The Big Bad Wolf Read online

  Stupid, stupid people. Keeping notebooks for a dog, Slava thought. Then he spotted the target again. She was coming out of Skechers with her small children in tow.

  Actually, the target looked a little apprehensive to them at the moment. Why was that? Maybe she was afraid that she would be recognized and have to sign an autograph or make small talk with her fans. Price of fame, eh? She moved quickly now, guiding the precious little ones into Dick Clark’s American Bandstand Grill, presumably for lunch, but maybe just to escape the crowds.

  “Dick Clark came from Philadelphia, near here,” Slava said. “Did you know that?”

  “Who the hell cares about Dick Clark, Dick Tracy, or dickless,” said Zoya, and hammered Slava’s biceps with her fist. “Stop this stupid trivia game. It gives me a headache. Excedrin headache number one trillion since I met you.”

  The target certainly fit the description they had been given by their controller: tall, blond, ice queen, full of herself. But also tasty down to the last detail, thought Slava. It made sense, he supposed. She had been purchased by a client who called himself the Art Director.

  The Couple waited about fifty minutes. A middle school choir from Broomall, Pennsylvania, was performing in the atrium. Then the target and her two kids emerged from the restaurant.

  “Let’s do it,” said Slava. “This should be interesting, no? The kids make it a challenge.”

  “No,” Zoya said. “The kids make it insane. Wait until the Wolf hears about this. He’ll have puppies. That’s American slang, by the way.”

  Chapter 24

  THE NAME OF THE WOMAN who’d been purchased was Audrey Meek. She was a celebrity, having founded a highly successful line of women’s fashions and accessories called Meek. It was her mother’s maiden name, and the one she used herself.

  The Couple watched her closely, tailed her into the parking garage without creating suspicion. They jumped her as she was putting her Neiman Marcus and Hermès and other shopping bags into a shiny black Lexus SUV with New Jersey plates.

  “Children, run! Run away!” Audrey Meek struggled fiercely as Zoya tried to stuff an acrid-smelling gauzy cloth over her nose and mouth. Soon she saw circles, stars, and bright colors for a few dramatic seconds. Then she finally passed out in Slava’s powerful arms.

  Zoya peered around the parking garage. It was nothing much to look at—cement walls with number and letter marks. Nobody anywhere near them. Nobody noticing anything wrong, even though the children were yelling and starting to cry.

  “Leave my mommy alone!” Andrew Meek shouted, and threw punches at Slava, who only smiled at the boy. “Good little fellow,” he applauded. “Protect your mama. She would be proud of you. I am proud of you.”

  “Let’s go, stupid!” shouted Zoya. As always, she was the one who took care of all the important business. It had been that way since she was growing up in the Moskovskaya oblast outside Moscow and had decided she couldn’t bear to be either a factory worker or a prostitute.

  “What about the kids? We can’t leave them here,” said Slava.

  “Leave them. That’s what we’re supposed to do, you idiot. We want witnesses. That’s the plan. Can’t you keep anything straight?”

  “In the garage? Leave them here?”

  “They’ll be fine. Or not. Who the hell cares? C’mon. We must go. Now!”

  They drove off in the Lexus with the target, Audrey Meek, unconscious on the backseat and her two children wailing in the parking garage. Zoya drove at a moderate speed around the mall, then turned onto the Dekalb Pike.

  They traveled only a few minutes to the Valley Forge National Historical Park, where they switched cars.

  Then another eight miles to a remote parking area where they changed vehicles yet again.

  Then off to Ottsville, in the Montgomery County area of Pennsylvania. Soon Mrs. Meek would meet the Art Director, who was madly in love with her. He must have been—he had paid $250,000 for the pleasure of her company, whatever that might be.

  And there had been witnesses to the abduction—a screwup—on purpose.

  Part Two

  FIDELITY, BRAVERY, INTEGRITY

  Chapter 25

  NO ONE HAD been able to figure out the Wolf yet. According to information from Interpol and the Russian police, he was a no-nonsense, hands-on operator, who had originally been trained as a policeman. Like many Russians, he was able to think in very fluid, commonsense terms. That native ability was sometimes given as the reason the Mir space station was able to stay in space so long. The Russian cosmonauts were simply better than the Americans at figuring out everyday problems. If something unexpected went wrong in the spacecraft, they fixed it.

  And so did the Wolf.

  On that sunny afternoon, he drove a black Cadillac Escalade to the northern section of Miami. He needed to see a man named Yeggy Titov about some security matters. Yeggy liked to think of himself as a world-class Web site designer and cutting-edge engineer. He had a doctorate from Cal-Berkeley and never let anyone forget it. But Yeggy was just another pervert and creep with delusions of grandeur and an attitude, a really bad attitude.

  The Wolf banged on the metal door of Yeggy’s apartment in a high-riser overlooking Biscayne Bay. He was wearing a skullcap and a Miami Heat windbreaker, just in case anyone saw him visiting.

  “All right, all right, hold your urine!” Yeggy shouted from inside. It took him another couple of minutes to finally open up. He had on blue-jean shorts and a tattered, faded-black novelty-store sweatshirt with Einstein’s grinning face on it. Quite the kidder, that Yeggy.

  “I told you not to make me come and see you,” the Wolf said, but he was smiling broadly, as if he were making a big joke. So Yeggy smiled too. They had been business associates for about a year—which was a long time for anyone to put up with Yeggy. “Your timing is perfect,” he said.

  “How lucky for me,” said the Wolf, as he strolled into the living room and immediately wanted to hold his nose. The apartment was an incredible dump—littered with fast-food wrappers and pizza boxes, empty milk cartons, and dozens, maybe a hundred, old copies of Novoye Russkoye Slovo, the largest Russian-language newspaper in the United States.

  The odor of filth and decaying food was bad enough, but even worse was Yeggy himself, who always smelled like week-old sausages. The science man led him into a bedroom off the living room area—only it turned out not to be a bedroom at all. It was the lab of a very disorganized person. Ugly brown carpeting, three beige CPU boxes on the floor, and parts in a corner—discarded heat sinks, circuit boards, hard drives.

  “You are a pig,” the Wolf said, then laughed again.

  “But a very smart pig.”

  In the center of the room was a modular desk. Three flat-screen displays formed a semicircle around a well-worn rumble chair. Behind the display screens was a fire hazard of intertwined cables. There was only one outside window, the blind permanently drawn.

  “Your site is very secure now,” Yeggy said. “Primo. One hundred percent. No possible screwups. The way you like it.”

  “I thought it was already secure,” the Wolf replied.

  “Well, now it’s more secure. You can’t be too careful these days. Tell you what else—I finished the latest brochure. It’s a classic, instant classic.”

  “Yes, and only three weeks late.”

  Yeggy shrugged his bony shoulders. “So what—wait’ll you see my work. It’s genius. Can you recognize genius when you see it? This is genius.”

  The Wolf examined the pages before he said anything to the science man. The brochure was printed on 81/2-by-11-inch glossy paper bound in a clear report cover with a red spine. Yeggy had cranked it out on his HP color laser printer. The colors were electric. The cover looked perfect. The elegance was weird, actually, as if the Wolf were looking at a Tiffany’s catalogue. It sure didn’t look like the work of a man who lived in this shit hole.

  “I told you that girls number seven and seventeen were no longer with us. Dead, actually,�
�� the Wolf finally said. “Our boy genius is forgetful, no?”

  “Details, details,” said Yeggy. “Speaking of which, you owe me fifteen thousand cash on delivery. This would be considered delivery.”

  The Wolf reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a Sig Sauer 210. He shot Yeggy twice between the eyes. Then, for laughs, he shot Albert Einstein between the eyes too.

  “Looks like you are no longer with us, either, Mr. Titov. Details, details.”

  The Wolf sat at a laptop computer and fixed the sales catalogue himself. Then he burned a CD and took it with him. Also several copies of Novoye Russkoye Slovo that he had missed. He would send a crew to dispose of the body and burn this shit hole later. Details, details.

  Chapter 26

  I SKIPPED A CLASS on “Arrest Techniques” that morning. I figured I probably knew more on the subject than the teacher. I called Monnie Donnelley instead and told her I needed whatever she had on the white slave trade, particularly recent activity in the U.S., that might relate to the White Girl case.

  Most of the Bureau’s crime analysts were housed ten miles away at CIRG, but Monnie had an office at Quantico. Less than an hour later, she was at the doorway of my no-frills cubicle. She held out two disks, looking proud of herself.

  “This should keep you busy for a while. I concentrated on white women only. Attractive. Recent abductions. I also have a lot on the crime scene in Atlanta. I expanded the circle to get a read on the mall, owner, employees, the neighborhood in Buckhead. I have copies for you of the police and the Bureau’s investigative reports. All the things you asked for. You do your homework, don’t you?”

  “I’m a student of the game. I prepare as best I can. Is that so unusual? Here at Quantico?”

  “Actually, it is for agents who come to us from police departments or the armed forces. They seem to like to work out in the field.”

  “I like field work too,” I admitted to Monnie, “but not until I’ve narrowed it some. Thank you for this, all of this.”

  “Do you know what they say about you, Dr. Cross?”

  “No. What do they say?”

  “That you’re close to psychic. Very imaginative. Maybe even gifted. You can think like a killer. That’s why they put you on White Girl right away.” She remained in the doorway. “Listen. Some unasked-for advice, if I may. You shouldn’t piss off Gordo Nooney. He takes his little orientation games seriously. He’s also basically a bad guy. And he’s connected.”

  “I’ll remember that.” I nodded. “So there are good guys too?”

  “Absolutely. You’ll see that most of the agents are real solid. Good people, the best. All right, well, happy hunting,” Monnie said. Then she left me to my reading, lots and lots of reading. Too much.

  I started off with a couple of abductions—both in Texas—that I thought could be related to the one in Atlanta. Just reading the accounts got my blood boiling again, though. Marianne Norman, twenty, had disappeared in Houston on August 6, 2001. She’d been staying with her college sweetheart in a condo owned by his grandparents. Marianne and Dennis Turcos were going to be seniors at Texas Christian that fall and had planned to be married in the spring of ’02. Everybody said they were the nicest kids in the world. Marianne was never seen or heard from after that night in August. On December 30 of that year, Dennis Turcos had put a revolver to his head and killed himself. He said he couldn’t live without Marianne, that his life had ended when she disappeared.

  The second case involved a fifteen-year-old runaway from Childress, Texas. Adrianne Tuletti had been snatched from an apartment in San Antonio where three girls said to be involved in prostitution lived. Neighbors in the complex reported having seen two suspicious-looking people, a male and a female, entering the building on the day that Adrianne disappeared. One neighbor thought they might have been the girl’s parents coming to bring their daughter home, but the girl was never seen or heard from again.

  I looked at her picture for a long moment—she was a pretty blonde and looked as if she could have been one of Elizabeth Connolly’s daughters. Her parents were elementary school teachers back in Childress.

  That afternoon, I got more bad news. The worst kind. A fashion designer named Audrey Meek had been abducted from the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania. Her two young children had witnessed the kidnapping. That piece of information stunned me. The children had told the police that the abductors were a man and a woman.

  I started to get ready to travel to Pennsylvania. I called Nana and she was supportive for a change. Then I got a message from Nooney’s office. I wasn’t going to Pennsylvania. I was expected at my classes.

  The decision had obviously come from the top, and I didn’t understand what was happening. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to.

  Maybe all of this was a test?

  Chapter 27

  “DO YOU KNOW what they say about you, Dr. Cross? That you’re close to psychic. Very imaginative. Maybe even gifted. You can think like a killer.” Those were Monnie Donnelley’s words to me that very morning. If that was true, why had I been taken off the case?

  I went to my classes in the afternoon, but I was distracted, maybe angry. I suffered a little angst: What was I doing in the FBI? What was I becoming? I didn’t want to fight the system in Quantico, but I’d been put in an impossible position.

  The next morning I had to be ready for my classes again: “Law,” “White-Collar Crime,” “Civil Rights Violations,” “Firearms Practice.”

  I was sure that I’d find “Civil Rights Violations” interesting, but a couple of missing women named Elizabeth Connolly and Audrey Meek were out there somewhere. Maybe one or both of them were still alive. Maybe I could help find them—if I was so goddamn gifted.

  I was finishing breakfast with Nana and Rosie the cat at the kitchen table when I heard the morning paper plop on the front porch.

  “Sit. You eat. I’ll get it,” I told Nana as I pushed my chair away from the table.

  “No argument from this corner,” Nana said, and sipped her tea with great little-old-lady aplomb. “I have to conserve myself, you know.”

  “Right.”

  Nana was still cleaning every square inch of the house, inside and out, and cooking most of the meals. A couple of weeks ago I’d caught her hanging on to an extension ladder, cleaning out the gutters on the roof. “It’s not a problem,” she hollered down to me. “My balance is excellent and I’m light as a parachute.” Come again?

  The Washington Post hadn’t actually reached the porch. It lay open halfway up the sidewalk. I didn’t even have to stoop to read the front page.

  “Awhh, hell,” I said. “Damn it.”

  This wasn’t good. It was awful, actually. I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

  The headline was a shocker: ABDUCTIONS OF TWO WOMEN MAY BE CONNECTED. Worst of all, the rest of the story contained very specific details that only a few people in the FBI knew. Unfortunately, I was one of them.

  Key was the story told about a couple—a man and a woman—who had been seen at the most recent kidnapping in Pennsylvania. I felt sick in the pit of my stomach. The eyewitness account given by Audrey Meek’s children was information that we hadn’t wanted released to the press.

  Somebody had leaked the story to the Post; somebody had also connected the dots for them. Other than maybe Bob Woodward, nobody at the newspaper could have done it by themselves. They weren’t that smart.

  Who had leaked information to the Post?

  Why?

  It didn’t make sense. Was somebody trying to sabotage the investigation? Who?

  Chapter 28

  I DIDN’T WALK Jannie and Damon to school Monday morning. I sat out on the sunporch with the cat and played the piano—Mozart, Brahms. I had the guilty thought that I should have gotten up earlier and helped out at St. Anthony’s soup kitchen. I usually pitch in a couple mornings a week, often on Sundays. My church.

  Traffic was terrible that morning and the frustrating drive down to Quantic
o took me almost an hour and a half. I imagined SSA Nooney standing at the front gates, waiting impatiently for me to arrive. At least the drive gave me time to think over my current situation. I decided the best course of action, for now, anyway, was to go to my classes. Keep my head down. If Director Burns wanted me on White Girl, he’d get word to me. If not, then fine.

  That morning the class centered on what the Bureau called a “practical application exercise.” We had to investigate a fictitious bank robbery in Hogans Alley, including interviews with witnesses and tellers. The instructor was another very competent SSA named Marilyn May.

  About half an hour into the exercise, Agent May notified the class of a fictitious automobile accident about a mile from the bank. We proceeded as a group to investigate the accident, and to see if it had any connection to the bank robbery. I was being conscientious, but I’d been involved in actual investigations like this for the past dozen years, and it was hard for me to take it too seriously, especially since some of my classmates conducted interviews according to the instructional manual. I thought maybe they’d watched cop shows on television too often. Agent May seemed amused at times herself.

  As I stood around the accident scene with a new buddy who had been a captain in the army before going into the Bureau, I heard my name spoken. I turned to see Nooney’s administrative assistant. “Senior Agent Nooney wants to see you in his office,” he said.

  Oh, Christ, what now? This guy is nuts! I was thinking as I walked quickly to Administration. I hurried upstairs to where Nooney was waiting.

  “Shut the door, please,” he said. He was seated behind a scarred oak desk, looking as if someone close to him had died.