Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

by James Patterson

  “You tell me what this was really about,” I said. “What you were really doing inside Union Station.”

  Hala cocked her head, said, “How many times do I have to tell you, Cross? I was fighting for Allah. It is as simple as—”

  The interrogation room door opened. Mahoney returned, carrying a laptop computer with a seventeen-inch screen, and sat beside me. “Any progress?”

  “We’re establishing a bit of mutual understanding,” I said.

  “In other words, no,” Mahoney said. “Sorry, Alex, but I need to take over the questioning here.”

  “All yours,” I said, and made as if to leave.

  Mahoney put his hand on my arm, and I settled back into the chair. Hala shifted uncomfortably in hers.

  “I understand you are in pain?” Mahoney said.

  She nodded. “I am.”

  He fished in his jacket pocket, came up with two small white pills, each stamped OC on one side and 10 on the other. He put them on the table where she could see them but not reach them.

  CHAPTER

  90

  HALA LOOKED AT THE PILLS, AND I COULD FEEL HER LEG JIGGLING ON THE other side of the table. “So, what? You withhold medical treatment so I talk? I think your ACLU will be interested to hear this.”

  Mahoney smiled. “Who said anything about withholding treatment?” He slid the tablets over in front of her. “We’re not tribal savages a generation out of the desert here.”

  Hala scowled at him but took up one of the tablets. I pushed a plastic water bottle across the table. She swallowed the painkiller but then said, “If you think I will talk because of these pills, you do not know me.”

  “Hey,” Mahoney said, arms wide: Mr. Nice Guy. “We want to know you, Doctor. We want to hear what you have to say in your defense.”

  “I’m saying nothing in my defense. I’ll wait for the lawyer.”

  “Let us check a few things that are verifiable,” the FBI agent said, as if he were a clerk taking insurance information. “Where do you live in Saudi Arabia?”

  Hala did not reply, but she watched him closely.

  Mahoney typed on his keypad, rolled his lower lip between fingers, said, “Al Hariq? No, that’s where you were born, right out there on the edge of the erg, the sea of sand, right?”

  He looked up at her. She said, “A place of terrible beauty.”

  I said, “That where you became afraid of dogs?”

  She smiled sourly at me. “I have no idea where that came from. It’s always just been there.”

  “You’re smart though,” Mahoney observed, returning his attention to the screen. “King Saud University for one year and then four years at Penn, courtesy of the Saudi royal family. Impressive. Medical degree from Dubai. Children. A career. And then a sudden radicalization. But that’s what happens when God talks to you, right?”

  She said nothing, rolled her eyes at me.

  “Now,” Mahoney said. “Where do you live in Saudi Arabia?”

  “I do not live in Saudi Arabia.”

  “And probably never will again,” the FBI agent said brightly, still looking at his screen. “I guess what I was asking was…oh, here it is. Fahiq. It’s right there outside Riyadh, on the road to Mecca.”

  For the first time since we’d been talking to Hala, I saw something resembling anxiety in her expression, just a glimpse of it, and then she turned stony once more.

  I glanced at Mahoney, who seemed so confident now that I thought, What has Ned got on her? What about Fahiq could break her?

  CHAPTER

  91

  “WE NO LONGER LIVE IN FAHIQ,” HALA SAID. “WE SOLD THAT HOUSE YEARS ago, long before we came to this—”

  “There was a transfer of property,” Mahoney agreed. “But it was a gift, not a sale, to Gabir Salmann, who I believe is your uncle, the older brother of your mother, Shada?”

  Something shifted in Hala. The coolness was gone. She studied the FBI agent the way a hawk might and made no reply.

  “It’s right here in the Saudi records the embassy was good enough to send over by courier,” he said. “You want to see?”

  No answer.

  “Despite what you hear, Doctor, the Saudi royal family are, on the whole, keen allies of the United States,” Mahoney went on. “Why? They might have all the oil, but we have all the weapons and God only knows how many times the number of soldiers. In any case, the Saudi royals find it most embarrassing when one of their nationals goes off the reservation and starts killing some of the country’s best customers and friends.”

  He paused and looked at me, almost cheery. “Very cooperative, the Saudis.” Mahoney held up his hand, set it down, looked back at Hala. “Not a lot of political freedom back home, is there?”

  Hala said nothing.

  “Not a lot of wiggle room in the judicial system in Saudi, right? Sharia law? Secret police?”

  Mahoney leaned forward, began talking louder: “No constitutional guarantees of civil rights and humane treatment. What the Saudi royals want from their people, the Saudi royals get. Am I right, Dr. Al Dossari?”

  “So what?” Hala snapped. “I am not in my homeland, and I think there is zero chance that your government extradites me.”

  “I agree you are not in your homeland, nor are you likely to be any time soon,” Mahoney replied. He paused, glanced at me, then said to her, “But your children are there.”

  I immediately saw a change in her breathing pattern: her respirations became shallow, more rapid. She straightened in her chair.

  “What are their names?” Mahoney asked. “Oh, here it is: Fahd, ten, and Aamina, seven. Good-looking kids.” He smiled at her. “The last time you spoke to them was when?”

  Hala said nothing.

  “Got to be ten, eleven months.” Mahoney let that hang as he started typing again. “You use Skype, Dr. Al Dossari?”

  “No.”

  “Amazing thing,” he said, hitting Return. “You can look right into a compound on the other side of the world.”

  He slid the computer to his left, where all of us could see it.

  Hala took one look and lunged at Mahoney. The chains caught her, but she strained hard against them, and she spit at him before hissing, “Allah will see you in hell for this. And my lawyers will see you in court.”

  CHAPTER

  92

  MAHONEY RAISED HIS HAND AND SAID, “YOU’LL NEVER SEE ME IN COURT because there will be no evidence of what you are about to witness, Dr. Al Dossari. And I’ll just have to take my chances with Allah.”

  With my uneasiness building quickly toward horror, I studied the screen: a terrace and part of a beautiful garden where purple and red anemones grew tall and stood floppy in a wide section of grass. There was a table in the foreground with a plate of pastries on it and an icy pitcher of water, or perhaps lemonade. In the background to the right of the garden was a high whitewashed wall. Two hooded men holding AK-47s flanked three wrought-iron chairs that were pushed up against that wall, facing the camera.

  An older woman in traditional Arabic dress sat without her veil in the middle seat, tied to its arms and legs. She was gagged and looked petrified. A young girl sat to her left, an older boy to her right, each of them lashed to the chair and gagged as well.

  Hala glared at me. “You speak of fair!” she screamed. “You let him do this to my mother? My children?”

  “I had nothing to do with this,” I said, turning to Mahoney. “Stop this, Ned. I won’t be part of this.”

  “I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to,” the FBI agent replied. “This is not something we condone. It is not something we sought.”

  “Liar!” Hala screeched. “You can stop this.”

  Mahoney shook his head. “No more than al-Qaeda could stop its people from chopping off the head of that Wall Street Journal reporter. I have reason to believe these are Saudi secret policemen. The only people they take orders from are much higher up the food chain, men with mindboggling power.”

  �
��In the hall, now, or you can forget my involvement,” I said; I stood and went out the door.

  Mahoney followed me.

  “Are those children going to be tortured?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” my old friend said. “It’s out of my hands.”

  “You asked for this!” I shouted. “You said you were going to wake somebody up, for God’s sake!”

  “Turns out, most of them were already up,” Mahoney shot back. “They were contacted by the Saudi government right about the time the good doctor was entering Union Station. The Saudis intercepted an encrypted e-mail from two high-ranking members of the Family earlier today. So far they’ve been able to decipher only three words in the whole thing: Dossari, train, and gas.”

  CHAPTER

  93

  “GAS LIKE ‘CAR GAS’ OR GAS LIKE ‘NERVE GAS’?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m about to find out, Alex,” Mahoney said coldly. “It’s why the Saudis offered to create the little telecast in there.”

  “Ned, you still can’t condone the torture—”

  “If the Family is plotting some kind of gas attack in the United States, I will do everything in my power to prevent it,” Mahoney said sharply. “Does that include accepting help from a regime that does not give its citizens the same rights we have? Yes. I’ll live with that if I can save even one American life. Now, you can come back in and help me so this goes only so far, or you can walk away and risk being partly responsible for the deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands of people.”

  “That’s bullshit and unfair,” I said.

  “In situations like these, life is bullshit and unfair!” Mahoney shouted, and then he lowered his voice. “I need you, Alex. I need you to help me crack her so we can stop whatever she’s got planned.”

  I shook my head. There was no right answer here; neither position was nobler than the other. Was I going to side with torture or with mass murder on the day after my dear Savior’s birth?

  Before I could decide, we heard a scream from the interrogation room. Mahoney spun from me and went back in. I hesitated as I heard Hala scream, “No, please!”

  I entered the room feeling like a zombie, tired beyond reason and fearing that my soul might be permanently tarnished before the night was over. That sense was intensified when I saw what was happening on the screen.

  The hooded men had left Hala’s mother where she was, gagged and tied to the chair against the wall. But they had brought the children’s chairs close to the table, where they were looking wild-eyed at the camera.

  The secret policemen stood behind the children. One carried what looked like a heavy-duty marine battery hitched to jumper cables. The end of the black negative clamp was already attached to the metal chair Hala’s son was sitting in. The second guy held the red clamp above it.

  Hala looked at me, enraged. “You cannot do this! He’s a boy!”

  “There were plenty of boys here in DC when you tried to poison the water supply,” I said. “But this doesn’t have to happen, Doctor. You tell us about the gas attack, and we let your kids and mom go on with their life without you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking—”

  The hooded man barely grazed the back of her son’s metal chair with the clamp. The boy’s entire body jerked hard and he began to scream and cry.

  “Fahd!” Hala cried. “Be brave!”

  The boy seemed to hear her, but that only upset him more. He began to squirm and make noises like an animal with a broken leg. One of the men released the boy’s gag, and he began to scream in Arabic.

  The translator said: “‘Mama! Mama, why are they doing this to me?’”

  CHAPTER

  94

  MY STOMACH SOURED AND TURNED. ALL SENSE OF ORDER IN MY BRAIN HAD become disrupted. I thought of my son Ali in that situation and wanted to puke.

  I waited for Hala to break. A sob. A tear. Anything. She turned away and looked at the wall, her jaw set.

  Mahoney reached over, hit the mute button on the computer, and said, “This can end right now if you tell us about the gas.”

  She said nothing.

  “Turn the camera on us,” I said. “Let Fahd see us and her.”

  Mahoney tapped a couple of buttons, and a small image of the interrogation room appeared in one corner of the screen. “Fahd?” I said. “Can you hear me? Can you see your mother?”

  Hala was trying not to glance at the screen. The boy’s hysterics had slowed, but when he saw his mother, they began again. “They are everywhere in the house.” He sobbed. “Men and women everywhere. In the washrooms and the pantry and the servants’ quarters.”

  Hala spoke coldly to him. “That is why I have always taught the two of you that the most important thing in life is bravery.”

  “Listen, Fahd,” I said. “Sometimes bravery has nothing to do with guns or pain or bullets. Sometimes bravery is just doing the right thing. And at this moment, the right thing would be to help us, so we can help you. Please ask your mother to tell us what we need to know so we can keep everyone safe, and then those people there can go home.”

  I turned my head toward Hala, who looked at me with utter hatred. One of the men released the gag on her daughter. They’d moved behind her with the battery and cables.

  “Tell them what they want, Mama,” Fahd said. “Tell them, or they’re going to hurt Aamina.”

  The girl began to squirm, trying to look back over her shoulder to see what the men were doing. They had the black clamp already affixed behind her. The red clamp was inches from joining it.

  “I cannot tell them my secrets…because they are evil men,” Hala said to her son.

  “Mama, please help, please!” Aamina cried.

  The hooded man snapped the red clamp to the metal chair, and the girl stiffened and arched toward the camera, straining every muscle in her face, wanting to scream but utterly unable to do it. Her brother was screaming for her, petrified that the men would return to him. I wanted to cry when they took the clamp off the chair, and the girl collapsed into hysterics.

  Sweat soaked the armpits of Hala’s jail jumpsuit. It had begun to form on her upper lip too. But otherwise she was back to that warrior expression that revealed nothing.

  “Mom?” Fahd said. He hiccupped. “Please help us.”

  “Help them, Doctor,” Mahoney said.

  The hooded men moved back behind her son, who began craning his neck around, whimpering, and begging his captors to stop as they clamped the negative line to his chair a second time.

  The boy looked back to the camera, lost and bewildered, and blubbered out words in Arabic, the same ones, over and over. If they’d been punches, they’d have been knockouts. The shock in Hala’s expression was complete and devastating. She began to shrink in her chair, opening her mouth but unable to speak, as Fahd kept repeating those same words.

  In my earbud, the translator interpreted. “‘Mommy? Why don’t you love us?’”

  CHAPTER

  95

  HALA’S CHEEK QUIVERED AS IF SHE’D BEEN SLASHED THERE. THEN HER composure simply crumpled and slid away, like dirt down a riverbank.

  She began to sob, saying in Arabic, “Mommy does love you! Mommy loves you both more than anything on earth.”

  “No,” her daughter said and started to cry again. “You don’t.”

  “Aamina! Please, you’re too young to—”

  The hooded man squeezed the red clamp. Fahd screamed, “Mommy, if you love us, please tell them!”

  The clamp lowered, almost made contact.

  Dr. Al Dossari watched through her tears, trembling, and then she shouted, “Stop! Stop.” She looked at me with an expression I’d seen only once in my life, more than thirty years before, in North Carolina—it was on the face of a mother so driven by love that she was able to lift the front end of an old jeep off the back of her ten-year-old daughter.

  “I’ll tell you,” Hala said piteously. “Make them stop.”

  “A smart ch
oice,” Mahoney said softly.

  I hung my head and felt ashamed, guilty, disgusted by what I’d been party to. I thought about Henry Fowler, the man I’d coaxed out of murdering his entire family what seemed a lifetime ago, and wondered if this was what he felt when he won those lawsuits. I could see clearly how a man might develop self-hatred by doing the wrong thing to achieve the desired end.

  “Dr. Al Dossari,” Mahoney said. “When we are finished with our business, I will let you talk with them one last time.”

  He closed the camera that showed our image but he kept the screen up so she could watch her children being released from their bonds and going to their grandmother.

  “Tell us about the gas,” I said.

  Hala wiped at her eyes. “Nerve gas. It will be used in an attack.”

  CHAPTER

  96

  OMAR NAZAD COULD NOT REMEMBER EVER HAVING BEEN THIS EXHAUSTED IN HIS entire life. They’d been digging and shoveling for more than an hour and a half in twenty inches of wet snow that had gotten more and more like a massive block of ice as the temperature in DC had plunged and bottomed out at five degrees above zero.

  They’d opened a path almost six feet wide and nearly sixty-five yards long.

  “I can’t go on,” Mustapha bitched in Arabic. “I must drink, brother.”

  “Five yards,” Nazad said, gesturing at the short distance that separated them from M Street, which was unplowed but crisscrossed with tracks. “That’s all that separates us, brother. Put your back into it and we go on. Quit, and it all has been for nothing.”

  Saamad was drenched in sweat, but he raised his pick and began chopping at the remaining snow, breaking off big hunks of it that Nazad and then Mustapha shoveled from the path. After about the third shovelful, it dawned on the Tunisian that there was another way, a better way.

  “Stop,” he said. “We’re done. We’ll get the van going like hell and just plow through it.”