Cross the Line (Alex Cross 24)

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.”