The Big Bad Wolf ак-9

by James Patterson

  Well, what the hell else could she do except get ideas? There was nothing for her to do all day in the dark by herself. She was–

  The closet door swung open violently! Then it slammed against the wall outside.

  The Wolf screamed in Lizzie’s face. ‘You were thinking about me, weren’t you? You’re starting to get obsessive, Elizabeth? I’m in your thoughts all the time.’

  Damn it, he was right about that.

  ‘You’re even glad for the company. You miss me, don’t you?’

  But he had that wrong, dead wrong.

  She hated the Wolf so much that Lizzie contemplated the unthinkable: she could kill him. Maybe that day would come.

  Imagine that, she thought. God, that is what I want to do – kill the Wolf myself. That would be the greatest escape of all.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  That same night the Wolf had a meeting with two professional hockey players at Caesars in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The suite where he stayed had gold-foil wallpaper everywhere, windows facing the Atlantic, a hot tub in the living room. Out of respect for his guests, who were big stars, he wore an expensive, chalk-stripe Prada suit.

  His contact happened to be a wealthy cable TV operator, who arrived at the Nero suite with the hockey players Alexei Dobrushkin and Ilia Teptev in tow. Both were members of the Philadelphia Flyers. They were top defensemen who were considered to be tough guys, because they were big men who moved quickly and could do a lot of damage. The Wolf didn’t believe the hockey players were that tough, but he was a huge fan of the game.

  ‘I love American-style hockey,’ he said as he welcomed them with a broad smile and an extended hand.

  Alexei and Ilia nodded his way, but neither of the hockey players shook his hand. The Wolf was offended, but he didn’t reveal his feelings. He smiled some more and figured that the hockey players were too stupid to understand who he was. Too many wooden sticks to the skull.

  ‘Drinks anyone?’ he asked his guests. ‘Stolichnaya? Whatever you like.’

  ‘I’ll pass,’ said the cable operator, who seemed incredibly self-important, but a lot of Americans were that way.

  ‘Nyet,’ Ilia said with disinterest, as if his host were a hotel barman, or a waiter. The hockey player was twenty-two years old, born in Voskrensh, Russia. He was six foot five with close-cropped hair, stubble not quite amounting to a beard, a block of a head sitting on an enormous neck.

  ‘I don’t drink Stoly,’ said Alexei, who, like Ilia, wore a black leather jacket with a dark turtleneck underneath. ‘Maybe you have Absolut? Or some Bombay Gin?’

  ‘Of course,’ the Wolf nodded cordially. He walked to the suite’s mirrored wet bar where he made the drinks, and decided what to do next. He was starting to enjoy this. It was different. No one here was afraid of him.

  He plopped down on the pillowed couch between Ilia and Alexei. He looked back and forth into their faces, smiling broadly again. ‘You’ve been away from Russia for a long time, no? Maybe too long,’ he said. ‘You drink Bombay Gin? You forget your manners?’

  ‘We hear you’re a real tough man,’ said Alexei, who was in his early thirties and obviously lifted weights, a lot of weights, and often. He was around six feet, but over two hundred and twenty pounds.

  ‘No. Not really,’ said the Wolf. ‘I am just another American businessman these days. Nothing very special. Not tough anymore. So, I was wondering, do we have a deal for the game with Montreal?’

  Alexei looked over at the cable guy. ‘Tell him,’ he said.

  ‘Alexei and Ilia are looking for a little more action than what we originally talked about,’ he said. ‘You understand what I’m saying? Action?’

  ‘Aahhh,’ said the Wolf and grinned broadly. ‘I love action,’ he said to the businessman. ‘I love shalit too. Means mischief in my country. Shalit.’

  He was up off the couch faster than anyone would have thought possible. He’d pulled out a small lead pipe from beneath the couch cushion and cracked it across Alexei Dobrushkin’s cheek. Then he swung it off the bridge of Ilia Teptev’s nose. The two hockey stars were bleeding like pigs in seconds.

  Then, and only then, did the Wolf take out his gun. He held it between the eyes of the cable operator. ‘You know, they’re not such tough guys as I thought. I can tell about these things in a few seconds,’ he said. ‘Now, down to business. One of the two big bears will allow a score by Montreal in the first period. The other will miss a play for a score in the second. Do you understand? The Flyers will lose the game in which they’re favored. Understood?

  ‘If, for any reason, this doesn’t happen, then everybody dies. Now let yourselves out. I look forward to the game. As I said, I love American-style hockey.’

  The Wolf began to laugh as the big hockey stars stumbled out of the Nero suite. ‘Nice meeting you Ilia, Alexei,’ he said as the door shut. ‘Break a leg.’

  Chapter Sixty

  A huge task force meeting was held in the SIOC Suite on the fifth floor of the Hoover Building, which was considered sacred ground in the Bureau. SIOC is the Strategic Information Operations Center, and the central suite was where most of the really important powwows were held, from Waco to September 11.

  I had been invited, and I wondered whom I had to thank for it. I arrived at around nine and had to be brought in by an agent who manned the front desk.

  I saw that the SIOC Suite consisted of four rooms, three of which were filled with state-of-the-art workstations, probably for researchers and analysts. I was led into the last large conference room. The focal point was a long glass-and-metal table. On the walls were clocks set to different time zones, several maps, half a dozen TV monitors. A dozen or so agents were already inside the room, but it was quiet.

  Stacy Pollack finally arrived and the outside doors were shut. The head of SIOC introduced the agents who were present, as well as two visitors from the CIA. Pollack had a reputation inside the Bureau for being a no-nonsense administrator who didn’t suffer fools, and who got results. She was thirty-one years old, and Burns loved her.

  The TV monitors on the wall told the latest story: live-action film was up and running on the major networks. Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, said the super.

  ‘That’s old news. We have a new problem,’ announced Pollack from the front of the room. ‘We’re not here because of the screw-up at Beaver Falls. This is internal, so it’s worse. Folks, we think we’ve learned the name of the person responsible for the leaks out of Quantico.’

  Then Pollack looked right at me. ‘A reporter at the Washington Post denies it, but why wouldn’t he? The leaks come from a Crime Analyst named Monnie Donnelley. You’re working with her, aren’t you, Dr Cross?’

  Suddenly the SIOC Suite room seemed very small and constricting. Everyone had turned toward me.

  ‘Is this why I’m here?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Pollack. ‘You’re here because you’re experienced with sexual-obsession cases. You’ve been involved with more of them than anyone else in the room. But that wasn’t my question.’

  I thought carefully before I answered. ‘This isn’t a sexual-obsession case,’ I told Pollack. ‘And Monnie Donnelley isn’t the leak.’

  ‘I’d like you to explain both of those statements,’ Pollack challenged me immediately. ‘Please, go ahead. I’m listening with great interest.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I said. ‘The abductors, the group or ring behind the kidnappings, are in this for the money. I don’t see any other explanation for their actions. The slain Russian couple on Long Island are a key. I don’t think we should be looking at past sex offenders as our focus. The question should be, who has the resources and expertise to abduct men and women for a price, and probably a very large price? Who has experience in this area? Monnie Donnelley knows that and she’s an excellent analyst. She’s not the leak to the Post. What would she have to gain?’

  Stacy Pollack looked down and shuffled some of her papers. She didn’t comment on anything I’d said. ‘
Let’s move on,’ she said.

  The meeting resumed without any further discussion of Monnie and the charges against her. Instead, there was a lengthy discussion of the Red Mafiya, including new information that the couple murdered on Long Island definitely had connections to Russian gangsters. There were also rumors of a possible mob war about to break out on the East Coast, involving the Italians and Russians.

  After the larger meeting, we broke off into smaller groups. A few agents took workstations. Stacy Pollack pulled me aside.

  ‘Listen, I wasn’t accusing you of anything,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t suggesting that you’re involved in the leaks, Alex.’

  ‘So who accused Monnie?’ I asked.

  She seemed surprised by the question. ‘I won’t tell you that. Nothing is official yet.’

  ‘What do you mean, “nothing is official yet”?’ I asked.

  ‘No action has been taken against Ms Donnelley. We will probably pull her off this investigation, though. That’s all I have to say on the subject for now. You can go back to Quantico now.’ I guess I’d been dismissed.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  I called Monnie as soon as I could, and told her what had happened. She got furious – as she should. But then Monnie took hold of herself. ‘All right, so now you know – I’m not as controlled as I look,’ she said. ‘Well, fuck them. I didn’t leak anything to the Washington press, Alex. That’s absurd. Who would I tell – our paperboy?’

  ‘I know you didn’t,’ I said. ‘Listen, I have to stop at Quantico, then how about I take you and your boys for a quick meal tonight. Cheap,’ I added and she managed to sniffle out a laugh.

  ‘All right. I know a place. It’s called the Command Post Pub. We’ll meet you. The boys like it there a lot. You’ll see why.’

  Monnie told me how to get to the pub, which was close to Quantico on Potomac Avenue. After I made a stop at my temporary office at Club Fed, I drove over to meet her and her two boys. Matt and Will were just eleven and twelve. They were big dogs, though, like their father. Both were already close to six feet.

  ‘Mom says you’re okay,’ said Matt as he shook hands with me.

  ‘She said the same about you and Will,’ I told him. Everybody laughed at the table. Then we ordered guilty pleasures – burgers, chicken wings, cheese fries, which Monnie figured she deserved after her ordeal. Her sons were well mannered and easy to be with, and that told me a lot about Monnie.

  The pub was an interesting choice. It was cluttered with Marine Corps memorabilia including officers’ flags, photos, and a couple of tables with machine-gun rounds in them. Monnie said that Tom Clancy had mentioned the bar in Patriot Games, but in the novel he said there was a picture of George Patton on the wall, which upset everybody at the bar, especially since Clancy had made a career out of being in the know. The Command Post was a Marines bar, not Army.

  When we were leaving, Monnie took me aside. A few Marines were going in and out. They gawked a little at us. ‘Thank you, thank you, Alex. This means a lot to me,’ she said. ‘I know denials don’t mean a damn thing, but I did not leak information to the Washington Post. Or to Rush Limbaugh. Or O’Reilly either. Or anyone fucking else. Never happened, never will. I’m true blue to the end, which apparently could be near.’

  ‘That’s what I told them at the Hoover Building,’ I said. ‘The true blue part.’

  Monnie rose on her toes and kissed me on the cheek. ‘I owe you big time, mister. You should also know, you’re impressing the hell out of me. Even Matt and Will seemed neutral to positive, and you’re one of the enemy to them – grown-ups.’

  ‘Keep working the case,’ I told her. ‘You have exactly the right attitude.’

  Monnie looked puzzled, but then she got it. ‘Oh yeah, I do, don’t I. Fuck them.’

  ‘It’s the Russians,’ I said before I left her at the door of the Command Post. ‘It has to be. We’ve got that much right.’

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  T wo people very much in love. Often a beautiful thing to watch. But not in this case, not on this starry night in the hills of central Massachusetts.

  The devoted lovers’ names were Vince Petrillo and Francis Deegan, and they were juniors at Holy Cross College in Worcester, where they had been inseparable since their first week as freshmen. They’d met in the Mulledy Dorm on Easy Street and had rarely been apart since. They’d even worked at the same fish restaurant the past two summers in Provincetown. When they graduated, they planned to be married, then do the grand tour through Europe.

  Holy Cross is a Jesuit school which, justly or unjustly, has some reputation for being homophobic. Offending students can be suspended or even expelled under the Breach of Peace rule, which forbids ‘conduct which is lewd or indecent’. The Catholic Church does not actually condemn ‘temptation’ toward members of the same sex, but homosexual acts are often considered ‘intrinsically perverted’ and constitute a ‘grave moral disorder’. Because the Jesuits could be hard on homosexual relationships, among the students anyway, Vince and Francis kept theirs as private and secret as they could. In recent months, though, they figured their relationship probably wasn’t a very big deal, especially given the other scandals among the Catholic clergy.

  The Campus Arboretum at Holy Cross had long been a hangout for students who wanted to be alone, and who sometimes had romantic intentions. The garden area boasted over a hundred different kinds of trees and shrubs, and overlooked downtown Worcester, ‘Wormtown,’ as it was sometimes called by students.

  That night Vince and Francis, dressed in athletic shorts, T-shirts, and matching royal-purple-and-white baseball caps, strolled down Easy Street to a brick patio and lawn area known as Wheeler Beach. It was crowded, so they continued on to find a quiet spot in the Arboretum.

  There they lay on a blanket under a nearly full moon and a sky studded with stars. They held hands and talked about the poetry of W.B. Yeats, whom Francis adored, and Vince, a pre-med student, tolerated as best he could. The two men were an unusual couple physically. Vince was just over five foot seven and weighed one-eighty. Most of it was solid, due to his obsessive weight-lifting at the gym, but it was obvious he had to work hard to keep the weight off. He had curly black hair that framed a soft, almost angelic face which wasn’t too different from his baby pictures, one of which his lover carried in his wallet.

  Francis could make either sex drool; and that was Vince’s private joke when they were among co-eds, ‘drool fools’. Francis was six foot one, trim, without an ounce of fat. His white-blond hair was cut in the same style he had adopted as a sophomore at Christian Brothers Academy in New Jersey. He adored Vince with all his heart, and Vince worshipped him.

  They came for Francis, of course.

  He had been scouted, and purchased.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  The three burly men were dressed in loose jeans, work boots and dark windbreakers. They were hoodlums. In Russian they were called baklany, or bandity. Scary demons wherever you met up with them; monsters from Moscow let loose in America by the Wolf.

  They parked a black Pontiac Grand Prix on the street, then climbed the hill to the main campus at Holy Cross.

  ‘Ёбаные холмы, ненавижу!’ Fucking hills, I hate them. One of them was short of breath and complained about the steepness of the hill.

  ‘Заткнись, мудак!’ Quiet, asshole, said group leader Maxim, who liked to call himself a personal friend of the Wolf’s, though of course he wasn’t. No pakhan had real friends, but especially not the Wolf. He only had enemies, and almost never met those who worked for him. Even in Russia, he had been known as an invisible or mystery man. But here in the US, it was even worse. Virtually no one knew him by sight.

  The three thugs watched the college students on the blanket as they held hands, then kissed and fondled.

  ‘Kiss like girls,’ said one of the Russian men with a nasty laugh.

  ‘Not like any girls I ever kiss.’

  The three of the
m laughed and shook their heads in disgust. Then the hulking leader of the team strode forward, moving very fast, given his weight and size. He silently pointed toward Francis, and the two other men pulled the boy away from Vince.

  ‘Hey, what the hell is this?’ Francis started to yell, but was stopped by a wide strip of insulating tape pressed over his mouth, cutting off all sound for help.

  ‘Now you can scream,’ said one of the smirking hoods. ‘Scream like a girl. But nobody hears you anymore.’

  They worked together quickly. While one thug wrapped more black tape around Francis’s ankles, the other bound his wrists tightly behind his back. Then he was stuffed inside a large duffel bag, the sort used to carry athletic equipment such as baseball bats or basketballs.

  The leader, meanwhile, took out a thin, very sharp stiletto knife. He slit the heavy-set boy’s throat, just like he used to kill pigs and goats back in his home country. Vince hadn’t been purchased, but he might have seen the abduction team. Unlike the Couple, these men would never play their own little games, or betray the Wolf, or disappoint him. There would be no more mistakes. The Wolf had been explicit on that, clear in a dangerous way that only he could be.

  ‘Take the pretty boy. Quickly,’ said the leader of the team as they hurried back to their car. They tossed the bulging bag into the trunk of the Pontiac and got out of town.

  The job was perfect.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Here was the deal as Francis saw it now, as he tried to be calm and logical about it. Nothing that had happened to him could possibly have happened! He couldn’t have been abducted a few hours ago by three absolutely terrifying men at the Arboretum on the campus of Holy Cross. It just couldn’t have happened! Nor could he have been transported in the trunk of a late-model black sedan for four, maybe five hours, to God only knows where.