The Big Bad Wolf

ex-Philadelphia street cop himself. He had brought me into the FBI as a GS13, the highest I could go as a street agent. I’d also been promised assignments as a consultant, which meant a better salary. Burns had wanted me in the Bureau, and he got me. He said that I could have any reasonable resources I needed to get the job done. I hadn’t discussed it with him yet, but I thought I might want two detectives from the Washington PD—John Sampson and Jerome Thurman.
    The only thing Burns had been quiet about was my class supervisor at Quantico, a senior agent named Gordon Nooney. Nooney ran Agent Training. He had been a profiler before that, and prior to becoming an FBI agent, had been a prison psychologist in New Hampshire. I was finding him to be a bean counter at best.
    That morning, Nooney was standing there waiting when I arrived for my class in abnormal psych, an hour and fifty minutes on understanding psychopathic behavior, something I
hadn’t
been able to do in nearly fifteen years with the D.C. police force.
    There was gunfire in the air, probably from the nearby Marine base. “How was traffic from D.C.?” Nooney asked. I didn’t miss the barb behind the question: I was permitted to go home nights, while the other agents-in-training slept at Quantico.
    “No problem,” I said. “Forty-five minutes in moving traffic on Ninety-five. I left plenty of extra time.”
    “The Bureau isn’t known for breaking rules for individuals,” Nooney said. Then he offered a tight, thin smile that was awfully close to a frown. “Of course, you’re Alex Cross.”
    “I appreciate it,” I said. I left it at that.
    “I just hope it’s worth the trouble,” Nooney mumbled as he walked off in the direction of Admin. I shook my head and went into class, which was held in a tiered symposium-style room.
    Dr. Horowitz’s lesson this day was interesting to me. It concentrated on the work of Professor Robert Hare, who’d done original research on psychopaths by using brain scans. According to Hare’s studies, when healthy people are shown “neutral” and “emotional” words, they respond acutely to emotional words, such as
cancer
or
death.
Psychopaths register the words equally. A sentence like “I love you” means nothing more to a psychopath than “I’ll have some coffee.” Maybe less. According to Hare’s analysis of data, attempts to reform psychopaths only make them more manipulative. It certainly was a point of view.
    Even though I was familiar with some of the material, I found myself jotting down Hare’s “characteristics” of psychopathic personality and behavior. There were forty of them. As I wrote them down, I found myself agreeing that most rang true.

    Glibness and superficial charm
    Need for constant stimulation / prone to boredom
    Lack of any remorse or guilt
    Shallow emotional response
    Complete lack of empathy . . .

    I was remembering two psychopaths in particular: Gary Soneji and Kyle Craig. I wondered how many of the forty “characteristics” the two of them shared, and started putting
G.S.
and
K.C.
next to the appropriate ones.
    Then I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned away from Dr. Horowitz.
    “Senior Agent Nooney needs to see you right now in his office,” said an executive assistant, who then walked away with the full confidence that I would be right on his heels.
    I was.
    I was in the FBI now.

Chapter 5
    SENIOR AGENT GORDON NOONEY was waiting in his small, cramped office in the Administration building. He was obviously upset, which had the desired effect: I wondered what I could have done wrong in the time since we’d talked before class.
    It didn’t take him long to let me know why he was so angry. “Don’t bother to sit down. You’ll be out of here in a minute. I just received a highly unusual call from Tony Woods in the director’s office. There’s a ‘situation’ going down in Baltimore. Apparently the director wants
you
there. It will take precedence over your training classes.”
    Nooney shrugged his broad shoulders. Out the window behind him I could see thick woods, and also Hoover Road, where a couple of agents jogged. “What the hell, why would you need any training here, Dr. Cross? You caught Casanova in North Carolina. You’re the man who brought down Kyle Craig. You’re like Clarice Starling in the movies. You’re already a star.”
    I took a deep breath before responding. “I had nothing to do with this. I won’t apologize for catching Casanova or