The Big Bad Wolf

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."