The Big Bad Wolf

trouble stopping pedestrian flow.
    Mahoney drove up to the blockade. We left a window cracked for the dog. He and I jumped out and ran toward the Gap. We were wearing flak jackets, carrying handguns.
    The store lights were blazing. I could see people inside. But not the Wolf. Not the bodyguard either.
    “We think it’s him,” an agent told us when we got up close to the store.
    “How many gunmen inside?” I asked.
    “We count two. Two that we know about. Could be more. There’s a lot of confusion.”
    “Yeah, no shit,” said Mahoney. “I get that impression.”
    For the next few minutes nothing useful happened—except that more Lauderdale patrol cars arrived on the scene. So did a heavily armed and armored SWAT unit. A hostage negotiator showed up. Then a pair of news helicopters began to hover over the Gap and surrounding stores.
    “Nobody’s answering the goddamn phone inside,” the negotiator reported. “It just rings.”
    Mahoney looked questioningly at me and I shrugged. “We don’t even know if it’s them inside.”
    The negotiator took up a bullhorn. “This is the Fort Lauderdale police. Come out of the store now. We’re not going to negotiate. Come out with your hands up. Whoever’s in there, get out now!”
    The approach sounded wrong to me. Too confrontational. I walked up to the negotiator. “I’m FBI, Agent Cross. Do we need to back him into a corner? He’s violent. He’s extremely dangerous.”
    The negotiator was a stocky guy with a thick mustache; he was wearing a flak jacket, but it wasn’t secured. “Get the fuck away from me!” he shouted in my face.
    “This is a federal case,” I shouted right back. I grabbed the bullhorn out of his hand. The negotiator went at me with his fists, but Mahoney wrestled him to the ground. The press was watching; to hell with them. We had a job to do here.
    “This is the FBI!” I said into the bullhorn. “I want to talk to Pasha Sorokin.”
    Then suddenly the strangest thing of the night happened, and it had been a very strange night. I almost couldn’t believe it.
    Two men emerged from the front door of the Gap.
    They held their hands in front of their faces, shielding them from the cameras, or maybe from us.
    “Get down on the ground!” I shouted at them. They didn’t comply.
    But then I could see—it was Sorokin and the bodyguard.
    “We’re not armed,” Sorokin yelled, loudly enough for everybody to hear. “We’re innocent citizens. We have no guns.”
    I didn’t know whether to believe him. None of us knew what to make of this. The TV helicopter over our heads was getting too close.
    “What’s he doing?” Mahoney asked me.
    “Don’t know . . .
Get down!
” I shouted again.
    The Wolf and the bodyguard continued to walk toward us. Slowly and carefully.
    I moved ahead with Mahoney. We had our guns out. Was this a trick? What could they try with dozens of rifles and handguns aimed at them?
    The Wolf smiled when he saw me.
Why the hell was he smiling?
    “So, you caught us,” he called out. “Big deal! It doesn’t matter, you know. I have a surprise for you, FBI. Ready? My name
is
Pasha Sorokin. But I’m not the Wolf.” He laughed. “I’m just some guy shopping in the Gap. My clothes got wet. I’m
not
the Wolf, Mr. FBI. Is that funny or what? Does it make your day? It makes mine. And it will make the Wolf’s too.”

Chapter 106
    PASHA SOROKIN
wasn’t
the Wolf.
Was that possible?
There was no way to know for sure. Over the next forty-eight hours it was confirmed that the men we had captured in Florida
were
Pasha Sorokin and Ruslan Federov. They were Red Mafiya, but both claimed never to have met the real Wolf. They said they had played the “parts” they were given—stand-in roles, according to them. Now they were willing to make the best deals they could.
    There was no way for us to know for sure what was going on, but the deal-making went on for two days. The Bureau liked to make deals. I didn’t. Contacts were made inside the Mafiya; more doubts were raised about Pasha Sorokin’s being the Wolf. Finally, the CIA operatives who’d gotten the Wolf out of Russia were found and brought to Pasha’s cell. They said he wasn’t the man they’d help get out of the Soviet Union.
    Then it was Sorokin who gave us a name we wanted—one that blew my mind completely, blew everybody’s minds. It was part of his “deal.”
    He gave us Sphinx.
    The next morning, four teams of FBI agents waited outside Sphinx’s