The Big Bad Wolf

by James Patterson

  The kidnappers were keeping close to Park Drive, and I figured they had a van or truck out on the street. They looked confident and unafraid. They’d done this before: grabbed purchased men and women. They were professional kidnappers.

  “Take them now,” I told Senior Agent Nielsen. “Gautier is at risk.”

  “Wait until they grab him,” the response came back. “We want to do this right. Wait.”

  I didn’t agree with Nielsen and I didn’t like what was happening. Why wait? Gautier was hanging out there too much, and the park was dark.

  “Gautier is at risk,” I repeated.

  One of the men, blond, wearing a Boston Bruins windbreaker, waved to him.

  Gautier watched the man approach, nodded his head, smiled. The blond had some kind of small flashlight in his hand. He lit up Paul Gautier’s face.

  I could hear them talking. “Nice night for a walk,” Gautier said, then laughed. He sounded nervous.

  “The things we do for love,” the blond said. He spoke with a Russian accent.

  The two of them were only a few feet apart. The other abductors held back, but not far.

  Then the blond whipped a gun out of his jacket pocket. He pushed it against Gautier’s face. “You’re coming with me. No one will hurt you. Just walk with me. Make it easy on yourself.”

  The two others joined them.

  “You’re making a mistake,” said Gautier.

  “Oh, and why is that?” asked the blond. “I’ve got the gun, not you.”

  “Take them. Now,” came the order from Senior Agent Nielsen.

  “FBI! Hands up. Back away from him!” Nielsen shouted as we ran forward.

  “FBI!” came a second shout. “Everybody, hands up!”

  Then everything went crazy. The other two abductors pulled out guns. The blond still held his to Agent Gautier’s skull.

  “Back off!” he screamed. “I’ll shoot him dead! Drop your guns. I’ll shoot him, I promise you! I don’t bluff.”

  Our agents continued to move forward—slowly.

  Then the worst thing happened—the heavyset blond shot Agent Paul Gautier in the face.

  Chapter 87

  BEFORE THE SHOCK of the gun blast had faded, the three men took off running very fast. Two of them galloped toward Park Drive, but the blond who’d shot Paul Gautier sprinted out onto Boylston Street.

  He was a big man, but he was motoring. I remembered hearing from Monnie Donnelley that great Russian athletes, even former Olympians, were sometimes recruited into the Mafiya. Was blondie a former jock? He moved like it. The confrontation, the shooting and everything else, reminded me of how little we knew about the Russian mobsters. How did they work? How did they think?

  I took off after him, an overload of adrenaline rocketing through my body. I still couldn’t believe what had happened. It could have been avoided. Now Gautier was possibly dead, probably dead.

  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.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Dallas. The money went to Dallas. And we have a name—a recipient for the funds. We’re hoping that he’s the Wolf. At any rate, we know where he lives, Alex. You’re going to Dallas.”

  Chapter 89

  THE EARLIEST ABDUCTION CASES we tracked had occurred in Texas, and dozens of agents and analysts went to work investigating them in depth. Everything about the case was larger in scale now. The surveillance details on the suspect’s house and place of business were the most impressive I had ever seen. I doubted that any police force in the country, with the possible exceptions of New York and Los Angeles, could afford this kind of effort.

  As usual, the Bureau had done a thorough job of finding out everything possible about the man who had received money from us through the Caymans bank. Lawrence Lipton lived in Old Highland Park, a moneyed neighborhood north of Dallas proper. The streets there meandered alongside creeks under a canopy of magnolias, oaks, and native pecans. The grounds of nearly every house were expensively landscaped, and most of the traffic during the day consisted of tradesmen, nannies, cleaning services, and gardeners.

  So far the evidence we’d gathered on Lipton was contradictory, though. He had attended St. Mark’s, a prestigious Dallas prep school, and then the University of Texas at Austin. His family and his wife’s were old Dallas oil money, but Lawrence had diversified and now owned a Texas winery, a venture capital group, and a successful computer software company. The computer connection caught Monnie Donnelley’s eye, and mine as well.

  Lipton seemed to be a straight arrow, however. He sat on the boards of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Friends of the Library. He was a trustee for the Baylor Hospital and a deacon at First United Methodist.

  Could he be the Wolf? It didn’t seem possible to me.

  The second morning I was in Dallas, a meeting was held at the field office there. Senior Agent Nielsen remained in charge of the case, but it was clear to everyone that Ron Burns was calling the shots on this from Washington. I don’t think any of us would have been too surprised if Burns had shown up for the briefing himself.

  At eight in the morning, Roger Nielsen stood before a roomful of agents and read from a clipboard. “They’ve been real busy through the night back in Washington,” he said, and seemed neither impressed nor surprised by the effort. Apparently this had become SOP on cases that got big in the media.

  “I want to acquaint all of you with the latest on Lawrence Lipton. The most important development is that he doesn’t seem to have any known connections to the KGB or any Russian mobs. He isn’t Russian. Maybe something will turn up later or maybe he’s just that good at hiding his past. In the fifties, his father moved to Texas from Kentucky to seek his fortune on ‘the prairie.’ He apparently found it under the prairie, in West Texas oil fields.”

  Nielsen stopped and looked around the meeting room, going from face to face. “There is one interesting recent development,” he went on. “Among its holdings, Lipton’s Micro-Management owns a company called Safe Environs in Dallas. Safe Environs is a private security firm. Lawrence Lipton has recently put himself under armed guard. I wonder why?

  “Is he worried about us or is he scared of somebody else? Maybe like the big bad Wolf?”

  Chapter 90

  IF IT WASN’T so incredibly terrifying, it would be mind-boggling. Lizzie Connolly was still among the living. She was keeping herself positive by being somewhere else—anywhere but here in the horrid closet. With this complete madman bursting in two, three, sometimes five times a day.

  Mostly she got lost in her memories. Once upon a time, and it seemed so long ago, she had called her girls Merry Berry, Bobbie Doll, names like that. They used to sing “High Hopes” all the time, and songs from Mary Poppins.

  They had endless positive-energy thoughts—which Lizzie called “happy thoughts”—and always shared them with one another, and with Brendan, of course.

  What else could she remember? What? Anything?

  They had so many animals over the years that eventually they gave each one a number.

  Chester, a black Lab with a curly tail like a chow, was number 16. The Lab would bark constantly, all day and all night, until Lizzie merely showed him a bottle of Tabasco sauce—his kryptonite. Then he would finally shut up.

  Dukie, number 15, was a short-haired orange calico who Lizzie believed had probably been an old Jewish lady in another life and who was always complaining, “Oh no, no, no, no.”

  Maximus Kiltimus was number 11; Stubbles was number 31; Kitten Little was number 35.

  Memories were all that Lizzie Connolly had—because there could be no present for her. None.

  She couldn’t be here in this horror house.

  She had to be somewhere else, anywhere else.

  Had to be!

  Had to be!

  Had to be!

  Because he was inside her now.

  The Wolf was inside her, in the real world, grunting and thrusting like an animal, violating, raping for minutes that seemed like hours.

  But Lizzie had the last laugh, didn’t she?

  She wasn’t there.

  She was somewhere in her memories.

  Chapter 91

  THEN HE WAS FINALLY GONE, the terrible, inhuman Wolf. Monster! Beast! He’d given her a bathroom break, and food, but now he was gone. God, his arrogance in keeping her here in his house! When is he going to kill me? I’m going mad. Going, going, gone!

  She peered through teary eyes into the pitch-blackness. She’d been bound and gagged again. In a strange way, that was good news. It meant he still wanted her, right?

  Good God, I’m alive because I’m desirable to a horrid beast! Please help me, dear God. Please, please, help me.

  She thought about her good girls and then she turned her mind toward escape. A fantasy, she understood, and therefore escape in itself.

  By now, she knew this closet by heart, even in total darkness. It was as if she could see everything, as if she had night sight. More than anything, she was aware of her own body—trapped in here—and her mind—trapped as well.

  Lizzie let her hands wander as much as they could. There were clothes in the closet—a male’s—his. The closest to her was some kind of sport coat with round, smooth buttons. Possibly a blazer? Lightweight, which reinforced her belief that this was a warm-weather city.

  Next was a vest. A smallish ball was in one pocket, hard,
maybe a golf ball.

  What could she do with a golf ball? Could it be a weapon?

  A zipper on the pocket. What could she do with a zipper? She’d like to catch his tattooed dick in it!

  Then a windbreaker. Flimsy. Strong, sickening smell of tobacco on it. And then, her favorite thing to touch, a soft overcoat, possibly cashmere.

  There were more “treasures” in the overcoat’s pockets.

  A loose button. Scraps of paper. From a notepad?

  A ballpoint pen, possibly a Bic. Coins—four quarters, two dimes, a nickel. Unless the coins were foreign? She wondered endlessly.

  There was also a book of matches with a shiny cover and embossed letters.

  What did the embossed letters say? Could they tell her the city where she was being kept?

  Also, a lighter.

  A half pack of mints, which she knew to be cinnamon because she smelled it on her hands.

  And at the bottom of the pocket—lint, so insignificant, yet important to her now.

  Behind the overcoat were two bundles of his clothing still covered in plastic from the cleaners. A receipt of some kind on the first packet. Attached by a staple.

  She imagined the name of the cleaners, an identification number in red, writing by some dry-cleaning store clerk.

  All of it seemed strangely precious to Lizzie because she had nothing else.

  Except a powerful will to live.

  And get her revenge on the Wolf.

  Chapter 92

  I WAS A PART of the large surveillance detail near the house in Highland Park, and I thought we were going to take Lawrence Lipton down soon, maybe within hours. We’d been told that Washington was working with the Dallas police.

  I stared absently at the house, a large two-story Tudor on about two and a half acres of very expensive real estate. It looked pristine. A redbrick sidewalk went from the street to an arched doorway, which led to a sixteen-room house. The big news that day in Dallas was about a fire in Kessler Park that had incinerated a 64,000-square-foot mega mansion. The Lipton spread was less than a third that size, but it was still impressive, or depressing, or both.