The Big Bad Wolf

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 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 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.”