Джеймс Паттерсон - Cross the Line

“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.”

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.

“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.