The Big Bad Wolf

Chapter Fifty-Three

I didn’t get back to Washington until almost ten the following night, and I knew I was in trouble with Jannie, probably with everybody in the house except little Alex and the cat. I’d promised we would go to the pool at the Y and now it was too late to go anywhere except to sleep.

Nana was sitting over a cup of tea in the kitchen when I came in. She didn’t even look up. I bypassed a lecture and headed upstairs in the hopes that Jannie might still be awake.

She was. My best little girl was sitting on her bed surrounded by several magazines, including American Girl. Her old favorite bear, Theo, was propped in her lap. Jannie had gone to sleep with Theo since she was less than a year old, when her mother was still alive.

In one corner of the room Rosie the cat was curled up on a pile of Jannie’s laundry. One of Nana’s jobs for her and Damon was that they start doing their own laundry.

I had a thought about Maria now. My wife was kind and courageous, a special woman who’d been shot in a mysterious drive-by incident in Southeast that I’d never been able to solve. I never closed the file. Maybe something would turn up. It’s been known to happen. I still missed her almost every day. Sometimes I even say a little prayer. I hope you forgive me, Maria. I’m doing the best I can. It just doesn’t seem good enough sometimes, good enough to me anyway. We love you dearly.

Jannie must have sensed I was there, watching her, talking to her mother. ‘I thought it was you,’ she said.

‘Why is that?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘I just did. My sixth sense is working pretty good lately.’

‘Were you waiting up for me?’ I asked as I slipped into her room. It had been our one guest bedroom, but last year we had converted it to Jannie’s. I had built the shelving for the clay menagerie from her ‘Sojourner Truth period’: the stegosaurus, a whale, black squirrel, a panhandler, a witch tied to a stake, as well as dozens of her favorite books.

‘I wasn’t waiting up, no. I didn’t expect you home at all.’

I sat down on the edge of the bed. Framed over it was a copy of a Magritte painting of a pipe with the caption: This is not a pipe. ‘You’re going to torture me some, huh?’ I said.

‘Of course. Goes without saying. I looked forward to some pool-time all day.’

‘Fair enough.’ I put my hand on top of hers. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Jannie.’

‘I know. You don’t have to say that, actually. You don’t have to be sorry. Really you don’t. I understand what you do is important. I get it. Even Damon does.’

I squeezed my girl’s hands in mine. She was so much like Maria. ‘Thank you, sweetie. I needed that tonight.’

‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘I could tell.’

Chapter Fifty-Four

The Wolf was in Washington, D.C. on a business trip that night. He had a late dinner at the Ruth Chris Steak House on Connecticut Avenue near Dupont Circle.

Joining him was Franco Grimaldi, a stocky, thirty-eight-year-old Italian capo from New York. They talked about a promising scheme to build Tahoe into a gambling mecca that would rival Vegas and Atlantic City; they also talked about pro hockey, the latest Vin Diesel movie, and a plan the Wolf had to make a billion dollars on a single job. Then the Wolf said he had to leave. He had another meeting in Washington. Business rather than pleasure.

‘You seeing the President?’ Grimaldi asked.

The Russian laughed. ‘No. He can’t get anything done. He’s all stronzate. Why should I see him? He should see me about Bin Laden and the terrorists. I get things done.’

‘Tell me something,’ Grimaldi asked, before the Wolf left. ‘The story about Palumbo out in the max-security prison in Colorado. You did that?’

The Wolf shook his head. ‘A complete fairy tale. I am a businessman, not a low-life, not some butcher. Don’t believe everything you hear about me.’

The Mafia head watched the unpredictable Russian leave the steakhouse, and he was almost certain the man had killed Palumbo, and also that the President ought to contact the Wolf about Al Qaeda.

Around midnight, the Wolf got out of a black Dodge Viper in Potomac Park. He could see the outline of an SUV across Ohio Drive. The roof light blinked on and a single passenger got out. Come to me, pigeon, he whispered.

The man who approached him in Potomac Park was FBI and worked in the Hoover Building. His carriage was stiff and herky-jerky like that of so many government functionaries. There was no confident G-man swagger. The Wolf had been warned that he couldn’t buy a useful agent, and then he couldn’t trust the information if he did. But he hadn’t believed that. Money always bought things, and it always bought people – especially if they had been passed over for promotions and raises; this was as true in America as it had been in Russia. If anything, it was more true here where cynicism and bitterness were becoming the national pastimes.

‘So is anybody talking about me up on the fifth floor of the Hoover?’ he asked.

‘I don’t want to meet like this. Next time, you run an ad in the Washington Times.’

The Wolf smiled, but then he jabbed a finger into the federal agent’s jaw. ‘I asked you a question. Is anybody talking about me?’

The agent shook his head. ‘Not yet, but they will. They’ve connected the murdered couple on Long Island to Atlanta, and to the King of Prussia Mall.’

The Wolf nodded. ‘Of course they have. I understand that these people of yours aren’t stupid. They’re just very limited.’

‘Don’t underestimate them,’ the agent warned. ‘The Bureau is changing. They’re going to come after you with everything they have.’

‘It won’t be enough,’ said the Wolf. ‘And besides, maybe I’ll come after them – with everything I have. I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow their house down.’

Chapter Fifty-Five

The next night I got home before six o’clock. I had a sit-down dinner with Nana and the kids, who were surprised, but clearly thrilled that I was home so early.

The telephone rang toward the end of the meal. I didn’t want to answer it. Maybe somebody else had been grabbed, but I didn’t want to deal with it. Not tonight.

‘I’ll get it,’ said Damon. ‘It’s probably for me. Some girlfriend.’ He snatched the ringing telephone off the kitchen wall, flipped it from one hand to the other.

‘You wish it was a girl,’ taunted Jannie from the table. ‘Dinnertime. It’s probably somebody selling insurance or a bank loan. They always call at dinner.’

Then Damon was pointing at me, and he wasn’t smiling. He didn’t look so good either, as if he’d suddenly gotten a little sick to his stomach. ‘Dad,’ he said in a low voice, ‘it’s for you.’

I got up from the table and took the phone from him.

‘You okay?’ I asked.

‘It’s Mrs Johnson,’ Damon whispered.

My throat felt constricted as I took the receiver. Now I was the one who felt a little sick, but also confused. ‘Hello? This is Alex,’ I said.

‘It’s Christine, Alex. I’m in Washington. For a few days. I’d like to see little Alex while I’m here,’ she said, and I almost felt it was a prepared speech.

I felt my face flush. Why are you calling here? Why now? I wanted to say, but didn’t. ‘Do you want to come over tonight? It’s a little late, but we could keep him up.’

She hesitated. ‘Actually, I was thinking about tomorrow. Maybe around eight-thirty, quarter to nine in the morning? Would that be all right?’

I hesitated, then I said, ‘That would be fine, Christine. I’ll be here.’

‘Oh,’ she said, then fumbled her words a little. ‘You don’t have to stay home for me. I heard you were working for the FBI.’

My stomach clenched. Christine Johnson and I had split up over a year ago, mainly because of the nature of the murder cases I worked. She had actually been abducted because of my work. We finally found her in a shack in a remote area of Jamaica. Alex was born there. We were never the same after that. I never knew Christine was pregnant at the time. I felt it was my fault. Several months ago she’d moved to Seattle. It had been Christine’s idea that Alex stay with me. She’d been seeing a psychiatrist, and said she wasn’t emotionally fit to be his mother. Now she was in D.C. ‘for a few days’.

‘What brings you back to Washington?’ I finally asked.

‘I wanted to see our son,’ she said, her voice going very soft. ‘And some other friends of mine.’ I remembered how much I had loved her, and probably still did on some level, but I was resigned to the fact that we wouldn’t be together. Christine couldn’t stand my life as a cop; and I couldn’t seem to give it up.

‘All right, well, I’ll be over at around eight-thirty tomorrow,’ she said.

‘I’ll be here,’ I said.

Chapter Fifty-Six

Eight-thirty on the button.

A shiny silver Taurus, a rental car from Hertz, pulled up in front of our house on Fifth Street.

Christine Johnson got out, and though she looked a little severe with her hair pulled back in a tight bun, I had to admit that she was still a beautiful woman. Tall and slender, with distinct, sculpted features that I couldn’t make myself forget. Seeing her again made my heart catch in spite of what had happened between us.

Suddenly I was edgy, but also tired. Why was that? I wondered how much energy I’d lost in the past year and a half. A doctor friend from Johns Hopkins has a half-serious theory that our lifelines are written on the palms of our hands. He swears he can chart stress, illnesses, general health. I visited him a few weeks ago and Bernie Stringer said I was in excellent physical shape, but that my lifelines had taken a beating in the last year. That was partly because of Christine, our relationship, and the eventual break-up.

I was standing behind the protective screen of the front door, with Alex in my arms. I stepped outside as Christine approached the house. I saw that she was wearing heels and a dark blue suit.

‘Say hi,’ I said to Alex and waved one of his arms at his mother.

It was so strange, so completely unnerving to see Christine like this again. We had such a complicated history. Much of it was good, but what was bad, was very bad. Her husband had been killed in her house during a case I was working on. I had nearly been responsible for her death. Now we were living thousands of miles apart. Why was she in D.C. again? To see little Alex of course. But what else had brought her?

‘Hello, Alex,’ she said and smiled, and for a dizzying instant, it was as if nothing had changed between us. I remembered the first time I had seen her, when she was still the principal at the Sojourner Truth School. She’d taken my breath away. Unfortunately, I guess, she still did.

Christine knelt at the foot of the stairs, and spread her arms. ‘Hi, you handsome guy,’ she said to little Alex.

I set him down and let him decide what to do next. He looked up at me, and laughed. Then he chose Christine’s beckoning smile, chose her warmth and charm – and ran right into her arms.

‘Hello, baby,’ she whispered. ‘I missed you so much. You’ve grown so big.’

Christine hadn’t brought a gift, no bribes, and I liked that. It was just her, no tricks or gimmicks, but that was enough. In seconds, Alex was in her arms, laughing and talking up a storm. They looked good together, mother and son.

‘I’ll be inside,’ I said after I watched them for a moment. ‘Come in when you want. There’s fresh coffee. Nana’s. Breakfast if you haven’t eaten.’

Christine looked up at me, and she smiled again. She looked so happy holding The Boy, our small son. ‘We’re fine for the moment,’ she said. ‘Thank you. I’ll come in for coffee. Of course I will.’ Of course. Christine had always been so sure about everything, and she hadn’t lost any of her confidence.

I stepped back inside and nearly bumped into Nana, who was watching from just beyond the screen door.

‘Oh, Alex,’ she whispered, and didn’t have to say any more than that. I felt as if a knife had been plunged into my heart. It was the first twist, and just the first of many. I shut the front door and left them to have their private time.

Christine brought little Alex inside after a while, and we all sat in the kitchen and drank coffee and she watched our son drinking his apple juice. She talked about her life out in Seattle; mostly about work at a school out there, nothing too personal or revealing. I knew she had to be nervous and stressed, but I never saw it.

And then Christine showed the kind of warmth that could melt a heart. She was looking at little Alex. ‘What a sweetheart he is. What a sweet, darling little boy. Oh, Alex, my little Alex, how I missed you. You have no idea.’

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Christine Johnson in D.C. again.

Why had she come back now? What did she want with us?

The questions throbbed in my head, but also deep inside my heart. They made me afraid, even before I had a clear idea what to fear. Of course, I had a suspicion – Christine had changed her mind about little Alex. That was it, had to be. Why else would she be here? She certainly hadn’t come back to see me. Or had she?

I was still on I-95, but just minutes away from Quantico when Monnie Donnelley got through to me on my cell. Miles Davis played on the radio in the car. I’d been trying to chill before I got to work.

‘You’re late again,’ she said, and though I knew it was a joke, it still cut me some.

‘I know, I know. I was out partying last night. You know how it is.’

Monnie got right to it. ‘Alex, did you know they grabbed a couple more suspects last night?’

Them again. I was so surprised that I didn’t answer Monnie right away. I hadn’t been told anything about a bust!

‘I guess not,’ Monnie answered her own question. ‘It took place in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. Joe Nameth’s old hometown? Two UNSUBS in their forties, ran an adult bookstore, sort of named after the town. The press got a hold of it a few minutes ago.’

‘Did they find any of the missing women?’ I asked Monnie.

‘Don’t think so. It’s not in the news reports. Nobody seems to know for sure here.’

I didn’t understand. ‘Do you know how long they were under surveillance? Forget it, Monnie, I’m getting off 95 right now. I’m almost there. I’ll see you in a couple of minutes.’

‘Sorry to ruin your day so early,’ she said.

‘It was already ruined,’ I muttered.

We worked straight through the day, but at seven, we still didn’t have very good answers to several questions about the takedown in Pennsylvania. I knew a few things, mostly unimportant details, and it was frustrating. The two men had criminal records for selling pornography. Agents from the field office in Philly had gotten a tip that the two of them were involved in a kidnapping scheme. It was unclear who in the FBI’s chain of command knew about the suspects, but there seemed to have been an internal communication breakdown of the sort I had been hearing about years before I arrived at Quantico.

I talked with Monnie a couple of times during the day, but my buddy Ned Mahoney never called me about the bust; Burns’s office didn’t try to contact me either. I was shook. For one thing, there were reporters out in the parking lot at Quantico. I could see a USA Today van and a CNN truck from my window. Very strange day. Odd and unsettling.

Late in the afternoon, I found myself thinking about Christine Johnson’s visit to the house. I kept playing back the scene of her holding the baby, playing with Alex. I wondered if I could believe that she’d come to D.C. just to see him and a few of her old friends. It made my heart ache to think about losing ‘the big boy’, as I always called him. The big boy! What a joy he was to me, and the kids, and to Nana Mama. What an unbearable loss it would be. I just couldn’t imagine it. Nor could I imagine being Christine, and not wanting him back.

Before I left for the night, I forced myself to pick up the phone and make a call that I was dreading. Judge Brendan Connelly answered after a few rings. Thinking about little Alex made me remember the promise I’d made.

‘It’s Alex Cross,’ I said. ‘Just wanted to check in with you. Tell you about the news stories you’ve been seeing today.’

Judge Connelly asked me if his wife had been found, if there was any news about Lizzie.

‘They didn’t find her yet. I don’t think those two men were involved with your wife. We’re still very hopeful that we’ll find her.’

Abruptly he began to mutter words that I couldn’t make out. After listening to him for a few seconds, trying to make sense of it, I told him I’d keep him informed. If someone informed me.

After the difficult phone call, I just sat at my desk. Suddenly, I realized I’d forgotten something else – my class had graduated today! We were officially agents. The others in my class had gotten their credentials, or ‘creds’, as well as their assignments. Right now, cake and punch were being served in the lobby of the Hall of Honor. I didn’t bother to go to the party. Somehow, it seemed inappropriate to attend. I went home instead.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

How much time did she have left now?

A day? Hours?

It almost didn’t matter, did it? Lizzie Connelly was learning to accept life as it came; she was learning who she was – inside; and how to keep herself in balance.

Except, of course, when she was frightened out of her mind.

Lizzie called them her ‘swimming dreams’. She had been an avid swimmer ever since she was four years old. The repetition of stroke after stroke, kick after kick, could always put her in another place and time, on autopilot, let her escape. So that was what she was doing now in the closet-room where she was being kept.

Swimming.

Escaping.

Reach, slightly cupped hand, S-figure with her arms, pull at the top, grab the water. Tip through to the belly button, then down through the bottom of her swimsuit. Swoosh, swoosh, kick, kick, feeling hot inside, but the water was cooling, refreshing, invigorating. Feeling empowered because she was feeling stronger.

She had been thinking about escape for much of the day, or what she thought of as a day anyway. Now she began to get serious about other things.

She reviewed what she knew about this place – the Closet – and the vicious, horrifying man who kept her. The Wolf. That was what the bastard called himself. Why the Wolf?

She was somewhere in a city. She was almost sure the city was in the south, and fairly large, lots of money in the surrounding area. Maybe it was Florida, but she didn’t know why she thought that. Maybe she had overheard something and it only registered in her subconscious? She’d definitely heard voices in the house when there had been large parties or, occasionally, smaller get-togethers. She believed that her vermin captor lived alone. Who could possibly live with such a horrible monster? No woman could.

She knew some of his pathetic habits by heart. He usually turned on the TV when he came home: sometimes ESPN, but more often CNN. He watched the news constantly. He also liked detective shows such as Law and Order, CSI, Murder/Homicide. The TV was always on, late into the night.

He was physically large and strong, and he was a sadist – but also careful about not hurting her badly, not so far anyway. Which meant – what did it mean? – that he planned to keep her around for a while more?

If Lizzie Connelly could stand it here for another minute. If she didn’t flip out and make him so angry that he’d snap her neck, as he’d threatened to several times a day. ‘I’ll snap your little neck. Like this! You don’t believe me? You should believe me, Elizabeth.’ He always called her Elizabeth, not Lizzie. He told her that Lizzie wasn’t a beautiful enough name for her. ‘I’ll break your fucking neck, Elizabeth!’

He knew who she was and quite a bit about her, and also about Brendan, Brigid, Merry and Gwynnie. He promised that if she made him angry he’d not only hurt her, but he’d do the same to her family. ‘I’ll go back to Atlanta. I’ll do it for kicks, just for fun. I live for that kind of thing. I could murder your whole family, Elizabeth.’

Ironically, he was desiring her more and more – she could certainly tell when a man got like that. So she did have some control over him, didn’t she? How about that. So fuck you too, buddy!

Sometimes he would leave her binds slightly looser and even give her free time to walk around in the house. Tied up of course – on a kind of chain leash that he would hold in his hands. It was so demeaning. He told her that he knew she’d be thinking that he was getting kinder and gentler – but not to get any stupid ideas.

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

Two 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 them 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.

Most important, Vince couldn’t be dead. That was what he had been told. But it couldn’t have happened. It didn’t happen.

So all of this had to be an impossibly bad dream, a nightmare of the sort that Francis Deegan hadn’t experienced since he was maybe three or four years old. And this man standing before him now, this absurd caricature with curly tufts of white-blond hair around the side of his balding head, dressed in a tight, black leather body suit – well, he couldn’t be real either. No way.

‘I’m very angry at you! I’m good and pissed!’ Mr Potter yelled right in Francis’s face. ‘Why did you leave me?’ he screeched. ‘Why? Tell me why? You must never leave me again! I get very scared without you and you know that. You know how I am. That was thoughtless of you, Ronald!’

Francis had already tried reasoning with the madman – Potter, he called himself, and no, not Harry. Mister Potter! But reasoning didn’t work. He’d told the raving lunatic several times that he had never seen him before. He wasn’t Ronald! Didn’t know any Ronalds! That had earned him a series of full-handed slaps across the face, one so hard that it bloodied his nose. The dweeby, Billy Idol-lookalike freak, was a lot stronger than he looked.

So out of desperation, Francis finally whispered an apology to the creep. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I won’t do it again.’

And then Mr Potter was hugging him fiercely and he was crying all over him. Wasn’t this too weird? ‘Oh God, I’m so glad you’re back. I was so worried about you. You must never leave me again, Ronald.’

Ronald? Who the hell was Ronald? And who was Mister Potter? What was going to happen now? Was Vince really dead? Had he been killed tonight back at the college? All of these questions were exploding inside Francis’s throbbing skull. So actually it was easy for him to cry in Potter’s arms, and even to hold on to him for dear life. To press his face into the fragrant black leather and whisper over and over again, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Oh my God, I’m sorry.’

And Potter answered, ‘I love you too, Ronald. I adore you. You’ll never leave me again, will you?’

‘No. I promise. I’ll never leave.’

Then Potter laughed, and pulled away sharply from the boy.

‘Francis, dear Francis,’ he whispered. ‘Who the hell is Ronald? I’m just playing with you, boy. This is just a game of mine. You’re in college, you must have figured that much out. So let’s play games, Francis. Let’s go out to the barn and play.’

Chapter Sixty-Five

I received a strange e-mail from Monnie Donnelley at my temporary office. An update of sorts. She hadn’t been suspended, Monnie said. Not yet anyway. Plus, she had some news for me.

Need to see you tonight. Same place, same time. Very important news. – M

So I arrived at the Command Post Pub just past seven and searched around for Monnie. What was this mysterious news she had? The bar area was crowded with customers, but I spotted her. Easy – she was the only woman. I also figured that Monnie and I might be the only non-Marines in the Command Post.

‘I couldn’t talk to you over the phone at Quantico. Does that suck or what? Whom do you trust?’ she said when I walked up to her.

‘You can trust me. Of course I don’t expect you to believe that, Monnie. You have news?’

‘I sure do. Take a load off. I think I have some good news, actually.’

I took a stool beside Monnie. The bartender came and we ordered beers. Monnie started up as soon as he walked away. ‘I have a good friend at ERF,’ she began. ‘That’s the Engineering Research Facility at Quantico.’

‘I know what it is. You seem to have friends everywhere.’

‘That’s true. I guess not at the Hoover Building, though. Anyway, my friend alerted me to a message the Bureau got a couple of days ago, but dismissed as a crank call. It’s about a website called the Wolf’s Den. Supposedly, you can buy a lover at the Den, as in, have someone abducted. The site is supposed to be impossible to hack into. That’s the catch.’

‘So how did he get in? Our hacker.’

‘She’s a genius. I suspect that’s why she was ignored. Want to meet her? She’s fourteen years old.’

Chapter Sixty-Six

Monnie had an address for the hacker in Dale City, Virginia, only about twelve miles from Quantico. The agent who’d fielded the original call hadn’t followed up very well, which bothered us, so we figured the agent wouldn’t mind if we did his job for him.

I wasn’t actually planning on taking Monnie along, but she wouldn’t have it. So we dropped her SUV off at her house, and she rode with me to Dale City. I’d already called ahead and spoken to the girl’s mother. She sounded nervous, but she said she was glad the FBI was finally coming to talk to Lili. She added, ‘Nobody can ignore Lili for long. You’ll see what I mean.’

A young girl in black coveralls answered the front door, and I assumed it was Lili, but that turned out to be wrong. Annie was the twelve-year-old sister. She certainly looked fourteen. She beckoned, and we stepped into the house.

‘Lili is in her laboratory,’ said Annie. ‘Where else?’

Then Mrs Lynch appeared from the kitchen and we introduced ourselves. She had on a plain white blouse and a green corduroy jumper. She was holding a greasy spatula, and I couldn’t help thinking how casual the domestic scene was. Especially if what Lili thought she had come upon was actually true. Had a fourteen-year-old found a possible trail that would lead us to the kidnappers? I’d heard of cases solved in stranger ways. But still…

‘We call her Dr Hawking. Like Stephen Hawking? Her I.Q. is up there,’ said her mom, waving the cooking utensil upward for emphasis. ‘Smart as she is, Lili lives on Sprite and Pixie Stix. There’s nothing I can do to influence her dietary habits.’

‘Is it all right if we talk to Lili now?’ I asked.

Mrs Lynch nodded. ‘So I guess you’re taking this seriously. That’s so wise with Lili. She’s not making any of this up, believe me.’

‘Well, we just want to talk to her. To be on the safe side. We’re not sure that this is anything, really.’ Which was true enough.

‘Oh, it’s something,’ said Mrs Lynch. ‘Lili never makes a mistake. She hasn’t so far anyway.’

She pointed the spatula down the hall. ‘Second door on the right. She left it unlocked for a change, because she’s expecting you. She instructed us to stay out of it.’

Monnie and I headed down the hallway. ‘They have no idea what this could be, do they?’ she whispered. ‘I almost hope it’s nothing. A false lead.’

I knocked once on a wooden door that sounded hollow.

‘It’s open,’ came a high-pitched female voice. ‘Come.’

I opened the door and looked in on a pine bedroom suite. Single bed, rumpled cow-pattern sheets, posters from MIT, Yale and Stanford up on the walls.

Seated behind a blue halogen lamp at a laptop was a teenage girl – dark hair, eyeglasses, braces on her teeth. ‘I’m all set up for you,’ she said. ‘I’m Lili of course, of course. I’ve been working on a decryption angle. It comes down to finding flaws in the algorithms.’

Monnie and I both shook Lili’s hand, which was very small and seemed as fragile as an eggshell.

Monnie began, ‘Lili, you said in your e-mail to us that you had information that could help with the disappearances in Atlanta and Pennsylvania.’

‘Right. But you found Mrs Meek already.’

‘You hacked on to a very secure site? That’s right, isn’t it?’ Monnie asked.

‘I sent out some stealth UDP scans. Then IP spoofing. Their rootserver bit on the false packets. I planted a sourcecode for the sniffer. Finally hacked in using DNS poisoning. It’s a little more complicated, but that’s the basic idea.’

‘I get it,’ Monnie said. Suddenly I was very glad she was there with me at the Lynch house.

‘I think they know I was on with them. Actually, I’m sure of it,’ said Lili.

‘How do you know that?’ I asked Lili.

‘They said so.’

‘You didn’t get into too many specifics with Agent Tiezzi. You said you thought someone might be “for sale” at the site.’

‘Yeah, but I blew it, didn’t I? Agent Tiezzi didn’t believe me. I also admitted I was fourteen, and a girl. How dumb of me, right?’

‘I won’t hold it against you,’ Monnie said and smiled kindly.

Lili finally cracked a smile too. ‘I’m in big trouble, aren’t I? Actually, I know that I am. They might already know who I am.’

I shook my head. ‘No, Lili,’ I said to her. ‘They don’t know who you are, or where you are. I’m sure they don’t.’

If they did, you’d already be dead.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

It was so eerie and strange, being in the young wunderkind’s room – with her life, and her family members’ lives, possibly in great danger. Lili had been a little coy in her message to the Bureau, so I understood how the tip might have fallen through the cracks. Also, she was fourteen years old. But now that we’d met and spoken to Lili one-to-one, I was sure that she had something real that could help us.

She’d heard them talking.

Someone had been purchased while she’d listened.

She was afraid for herself, and for her family.

‘Do you want to go on-line with them?’ Lili suddenly asked in an excited voice. ‘We could! See if they’re together now. I’ve been working on some cool anonymizing software. I think it will work. Not sure though. Well, yeah, it’ll work.’

She smiled broadly, showing those beautiful braces.

I could see in her eyes that she wanted to prove something to us.

‘Is this a good idea?’ Monnie leaned in and asked me.

I pulled her aside, I lowered my voice. ‘We have to move her and the family anyway. They can’t stay here now, Monnie.’

I looked over at Lili. ‘Okay. Why don’t you try to get on-line with them again. Let’s see what they’re up to. We’ll be right here with you.’

Lili talked constantly as she went through the various steps to get the site’s passwords and encrypted protection. I didn’t understand any of what the fourteen-year-old had to say, but Monnie got most of it, and she was enthusiastic, supportive, but mostly impressed.

Suddenly, Lili looked up in alarm. ‘Something’s all wrong here.’ She went back to her computer.

‘Oh shit! God damn them!’ she swore. ‘Those creeps. I can’t believe this.’

‘What’s happened?’ Monnie asked. ‘They changed the keys, didn’t they?’

‘Worse,’ Lili said and kept tapping out commands very rapidly. ‘Much, much worse. Awhh horsespit. I can’t believe it.’

She finally turned away from the glowing screen of her laptop.

‘First, I couldn’t even find the site. They set up this very cool, very dynamic network – it was in Detroit, Boston, Miami, bouncing all over the place. Then when I did find it, I couldn’t get on. Nobody can get into the site except them.’

‘Why is that?’ Monnie asked. ‘What happened between a couple of days ago and now?’

‘They installed an eye-scan. It’s almost impossible to fool. The whole thing is run by this guy who calls himself Wolf. Wolf’s a very scary dude. He’s Russian. Like a wolf from Siberia. I think he’s even smarter than I am. And that’s fucking smart.’

Chapter Sixty-Eight

The next day I worked in the Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC) conference rooms on the fifth floor of the Hoover. So did Monnie Donnelley, who still felt as if she were in limbo. We were keeping what we had found out quiet so that we could check out a few things. The main room was humming around us. The abductions were the major media story now. The Bureau had taken an incredible amount of heat in the past few years; they needed a win. No, I thought, we needed a win.

A lot of important Bureau people were at the group meeting late that night: they included the heads of the Behavioral Analysis Unit-east and BAU-west, the unit chief of the Child Abduction Serial Murder Investigative Resource Center (CASMIRC), the head of Innocent Images in Baltimore, an FBI unit dedicated to finding and eliminating sexual predators on the Internet. Stacy Pollack led the discussion again; and she was clearly in charge of the case.

In spite of all the heavies present, the briefing was non-eventful, since not much had happened that day.

‘I want to get approval for a reward, maybe half a million,’ said Jack Arnold, who ran BAU-east. No one commented on the proposal. Several agents went on making notes or using their laptops. Actually, it was de-spiriting.

‘I think I have something.’ I finally spoke from the back of the room.

Stacy Pollack looked my way. A few heads popped up, reacting to the group’s silence more than anything. I rose at my seat.

The FNG had the floor. I introduced Monnie, just to be cute. Then I told them about the Wolf’s Den and our meeting with fourteen-year-old Lili Lynch. I also mentioned the Wolf, who, according to Monnie’s findings, might be a Russian gangster by the name of Pasha Sorokin. His pedigree was hard to trace, especially before he moved out of the USSR. ‘If we can get inside the Den somehow, I think we’ll find out something about the missing women. In the meantime, I think we need to put more heat on some of the sites already identified by Innocent Images. It seems logical that the pervs using the Wolf’s Den might visit other porn sites too. We need help. If the Wolf turns out to be Pasha Sorokin, we’ll need a lot of help.’

Suddenly Stacy Pollack was interested. She led a discussion in which both Monnie and I were given the third degree. It was clear that we threatened some of the other agents in the room. Then Pollack made a decision.

‘You can have resources,’ she said. ‘We’ll watch the porn sites, twenty-four, seven. Thing is, we have nothing better at this point. I want our Russian group out of New York on this, too. I can’t quite believe Pasha Sorokin would be personally involved in this, but if he is, it’s huge. We’ve been interested in Sorokin for six years! We’re very interested in the Wolf.’

Chapter Sixty-Nine

During the next twenty-four hours, over thirty agents were assigned to surveillance of fourteen different porn sites and chat rooms. It had to be one of the most lurid ‘stakeouts’ ever. We didn’t know exactly whom we were looking for – other than anyone who happened to mention a site called Wolf’s Den, or possibly the Wolf. In the meantime, Monnie and I were gathering all the information we could about the Red Mafiya, and especially about Pasha Sorokin.

At four that afternoon, I had to leave. The timing couldn’t have been much worse, but there wouldn’t have been any good time for this. I’d been asked to attend a preliminary meeting with Christine Johnson’s lawyers at the Blake Building in the Dupont Circle area. Christine was coming after little Alex.

I arrived at a little before five-thirty and had to fight the tide of office workers streaming from an unusual twelve-story structure, which actually rounded the corner where Connecticut Avenue met L. I checked the downstairs registry and saw that the tenants in the building included Mazda, Barron’s, the National Safety Council, several law offices, including Mark, Haranzo, and Denyeau which represented Christine.

I trudged to the elevator bank and pushed a button. Christine wanted custody of Alex Jr. Her attorney had arranged for this meeting in the hopes of eventually resolving things without going to court or possibly resorting to Alternative Dispute Resolution. I had talked to my attorney in the morning and decided not to have him present since this was an ‘informal’ meeting. I tried to have only one thought as I rode the elevator to the seventh floor: do what is best for little Alex. No matter what, or how it might make me feel.

I got off at seven and was met by Gilda Haranzo who was slim and attractive, dressed in a charcoal suit with a white silk blouse knotted at the throat. My lawyer had competed against Ms Haranzo and told me she was good, and also ‘on a mission’. She was divorced from her physician husband and had custody of their two children. Her fees were high, but she and Christine had gone to Villanova together and were friends from back then.

‘Christine is already in the conference room, Alex,’ she said after introducing herself. Then she added. ‘I’m sorry it’s come to this. This case is difficult. There are no bad people involved. Will you please follow me?’

‘I’m sorry it’s come to this too,’ I said. I wasn’t so sure that there weren’t any bad guys, though. We’d see soon enough.

Ms Haranzo led me to a mid-size room with gray carpeting and light blue fabric walls. There was a glass table with six toney, black leather chairs in the center of the room. The only things on the table were a pitcher of iced water, some glasses, and a laptop computer.

A row of tall windows looked out on a view of Dupont Circle. Christine was standing near the windows, and she didn’t speak as I entered. Then she walked over to the table and sat in one of the leather chairs.

‘Hello, Alex,’ she finally said.

Chapter Seventy

Gilda Haranzo slid into her seat behind her laptop, and I chose a spot across from Christine at the glass conference table. Suddenly, the loss of little Alex seemed very real to me. The thought took my breath away. Whether it was a good decision or not, fair or unfair, Christine had walked away from us, moved thousands of miles away and hadn’t been to see him once. She’d knowingly relinquished her parental rights. Now she’d changed her mind. And what if she changed her mind again after that?

Christine spoke again. ‘Thank you for coming here, Alex. I’m sorry about the circumstances. You must believe that I’m sorry.’

I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t that I was mad at her, but – well, maybe I was angry. I’d had little Alex for so long, and I couldn’t stand the thought of losing him now. My stomach was dropping like an elevator in free fall. The experience was like seeing your child run into the street, about to have a serious accident, and not being able to stop it from happening, not being able to do a thing. I sat there very quietly, and I held in a primal scream that would have shattered all the glass in the office.

Then the meeting began. The informal get-together. With no bad people in the room.

‘Dr Cross, thank you for taking the time to come here,’ Gilda Haranzo said and threw a cordial smile my way.

‘Why wouldn’t I come?’ I asked.

She nodded and smiled again. ‘We all want this problem to be settled amicably. You’ve been an excellent caregiver and no one disputes that.’

‘I’m his father, Ms Haranzo,’ I corrected.

‘Of course. But Christine is able to take care of the boy now, and she is the mother. She’s also a primary school principal in Seattle.’

I could feel my face and neck flushing. ‘She left Alex with me.’

Christine spoke up. ‘That isn’t fair, Alex. I told you that you could take him for now. Our arrangement was always meant to be temporary.’

Ms Haranzo asked, ‘Dr Cross, isn’t it true that your eighty-two-year-old grandmother takes care of the child most of the time?’

‘We all do,’ I said. ‘And besides, Nana wasn’t too old when Christine left to go to Seattle. She’s extremely capable and I don’t think you’d ever want Nana on the witness stand.’

The lawyer continued. ‘Your work takes you away from home frequently, doesn’t it?’

I nodded. ‘Occasionally, it does. But Alex is always well cared for. He’s a happy, healthy, bright child, smiles all the time. And he’s loved. He’s the center of our household.’

Ms Haranzo waited for me to finish, then she started in again. Suddenly, I felt as if I were on trial here. ‘Your work, Dr Cross. It’s dangerous. Your family has been put in grave danger before. Also, you’ve had intimate relationships with women since Ms Johnson left. Isn’t that so?’

I sighed. Then I slowly rose from the leather chair. ‘I’m sorry, but this meeting is over. Excuse me. I have to get out of here.’ But at the door, I turned back to Christine. ‘This is wrong.’

Chapter Seventy-One

I had to get out of there and put my mind somewhere else for a while. I returned to the Hoover Building and no one seemed to have missed me. I couldn’t help thinking that some of these agents squirreled away in the home office had no idea how crimes were solved in the real world. They almost seemed to believe that you fed data into computers and eventually it spit out a killer. It happens on the street! Get out of this windowless ‘crisis’ room with all the bad air. Work the sidewalks! I wanted to shout.

But I didn’t say a word. I sat at a computer and read the latest on the Russian mob. I didn’t see any promising connections. Plus, I couldn’t really concentrate after my meeting at Christine’s lawyers’. Eventually, I packed up my things and left the Hoover Building.

Nobody seemed to notice me leave. And then I wondered – is that such a bad thing?

When I got home, Nana was waiting at the front door. I was just walking up the steps when she opened the door and came outside. ‘You watch little Alex, Damon. We’ll be back in a while,’ she called through the screen.

Nana limped down the front stairs and I followed her. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘We’re going for a drive,’ she said. ‘You and I have some things to talk about.’

Oh shit.

I got back in the old Porsche and started it up. Nana flopped down in the passenger seat.

‘Drive,’ she said.

‘Yes, Miss Daisy.’

‘Don’t give me any of your lip either, or your sorry attempts at wit.’

‘Yes ma’am.’

‘That’s a good example of your lip.’

‘I know it is, ma’am.’

I decided to head out west toward the Shenandoah Mountains, a pretty ride and one of Nana’s favorites. For the first part of the drive, we were both fairly quiet, unusual for the two of us.

‘What happened at the lawyers’?’ Nana finally asked as I turned on to Route 66.

I gave her the long version, probably because I needed to vent. She listened very quietly, then she did something unusual for her. Nana actually cursed. ‘The hell with Christine Johnson. She’s wrong about this!’

‘I can’t completely blame Christine,’ I said. As much as I didn’t want to, I could see her side of things.

‘Well, I do. She left that sweet little baby and went to Seattle. She didn’t have to go that far away. Her decision. Now she has to live with it.’

I glanced over at Nana. Her face was screwed tight. ‘I don’t know if that would be considered an enlightened point of view these days.’

Nana waved away what I’d said. ‘I don’t think these days are all that enlightened. You know I believe in womens’ right, mothers’ rights, all of that, but I also believe you have to be held responsible for your actions. Christine walked away from that little boy for all this time. She walked away from her responsibility.’

‘You through?’ I asked.

Nana had her arms folded tightly across her chest. ‘I am. And it felt good, real good. You ought to try it sometime. Vent, Alex. Lose control. Let it out.’

I finally had to laugh. ‘I had the radio blasting all the way home from work, and I was yelling half the time. I’m more upset than you are, Nana.’

For once – and I don’t ever remember this happening before – she actually let me have the last word.

Chapter Seventy-Two

Jamilla called that night around eleven o’clock – eight o’clock her time. I hadn’t spoken to her for a few days, and to be truthful, now wasn’t the best time. Christine’s visit to D.C. and then the meeting with her lawyer had me tense and messed-up. Shook. I tried not to show it, but that was wrong too.

‘You never write, you never call,’ Jamilla said and laughed in her usual loose and engaging way. ‘Don’t tell me you’re already wrapped up in a case for the Bureau? You are, aren’t you?’

‘A big, nasty one, yeah. I’m sort of in and out of it,’ I told Jam, then quickly explained what was happening, and what wasn’t, at the Hoover Building, including my mixed emotions about being with the Bureau – all the stuff in my life that didn’t really matter right now.

‘You’re the new guy on the block,’ she said. ‘Give it some time.’

‘I’m trying to be patient. It’s just that I’m not used to this wasted motion, the wasted resources.’

I heard her laugh. ‘That, and you’re used to being the center of attention, don’t you think? You’ve been a star, Alex.’

I smiled. ‘You’re right, you’re right. That’s part of it.’

‘You saw the Bureau from the other side of the fence. You knew what you were getting yourself into. Didn’t you know?’

‘I guess I should have, sure. But I listened to a lot of promises that were made when I signed up.’

Jamilla sighed. ‘I know, I’m not being very sympathetic, empathetic, whatever. One of my faults.’

‘No, it’s me.’

‘Yeah,’ she laughed again. ‘It is. I never heard you so down and out. Let’s see what we can do to bring you up.’

We talked about the case she was working on, then Jamilla asked about each of the kids. She was interested as always. But I was in a sour mood, and I couldn’t shake it. I wondered if she could tell, and then I got my answer.

‘Well,’ Jam said, ‘I just wanted to see how you were. Call if you have any news. I’m always here for you. I miss you, Alex.’

‘I miss you too,’ I said.

Then Jamilla broke the connection with a soft, ‘Bye.’

I sat there shaking my head back and forth. Shit. What an ass I am sometimes. I was blaming Jamilla for what had happened with Christine, wasn’t I? How dumb was that?

Chapter Seventy-Three

‘Hi there. I missed you,’ I said and smiled. ‘And I’m sorry.’

Five minutes after Jamilla hung up, I called her back to try and make amends.

‘You should be sorry, you poop. Glad to see your famous antennae are still working all right,’ she said.

‘Not so hard to figure out. The crucial evidence was right before my eyes. That was the shortest phone talk we’ve ever had. Probably the most uncomfortable and frustrating too. I had one of my famous feelings about it.’

‘So what’s the matter, boy scout? Is it the job or is it something else? Is it me, Alex? You can tell me if it is. I have to warn you, though, I carry a gun.’

I laughed at her joke. Then I took a breath, before I let it out slowly. ‘Christine Johnson is back in town. It gets worse from there. She came for little Alex. She wants to take him away, to get custody, probably take him to Seattle.’

I heard a sharp intake of breath, then. ‘Oh, Alex, that’s terrible. Terrible. Did you talk to her about it?’

‘I sure did. I was at her lawyers’ this afternoon. Christine finds it hard to be tough, her lawyer doesn’t.’

‘Alex, has Christine seen the two of you together? How you are with him? You’re like that old movie, Kramer vs. Kramer. Dustin Hoffman and that cute little boy?’

‘No, she hasn’t really watched us together, but I’ve seen her with Alex. He turned on the charm. Welcomed her back without any recriminations. Little traitor.’

Jamilla was angry now. ‘Little Alex would. Always the perfect gentleman. Like his father.’

‘That, plus – she is his mother. The two of them have a history, Jam. It’s complicated.’

‘No it isn’t. Not for me, not for anybody with a brain. She left him, Alex. Separated herself by three thousand miles. Stayed away for over two years. What’s to say she won’t do it again? So what are you going to do now?’

That was the big question, wasn’t it?

‘What do you think? What would you do?’

Jam sniffed out a laugh. ‘Oh, you know me – I’d fight her like hell.’

I finally smiled. ‘That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to fight Christine like hell.’

Chapter Seventy-Four

The phone calls weren’t over for the night. As soon as I got off with Jamilla, and we’re talking sixty seconds here, the infernal contraption started to ring again. I wondered if it was Christine. I really didn’t want to talk about Alex right now. What would she want to say to me – and what could I say to her?

The phone wouldn’t stop ringing, though. I looked at my watch. Saw it was past midnight. Now what? I hesitated before I finally snatched it up.

‘Alex Cross,’ I said.

‘Alex. This is Ron Burns. Sorry to call you so late. I’m just flying into D.C. from New York. Another conference on counterterrorism, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean right now. Nobody seems to know exactly how to fight the bastards, but everybody has a theory.’

‘Play by their rules. Of course, that would inconvenience a few people,’ I said. ‘And it’s sure not politically or socially correct.’

Burns laughed. ‘You go to the heart of the matter,’ he said. ‘And you aren’t timid about your ideas.’

I said, ‘Speaking of which… ’

‘I know you’re a little pissed,’ he said. ‘I don’t blame you after what’s been happening. The Bureau runaround, everything you were warned about. You have to understand something, Alex. I’m trying to turn around a very slow-moving ocean liner. In the Potomac. Trust me for a little longer. By the way, why are you still in D.C.? Not up in New Hampshire?’

I blinked, didn’t understand. ‘What’s in New Hampshire? Oh shit, don’t tell me.’

‘We have a suspect. Nobody told you, did they? Your idea about tracking the mentions of the Wolf’s Den on the Internet worked. We got somebody!’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing now, at midnight. ‘Nobody told me. I’ve been home since I left work.’

There was silence at his end. ‘I’m going to make a couple of calls. Get on a plane in the morning. They’ll be expecting you in New Hampshire. Believe me, they will be expecting you. And Alex, trust me a little longer.’

‘Yeah, I will.’ A little longer.

Chapter Seventy-Five

It seemed both unlikely and peculiar, but a respected assistant professor of English at Dartmouth was the subject of the FBI surveillance in New Hampshire. He had recently gone into a chat room called Taboo and bragged about an exclusive website where anything could be bought if you had enough money.

An agent at SIOC had monitored the strange conversation with Mr Potter…

BOYFRIEND: EXACTLY HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH MONEY TO BUY ‘ANYTHING’?

POTTER: MORE THAN YOU HAVE, MY FRIEND. ANYWAY, THERE’S AN EYESCAN TO KEEP OUT RIFFRAFF LIKE YOURSELF.

THE PACKAGE: WE’RE HONORED THAT YOU’RE SLUMMING WITH US TONIGHT.

POTTER: THE WOLF’S DEN IS ONLY OPEN ABOUT TWO HOURS A WEEK. NONE OF YOU ARE INVITED, OF COURSE.

It turned out that Mr Potter was the moniker used by Dr Homer Taylor. Guilty or not, Dr Taylor was in a world of trouble right now. Twenty-four agents, four two-person teams working eight-hour shifts, were watching every step he took in Hanover. During the work week, he lived in a small Victorian house near the college and walked back and forth to classes. He was a thin, balding, proper-looking man who wore English-made suits with bright-colored bow ties and purposefully uncoordinated suspenders. He always looked very pleased to be himself. We’d learned from college authorities that he was teaching Restoration and Elizabethan drama as well as a Shakespeare seminar that semester.

His classes were extremely popular and so was he. Dr Taylor had the reputation of being available to his students, even ones who weren’t actually taking his courses. He was also known for his quick wit and nasty sense of humor. He often played to standing room, which he called ‘full houses’, and frequently acted out scenes, both the male and female parts.

It was assumed that he was gay, but no one was aware of any serious relationships the professor had. He owned a farm about fifty miles away in Webster, New Hampshire, where he spent most weekends. Occasionally, Taylor went to Boston or New York, and he’d spent several summers in Europe. There had never been an incident with a student, though some of the males called him ‘Puck’, a few openly to his face.

The surveillance on Taylor was difficult, given the college-town atmosphere. So far, it was believed that our agents hadn’t been spotted. But we couldn’t be certain of that. Taylor hadn’t been seen doing much beyond teaching his classes, and returning home.

The second day that I was in Hanover, I was in a surveillance car, a dark blue Crown Vic, along with an agent named Peggy Katz. Agent Katz had been raised in Lexington, Massachusetts. She was a very serious person whose main hobby seemed to be an avid interest in professional basketball. She could talk about the NBA or WNBA for hours, which she did during our surveillance time together.

The other agents on with us that night were Roger Nielsen, Charles Powiesnik and Michelle Bugliarello. Powiesnik was the senior agent in charge. I wasn’t really sure where I fit in, but they all knew I’d been sent in by Washington, and by Ron Burns himself.

‘The good Doctor Taylor is going out. Could be interesting,’ Katz and I heard over our two-way late that night. We couldn’t actually see his house from where we were parked.

‘He’s coming your way. You pick him up first,’ said agent-in-charge, Powiesnik.

Katz turned on the headlights, and we pulled up to a street corner. Then we waited for Taylor to pass. His Toyota 4-Runner appeared a moment later.

‘He’s going out toward I-89,’ she reported in. ‘Proceeding at about forty-five, keeping within the speed limit, which makes him suspicious in my book. Maybe headed to his farm in Webster. Kind of late for picking tomatoes, though.’

‘We’ll have Nielsen precede him on I-89. You stay behind. Michelle and I will be right with you,’ said Powiesnik.

That sounded familiar to me, and apparently to Agent Katz since she muttered ‘right’ as soon as she signed off.

Once he exited off 89, Taylor made turns on a couple of narrow side roads. He was doing close to sixty.

‘Seems to be in a little more of a hurry now,’ Peggy said.

Then Taylor’s Toyota veered off on to a drive that appeared to be dirt. We had to stay back or be spotted. Fog lay low over the farmlands, and we proceeded slowly until we could safely park on the side of the road. The other FBI cars hadn’t arrived yet, at least we didn’t see any of them. We got out of our sedan and headed back into the woods.

Then we could see Taylor’s Toyota parked in front of a shadowy farmhouse. A light eventually blinked on inside the house, then another light. Agent Katz was quiet and I wondered if she’d been involved in anything quite as heavy as this before. I didn’t think that she had.

‘We can see Taylor’s Toyota at the house,’ she reported in to Powiesnik.

Then she turned to me. ‘So now what?’ she asked in a whisper.

‘It’s not up to us,’ I said.

‘If it was?’

‘I’d move in closer on foot. I want to see if that missing kid from Holy Cross is there. We don’t know how much danger he’s in.’

Powiesnik contacted us again. ‘We’re going to take a look. You and Agent Cross stay where you are. Watch our backs.’

Agent Katz turned to me and sniffed out a laugh. ‘Powiesnik means – watch our dust, doesn’t he?’

‘Or, eat our dust,’ I said.

‘Or suck hind tit,’ grumped Katz. Maybe she hadn’t seen any action before, but she apparently wanted some now. And I had a feeling Agent Katz might get her wish.

Chapter Seventy-Six

‘Over there, heading toward the barn,’ I said and pointed. ‘That’s Taylor. What’s he doing?’

‘Powiesnik is on the other side of the house. He probably can’t see that Taylor is outside,’ said Agent Katz.

‘Let’s see what he’s up to.’

Katz hesitated. ‘You’re not going to get me shot, are you?’

‘No,’ I said, a little too quickly. This was getting complicated suddenly. I wanted to follow Taylor, but I felt I had to watch out for Katz too.

‘Let’s go,’ Katz finally said, reaching a decision. ‘Taylor is out of the house. He’s headed southwest,’ she alerted Powiesnik. ‘We’re following.’

The two of us hurried forward for a hundred yards or so. We had some ground to make up, and we wanted to keep Taylor in sight. There was a half-moon overhead and that helped, but it was also possible that Taylor might see us coming. We could lose him easily now, especially if he was suspicious.

He didn’t seem to be aware of anything going on around him – at least not so far. Which got me thinking that he was used to sneaking around out here late at night. Not worrying about being seen by anyone. This was his private reserve, wasn’t it? I watched him go inside the barn.

‘We should call in again,’ Katz said.

I didn’t disagree completely, but I was nervous about the other agents coming up fast and making noise. How many of them had experience in the field?

‘You better call in,’ I finally agreed.

It took the other agents a couple of minutes to get to the edge of the woods where we were crouched behind tall brush. Light from inside the barn shone through cracks and holes in the weatherboarding. We couldn’t see or hear much from where we were hiding. Finally we could make out Potter crossing the service court and entering the great door of the barn.

Then music blasted from somewhere in the barn. I recognized a choral arrangement by Queen. A sexy lyric about riding a bicycle. Totally whacked at this time of night, playing in the middle of nowhere.

‘There’s no evidence of violence in his past,’ Powiesnik said as he came up and crouched beside me.

‘Or kidnapping either,’ I said. ‘But he might have somebody in that barn. Maybe the kid from Holy Cross. Taylor knew about the Wolf’s Den, even the eye scan. I doubt he’s an innocent bystander.’

‘We’re moving on Taylor,’ the senior agent ordered. ‘He may be armed,’ he told the other agents. ‘Proceed as if he is.’

He assigned two teams to surveil the far side of the barn in case Taylor tried to get out some other way. Powiesnik and Nielsen, along with Agent Katz and myself, were going in the great door that Taylor had entered.

I moved up alongside Powiesnik. ‘You okay with this? Going in after him now?’

‘It’s already been decided,’ he said in a tight voice.

So I moved forward, wearing a dark blue windbreaker with FBI printed on the back. Queen continued to play loudly in the barn. ‘I want to ride my bicycle! Bicycle! Bicycle!’ This was a strange feeling, all of it. The Bureau had excellent resources for getting information; their personnel were certainly booksmart and well trained, but, in the past, I’d always known and trusted only those I went into a dangerous crime scene with.

The wooden barn door hadn’t been latched or locked by Taylor. We could see that as we crouched in tall brush a few yards away.

Suddenly the music stopped.

Then I heard loud voices inside. More than one. But I couldn’t make out what was being said, or who was doing the talking.

‘We should take him down. Now,’ I whispered to Powiesnik. ‘We’re already committed. We have to go.’

‘Don’t tell me–’

‘I’m telling you,’ I said.

I wanted to take over from Powiesnik. He was hesitating much too long. Once we had moved close to the barn, we shouldn’t have stopped.

‘I’ll go first. Come in behind me,’ I finally said.

Powiesnik didn’t overrule me, didn’t argue. No one else in the group spoke a word.

I ran very quickly toward the barn, my gun out of my holster. I was there in seconds. The door made a heavy creaking sound when I pulled it open. Bright light escaped outside, splintered into my eyes for a second. ‘FBI!’ I yelled at the top of my voice. FBI! Jesus!

Taylor looked at me and his eyes filled with surprise, fear. I had a clear shot at him. He’d had no idea he was being followed. He’d been operating in his own private safety zone, hadn’t he? I could see that now.

I could also make out someone else illuminated in the shadows of the barn. He was tied with leather bindings to a wooden post that hung from a beam in the hayloft. He had no clothes on. Nothing. His chest and genitals were bloodied. But Francis Deegan was alive!

‘You’re under arrest… Mr Potter.’

Chapter Seventy-Seven

The first interview with Potter took place in the small library he’d built in the farmhouse. It was cozy and tastefully furnished, and gave no hint of the horrible acts going on elsewhere on the property. Potter sat on a dark wood bench with his wrists handcuffed in front of him. His dark eyes boiled over in anger directed at me.

I sat in a straight-backed chair directly across from him. For a long moment we glared at each other, then I let my eyes wander around the room. Bookcases and cabinets had been custom-built and covered every wall. A large oak desk held a computer and printer as well as wooden in/out boxes and stacks of ungraded papers. A green wooden sign behind the desk read: ‘Bless This Mess.’ There was no hint of the real Taylor, or ‘Potter’, anywhere.

I noticed authors’ names on the spines of the books: Richard Russo, Jamaica Kinkaid, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis, Stanley Kunitz. It was rumored that the Bureau often had an incredible amount of information on a subject before an interview was conducted. This was true with Taylor. I already knew about his boyhood spent in Iowa; then his years as a student at Iowa and NYU. No one had suspected he had a dark side. He had been up for promotion and tenure this year, and had been working to finish a book on Milton’s Paradise Lost as well as an article on John Donne. Drafts of the literary projects were laid out on the desk.

I got up and looked through the pages. He’s organized. He compartmentalizes beautifully, I was thinking. ‘Interesting stuff,’ I said.

‘Be careful with those,’ he warned.

‘Oh, sorry. I’ll be careful,’ I said, as if anything he had to write about Milton or Donne mattered anymore. I continued to look through his books – the OED, Riverside Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Milton quarterlies, Gravity’s Rainbow, a Merck manual.

‘This interrogation is illegal. You must know that. I want to see my lawyer,’ he said as I sat down again. ‘I demand it.’

‘Oh, we’re just talking,’ I said. ‘This is only an interview. We’re waiting for a lawyer to get here. Just getting to know you.’

‘Has my lawyer been called? Jackson Arnold in Boston?’ Taylor said. ‘Tell me. Don’t fuck with me.’

‘As far as I know,’ I said. ‘Let’s see, we busted you at around eight. He was called at eight-thirty.’

Taylor looked at his watch. His dark eyes blazed. ‘It’s only five o’clock now!’

I shrugged. ‘Well, no wonder your lawyer isn’t here yet. You haven’t even been apprehended. So, you teach English Lit, right. I liked literature in school, read a lot, still do, but I loved the sciences.’

Taylor continued to glare at me. ‘You forget Francis was taken to a hospital. The time is on the record.’

I snapped my fingers and winced. ‘Right. Of course it is. He was picked up at a little past nine. I signed the form myself,’ I said. ‘I have a doctorate, like yourself. In psychology, from Johns Hopkins down in Baltimore.’

Homer Taylor rocked back and forth on the bench. He shook his head. ‘You don’t scare me, you fucking asshole. I can’t be intimidated by little people like you. Trust me. I doubt you have a PhD. Maybe from Alcorn State. Or Jackson State.’

I ignored the baiting. ‘Did you kill Benjamin Coffey? I think you did. We’ll start looking for the body a little later this morning. Why don’t you save us the trouble?’

Taylor finally smiled. ‘Save you the trouble? Why would I do that?’

‘I actually have a pretty good answer. Because you’re going to need my help later on.’

‘Well then, I’ll save you some trouble later on, after you help me.’ Taylor smirked. ‘What are you?’ he finally asked. ‘The FBI’s idea of affirmative action?’

I smiled. ‘No, actually I’m your last chance. You better take it.’

Chapter Seventy-Eight

The library in the farmhouse was empty except for Potter and me. He was handcuffed, totally cool and unafraid, glaring menacingly.

‘I want my lawyer,’ he said now.

‘I’ll bet you do. I would if I was you. I’d be making a real scene in here.’

Taylor finally smiled. His teeth were badly stained. ‘How about a cigarette? Give me something.’

I gave him one. I even lit it for him. ‘Where did you bury Benjamin Coffey?’ I asked again.

‘So, you’re really the one in charge?’ he asked. ‘Interesting. The world turns, doesn’t it? The worm, too.’

‘You know, the calmness gives you away,’ I told him. ‘You show no fear. Nothing in your eyes. I’ve seen so many like you. Better, smarter.’

He blew out a smoke ring in my direction. ‘To such a skilled interrogator as yourself, such things must be obvious. The calmness I show.’

‘So where did you learn about drama, the theatre, English and American literature?’

‘You know the answers to that. Iowa. Then NYU. It’s on my résumé. I want a lawyer.’

‘You mentioned the lawyer earlier. You’ll be given one. All in good time. So where is Benjamin Coffey? Is he buried out here? I’m sure he is.’

‘Then why ask? If you already know the answer.’

‘Because I don’t want to waste time digging up these fields, or dredging the pond over there.’

‘I really can’t help you. I don’t know a Benjamin Coffey. Of course, Francis was here of his own free will. He hated it at Holy Cross. The Jesuits don’t like us. Well, some of the priests don’t.’

‘The Jesuits don’t like who? Who else is involved with you?’

‘You’re actually funny, for a police drone. I like a bit of dry humor now and then.’

I stretched my leg out, struck his chest, and knocked his wooden bench over. He hit the floor hard. Banged his head. I could see that it shook him, surprised him anyway. Must have hurt at least a little bit.

‘That supposed to scare me?’ he asked once he’d gotten his breath. He was angry now, redfaced, veins in his neck pulsing. That was a start. ‘I want my lawyer!… I’m explicitly asking you for a lawyer!’ he began to yell over and over again. ‘Lawyer! Lawyer! Lawyer! Lawyer! Can anyone hear me?’

Taylor kept yelling at me for over an hour – like some sociopathic kid who wasn’t getting his way. I let him scream and curse, until he started to get hoarse. I even went outside and stretched my legs, drank some coffee, chatted with Charlie Powiesnik, who was a pretty good guy.

When I came back inside, Potter looked changed. He’d had time to think about everything that had happened at the farm. He knew that we were talking to Francis Deegan, and that we’d find Benjamin Coffey, too. Maybe a few others.

Then he sighed out loud. ‘I assume we can make some sort of arrangement to my liking. Mutually beneficial.’

I nodded. ‘I’m sure we can make an arrangement. But I need something concrete in return. How did you get the boys? How did it work? That’s what I need to hear from you.’

I waited for him to answer. Several minutes passed.

‘I’ll tell you where Benjamin is,’ he finally said.

‘You’ll tell me that, too.’

I waited some more. Took another turn outside with Charlie. Came back to the study.

‘I bought the boys from the Wolf,’ Potter finally said. ‘But you’ll be sorry you asked. So will I, probably. He’ll make both of us pay. In my humble opinion – and remember, this is just a college professor talking – the Wolf is the most dangerous man alive. He’s Russian. Red Mafiya.’

‘Where do we find the Wolf?’ I asked. ‘How do you contact him?’

‘I don’t know where he is. Nobody does. He’s a mystery man. That’s his thing, his trademark. I think it turns him on.’

It took several more hours of talking, bargaining and negotiating, but Potter finally told me some of what I wanted to know about the Wolf, this Russian mystery man who impressed him so. Late in the day, I wrote in my notes – This makes no sense yet. None of it does, really. The Wolf’s plans seem insane. Are they?

Then I wrote my final thought, at least for the moment.

The brilliance of it may be that it makes no sense.

To us.

To me.