Cross the Line (Alex Cross 24)

“You want to take this to the next level or not?”

The next level. Brown felt all doubt leave him then, and said, “You know it’s the only long-term solution. If we don’t, nothing we’ve done will really matter.”

“Exactly. So steel yourself and get rid of Elena Guryev.”

Chapter

81

At eight thirty the morning after the massacre, Ned Mahoney and I sprinted down Monroe Street in Columbia Heights. Patrol cars and an ambulance blocked the street, their lights flashing.

We showed our badges. The patrol officer pointed at the open door of a town house. The call had come into 911 only twenty minutes before. I’d been on my way to work and came straight over. Mahoney had been heading to FBI headquarters, heard about the

call, and came straight over as well.

After putting on gloves and booties, we stepped inside and saw a dead man lying facedown in the entryway, another one beyond him.

“Simms and Frawley,” Mahoney said angrily. “Good agents. Seasoned agents.”

“Shot in the back,” I said.

“They were replacing the night team,” Mahoney said. “The killers must have come in right behind them.”

The locations of federal safe houses are some of the most secure and heavily guarded secrets in law enforcement, so it was understood that the killers had had inside intelligence. Mahoney had a traitor in his midst, and we both knew it.

We stepped over and around the dead agents, passed a television room on our left where the carpet was smeared with blood, and went into the kitchen, where a third FBI agent lay dead. Two EMTs worked on a fourth man, George Potter, the DEA’s acting special agent for the Washington, DC, office.

Potter’s face was covered with blood from a nasty wound to his scalp. His shirt was off, and there was a clotting patch pressed into a chest wound. The medics had him hooked up to IVs and oxygen.

“How is he?” Mahoney asked the EMT.

Potter opened his eyes and said, gasping, “I’ll live.”

“How is he?” Mahoney asked again.

The EMT said, “Took a slug through his right lung, and he has a hell of a gash on his head. But he’s lucky. He’ll live.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“We need to get him to the hospital,” the medic said.

“Wait, they need to know,” Potter said, looking at me. “Ned asked me to come in with the replacements and start talking to Mrs. Guryev first thing.”

I glanced at Mahoney, who nodded.

“Everything looked fine coming through the door,” Potter said. “I was walking down the hall with Simms and Frawley behind me. Out of nowhere there were sound-suppressed shots. Three of them. Fast. I got hit by the third shot. Spun me into that TV room. Went down, hit my head on the coffee table. When I came to, I called 911. What’s happened? Has anyone gone upstairs to see?”

“No,” Mahoney said, looking grim.

“We’re leaving,” the EMT said forcefully. “You can talk to him at GW Medical Center.”

“We’ll be talking to you,” I said.

Potter gave a thumbs-up and closed his eyes as they wheeled him away.

I could tell from the expression on Mahoney’s face that he was dreading the climb upstairs as much as I was. We found a fourth dead FBI agent on the landing, and in a bedroom, Elena Guryev, in a T-shirt and panties, lay sprawled on the floor, dead from a single gunshot wound to her forehead.

The bathroom door was open. Empty. The only other door on the second floor was shut.