The Big Bad Wolf

man called Wolf was throwing a huge party at his 20,000-square-foot house on the waterfront in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The occasion was the launch of his new men’s magazine, called
Instinct,
which would compete with
Maxim
and
Stun.
    In Lauderdale, the Wolf was known as Ari Manning, a wealthy businessman originally from Tel Aviv. He had other names in other cities. Many names, many cities.
    He was passing through the den now, where about twenty of his guests were watching a football game on several TVs, including a 61-inch Runco. A couple of football fanatics were bent over a computer with a statistics database. On a nearby table was a bottle of Stolichnaya encased in a block of ice. The vodka in ice was the only real Russian touch that he allowed.
    At six-foot-two, this Wolf could carry 240 pounds and still move like a big and very powerful animal. He circulated among his guests, always smiling and joking, knowing that no one in the room understood why he smiled, not one of these so-called friends or business partners or social acquaintances had any idea who he was.
    They knew him as Ari, not as Pasha Sorokin, and definitely not as the Wolf. They had no clue about the pounds of illegal diamonds he bought from Sierra Leone, the tons of heroin from Asia, and weapons and even jets sold to the Colombians, or white women purchased by the Saudis and Japanese. In south Florida, he had a reputation for being a maverick both socially and in business. There were more than 150 guests tonight, but he’d ordered food and drink for twice that number. He had imported the chef from Le Cirque 2000 in New York, and also a sushi cook from San Francisco. His servers were dressed as cheerleaders and were topless, which he thought a cheeky joke, guaranteed to offend. The famous surprise dessert for the party was Sacher tortes flown in from Vienna. No wonder everybody loved Ari. Or hated him.
    He gave a playful hug to a former pro running back for the Miami Dolphins and talked to a lawyer who’d made tens of millions from the Florida tobacco settlement—exchanged stories about Governor Jeb Bush. Then he moved on through the crowd. There were so many ass-kissing social climbers and opportunists who came to his house to be seen among the right, and wrong, people: self-important, spoiled, selfish, and, worst of all, boring as tepid dishwater.
    He walked along the edge of an indoor swimming pool toward an outdoor pool more than twice the size. He chatted with his guests and made a generous pledge to a private-school charity. Not surprisingly, he was hit on by somebody’s wife. He had serious conversations with the owner of the most important hotel in the state, a Mercedes-dealing mogul, and the head of a conglomerate who was a hunting “buddy” of his.
    He despised all of these pretenders, especially the older used-to-bes. None of them had ever taken a real risk in their lives. Still, they had made millions, even billions, and they thought they were such hot shit.
    And then—he thought about Elizabeth Connolly for the first time in an hour or so. His sweet, very sexy Lizzie. She looked like Claudia Schiffer, and he fondly remembered the days when the image of the German model was on hundreds of billboards all over Moscow. He had lusted for Claudia—all Russian men had—and now he had her likeness in his possession.
    Why?
Because he could.
It was the philosophy that drove him and everything in his life.
    For that very reason, he was keeping her right here in his big house in Fort Lauderdale.

Chapter 16
    LIZZIE CONNOLLY COULDN’T BELIEVE any of this awfulness was happening to her. It still didn’t seem possible. It
wasn’t
possible. And yet, here she was. A hostage!
    The house where she was being kept was full of people. Full! It sounded as if a party was going on. A party? How dare he?
    Was her insane captor that sure of himself? Was he so arrogant? So brazen? Was it possible? Of course it was. He’d boasted to her that he was a gangster, the king of gangsters, perhaps the greatest that ever lived. He had repulsive tattoos—on the back of his right hand, his shoulders, his back, around his right index finger, and also on his private parts, on his testicles and penis.
    Lizzie could definitely hear a party going on in the house. She could even make out conversations: small talk about an upcoming trip to Aspen; a rumored affair between a nanny and a local mother; the death of a child in a pool, a six-year-old like her Gwynne;