The Big Bad Wolf

spoken to Lili face-to-face, I was sure that she had something real that could help us.
    She’d heard them talking.
    Someone had been purchased while she listened.
    She was afraid for herself, and for her family.
    “Do you want to go on-line with them?” Lili asked in an excited voice. “We could! See if they’re together now. I’ve been working on some cool anonymizing software. I think it will work. Not sure, though. Well, yeah, it’ll work.”
    She smiled broadly, showing those beautiful braces.
    I could see in her eyes that she wanted to prove something to us.
    “Is this a good idea?” Monnie leaned in and asked me.
    I pulled her aside and lowered my voice. “We have to move her and the family anyway. They can’t stay here now, Monnie.”
    I looked over at Lili. “Okay. Why don’t you try to get on-line with them again. Let’s see what they’re up to. We’ll be right here with you.”
    Lili talked constantly as she went through the various steps to get through the site’s passwords and encrypted protection. I didn’t understand any of what the fourteen-year-old had to say, but Monnie got most of it. She was enthusiastic and supportive but mostly impressed.
    Suddenly, Lili looked up in alarm. “Something’s all wrong here.” She went back to her computer.
    “Oh, shit! God damn them!” she swore. “Those
creeps.
I can’t believe this.”
    “What’s happened?” Monnie asked. “They changed the keys, didn’t they?”
    “Worse,” Lili said, and kept tapping out commands rapidly. “Much, much worse. Awhh, horse spit. I can’t believe it.”
    She finally turned away from the glowing screen of her laptop.
    “First, I couldn’t even
find
the site. They set up this very cool, very dynamic network—it was in Detroit, Boston, Miami, bouncing all over the place. Then, when I did find it, I couldn’t get on.
Nobody
can get into the site now except them.”
    “Why is that?” Monnie asked. “What happened between the last time you got in and now?”
    “They installed an
eye scan.
It’s almost impossible to fool. The whole thing is run by this guy who calls himself Wolf. Wolf’s a very scary dude. He’s Russian. Like a wolf from Siberia. I think he’s even smarter than I am. And that’s fucking smart.”

Chapter 67
    THE NEXT DAY I WORKED in the SIOC conference rooms on the fifth floor of the Hoover. So did Monnie Donnelley, who still felt as if she were in limbo. We were keeping what we had learned from Lili Olsen quiet so that we could check out a few things. The main room was humming around us. The abductions were a major media story now. The Bureau had taken an incredible amount of heat in the past few years; they needed a win.
No,
I thought,
we need a win.
    A lot of important Bureau people were at the group meeting late that night: they included the heads of the Behavioral Analysis Unit-east and BAU-west, the unit chief of the Child Abduction Serial Murder Investigative Resource Center (CASMIRC), and the head of Innocent Images in Baltimore, an FBI unit dedicated to finding and eliminating sexual predators on the Internet. Stacy Pollack led the discussion again; she was clearly in charge of the case.
    A male student from Holy Cross College in Massachusetts was missing, and a close friend of his had been found murdered on campus. Francis Deegan’s physical resemblance to Benjamin Coffey, the student kidnapped in Newport, led many of us to believe that he had been selected as a replacement for Coffey, who was feared dead.
    “I want to get approval for a reward, maybe half a million,” said Jack Arnold, who ran BAU-east. No one commented on the proposal. Several agents went on making notes or using their laptops. Actually, it was dispiriting.
    “I think I have something,” I finally said from the back of the room.
    Stacy Pollack looked my way. A few heads popped up, reacting to the break in the group’s silence more than anything. I rose at my seat.
    The FNG had the floor. I introduced Monnie, just to be cute. Then I told them about the Wolf’s Den and our meeting with fourteen-year-old Lili Olsen. I also mentioned the Wolf, who, according to Monnie’s findings, might have been a Russian gangster by the name of Pasha Sorokin. His pedigree was hard to trace, especially before he moved out of the USSR. “If we can get inside the Den somehow, I think we’ll find out something about the missing women. In the meantime, I think we need to put more heat on some of the sites