Read Online The Wolf by Lorenzo Carcaterra - Free Book Online Page B

but loyal following of roughly two hundred men, all as educated as he was and equally as fanatical. He was well-funded, holding private bank accounts in Switzerland, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, three countries where banks are known to ask few questions. He traveled often and seldom slept in the same bed more than three nights in a row. He had a wife and two sons living in the suburbs of Cairo and a teenage mistress who occupied the top floor of a modest hotel on an island in southern Italy. But he spent the bulk of his time with a third woman, an American from Northern California, whose biographical information remained sketchy. All I knew about her at this point was that she had graduated from Northwestern with a degree in economics, worked for two years at a small accounting firm in New York, and met Al-Madel there. She became smitten with his charm, then his cause.
    I sat back in the leather chair and looked at the chessboard. The crime bosses were right to question my desire to declare open war on the terrorists and their sponsors. It was difficult enough to go head-to-head with an enemy you knew.
    Here, we would be up against thousands of young men who fit Al-Madel’s profile, eager to die and take as many innocents with them as possible. They weren’t after control of an operation or looking to come out of their gamble with a profit. Their victory rested in death, their spoils were the remains they left behind—in a schoolyard, a church, a crowded airport, crashing a plane through a building, or dropping vials of poison in the middle of a packed train. How do you take down somebody whose goal is to be taken down ? Carbone, the French crime boss, had asked as we made our way out of the meeting. If you come up with an answer, maybe we have a chance. If not, we’re going to be knee deep in blood for many years.
    Carbone wasn’t wrong.
    I had designed a road map I believed would lead to victory. But I felt there was still something missing. I leaned forward and moved my pawn in front of a Victorian-era version of a knight and looked up at Al-Madel’s photo. There were too many of them. Too many Al-Madels spread throughout the world, each more eager to die than the next. I needed to figure a way to lessen the impact of such a numerical disadvantage. I would need to be three steps ahead of them at every play—detect their objective, break their plan, reach them before they could do damage.
    And the only way for me to do this was to know who was calling the shots. Who was directing the Al-Madels of the world? If I knew for certain who that person was—or who those people were—and was able to anticipate the moves, then we had a chance.
    The terrorist landscape was changing. It was no longer solely the realm of Middle Eastern fundamentalists, though they got all the attention. Each country had its own growing contingent, either disenchanted with the direction of their government or fueled by drugs and ready to right perceived wrongs. These free floaters would be the most difficult targets to pinpoint, because their faces could be any face, anywhere—from a neglected teenager in Ohio to an abused housewife in Budapest to a middle-age drifter in Norway. I would need to solve the riddle of a thousand nondescript faces.
    I held the queen, debating whether to move her in direct line of a rook and a knight, anticipating the consequences of such an action to the second move, never the first. I knew Vladimir would utilize terrorists who did not fit the profile, promise them great wealth or financial security for their families.
    His first move was obvious—keep the Colombian cartels in the loop, make them think they were more than shadows of the Mexican gangs who had grown so large that they now eclipsed their once more powerful adversaries. Together, the Mexicans, Colombians, Russians—and the terrorists they were exploiting—had enough manpower and financial resources to enter the profitable world of organized crime and