“This is a federal case,” I shouted right back. I grabbed the bullhorn out of his hand. The negotiator went at me with his fists, but Mahoney wrestled him to the ground. The press was watching; to hell with them. We had a job to do here.
“This is the FBI!” I said into the bullhorn. “I want to talk to Pasha Sorokin.”
Then suddenly the strangest thing of the night happened, and it had been a very strange night. I almost couldn’t believe it.
Two men emerged from the front door of the Gap.
They held their hands in front of their faces, shielding them from the cameras, or maybe from us.
“Get down on the ground!” I shouted at them. They didn’t comply.
But then I could see—it was Sorokin and the bodyguard.
“We’re not armed,” Sorokin yelled, loudly enough for everybody to hear. “We’re innocent citizens. We have no guns.”
I didn’t know whether to believe him. None of us knew what to make of this. The TV helicopter over our heads was getting too close.
“What’s he doing?” Mahoney asked me.
“Don’t know . . . Get down!” I shouted again.
The Wolf and the bodyguard continued to walk toward us. Slowly and carefully.
I moved ahead with Mahoney. We had our guns out. Was this a trick? What could they try with dozens of rifles and handguns aimed at them?
The Wolf smiled when he saw me. Why the hell was he smiling?
“So, you caught us,” he called out. “Big deal! It doesn’t matter, you know. I have a surprise for you, FBI. Ready? My name is Pasha Sorokin. But I’m not the Wolf.” He laughed. “I’m just some guy shopping in the Gap. My clothes got wet. I’m not the Wolf, Mr. FBI. Is that funny or what? Does it make your day? It makes mine. And it will make the Wolf’s too.”
Chapter 106
PASHA SOROKIN wasn’t the Wolf. Was that possible? There was no way to know for sure. Over the next forty-eight hours it was confirmed that the men we had captured in Florida were Pasha Sorokin and Ruslan Federov. They were Red Mafiya, but both claimed never to have met the real Wolf. They said they had played the “parts” they were given—stand-in roles, according to them. Now they were willing to make the best deals they could.
There was no way for us to know for sure what was going on, but the deal-making went on for two days. The Bureau liked to make deals. I didn’t. Contacts were made inside the Mafiya; more doubts were raised about Pasha Sorokin’s being the Wolf. Finally, the CIA operatives who’d gotten the Wolf out of Russia were found and brought to Pasha’s cell. They said he wasn’t the man they’d help get out of the Soviet Union.
Then it was Sorokin who gave us a name we wanted—one that blew my mind completely, blew everybody’s minds. It was part of his “deal.”
He gave us Sphinx.
The next morning, four teams of FBI agents waited outside Sphinx’s house until he left for work. We had agreed not to take him inside the house. I would
n’t let it go down that way. I just couldn’t do it.
We all felt that Lizzie Connolly and her daughters had been through more than enough pain already. They didn’t need to see Brendan Connolly—Sphinx—arrested at the family house in Buckhead. They didn’t need to find out the awful truth about him like that.
I sat in a dark blue sedan parked two blocks up the street but with a view of the large Georgian-style house. I was feeling numb. I remembered the first time I’d been there. I recalled my talk with the girls, and then with Brendan Connolly in his den. His grief had seemed heartfelt, as genuine as his young daughters.
Of course, no one had suspected he had betrayed his wife, sold her to another man. Pasha Sorokin had met Elizabeth at a party in the Connolly house. He’d wanted her; Brendan Connolly didn’t. The judge had been having affairs for years. Elizabeth reminded Sorokin of the model Claudia Schiffer, who had appeared on billboards all over Moscow during his gangster days. So the horrifying trade was made. A husband had sold his own wife into captivity; he’d gotten rid of her in the worst way imaginable. How could he have hated Elizabeth so much? And how could she have loved him?
Ned Mahoney was in the car with me, waiting for action: the takedown of Sphinx. If we couldn’t have the Wolf yet, he was our second choice—the consolation prize.
“I wonder if Elizabeth knew about her husband’s secret life?” Mahoney muttered.
“Maybe she suspected something. They didn’t sleep together regularly. When I visited the house, Connolly showed me the den. There was a bed in there. Unmade.”
“Think he’ll go to work today?” Mahoney asked. He was calmly munching an apple. A very cool head to work with.
“He knows we took down Sorokin and Federov. I figure he’ll be cautious. He’ll probably play it straight. Hard to tell.”