James Patterson - Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

I glanced at the caller ID, smiled, and said, “It’s Ali.”

My six-year-old son was with his mother, Christine, for the holiday. Everyone’s shoulders relaxed. Bree grinned, got up, and said, “I’ll warm that pie.”

“Merry Christmas,” I said as I picked up the phone.

“God bless us, every one!” Ali cried.

“Watching Scrooge ?” I asked.

“Last night,” Ali said. “Thank you for the boxing gloves.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Mommy doesn’t like them.”

“You just bring them home with you, then.”

“Santa gave me an Xbox. What did he get you?”

“Seventeen inches of snow, and the best little boy in the world,” I replied.

He laughed and boasted, “I went sledding in the park.”

“Fun?”

“We built a jump.”

“Then it had to be fun,” I said. “Do you want to say hello to Nana and everyone?”

He said he did and I passed the phone down the table to my grandmother, watching her light up as she listened. “Well, God bless us, every one, to you too, little man,” she said.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see Bree back from the kitchen, silhouetted against the fading day. My wife smiled and kissed me on the cheek. She smelled wonderful when she leaned over and whispered, “You’ll be getting a special gift later.”

I smiled and squeezed her hand, feeling that, for at least a little while, nothing could possibly wreck our well-deserved celebration.

At 5:19 that Christmas afternoon, a woman carrying a U.S. passport that identified her as Julia Azizz of Philadelphia tipped the Diamond Cab driver extremely well for bringing her all the way from Arlington, Virginia, to DC in the horrible weather. Then she got out of the taxi at the Massachusetts Avenue entrance to Union Station, north of Capitol Hill.

Azizz shivered in the frigid wind and stepped into deep snow that workers were struggling to clear. The light was fading, but for the moment she kept her sunglasses on as she lugged a large, heavy shopping bag from Macy’s toward the station door.

A small, fit, and exotically attractive woman with burnished copper skin, Azizz wore a dark wool coat, gray cashmere scarf, dark wool slacks, and a ribbed turtleneck sweater. A pair of calf-high black leather boots completed the look, an outfit that suggested she was perhaps some stylish congressional aide instead of a fanatical member of Al Ayla, the Family.

Azizz’s real first name was Hala.

A plague upon them, she thought as she pushed her way through the revolving doors into the vaulted marble Amtrak facility. Hala was pleased to see that what she’d heard on the taxi radio on the way into the city was true: though everything else had come to a near standstill, Amtrak trains were still running. They were heavily delayed by the storm, though, and Union Station was packed with travelers.

It was perfect. Even better than she’d planned.

Indeed, the events that were about to unfold were supposed to have taken place earlier in the day, around eleven, give or take ten minutes. But the storm had changed things, delayed the intricate timing of her plot by some five hours at least, the last time she’d checked.

Kicking the snow off her boots, she looked around the main hall, ignoring the voice of Nat King Cole crooning about chestnuts on an open fire, paying no attention to the Christmas trees and lights, the token menorah, and the darkened shops to her left and right. She saw only the long lines at the ticket counters ahead of her and the scores of anxious travelers sitting on benches and on the floor, some groggy from Christmas dinner and eager to be on their way home, others frustrated and hungry because they still hadn’t gotten to their holiday feasts, having been separated from their families by the freak storm.

Hala felt no pity whatsoever for any of them. As far as she was concerned, they were pigs who ignored the teachings of their own prophet Isa, swine who believed in only what they could buy, drink, or stuff down their fat throats.

Americans are weak. They know nothing of sacrifice, or of God.

She flipped open a throwaway cell phone and hit Redial.

“Yes?” a male voice answered in Arabic.

“Why?” Hala asked.

“One, four, and zero,” he replied.

She glanced at the big clock inside the station. It was 5:25. She calculated and then said, “Seven and five.”

“Inshallah,” the man replied and hung up.

Hala stuffed the phone in her pocket, thinking, And now, finally, it begins.

She almost smiled at that thought before reaching up to remove her sunglasses and scarf. She’d grown her hair out recently and stopped dying it auburn. Now luxuriously thick, long, and near jet-black, her hair was pulled back severely into a bun so that her face, with its extraordinary bone structure, was visible to everyone, infidel and believer alike.

Indeed, that’s how Hala wanted it. She looked around at a young family moving toward the ticket line.

She flashed on her own children, Fahd and Aamina, back in Saudi Arabia, abandoned to her mother while Hala fought and sacrificed for God. Seeing her young son and daughter in her mind now, seeing them that last time in her husband’s arms, Hala felt a moment of desperate, almost crippling grief, but she quickly compartmentalized the emotion, used her husband’s death and the soon-to-be-eternal rift between her and her children to fuel her anger, and her will.

Her head felt light, speedy, undulating. Stuffing the scarf and sunglasses into the Macy’s bag, Hala understood that this was what it was like to be a martyr, to give one’s soul over to the Eternal One.

She was at peace with it, submissive even.

Hala looked around, spotted security cameras aimed at various angles inside the station. Before going in search of something to eat, she made a point of walking in front of each and every one of those cameras, looking right up into the lens and giving the people watching a nice icy smile.

Shortly after the pecan pie with vanilla ice cream was demolished and the dishes cleared, Nana Mama began to read out loud from the King James Bible and the Gospel of Saint Luke: “‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.’”

My grandmother has been reading Luke’s account of Jesus’s birth after every Christmas dinner since I came to live with her, when I was ten. As exhausted as I was, hearing her recount the circumstances of Jesus’s birth, I felt rooted by the words of the Bible and connected by the strength of Nana Mama’s moving delivery. Bree was sitting in my lap, and I hugged her and laid my head against her back, listening to her heartbeat and feeling like I could drift off to sleep a very happy man.

But then my cell phone rang again.

Nana Mama stopped reading and shot me a withering look. I glanced at the caller ID. There was no name, but I knew that number, or a variation of it. The call was coming from someone inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where I used to work as a criminal profiler.

I winced at the reaction I knew I was going to get, but I whispered, “I have to take this. Keep going.”

Stonily, Bree stood to let me up. Stonily, Nana Mama read on, raising her voice as I left the room, calling after me as I headed into the kitchen: “‘And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.’”