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.
I braced myself, turned the handle, and pushed the door open.
Ten-year-old Dimitri Guryev was sitting up in a twin bed, a small rose circle of dried blood showing through the gauze that wrapped his head. He had an iPad in his lap and was watching a closed-captioned Harry Potter movie.
The boy must have glimpsed my shadow because he looked up, saw me, and shrank back in fear.
“It’s okay,” I said, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me.
I showed him my open hands, and then my badge.
Seeing the badge, he said in an odd, nasal voice that was difficult to understand, “What do you want? Where’s my mother? Where’s my father?”
My stomach sank.
I turned around and saw Mahoney, who was standing in the doorway, looking stricken at the boy’s loss.
“Get sheets over the bodies,” I said. “And close the door to his mother’s bedroom. I don’t want him seeing any of it.”
82
A FEW HOURS later, Bree looked up from a memo she was writing. Alex trudged into her office, shut the door behind him, and sat down hard.
“Sometimes I hate my job,” he said. “Sometimes it’s just too much.”
Bree rarely saw him this upset. “What happened?” she said softly.
“I had to tell a ten-year-old totally deaf boy that his mother and father had been murdered and that he was an orphan now,” Alex said, his eyes watering. “I don’t know if it was due to the deafness, Bree, but the grieving sounds he made were like nothing I’ve ever heard before, just gut-wrenching. I couldn’t stop thinking about Ali as I held the poor kid.”
He sat forward and put his head in his hands. “Jesus, that was hard.”
Bree got up, came around the desk, and hugged him. “Maybe you were meant for the hard things, Alex. Maybe you were meant to help people through these terrible moments.”
“I couldn’t help that child,” Alex said. “I couldn’t get through to him. After I showed him the note that said his mom and dad were dead, he wouldn’t read anything I wrote. He won’t read anything anyone writes. He’s suffering in total silence, in total isolation.”
Bree hugged him tighter. “You feel too much sometimes.”
“Can’t help it,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “But we need you to buck up and push on.”
Alex hugged her tight and then broke their embrace, saying, “You would have been a great cornerman in a boxing match.”
“Clean them, patch them, and send them back out there with Vaseline on their brows,” Bree said. “That’s me.”
He kissed her, said, “Thank you for being you.”
Bree once again realized how much she loved him. She loved everything about him. Even when he was wounded, Alex filled her up.
Her phone rang.
“Yes?” she said.
“This is Ned,” Mahoney said.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Bree said.
The FBI agent sounded distraught and sad. “I appreciate that, Bree. They were four of my best.”
“How can I help?”
“A federal judge in Alexandria just perfected our warrants. Get to Vienna ASAP if you’re still interested. We’re searching the Phoenix Club.”
83
BREE, SAMPSON, AND I met Mahoney and a team of ten from the FBI in the parking lot at Wolf Trap. The heat had returned, and we were sweating as we armored up, got documents in order, and rolled toward the Phoenix Club.
Based on an aerial view of the compound from Google Earth, Mahoney gave out assignments. Five agents would loop into the woods behind the property to stop any runners. The rest of us were going in the front gate.
“Pretty swank neighborhood,” Bree said, seeing the mansions. “I thought where Vivian McGrath lived was big money.”
“She’s in the millionaires’ club,” Sampson said. “This is strictly billionaires.”
Mahoney stopped a quarter of a mile from the club and watched five FBI agents head up the driveway of a big Tudor estate and then disappear into the woods.
“Here we go,” Mahoney said into his radio, and he put the car back in gear.
He drove us to the entrance and up the long drive. As we caught sight of the gate, it started to swing open to let a white Range Rover exit.
Mahoney blocked the way. The window of the luxury SUV rolled down and a guy with slicked-back hair wearing five-hundred-dollar sunglasses and a five-thousand-dollar suit yelled, “Move, for God’s sake. I’m late for a very important meeting at the Pentagon.”
“Tell it to someone who cares,” Mahoney said, climbing out of the car, hand on his pistol.
“I’m a goddamned founding member of this club!” the man shouted.
“And I’m an FBI agent,” Mahoney said, and then he called back to his men, “Detain him for questioning.”
“What? No!” the man said, no longer belligerent but terrified as the same guard Sampson and I had seen on our previous visit appeared from the shack.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I have a federal warrant to search the premises,” Mahoney said, wielding a sheaf of papers.
“You can’t just go in there,” the guard said, agitated. “It’s private.”
“Not anymore,” Mahoney said and he signaled his team to move forward.