James PATTERSON: The Big Bad Wolf

As soon as I stepped on to the Director’s floor, I was met by his executive assistant, a very efficient man named Tony Woods, whom I liked quite a bit already.

‘How is he this morning, Tony?’ I asked.

‘He likes what happened down in Baltimore,’ Tony answered. ‘His Highness is in a pretty good mood. For a change.’

‘Was Baltimore a test?’ I asked, not sure how far I could go with the assistant.

‘Oh, it was your final exam. But remember, everything ’s a test.’

I was led into the Director’s relatively small conference room. Burns was already sitting and waiting for me. He raised a glass of orange juice in mock salute. ‘Here he is!’ he smiled. ‘I’m making sure that everybody knows you did a bang-up job in Bal’more. Just the way I wanted to see you start out.’

‘Nobody got shot,’ I said.

‘You got the job done, Alex. HRT was very impressed. So was I.’

I sat down and poured myself coffee. I knew it was ‘help yourself’ and no formalities with Burns. ‘You’re spreading the word… because you have such big plans for me?’ I asked.

Burns laughed in his usual, conspiratorial way. ‘Absolutely, Alex. I want you to take my job.’

Now it was my turn to laugh. ‘No, thank you.’ I sipped the coffee, which was dark brown, a little bitter, but delicious – almost as good as Nana Mama’s. Well, maybe half as good as the best in Washington. ‘You care to share any of your more immediate plans with me?’ I asked.

Burns laughed again. He was in a good mood this morning. ‘I just want the Bureau to operate simply and effectively, that’s all. It’s the way it was when I ran the New York office. I’ll tell you what I don’t believe in: bureaucrats and cowboys. There are too many of both in the Bureau. Especially the former. I want street smarts on the street, Alex. Or maybe I just want smarts . You took a chance last night, only you probably didn’t see it that way. There were no politics for you – just the right way to get the job done.’

‘What if it hadn’t worked?’ I asked as I set my coffee down on a coaster emblazoned with the Bureau’s emblem.

‘Well, hell, then you wouldn’t be here now and we wouldn’t be talking like this. Seriously, though, there’s one thing I want to caution you about. It may seem obvious to you, but it’s a lot worse than you imagine. You can’t always tell the good guys from the bad ones in the Bureau. No one can. I’ve tried, and it’s almost impossible.’

I thought about what he was implying – part of which was that Burns already knew that one of my weaknesses was to look for the good in people. I understood it was a weakness sometimes, but I wouldn’t change, or maybe I couldn’t change.

‘Are you a good guy?’ I asked him.

‘Of course I am,’ Burns said with a wholesome grin that could have landed him a starring role in the West Wing . ‘You can trust me, Alex. Always. Absolutely. Just like you trusted Kyle Craig a few years back.’

Jesus, he was giving me the shivers. Or maybe the Director was just trying to get me to see the world his way: Trust no one. Go to the head of the class .

At a little past eleven, I was on my way down to Quantico. Even after my ‘final’ in Baltimore, I still had a class on ‘Stress Management and Law Enforcement’. I already knew the operative statistic: FBI agents were five times more likely to kill themselves than to be killed in the line of duty .

A Billy Collins poem was floating through my brain as I drove: ‘Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House’. Nice concept, good poem, bad omen.

The cell rang and I heard the voice of Tony Woods from the Director’s office. There had been a change of plans. Woods gave me orders from the Director to go straight to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. A plane was waiting for me.

Jesus! I was on another case already; I’d been ordered to skip school again. Things were happening faster than even I had expected and I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing.

‘Does ACAS Nooney know that I’m the Director’s one-man flying squad?’ I asked Woods. Tell me that he does. I don’t need more trouble down at Quantico .

‘We’ll let him know post-haste where you’re going,’ Woods promised. ‘I’ll take care of it personally. Go to Atlanta, and keep us posted on what you find down there. You’ll be briefed on the plane. It’s a kidnapping case.’ But that was all Tony Woods would tell me on the phone.

For the most part, the Bureau flies out of Reagan Washington National. I boarded a Cessna Citation Ultra, tan, with no identifying mark-ups. The Cessna sat eight, but I was the only passenger.

‘You must be important,’ the pilot said before we took off.

‘I’m not important. Believe me, I’m nobody.’

The pilot just laughed. ‘Buckle up then, nobody.’

It was perfectly clear that a call from the Director’s office had preceded me. Here I was, being treated like a Senior Agent. The Director’s troubleshooter?

Another agent jumped aboard just before we took off. He sat down across the aisle from me and introduced himself as Wyatt Walsh from D.C. Was he part of the Director’s ‘flying team’ too? Maybe my partner?

‘What happened in Atlanta?’ I asked. ‘What’s so important, or unimportant, that it requires our services?’

‘Nobody told you?’ He seemed surprised that I didn’t know the details.

‘I got a call from the Director’s office less than half an hour ago. I was told to come here. They said I’d be briefed on the plane.’

Walsh slapped two volumes of case notes on my lap. ‘There’s been a kidnapping in the Buckhead section of Atlanta. Woman in her thirties. White woman, well-to-do. She’s the wife of a judge, which makes it federal. More important, she isn’t the first .’

Everything was suddenly in a hurry-up mode. After we landed I was driven in a van to the Phipps Plaza Shopping Center in Buckhead.

As we pulled into the lot off Peachtree, it was obvious to me that something was very wrong there. We passed the anchor stores: Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor. They were nearly empty. Agent Walsh told me that the victim, Mrs Elizabeth Connelly, had been abducted in the underground parking lot near another large store called Parisian.

The entire parking area was a crime scene, but particularly Level 3 where Mrs Connelly had been grabbed. Each level of the garage was marked with a purple-and-gold scroll design, but now crime-scene tape was draped over the scrolls. The Bureau’s Evidence Response Team was there already. The incredible amount of activity indicated that the local police agencies were taking this extremely seriously. Walsh’s words were floating in my head: She isn’t the first .

It struck me as a little ironic, but I was more comfortable talking to the local police than to agents from the Bureau’s field office. I walked over and I spoke to two detectives, Pedi and Ciaccio, from the Atlanta P.D.

‘I’ll try to stay out of your way,’ I said to them, then added: ‘I used to be Washington P.D.’

‘Sold out, huh?’ Ciaccio said, and she sniffed out a laugh. It was supposed to be a joke, but it had enough truth in it meant to sting. Her eyes had a light frost in them.

Pedi spoke up. He looked about ten years older than his partner. Both were attractive. ‘Why’s the FBI interested in this case?’

I told them only as much as I thought I should, not everything. ‘There have been abductions, or at least disappearances that resemble this one. White women, suburban locales. We’re here checking into possible connections. And of course this is a judge’s wife.’