Cross the Line: (Alex Cross 24) Read online

  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!”

  CHAPTER

  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.

  CHAPTER

  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.

  CHAPTER

  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.”

  CHAPTER

  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 careful
ly 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.

  CHAPTER

  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.