Merry Christmas, Alex Cross ac-19

by James Patterson

  She transferred the cup to her left hand, paused a moment, and then brought her right index finger to her lips, moistened it with her tongue, and reached into her coat pocket. Her finger found a clear pharmaceutical capsule that stuck to her saliva. She waited until the soda counter cleared, then angled quickly at it.

  Hala moved the cup to her right hand, the capsule still stuck to her finger. She held the cup up to the Coke nozzle, pressed on the lever, and filled the cup halfway. Pleased to sense no one in line behind her, she acted as if she were waiting for the fizz to settle and moved the cup slightly left, giving her right finger access to the bottom of the nozzle.

  Hala crammed the capsule up into the dripping nozzle, felt it lodge, and quickly moved her hand away. She pressed the water lever, rinsed her finger in case the enzymes in her saliva had made the capsule leak, and headed toward the customers waiting to order, not once looking back.

  She stood there at the end of the line closest to the exit into the rail station, imagining the poison melting up in the nozzle, imagining someone getting a Coke, trying to decide how long it might take until some people started dying and others started screaming.

  CHAPTER 49

  Hala Al Dossari is back in DC, I thought, sitting in the passenger seat of a blue Jeep Grand Cherokee that had come to get me.

  A doctor by training, a jihadist by choice, Hala was a member of Al Ayla, the Family, a terrorist organization seeded and rooted in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and subsequently transplanted to the United States. At the moment, Hala occupied slot number six on the FBI’s ten most wanted list, sought in connection with the poisoning of the Washington, DC, water supply the prior summer and suspected in the murders of at least six Saudi expatriates, including her late husband, Tariq.

  I understood why Mahoney had called me. We’d worked together trying to catch Al Dossari after the water incident. I’d even helped construct an extensive profile of her.

  But my mind would not call up the details. As we drove through the city, I stared out the windows. I couldn’t believe how much snow there was. It looked like an avalanche had hit Washington. But wreaths still hung on doors, and Christmas trees still lit windows. Seemed like everybody in the District had given up on going outside and settled in for a sweet night. Everybody, of course, except me.

  When do I start saying no, I thought, instead of just reacting to whatever crisis life sends my way? When do I begin to live Alex Cross’s life? I mean really live it. Here I was, blessed with terrific kids and a grandmother who was as healthy as a twenty-year-old and as smart as the Sphinx. And then there was the miracle of Bree. I’d found someone wonderful to love me just when I’d thought romance had left me lame at the starting gate.

  When was I going to have the chance to enjoy life?

  I called home, wanting at least to tell Bree that I was feeling these things.

  The phone at my house rang. Then it rang some more. And some more. Then the damn thing kept ringing. In my mind, I could see and hear the scene at home where that phone was ringing.

  Nana Mama would most likely say something like “If you don’t want a slap on the wrist, then I advise you not to answer the phone.”

  “But Nana,” Damon would say, “what if it isn’t Dad calling? What if it’s somebody else?”

  “Well, whoever it is should have called earlier,” she would reply.

  “What if it’s an emergency?”

  “They should call 911.”

  I hung up and then pressed Redial. The ringing started in again, and I had a vision of Nana coolly saying something along the lines of “I wonder who that could be?”

  I hung up and stared morosely out the window. My family knew what a detective’s life was like. Bad guys don’t take holidays. They show up anytime, anyplace. Not just on a summer Sunday afternoon when you’re sitting and painting a fence, but also on a Christmas afternoon when you’re sitting and having dinner.

  They all knew my job was an emergency-type job, like being a doctor or a firefighter. On top of that, it was a tough job. And beyond that…beyond that…Well, beyond that, I wished someone would answer the damn phone. Because they were my family, and I was really missing them.

  That longing remained as we passed through police lines that closed off Louisiana Avenue for two blocks between C Street and Massachusetts Avenue, including most of lower Senate Park. The road had already been plowed on both sides. But the only vehicles visible on that stretch of Louisiana were two black motor homes idling near D Street, wheels buried in the snow.

  CHAPTER 50

  I recognized the vehicles in an instant. Both were FBI mobile command centers, probably brought over from the parking garage beneath the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Jeep stopped beside the forward command center and I climbed out.

  The wind was picking up, penetrating the blue police parka and Washington Redskins wool hat I wore, and I hustled to the door of the mobile command center. I happened to glance beneath it and saw barely any snow there at all. The door opened with a whoosh, distracting me. I climbed up the stairs and found Ned Mahoney waiting.

  Lean, intense, with distinctive gray-blue eyes, Mahoney had once run the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, which also served as the Bureau’s domestic counterterrorism unit. Until recently, Mahoney had been in charge of specialized training for agents up and down the East Coast; now he ran a new rapid-response operation that the Bureau activated in times of crisis, like this one. Beyond him stood Bobby Sparks, taller than Mahoney, early thirties, and currently the East Coast HRT leader. Both men were dressed casually.

  I shook hands with them, said, “You know for sure she’s in there?”

  “If it’s not her, it’s her twin,” Mahoney said. “She paraded through the main hall, gave the cameras a show. Since then she’s shown a fairly sophisticated understanding of the cameras, their positions, and their limitations. She’s in the food court downstairs.”

  He gestured over his shoulder at three FBI agents working a bank of screens. “We’re tied into every camera in the station, and the memory banks.”

  I followed him and stood behind the agents, looking at screens that showed various scenes inside the train station, including one in the lower food court. “Where is she?”

  An agent, a woman with close-cropped reddish hair, tapped the food-court feed, said, “She went there, to the right side of the escalator, just outside of range. There’s no way out of there, and she’s in plain sight of everyone else.”

  “How long’s she been there?”

  “Five minutes, tops,” Bobby Sparks said. “Twenty-three inside total.”

  “And you guys are already here?” I asked.

  Mahoney did not answer for a moment. Bobby Sparks said, “We’re quick.”

  I squinted, realizing what I’d seen outside. “No, you’re not. There’s no snow under this bus, which means it was parked here before the storm started.”

  The FBI agent looked annoyed. “Nothing gets by you, does it?”

  “Rarely,” I said. “Level with me, gentlemen.”

  Sparks appeared conflicted, but Mahoney said to one of the agents working at the screens, “Call up the Mokiri interrogation. Fast.”

  CHAPTER 51

  The agent typed several commands, and grainy footage appeared: a swarthy man in his late thirties strapped to a chair and glaring defiantly at a man in a denim outfit who had his back to us.

  “Guy in the chair is Abdul Mokiri. He’s Syrian, here on a research grant at Tulane University. He’s also a member of Al Ayla, and he trained with Hala Al Dossari and her husband in Saudi Arabia three years ago.”

  “Where’s she gone? What is she doing?” the man with his back to the camera demanded. “Hala?”

  “You can’t do this,” Mokiri said. “I have the civil rights.”

  “You only have rights if you’re in America,” the man we couldn’t see said. “And let me assure you, you’re not in America, Abdul, and therefore we do not play by
American rules.”

  The Syrian spit at the interrogator. Someone very big, his upper body and face lost in the shadows, pushed Mokiri’s chair forward and up close to a card table that had been blocked from view by the interrogator. The same person grabbed the terrorist’s right hand and stretched it toward something on the table I did not recognize at first. Mokiri began to squirm, and he shouted, “You can’t do this!”

  The hot plate turned brilliant red. Mokiri’s hand was lowered toward the coils.

  “Shut it off,” I said.

  The agent did. I glared at Mahoney and Bobby Sparks as intensely as the Syrian had at his interrogator. “Didn’t know the Bureau participated in torture, Ned.”

  “It doesn’t,” Mahoney shot back. “I don’t know where it came from, Alex. I don’t want to know where it came from. But I’m glad I know what Mokiri spilled.”

  “Confessions made under torture can’t be taken seriously,” I said. “They’re half-truths mixed with what the tortured person thinks the torturer wants to hear.”

  “Maybe,” Bobby Sparks said stonily. “But we didn’t have the luxury of thinking that way when Mokiri said that Hala was planning to bomb Union Station on Christmas morning.”

  “She’s kind of late,” I said.

  “Snowstorm,” Mahoney said.

  I closed my eyes. “But she’s in there now? No doubt?”

  “Show him those videos of her coming into the station,” Mahoney told another one of the agents working the screens.

  A moment later, several of the lower feeds showed Hala Al Dossari moving about the south side of the main hall looking directly at the cameras.

  “She had to have known we run facial-recognition software on everyone who enters that station,” I said.

  “It’s been written about,” Mahoney agreed. “And she certainly seemed to want us to see her in there.”

  “Right, but why?”

  “We were hoping you might have some insight on that.”

  I shrugged, trying to get my brain to think clearly. “She could be trying to lure you guys in there so she can detonate and kill a bunch of federal agents.”

  “That occurred to us,” Bobby Sparks said.

  “Okay. Any other information I need to know?”

  Mahoney nodded. “We’ve had NSA targeting the station since yesterday afternoon, picking up all mobile transmissions. Only one seems pertinent.”

  The agent with the red hair gave her computer an order. The interior of the command center filled with whispers in what I guessed was Arabic, a woman speaking with a man.

  Bobby Sparks said, “That’s her twenty-five minutes ago, after she entered the station. She says, ‘Why?’ Then the unidentified male replies, ‘One, four, and zero.’ She says, ‘Seven and five.’ Unidentified male replies, ‘Inshallah.’”

  “So a code?” I asked.

  “Obviously,” Mahoney said.

  “Give me a break, Ned,” I said. “I’m running on fumes here. You get a location on the guy’s cell?”

  “We pinged the towers,” Mahoney replied. “He was in the Suitland-Silver Hill area, but we didn’t have enough time to get him located better.”

  Before I could filter that, the third agent working the camera surveillance inside Union Station tapped his headset and said, “Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve got someone down and dead inside the McDonald’s, street level, northeast corner of the station.”

  CHAPTER 52

  Six minutes before, as white foam came from the mouth of a convulsing pimply-faced homeboy in his late teens and people began to shout for help, Hala had slipped from the McDonald’s and taken four big, easy steps diagonally with her back to the nearest security camera. She was inside the women’s restroom in fewer than six seconds.

  She walked the length of the stalls until she spotted one with a metal grate in the wall above it. Luckily, the stall was open. She entered, still hearing shouts of alarm outside the restroom, turned, and went to work, knowing full well that the poisoning would quickly bring DC police to the area, police who would soon figure out that a suspect matching her description had been at the fountain a few minutes before the homeboy got his Coke. And so the police would join the others, probably FBI, already looking for her.

  Six minutes. That’s all she gave herself.

  Hala opened the Macy’s bag and retrieved a blue workman’s suit that had a patch sewn to the chest that said AMTRAK and beneath it the name SEAN. She tore off her jacket, removed her boots, and climbed into the jumpsuit. Around her neck, she hung a chain attached to a remarkably good forgery of an Amtrak employee card that identified her as Sean Belmont, a member of an emergency-train-repair crew.

  Four minutes left. She scrubbed her face, lashes, and brows free of all makeup. She slid on workman’s boots and then tucked her hair up under a wig that featured short blond hair in a masculine cut. She put in contact lenses that turned her eyes blue and painted her face and hands with pale makeup.

  Ninety seconds to go. Hala stood up on the toilet, which put the metal grate at about shoulder height. She could look through it into a length of air duct about eighteen inches wide and thirteen high. She glanced at the stalls on either side of her and was heartened to see them empty. Quick as she dared, she tried the screws holding the grate over the duct and found them loose. She had the grate off and balanced on the toilet in less than thirty seconds.

  Hala reached inside and groped until she found the sound-suppressed pistol taped there. She tore it off, duct tape and all, stepped off the toilet, and dropped the gun into the battered canvas tool kit in the Macy’s bag. She retrieved the tool kit and set it aside. Then she reached to the bottom of the bag and took out eight Christmas-paper-wrapped boxes, each about the size of a large coffee cup. She put them in the tool kit. The jacket and high-heeled boots went in the Macy’s bag.

  Forty seconds.

  Hala got back on the toilet with the Macy’s bag. She shoved the bag into the duct hard, sending it in deep, and then refitted the grate.

  Ten seconds. The restroom door opened. A girl squealed, “OMG! Did you see the stuff coming out his mouth?”

  “I’m gonna be sick, you keep talking about it,” another girl replied.

  Hala grabbed the tool bag, opened the stall, and went right at them. “Sorry, young ladies,” she said in the deepest voice she could muster. “We had a leak back there. She’s all yours now.”

  “You coulda, like, put up a sign or something,” the OMG girl said indignantly.

  “Too much snow,” Hala said, as if there were some connection, and exited the restroom.

  She made a sharp right, ignoring the commotion unfolding in and outside of the McDonald’s to her immediate left. She walked resolutely west toward the entrance to the Amtrak gates and glanced to her left only once, when she picked up in her peripheral vision a big guy wearing a blue MPD parka and two shorter men wearing vests that said FBI. A sweaty man in an Amtrak police uniform followed the three of them into the McDonald’s.

  Hala allowed herself the barest grin. That had flushed them out, hadn’t it?

  She had no idea who the FBI agents were and guessed the sweaty guy was the Amtrak officer in charge tonight. But she totally recognized Alex Cross, the guy who found the president’s kidnapped kids. He’d been all over the papers.

  In an odd way, Hala felt honored.

  CHAPTER 53

  I knelt over the body of Phillip Lamonte, who dressed the gangsta but whose identification showed he was a junior at Catholic University. He had a home address on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and carried a ticket to Penn Station on the Acela that was about to board. The extra-large cup lay on the floor next to him. The ice in it hadn’t yet melted.

  I lowered my face over the foam around his mouth and sniffed. I smelled an acrid odor I recognized.

  “Cyanide poisoning,” I said.

  “Hala?” Mahoney said.

  “Has to be,” I replied. “That’s how she killed her husband, right?”
<
br />   “That’s how he died,” Bobby Sparks agreed.

  I looked at the closest patrol officer. “Was this guy with anyone?”

  The cop gestured with her chin toward a skinny white kid, late teens, who was also dressed to party with 5 °Cent and Diddy. “Name’s Allen Kent.”

  I glanced at the cup. “Phillip drinking from that before he died?” I asked Kent.

  The kid nodded, but he was obviously in shock.

  “Anyone else get close to that drink, son?” I asked.

  Kent shook his head. “Phil got it himself from the fountain.”

  I didn’t know how she’d done it, but I was certain Hala Al Dossari had murdered this college kid. And how didn’t seem to matter as much as why.

  I looked at Mahoney and Sparks, said, “Close this place down.”

  Captain Seymour Johnson, the shift commander of the Amtrak police, a sweaty, unhealthy-looking man, lost more color. “Are you crazy? We’re the only transportation into or out of DC. We don’t even know if this woman is still in here, for God’s sake.”

  “Maybe she’s not,” I said. “But if I were you, I’d put men with her picture at every exit. No one gets out of Union Station without proper identification. That goes for passengers who are boarding too. And call in Metro homicide and patrol. There’s deep snow everywhere. If she has made it outside and doesn’t have a car, then she’s on foot and visible.”

  Mahoney agreed and started making calls. Bobby Sparks did the same. So did Johnson. I looked around, spotted a guy, early thirties, wearing a chesterfield overcoat, watching. He held an iPad.

  I went to him. “You see what happened, Mr.…?”

  “Goldberg. Jared Goldberg. And no, I didn’t see anything. I came over when I heard the screaming.”

  “You a patriot, Mr. Goldberg?” I asked.