The Big Bad Wolf

nodded. So did I. And I also thought that Monnie had great street smarts for somebody who rarely left the office. So far, she was the best person I’d met at the Bureau, and here we were in her tiny cube trying to solve White Girl.

Chapter 47
    I HAD NEVER really stopped being a student since my days at Johns Hopkins, and it had served me well in the Washington PD, even given me a certain mystique. I hoped it would be the same in the Bureau, though it hadn’t been so far. I set myself up with a supply of black coffee and started in on the Russian mob research. I needed to know everything about them, and Monnie Donnelley was a willing accomplice.
    I made notes along the way, though I usually remember most of what is important enough and don’t need to write it down. According to the FBI files, the Russian mob was now more diverse and powerful in America than La Cosa Nostra. Unlike the Italian Mafia, the Russians were organized into loose networks that cooperated with but weren’t dependent on one another. At least not so far. A major benefit was that the loose style of organization avoided RICO prosecutions by the government. No conspiracies could be proved. There were two distinctly different types of Russian mobsters. The “knuckle draggers” were into extortion, prostitution, and racketeering, and their particular crime group was called the Solntsevo. The second type of Russian mobster operated at a more sophisticated level, often securities fraud and money laundering. These were the neocapitalist criminals, called the Izmailovo.
    For the moment, I decided to concentrate on the first group, the lowlifes, especially the brigades involved with prostitution. According to the Bureau’s OC Section report, the prostitute business operated “a lot like major league baseball.” A group of prostitutes could actually be “traded” from an owner in one city to one in another. As a footnote, a survey conducted among seventh-grade girls in Russia listed prostitution among the top-five career choices of the girls when they grew up. Several historical anecdotes had been inserted in the file to represent the Russian criminal mentality:
smart and ruthless.
According to one story, Ivan the Terrible had commissioned St. Basil’s Cathedral to rival, even surpass, the great churches of Europe. He was pleased with the result and invited the architect to the Kremlin. When the artist arrived, his blueprints were burned and his eyes poked out, thus ensuring that he could never create a finer cathedral for anyone else.
    There were several more contemporary examples in the report, but that was how the Red Mafiya worked. It was what we were up against if the Russians were behind White Girl.

Chapter 48
    SOMETHING INCREDIBLE WAS about to happen.
    It was a gorgeous afternoon in eastern Pennsylvania. The Art Director found himself lost in the dazzling blue of the sky, and the reflections of the white clouds sliding across his windshield were mesmerizing.
Am I doing the right thing now?
he had asked himself several times during the ride. He thought that he was.
    “You have to admit that it’s beautiful,” he said to the bound passenger in his Mercedes G-Class SUV.
    “It is,” said Audrey Meek. She was thinking that she’d believed she would never see the outdoors again, never smell fresh grass and flowers. So where was this madman taking her with her hands tied? They were driving away from his cabin. Going where? What did it mean?
    She was terrified but trying not to show it.
Small talk,
she told herself.
Keep him talking.
    “You like this G-Class?” she asked, and immediately knew it was an insane question, just insane.
    His tight smile, but especially his eyes, told her that he thought so too. And yet he answered politely. “I do, actually. At first I thought it was the final proof that rich people are incredibly stupid. I mean, it’s kind of like putting a Mercedes logo on a wheelbarrow and then paying triple for it. But I do like the oddness of the vehicle, the rigid lines of the design, the gizmos like lockable differentials. Of course, I’ll have to get rid of this one now, won’t I?”
    Oh, God, she was afraid to ask why, but maybe she knew already. She’d seen the car he drove. Maybe someone else had too. But she had also seen his face, so he wasn’t really making sense. Or was he?
    Suddenly Audrey found that she couldn’t talk at all. No words would come out of her mouth, which was very dry. This self-professed