Джеймс Паттерсон - Cross the Line

“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.”

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.