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 and 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 PD 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. Lots 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 PD?”
“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 here at headquarters. She’s one of the best. Tough, smart, she could run this place someday.”
“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 110
ON 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 wooden. The odd thing, though, was that the wooden 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 desk and chair, a file cabinet with a large dial lock, and a coat tree that held my black Kevlar vest and blue nylon raid jacket. The office 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 call 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 toward the helicopter. The skies were bright blue and streaming with clouds that appeared to be shredding in the distance.
“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 ran onto 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 shot. I lay on Stacy, trying to protect her, hoping she wasn’t dead, and 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 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 her. 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, and 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. Sorokin said that the Wolf would come after us and he did. Now we’re going to go 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 111
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 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 massage
d 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.”
“Alex, they got to the Lipton family 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 locked 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.
Ned Mahoney came 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.”
I nodded. “Let me get my kids up.”
Twenty minutes later my family was escorted outside to a waiting van. They climbed inside like frightened refugees in a war zone. That’s what the world was becoming, wasn’t it? Every city and town was a potential battlefield. No place was safe.
Just before I climbed into the van, I spotted a photographer posted across the street from our house on Fifth Street. It looked like he was photographing the evacuation of our house. Why was that?
I’m not sure how I knew who he was, but somehow I did. He’s not from any newspaper, I thought. I felt myself filling with rage and disgust. He works for Christine’s lawyers.
Chapter 112
CHAOS.
The next day, and for two days after that, I found myself in Huntsville, Texas, the site of the federal prison where Lawrence Lipton had been murdered while he was in the custody of the Federal Bureau. No one there had any explanation for how Lipton and two agents had been killed.
It had happened during the night. In his cell. Actually, the small suite where he was kept under guard. None of the video cameras had a record of visitors. None of the interviews or interrogations had turned up a suspect. Lipton had had most of the bones in his body broken. Zamochit. The Red Mafiya trademark.
The same method had been used on an Italian Mafia figure named Augustino Palumbo this past summer. According to stories, Palumbo’s killer had been a Russian mobster, possibly the Wolf. The murder had taken place at the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
The following morning I arrived in Colorado. I was there to visit a killer named Kyle Craig, who had once been an FBI agent, and also a friend of mine. Kyle was responsible for dozens of murders; he was one of the worst psychopathic killers in history. I had captured him. My friend.
We met in an interview room on death row in the isolation unit. Kyle looked surprisingly fit. When I’d last seen him he had been gaunt and very pale, with deep, dark hollows under his eyes. He appeared to have put on at least thirty pounds, all of it muscle. I wondered why—what had given Kyle hope? Whatever it was scared me a little.
“All roads lead to Florence?” he quipped, and grinned as I entered the interview room. “Some associates of yours from the Bureau were here just yesterday. Or was it the day before? You know, the last time we met, Alex, you said you didn’t care what I think. That hurt.”
I corrected him, which I knew would annoy Kyle. “Not exactly what I said. You accused me of being condescending and told me that you didn’t like it. I said, ‘Who cares what you like anymore?’ I do care about what you think. That’s why I’m here.”
Kyle laughed again, and the braying sound he made, the baring of his teeth, chilled me. “You always were my favorite,” he said.
“You were expecting me?” I asked.
“Hmm. Hard to say. Not really. Maybe at some time in the future.”
“You look like you have big plans. You’re all buffed.”
“What plans could I possibly have?”
“The usual. Grand delusions, homicidal fantasies, rape, the slaughter of innocents.”
“I do hate it when you play psychologist, Alex. You didn’t make it in that world for a good reason.”
I shrugged. “I know that, Kyle. None of my patients in Southeast had money to pay me. I needed to start a practice in Georgetown. Maybe I will someday.”
He laughed again. “Talk about delusions. So why are you here? No, I’ll tell you why. There’s been a terrible miscarriage of justice and I’m being released. You’re the messenger of glad tidings.”
“The only miscarriage is that you haven’t been executed, Kyle.”
Kyle’s eyes sparkled. I was one of his favorites. “All right, now that you’ve charmed me, what is it that you want?”
“You know what I want, Kyle,” I said. “You know exactly why I’m here.”
He clapped his hands loudly. “Zamochit! The mad Russian!”
For the next half an hour I told Kyle everything I knew about the Wolf; well, nearly everything. Then I gave him the kicker. “He met with you on the night he came here to kill Little Gus Palumbo. Did you set up the kill for him? Somebody did.”
Kyle leaned back and seemed to be considering his options, but I knew he’d already decided what he meant to do. He was always a step or two ahead.
Finally he leaned forward and beckoned me closer. I wasn’t afraid of Kyle, at least not physically, not even with his extra pounds of muscle. I almost hoped he’d make a move.
“I do this out of love and respect for you,” Kyle said. “I did meet with the Russian last summer. Ruthless chap, no conscience. I liked him. We played chess. I know who he is, my friend. I might be able to help you.”
Chapter 113
IT TOOK ME another day at Florence, but I finally negotiated a name out of Kyle. Now, could we believe him? The name was checked and rechecked in Washington, and the Bureau was becoming confident that he had given us the Red Mafiya leader. I had doubts—because it came from Kyle. But we had no other leads.
Maybe Kyle was trying to blow me up or embarrass the Bureau. Or maybe he wanted to demonstrate how smart he was, how well-connected, how superior to us all. The name, the person’s position, made the arrest controversial and risky. If we went after this man and we were wrong, the embarrassment would stick to the Bureau.
So we waited for nearly a week. We checked all of our information again and did several interviews in the field. The suspect was put under surveillance.
When we had completed the due diligence, I met with Ron Burns and the director of the CIA in Burns’s office. Ron got to the point. “We believe he’s the Wolf, Alex. Craig is probably telling the tr
uth.”
Thomas Weir from the CIA nodded my way. “We’ve been watching this suspect in New York for some time. We thought he’d been KGB back in Russia, but there wasn’t conclusive evidence. We never suspected Red Mafiya, never the Wolf. Not this man. Not given his position with the Russian government.”
Weir’s look was intense. “We increased the levels of audio surveillance to include the apartment where the suspect lives in Manhattan. He’s making arrangements to go after Director Burns again.”
Burns looked at me. “He doesn’t forgive and forget, Alex. Neither do I.”
“Is that it? We go to New York and arrest him?”
Burns and Weir nodded solemnly. “This should be the end of it,” said Burns. “Go and take down the Wolf. Bring me his head.”
Chapter 114
THIS SHOULD BE the end of it. From Director Burns’s mouth to God’s ear.
The Century is a famous art deco apartment building on Central Park West, north of Columbus Circle, in New York City. For decades it has been a residence of choice for well-to-do actors, artists, and businesspeople, especially those who are humble enough to share space with working-class families who’ve passed down their apartments for decades.
We arrived at the building around four in the morning. HRT immediately took over the three main entrances on Central Park, Sixty-second, and Sixty-third Streets. This was the largest bust I had been a part of, definitely the most complicated: The New York City Police, FBI, CIA, and Secret Service were all involved in the operation. We were about to take down an important Russian. The head of the trade delegation to New York. A businessman himself, supposedly above suspicion. The repercussions would be severe if we were wrong. But how could we be wrong? Not this time.
I was at the Century, along with my partner for the past week or so. Ned Mahoney was hardworking, honest, and tough in the clutch. The head of HRT had been to my house and even passed Nana’s inspection, mostly because he’d grown up on the streets of D.C.
The Big Bad Wolf Page 22