A shot rang out from the woods directly behind us. I had thrown back my head, laughing at Stacy’s little joke. I saw her get hit and blood spatter. I went down and covered her body.
Agents ran onto the tarmac. One of them fired in the direction of the sniper shot. Two came sprinting toward us: the others ran toward the woods in the direction of the shot. I lay on Stacy, trying to protect her, hoping she wasn’t dead, and wondering if maybe the bullet had been meant for me.
You’ll never catch the Wolf, Pasha Sorokin had said in Florida. He will catch you. Now the warning had come true.
The briefing that night at the Hoover Building was the most emotional I had seen at the Bureau so far. Stacy Pollack was alive, but she was in critical condition at Walter Reed. Most of the agents respected Stacy Pollack tremendously, and they couldn’t believe she’d been targeted. I still wondered if the bullet had been meant for her. She and I had been headed to New York to see about the Wolf; he was the chief suspect in the shooting. But did he have help? Was there someone inside the Bureau?
“The other bad news,” Ron Burns told the group that night, “is that our lead in Brighton Beach turns out to be bogus. The Wolf isn’t in New York, and apparently he wasn’t there recently. The questions that we have to answer are, Did he know we were going after him? If he knew, how did he know? Did one of us tell him? I promise that we will spare nothing to get the answers to those questions.”
After the meeting, I was one of the agents invited to a smaller briefing held in the director’s conference room. The mood continued to be somber, serious, and angry. Burns took the floor again, and he seemed more upset by the Stacy Pollack shooting than anyone else.
“When I said that we were going to bring that Russian bastard down, I wasn’t using hyperbole for effect. I’m establishing a BAM team to go after him. Sorokin said that the Wolf would come after us and he did. Now we’re going to go after him, with everything we have, all our resources.”
Heads around the room nodded their approval. I’d heard of the existence of BAM teams in the FBI but hadn’t known if they were real or not. I knew what the acronym stood for: By Any Means. It was what we needed to hear right now. It was what I needed to hear.
BAM.
Chapter 111
EVERYTHING FELT LIKE it was going much too fast, like it was spinning out of control. Maybe that was right. The case was out of our control—the Wolf was running it.
I got a phone call at home two nights later. It was quarter past three in the morning. “This had better be good.”
“It isn’t. All hell’s broken loose, Alex. It’s a war.” The caller was Tony Woods, and he sounded groggy.
I massage
d my forehead as I spoke. “What war? Tell me what happened.”
“We got word from Texas a few minutes ago. Lawrence Lipton is dead, murdered. They got to him in his cell.”
I was starting to wake up in a hurry.
“How? He was in our custody, wasn’t he?”
“Two agents were killed with Lipton. He predicted it, didn’t he?”
I nodded, then I said, “Yeah.”
“Alex, they got to the Lipton family too. They’re all dead. HRT is on the way to your house, also the director’s, even Mahoney’s. Anybody who worked on the case is considered vulnerable and at risk.”
That got me up out of bed. I took my Glock out of the locked cabinet beside my bed.
“I’ll be waiting for HRT,” I told Woods, then I hurried downstairs with my gun in hand.
Was the Wolf already here? I wondered.
The war came to our house a few minutes later, and even though it was HRT, it couldn’t have been much scarier. Nana Mama was up and she greeted the heavily armed FBI agents with angry looks but also offers of coffee. Then she and I went to wake the children as gently as we could.
“This isn’t right, Alex. Not in our home,” Nana whispered as we went upstairs to get Jannie and Damon. “The line has to be drawn somewhere, doesn’t it? This is bad.”
“I know it is. It’s gotten out of control, everything has. The world is that way now.”
“So what are you going to do about it? What are you planning to do?”
“Right now, wake the kids. Hug them, kiss them. Get them out of this house for a while.”
“Are you listening to yourself?” Nana asked as we arrived at the doorway to Damon’s bedroom. He was already sitting up in bed. “Dad?” he said.