James PATTERSON - The Big Bad Wolf

‘Dick Clark came from Philadelphia near here,’ Slava said. ‘Did you know that?’

‘Who the hell cares about Dick Clark, Dick Tracy, or dickless,’ said Zoya, and hammered Slava’s bicep with her fist. ‘Stop this stupid trivia game. It gives me a headache. Excedrin headache number one trillion since I met you.’

The target certainly fit the description they had been given by their controller: tall, blond, ice queen, full of herself. But also tasty down to the last detail , thought Slava. It made sense, he supposed. She had been purchased by a client who called himself the Art Director.

The Couple waited about fifty minutes. A middle school choir from Broomall, Pennsylvania, was performing in the atrium. Then the target and her two kids emerged from the Dick Clark restaurant.

‘Let’s do it,’ said Slava. ‘This should be interesting, no? The kids make it a challenge.’

‘No,’ Zoya said. ‘The kids make it insane. Wait until the Wolf hears about this. He’ll have puppies. That’s American slang, by the way.’

The name of the woman who’d been purchased was Audrey Meek. She was a celebrity and had founded a highly successful line of women’s fashions and accessories called Meek . It was her mother’s maiden name, and the one she still used herself.

The Couple watched her closely, tailed her into the parking garage without creating suspicion. They finally jumped her as she was putting her Neiman Marcus and Hermès and other shopping bags into a shiny black Lexus SUV with New Jersey plates.

‘Children, run! Run away!’ Audrey Meek struggled fiercely as Zoya tried to stuff an acrid-smelling gauzy cloth over her nose and mouth. Soon she saw circles, stars and bright colors for a couple of dramatic seconds. Then she finally passed out in Slava’s powerful arms.

Zoya peered around the parking garage. It was nothing much to look at – cement walls with number/letter marks. Nobody anywhere near them. Nobody noticing anything wrong, even though the children were yelling and starting to cry.

‘Leave my mommy alone!’ Andrew Meek shouted and threw punches at Slava, who only smiled at the boy.

‘Good little fellow,’ he applauded. ‘Protect your mama. She would be proud of you. I am proud of you.’

‘Let’s go, stupid!’ shouted Zoya. As always, she was the one who took care of all the important business. It had been that way since she was growing up in the Moskovskaya oblast outside Moscow, and Zoya had decided she couldn’t bear to be either a factory worker or a prostitute.

‘What about the kids? We can’t leave them here,’ said Slava.

‘ Leave them. That’s what we’re supposed to do, you idiot. We want witnesses. That’s the plan. Can’t you keep anything straight?’

‘In the garage? Leave them here?’

‘They’ll be fine. Or not. Who the hell cares. C’mon. We must go. Now!’

They drove off in the Lexus wagon with the target, Audrey Meek, unconscious on the backseat, and her two children wailing uncontrollably in the parking garage. Zoya drove at a moderate speed around the mall’s plaza, then turned on to the Dekalb Pike.

They traveled only a few minutes to the Valley Forge Station Park, where they switched cars.

Then another eight miles to a remote parking area where they changed vehicles yet again.

Then off to New Hope in the Bucks County area of Pennsylvania. Soon, Mrs Meek would meet the Art Director, who was madly in love with her. He must have been – he had paid $250,000 for the pleasure of her company, whatever that might be.

And there had been witnesses to the abduction – a screw-up – on purpose .

No one had been able to figure out the Wolf yet. According to information from Interpol and also the Russian police, he was a no-nonsense, hands-on operator, but one who had originally been trained as a policeman. Like many Russians, he was able to think in very fluid, commonsense terms. That native ability was sometimes given as the reason the Mir space station was able to stay in space so long. The Russian cosmonauts were simply better than the Americans at figuring out everyday problems. If something unexpected went wrong in the spacecraft, they fixed it.

And so did the Wolf.

On that sunny afternoon, he drove a black Cadillac Escalade to the northern section of Miami. He needed to see a man named Yeggy Titov about some security matters. Yeggy liked to think of himself as a world-class website designer and cutting-edge engineer. He had a doctorate from Cal-Berkeley and never let anyone forget it. But Yeggy was just another pervert and creep with delusions of grandeur and an ‘attitude’; a really bad attitude.

The Wolf banged on the metal door of Yeggy’s apartment in a high-riser overlooking Biscayne Bay. He was wearing a skullcap and a Miami Heat windbreaker, just in case anyone saw him visiting.

‘All right, all right, hold your urine!’ Yeggy shouted from inside. It took him another couple of minutes to finally open up. He had on blue jean shorts and a tattered, faded-black novelty-store sweatshirt with Einstein’s grinning face on it. Quite the kidder, that Yeggy.

‘I told you not to make me come and see you,’ the Wolf said, but he was smiling broadly, as if he were making a big joke. So Yeggy smiled too. They had been business associates for about a year – which was a long time for anyone to put up with Yeggy.

‘Your timing is perfect,’ he said.

‘How lucky for me,’ said the Wolf as he strolled into the living room and immediately wanted to hold his nose. The apartment was an incredible dump – littered with fast-food wrappers and pizza boxes, empty milk cartons, and dozens, maybe a hundred, old copies of Novoye Russkoye Slovo , the largest Russian-language newspaper in the United States.

The odor of filth and decaying food was bad enough, but even worse was Yeggy himself, who always smelled like week-old sausages. The science-man led him into a bedroom off the living-room area – only it turned out not to be a bedroom at all. It was the lab of a very disorganized person. Ugly brown carpeting, three beige CPU boxes on the floor, parts in a corner – discarded heatsinks, circuit boards, hard drives.

‘You are a pig,’ the Wolf said, then laughed again.

‘But a very smart pig.’

In the center of the room was a modular desk. Three flat screen displays formed a semicircle around a well-worn rumble chair. Behind the display screens was a fire hazard of intertwined cables. There was only one outside window, the blind permanently drawn.

‘Your site is very secure now,’ Yeggy said. ‘Primo. One hundred per cent. No possible screw-ups. The way you like it.’

‘I thought it was already secure,’ the Wolf replied.

‘Well now it’s more secure. You can’t be too careful these days. Tell you what else – I finished the latest brochure. It’s a classic, instant classic.’

‘Yes, and only three weeks late.’

Yeggy shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘So what – wait’ll you see my work. It’s genius. Can you recognize genius when you see it? This is genius.’

The Wolf examined the pages before he said anything to the science-man. The brochure was printed on 8½- by 11-inch glossy paper, bound in a clear report cover with a red spine. Yeggy had cranked it out on his HP color laser printer. The colors were electric. The cover looked perfect. The elegance was weird, actually, as if the Wolf were looking at a Tiffany’s catalog. It sure didn’t look like the work of a man who lived in this shithole.