Chapter Eighty-Nine
I don’t think that I’d felt this bad in all my years with the Washington P.D., 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. The Bureau 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 streets. There was some great personnel; and some incredible losers.
After the shootout in Boston I had driven over to the FBI offices. The agents who 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 did it do 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 didn’t listen.
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 it had 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 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, a Ford Explorer commandeered by the two other abductors was found in the parking lot of a bank in Arlington, Massachusetts. They had stolen a second vehicle out of the bank lot. By now they’d probably switched it for another stolen car.
A total screw-up 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. 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. ‘There’s something else,’ she finally spoke again. ‘We’ve had some luck. Most of us have been here all night. The money transfer we made to the Wolf’s Den… 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 US 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 Ninety
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 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 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 belonged to tradesmen, nannies, cleaning services and gardeners.
So far the evidence we’d gathered on Lipton was contradictory though. He had attended St Marks, a prestigious Dallas prep school and then the University of Texas at Austin. His family, and his wife’s, was 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 such 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 s.o.p. 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, 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 the big bad Wolf?’
Chapter Ninety-One
If it wasn’t so incredibly terrifying, it would be mind-boggling. Lizzie Connelly 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.’