The Big Bad Wolf

CHAPTER 4

NEW-AGENT TRAINING at the FBI Academy in Quantico, sometimes called “Club Fed,”

was turning out to be a challenging, arduous, and tense program. For the most part, I liked it,

and I was making an effort to keep any skepticism down. But I had entered the Bureau with

a reputation for catching pattern killers, and I already had the nickname Dragonslayer. So

irony and skepticism might soon be a problem.

Training had begun six weeks before, on a Monday morning, with a crew-cut broad-shouldered SSA, or supervisory special agent, Dr. Kenneth Horowitz, standing in front of our

class trying to tell a joke: “The three biggest lies in the world are: All I want is a kiss, The

check is in the mail, and I’m with the FBI and I’m only here to help you.” Everybody in

the class laughed, maybe because the joke was so ordinary, but at least Horowitz had tried

his best, and maybe that was the point.

FBI director Ron Burns had set it up so that my training period would last for only eight

weeks. He’d made other allowances for me as well. The maximum age for entrance into the

FBI was thirty-seven years old. I was forty-two. Burns had the age requirement waived for

me and also voiced his opinion that it was discriminatory and needed to be changed. The

more I saw of Ron Burns, the more I sensed that he was something of a rebel, maybe

because he was an ex-Philadelphia street cop himself. He had brought me into the FBI as a

GS13, the highest I could go as a street agent. I’d also been promised assignments as a

consultant, which meant a better salary. Burns had wanted me in the Bureau, and he got me.

He said that I could have any reasonable resources I needed to get the job done. I hadn’t

discussed it with him yet, but I thought I might want two detectives from the Washington PD

John Sampson and Jerome Thurman.

The only thing Burns had been quiet about was my class supervisor at Quantico, a senior

agent named Gordon Nooney. Nooney ran Agent Training. He had been a profiler before

that, and prior to becoming an FBI agent, had been a prison psychologist in New Hampshire.

I was finding him to be a bean counter at best.

That morning, Nooney was standing there waiting when I arrived for my class in abnormal

psych, an hour and fifty minutes on understanding psychopathic behavior, something I

hadn’t been able to do in nearly ˙teen years with the



D.C. police force.

There was gunfire in the air, probably from the nearby Marine base. “How was traffic from

D.C.?” Nooney asked. I didn’t miss the barb behind the question: I was permitted to go home

nights, while the other agents-in-training slept at Quantico.

“No problem,” I said. “Forty-five minutes in moving traffic up on Ninety-five. I left plenty of

extra time.”



“The Bureau isn’t known for breaking rules for individuals,” Nooney said. Then he offered a

tight, thin smile that was awfully close to a frown. “Of course, you’re Alex Cross.”



“I appreciate it,” I said. I left it at that.

“I just hope it’s worth the trouble,” Nooney mumbled as he walked off in the direction of

Admin. I shook my head and went into class, which was held in a tiered symposium-style

room.

Dr. Horowitz’s lesson this day was interesting to me. It concentrated on the work of Professor

Robert Hare, who’d done original research on psychopaths by using brain scans. According to

Hare’s studies, when healthy people are shown “neutral” and >motional” words, they

respond acutely to emotional words, such as cancer or death. Psychopaths register the words

equally. A sentence like “I love you” means nothing more to a psychopath than “I’ll have

some coffee.” Maybe less. According to Hare’s analysis of data, attempts to reform

psychopaths only make them more manipulative. It certainly was a point of view.

Even though I was familiar with some of the material, I found myself jotting down Hare’s

“characteristics” of psychopathic personality and behavior. There were forty of them. As I

wrote them down, I found myself agreeing that most rang true.

Glibness and superior charm



Need for constant stimulation prone to boredom<p>

Lack of any remorse or guilt



Shallow emotional response



Complete lack of empathy…



I was remembering two psychopaths in particular: Gary Soneji and Kyle Craig. I wondered

how many of the forty characteristics” the two of them shared, and started putting



G.S. and K.C. next to the appropriate ones. Then I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned away

from Dr. Horowitz.

“Senior Agent Nooney needs to see you right now in his office,” said an executive assistant,

who then walked away with the full concept that I would be right on his heels.

I was.

I was in the FBI now.