Page 43 of The Big Bad Wolf (Alex Cross 9)

She seemed surprised by the question. “I won’t tell you that. Nothing is official yet.”

“What do you mean, ‘nothing is official yet’?” I asked.

“No action has been taken against Ms. Donnelley. We will probably pull her off this investigation, though. That’s all I have to say on the subject for now. You can go back to Quantico.”

I guessed I’d been dismissed.

Chapter 60

I CALLED MONNIE as soon as I could and told her what had happened. She got furious—as she should have. But then Monnie took hold of herself. “All right, so now you know—I’m not as controlled as I look,” she said. “Well, fuck them. I didn’t leak anything to the Washington press, Alex. That’s absurd. Who would I tell—our paperboy?”

“I know you didn’t,” I said. “Listen, I have to stop at Quantico, then how about I take you and your boys for a quick meal tonight? Cheap,” I added, and she managed to sniffle out a laugh.

“All right. I know a place. It’s called the Command Post Pub. We’ll meet you. The boys like it there a lot. You’ll see why.”

Monnie told me how to get to the pub, which was close to Quantico on Potomac Avenue. After I made a stop at my temporary office at Club Fed, I drove over to meet her and her two boys. Matt and Will were just eleven and twelve. They were big dogs, though, like their father. Both were already close to six feet.

“Mom says you’re okay,” said Matt as he shook hands with me.

“She said the same about you and Will,” I told him. Everybody at the table laughed. Then we ordered guilty pleasures—burgers, chicken wings, cheese fries, which Monnie figured she deserved after her ordeal. Her sons were well mannered and easy to be with, and that told me a lot about Monnie.

The pub was an interesting choice. It was cluttered with Marine Corps memorabilia, including officers’ flags, photos, and a couple of tables with machine gun rounds in them. Monnie said that Tom Clancy had mentioned the bar in Patriot Games, but in the novel he said there was a picture of George Patton on the wall, which upset the bar’s regulars, especially since Clancy had made a career out of being in the know. The Command Post was a Marines bar, not Army.

When we were leaving, Monnie took me aside. A few Marines were going in and out. They gawked a little at us. “Thank you, thank you, Alex. This means a lot to me,” she said. “I know denials don’t mean a damn thing, but I did not leak information to the Washington Post. Or to Rush Limbaugh. Or O’Reilly, either. Or anyone fucking else. Never happened, never will. I’m true-blue to the end, which apparently could be near.”

“That’s what I told them at the Hoover Building,” I said. “The true-blue part.”

Monnie rose on her toes and kissed me on the cheek. “I owe you big-time, mister. You should also know you’re impressing the hell out of me. Even Matt and Will seemed neutral to positive, and you’re one of the enemy to them—grown-ups.”

“Keep working the case,” I told her. “You have exactly the right attitude.”

Monnie looked puzzled, but then she got it. “Oh, yeah, I do, don’t I. Fuck them.”

“It’s the Russians,” I said, before I left her at the door of the Command Post. “It has to be. We’ve got that much right.”

Chapter 61

TWO PEOPLE VERY MUCH IN LOVE. Often a beautiful thing to watch. But not in this case, not on this starry night in the hills of central Massachusetts.

; The devoted lovers’ names were Vince Petrillo and Francis Deegan, and they were juniors at Holy Cross College in Worcester, where they had been inseparable since their first week as freshmen. They’d met in the Mulledy dorm on Easy Street and had rarely been apart since. They’d even worked at the same fish restaurant the past two summers in Provincetown. When they graduated, they planned to be married, then do the grand tour through Europe.

Holy Cross was a Jesuit school that, justly or unjustly, had some reputation for being homophobic. Offending students could be suspended or even expelled under the Breach of Peace rule, which forbade “conduct which is lewd or indecent.” The Catholic Church did not actually condemn “temptation” toward members of the same sex, but homosexual acts were often considered “intrinsically perverted” and seen as constituting a “grave moral disorder.” Because the Jesuits could be hard on homosexual relationships, among the students, anyway, Vince and Francis kept theirs as private and secret as they could. In recent months, though, they had started to figure their relationship probably wasn’t a very big deal, especially given the scandals among the Catholic clergy.

The Campus Arboretum at Holy Cross had long been a hangout for students who wanted to be alone and those who had romantic intentions. The garden area boasted over a hundred different kinds of trees and shrubs, and overlooked downtown Worcester, “Wormtown,” as it was sometimes called by students.

That night Vince and Francis, dressed in athletic shorts, T-shirts, and matching purple-and-white baseball caps, strolled down Easy Street to a brick patio and lawn area known as Wheeler Beach. It was crowded, so they continued on to find a quiet spot in the arboretum.

There, they lay on a blanket under a nearly full moon and a sky studded with stars. They held hands and talked about the poetry of W. B. Yeats, whom Francis adored and Vince, a pre-med student, tolerated as best he could. The two men were an unusual couple physically. Vince was just over five-foot-seven and weighed one eighty. Most of it was solid, due to his obsessive weight lifting at the gym, but it was obvious he had to work hard at it. He had curly black hair that framed a soft, almost angelic face that wasn’t too much different from his baby pictures, one of which his lover carried in his wallet.

Francis could make either sex drool, and that was Vince’s private joke when they were among coeds, “Drool, fools!” Francis was six-foot-one, without an ounce of fat. His white-blond hair was cut in the same style he had adopted as a sophomore at Christian Brothers Academy in New Jersey. He adored Vince with all his heart, and Vince worshiped him.

They came for Francis, of course.

He had been scouted, and purchased.

Chapter 62