James Patterson - Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

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.

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.

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.