‘I do. I’m a fan of our personnel, most of them, anyway. And on the dark side?’ he asked. ‘Problem areas? Things to work on? I want to hear what you think. I need to hear it. Tell me the truth, as you see it.’
‘Bureaucracy. It’s a way of life. It’s almost the FBI’s culture. And fear. It’s mostly political in nature, and it inhibits agents’ imaginations. Did I mention bureaucracy? It’s bad, awful, crippling. Just listen to your agents.’
‘I’m listening,’ Burns said. ‘Go on.’
‘The agents aren’t allowed to be nearly as good as they can be. Of course that’s a complaint with most jobs, isn’t it?’
‘Even your old job with the Washington P.D.?’
‘Not as much as here. That’s because I sidestepped a lot of red tape and other bullshit that got in the way.’
‘Good. Keep sidestepping the bullshit, Alex,’ Burns said. ‘Even if it’s mine.’
I smiled. ‘Is that an order?’
Burns nodded soberly. I felt that he had something else on his mind. ‘I had a difficult meeting before you got here. Gordon Nooney is leaving the Bureau.’
I shook my head. ‘I hope I didn’t have anything to do with that. I don’t know Nooney well enough to judge him. Seriously. I don’t.’
‘Sorry, but you did have something to do with it. But it was my decision. The buck passes through here at a hundred miles an hour, and I like it that way. I do know Nooney well enough to judge him. Nooney was the leak to the Washington Post. That son of a bitch has been doing it for years. Alex, I thought about putting you in Nooney’s job.’
I was shocked to hear it. ‘I’ve never trained people. I didn’t finish orientation myself.’
‘But you could train our people.’
I wasn’t sure about that. ‘Maybe I could struggle through. But I like the streets. It’s in my blood. I’ve learned to accept that about myself.’
‘I know. I get it, Alex. I want you to work right here in the Hoover Building though. We’re going to change things. We’re going to win more than we lose. Work the big cases with Stacy Pollack at headquarters. She’s one of the best. Tough, smart, she could run this place some day.’
‘I can work with Stacy,’ I said, and left it at that.
Ron Burns put out his hand and I took it.
‘This is going to be good. Exciting stuff,’ he said. ‘Which reminds me of a promise I made. There’s a spot here for Detective John Sampson, and any D.C. street cop you like. Anybody who wants to win. We’re going to win, Alex.’
I shook Ron Burns’s hand on it. The thing is, I wanted to win, too.
Chapter One Hundred and Eleven
On a Monday morning I was in my new office on the fifth floor at headquarters in D.C. Tony Woods had given me a walking tour earlier that morning, and I was struck by strange, funny details that I couldn’t get out of my head. Like… the office doors were metal all through the building, except on the executive floor, where they were wood. The odd thing, though, the wood doors looked exactly like the metal ones. Welcome to the FBI.
Anyway, I had a lot of reading to do, and I hoped I’d get used to being in an eleven-by-fifteen-foot office, which was kind of bare. The furniture looked as if it were on loan from the Government Accounting Office; there was a file cabinet with a large dial lock; a coat tree that held my black vest and blue nylon raid jacket. The office also looked down on Pennsylvania Avenue, which was something of a ‘perk’.
Just past two that afternoon I got a phone call, actually the first incoming message to my new office. It was Tony Woods. ‘All settled in?’ he asked. ‘Anything you need?’
‘I’m getting there, Tony. I’ll be fine. Thanks for asking.’
‘Good. Alex, you’re going out of town in about an hour. There’s a lead on the Wolf in Brooklyn. Stacy Pollack will be going with you, so it’s a big deal. You fly out of Quantico at fifteen hundred. This thing isn’t over.’
I called home, then I gathered some paperwork on the Wolf, grabbed the overnight bag I’d been told to keep in my office, and headed to the parking garage. Stacy Pollack came down a few minutes later.
She drove, and it took us less than half an hour to get to the small private airfield at Quantico. On the way, she told me about the lead in Brooklyn. Supposedly, the real Wolf had been spotted at Brighton Beach. At least we weren’t giving up on him.
One of the black Bells was saddled up and waiting for us. Stacy and I got out of the sedan and walked side by side to the helicopter. I remember that the skies were bright blue and streaming with clouds that appeared to be shredding in the distance. A crisp smell of fall was in the air.
‘Nice day for a train wreck,’ Stacy said and grinned.
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 were running on to 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 shots. I lay on Stacy, trying to protect her, hoping she wasn’t dead, but 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 a 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 me? 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, 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. He said that he would come after us, and he did. Now we’re going to come 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 One Hundred and Twelve
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 a 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 massaged my forehead as I spoke. ‘What war? Tell me what happened?’