Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

by James Patterson

  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.

  His brows knit. “I like to think so.”

  I handed him my card, said, “Alex Cross. I work with Metro DC Police and as a consultant to the FBI. Can you help me?”

  Goldberg frowned. “I clerk at the tax court. How can I—”

  “Your iPad,” I said. “Work on one of those 4G networks?”

  He nodded.

  “Backed up in—what do they call it—the iCloud or something?”

  The law clerk frowned but nodded again.

  “Good, can I use it?” I asked. “I promise you I’ll return it. And if I break it, I’ll replace it with one even better.”

  Goldberg looked pained, but he handed it over.

  “What are you up to, Cross?” asked Bobby Sparks when he saw me return with the iPad in hand.

  “Those guys out in the command center,” I said. “Can they transmit the footage from the cameras at this end of the station?”

  The HRT commander thought, then said, “They’ll have to feed it through one of our secure websites, but affirmative, I think they can do that.”

  CHAPTER

  54

  AT THE OPPOSITE END OF THE RAIL STATION, INSIDE THE MEN’S ROOM NOW, Hala had again taken a stall that featured a duct grate above it. She waited until the stalls adjacent to hers emptied, and then, for the second time in the past few minutes, removed already loosened screws. She turned the grate sideways and pushed it deep into the duct.

  She had to stand there for several minutes while an old man came in and urinated, but then he left and the place fell silent.

  Slight in stature, Hala had been a highly competitive gymnast as a girl and still maintained her agility and limberness. After shoving the tool kit in after the grate, she stood up on the exposed pipe of the toilet, grasped the stall walls on either side of her, tightened her abdomen, and swung her legs up into a pike position, toes pointed almost at the ceiling.

  The split second she felt her hips about to fall, she snapped her heels and calves forward into the open duct. Wriggling, she was completely inside the ventilation system within ten seconds. She kept wriggling and scooting, pushing the tool bag and the grate ahead of her, deeper into the duct.

  Three feet in was an intersection of four ducts. She turned her upper body into the right-side passage, pulled herself totally in, and then inched back across the one she’d just left. It took some straining with her left hand, but she was able to retrieve the grate.

  Looking toward the light shining in through the open hole in the wall to the restroom, she crabbed back to it and then peered out. A boy was peeing with his father. Hala looked at them from the darkness of the ductwork, wondering if this was something Tariq had ever done with their son, Fahd. Had her boy ever been that young?

  When they left, Hala shook off whatever regrets she had and pulled the grate back over the open duct, securing it with an eight-inch length of picture-frame wire she’d brought along for that purpose. Two minutes later, she’d gotten herself turned around again, and she pushed on, straight down the main duct, smelling the odor of pizzas cooking at Sbarro pouring into the air-vent system from her left.

  She felt her stomach grumble, ignored it, and kept wriggling. Twenty-five feet farther on, Hala reached a second intersection in the ductwork; she arched and pulled her way into the one that broke right, heading north. When she was fully inside that duct, she stopped, chest heaving, got out the disposable cell from the pocket of the workman’s suit, and hit Redial.

  “Why?” she whispered.

  “Four and zero,” the male voice replied.

  Her allies were close to the target now—it would have taken them no more than twelve minutes to get there on an ordinary day, but the snow had changed everything. Still, she trusted his judgment.

  “Go with God,” she said, and hung up.

  After stowing the cell phone, she slid on another ten feet, to where the duct made a ninety-degree left turn. In the north wall there was another grate. Cold air was blowing through it. Hala shivered; she paused for only a second to look through the grate, finding herself high above dimly lit loading platforms and two commuter trains sitting dark on the suburban rail tracks.

  Hala crawled on toward a third grate. She moved stealthily, as if she were sliding into position for a sniper’s shot, which she was. The last ten feet took nearly ten minutes, leaving her twenty-eight minutes before her role turned crucial.

  Irritating Christmas music blared from somewhere. Hala peered through the grate. She was fifteen feet up the east wall of a loading dock platform owned by the U.S. Postal Service. Directly below her were large canvas hampers holding canvas bags that were filled with mail. A skeleton crew of three men worked on the dock, transferring the mailbags from the hampers into an open compartment at the rear of a railcar.

  Hala flashed on an image of herself much younger, out in the desert with Tariq, before the children came. He was teaching her how to shoot a pistol. How odd it had been, that aiming and firing a gun came so naturally to her. Then again, shooting was something precise, like medicine, where attention to technique and detail came together to create a little miracle. And wasn’t that what a perfectly placed shot was? A little miracle? A gift from God?

  Hala thought so. She got the silenced Glock out of the tool bag and aimed down through the slats of the grate at a fat Latino guy with muttonchops. He was farthest from her, closest to the tracks. The one most likely to get away.

  CHAPTER

  55

  BOBBY SPARKS AND MAHONEY COMMANDEERED OTHER IPADS WITHIN MINUTES of seeing what I was up to. With the tablets we could be two, three, or four places at once. The rail station itself had become our movable crisis center. We could manipulate time as well—backward, anyway.

  I had all the feeds from the three cameras in and around the northeast end of the station, the ones closest to the McDonald’s, run back to the approximate time of Phillip LaMonte’s collapse. I heard the shouts and saw Hala Al Dossari slipping out in the commotion and disappearing in the direction of the ladies’ room to the left of the restaurant. None of the cameras faced the restroom directly, but it was clear that that’s where she was going.

  “Block it off,” Bobby Sparks barked at Johnson, the Amtrak police commander. Then the FBI hostage rescue leader led the way in, badge up, gun out, with Mahoney and me bringing up the rear.

  We found three women inside. One was in her eighties, an older lady who put me in mind of Nana, and a younger, prettier woman who nonetheless didn’t hold a candle to Bree. The third was a girl in her late teens, plump where Hala Al Dossari was thin.

  When they’d left, we searched the restroom from top to bottom. The toilet stalls had not been serviced since before the storm. Wearing latex gloves, I got down on my hands and knees and peered into each one. I spotted an off-white blotch on the floor of the third.

  I got out a pencil and poked at it with the eraser, saw it smear.

  “What do you have, Alex?” Mahoney asked.

  “Looks like makeup,” I said.

  “In a ladies’ room,” Bobby Sparks said. “Imagine that.”

  I got back to my feet and noticed the grate above the toilet. I didn’t see how anyone could’ve gotten into such a small space, but then again, I’m six two and more than two hundred pounds.

  I slid a fingernail into one of the screws and was interested to find it loose. “Got a flashlight?” I asked.

  Mahoney produced a mini Maglite. I flipped it on, shone it through the slats, and saw about six feet away the crumpled Macy’s bag Hala Al Dossari had been carrying.

  CHAP
TER

  56

  I DRAGGED THE BAG OUT WITH A MOP HANDLE MAHONEY FOUND.

  “Her boots and the jacket,” I said. “Nothing in the pockets.”

  “I’ll take that,” Mahoney said. “I want it checked for explosive residue.”

  “We need the feeds of all cameras in the station in the ten minutes or so after LaMonte died,” I said, heading out of the restroom.

  Two minutes later, an FBI technician was running a swab test on the Macy’s bag, and I was looking at a long-angle shot of the northeast end of Union Station, the feed from the only camera that gave us a reasonable view of the area around the restroom. I sped it up, checking out everyone walking west of the McDonald’s.

  “There we are,” Mahoney said, pointing to the image of the four of us hurrying toward the McDonald’s.

  But I was staring at the man who’d glanced at us as we’d passed, a slight figure with sandy-colored hair who was wearing a workman’s jumpsuit that said AMTRAK and carrying a canvas tool bag.

  “That’s off,” I said.

  “What?” Mahoney asked.

  “That tool bag,” I said. “It’s the kind of thing plumbers used to carry. Or masons. I don’t see a modern workman with something like that.”

  The figure disappeared from view.

  “Where’s he going?” Mahoney asked.

  We were standing back out in the main hall by then. I looked around, orienting myself to the camera’s angle, and let my eye travel in the direction the workman had taken, seeing the tail end of a line of people clearing security and climbing down the stairs to Amtrak gates A through L.

  “There’s an Acela leaving soon,” I said, running toward the line while Mahoney called out to the command center out on Louisiana Avenue, asking for all footage of the security gate since it had opened for boarding.

  We had it in less than thirty seconds. I replayed it at four times the normal speed and quickly spotted the workman with the canvas bag. But he wasn’t in line for the Acela. He skirted the gate and walked all the way to the other end of the station, where he entered the men’s restroom.

  We began to run. My phone rang. Bree.

  “Alex?”

  “I can’t talk,” I said. “I want to talk. More than you know, but I can’t.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “All I can say is that there is a very, very bad person in Union Station.”

  “Give me a great Christmas present. Stay away from him.”

  “It’s a woman, and I promise you I’ll try.”

  CHAPTER

  57

  HALA TOOK A SLOW, DEEP BREATH, DROPPED THE TENSION FROM HER shoulders, and dwelled within the sight picture she had over the barrel of the suppressed pistol. The big Hispanic postal worker with the muttonchops turned from the open railcar and took two steps before she squeezed the trigger.

  The pop the suppressed gun made going off seemed loud to her in the duct. But neither of the other two postal workers reacted until Muttonchops fell to his knees, hands trying to stop the blood from gushing out of the hole she’d put through his windpipe.

  The second postal worker was bald. His pale skull made an easy target for her next shot, which went through the back of his head. The third worker, a thin black guy, seemed to have figured out he was next, because he ducked and ran zigzags across the loading dock, screaming for help.

  He didn’t get any. Hala’s third shot shattered his pelvis as he tried to climb the stairs leading to the main postal facility. His legs buckled, leaving him howling at the bottom of the steps. Her fourth shot hit him in the chest, and he sagged forward.

  Hala returned the gun to the tool bag and got out a power screwdriver fitted with a tungsten-coated drill bit. In less than two minutes, she’d reamed out the mounts holding the four screws and gripped the grate by the slats.

  She felt the grate come free of the wall, moved it out, and then flicked it hard to her right. It clanged to the floor. After grabbing the tool bag, she wriggled her arms and shoulders free of the duct, looked right below her, and realized she wouldn’t need the thin rope she’d brought along.

  Hala tossed the tool bag to her left, saw it land in one of the mail hampers. She focused on the hamper fifteen feet directly below her and squirmed free of the hole up to the top of her hips, then rotated so her back faced the wall. She let herself hang down it, felt her hips and legs begin to slide free of the duct.

  The instant Hala felt the edge scrape the backs of her calves, she arched her spine, pushed her belly forward, and then let all that tension go in a snapping action. Her legs flipped her out and over the duct. As she fell, she rotated her legs around, as if she were dismounting off the balance beams of her childhood; her head glanced off the wall before she landed in a jolting squat that pulled something sharply in her left hip.

  Hala grunted, fought the pain, rolled over the metal rim of the hamper’s frame, and got to the floor. A moment later, she had the tool bag. She winced as she went by the dead postal workers, trying to compensate for a torn muscle; the psoas or the iliacus, by the feel of it.

  This would not do. She stopped, set the bag down by Muttonchops, dug in her pocket for a baggie with pills she’d stuffed there. She found one ten-milligram OxyContin tablet and an eight-hundred-milligram ibuprofen. One for pain. One for swelling.

  The fiery sensation spreading through her hip had not lessened by the time she reached the edge of the loading dock. She flinched as she got down and then crawled backward off the edge of the dock, the cold night breeze on her cheeks, knowing how much it was going to hurt to drop just three feet.

  What I feel doesn’t matter, she thought as she pushed off.

  But when she landed beside the postal railcar, she felt the pain like a knife shoved into her. Hala gasped and stumbled, dropped the canvas bag, squeezed her eyes shut, and bit her lip to keep from screaming.

  CHAPTER

  58

  WE RAN TO THE MEN’S RESTROOM WHERE I WAS SURE HALA HAD GONE IN disguise. Halfway there, Mahoney heard something in his earbud and slowed to a stop, holding up his hand to me and Bobby Sparks.

  “She made a call about eleven minutes ago,” he said, looking up at a clock on the station wall. It was 6:36, which put the call at 6:25.

  Bobby Sparks grumbled, “It took us eleven minutes to—”

  “I can’t control the National Security Agency,” Mahoney snapped, cutting him off. “In the call, an unidentified female said in Arabic: ‘Why?’ Unsub male replied in Arabic: ‘Four and zero.’ End of conversation. We have a rough idea of unsub male’s location: not far from where Suitland Parkway meets the Anacostia Freeway.”

  “He could be coming toward us,” I said, looking at the clock.

  “Possibly,” Mahoney agreed, and he started to move again.

  “‘Four and zero,’” I said. “What did the unsub male say the first time?”

  “‘One, four, and zero,’” Bobby Sparks replied.

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Just after she entered the station,” Mahoney said. “It was at five twenty-five.”

  “So they dropped the one, and an hour has passed,” I said.

  Both FBI agents slowed. “Again,” Bobby Sparks said.

  “An hour and forty from five twenty-five is seven oh-five,” I said. “Forty minutes from six twenty-five is seven oh-five. I think we’ve got their timetable.”

  Mahoney paled. “Which means we’ve got less than twenty-nine minutes to find her.”

  CHAPTER

  59

  IT TOOK HALA A GOOD TWENTY SECONDS BEFORE SHE COULD GET HER MUSCLES to relax and her eyes to open. She gritted her teeth at the burning pain in her hip as she looked all around her.

  To her left and down the tracks, red lights glowed at intervals all the way to the snow-blanketed mouth of the terminal. Hala could make out, about fifty feet ahead of her, the dark hulks of the suburban MARC trains. She smelled diesel exhaust and heard the rumble of the Acela’s engines warming an
d the chatter of the last few grateful travelers boarding the train bound for New York City.

  Hala got out her phone and checked the time: 6:47 p.m. She had eighteen minutes to get into position and get ready. Limping toward the far end of the dark commuter train, she heard the Acela’s wheels begin to squeal across the tracks, pushing north.

  She stood in the darkest shadows, feeling the effects of the painkillers start to seep through her as she ripped open the first of the Christmas presents and watched the train leave the terminal. Weary travelers were visible in the lit windows.

  Hala wondered if these train passengers would look back on this day and feel the way people who’d been late to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11 did: confused and haunted by the random circumstances that had led to their survival.

  CHAPTER

  60

  SEEING THAT THE GRATE ABOVE THE STALL IN THE MEN’S RESTROOM HAD NO screws holding it to the wall, I stepped up on the toilet and yanked at it. It was exactly 6:57. It had taken us that long to clear the restroom and search it.

  The grate didn’t budge. I used Mahoney’s flashlight and shone it through the slats before looking back at him, Bobby Sparks, and Captain Johnson. “Where do these ducts go?” I asked Johnson.

  The Amtrak cop squinted at me in disbelief. “You think she got in there?”

  “I don’t know how else to explain that the grate’s been wired shut from inside. So where do they go?”

  Johnson looked confused. “I don’t know. And I don’t think there’s anyone from maintenance who can tell us until—”

  “Wait, why don’t you know this?” Bobby Sparks asked incredulously.

  “We control the gate areas and the tracks,” the Amtrak cop retorted hotly. “The station’s interior is the responsibility of a private management firm in Virginia, but everyone there’s got the night off. It’s Christmas, for God’s sake.”