Merry Christmas, Alex Cross ac-19 Read online

  “We got Nyquil and other stuff in the locomotive cab up here. Ice building on them rails?”

  “Nothing to worry about,” Nazad said.

  “You better start heading this way, then,” Tony said. “Union Station’s saying we might be able to move along here at some point.”

  “They say what’s going on?”

  “Some nut’s loose in the station, but they’re bringing in dogs after her.”

  Dogs? Nazad flashed on Hala, begged Allah to have mercy on her, and then responded, “Be right along. Fast as I can get through this snow.”

  The Tunisian stuck the radio in his coat, looked at the three men. One said, “Everything is in the van, brother. We are good?”

  Nazad thought about that, shook his head, pointed at the other two men and then the dead body. “Bury this one in the snow on the other side of the tracks, where he won’t be seen from the freeway when it melts.”

  He looked back to the third man. “You come with me, Aman.”

  “Where are we going, brother?” Aman asked, confused.

  Nazad said, “To see this Tony who drives the train before he comes looking for his friend.”

  CHAPTER 76

  The second hand on my watch swept past twelve. A minute had elapsed.

  “Her call,” I said, and then I nodded to Mahoney, who spoke into his radio and ordered the dog team at the far west end to pick up her scent.

  From my position midterminal on the rear platform, facing the locomotive for the Crescent train, I saw a rottweiler, as dark as Jasper was white, leap off the postal loading dock on a leash. His handler let him sniff the jacket and boots Hala had left in the ventilator duct.

  Flanked by FBI HRT personnel, three to a side, the dog started to arc northwest and quickly disappeared from my view. I looked to Officer Carstensen, who was stroking Jasper’s head.

  “Will we know when he’s got the scent?” I asked.

  Before she had time to answer, an excited howl rose and then broke into baying.

  “That Pablo’s a good dog,” Carstensen said.

  I picked up the microphone that connected me to the terminal’s public address system and said, “Can you hear him, Hala? His name is Pablo. He smells you. You can’t see him yet, but that dog’s salivating, wild with the idea of tracking you down. So are the others. There’s an absolute monster dog named Jasper here next to me. He’s dying to meet you too.”

  Mahoney looked at me, amused. “You’re kind of enjoying that, Alex.”

  I shrugged. “You always say, if you’re gonna do something, do it right.”

  “Now?” Carstensen said.

  “We’re following your lead from here on out,” I replied.

  The K-9 officer listened for the barking of the tracking dog and then gave her animal partner an order I did not understand. But Jasper certainly did. If the dog had been a football player, he’d have been a safety, up on his toes, alert, excited, ready to cut in any direction. Jasper’s ears stood straight up, swiveled like mini satellite dishes. He raised and lowered his head, halted, quivered, and then surged against the leash and barked.

  “He hears something,” Carstensen said.

  “You gonna let him go?”

  “Didn’t you say there could be booby traps?”

  I nodded.

  “Then I’ll be holding him until I get a visual,” she said, gripping Jasper’s leash with both hands. You could tell the dog wanted to run. You could also tell Carstensen loved the dog too much to let him. We followed her lead, heading out onto platform F, the Crescent to our left. Amtrak had opened all doors on all trains in the terminal so the dogs could scent-check each car.

  Four or five cars along, Jasper paused, listening to the sound of the other two dogs barking in the terminal. Then he nosed around the exit to the sixth car and began progressing at a brisker pace, as if he were ignoring things he knew to be ignorable, moving to his own music.

  I don’t know if this makes sense, but Jasper seemed so sure of himself that I was confident that Hala Al Dossari was as good as subdued, cuffed, and on her way to the federal lockup across the river in Alexandria.

  What the hell was I thinking?

  CHAPTER 77

  Omar Nazad moved easily in the space between the freight cars and the tunnel wall, listening to the dry crunch of the coarse gravel under his boots, such a change from the snow. The soft echoes of Aman’s footfalls came to him from the other side of the train. Aman wore a headlamp that glowed a soft red, just enough for him to see the way ahead, not quite strong enough to attract attention.

  The Tunisian, however, carried Robby’s flashlight and wore the dead rail worker’s hat and coat. He wanted to attract attention. He wanted Tony, who he figured was the engineer in the locomotive cab, to be focused on him and how at ease he seemed.

  Nazad had no choice in the matter. The original plan had called for leaving the train intact and letting it chug north with the engineers having no idea that the load had been hijacked and substituted. But the dead railroad worker had changed everything. They needed to improvise, make sure that the freight train continued north.

  He and Aman kept pace in the tunnel, adjusting to each other when they passed between cars. At last Nazad saw the halo of light thrown from the cab. He did not hesitate but went straight to the ladder and began noisily climbing up the side of the locomotive to the narrow steel platform by the door. A soft light in a metal protective housing glowed above and to the left of the door.

  The dead rail worker had had a key card in his pocket, and Nazad had given it to Aman. He prayed the fool of a Turk was climbing quietly. Keeping below the window, he got to the left of the cab door. Nazad reached up, twisted the bulb dark, and then knocked.

  “Use your key, for Christ’s sake, Robby,” a voice yelled back. “I’m pouring us some holiday grog here.”

  The Tunisian rapped his knuckles on the glass again.

  “For Jesus’s sake, Robby, I love you, but you’re an imbecile sometimes.”

  He heard a creaking noise and thought he saw a shadow before a pie-faced man wearing a white shirt, Christmas-green suspenders, and a Santa hat appeared in the door window. He was carrying a coffee cup and a fifth of Johnnie Walker, and he peered out with confusion before he flipped some kind of switch or pressed some kind of button.

  The door slid back with a sigh. Nazad flipped on the Maglite and swung it and the gun around and into the doorway, expecting to find Tony on the other end of the muzzle. But in the next instant, he realized that the engineer had stepped back and to the right.

  The Tunisian also saw that there was a second man in the cab, sitting in front of what looked like the instrument panel of a modern jet airplane. Instinct took over. Nazad began to pivot the pistol toward Tony, yelled, “Down on the-”

  But the engineer was too quick for him. With a flick of his wrist, Tony hurled scalding-hot coffee at Nazad’s face.

  Blinded in one eye, the Tunisian screamed and dropped the gun. The pain was excruciating, far worse than the knee to the stomach and the blow to the back that quickly leveled him. He heard Tony say, “Call Union, Pete. Tell ’em we’ve got our own nutcase down here. And a man missing.”

  A whoosh. “Drop the gun, or I blow your brains out!” Aman shouted.

  Nazad heard a gun clatter to the floor. He raised his head, looked around with his good eye. Aman stood in the doorway, shaking from head to toe, swinging his pistol from one railroad worker to the other, screaming, “And no one calls anyone!”

  CHAPTER 78

  Beneath the last car on the crescent, Hala listened to the dogs baying. She thought of how quickly Cross had identified and attacked her one weakness. She heard the different barks coming at her; it was almost as if they were triangulating in on her. Her mind conjured images of them coming after her, ripping at her skin, and she became totally panic-stricken, crying out to God for mercy and deliverance, and finding none.

  The children.

  Hala swore she heard T
ariq’s voice calling to her again.

  You must fight for them, Hala.

  It was Tariq’s voice. Her dead husband talked to her from beyond the grave. Fight for our children, Hala.

  The image of her son and daughter surfaced in her drugged and terrorized mind. She saw her children threatened by dogs. In an instant, Hala felt all fear and all pain drain from her, leaving her trembling, blinking, as if her spirit had been slipped back into her body somehow.

  The dogs’ barking was closer now. The only possible way to freedom was straight ahead, toward the far north end of the terminal and the Ivy City Yard. But she knew she’d be in the open, and she’d probably face dogs and gunfire there as well. It would be a lone martyr’s suicide.

  Hala would not let that be her fate. If she was going to die, she wanted enemies of God to die along with her. That was the death of a holy warrior. That was the ending she wanted.

  Ignoring the dogs, Hala crawled out from under the train car, slammed her back against it, stuffed one grenade in the open top of her blue jumpsuit, and pulled the pins from the remaining two. She saw headlamps cutting to the west. The trackers were almost on her. She heard a bark over her right shoulder, no more than fifty, sixty yards behind her.

  Hala whipped the two grenades underhand, one left, one right, both at ninety-degree angles to her position, toward the rottweiler and toward the raised loading platform. Pressing her face against the back of the train car, digging out the pistol and the remaining grenade, Hala felt outside of herself, already spirit, no longer tethered to the husk of her body, an avenging instrument of heaven.

  The grenades went off within a second of each other, throwing dust and debris, leaving a caustic smell in the air and making a sound so deafening that for a beat, Hala could hear nothing but the echo of the dog’s bark that had come the instant before the first grenade exploded.

  The dog had been to her left. Closer than she’d expected. Almost on her.

  Fight, Hala.

  She saw herself as that little girl going after the dogs with the stick, saw the whole scene as if it were playing on screens all around her.

  Hala suddenly threw herself to her left, up to the loading platform and onto her knees, the pistol in her left hand, the grenade in her right.

  A female police officer covered in dust knelt next to a whimpering white German shepherd with a growing red stain on its side. Hala’s instinct was to shoot the cop and the dog and save the grenade to take as many enemy lives as she could. But then she spotted a large figure crouched in the lingering dust behind the policewoman and the dog.

  Alex Cross was aiming a pistol at her.

  “Drop it, Hala!” he roared.

  “Catch, Cross,” Hala said, and lobbed the grenade at him.

  CHAPTER 79

  I saw the grenade leave Hala’s hand and turn end over end, its safety lever flipped, and everything about me seemed over.

  My life did not pass before me. I did not see Bree, the kids, Nana, my friends, or my Lord and Savior. There was just the grenade and the end of things somersaulting toward me at last.

  I’ll never know why my body did what it did then. There was no thought involved, no voice screaming at me to act in a certain way. My only explanation is that my subconscious was hyper-aware of my surroundings, saw things that my conscious self did not. It took control and made me do something approximating a move I’d seen only once, at a jai alai game Sampson had dragged me to in Atlantic City a few years before.

  It all seemed to go down in slow motion then, the way I accepted the grenade with my right hand as if I were catching a fragile egg, the way my feet pivoted hard left, the way my legs uncoiled, hurling my upper body away from Hala, Officer Carstensen, and the wounded dog. My right arm whipped over. My fingers released. The grenade flew fifteen feet into the open door of the train car. I flung myself down on the cement platform, threw my arms up over my head.

  I heard a gunshot before the explosion blew out windows on both sides of the Crescent, the sound almost rupturing my eardrums. I felt glass shards slicing into my scalp and hands but knew I had been saved from the brunt of the blast. I lay there no more than a beat before the adrenaline in my body surged again, and with my service pistol leading, I swung myself up into a sitting position, ignoring the tiny streams of blood dripping down my face and off my slick hands.

  Hala was gone.

  Officer Carstensen lay in her own blood, shot through the right shoulder. She looked at me, dazed, released her hold on Jasper, and gestured weakly with her left hand as she tried to speak. I couldn’t hear, but I understood. Hala had rolled backward off the platform the same way she’d rolled on.

  Jasper sniffed at the blood on his handler’s shirt, got to his feet with his hackles rising, and lunged away from Carstensen. The wounded dog took two bounds and then leaped off the loading platform.

  Sound began to return to me, a dull roar, and then ringing, and then the thud of another gunshot, terribly close. The sound of Jasper yipping in pain was followed by the most terrified screams I have ever heard.

  These things all brought me to my feet. I jumped from the end of the loading platform, gun drawn, spotting the tracking dog and the HRT operators moving swiftly toward us.

  I went down on my knees and aimed the Maglite beam under the railcar, searching for the source of the screaming. Jasper had been shot again, this time in the back leg. I could see broken bone and torn sinew.

  But he had Hala pinned on her right side, and she was screaming in Arabic. Jasper had bitten deep into her left biceps and was shaking her as if trying to tear her arm loose from its socket.

  CHAPTER 80

  Omar Nazad found antibiotic cream and bandages in the freight train’s first-aid kit. And he’d eaten a few of those pills Hala had insisted they all carry, so his face and blinded eye throbbed less.

  In fact, the Tunisian felt like he was on top of things once more, doing Allah’s work, as he sat astride the train engineer, pinning the man’s back and shoulders to the floor of the cab. Aman was on the floor as well, bracing Tony’s head between his knees and pressing his gun to the engineer’s temple.

  From the floor, the Tunisian picked up a cup of coffee. It was fresh and scalding hot; he’d just taken it out of the microwave at the back of the cab. He held it with his right hand, feeling warm and fuzzy as he reached toward the engineer’s horrified face.

  “No! What are you doing?” Tony yelled.

  Nazad smiled. “What’s that saying from your Old Testament? An eye for an eye?”

  “No! Please!” Tony screamed as the Tunisian pried up his right eyelid.

  “It’s either this or death, infidel,” Nazad said, and he poured the boiling-hot coffee onto the engineer’s eye, saw it turn gray and then milky as Tony went insane, bucking and screeching out pleas to God and his mother.

  Now the Tunisian felt better about losing his sight in one eye, and he got up off the engineer. Tony rolled around, hands covering the wounded eye.

  “He needs a hospital,” said Pete, the other engineer, who’d watched in shock. “And so do you.”

  “I need only God’s blessing,” Nazad snarled. “You take him to the hospital when you finish your trip.”

  “What?” Pete said.

  “What is your destination?” the Tunisian asked.

  “New Jersey. Freight yard on the west side of the Hudson.”

  “When you get there, you may take your friend to the hospital,” Nazad said, and then he looked at Aman.

  In Arabic, he said, “This is your destiny, brother. You will stay on the train until you reach New Jersey, and then make your escape. Go to the Syracuse house.”

  Upset, the Turk said, “But that’s not the plan. I won’t be there to see the blow struck.”

  “And I lose an eye to see the blow struck,” Nazad snapped. “These things are the will of God, brother. The will of God.”

  Book Three

  Leaving On A Fast Train

  CHAPTER 81 />
  They rushed both officer Carstensen and Jasper out on stretchers from the Union Station terminal. They took Hala Al Dossari to Captain Johnson’s office on a stretcher too that Christmas night. Plastic ties bound her wrists and ankles. Straps pinned her flat to the board. She’d be kept in Johnson’s office until the roads were clear enough for the Feds to transfer her.

  As the EMTs worked to clean up my cuts, I called home. Bree answered.

  “Hey,” I said. “It’s done. I’m good. Couple nicks, but good. Well, a lot of nicks, but still good.”

  I heard my wife exhale gently. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all day, Alex. When will you be home?”

  “Before midnight,” I promised. “Just a few things to take care of now.”

  “You gonna tell me what happened?”

  “Full disclosure,” I said. “After I open that present you were telling me about at dinner.”

  “Hmm,” she said, a bit skeptically. “Unless you’re a superman, I don’t think you’ll be ready or able to unwrap something like that tonight.”

  “There’s always tomorrow.”

  “We’re celebrating Boxing Day now?”

  “That too. Christmas has twelve days, you know.”

  She laughed, said, “I love you.”

  “I love you too. Before you know it, I’ll be snoring in bed next to you.”

  “Perfect,” she said, and she hung up.

  Eventually, the EMTs finished cleaning and bandaging my cuts. They said I needed to go to a hospital to have the wounds checked by a doctor. Instead, I headed to Captain Johnson’s office. Hala was probably still there, but soon the roads would be good enough for her to be transferred; she’d be taken to the Alexandria detention center, where she’d be held until her arraignment in federal court.