Merry Christmas, Alex Cross Read online

  “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.

  The office door opened before I got to the FBI agent guarding it. Mahoney came out of the room, his face flushed. “She won’t say a damn thing in English, Alex, and seems to find the entire situation laughable. That’s not right. Someone like that’s just not right in the head.”

  “I think there’s not a doubt about that,” I said.

  “Yeah?” Mahoney said. “Well, I’ve got an idea that just might get her thinking right. I’ve got to go wake up some important people.”

  “Mind if I try talking to her in the meantime?”

  “They’re starting the transfer in five minutes,” Mahoney said, distracted. “But sure, go ahead, knock yourself out, Alex.”

  CHAPTER

  82

  “NORTHBOUND CSX FREIGHT, WE NEED TO GET THAT TUNNEL CLEARED, SO you’ll be first out,” said the Union Station radio dispatcher, his voice coming over the speaker built into the dash of the locomotive. “You’re good to go in five.”

  Aman pressed the muzzle of his pistol to Pete the engineer’s temple. With a shaky hand, Pete triggered the hand mike, said, “Appreciate it. Everyone safe up there?”

  “They set the dogs on her; got the bitch.”

  “Thank God,” Pete said.

  Omar Nazad wanted to pour scalding coffee into Pete’s eye too, but he restrained himself. There was nothing he could do for Hala now but execute the plan, make the great blow himself.

  “I leave, then,” he said, clapping Aman on the back. “Go with God, brother.”

  “And you, brother,” Aman said.

  The Tunisian never bothered to turn his weeping eye toward the other engineer, who sat in the corner moaning with pain.

  The cold wind coming up the tunnel was like new fire against the burns on Nazad’s cheek, but the bandage blocked it from hitting his eye. Nazad climbed down from the cab as the diesel engines coughed up black smoke through the exhaust stacks. The locomotive began to rumble.

  Nazad reached the ground, ate another pain pill, flipped on the Maglite. As the freight train groaned and began to move, the Tunisian started to jog in the opposite direction, toward the tunnel mouth, thinking pleasantly about the present he and his men would soon give to all Americans on Hala Al Dossari’s behalf.

  CHAPTER

  83

  I WENT INTO CAPTAIN JOHNSON’S OFFICE, SAW TWO FBI AGENTS I DIDN’T recognize standing on either side of Dr. Al Dossari’s stretcher, near a window that overlooked the terminal and the tracks. Hala gazed at me, seeming to feel a mixture of contempt and interest. Facing this woman who lived beyond the pale, whose beliefs and actions were virtually incomprehensible to me, I felt pretty much the same way about her.

  “I need a doctor, Cross,” she said.

  “You are a doctor,” I replied.

  “Have you not heard? One cannot heal oneself.”

  “I have heard that. What I don’t get is how a doctor becomes a terrorist.”

  “But you would understand how a doctor becomes a soldier?”

  Before I could figure out how to respond to that, I heard the now familiar sound of train wheels on tracks and watched a freight train emerge from a tunnel at the station’s east end and chug toward the Ivy City Yard and points north. Despite the fact that I was talking to a ruthless terrorist, I couldn’t help thinking that some degree of normalcy had returned to Union Station.

  “What was this all about?” I asked, gesturing out the window. “I mean, was it a spur-of-the-moment thing? Or part of something bigger?”

  She studied me, and I noticed her eyes were glassy and her pupils pinpoint. She said, “Spur-of-the-moment. I was in the area, bored on a holiday I don’t believe in, and decided to go out and play in the snow.”

  One of the agents pressed his earbud and then said, “Let them in.”

  Four U.S. Marshals came into the office, signed the necessary paperwork, and took Hala into their custody.

  “Good-bye, Cross,” she said as they wheeled her out. “I hope to meet you again.”

  “Probably sooner than later,” I said, and watched her go.

  I heard diesel engines starting, looked out the window, and saw the Crescent light up.

  “Dr. Cross?”

  I turned to find Captain Johnson, who’d stepped up to the window beside me. “I wanted to thank you. Without your bravery—”

  “Without a lot of people’s bravery, including yours.”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” he said, his eyes watering as he gestured out at the terminal and the trains. “But what if she’d managed to get something big in here? What if it had gone off?”

  “We can only guess at that kind of thing, Captain,” I said as the last car in the freight train disappeared from sight. “But for now, Christmas goes on.”

  CHAPTER

  84

  IF I’D MOVED QUICKER, FOLLOWED HALA AL DOSSARI AND HER ARMED GUARDS out of Union Station, found a taxi or a patrol car to take me back to my family, I might have made it home before midnight.

  But Mahoney caught me crossing the main hall. “I need you, Alex.”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve got to sleep, Ned. I’m a zombie, no help to anyone.”

  “I’ll get you a B-twelve shot,” Mahoney said. “Maybe with a kicker of caffeine and sodium benzoate.”

  “What?”

  “You never took a pick-me-up when you were with the Bureau?”

  “No. Never did.”

  “Works like a charm,” Mahoney said, sounding like he’d just gotten ten hours of sleep. “We’ll take care of you. We’ll go to Alexandria, have another chat with Hala Al Dossari.”

  “I don’t think she’ll be talking at any point soon. Time in the cell will loosen her up. More than enough time for me to rest and join you tomorrow afternoon, say.”

  “No say, Alex,” Mahoney complained. “I’ve arranged for a little show, something I think is guaranteed to open her up now.”

  “Okay, then go run your show. I don’t need to be there.”

  “Actually, you do. You’ll be the one to tell me if we’re going too far.”

  CHAPTER

  85

  OMAR NAZAD TURNED OFF THE FLASHLIGHT AND EMERGED FROM THE MOUTH OF the tunnel to find the storm had eased somewhat; there were just a few random flakes now. He waded into the snow, his eye weeping behind the bandage, his burned skin twitching at each contact with the frozen flakes.

  Above him on the elevated freeway, more cars were moving, which meant more streets and lanes had been plowed. It was good. It was a blessed thing. As traffic built, they would blend into the traffic, and—

  He heard a soft trilling sound, the call of the desert; he smiled and immediately gave a response back. His last two men, Saamad and Mustapha, were fearless Bedouins from the rugged dry mountains of southern Algeria, warriors for God who would not abandon him no matter what.

  Even with the one eye, the Tunisian spotted his brothers in arms standing there on the bank, and he struggled up through the snow to them.

  “What has happened to you, brother?” Saamad asked. “Where is Aman? Hala?”

  “Allah took my eye,” Nazad replied, he
aring the slight slur in his voice. “But I am happy to give it for our cause. Hala has been captured, but she will never speak of what we will unleash twenty-six days from now. And Aman is on the train and will make sure it gets far away from here before he makes his escape.”

  “Allahu Akbar,” Mustapha said.

  “God is great,” Nazad agreed. “Now, let’s get out of here, brothers.”

  CHAPTER

  86

  THE PLOWS HAD BEEN BUSY THE PAST FEW HOURS, PUSHING LANES CLEAR along many of the main routes of the nation’s capital. But they’d thrown up huge banks of snow that sealed off driveways and roads and that buried cars, making some streets look like they were lined with odd-shaped igloos.

  My right butt cheek was sore from the B12 shot, but, as Mahoney had promised, despite almost forty hours with minimal sleep, I felt alert. Mahoney drove, following a plow as it exited the Southeast Freeway onto 295 and took the Eleventh Street bridge to Virginia. It was slow going, but we had as good a driving surface as could be found that night.

  “I wonder why she never tried to contact him again,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “The guy she called. The one who was somewhere near the other end of this bridge.”

  “I dunno. But you’ll get the chance to ask her in a few minutes.”

  Still following the plow, we left the bridge and headed south on the Shepherd Parkway toward 495, Alexandria, and the detention center where they’d taken Hala Al Dossari to be interrogated and to await arraignment.

  I checked my watch. Pushing ten thirty. Last night around this time, I had been outside a mansion in Georgetown, trying to get a psychotic to answer the phone. Now I was on my way to watch Mahoney interrogate a sociopath. I felt tired of my profession right then, wondered what it would be like to change, to put a complete end to coming face-to-face with deranged people, to begin seeking out the good, sane folks, and only the good, sane folks.

  That caused me to think of Bree and wonder if I should call her to tell her of my likely delay. But what was the point? She had to be almost expecting that by now. The problem was that when other women in my life had finally come to expect my absence, they had gone on to make it permanent, something I was determined would not occur with Bree.

  “This absolutely has to happen now?” I asked, yawning.

  Mahoney nodded. Up until then, he hadn’t been willing to tell me what he planned for Hala Al Dossari, but now he said, “She’s tired, confused, in custody, figuring out she’s fucked for life, and she’s coming down off painkillers. Looks like Oxy, from the blood work they did on her.”

  I squinted. “You’re saying she’s a jihadist and a junkie?”

  “I don’t know about that,” Mahoney said. “But she had a bunch of pills with her, including Oxy, antibiotics, and muscle relaxants.”

  “Like she was expecting to be wounded.”

  “Or was just being a prepared doctor,” Mahoney said.

  CHAPTER

  87

  THE VAN’S REAR WHEELS SPUN IN THE SNOW, DIGGING DEEPER AND DEEPER troughs that almost immediately glazed over with ice.

  Omar Nazad pounded the wheel, furious, an emotion compounded and turned into homicidal rage by the shooting pains and twitches that had suddenly started all around his blinded eye. They’d been at this solidly for the past hour, trying to get the van free without attracting attention. It was eighty, maybe ninety, yards out to M Street. You could see the snowed-over tracks they’d laid down coming in. But the van hadn’t moved more than six feet in that direction since he’d returned from the tunnel.

  Saamad and Mustapha were exhausted. He told them to take some of the pills Hala had given them and try again. But even that had not helped. There was nothing they could do really, except…

  He jumped out of the van, turned it off, trudged around the back, and said, “We dig our way out.”

  “With what?” Mustapha grumbled. “Our hands?”

  “This is a construction site,” Saamad said. “We find shovels!”

  “Shovels?” Nazad said scornfully. “I’m hoping bulldozer or backhoe.”

  The Tunisian went around the construction site and looked in the cabs of the John Deere backhoe loaders and the Cat D6K bulldozer, but he found no keys. However, as he was climbing down off the second backhoe, the Algerians showed up with tools. They’d broken into a shed at the rear of the site and discovered shovels and picks.

  At a quarter to twelve, they began to dig the seventy yards to freedom.

  CHAPTER

  88

  THE ALEXANDRIA DETENTION CENTER SITS JUST WEST OF THE 495 FREEWAY, A couple of miles from the U.S. federal court and the local office of the American Civil Liberties Union, which monitors this jail, where terrorists are often held awaiting arraignment or trial.

  The U.S. Marshals Service contracts with the Alexandria sheriff’s office to hold suspected terrorists in custody, which they do incredibly well. It’s one of the cleanest, most humane houses of incarceration that I’ve ever visited.

  We found Hala Al Dossari chained by the ankles to a chair in an interrogation room that had the requisite Formica-topped table and one-way mirror with an observation booth behind it. A translator sitting in that booth would interpret anything Hala said in Arabic and report it to us through earbuds we wore. Hala had been cleaned. Her wounds had been treated. Her clothes had been taken for processing. She was dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit that said FEDERAL on the back. Her left arm hung in a sling.

  Hala had evidently been acting in a belligerent manner since being taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals. Despite her wounds, she had refused to cooperate with doctors or jail personnel. They had had to forcibly lift and move her through the medical examination and treatment, and then through the body and cavity search conducted at her intake. She’d refused food and water and had to be carried into the interrogation room by two deputies who’d been defensive linemen at Old Dominion.

  She ignored Mahoney and focused on me with an expression that revealed neither surprise nor fear.

  “We meet again, Cross,” she said. “So soon you want to talk? I do not think this is smart for me to do. I want my lawyer.”

  “Federal public defender’s on his way,” Mahoney said agreeably. “But it might be awhile. The snowstorm, you know.”

  “I say nothing to you anyway. So go ahead, we stay here all night.”

  “I’ll arrange that,” Mahoney said with a plastic smile, and he left the room, which was what he had told me he was going to do.

  I said nothing, just sat down and watched her watching me. It was still hard for me to believe that someone with such intelligence, training, and classic beauty had turned out so ruthless and cold-blooded.

  The silence, as I expected, finally unnerved her. “You the good cop?”

  “I like to think so, Dr. Al Dossari,” I said. “The fair one, at least.”

  “Fair,” she said as if she were spitting the word. “You used dogs on me.”

  I shrugged. “I knew dogs frightened you. I used it. You would have done the same thing.”

  She glared at me.

  “Why’d you kill your husband?”

  “I did not kill him. He killed himself at the order of a crazy man.”

  “Whom you in turn killed?”

  Hala said nothing.

  “Your dossier makes interesting reading. And the Saudi embassy has promised to ship over everything it has on you.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m sure I’ll find other things in there, ways to get inside your head.”

  Her chin rose, and she looked down her nose at me as if she were of noble birth and I were a slave. “You could spend every day of the rest of your life studying me, Cross, and you would not come close to an understanding of who I am.”

  “Some people are inexplicable,” I agreed. “But not you, Doctor. You are easy to explain. Even without more information about your shitty childhood or whatever drove you to the Family, I know yo
u will ultimately be defined by your fanaticism. That is how people will understand you, and how they’ll condemn you: as an insane doctor, a terrorist willing to poison and bomb innocent people for her own twisted ends.”

  CHAPTER

  89

  THE SMILE THAT HALA GAVE ME RAISED THE HAIR ON THE BACK OF MY NECK and almost made me shiver. “I can live with that,” she said. “Because I know there are two sides to every story. And I promise you, Cross, for every American who believes your version of events, there will be five Muslims who accept my story: that because of a deep and abiding faith, I decided to live the words of my Prophet and take up arms against the infidels right inside their own center of power. Am I crazy? Or brilliant? Honestly, I don’t mind either interpretation.”

  She didn’t. I could see it plain as day in her expression and in the cold tone of her voice. Hala Al Dossari was one of the most disturbing criminals I’d ever tangled with, super-smart but almost reptilian when it came to questions of life and death, able to extinguish a human as easily as she would a bug, as long as it was done in God’s name.

  “Where have you been the past ten months?” I asked.

  “Visiting old friends,” she said. “You?”

  I ignored the question. “I can help if you let me.”

  Hala laughed scornfully. “What can you do for me, Cross?”

  “Let you see light,” I replied.

  “I have already seen the light.”

  “Yes, and that’s what will make not seeing the sun so debilitating for you,” I said. “You’re used to a life spent in powerful sunlight, Dr. Al Dossari. Where you’re going, there will be no sunlight, and eventually it will affect your serotonin levels and you’ll fall into despair, a state you’ll remain in the rest of your life.”

  She looked at me, blinking but expressionless. “Or?”