James PATTERSON - The Big Bad Wolf

Then I let my mind go in a different direction – he’s arrogant and fearless. He didn’t believe we’d find him and come here to take him down. He didn’t have an escape route! So maybe he was still hiding in Isla Bahia.

I passed my ideas on to HRT, but they’d already begun to go door-to-door at the estates. There were dozens of agents and local police combing the exclusive neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale. I wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t let the others quit. Whatever drove me – stubbornness? perseverance? – had paid off before. But we didn’t find the Wolf, or anyone who’d seen him in Isla Bahia.

‘There’s nothing? No sign? Nobody saw anything?’ I asked Mahoney.

‘Nothing,’ Mahoney said. ‘We found a cocker spaniel on the loose. That’s it.’

‘We know who owns the dog?’ I asked.

Mahoney rolled his eyes. I didn’t blame him. ‘I’ll check.’ He went away and came back after a couple of minutes.

‘It belongs to a Mr and Mrs Steve Davis. The Davises live at the end of the street. We’ll bring them their dog. Satisfied?’

I shook my head. ‘Not really. Let’s the two of us return the dog,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why a dog would be loose this late at night. Is the family home?’

‘Doesn’t look like it. The lights are off at the house. C’mon, Alex. Jesus. This is hopeless. You’re clutching at straws. Pasha Sorokin is gone.’

‘Let’s go. Get the dog,’ I said. ‘We’re going to the Davis house.’

We had started toward the Davis house with the brown and white cocker spaniel when a report came over the two-way. ‘Two suspicious males. Heading toward Las Olas Boulevard. They’ve spotted us! We’re in pursuit.’

We were only a few blocks from the shopping district and got there in minutes. The cocker spaniel was barking in the back seat. Fort Lauderdale police patrol cars and FBI sedans had already formed a tight ring around a GAP clothing store. More patrol cars were still arriving, their sirens screaming in the night. The street was crowded and the local police were having trouble stopping the pedestrian flow.

Mahoney drove up to the blockade. We left a window cracked for the dog. We jumped out and ran toward GAP. We were wearing flak jackets, carrying handguns.

The store lights were blazing. I could see people inside. But not the Wolf. Not the bodyguard either.

‘We think it’s him,’ an agent told us when we got up close to the store.

‘How many gunmen inside?’ I asked.

‘We count two. Two that we know about. Could be more. There’s a lot of confusion.’

‘Yeah, no shit,’ said Mahoney. ‘I get that impression.’

For the next few minutes nothing useful happened – except that more Lauderdale patrol cars arrived on the scene. So did a heavily armed and armored SWAT Unit. A hostage negotiator showed up. Then a pair of news helicopters began to hover over the GAP store and surrounding palm trees.

‘Nobody’s answering the goddamn phone inside,’ the negotiator reported. ‘It just rings.’

Mahoney looked questioningly at me and I shrugged. ‘We don’t even know if it’s them inside.’

The negotiator took up an electronic bullhorn. ‘This is the Fort Lauderdale police. Come out of the store now. We’re not going to negotiate. Come out with your hands up. Whoever’s in there, get out now!’

The approach sounded wrong to me. Too confrontational. I walked up to the negotiator. ‘I’m FBI, Agent Cross. Do we need to back him into a corner? He’s violent. He’s extremely dangerous.’

The negotiator was a stocky guy with a thick mustache; he was wearing a flak jacket, but it wasn’t secured. ‘Get the fuck away from me!’ he shouted in my face.

‘This is a federal case,’ I shouted right back. I grabbed the bullhorn out of his hand. The negotiator went at me with his fists, but Mahoney wrestled him to the ground. The press was watching; to hell with them. We had a job to do here.

‘This is the FBI!’ I spoke into the bullhorn. ‘I want to talk to Pasha Sorokin.’

Then suddenly the strangest thing of the night happened, and it had been a very strange night. I almost couldn’t believe it.

Two men emerged from the front door of the GAP.

They held their hands over their heads. They were shielding their faces from the cameras, or maybe from us.

‘Get down on the ground!’ I shouted at them. They didn’t comply.

But then I could see – it was Sorokin and the bodyguard.

‘We’re not armed,’ Sorokin yelled loud enough for everybody to hear. ‘We’re innocent citizens. We have no guns.’

I didn’t know whether to believe him. None of us knew what to make of this. The TV helicopter over our heads was getting too close.

‘What’s he pulling?’ Mahoney asked me.

‘Don’t know… Get down!’ I shouted again.

The Wolf and the bodyguard continued to walk toward us. Slowly and carefully. Hands held high.

I moved ahead with Mahoney. We had our guns out. Was this a trick? What could they try with dozens of rifles and handguns aimed at them?

The Wolf smiled when he saw me. Why the hell was he smiling?

‘So, you caught us,’ he called out. ‘Big deal! It doesn’t matter, you know. I have a surprise for you, FBI. Ready? My name is Pasha Sorokin. But I’m not the Wolf.’

He laughed. ‘I’m just some guy shopping in the GAP store. My clothes got wet. I’m not the Wolf, Mr FBI. Is that funny or what? Does it make your day? It makes mine. And it will make the Wolf’s too.’

Pasha Sorokin wasn’t the Wolf. Was that possible? There was no way to know for sure. Over the next forty-eight hours it was confirmed that the men we had captured in Florida were Pasha Sorokin and Ruslan Fedorov. They were Red Mafiya, but both claimed never to have met the real Wolf. They said they had played the ‘parts’ they were given – stand-in roles – according to them. Now they were willing to make the best deals they could.

There was no way for us to know for sure what was going on – but the deal-making went on for two days. The Bureau liked to make deals. I didn’t. Contacts were made inside the Mafiya; more doubts were raised about Pasha Sorokin being the Wolf. Finally, the CIA operatives who’d gotten the Wolf out of Russia were found and brought to Pasha’s cell. They said he wasn’t the man they’d help get out of the Soviet Union.

Then it was Sorokin who gave us a name we wanted – one that blew my mind completely, blew everybody’s minds. It was part of his ‘deal’.

He gave us Sphinx.

And he told us where we could find him.

The next morning, four teams of FBI agents waited outside Sphinx’s house until he left for work. We had agreed not to take him inside the house. I wouldn’t let it go down that way. I just couldn’t do it.

We all felt that Lizzie Connelly and her daughters had been through more than enough pain already. They didn’t need to see Brendan Connelly – Sphinx – arrested at the family house in Buckhead. They didn’t need to find out the awful truth about him like that.

I sat in a dark blue sedan parked two blocks up the street, but with a view of the large Georgian-style house. I was feeling numb. I remembered the first time I’d been there. I recalled my talk with the girls; and then with Brendan Connelly in his den. His grief had seemed heartfelt, as genuine as his young daughters’.

Of course, no one else had suspected he had betrayed his wife, sold her to another man. Pasha Sorokin had met Elizabeth at a party in the Connelly house. He’d wanted her; Brendan Connelly didn’t. The judge had been having affairs for years. Elizabeth reminded Sorokin of the model Claudia Schiffer, who had appeared on billboards all over Moscow during his gangster days. So the horrifying trade was made. A husband had sold his own wife into captivity; he’d gotten rid of her in the worst way imaginable. How could he have hated Elizabeth so much? And how could she have loved him?