The slick-haired suit in the Range Rover used the moment to spring from his car and start running back up the hill. Sampson thundered after him and caught him by the collar halfway up the inner drive.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Sampson demanded.
“Please,” he said in a whine. “I’ll help you. Anything you want, but my name cannot be associated with this place.”
“If I were you, Mr. Founding Member, I’d shut the hell up,” Sampson said, cuffing him.
Bree, Mahoney, and I kept going up the drive, past flowering gardens and trees. We rounded a corner and saw the clubhouse, a sprawling, two-story place that suggested an inn in the south of France in its design and muted colors. There were tennis courts on our right. To the left, a high whitewashed picket fence enclosed a pool and side yard. A hedge about four feet high ran out from the fence to the drive and continued on to the woods on the other side of it, effectively cutting the front yard in two, an outer manicured lawn and an inner yard of blooming gardens surrounding the clubhouse. Piano music and the sound of people laughing drifted from the pool area.
“Looks like we may be interrupting a party,” I said, stepping through a gap in the hedge.
Shots rang out. Bullets slapped the pavement at our feet.
84
I SPUN AROUND, tackled Bree, and drove her down behind the hedge before another round of shots came from the house. We landed hard. Bree had the wind knocked out of her, but we were alive. So were Sampson and Mahoney, who were returning fire from behind the hedge on the other side of the drive.
I scrambled up to my knees and called to them, “Where are they?”
“Second floor!” Sampson called back.
People were screaming by the pool.
“We have multiple runners,” an FBI agent said through our earbuds. “Women in bikinis and bare-chested guys with white towels around their waists.”
What the hell was this place?
“Shoot them if they’re armed, stop them if they’re not,” Mahoney said.
Ten seconds passed. Then twenty. Bree caught her breath and sat up beside me. The panic continued in the pool yard, but no more shots were fired from the clubhouse. Why? The gunmen had to know where we were hiding. They had to have seen us take cover.
Something felt strange. We’d been in the wide open in that gap between the hedges. If they’d wanted to kill us, they could have, and yet…
I thought about the layout of the property and the satellite photo we’d seen of the place. I dug in my pocket and called it up on my iPhone. Only one way in, which meant only one way out. Right?
I was about to put the phone away when I noticed something. Beyond the north security wall a good hundred feet, a stubby spur of pavement appeared out of the woods, curved, and met the driveway of the adjoining mansion. I magnified the image, looked right where the spur disappeared into the trees, and saw a thick, dark smudge about the width of the pavement.
“It was a diversion,” I said, jumping to my feet.
“Alex!” Bree said.
“They’ve got an underground escape route,” I said, and I sprinted back down the driveway, Sampson, Mahoney, and Bree behind me.
“Hey!” the suit in the cuffs said when I ran by. “I want witness protection.”
“Lot of good it will do you,” Sampson said as I dodged by the Range Rover and Mahoney’s car.
As I ran down the long drive, I kept peering north through the trees, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone. But I hit the street and there was no one.
I turned to tell the others when I heard an engine revving and tires squealing, and then a black Chevy Suburban came hurtling out of the estate to the north. It skidded sideways and then accelerated right at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sampson, Mahoney, and Bree appear.
“Driver!” I shouted when the car was less than fifty yards from me.
All four of us opened fire on the right side of the windshield, seeing it spiderweb before we had to dive for the ditch.
The Suburban ripped by us. Then the big SUV swerved hard, went off the road, jumped the ditch, and smashed head-on into a very large granite boulder.
85
BREE STONE WALKED toward a group of young women wearing terry-cloth robes and smoking cigarettes by the kidney-shaped pool. They watched her from under hooded, mistrustful eyes.
Why should they trust me? Bree thought. Sergei Bogrov and the three other guys in the Suburban had abandoned them, made a run for it. The driver had died. Bogrov was badly injured. The other two weren’t talking, nor were the ten club members the FBI had caught trying to flee the grounds.
That left these women.
Bree had been all through the Phoenix Club by then. She’d seen a gourmet kitchen, a well-stocked wine cellar and bar, a complete workout facility, a steam room, a sauna, a massage room, and eight bedrooms designed to cater to a variety of perversions and fetishes.
There was a dungeon room, a room with mirrored walls and ceiling, a room with a bathtub you could do laps in, and a room with furniture designed for gravity-defying sex positions. There was also a storage area, where Mahoney’s men found several kilos of cocaine and several kilos of crystal methamphetamine that looked remarkably similar to the high-grade stuff manufactured in the lab at the first massacre scene.
Bree stopped in front of the women. One of them, a woman with an attractive beauty mark just to the right of her ruby lips, lit a cigarette and said something in a language that wasn’t English. Several of the others chuckled bitterly.
“Some of you must speak English,” Bree said. “If you do, know that you are not in danger anymore.”
The woman with the beauty mark made a tsk noise, said, “You know nothing.”
“I know Stavros is dead,” Bree said. “I know Bogrov is in handcuffs.”
That set off a lot of chatter among the women.
Bree waited for a few moments and then spoke directly to Ms. Beauty Mark. “I am DC Metro Police chief of detectives Bree Stone. I’m telling you the truth. You are no longer in danger.”
Ms. Beauty Mark’s upper lip curled, “We know the better. You get some, maybe, but not all. I’m telling you the truth. This is so much the bigger than you think. So, smart thing for me? For us? We don’t talk to no one. A lawyer comes. They always come.”
“I know what you’ve been through,” Bree said. “How you were told you’d have to work for four or five years to pay off your debt for being smuggled into America. I know some of you rode in refrigerated cars and saw people freeze to death and that you were brought here to be sex slaves. Am I right?”
Many of the women would not look at her. None of them replied.
Bree almost quit, but then she gestured at the mansion and said, “All this? That’s the FBI’s business. I’m here for other reasons, for someone who may have been a friend of yours. I’m here for Edita Kravic.”
That caused quite a few of them, including the woman with the beauty mark, to raise their heads.
“Why for Edita?” she said. “You see her?”
“I’m sorry,” Bree said, seeing the yearning in her eyes and coming closer. “Edita’s dead. She was murdered.”
The woman acted as if she’d been slapped, and then her hand flew to her mouth and she began to sob.
Bree went over to her. “You knew Edita?”
“I’m her sister,” she said through tears. “Her baby sister, Katya.”
86
KATYA KRAVIC DISSOLVED into misery. Bree stood back as her friends came over to console her. When Katya finally calmed down, her eyes puffy and bloodshot, she lit a cigarette shakily.
“Can you help me?” Bree asked.
“Can you help me? ” Katya said. “All of us?”
“I’ll try.”
“They’ll throw us out of country,” Katya said. “We’re not supposed to be here. At least not on the immigration computers.”
“A lot depends on your cooperation,” Bree said. “The more you cooperate, the more likely a judge is to look at you favorably.”
Katya thought about that. Spoke to one of her friends, who nodded.
“What do you want to know?” she said.
“Tell me about Edita.”
Katya said her older sister had come first, almost eight years ago. The agreement Edita had struck with the Russian broker was similar to the terms Alex had heard from the woman he and Sampson rescued from the refrigerated trucks at the tobacco-shed massacre site.
In return for five years of her life, Edita got false documents and a way into the United States. She was moved up and down the East Coast for two years before finding a permanent position with the Phoenix Club.
According to Katya, the club was not a high-volume brothel. Members paid a fifty-thousand-dollar initiation fee to join, and ten thousand a year in dues thereafter. In return, they got access to the club, its facilities, all the booze and illicit drugs they wanted, and the company of the women.
“What happened when Edita’s five years were up?” Bree asked.
“They gave her back her passport and even gave her a green card, and then they said she had a choice,” Katya said. “Leave, make a new life. Or become part of the management.”
“She took management.”
“No, Edita is… she was smart girl,” Katya said. “She found an apartment in Washington and worked here. She ran the club in the evening, and Stavros and Bogrov pay her much money. She uses the money to become a lawyer.”
Katya said this with such pride that Bree was touched.
“Did she ever mention a man named Tom McGrath?”
Katya’s face clouded. “He is the one who killed her?”
“No, he died with her. Thomas McGrath.”
“Tommy?” Katya said, her face clouding further. “Yes, Edita tells me about Tommy. Too much about Tommy.”
Edita had met McGrath when he’d come to speak at her criminal law class. She was ten years older than the other students, and he was funny and handsome, and his wife had recently thrown him out of the house and said she didn’t love him anymore. Edita and McGrath had had a drink after class and dinner the next night.
“They became lovers,” Katya said. “Edita was the happiest I have seen her. Ever. For a month, maybe.”
“Then what happened?”
Katya said McGrath ran a background check on Edita and discovered that the green card she had was fake, and there were no records in INS of an Edita Kravic applying for citizenship.
“They lie,” Katya said. “Bogrov and the others. They sell to Edita a lie.”
After discovering the forgery, Katya said, McGrath forced Edita to come clean and tell him everything. But the more she told him about the Phoenix Club, the more he wanted to know. Tommy asked Edita to break into the club’s computers and copy things for him.
Katya stopped talking and looked up angrily. “Tommy, he says he loves Edita, but she has to prove she loves him. So he pushes and pushes, and she loves him, but she is so scared the last time I saw her. Tommy would not listen to her about Bogrov and Stavros, how they are bad men, crazy men. You ask me, Tommy got my Edita killed, and Tommy, he got himself killed too.”