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 fifteen 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 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.