"Ba-bye," said Little Alex, and so did Jannie and Damon, calling back to their brother, "Ba-bye, ba-bye!" I picked up Little Alex and we headed home; then it would be off to work for soon-to-be Agent Cross of the FBI. "Dada," said Little Alex as I carried him in my arms. That was right - Dada. Things were falling into place for the Cross family. After all these years, my life was finally close to being in balance. I wondered how long it would last. Hopefully at least for the rest of the day.

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.