The Big Bad Wolf

ON 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 wooden. The odd thing, though, was that the wooden 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 desk and chair, a file cabinet with a large dial lock, and a coat tree that held my black Kevlar vest and blue nylon raid jacket. The office 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 call 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 toward the helicopter. The skies were bright blue and streaming with clouds that appeared to be shredding in the distance. "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 ran onto 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 shot. I lay on Stacy, trying to protect her, hoping she wasn't dead, and 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 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 her. 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, and 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. Sorokin said that the Wolf would come after us and he did. Now we're going to go 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.