The Big Bad Wolf

same time, we moved on them. I had my Glock out, but was I really ready for what might happen in this small dark park?
    The kidnappers were keeping close to Park Drive, and I figured they had a van or truck out on the street. They looked confident and unafraid. They’d done this before: grabbed purchased men and women. They were professional kidnappers.
    “Take them now,” I told Senior Agent Nielsen. “Gautier is at risk.”
    “Wait until they grab him,” the response came back. “We want to do this right. Wait.”
    I didn’t agree with Nielsen and I didn’t like what was happening. Why wait? Gautier was hanging out there too much, and the park was dark.
    “Gautier is at risk,” I repeated.
    One of the men, blond, wearing a Boston Bruins windbreaker, waved to him.
    Gautier watched the man approach, nodded his head, smiled. The blond had some kind of small flashlight in his hand. He lit up Paul Gautier’s face.
    I could hear them talking. “Nice night for a walk,” Gautier said, then laughed. He sounded nervous.
    “The things we do for love,” the blond said. He spoke with a Russian accent.
    The two of them were only a few feet apart. The other abductors held back, but not far.
    Then the blond whipped a gun out of his jacket pocket. He pushed it against Gautier’s face. “You’re coming with me. No one will hurt you. Just walk with me. Make it easy on yourself.”
    The two others joined them.
    “You’re making a mistake,” said Gautier.
    “Oh, and why is that?” asked the blond. “I’ve got the gun, not you.”
    “Take them. Now,”
came the order from Senior Agent Nielsen.
    “FBI! Hands up. Back away from him!” Nielsen shouted as we ran forward.
    “
FBI!”
came a second shout. “Everybody, hands up!”
    Then everything went crazy. The other two abductors pulled out guns. The blond still held his to Agent Gautier’s skull.
    “Back off!”
he screamed. “I’ll shoot him dead! Drop
your
guns. I’ll shoot him, I promise you! I don’t bluff.”
    Our agents continued to move forward—slowly.
    Then the worst thing happened—the heavyset blond shot Agent Paul Gautier in the face.

Chapter 87
    BEFORE THE SHOCK of the gun blast had faded, the three men took off running very fast. Two of them galloped toward Park Drive, but the blond who’d shot Paul Gautier sprinted out onto Boylston Street.
    He was a big man, but he was motoring. I remembered hearing from Monnie Donnelley that great Russian athletes, even former Olympians, were sometimes recruited into the Mafiya.
Was blondie a former jock?
He moved like it. The confrontation, the shooting and everything else, reminded me of how little we knew about the Russian mobsters. How did they work? How did they think?
    I took off after him, an overload of adrenaline rocketing through my body. I still couldn’t believe what had happened. It could have been avoided. Now Gautier was possibly dead, probably dead.
    I ran as I shouted, “Take them alive!” It should have been obvious, but the other agents had just seen Paul Gautier gunned down. I didn’t know how much street action, or combat, any of them had seen before. And we desperately needed to question the kidnappers once we caught them.
    I was getting winded. Maybe I needed more time in the physical-training classes at Quantico, or maybe it was because I’d spent too much time sitting around inside the Hoover Building these past few weeks.
    I chased the blond killer through a tree-lined residential area. A moment later, the trees cleared and the glittering towers of the Prudential Center and the Hancock loomed ahead. I glanced back. Three agents trailed behind, including Peggy Katz, who had her gun out.
    The man running ahead of me was approaching the Hynes Convention Center with four FBI agents racing behind. I was closing on him, but not enough. I wondered if maybe we’d gotten lucky:
Could this be the Wolf up ahead? He was hands-on, right? If it was, then we had him for murder.
Whoever he was, he was still moving well. A long-distance sprinter.
    “Stop! We’ll shoot!” one of the agents yelled behind me. The blond Russian didn’t stop. He made a sharp, sliding turn down a side street. It was narrow and darker than Boylston. One way. I wondered if he’d thought about his escape route before this. Probably not.
    The extraordinary thing was that he hadn’t hesitated when he shot Agent Gautier.
I don’t bluff,
he’d said. Who would murder so casually? With so many FBI