James Patterson - Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

I hung up and stared morosely out the window. My family knew what a detective’s life was like. Bad guys don’t take holidays. They show up anytime, anyplace. Not just on a summer Sunday afternoon when you’re sitting and painting a fence, but also on a Christmas afternoon when you’re sitting and having dinner.

They all knew my job was an emergency-type job, like being a doctor or a firefighter. On top of that, it was a tough job. And beyond that…beyond that…Well, beyond that, I wished someone would answer the damn phone. Because they were my family, and I was really missing them.

That longing remained as we passed through police lines that closed off Louisiana Avenue for two blocks between C Street and Massachusetts Avenue, including most of lower Senate Park. The road had already been plowed on both sides. But the only vehicles visible on that stretch of Louisiana were two black motor homes idling near D Street, wheels buried in the snow.

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.”

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 assure 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 participated 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 Suitland-Silver 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.”