AllFreeNovel
Share Us
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 wa
s 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.
Chapter
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.”
