Merry Christmas, Alex Cross Read online

“What if we get stuck again?” Saamad asked.

  “We won’t,” Nazad said. “I won’t allow us to get stuck.”

  “But what if we do?” Mustapha insisted.

  “We’ll dig it out!” Nazad yelled, wanting to brain the man with his shovel. “We’ll do whatever it takes.”

  A minute later they were all in the van, back where they’d left it so it would not be seen from the road. The Tunisian debated whether or not to turn on his headlights, opted to go with running lights, just enough to see the way forward.

  He stepped gingerly on the gas, heard the dreaded whine of the tires spinning, and then the treads caught and they crept forward, first at a crawl, and then faster.

  “Here we go!” Nazad said, cocking his head to see with his good eye.

  “Brother! Stop!” Saamad cried, pointing to their left, out onto M Street and the flashing red and yellow lights coming their way.

  Nazad slammed on the brakes and shut down the running lights.

  Two snowplows struggled down their side of the street, one trailing the other, throwing all the snow in two lanes toward them, leaving a compacted wall of snow and ice six feet high and fifteen feet deep.

  CHAPTER

  97

  “TALK, DOCTOR,” I SAID. “THOSE MEN ARE STILL WITH AAMINA AND FAHD.”

  “You must guarantee me that their safety will—” she began.

  Mahoney grabbed her chin. “We guarantee you nothing until we hear what you have to say.”

  She shook her chin free, glared at me.

  “Where’s the nerve gas?” I demanded. “Where’s it going?”

  Hala hesitated, glanced at the computer screen and her children with her mother. She said, “It’s on a train heading north.”

  Once Hala began talking, she seemed to enjoy our reactions to an audacious scheme designed to kill thousands and instill panic once again in New York City. She said that men loyal to Al Ayla worked janitorial services at Pinkler Industries, a chemical-manufacturing concern in South Carolina. The Family members discovered that Pinkler had developed a radical new compound belonging to the organophosphate family of chemicals.

  “The basis of all modern pesticides and of nerve gases, such as sarin and VX,” Mahoney said, sitting forward.

  Hala nodded. “The new compound could be processed precisely enough to eliminate a single species of insect in a field while allowing others to live. But it could also be used to create a gas far more deadly than either sarin or VX. We learned there was to be a shipment of the organophosphate, three barrels of it, going to a pesticide-manufacturing facility in New York. We found out it would be on a train heading north on Christmas Eve, that it would pass through Union Station and end up at a freight facility on the west shore of the Hudson River. Someone loyal to our cause would see all of it transferred onto a barge bound for Manhattan.”

  I frowned, not sure if I bought the story. “Back up a second. What was your job?”

  “I stopped the train.”

  I glanced at Mahoney, whose initial confusion gave way to understanding. “All of that was just to stop the train?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  Hala shrugged, said, “Somewhere outside the First Street tunnel before it goes under Capitol Hill and through Union Station to the Ivy City Yard.”

  I knew exactly where she was talking about. As young teenagers, Sampson and I had climbed the fence and gone into the tunnel a couple of hundred yards before we heard a train coming at us. Wasn’t that the fastest I’d ever run?

  Mahoney asked, “So, what, you stopped the train long enough for someone to steal the barrels?”

  She shook her head a little too quickly and said, “I stopped it long enough for a PhD student in chemistry to attach a timed system that will convert the compound to nerve gas when triggered.”

  “And?” I asked. “Who is going to trigger it?”

  Hala shrugged. “Whoever is in the van that is supposed to meet the freight barge tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Driver’s name?” Mahoney demanded.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t need to know. It’s better that way.”

  “So the van driver meets the freight barge, and then what?” I asked.

  She smiled. “He places the barrels in his van, triggers the system, puts on a gas mask, and drives around the city letting the gas escape, starting with Wall Street right after the markets close.”

  I flashed on the freight train that I’d seen after Hala was caught, coming from that tunnel and heading toward the Ivy City Yard, and remembered how it had made me think that some semblance of normalcy had returned to Union Station.

  Actually, I’d been watching a chemical weapon pass right under everyone’s nose.

  CHAPTER

  98

  I CHECKED MY WATCH: 12:31 A.M. CHRISTMAS HAD COME AND GONE, AND SO had my promise to Bree, along with an innocence that I had not known I had left to lose. But of course, although I’d heard testimony about it, had gathered evidence in its wake, I had never personally seen children tortured before.

  The freight train had gotten at least a three-hour head start. But it was traveling in the wake of a nor’easter barreling toward New York. We’d catch the train, stop it, and disarm that triggering device.

  Mahoney seemed to think the same thing. He got up and left the room to arrange for the Critical Incident Response Group to mobilize while he made plans to intercept the train.

  I studied Hala, who was staring at the table as if she couldn’t believe she was in this position: a traitor to her cause.

  I said, “Which freight car carries those organophosphates?”

  Hala looked at me as if she had one last card to play. “Twenty-ninth behind the engine,” she said. “It’s green with CSX and C. Itoh markings. You can’t miss it.”

  CHAPTER

  99

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, AT A QUARTER TO ONE IN THE MORNING, I STOOD IN the snow on the roof of the detention center with Ned Mahoney, waiting for a U.S. Marine helicopter that was coming in from Quantico loaded with members of the Critical Incident Response Group.

  “We’ve got a location on the train,” Mahoney said. “It’s almost to Trenton. We’ll stop it somewhere north of there, someplace rural.”

  “What if it’s booby-trapped?” I asked.

  “Believe me, we’ll be wearing full HAZMAT gear,” Mahoney said. “Sounds sporty, doesn’t it? I can’t believe you don’t want to be there to see this through.”

  I’d known Mahoney for nearly fifteen years, worked side by side with him for several of those years, had been to his home too many times to count, knew all the doings of his wife and children. And yet right then, he seemed a stranger to me.

  “I didn’t like what went on in that room, Ned,” I said.

  “You think I did, Alex?” he shot back.

  “It’s beneath us.”

  “It is,” he agreed, pain rippling through his face. “Shows you that you’ve got to meet people like that on their own turf, using their rules. It’s a sad thing to say, but true.”

  “They were kids.”

  “They were leverage against an insane scheme.”

  I heard the thumping of the helicopter coming, saw the spotlight on its belly. “What if her attorney finds out, Ned? Demands to see a tape of the interrogation. Everything Hala told us will be fruit of the poisoned tree, disallowed in court.”

  “Not everything has to play out in court,” Mahoney replied coldly. “Besides, when I raised my hand there just before we began, the battery pack on the camera in the observation booth mysteriously fell off. Anything that went on beyond that is baseless hearsay on Dr. Al Dossari’s part, her word against ours, and who is a judge going to trust, Alex? A twenty-year veteran of the FBI and the legendary Dr. Alex Cross, or a madwoman willing to send nerve gas into Manhattan?”

  I gazed at him as if he were transforming before my eyes, seeing new dimensions to his character. “I never pegged you as a ma
ster strategist, Ned.”

  He raised his arm to block the snow being thrown up by the helicopter, yelled, “I have my moments. You can take my car home if you’re good to drive.”

  “I’ll make it,” I said and accepted the keys as the chopper settled into the snow. “Ned?”

  “What’s that, Alex?”

  “Be careful,” I said. “You’ve got a lot of people to come back to.”

  Mahoney locked gazes with me, understanding. He shook my hand. “Thanks, Alex. It means a lot.”

  CHAPTER

  100

  I MADE IT HOME AT TWO IN THE MORNING ON THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS. Everyone had gone to sleep, though the lights on the tree still glowed in the front window, a beacon left on for me, I guessed. Where had the holiday gone?

  I kicked off my shoes, climbed the stairs, listened at the doors of my children and my grandmother, and felt drowsy at the rhythm of their breathing. Not even Nana’s gentle snoring could keep me awake.

  I slipped into my room, dropped my pants, and slid into bed, feeling the heat of Bree’s body. Her smell was there too, all around me. She rolled over, laid her head on my chest, murmured, “You okay, baby?”

  “I’m good now,” I said, and closed my eyes, telling myself to compartmentalize, to take refuge in my own bed with my wife holding me, and rest.

  But as I hugged Bree, my mind slipped back and forth between images of the Al Dossari children under torture and the details of the story Hala told us.

  Just before I plunged into sleep, I remembered something I’d said to Mahoney the evening before: Confessions made under torture can’t be taken seriously. They’re half-truths mixed with what the tortured person thinks the torturer wants to hear.

  CHAPTER

  101

  FOR AN HOUR AND A HALF, I SLEPT WITH NO DREAMS OF ANYTHING. BUT THEN, from the inky depths of my brain, images began to roll. I saw Hala lobbing the grenade at me. I saw Henry Fowler holding a gun to his ex-wife’s head and kicking at his children, who became Hala’s kids strapped to the torture chairs.

  The Saudi secret policemen in their hoods were there as well, one carrying the battery, the other holding the ends of the jumper cables. The one with the battery pulled off his hood, revealing himself as Mahoney. The second hooded man tried to get away, but Mahoney grinned grimly and tore the hood off his head.

  It was me. I was the one who held the jumper-cable clamps. Mahoney and I were laughing, enjoying ourselves the way we’d done dozens of times at backyard barbecues and other family get-togethers.

  My dream self opened the red clamp’s jaw wide, looked at the children, and seemed fascinated by the terror they displayed. I clamped the cable to Aamina’s chair, expecting the arch and trembling I’d seen her exhibit during her torture before.

  Instead, I heard a rhythmic buzzing noise that broke the spell and roused me from sleep. I was drenched with sweat. Bree rolled over and slept on. I looked at the clock groggily: 3:40 a.m. I needed at least ten, fourteen more hours, but my bladder felt full. And what was the noise that woke me?

  I slid out of bed as carefully as I could, stood, felt wobbly, and then noticed the message light blinking on my mobile. I picked it up, staggered to the bathroom, and sat down on the toilet because I did not think standing was such a good idea. Before I could check the message, the phone began buzzing in my hand, the sound that had wrenched me from sleep.

  It was Mahoney.

  I accepted the call, peed, and grumbled, “You a vampire or something? Never need sleep.”

  “Yeah, I’m a new character in that Twilight series my kid’s always reading,” he replied, and I could hear wind blowing hard.

  “Get the nerve gas?”

  “We got in a firefight with one of Hala’s coconspirators,” Mahoney said. “He’d been holding engineers at gunpoint. Sniper got him, and we freed the rail workers. One had been mutilated, his eyeball boiled.”

  That got me more awake. “What? An engineer’s eye?”

  “In revenge, because the engineer had done the same thing to the dead guy’s partner, with hot coffee. It’s a long story for another time. But they, the engineers, said the partner left the train in the First Street tunnel and went back toward the entrance, where the third man in the rail crew, a Robby Simon, had disappeared.”

  “You find the organophosphates and the triggering device in car twenty-nine?”

  “There were three blue barrels with Pinkler Industries labels in car twenty-nine,” Mahoney replied. “But when we opened them, we found sand and gravel.”

  I remembered the enthusiasm Hala had shown when she’d described the plot.

  “She fed us half-truths mixed with what we wanted to hear,” I said, furious at myself for wanting to believe her confession so much that I’d set aside my suspicions.

  “My instincts were right,” Mahoney said. “She stopped the train so other Al Ayla members could steal the chemicals.”

  My hand shot to my temple. “And they’re here. In DC.”

  “Last known whereabouts: two miles from Congress.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “We’re going back to Hala,” Mahoney said.

  I flashed with dread on the image of her kids being tortured.

  “You’re going, Ned,” I said. “I’m done with that.”

  I ended the call and shut the ringer off. I intended to return to bed. But then I realized that I was no more than fifteen blocks from where Hala’s accomplices had stolen the organophosphates.

  So was my family.

  My first reaction was to wake them all, move them from the area until the three barrels were found and neutralized.

  But then old habits reasserted themselves. Snow on the ground, I thought. They had to have left evidence around there somewhere.

  I picked up the phone and called the man I trusted more than anyone in my life.

  CHAPTER

  102

  OMAR NAZAD SAT IN THE CAB OF THE VAN, FEELING HIS STINGING HANDS AND feet begin to thaw, and stared through the windshield at the one hundred and twenty cubic yards of snow and ice that still lay between him and M Street.

  He and the Algerians had broken up and removed at least that amount in the past three hours. They were still only halfway to the road. They hadn’t eaten in twelve hours. And they hadn’t had anything to drink for six. The snow they put in their mouths seemed to make them even thirstier.

  “Inshallah,” the Tunisian kept muttering to himself. The will of Allah. It is God’s will that we must suffer and sacrifice and suffer again in order to defeat His enemies. This is a gift, somehow. A blessing.

  “We should leave, brother,” Mustapha said from the passenger seat.

  “I agree,” Saamad said. “Leave while we still can.”

  Nazad looked at them like they were mad. “Leave the best weapon the Family’s ever had? No. That is not what God wants.”

  “But what if Allah wants us to get caught and sent to prison?” Saamad demanded.

  “Shut up,” Nazad said. He was sick of the Algerians, how quick they were to cut and run. It had to be the French influence.

  “I have to eat something, drink something,” Mustapha complained.

  “I can’t help you.”

  “Maybe there was food in that shed,” Saamad said. “Water too.”

  Nazad looked at him again. “You didn’t search the entire place?”

  Mustapha shrugged. “The shovels and picks were right by the door.”

  Moments later they were all following the path the Algerians had taken to the toolshed earlier. The door hung open on its hinges, flapped in the wind. They went inside, flashed their lights, and saw a portable generator, half a dozen power tools, a jackhammer, three sledgehammers, more picks, a row of hard hats, a surveyor’s transom, and a cooler. Mustapha and Saamad went straight to the cooler, yanked it open, and cried out in delight.

  Saamad grabbed a granola bar and a frozen bottle of Gatorade, shook them at Nazad. “Allah be praised! Food and
drink, brother.”

  “And a jackhammer!” Mustapha cried.

  But the Tunisian paid them no mind. He was staring at a metal box attached to the wall and sealed with a Master Lock. On instinct, he retrieved one of the sledgehammers and tried to break the lock, but he couldn’t. He looked closely at the other tools now at his disposal and smiled.

  Nazad started the generator. Then he plugged in a Benner-Nawman rebar cutter. He fit the hasp of the lock into the jaws of the cutter and flipped it on. The jaws bit and snapped it in less than a second.

  The Algerians had been gnawing on frozen granola bars while he worked. Only when Nazad set the cutter down and pulled open the door to the box did Mustapha become interested.

  “What do you find in there, brother?” he asked.

  The Tunisian was beaming already, feeling blessed once again by God. The first thing his headlamp had revealed in the box was a row of keys hanging on hooks, all neat and orderly and tagged.

  The first key on the right said CAT D6K.

  CHAPTER

  103

  “YOU WOKE ME OUT OF A PERFECTLY GOOD SLEEP TO RIDE IN A SARDINE CAN?” John Sampson groaned, trying to get his massive frame into Mahoney’s Subaru at around four in the morning. He wore a snorkel jacket, hood up, and peered at me blearily from inside the fur trim. He took the travel cup of coffee I offered him.

  “Need help checking out a potential crime scene before I call in an evidence team,” I said, putting the Forester in gear. All-wheel drive and weighed down with Sampson’s and my combined four hundred and thirty pounds, the car moved like a mini tank into the tracks other cars had made going up and down Sampson’s street.

  “Potential crime scene?” Sampson asked, annoyed.

  “I don’t know exactly where the crime scene is, John,” I explained. “That’s why I need you. To help find it.”

  He groaned, drank the coffee. “Why do I feel like I’m two hundred moves behind you, Alex?”