Merry Christmas, Alex Cross Part 13

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 a.s.sure 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 partic.i.p.ated 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 SuitlandSilver 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 c.o.ke. 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 AMTRAK and beneath it the name and beneath it the name SEAN 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. FBI. A sweaty man in an Amtrak police uniform followed the three of them into the McDonald's. 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?"

"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 50 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."