Cross the Line (Alex Cross 24)

“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.