The Big Bad Wolf Read online

  Then and only then did the Wolf take out his gun. He held it between the eyes of the cable owner. “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 closed. “Break a leg.”

  Chapter 59

  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 was 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 a 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, and half a dozen TV monitors. A dozen or so agents were already inside the room, but it was quiet.

  Stacy Pollack, the head of SIOC, finally arrived, and the doors were shut. Pollack introduced the agents who were present, as well as two visitors from the CIA. She 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 screwup 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?” She continued, “The leaks come from a crime analyst named Monnie Donnelley. You’re working with her, aren’t you, Dr. Cross?”

  Suddenly the conference 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 isn’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 is 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 the 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.”

  I guessed I’d been dismissed.

  Chapter 60

  I CALLED MONNIE as soon as I could and told her what had happened. She got furious—as she should have. 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 at the table laughed. 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 the bar’s regulars, 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 61

  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 was a Jesuit school that, justly or unjustly, had some reputation for being homophobic. Offending students could be suspended or even expelled under the Breach of Peace rule, which forbade “conduct which is lewd or indecent.” The Catholic Church did not actually condemn “temptation” toward members of the same sex, but homosexual acts were often considered “intrinsically perverted” and seen as constituting 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 had started to figure their relationship probably wasn’t a very big deal, especially given the scandals among the Catholic clergy.

  The Campus Arboretum at Holy Cross had long been a hangout for students who wanted to be alone and those who 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 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 at it. He had curly black hair that framed a soft, almost angelic face that wasn’t too much 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 coeds, “Drool, fools!” Francis was six-foot-one, 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 worshiped him.

  They came for Francis, of course.

  He had been scouted, and purchased.

  Chapter 62

  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.

  One of them was short of breath and complained in Russian about the steepness of the hill.

  “Quiet, asshole,” said group leader Maxin, 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 had only enemies and almost never met those who worked for him. Even in Russia, he had been known as an invisible or mystery man. Here in the U.S., 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 at Francis, and the two other men pulled the boy away from Vince.

  “Hey, what the hell is this?” Francis started to yell. He was stopped by a wide strip of electrical tape pressed over his mouth, cutting off all sound.

  “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 heavyset boy’s throat, just as he used to kill pigs and goats back in his home country. Vince hadn’t been purchased, and he had 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 63

  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 from the campus of Holy Cross by three absolutely terrifying men. It just couldn’t have happened. Nor could he have been transported in the trunk of a car for four, maybe five hours to God only knew where.

  Most important, Vince couldn’t be dead. That cruel and heartless piece of shit couldn’t have slit Vince’s throat back at the college. It hadn’t happened.

  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 bodysuit—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. Mr. 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-looking 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 Mr. 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 64

  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 looked 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? Who 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 Web site 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 65

  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.