the next target. His followers listened intently. They had to. Their lives and cause depended on it.

When he was done, he opened the floor to questions, comments, and suggestions. They talked for hours, until long past midnight, altering and tweaking the plan until all of them agreed it could work despite the fact there would likely be casualties on their side for the first time. It seemed unavoidable, but no one backed out.

“When do we go?” Cass asked.

“The meeting’s in three days,” Brown said.

“That helps us,” Fender said. “It will be the dark of the moon.”

69

TRACKING POTENTIAL MASS murderers can be a delicate job in this day and age of instant information and programs that alert someone when certain kinds of data are accessed. This is especially true when the suspects are former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Special Forces.

Everything about this particular part of the investigation, Mahoney told us, had to operate under the radar. The rest of that day and on into the next, Sampson and I focused on public records. Hobbes and Fender both had Virginia driver’s licenses with addresses that turned out to be mail-drop boxes in Fairfax County. Both paid income taxes from those addresses, and each listed his job as security consultant. Beyond that, they didn’t exist.

“These guys are pros,” Sampson said. “They leave no trace.”

“They’re probably using documented aliases and leading secret lives.”

“Paranoid way to live.”

“Unless you have someone hunting you.”

“Point taken, but I’m feeling like we’re dead in the water until Mahoney comes up with something.”

My cell phone rang. A number I didn’t recognize.

“Alex Cross,” I said.

On the other end of the line, a woman blubbered, “Who killed Nick? Were you there?”

For a moment I was confused, and then I remembered. “Dolores?”

She stopped crying and sniffed. “I loved him. I can’t… I can’t believe he’s gone. Were you there, Dr. Cross? Did he suffer? What do you think happened? Was he really part of this vigilante group?”

I was feeling pinched and unsure how to respond, but then I said, “What’s your security clearance, Dolores?”

There was a strong tremor in her voice as she said, “I helped you, Dr. Cross. Now you help me. That’s how it works in this town. I need to know.”

I thought about Mahoney’s investigative strategy and the need to limit the number of people who knew the truth and weighed that against the obvious grief and pain Dolores was suffering.

“He’s not dead.”

There was a long moment before she said in a whisper, “What?”

“You heard me. Take heart. Wait it out. There are reasons for this.”

Dolores choked, and then laughed, sniffed, and laughed again, and I imagined her wiping her tears away with her sleeve.

“I’m sure,” she said. “Oh God, you don’t know how… I was up all night after I heard. I have never felt such regret, Dr. Cross. For what could have been.”

“I think you’ll get the chance to tell him that yourself before long,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said, sounding stuffy but ecstatic. “From the bottom of my heart, thank you. And if there’s anything else I can do for you, just ask.”

“There is, actually. Tell me what you know about Lester Hobbes and Charles Fender.”

70

THE LINE WAS quiet for several moments before Dolores said, “Interesting pair. Can I ask where this is going?”

“Not today,” I said. “And please don’t start poking around in any files with security clearances attached to those two. Just give me what you know.”

“Fair enough,” Dolores said. “I’ll give you only what’s in my files.”

“You’ve got files on Hobbes and Fender?”

“I’ve got files on almost everyone in this business.”

“Can I ask how?”

“Only if you wish to pay me for my services.”

I smiled. “So, what, you’re like an agent for mercenaries?”

“A broker is closer to it,” Dolores said, all business now. “I’m the person you go to when you want to recruit a talented warrior, like Fender, or an assassin, like Hobbes.”

“That’s what Hobbes does?”

“Quite well. Very clean operator. Only takes out targets who deserve it.”

I wondered at Dolores’s sense of morality and justice for a moment but then pushed those concerns aside.

“Can you tell me where to find Hobbes and Fender?”

She laughed. “You want to talk to them?”

“Interrogate them is more like it.”

She laughed again. “Good luck with that.”

“You won’t help me find them?”

“I don’t know how to find them. The only time we communicate is when I have an offer for their services, and that’s done by secure e-mail. Honestly, we’ve never even met in person.”

I thought about that. “Could you make them an offer on our behalf?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “There are certain ethical standards in my line of work.”

“Your work representing mercenaries.”

“That’s right.”

“Next thing you’ll tell me is there’s an association of mercenary agents here in town.”

“There’s talk.”

“Remember how this conversation began?” I said.

After a pause, Dolores said, “I do, and I’m grateful for the peace of mind.”

“And I imagine you want to prevent further bloodshed?”

“That too.”

“Then you’ll help us find Hobbes and Fender?”

A longer silence followed before she said, “I’ll draft a proposal for you and see if they bite.”

“Make it a very lucrative offer,” I said. “Then they’ll definitely bite.”

71

OUT IN THE mouth of Mobjack Bay, close to where it meets the greater Chesapeake, John Brown’s fishing boat bobbed at anchor a mile north of a fifty-acre gated and guarded compound on a point.

Cass was aboard. So were Hobbes and Fender, who were holding fishing poles, jigging for bottom fish, and studying the compound.

“If we do it right, this will be a total surprise,” Brown said, handing binoculars to Fender. “We’ll be in and out in twenty minutes, tops.”

“That’s the plan, anyway,” Hobbes said, raising and lowering his rod.

That annoyed Brown. “What does that mean?”

“It means shit happens,” Hobbes said. “And sometimes you have to ad-lib. I mean, who knows, a big goddamned storm comes up and we’re blowing off whitecaps on our way in, we might want to ad-lib and take a different approach. That’s all I’m saying.”

Brown felt on edge, and he didn’t know why. His arm throbbed less, but it was waking him up at night. And of course there had to be contingencies in place, but with a situation like this, he wanted specific actions to move like clockwork, the team going in and out like phantoms.

“Those are huge cigarette boats,” Cass said, glued to her binoculars.

Brown shielded his eyes to look toward the big lifts that held the three boats above the water. “It’s a perfect location to take advantage of the eastern shipping lanes. Less than eight miles from the Atlantic. Boats that fast can get twenty miles out in minutes, offload cargo in the middle of the night, and be back quick.”

“There’s another guard,” said Fender, who was also glued to the binoculars. “Three so far. Looks like they’re on constant patrol.”

“And they’ll beef up security for the meeting,” Brown said. “But we are a superior fighting force.”

“Damned straight on that,” Fender said. “If this goes down as planned, they’ll never know what hit them.”

Fender had no sooner said that than his cell phone pinged. Hobbes’s phone buzzed a moment later.

Fender set his binoculars down to check his phone. Hobbes held his fishing pole one-handed to look at his message.

Brown picked up Fender’s binoculars and peered through them at the compound. He’d studied the aerial view of it in the drone footage, but getting eyeballs on the target still had benefits, especially in an amphibious attack.

He lowered the glasses, saw Fender and Hobbes still at their phones.

“Heads up,” Brown said. “Eyes on where we’re going.”

Hobbes looked up. “Sorry-short-term high-dollar employment offer.”

“Same,” Fender said. “Says a team of six total needed.”

Brown grew angry. “You’re needed here. Don’t you believe in what we’re doing?”

“I believe in what we’re doing,” Hobbes said. “But sometimes a man’s gotta eat before he makes the world a better place, which means sometimes he’s got to earn before he makes the world a better place.”

The skin below Brown’s left eye twitched. “Where I come from, desertion in a time of war is a killing offense, Hobbes.”

“Who’s deserting?” Fender said. “If we get the gig, we won’t be gone a month. We’ll be back. Think of it as us going on extended furlough without pay.”

Brown didn’t like it, but he said, “Get us through this phase before you go anywhere. You owe us that.”

After much hesitation, Hobbes said, “Works for me.”

“Me too,” Fender said.

Brown glanced at Cass, who nodded.

“Let’s head home, then,” Brown said. “We’ve got thirty-two hours to-”

“Holy shit!” Hobbes cried, struggling against his bowed fishing pole. “I got a big one hooked! A monster!”

72

AFTER TWO GRINDING and unsuccessful days trying to track Lester Hobbes and Charles Fender, I trudged down Fifth Street, wanting home and family and a break from the pressure that had been building relentlessly.

If Condon was right, politicians were the next targets. Corrupt politicians, but politicians nonetheless, which meant we were trying to stop an assassination.

But the assassination of whom? And how many? At what level?

Federal? Mahoney had alerted U.S. Capitol Hill Police to the increased threat, but without specifics, they couldn’t do much.

State? Municipal?

The truth was we could have been looking at any pol within a hundred and fifty miles of the nation’s capital. As far as limiting the pool to the dishonest, you could kick any azalea in Washington and a corrupt politician would scurry out. The number of potential targets felt overwhelming.

My cell phone beeped with a message from Judith Noble just as I walked up the steps to our home and heard symphonic music blaring.

“Turn the TV down!” Nana Mama shouted.

Stuffing my phone back in my pocket, I went in, cringing at how loud the music was and sticking my fingers in my ears. Ali sat on the couch staring at images of outer space on the screen and holding the remote away from my grandmother.

“Give it,” I said, putting out my hand.

Ali grimaced but handed it to me. I hit the mute button.

The house mercifully went silent. Nana Mama was trembling, she was so angry. “He would not listen to me. He flat-out defied me.”

“I didn’t want to listen to Jannie crying anymore,” Ali said. “Is that so hard to understand?”

“Jannie’s crying?” I said.

“You better go up and talk to her,” my grandmother said. “She thinks the world’s come to an end.”

I pointed my finger at Ali, said, “You and I are going to have a talk later about respecting your elders. In the meantime, get in the kitchen and do whatever Nana Mama tells you to do, and do it with your lips buttoned tight and your head on straight. Understand, young man?”

Ali’s lower lip began to tremble, but he nodded and got up. “Sorry, Nana Mama,” he mumbled as he walked past her. “I just don’t like hearing her cry.”

“Doesn’t give you the right to be sassing me,” Nana Mama said.

I went upstairs and knocked at Jannie’s door.

“Go away,” Jannie said.

“It’s Dad.”

A few moments later the door opened. Jannie hobbled backward on her crutches, sat down hard on her bed, and burst into tears.

“Hey, hey, what’s the matter?” I said, going in and putting my arm around her.

“Look at my foot,” she said, sobbing. “Look at how swollen it got just from, like, a half an hour on a stationary bike with practically no pressure.”

I leaned down and saw the swelling across her midfoot.

“That’s not good,” I said.

“What am I going to do?” Jannie said. “My physical therapist thinks there’s something else wrong in there. She said what we did should not have caused this kind of reaction.”

“Okay,” I said after several moments of thought. “I understand you’re upset. I would be too if I were you.”

“Dad, what if it’s real bad?” she said, starting to cry again. “What if there’s something so bad I can never run again?”

“Whoa, whoa,” I said. “We are not thinking that way at all. Ever. We’ll just take it step by step. Does your PT have a number and a name?”

She nodded and snuggled into my chest. “I have it.”

I rubbed her shoulder and said, “Don’t work yourself up into a state by imagining the worst. Okay? We’ll go see the best foot doctor in the country. I’m sure your coaches know who that is, and we’ll have that doctor take a look and tell us what to do. Okay?”

Jannie nodded and sniffled. “I just don’t want my dream to be over before it’s even started.”

“I don’t either,” I said, and I hugged her tight.

73

NANA MAMA WAS watching Ali sweep the kitchen floor when I walked in.

He looked at me with watery eyes. “Is it true Jannie will never run again?”

“What? No.”

“I keep telling him it’s not true,” Nana Mama said. “But he won’t listen.”

“It’s what Jannie said,” Ali told me.

“She was upset,” I said. “Everyone, calm down. Her foot’s swollen, not rotting off.”

“Ugh,” Ali said, but he smiled.

“Finish your sweeping, you,” Nana Mama said, and then she looked to me. “Thin pork chops fried in a little bacon grease and covered with a fiery compote of onions, applesauce, and sriracha.”

“That sounds great,” I said. “And it smells amazing in here.”

My grandmother smiled, said, “It’s the caramelized onions. Ten minutes? I’ve got the compote made already.”

“Ten minutes is fine,” I said, grabbing a beer from the fridge and going out into the great room. I sat down and pulled out my cell phone to look at the message from Judith Noble.

The phone rang before I could read it.

“It’s Dolores,” she said. “Fender and Hobbes both replied.”

I set my beer down and said, “Tell me.”

“They’re interested but said they’re tied up overseas until Monday. Then they’re open to any and all offers.”

“Which means what?”

“They’re busy for a few days.”

“So there could be an attack in the next few days?”

“I suppose you could interpret it that way,” Dolores said. “How’s Nick?”

“I don’t know. Mahoney’s got him stashed away in Virginia somewhere.”

“So how do I respond to Hobbes and Fender?”

I thought about that and said, “Tell them we look forward to hearing from them at their earliest possible convenience.”

“I can do that,” Dolores said, and she hung up.

I heard Bree come in the front door. It was past seven. She looked worse than I felt.

“Don’t ask,” she said.

“Deal,” I said. “Beer?”

“Red wine,” she said. “Pinot noir. And what smells so good?”

“Nana Mama’s on a roll,” I said and retrieved a bottle of her favorite wine.

I poured just about the time my grandmother finished the thin-sliced pork chops and set them on the table along with her mystery sauce. Jannie crutched her way in. We said grace with everyone holding hands.

Nana Mama’s new dish was a hit. Every bite gave you about six different flavors, but it wasn’t so spicy you screamed Fire! Bree and I cleared the dishes. At bedtime, Ali and I talked about respecting elders.

“Would you disrespect Neil deGrasse Tyson?”

“No,” he said. “But Nana Mama’s not-”

“Don’t go there,” I said, wagging a finger. “That argument won’t work. In this house, in this universe, Nana Mama is Neil deGrasse Tyson and more.”

He struggled with that, but then nodded. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” I said, leaning over and kissing his head.

I went into our bedroom and found Bree already under the covers, knees up and reading her new book. I crawled into bed minutes later, and my world seemed a whole lot better than it had when I got home; I felt good and drowsy enough for sleep.

74

DRESSED IN BLACK from his Wolverine boots to his leather jacket and Bell helmet, John Brown accelerated his motorcycle down a moonless rural road. Cass rode behind him.

“I still say we could have used a car,” she grumbled through a tiny earbud Brown wore.

“There’s no car on earth that can stay with this bike,” Brown said. “We may need that speed to get out of here alive.”

The headlight beam caught parked cars ahead by the side of the road and then the lights of the high-walled compound.

“Hobbes?” Brown said.

“Here,” Hobbes replied.

“Troll in to five hundred meters. Fender too.”

“Roger that.”

“Coming to it now,” Brown said, and he downshifted and slowed as he passed the two guards flanking the open gate.

The motorcycle rumbled when Brown pulled a U-turn and then backed into a spot between a Mercedes-Benz and a Cadillac Escalade, the bike’s front tire facing the compound.

“Confidence, now,” he said, shutting off the motorcycle.

“All the confidence in the world, darling,” Cass said, getting down.

Brown dismounted and drew off his helmet slowly, all too aware of the guards but careful not to tug too hard on the fake beard glued to his skin. He hung the helmet on the throttle and glanced at Cass. She wore a fringed red leather jacket, a platinum-blond wig, and an Atlanta Braves cap. She held a black leather briefcase. It was handcuffed to her wrist.

“Three hundred meters,” Brown murmured into the sensitive jawbone microphone affixed to the skin beneath his beard.

“Three hundred,” Fender said.

Brown put his head up as if he owned the goddamned world and walked across the road toward the gate and the guards, Cass trailing just behind his left shoulder.

“Nice bike,” the guard on the left said in Russian.

“The best,” Brown replied in Russian with a perfect St. Petersburg accent.

“How fast?” the guard on the right asked.

“Three hundred and five kilometers an hour,” Brown replied, smiling and looking each man in the eye. “The acceleration is breathtaking. Am I late?”

“We were close to shutting access off, but no,” the guard on the left said. “Invitation, please.”

Brown smiled, cocked his head, and said in English with a thick accent, “Where is the invitation, Leanne?”

“I put it in here for safekeeping, sugar,” Cass said in a deep Southern twang. She came around in front of Brown, her back to the guards, and held out the briefcase. “You’ll have to unlock me, boss.”

Feigning exasperation, Brown dug in his pocket, came up with the key, looked at the guards, and said in Russian, “She is not a rocket scientist, this one. But in bed, my God, boys, she’s a racehorse.”

The guards cracked up. Cass looked at him as if she had no idea what he’d just said. Brown unlocked the handcuff and set the combination locks on the hasps.

Then he thumbed them both open, pushed up the lid, and grabbed the two sound-suppressed Glock pistols inside. He swung them out and around the sides of the briefcase and Cass and head-shot both guards at near point-blank range.

They both rocked back and crumpled.

Cass threw aside the briefcase. Brown lobbed her one of the pistols. She caught it and they went to work. They grabbed the dead men by their collars, dragged them inside the gates and out of sight, then closed the gate, barred, and locked it. After taking two-way radios from the dead men, they stepped into the shadows to pull black hoods down over their faces.

“We’re in,” Brown said into his mike, and they trotted down the driveway toward a cluster of buildings overlooking the bay.

Brown could hear music playing-jazz-and the clinking of cocktail glasses and the laughter of thieves and slave owners. When they were in sight of a big antebellum-style mansion that dominated the compound, Brown said, “Ready.”

Brown imagined the Zodiac boats slipping toward shore, their electric trolling motors drowned out by the party din. Feeling fanatical, like God and history were on his side, Brown ran across a shadowed lawn toward the front porch and door.

“Go, Regulators,” he said. “Rage against the night.”

75

I COULD SEE bodies from the air, seven of them, five males and two females, sprawled on a brightly lit terrace behind an antebellum-style mansion, right on the water near the mouth of Mobjack Bay. It was three in the morning.

“Your mystery caller wasn’t lying, Ned,” Sampson said from the seat beside me in the back of the FBI helicopter.

“It’s another bloodbath,” Mahoney said from the front seat as the chopper landed.

“We’re sure they’re gone?” Sampson asked.

“She said they’d left almost an hour before she called, and then she hung up,” Mahoney said. “That was an hour ago, so we’re two hours behind them.”

“She call from in the house?” I asked as the chopper landed.

“She wasn’t on with the 911 operator long enough for us to tell.”

We got out, ducked under the rotor blades, and stopped to put on booties and gloves. If we were the first on the scene, we didn’t want to contaminate it for the forensics investigators sure to follow.

“What’s the Russian owner’s name?” Sampson said.

“Antonin Guryev,” Mahoney said. “Made his money in shipping and, as far as we know, clean. We’ve got Critical Incident Response Group agents at Quantico looking at him, but so far the name hasn’t rung any bells.”

Walking up onto the terrace and seeing the bodies was a bizarre experience. Judging from the way they were clustered and from their various positions, the victims seemed to have been shot down unawares.

There was a bar at one end of the terrace stocked with top-tier booze; a beefy bartender sprawled behind it. Another man had fallen near the piano. The others died in two small clusters, as if they’d been chatting when the bullets found their marks.

The lights were blazing inside. We went through open French doors into an opulently decorated home that clashed with the antebellum exterior-lots of marble, chrome, gilt, and mirrors.

“Looks like a Moscow disco, for Christ’s sake,” Mahoney said.

There was a long table to our left loaded with food, and four more dead people around it. To our right there was a large entertaining area and a kitchen.

Nine died in there, though at least four appeared to have died fighting. There were pistols and spent casings on the floor near them.

“I think I know this guy,” Sampson said, crouching by a man in a suit with perfectly coiffed silver hair. He was in his fifties and looked vaguely familiar to me despite the wound to his throat.

“I think I do too, but I can’t place him,” I said.

Sampson carefully reached into the victim’s breast pocket, got out his wallet.

He opened it and whistled. “Here’s your first corrupt politician. That’s Congressman Rory McMann.”

“Shit,” Mahoney said. “Justice has spent years trying to get that guy.”

Rep. McMann of Virginia Beach, Virginia, had been investigated several times, but no prosecutor had ever made charges stick. He was a good ol’ boy who chased skirts and liked to drink. Those vices had almost gotten him censured by the House of Representatives, but he’d managed to wriggle free of that as well. Now here he was, the victim of vigilantes.

“It’s going to take us days to process this place and identify everyone,” I said, bewildered by the carnage.

“I can tell you who they are,” a woman said loudly in a thick Russian accent. We started and looked around.

But there was no one alive in the room but us.

76

“I WILL TELL you everything, but I… I want witness protection,” she said, and we realized she was talking to us through Bluetooth speakers mounted high in the corners of the room.

“Who are you?” Mahoney asked. “Where are you?”

“My name is Elena Guryev,” she said. “I am in the panic room.”

“How do we find you?” Sampson asked.

“I tell you when I have witness protection.”

I looked at Mahoney and said, “With this many victims, I can’t see that being a hard sell.”

“I can’t give you the papers at the moment, Ms. Guryev,” Mahoney said. “But I give you my word.”

Several seconds of silence followed. “For my son too.”

Mahoney sighed. “For your son too. Where is he?”

“Here, with me. He’s sleeping.”

“Your husband?”

The silence was longer this time. “Dead.”

“Let us get you and your son out of here,” Mahoney said.

“Go to wine cellar in the basement. It has door, like from a barn. Go inside. There’s a camera there. Show me your badges and identifications.”

The house was sprawling and we took a wrong turn or two before finding a staircase into the basement. The wine-cellar door was rough-sawn barn wood. We opened it and stepped into a brick-floored room with thousands of bottles of wine in racks along the walls.

We each held up our badge and ID to a tiny camera on the ceiling.

A moment later, we heard large metal bars disengage and slide back. A section of the wine cellar’s rear wall swung open hydraulically, revealing Elena Guryev studying us from a space about the size of two prison cells.

She was tall, willowy, and in her late thirties, with sandy-blond hair and the kind of bone structure and lips that magazine editors swoon over. Black cocktail dress. Black hose and heels. Hefty diamonds at her ears, wrists, and throat.

Her hazel eyes were puffy and bloodshot, but she acted in no way distraught. Indeed, she seemed to exude a steely will as she stood with her arms crossed in front of a bunk bed. On the lower bunk, a boy of about ten slept, curled up under a blanket, his head wrapped in gauze bandages.

Across from the bed, six small screens showed six different views of the house and grounds.

“Mrs. Guryev,” Mahoney began softly.

“Dimitri cannot hear us,” she said. “He is stone-deaf and on pain drugs. He had a cochlear implant operation two days ago at Johns Hopkins.”

I said, “Do you want a doctor to see him?”

“I am physician,” she said. “He’s fine and better sleeping.”

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“No,” she said, her fingers traveling to her lips, her eyes gazing at the floor as if contemplating horror. “I don’t know what I’ll tell him about his father.”

A moment later, she raised her head and that toughness was back. “What do you want to know?”

Sampson gestured at the screens. “You saw what happened?”

“Some of it,” she said.

“Is the feed recorded?” Mahoney asked.

“It is,” she said. “But they knew where the big hard drive was stored and took it with them.”

“Got away clean again,” Sampson grumbled.

“They only think they got away clean,” Mrs. Guryev said, reaching down to the bed. “But I make sure they will pay.”

She held an iPhone in her hand like a pistol. “I videoed them, two without their hoods.”

77

ON A SCREEN in Bree’s office a few hours later, we watched a precision military force massacre the victims we’d found in the house, including Antonin Guryev, who begged for his life and offered the killers millions before he was shot to death in his bedroom.

The iPhone camera went haywire at that point and you heard Elena Guryev gasp and then cry out in Russian. The camera showed her shoes as she wept for several minutes and then returned to the feed from her bedroom.

“Here it comes,” I said.

The gunman who killed Guryev had gotten down on his knees by the bed. He reached under it and yanked out the hard drive that recorded all security feeds on the grounds. He tucked it under one arm, tore off his hood, and wiped at his sweaty brow before he walked out of sight.

I backed the recording up and froze it at the moment the hood was off, showing a face I’d seen before, the one that was a fusion of Asia and Africa.

“Say hello to Lester Hobbes,” Sampson said.

Bree sat forward, said, “No kidding.”

“Wait,” I said. “The second one’s coming up.”

The iPhone camera swung shakily to another feed in the panic room, and then it focused, showing the six hooded gunmen cleaning their way out of the entertainment area of the house, picking up their brass and even vacuuming around the bodies. When they reached the French doors that opened onto the terrace, one of them unzipped the back of the vacuum, removed the dust bag, and turned to leave while tugging off the hood.

You caught a flash of her, a woman with blond hair. It took a few tries at the computer to freeze her with her face in near profile.

“Who is she?” Bree asked

“No idea yet,” Sampson said.

“Who were the victims besides the congressman?” Bree asked.

“Russian mobsters, representatives from the Sinaloa drug cartel, two bankers from New York and their wives, and someone we didn’t expect.”

“Who?”

“We’ll get to him in a second,” I said.

We explained that, according to Elena Guryev, the party had actually been a kind of emergency board meeting of a loose alliance of criminals who trafficked in everything from narcotics to humans.

“What was the meeting about?” Bree asked.

“Ironically enough, the vigilantes,” Sampson said. “Every target they hit-the meth factories and the convoy-were part of the alliance’s business.”

“And then the vigilantes came in and wiped the leaders out,” Bree said.

“Like cutting off all the hydra’s heads at one time,” I said.

“How did Guryev get involved?”

We told her what Elena Guryev had told us: Several years ago, her husband had overextended himself financially and gotten in huge money trouble. Members of the alliance offered him a way out of his predicament-smuggling-and his global shipping business had exploded with unseen profits.

Elena Guryev claimed she didn’t know what her husband had gotten involved in until it was too late. When she discovered the depth of his criminality, she told him she wanted a divorce.

“She says he threatened to kill her and their son if she tried to leave or tell the police,” I said. “That was three months ago.”

Bree thought about that. “Why was she in the panic room?”

“Her son, Dimitri, had had an operation two days before and needed to sleep somewhere he wouldn’t be disturbed,” I said. “She put in an appearance at the beginning of the party and then went down to be with her son. She was there when the attack began.”

“Did she recognize Hobbes or the woman?”

“Said she’d never seen either of them before.”

“Where are Elena and the son now?”

I shrugged. “Mahoney’s got them stashed in a safe house. I suspect he’ll be questioning her for days if not weeks before she goes into witness protection. Which brings us back to this guy.”

I showed her a picture on my phone of a dead man in his late thirties, handsome, with a thick shock of dark hair and a bullet hole in his chest.

“Who is he?”

Sampson said, “According to Elena Guryev, his name is Karl Stavros, and he’s the owner of, among other businesses, the Phoenix Club.”

“Wait,” Bree said. “Where Edita Kravic worked?”

“One and the same,” I said. “So what are the odds that Tommy McGrath was onto something criminal going on in that club that Edita told him about?”

“I’d say very good,” Bree said. “Very, very good.”

“I think the answer to who killed Tommy is in that club,” Sampson said.

“We’ll need warrants,” she said.

“The Feds are filing,” I said. “Ned promised we’ll be part of any search, but it’s not going to be today.”

I yawned. So did Sampson.

“You two look like hell,” Bree said. “Go home. Get some sleep.”

Sampson got up and left without any argument.

I held up my hands. “No, I’m good. Nothing a cup of coffee won’t fix.”

“That’s a direct order, Detective Cross. Home, nap, and then I’d bet Nana Mama would appreciate you going to Ali’s interview for the Washington Latin charter school this afternoon.”

“Is that today?”

“It is. Five o’clock.”

“Then heading home as ordered, Chief Stone. See you at dinner?”

“If I’m lucky,” she said. “Love you.”

“Love you too,” I said, and I went out her door fantasizing about my bed and a two-hour coma.

78

BREE WATCHED ALEX leave, feeling a little cheated not to be an active part of Tommy McGrath’s murder investigation, or not really, anyway.

If Alex and Sampson were right about the Phoenix Club, the case was essentially in the FBI’s hands now. Even though Mahoney had promised that DC Metro would be part of any search, the FBI would be calling the shots.

Bree tried to put it out of her mind and deal with the barrage of paper that now dominated her working life. But after ten minutes of scanning a series of administrative memos, she couldn’t take it anymore.

She had to do something that engaged her mind, that wasn’t mundane, that would do some good. Wasn’t that what being a cop was? Doing some good?

Bree pushed the paper pile aside and found copies of the murder books for Tommy McGrath, Edita Kravic, and Terry Howard. She started back through them, trying to suppress any preconceived ideas she had about the case, trying to see it all anew, with a beginner’s mind.

As she reviewed the investigative notes and forensics reports, she realized that they’d all been looking at the case as a revenge killing of some kind, done by Howard or someone else who had a beef with McGrath, and maybe with Edita Kravic too.

Bree consciously tried to erase that filter from her mind and played with possible other motives. Bree started by asking herself who would benefit from Tommy McGrath dying. Or from Edita Kravic dying, for that matter.

Someone inside the Phoenix Club, she supposed. Karl Stavros? He was the owner. If Stavros thought Tommy was onto him, maybe he’d had Tommy and Edita killed to protect himself and the alliance.

She started down through a list of the evidence gathered at their apartments and, after the encryption codes were broken, from their computer hard drives. For almost an hour and a half, she studied each item in turn and tried to see it as a benefit or a loss to a killer. She ran a search for the Phoenix Club on McGrath’s hard drive and got nothing. She ran a search on Edita Kravic and got the same.

Then she started through McGrath’s financial affairs. The late COD had had $325,000 in his retirement account, $12,000 in his checking account, and zero debt. McGrath didn’t own a home, had paid cash for his car, and paid off his credit cards every month.

His will was brief, drafted four years before. To Bree’s surprise, it named Terry Howard as his sole heir. If Howard was not alive at the time of McGrath’s death, the modest estate was to go to McGrath’s wife, Vivian.

Bree thought about that. Tommy McGrath still cared about his old partner enough to leave him his money. Could Howard have known and killed him to collect? Or could Vivian have…

She dismissed that out of hand. McGrath’s estranged wife was loaded, worth multimillions. Why would she kill Tommy for a measly three hundred grand and change?

She turned to the last page of the will and saw a reference to a document in the appendix that caused her to pause. Bree dug deeper into the financial files and found the document she was looking for. She flipped through it and then stopped at one item, thinking: Now that might be something worth killing or dying for.

Bree took the document out and went down the hall to Muller’s cubicle. She found the senior detective not looking like his ordinary disheveled self; he was sharply dressed in a nice suit and freshly polished shoes.

“Kurt,” she said, showing him the document. “Did we ever look into this?”

Muller took it, scanned it, and nodded. “It’s unclaimed, at least as of two days ago. I check that kind of thing regularly.”

Some of the wind went out of Bree’s sails. She’d thought she was really onto something, something they’d missed, and she’d briefly felt like she was doing some good.

But Muller had things under control.

Some of her disappointment must have shown because he said, “We’ll figure it out, Chief. We always do. But for now, I have to skip out. Got a date.”

Bree smiled. “You haven’t had a date in years.”

“Don’t I know it,” Muller said, adjusting his tie.

“Who’s the lucky lady?”

“The divine Ms. Noble,” Muller said, and he winked.

Bree laughed and clapped her hands, feeling better than she had all day. “I thought there was a spark between you two there in the FBI lab.”

“A crackling spark,” Muller said, walking past her with a grin smeared across his face. “Just crack-crack-crackling.”

79

NANA MAMA BEAMED at Ali.

“You want your dessert before dinner?” my grandmother asked him. “Blueberry pie and ice cream?”

Unnerved by this break in the routine, Ali glanced at me. I smiled and held up my hands. “You heard her.”

“Yes, please, Nana,” Ali said. “And less Brussels sprouts at dinner?”

“Don’t push your luck,” my grandmother said, fetching the pie from beneath a fine-mesh cage. “Brussels sprouts are a superfood.”

“Kind of bitter,” Ali said.

Nana Mama squinted hard at him.

“Just saying,” Ali said.

My grandmother sighed, cut a thick slice of blueberry pie, plopped a scoop of French vanilla ice cream beside it, then set the plate in front of Ali.

“Any boy who can charm the pants off the admissions board of a fine school deserves this,” Nana Mama said, and then she handed him a spoon.

It was true. The principal and the math, science, and English teachers at Washington Latin had been waiting when we walked in. The principal introduced herself and the teachers and then asked Ali what he had been up to outside of school, on his own time. That set him off on a description of his epic quest to talk to Neil deGrasse Tyson.

“I could tell they were going to admit him about two minutes after he opened his mouth,” Nana Mama said. “I think they were most impressed at how many drafts of that letter he’s already written.”

“Though at some point he needs to just send it,” I said.

“Soon,” Ali said, his mouth full of blueberry pie and ice cream.

“You do me a favor, sugar?” my grandmother said to me. “Take a twenty from my purse and go on down to Chung’s and play my numbers?”

“The next drawing’s not for two days,” I said.

“Those jackpots are getting big,” she said. “I’d rather get in on the action before the stampede.”

“Get in on the action?” I said, smiling.

“Just laying my bets early, that’s all. Now, are you going to help an old lady out or not, Alex Cross?”

“You knew the answer the second you asked,” I said, and I got the money from her purse.

I went outside, feeling pretty good. The two-hour nap had helped. And it was only early September, but a front had come in and cooled things off. It felt nice to walk, and I did my best to focus on nothing but putting one foot in front of the other.

In my line of work, where I’m often bombarded by details and exposed to the worst of life, I have to clear my mind completely at least once a day. Otherwise, it all gets to be stressful chatter upstairs, an endless series of questions, theories, arguments, painful memories, and regrets. It can get overwhelming.

I was feeling even better by the time I reached the grocery and went inside. Chung’s was frigid, like always.

“Alex Cross, where you been, my man?” cried a woman behind the counter. “I was waiting on you or Nana Mama all day yesterday.”

Chung Sun Chung, a Korean American in her late thirties, sat framed in an arched hole in a plate of bulletproof glass. Sun, as she liked to be called, wore a puffy coat and fingerless mittens. She managed to keep an electronic cigarette in the corner of her mouth while smiling broadly at me.

I walked over to her. “We’ve both been busy.”

“How’s Damon like college?”

“Loves it.”

“I saw your Jannie on the YouTube.”

“Crazy, right?”

“She’s gonna be famous, that one. How many chances will Nana Mama be taking at an unlimited future today?”

“That’s your line?”

“Good one, huh?” She beamed and drew on her e-cigarette.

“Give her ten chances each on Powerball and Mega Millions,” I said, laying down the cash.

My grandmother played only the big-money lotteries. If you’re going to dream, you might as well dream big, she liked to say.

“Same number?” Sun asked.

“Sure. Wait! You know what? Let’s change it up. Five each on her numbers and for the rest, add a one to the last number.”

Sun glanced at me. “Nana Mama’s not going to like that.”

“She won’t even look,” I said.

“You like taking your life in your hands?”

We both laughed. We were still laughing as I left.

On my way home to dinner with my family, I decided there were still good people in the world, very good people, like Chung Sun Chung. I guess I’d needed reminding of that after the past couple of weeks I’d had.

The cumulative violence and bloodshed inflicted by the vigilantes was sobering when I thought about it. Climbing the steps to my front porch and smelling a pie Nana Mama had baked, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the violence wasn’t over, that Hobbes and Fender and the other vigilantes were somehow just getting started.

80

JOHN BROWN SAT forward in a chair, his eyes glued to the big-screen TV, where an NBC news reporter was standing in front of Antonin Guryev’s compound.

“This is the fourth such massacre in less than a month,” she was saying. “Up to now, the killers have left little evidence behind. But FBI special agent in charge Ned Mahoney says that has changed. Mistakes were made.”

Low voices rumbled through the room behind Brown. Many of his followers were looking at one another.

“Mistakes?” Hobbes said, putting down his beer. “No way.”

“Why don’t you shut up and listen,” Cass said, pacing and watching the screen. The scene jumped to Mahoney standing before a bank of microphones.

“We are confirming seventeen dead,” Mahoney said gravely. “We are also confirming that we have a witness, a survivor who saw many of the killings on security cameras in a secret panic room in the basement of the house. This witness got solid looks at two of the killers when they took off their hoods.”

“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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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 McGrath 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.”