The Big Bad Wolf ак-9

by James Patterson

  Then, ‘Braves Three in place at second intersect. We’re waiting on him.’

  ‘Should be about ten to fifteen seconds. He’s heading down the street. Making a right. It’s the route he always takes to work.’

  I spoke very calmly to Mahoney. ‘I want to take him down, Ned.’

  He looked straight ahead through the windshield. Didn’t answer me. But he didn’t say no.

  I watched the Porsche proceed at a normal speed to the next cross street. The Boxster eased into the turn. And then Brendan Connelly ran!

  ‘Oh boy,’ said Mahoney and tossed away his apple.

  Chapter One Hundred and Eight

  ‘Suspect is going southeast. He must have seen us!’ A message came over the short wave.

  I gunned our car in the direction where the Porsche had disappeared. I managed to get the sedan up to sixty-five on the narrow, winding street lined with gated McMansions. I still couldn’t see the silver Porsche up ahead.

  ‘I’m heading east,’ I spoke into the two-way. ‘I’ll take a chance he’s trying to get to the highway.’ I didn’t know what else to do. I passed several cars coming the other way on the quiet street. A couple of drivers sat on their horns. That’s what I would have done too. I was going seventy-five miles an hour in a residential area.

  ‘I see him!’ Mahoney yelled.

  I stepped down hard on the gas. I was finally making up some ground. I spotted a blue sedan approaching the Porsche from the east. It was Braves Two. We had Brendan Connelly from two sides. Now the question was whether or not he’d give up.

  Suddenly the Porsche shot right off the road and into a thicket of bushes that rose higher than the car’s roof. The Porsche tilted forward, then disappeared down a steep slope.

  I didn’t slow down until the last second, then I braked hard and went into a controlled shudder and spin.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Mahoney shouted from the passenger side.

  ‘Thought you were HRT,’ I said.

  Mahoney laughed. ‘All right then, partner! Let’s get the bad guy!’

  I steered the sedan through the bushes and found myself on a steep hill dotted with large rocks and trees. When the first branches cleared, I had limited vision because of all the other trees. Then I saw the Porsche smack into a mid-sized oak, and career to one side. The car slid sideways another fifty feet before it finally stopped.

  Sphinx was down.

  ‘Let’s go get the bad guy!’ I shouted.

  Chapter One Hundred and Nine

  Mahoney and I wanted Sphinx and it was personal with me, maybe with both of us. I let our sedan roll another fifty or sixty yards. Then I braked and the car stopped. Mahoney and I jumped out. We almost slid down the steep hill, which was slippery with mud.

  ‘Crazy son of a bitch!’ Ned Mahoney shouted as we stumbled ahead.

  ‘What choice did he have? He had to run.’

  ‘I mean you. You’re crazy! What a ride.’

  We saw Brendan Connelly lurch out of the damaged Porsche. He held a handgun aimed our way. Connelly fired off two quick shots. He wasn’t good with a gun, though. But he was shooting real bullets.

  ‘Son of a bitch!’ Mahoney fired a shot and hit the Porsche – just to show Connelly that we could shoot him if we wanted to.

  ‘Put the gun down,’ Mahoney shouted. ‘Put the gun down!’

  Brendan Connelly started to run down the hill but he was stumbling a lot. Mahoney and I kept gaining on him until we were only thirty yards or so behind.

  ‘Let me,’ I said.

  Brendan Connelly looked back over his shoulder just then. I could tell he was tired, scared, or both. His legs and arms were pumping in a disjointed rhythm. He might work out in some gym, but he wasn’t ready for this.

  ‘Get back! I’ll shoot!’ he shouted – almost right into my face.

  I hit him, and it was like a speeding tractor-trailer back-ending a barely moving compact. Connelly went down, cartwheeling crazily. I stayed upright. Didn’t even lose my balance. This was the good part. It almost made up for some of our misses and failures.

  Connelly’s ignominious roll finally stopped after twenty yards, but then he made his biggest mistake – he got back up.

  I was on him in a second. I was all over Sphinx, and it was where I wanted to be. Mano a mano with this bastard. He had sold his own wife – the mother of his children.

  I threw a hard right-handed shot into the bridge of Connelly’s nose. The perfect shot, or close to it. Probably broke it from the crunch I heard. He went down on one knee – but he got up again. Former college jock. Former tough guy. Current asshole.

  His nose was hanging to one side. Good deal. I threw an uppercut into the pit of Connelly’s stomach and liked the feeling so much I threw another. I crunched another right into his gut, which was softening to the touch. Then a quick, hard hook to his cheek. I was getting stronger.

  I jabbed his broken nose and Connelly moaned. I jabbed again. I looped a roundhouse at his chin, connected, bull’s-eye. Brendan Connelly’s blue eyes rolled back into his forehead. The lights went out and he dropped into the mud, and stayed there, where he belonged.

  I heard a voice behind me. ‘That how it’s done in D.C.?’ Mahoney asked from a few yards up the hill.

  I stared up at him. ‘That’s how it’s done, Natty Bumpo. Hope you took notes.’

  Chapter One Hundred and Ten

  The next couple of weeks were quiet, disturbingly, maddeningly so. I found out I was being assigned to headquarters, as Deputy Director of Investigations under Director Burns. ‘A big, fat plum,’ I was told by everybody. It sounded like a desk job to me, and I didn’t want that. I wanted the Wolf. I wanted the street. I wanted action. I hadn’t come over to the Bureau to be a desk jockey in the Hoover Building.

  I was given a week off and Nana, the kids and I went everywhere together. There was a lot of tension in the house, though. We were waiting to hear what Christine Johnson was going to do.

  Every time I looked at Alex my heart ached; every time I held him in my arms, or tucked him in bed at the end of the day, I thought about his leaving the house for good. I couldn’t let that happen, but my lawyer had advised me it could.

  The Director needed to see me in his office one morning during my week off. It wasn’t too much of a problem. I stopped in after I dropped the kids at school. Tony Woods, Burns’s assistant, seemed particularly glad to see me.

  ‘You’re something of a hero for the moment. Enjoy it,’ he said, sounding, as always, like an Ivy League prof. ‘Won’t last long.’

  ‘Always the optimist, Tony,’ I said.

  ‘That’s my job description, young man.’

  I wondered how much Ron Burns shared with his assistant, and also what the Director had in mind this morning. I wanted to ask Tony about this plum job I was slated for. But I didn’t. I figured he wouldn’t tell me anyway.

  Coffee and sweet rolls were waiting in Burns’s office, but the Director wasn’t there. It was a little past eight. I wondered if he’d even gotten to work yet. It was hard to imagine that Ron Burns had a life outside the office, though I knew he had a wife and four children, and lived out in Virginia, about an hour from D.C.

  Burns finally appeared at the door in a blue dress shirt and tie, with the shirtsleeves rolled up. So now I knew he’d had at least one meeting before this one. Actually, I hoped this meeting wasn’t about another case that he wanted me to dive into. Unless it involved the Wolf.

  Burns grinned when he saw me sitting there. He read my look instantly. ‘Actually, I have a couple of nasty cases for you to work on. But that isn’t why I wanted to see you, Alex. Have some coffee. Relax. You’re on vacation, right?’

  He walked into the room, sat down across from me. ‘I want to hear how it’s going so far. You miss being a homicide detective? Still want to stay in the Bureau? You can leave if you want to. The Washington P.D. wants you back. Badly.’

  ‘That’s good to hear, that I’m wanted. As for the Bureau,
what can I say? The resources are amazing. Lot of good people here, great people. I hope you know that.’

  ‘I do. I’m a fan of our personnel, most of them, anyway. And on the dark side?’ he asked. ‘Problem areas? Things to work on? I want to hear what you think. I need to hear it. Tell me the truth, as you see it.’

  ‘Bureaucracy. It’s a way of life. It’s almost the FBI’s culture. And fear. It’s mostly political in nature, and it inhibits agents’ imaginations. Did I mention bureaucracy? It’s bad, awful, crippling. Just listen to your agents.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ Burns said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘The agents aren’t allowed to be nearly as good as they can be. Of course that’s a complaint with most jobs, isn’t it?’

  ‘Even your old job with the Washington P.D.?’

  ‘Not as much as here. That’s because I sidestepped a lot of red tape and other bullshit that got in the way.’

  ‘Good. Keep sidestepping the bullshit, Alex,’ Burns said. ‘Even if it’s mine.’

  I smiled. ‘Is that an order?’

  Burns nodded soberly. I felt that he had something else on his mind. ‘I had a difficult meeting before you got here. Gordon Nooney is leaving the Bureau.’

  I shook my head. ‘I hope I didn’t have anything to do with that. I don’t know Nooney well enough to judge him. Seriously. I don’t.’

  ‘Sorry, but you did have something to do with it. But it was my decision. The buck passes through here at a hundred miles an hour, and I like it that way. I do know Nooney well enough to judge him. Nooney was the leak to the Washington Post. That son of a bitch has been doing it for years. Alex, I thought about putting you in Nooney’s job.’

  I was shocked to hear it. ‘I’ve never trained people. I didn’t finish orientation myself.’

  ‘But you could train our people.’

  I wasn’t sure about that. ‘Maybe I could struggle through. But I like the streets. It’s in my blood. I’ve learned to accept that about myself.’

  ‘I know. I get it, Alex. I want you to work right here in the Hoover Building though. We’re going to change things. We’re going to win more than we lose. Work the big cases with Stacy Pollack at headquarters. She’s one of the best. Tough, smart, she could run this place some day.’

  ‘I can work with Stacy,’ I said, and left it at that.

  Ron Burns put out his hand and I took it.

  ‘This is going to be good. Exciting stuff,’ he said. ‘Which reminds me of a promise I made. There’s a spot here for Detective John Sampson, and any D.C. street cop you like. Anybody who wants to win. We’re going to win, Alex.’

  I shook Ron Burns’s hand on it. The thing is, I wanted to win, too.

  Chapter One Hundred and Eleven

  On a Monday morning I was in my new office on the fifth floor at headquarters in D.C. Tony Woods had given me a walking tour earlier that morning, and I was struck by strange, funny details that I couldn’t get out of my head. Like… the office doors were metal all through the building, except on the executive floor, where they were wood. The odd thing, though, the wood doors looked exactly like the metal ones. Welcome to the FBI.

  Anyway, I had a lot of reading to do, and I hoped I’d get used to being in an eleven-by-fifteen-foot office, which was kind of bare. The furniture looked as if it were on loan from the Government Accounting Office; there was a file cabinet with a large dial lock; a coat tree that held my black vest and blue nylon raid jacket. The office also looked down on Pennsylvania Avenue, which was something of a ‘perk’.

  Just past two that afternoon I got a phone call, actually the first incoming message to my new office. It was Tony Woods. ‘All settled in?’ he asked. ‘Anything you need?’

  ‘I’m getting there, Tony. I’ll be fine. Thanks for asking.’

  ‘Good. Alex, you’re going out of town in about an hour. There’s a lead on the Wolf in Brooklyn. Stacy Pollack will be going with you, so it’s a big deal. You fly out of Quantico at fifteen hundred. This thing isn’t over.’

  I called home, then I gathered some paperwork on the Wolf, grabbed the overnight bag I’d been told to keep in my office, and headed to the parking garage. Stacy Pollack came down a few minutes later.

  She drove, and it took us less than half an hour to get to the small private airfield at Quantico. On the way, she told me about the lead in Brooklyn. Supposedly, the real Wolf had been spotted at Brighton Beach. At least we weren’t giving up on him.

  One of the black Bells was saddled up and waiting for us. Stacy and I got out of the sedan and walked side by side to the helicopter. I remember that the skies were bright blue and streaming with clouds that appeared to be shredding in the distance. A crisp smell of fall was in the air.

  ‘Nice day for a train wreck,’ Stacy said and grinned.

  A shot rang out from the woods directly behind us. I had thrown back my head, laughing at Stacy’s little joke. I saw her get hit and blood spatter. I went down and covered her body.

  Agents were running on to the tarmac. One of them fired in the direction of the sniper shot. Two came sprinting toward us, the others ran toward the woods, in the direction of the shots. I lay on Stacy, trying to protect her, hoping she wasn’t dead, but wondering if maybe the bullet had been meant for me.

  You’ll never catch the Wolf, Pasha Sorokin had said in Florida. He will catch you. Now the warning had come true.

  The briefing that night at the Hoover Building was the most emotional I had seen at the Bureau so far. Stacy Pollack was alive, but she was in a critical condition at Walter Reed. Most of the agents respected Stacy Pollack tremendously, and they couldn’t believe she’d been targeted. I still wondered if the bullet had been meant for me? She and I had been headed to New York to see about the Wolf; he was the chief suspect in the shooting. But did he have help? Was there someone inside the Bureau?

  ‘The other bad news,’ Ron Burns told the group that night, ‘is that our lead in Brighton Beach turns out to be bogus. The Wolf isn’t in New York, apparently he wasn’t there recently. The questions that we have to answer are, did he know we were going after him? If he knew, how did he know? Did one of us tell him? I promise that we will spare nothing to get the answers to those questions.’

  After the meeting, I was one of the agents invited to a smaller briefing held in the Director’s conference room. The mood continued to be somber, serious, and angry. Burns took the floor again, and he seemed more upset by the Stacy Pollack shooting than anyone else.

  ‘When I said that we were going to bring that Russian bastard down, I wasn’t using hyperbole for effect. I’m establishing a BAM team to go after him. He said that he would come after us, and he did. Now we’re going to come after him, with everything we have, all our resources.’

  Heads around the room nodded their approval. I’d heard of the existence of BAM teams in the FBI, but hadn’t known if they were real or not. I knew what the acronym stood for – By Any Means. It was what we needed to hear right now. It was what I needed to hear.

  BAM.

  Chapter One Hundred and Twelve

  Everything felt like it was going much too fast, like it was spinning out of control. Maybe that was right. The case was out of our control – the Wolf was running it.

  I got a phone call at home two nights later. It was a quarter past three in the morning. ‘This had better be good.’

  ‘It isn’t. All hell’s broken loose, Alex. It’s a war.’ The caller was Tony Woods and he sounded groggy.

  I massaged my forehead as I spoke. ‘What war? Tell me what happened?’

  ‘We got word from Texas a few minutes ago. Lawrence Lipton is dead, murdered. They got to him in his cell.’

  I was starting to wake up in a hurry.

  ‘How? He was in our custody, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Two agents were killed with Lipton. He predicted it, didn’t he?’

  I nodded, then I said, ‘Yeah.’ And so had the Wolf.

  ‘Alex, they got to the Lipton famil
y, too. They’re all dead. HRT is on the way to your house, also the Director’s, even Mahoney’s. Anybody who worked on the case is considered vulnerable and at risk.’

  That got me up out of bed. I took my Glock out of the cabinet beside my bed.

  ‘I’ll be waiting for HRT,’ I told Woods, then I hurried downstairs with my gun in hand.

  Was the Wolf already here? I wondered.

  The war came to our house a few minutes later, and even though it was HRT, it couldn’t have been much scarier. Nana Mama was up and she greeted the heavily armed FBI agents with angry looks, but also offers of coffee. Then she and I went to wake the children, as gently as we could.

  ‘This isn’t right, Alex. Not in our home,’ Nana whispered as we went upstairs to get Jannie and Damon. ‘The line has to be drawn somewhere, doesn’t it? This is bad.’

  ‘I know it is. It’s gotten out of control, everything has. The world is that way now.’

  ‘So what are you going to do about it? What are you planning to do?’

  ‘Right now, wake the kids. Hug them, kiss them. Get them out of this house for a while.’

  ‘Are you listening to yourself?’ Nana asked as we arrived at the doorway to Damon’s bedroom. He was already sitting up in bed.

  ‘Dad?’ he said.

  Suddenly I was aware of Ned Mahoney coming up behind me. ‘Alex, can I have a second?’ What was he doing here? What else had happened?

  ‘I’ll wake them, get them dressed,’ Nana said. ‘Talk to your friend.’

  I stayed behind with Mahoney. ‘What is it, Ned? Can’t it wait for a couple of minutes? Jesus.’

  ‘The bastards hit Burns’s house. Everybody’s all right. We got there in time.’

  I stared into Mahoney’s eyes. ‘Your family?’

  ‘They’re out of the house. They’re safe for now. We’ve got to find him, and burn him.’