The Big Bad Wolf

with the Dallas police.
    I stared absently at the house, a large two-story Tudor on about two and a half acres of very expensive real estate. It looked pristine. A redbrick sidewalk went from the street to an arched doorway, which led to a sixteen-room house. The big news that day in Dallas was about a fire in Kessler Park that had incinerated a 64,000-square-foot mega mansion. The Lipton spread was less than a third that size, but it was still impressive, or depressing, or both.
    It was around nine in the evening. A supervisory agent from the Dallas office, Joseph Denyeau, came on my earphones. “We just got word from the director’s office. We have to back off immediately. I don’t understand it either. The order couldn’t be any clearer, though. Pull back! Everybody head to the office. We need to reconnoiter and talk about this.”
    I looked at my partner in the car that night, an agent named Bob Shaw. It was pretty obvious that he didn’t understand what the hell had just happened either.
    “What was
that?
” I asked him.
    Shaw shook his head and rolled his eyes. “What do I know? We go back to the field office, drink some bad coffee, maybe somebody higher up explains it to us, but don’t count on it.”
    It took us only fifteen minutes to get to the field office at that time of night. We filed into a conference room at the field office, and I saw a lot of weary, confused, and pissed-off agents. Nobody was saying much yet. We’d gotten close to a possible break on this case, and now we’d been ordered to pull back. Nobody seemed to understand why.
    The ASAC finally came out of his office and joined the rest of us. Joseph Denyeau looked thoroughly disgusted as he threw his dusty cowboy boots up on a conference table. “I have
no
idea,
” he announced. “Not a clue, folks. Consider yourselves debriefed.”
    So about forty agents waited for an explanation of the night’s action, but one didn’t come, or wasn’t “forthcoming,” as they say. The agent in charge, Roger Nielsen, finally called D.C. and was told they would get back to us. In the meantime, we were to stand down. We might even be sent home in the morning.
    Around eleven o’clock Denyeau got another update from Nielsen and passed it on to us. “They’re working on it,” he said, and smiled wryly.
    “Working on what?” somebody called from the back.
    “Oh, hell, I don’t know, Donnie. Working on their pedicures. Working on getting all of us to quit the Bureau. Then there’ll be no more agents and, I guess, no more embarrassing screwups for the media to report. I’m going to get some sleep. I’d advise all of you to do the same.”
    That’s what we did.

Chapter 93
    WE WERE BACK at the field office by eight the next morning. Several of the agents looked a little messed up after the night off. First thing, Director Burns was on the line from Washington. I was pretty sure the director rarely, if ever, spoke to the troops like this. So why do it now? What was up?
    Agents around the room were looking at one another. Brows crinkled, eyebrows arched. No one could fathom why Burns was so involved. Maybe I could. I’d seen the restlessness in him, the dissatisfaction with the ways of the past, even if he couldn’t effectively change them all at once. Burns had started as a street cop in Philadelphia and worked his way up to police commissioner. Maybe he could change things at the Bureau.
    “I wanted to explain what happened yesterday,” he said over the speakerphone. Every agent in the room listened intently, myself included. “And I also wanted to apologize to all of you. Everything got territorial for a while. The Dallas police, the mayor, even the governor of Texas was involved. The Dallas police asked that we pull back because they didn’t have full confidence in us. I agreed to the action because I wanted to talk it through with them rather than force our presence there.
    “They didn’t want mistakes, and they weren’t sure that we have the right man. The Lipton family has a good reputation in the city. He’s very well connected. Anyway, Dallas was surprised that we listened to their concerns—and now they’ve backed off again. They respect the team we’ve assembled.
    “We will continue our action against Lawrence Lipton, and believe me, we’re going to take that bastard down. Then we’re going to take Pasha Sorokin down, the Wolf. I don’t want you to worry about past mistakes. Don’t worry about mistakes at