Merry Christmas, Alex Cross ac-19 Read online

  Diana followed the gurney. She stopped for a second and turned to me.

  “God bless you, Detective.”

  “You too. Take care of your husband, your kids,” I told her.

  “Somebody close the damn door,” Nu shouted. “It’s cold in here.”

  “Yeah, you’ve got it rough, Adam,” I told him.

  McGoey smiled and said, “The plan worked. You’re a smart guy.”

  “What if it hadn’t worked?” I asked. “What would you be saying then?”

  “I’d be saying, ‘You’re the dumbass who got himself shot on Christmas morning.’”

  The three of us took a last look at the living room. I doubted there was much that hadn’t been cracked, smashed, broken, or torn.

  “God,” said McGoey. “Looks like there was one helluva party here.”

  “Oh, there was,” I said. “One helluva party.” I shook my head. I felt like I should smile. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

  I looked at my watch. It was nearly eight thirty a.m. I took out my phone and tapped in Bree’s name.

  “Hey,” I said. “Save me some sweet bacon. I’m coming home.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Snow in Washington, DC, is always a disaster. Four inches can snarl traffic inside the Beltway. Eight inches will most definitely spawn a nightmare of accidents and near gridlock. True paralysis, however, arrives when the snow depth exceeds fourteen inches, a rare event.

  Between ten o’clock on Christmas Eve and ten the following evening, nearly twenty-three inches of snow would blanket the city. It shut down the airport. It shut down the Metro and the bus system. Few cars moved that entire Christmas Day.

  At around nine on that Christmas morning, there was only fourteen inches of snow to deal with, but I still couldn’t get my car to move. I had to have a Metro patrol unit bring me home. The officer and I had to get out twice to push the stuck cruiser from a drift over on Constitution Avenue. I’d given Nu back his extra boots, and my shoes got soaked and my toes were numb when I reached our home on Fifth Street.

  Needless to say, when my family heard the front door open, almost everybody rushed over to kiss me and hug me and wish me merry Christmas. I held Bree tight, said, “This is the best present I could ever get.”

  But Nana remained seated in her chair, her little throne.

  “My, my,” she finally said. “Is that my grandson over there? Must be a real special occasion that’s got him visiting. Oh, I guess it’s Christmas.”

  I walked to her chair and lifted her up. We stood with our arms around each other, and I never would have imagined a woman that size could have so much strength. She nearly squeezed the air right out of me.

  “I just made you some sweet bacon,” she said.

  “Sweet bacon and a nap sounds just about perfect,” I said.

  CHAPTER 44

  Even Nana Mama decided that spending Christmas Eve convincing a crazy man not to kill his family was enough of a reason for me to be excused from attending eleven o’clock mass.

  Bree tucked me in and I slept like a dead man for four hours, up until I heard Damon cheering downstairs. He’d become a big hockey fan at prep school and was watching a television broadcast of a game being played at a rink set up inside Fenway Park.

  I came downstairs groggily, smelled turkey roasting, and looked at the television. “Snowing in Boston too.”

  “It’s snowing everywhere,” Jannie said. “They say it won’t stop here until, like, tonight. Kind of a waste, if you ask me.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “If it was like two weeks from now, they’d call off school.”

  “The reporters say you saved a guy’s life last night,” Damon said.

  “Maybe two guys’ lives,” I replied.

  “That’s pretty cool.”

  “A gift, if you think about it.”

  I spent the rest of the afternoon eating too many cookies, watching the game, holding Bree whenever I could, and listening to my grandmother tell stories about Christmases past while she made yams with little marshmallows, and brussels sprouts with leftover bits of sweet bacon, and a pecan pie that I almost risked my fingers to taste.

  “Stay away from that now,” Nana kept saying and swatting at my hand.

  I taught Damon to carve the turkey when it came out of the oven around five. I carried that platter. Everyone else brought in his or her favorite dish. Damon had the marshmallow yams. Bree had whipped potatoes. Ava brought the cranberry sauce. Jannie carried the stuffing as if she were in a procession.

  And, just like every year, someone had to be asked to bring in the brussels sprouts. That would be me.

  We sat at the table with cloth napkins, good china, a little crystal for the Christmas wine.

  “Alex,” Nana said. That was my signal to say grace. We held hands with one another. Bree held mine so tight that I thought she might never let go.

  Then I spoke. “Let us thank the Lord for this meal. And also for our health and happiness. And-for being a good family gathered together like this on Christmas Day.”

  I paused and then said, “Now let us silently give our own personal thanks.”

  “I’m glad my dad is home!” Damon said and we all smiled.

  “Me too,” I said.

  Then the room went completely silent. The seconds passed. I had a lot to be thankful for: the safety of my family, my own survival, the joy of-

  The prayerful silence was broken by Ava.

  “I’m hungry. Doesn’t the Lord know it’s Christmas?”

  We all laughed. And then the bowls and platters of food were passed around. And just as we started to dig in, my cell phone rang.

  CHAPTER 45

  Before the phone jangled, everyone had been happy, thrilled to have me home at last, safe and sound. Now every face fell.

  Nana shook a butter knife at me. “Don’t you dare answer that, Alex. Don’t you dare.”

  Though everyone had been fine once I got home, I knew the hostage situation had taken its toll. Not only had I been in danger, but I had missed our family traditions. I had not been home to sing carols and put the kids to bed on Christmas Eve. I had not been up at dawn with Nana Mama to stuff the stockings. I had not been there to watch my children open their presents, and I had not been around to help make sweet bacon.

  I glanced at the caller ID, smiled, and said, “It’s Ali.”

  My six-year-old son was with his mother, Christine, for the holiday. Everyone’s shoulders relaxed. Bree grinned, got up, and said, “I’ll warm that pie.”

  “Merry Christmas,” I said as I picked up the phone.

  “God bless us, every one!” Ali cried.

  “Watching Scrooge?” I asked.

  “Last night,” Ali said. “Thank you for the boxing gloves.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Mommy doesn’t like them.”

  “You just bring them home with you, then.”

  “Santa gave me an Xbox. What did he get you?”

  “Seventeen inches of snow, and the best little boy in the world,” I replied.

  He laughed and boasted, “I went sledding in the park.”

  “Fun?”

  “We built a jump.”

  “Then it had to be fun,” I said. “Do you want to say hello to Nana and everyone?”

  He said he did and I passed the phone down the table to my grandmother, watching her light up as she listened. “Well, God bless us, every one, to you too, little man,” she said.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see Bree back from the kitchen, silhouetted against the fading day. My wife smiled and kissed me on the cheek. She smelled wonderful when she leaned over and whispered, “You’ll be getting a special gift later.”

  I smiled and squeezed her hand, feeling that, for at least a little while, nothing could possibly wreck our well-deserved celebration.

  CHAPTER 46

  At 5:19 that Christmas afternoon, a woman carrying a U.S. passport that ide
ntified her as Julia Azizz of Philadelphia tipped the Diamond Cab driver extremely well for bringing her all the way from Arlington, Virginia, to DC in the horrible weather. Then she got out of the taxi at the Massachusetts Avenue entrance to Union Station, north of Capitol Hill.

  Azizz shivered in the frigid wind and stepped into deep snow that workers were struggling to clear. The light was fading, but for the moment she kept her sunglasses on as she lugged a large, heavy shopping bag from Macy’s toward the station door.

  A small, fit, and exotically attractive woman with burnished copper skin, Azizz wore a dark wool coat, gray cashmere scarf, dark wool slacks, and a ribbed turtleneck sweater. A pair of calf-high black leather boots completed the look, an outfit that suggested she was perhaps some stylish congressional aide instead of a fanatical member of Al Ayla, the Family.

  Azizz’s real first name was Hala.

  A plague upon them, she thought as she pushed her way through the revolving doors into the vaulted marble Amtrak facility. Hala was pleased to see that what she’d heard on the taxi radio on the way into the city was true: though everything else had come to a near standstill, Amtrak trains were still running. They were heavily delayed by the storm, though, and Union Station was packed with travelers.

  It was perfect. Even better than she’d planned.

  Indeed, the events that were about to unfold were supposed to have taken place earlier in the day, around eleven, give or take ten minutes. But the storm had changed things, delayed the intricate timing of her plot by some five hours at least, the last time she’d checked.

  Kicking the snow off her boots, she looked around the main hall, ignoring the voice of Nat King Cole crooning about chestnuts on an open fire, paying no attention to the Christmas trees and lights, the token menorah, and the darkened shops to her left and right. She saw only the long lines at the ticket counters ahead of her and the scores of anxious travelers sitting on benches and on the floor, some groggy from Christmas dinner and eager to be on their way home, others frustrated and hungry because they still hadn’t gotten to their holiday feasts, having been separated from their families by the freak storm.

  Hala felt no pity whatsoever for any of them. As far as she was concerned, they were pigs who ignored the teachings of their own prophet Isa, swine who believed in only what they could buy, drink, or stuff down their fat throats.

  Americans are weak. They know nothing of sacrifice, or of God.

  She flipped open a throwaway cell phone and hit Redial.

  “Yes?” a male voice answered in Arabic.

  “Why?” Hala asked.

  “One, four, and zero,” he replied.

  She glanced at the big clock inside the station. It was 5:25. She calculated and then said, “Seven and five.”

  “Inshallah,” the man replied and hung up.

  Hala stuffed the phone in her pocket, thinking, And now, finally, it begins.

  She almost smiled at that thought before reaching up to remove her sunglasses and scarf. She’d grown her hair out recently and stopped dying it auburn. Now luxuriously thick, long, and near jet-black, her hair was pulled back severely into a bun so that her face, with its extraordinary bone structure, was visible to everyone, infidel and believer alike.

  Indeed, that’s how Hala wanted it. She looked around at a young family moving toward the ticket line.

  She flashed on her own children, Fahd and Aamina, back in Saudi Arabia, abandoned to her mother while Hala fought and sacrificed for God. Seeing her young son and daughter in her mind now, seeing them that last time in her husband’s arms, Hala felt a moment of desperate, almost crippling grief, but she quickly compartmentalized the emotion, used her husband’s death and the soon-to-be-eternal rift between her and her children to fuel her anger, and her will.

  Her head felt light, speedy, undulating. Stuffing the scarf and sunglasses into the Macy’s bag, Hala understood that this was what it was like to be a martyr, to give one’s soul over to the Eternal One.

  She was at peace with it, submissive even.

  Hala looked around, spotted security cameras aimed at various angles inside the station. Before going in search of something to eat, she made a point of walking in front of each and every one of those cameras, looking right up into the lens and giving the people watching a nice icy smile.

  CHAPTER 47

  Shortly after the pecan pie with vanilla ice cream was demolished and the dishes cleared, Nana Mama began to read out loud from the King James Bible and the Gospel of Saint Luke: “‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.’”

  My grandmother has been reading Luke’s account of Jesus’s birth after every Christmas dinner since I came to live with her, when I was ten. As exhausted as I was, hearing her recount the circumstances of Jesus’s birth, I felt rooted by the words of the Bible and connected by the strength of Nana Mama’s moving delivery. Bree was sitting in my lap, and I hugged her and laid my head against her back, listening to her heartbeat and feeling like I could drift off to sleep a very happy man.

  But then my cell phone rang again.

  Nana Mama stopped reading and shot me a withering look. I glanced at the caller ID. There was no name, but I knew that number, or a variation of it. The call was coming from someone inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where I used to work as a criminal profiler.

  I winced at the reaction I knew I was going to get, but I whispered, “I have to take this. Keep going.”

  Stonily, Bree stood to let me up. Stonily, Nana Mama read on, raising her voice as I left the room, calling after me as I headed into the kitchen: “‘And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.’”

  “Alex Cross,” I said, kneading at the pain growing between my eyes.

  “How fast can you get to Louisiana and D Street?” asked Ned Mahoney, an old friend and special agent I used to work cases with at the Bureau.

  “Tomorrow,” I said, suppressing a yawn. “Maybe the day after.”

  “I’m sending a car for you.”

  “It’s Christmas.”

  “I know it’s Christmas,” Mahoney snapped. “That’s why I need you.”

  “Ned, I’ve got a very angry ninety-something-year-old grandmother shouting the Gospel of Saint Luke at me, and-”

  “We think it’s Hala Al Dossari, Alex,” Mahoney said.

  A chill spiked through me, got me wide awake. “You think Dr. Al Dossari’s at Louisiana and D?”

  “Worse,” Mahoney said. “Inside Union Station. And she’s carrying a very big Macy’s shopping bag.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” Mahoney said. “I’m sending a four-wheel-drive vehicle to you. I expect you to get in it.”

  He hung up as if there were no counterargument to be made.

  Out in the dining room, my grandmother was still reading, even louder than before. “‘And the angel said to them, Fear not: for, behold-’”

  I returned to the dining room and Nana Mama stopped, studied me for a long moment, read it all in my body language. “Are you needed again, Alex?”

  I saw faces clouding, my wife’s included.

  “It’s a sad fact of life that not everyone believes in peace on earth and goodwill toward men,” I said. “The FBI’s sending a vehicle to pick me up.”

  CHAPTER 48

  As darkness took Christmas Day, there were only five food places open inside Union Station: Pizzeria Uno on the mezzanine level; McDonald’s and Sbarro, in the northeast and northwest corners of the station; and Great Wraps and Nothing But Doughnuts on the lower level, northwest side.

  Hala bought a gyro at the Great
Wraps and devoured it, thinking that this might well be her last meal. She was fine with that. Though the sandwich was mediocre at best, the spiced meat made her think of home and of Tariq barbecuing a lamb behind their house as part of the celebration for her daughter’s first birthday. It had been one of the best days of her life, and she clung to that memory as she waited for the group of Japanese tourists at the next table to get up and head to the escalator back to street level. Hala slipped in among them, carrying the Macy’s bag low enough that, she hoped, the security camera would be blocked from seeing it.

  Upstairs, she plotted her way across the rear of the station, choreographing every step so the cameras would get only glimpses of her.

  It was 5:47, twenty-two minutes since she’d shown her face to the cameras. She figured there was zero chance that the police had been alerted to her presence yet. That meant at least twenty-five minutes before there could be any direct response. She added ten, maybe fifteen minutes because of the snow, and decided that she’d see the first indication of law enforcement somewhere around 6:25.

  Hala headed east through the station, passing the dark entrance to the MARC suburban rail lines on her left and the staircase down to Amtrak gates A through L. With the rear of the ticket counter to her right, she glanced overhead at the board giving approximate times of train arrivals and departures.

  The Northeast Corridor Acela Express 2166 was leaving for New York City and Boston in fifteen minutes, approximately four hours late. The next Acela was due to leave at 6:50, also several hours late. But the Crescent, heading south to Atlanta and New Orleans, was only thirty minutes behind, scheduled to depart at 7:30.

  Perfect.

  Hala pushed on, weaving in and out of the crowd, doing her best to keep other people close to her as she headed to the McDonald’s, which was jammed. She slid into the crowded restaurant, skirting those waiting to order, and grabbed a small soda cup someone had left on an empty table.