Merry Christmas, Alex Cross Part 23

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 b.u.t.ton 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 b.u.t.tons, 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 choice," 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 ma.s.sive 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 b.i.t.c.hed 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 h.e.l.l and just plow through it."

"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, c.o.c.king his head to see with his good eye.

"Brother! Stop!" Saamad cried, pointing to their left, out onto M Street and the flas.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+pment 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 pa.s.s through Union Station and end up at a freight facility on the west sh.o.r.e 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 your job?" 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.