The Big Bad Wolf (Alex Cross 9)

I ran as I shouted, “Take them alive!” It should have been obvious, but the other agents had just seen Paul Gautier gunned down. I didn’t know how much street action, or combat, any of them had seen before. And we desperately needed to question the kidnappers once we caught them.

I was getting winded. Maybe I needed more time in the physical-training classes at Quantico, or maybe it was because I’d spent too much time sitting around inside the Hoover Building these past few weeks.

I chased the blond killer through a tree-lined residential area. A moment later, the trees cleared and the glittering towers of the Prudential Center and the Hancock loomed ahead. I glanced back. Three agents trailed behind, including Peggy Katz, who had her gun out.

The man running ahead of me was approaching the Hynes Convention Center with four FBI agents racing behind. I was closing on him, but not enough. I wondered if maybe we’d gotten lucky: Could this be the Wolf up ahead? He was hands-on, right? If it was, then we had him for murder. Whoever he was, he was still moving well. A long-distance sprinter.

“Stop! We’ll shoot!” one of the agents yelled behind me. The blond Russian didn’t stop. He made a sharp, sliding turn down a side street. It was narrow and darker than Boylston. One way. I wondered if he’d thought about his escape route before this. Probably not.

The extraordinary thing was that he hadn’t hesitated when he shot Agent Gautier. I don’t bluff, he’d said. Who would murder so casually? With so many FBI watching?

The Wolf? He was supposed to be fearless and ruthless, maybe even crazy. One of his lieutenants? . . . How did the Russians think?

I could hear his shoes slapping hard on the pavement up ahead. I was gaining on the Russian a little, getting a second wind.

Suddenly he whirled around—and fired at me!

I threw myself down on the ground fast. But then I was up just as quickly, chasing after him again. I’d seen his face clearly—broad, flat features, dark eyes, late thirties to early forties.

He turned again, planted, fired.

I ducked behind a parked car. Then I heard a scream. I whirled around and saw an agent down. One of the men. Doyle Rogers. The blond turned and started to run again. But I had my second wind and I thought I could catch him. Then what? He was ready to die.

A shot rang out behind me! I couldn’t believe what I saw. The blond dropped, falling flat on his chest and face.

He never moved once he hit the ground. One of the agents behind me had shot him. I turned and saw Peggy Katz. She was still in a shooting crouch.

I checked on Agent Rogers and found he’d only been hit in the shoulder. He’d be okay. Then I walked back alone toward the Fens. When I got there, I discovered that Paul Gautier was still alive. But the two other kidnappers had gotten away. They’d commandeered a car on Park Drive, and our agents had lost them. Bad news, the worst.

The whole operation had blown up in our faces.

Chapter 88

I DON’T THINK that I’d felt this bad about an operation in all my years with the Washington PD, maybe in all my years combined. If I hadn’t been sure before, I was now. I’d made a mistake in coming over to the FBI. They did things very differently from anything I was used to. They were by-the-book, by-the-numbers, and then suddenly they weren’t. They had tremendous resources and staggering amounts of information, but they were often amateurs on the street. There was some great personnel and some incredible losers.

After the shootout in Boston I drove over to the FBI offices. The agents gathered there all looked shell-shocked. I couldn’t blame them. What a mess. One of the worst I’d seen. I couldn’t help feeling that Senior Agent Nielsen was the one responsible, but what did it matter, what good to cast around blame? Two well-intentioned agents had been wounded; one had almost died. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I felt partly responsible. I’d told the senior agent to move in on Paul Gautier faster, but he hadn’t listened.

The blond man I’d chased down Boylston Street had unfortunately died. Katz’s bullet had hit him in the back of the neck and taken out most of his throat. He’d probably died instantly. He carried no identification. His wallet held a little more than six hundred bucks, but not much else. He had tattoos of a snake, a dragon, and a black bear on his back and shoulders. Cyrillic lettering that no one had deciphered yet. Prison tats. We assumed he was Russian. But we had no name, no identification, no real proof.

Photographs of the dead man and fingerprints had been taken, then sent to Washington. They were checking, so we had little to do in Boston until they called back. A few hours later, the Ford Explorer commandeered by the two other abductors was found in the parking lot of a convenience store in Arlington, Massachusetts. They had stolen a second vehicle out of the lot. By now they’d probably switched it for yet another stolen car.

A total screwup in every way. Couldn’t have gone worse.

I was sitting in a conference room by myself, my face in my hands, when one of the Boston agents walked in. He pointed an accusatory finger my way. “Director Burns’s office on the line.”

Burns wanted

me back in Washington—as simple and direct as that. There were no explanations or even recriminations about what had happened in Boston. I guess I was to be kept in the dark a while longer about what he really thought, what the Bureau thought, and I just couldn’t respect that way of operating.

I got to the SIOC offices in the Hoover Building at six in the morning. I hadn’t slept. The place was humming with activity, and I was glad no one had time to talk about the shooting of the two agents in Boston.

Stacy Pollack came up to me a few minutes after I arrived. She looked as tired as I felt, but she put a hand on my shoulder. “Everybody here knows that you felt Gautier was in danger and tried to move in on the shooter earlier. I talked to Nielsen. He said it was his decision.”

I nodded, but then I said, “Maybe you should have talked to me first.”

Pollack’s eyes narrowed. But she said nothing more about Boston. She finally spoke again: “There’s something else. We’ve had some luck.

“Most of us have been here all night. The money transfer we made to the Wolf’s Den?” she said. “We used a contact of ours in the financial world, a banker from Morgan Chase’s International Correspondent Unit. We were able to trace the money out of the Caymans. Then we monitored virtually every transaction to U.S. banks with correspondent relationships. Had them screen all inbound wire payment orders. That’s where our consultant, Robert Hatfield, said it got tricky. The transaction zipped from bank to bank—New York, then Boston, Detroit, Toronto, Chicago, a couple of others. But we know where the money finally wound up.”