London Bridges

inside the British embassy. On the face of it, he couldn’t have been more respectable. And yet he was a horrible murderer, one of the worst pattern killers I’d ever come across.
    A local agent named Fred Wade joined me near the helicopter I’d come in on. I was still studying the climber’s photos. Wade told me he wanted to know what was going on, and I couldn’t blame him. So did I.
    “The man who videotaped the explosion is named Geoffrey Shafer,” I told Wade. “I know him. He committed several murders in D.C. when I was a homicide detective there. The last we heard of him, he’d fled to London. He murdered his wife in front of their children in a London market. Then he disappeared. Well, I guess he’s back. I have no idea why, but it makes my head hurt just to think about it.”
    I took out my cell phone and put in a call to Washington. As I described what I’d discovered, I was reviewing the last few photographs taken of Colonel Shafer. In one of the photos he was climbing into a red Ford Bronco.
    The next was a rear shot of the Bronco as it rode away.
Jesus.
The license plate was visible.
    And that was the strangest thing of all so far:
the Weasel had made a mistake.
    The Weasel I’d known didn’t make them.
    So maybe it wasn’t a mistake after all.
    Maybe it was part of a plan.

Chapter 12
    THE WOLF WAS STILL in Los Angeles, but reports were coming in from the Nevada desert on a regular basis. Police arriving near Sunrise Valley . . . then helicopters . . . the U.S. Army . . . finally the FBI.
    His old friend Alex Cross was out there now, too.
Good for Alex Cross. What a good soldier.
    Nobody understanding a goddamn thing, of course.
    No coherent theory about what had happened in the desert.
    How could there be?
    It was chaos, and that was the beauty of it. Nothing scared people more than what they didn’t understand.
    Case in point, a local L.A. hot shit named Fedya Abramtsov and his wife, Liza. Fedya wanted to be a big Mafiya gangster, but also lead the life of a movie-star type in Beverly Hills. This was Fedya and Liza’s house that he was staying in now, but really, the Wolf thought of it as his house; after all,
their
money was
his
money. Without him, they were nothing but small-time punks with big ambitions.
    Fedya and Liza hadn’t even known he was at their house. The couple had been at their place in Aspen and finally got back to L.A. at just past ten that evening.
    Imagine their surprise.
    A powerful-looking man sitting by himself in the living room. Just sitting there. So peaceful. Rhythmically squeezing a rubber ball in his right hand.
    They had never seen him before.
    “Who the hell are you?” demanded Liza. “What are you doing here?”
    The Wolf spread his arms. “I am the one who gave you all of this wonderful stuff. And what do you give me in return? Disrespect like this? I am the Wolf.”
    Fedya had heard enough already. He knew that if the Wolf was there, letting himself be seen, then he and Liza were as good as dead.
Best to run and hope to God the Wolf is here alone, unlikely as that may be.
    He took a single step, and the Wolf raised a handgun from out of the seat cushion. He was good with a gun. He shot Fedya Abramtsov once in the back, once in the back of his neck.
    “He’s very dead,” he calmly said to Liza, which he knew to be a nickname of hers. “I prefer Yelizaveta,” he said. “Not so common, so Americanized. Come and sit. Come. Please.”
    The Wolf patted his lap. “Come. I don’t like to repeat myself.”
    The girl was a pretty one—smart, too—and apparently ruthless as a snake. She walked across the room and sat in the Wolf’s lap. She did as she was told, anyway. Good girl.
    “I like you, Yelizaveta. But what choice do I have—you’ve disobeyed me. You and Fedya stole my money. Don’t argue. I know it’s true.” He looked into her beautiful brown eyes. “Do you know
zamochit?
” he asked. “The breaking of bones?”
    Apparently Yelizaveta did, because she screamed at the top of her lungs.
    “This is good,” said the Wolf as he grabbed the woman’s slender left wrist. “Everything is going so well today.”
    He started with Yelizaveta’s little finger, just the pinkie.

Chapter 13
    HAD A WAR STARTED? If it had, who was the enemy?
    It was pitch-black, and it was freezing cold in the desert. Scary and disorienting, to put it mildly. No moon out. Was that part of the plan? What was supposed to happen next? Where? To whom? Why?
    I