James PATTERSON: The Big Bad Wolf

Damon shrugged. ‘We’re acing everything. Why do you want to change the subject all the time when it’s on you?’

I nodded and laughed. ‘You’re right. Well, my schooling is going fine. Eighty is considered a failing grade at Quantico. I expect to ace most of my tests.’

‘ Most? ’ Jannie arched an eyebrow and gave me one of Nana Mama’s ‘perturbed’ looks. ‘What’s this most stuff? We expect you to ace all your tests.’

‘I’ve been out of school for a while.’

‘No excuses.’

I fed her one of her own lines. ‘I’m doing the best I can, and that’s all you can ask from somebody.’

She smiled. ‘Well all right then, Poppa. Just as long as the best you can do puts all A’s on your next report.’

About a block from the school I gave Jannie and Damon their hugs – so as not to embarrass them, God forbid, in front of all their cool-ass friends. They hugged me back, and kissed their little brother, and then off they ran. ‘Ba-bye,’ said little Alex, and then so did Jannie and Damon, calling back to their brother, ‘Ba-bye, ba-bye!’

I picked up little Alex and we headed home, then it was off to work for soon-to-be Agent Cross of the FBI.

‘Dada,’ said little Alex as I carried him in my arms. That was right – Dada . Things were falling into place for the Cross family. After all these years, my life was finally close to being in balance. I wondered how long it would last. Hopefully, at least for the rest of the day.

New agent training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, sometimes called ‘Club Fed’, was turning out to be a challenging, arduous, and tense program, if a little repetitive. For the most part, I liked it, and I was making an effort to keep any skepticism down. But I had entered the Bureau with a reputation for catching pattern killers, and already I had the nickname ‘Dragonslayer’. So irony and skepticism might soon be a problem.

Training had begun six weeks before, on a Monday morning, with a crew-cut broad-shouldered SSA, or Supervisory Special Agent, Dr Kenneth Horowitz, standing in front of our class trying to tell a joke: ‘The three biggest lies in the world are: “All I want is a kiss”, “The check is in the mail”, and “I’m with the FBI and I’m only here to help you.”’ Everybody in the class laughed, maybe because the joke was so ordinary, but at least Horowitz had tried his best, and maybe that was the point.

FBI Director Ron Burns had set it up so that my training period would last for only eight weeks. He’d made other allowances for me as well. The maximum age for entrance into the FBI had been thirty-seven years old. I was over forty. Burns had the age requirement waived, and also voiced his opinion that it was discriminatory, and needed to be changed. The more I saw of Ron Burns, the more I sensed that he was something of a rebel, maybe because he was an ex-Philadelphia street cop himself. He had brought me into the FBI as a GS13, the highest I could go as a street agent. I’d also been promised assignments as a consultant, which meant a better salary. Burns had wanted me in the Bureau, and he’d got me. He said that I could have any reasonable resources I needed to get the job done. I hadn’t discussed it with him yet, but I thought I might want two detectives from the Washington P.D. – John Sampson and Jerome Thurman.

The only thing Burns had been quiet about was my Class Supervisor at Quantico, a Senior Agent named Gordon Nooney. Nooney ran ‘Agent Training’. He had been a profiler before that and, previous to becoming an FBI agent, had been a prison psychologist in New Hampshire. I was finding him to be a bean counter at best.

That morning, Nooney was standing there waiting when I arrived for my class in Abnormal Psyche, an hour and fifty minutes on understanding psychopathic behavior, something I hadn’t been able to do in nearly fifteen years with the D.C. police force.

There was gunfire in the air, probably from the nearby marine base. ‘How was traffic from D.C.?’ Nooney asked. I didn’t miss the barb behind the question: I was permitted to go home nights, while the other agents-in-training slept at Quantico.

‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Forty-five minutes in moving traffic on 95. I left plenty of extra time.’

‘The Bureau isn’t known for breaking rules for individuals,’ Nooney said. Then he offered a tight, thin smile that was awfully close to a frown. ‘Of course, you’re Alex Cross.’

‘I appreciate it,’ I said. I left it at that.

‘I just hope it’s worth the trouble,’ Nooney mumbled as he walked off in the direction of Admin. I shook my head and went into class, which was held in a tiered symposium-style room.

Dr Horowitz’s lesson this day was interesting to me. It concentrated on the work of Professor Robert Hare who’d done original research on psychopaths by using brain scans. According to Hare’s studies, when healthy people are shown ‘neutral’ and ‘emotional’ words, they respond acutely to emotional words, such as cancer or death . Psychopaths register the words equally. A sentence like ‘I love you’ means nothing more to a psychopath than ‘I’ll have some coffee.’ Maybe less. According to Hare’s analysis of data, attempts to reform psychopaths made them only more manipulative. It certainly was a point of view.

Even though I was familiar with some of the material, I found myself jotting down Hare’s ‘characteristics’ of psychopathic personality and behavior. There were forty of them. As I wrote them down, I found myself agreeing that most rang true:

glibness and superficial charm

need for constant stimulation/prone to boredom

lack of any remorse or guilt

shallow emotional response

complete lack of empathy …

I was remembering two psychopaths in particular: Gary Soneji and Kyle Craig. I wondered how many of the forty ‘characteristics’ the two of them shared, and started putting G.S . and K.C . next to the appropriate ones.

Then I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned away from Dr Horowitz.

‘Senior Agent Nooney needs to see you right now in his office,’ said an executive assistant, who then walked away with the full confidence that I would be right on his heels.

I was.

I was in the FBI now.

Senior Agent Gordon Nooney was waiting in his small, cramped office in the Administration building. He was obviously upset, which had the desired effect: I wondered what I could have done wrong in the time since we’d talked before class .

It didn’t take him long to let me know why he was so angry. ‘Don’t bother to sit down. You’ll be out of here in a minute. I just received a highly unusual call from Tony Woods in the Director’s office. There’s a “situation” going down in Baltimore. Apparently, the Director wants you there. It will take precedence over your training classes.’

Nooney shrugged his broad shoulders. Out the window behind him I could see thick woods, and also Hoover Road where a couple of agents jogged. ‘What the hell, why would you need any training here, Dr Cross? You caught Casanova in North Carolina. You’re the man who brought down Kyle Craig. You’re like Clarice Starling in the movies. You’re already a star.’

I took a deep breath before responding. ‘I had nothing to do with this. I won’t apologize for catching Casanova, or Kyle Craig.’

Nooney waved a hand my way. ‘Why should you apologize? You’re dismissed from the day’s classes. There’s a helicopter waiting for you over at HRT. You do know where Hostage Reserve Team is?’