James Patterson - Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

I had noticed on the news report that my hands were shaking a little and that I kept swallowing hard as I spoke. I also looked unpleasantly thin-not the trimness of a healthy person, but the gaunt, haggard look of a guy who was living life way too hard.

The Fowler situation had wrapped up less than twelve hours ago. Right then, it felt to me like it had happened thirty years ago. Tonight was turning into a much, much bigger nightmare. That was as plain as the bodies of the dead postal workers. Seeing the way their corpses lay broke me out of my thoughts. I did some quick trajectory calculations and then looked up the east wall and saw the gaping hole of the ventilation system.

How in the hell had she-?

Mahoney showed me his watch: 7:04:50. Mahoney said, “We’re-”

To the right and not far beyond the railcar the postal workers had been filling, I caught a brilliant flash followed by a stunning explosion. Shock waves hit me, hot metal whizzed by my head, and I dove for the ground.

Ten seconds too soon, but not a disaster, not a game changer , Hala thought after she heard the blast-the bomb she’d set closest to the front of that railcar at the loading dock.

Hala heard people yelling as she bit down on the steel clip that ran through the grenade’s safety mechanism. She pulled the device away from her, spit out the clip, held the firing lever tight. Wanting to keep them convinced as long as possible that she was attacking from the terminal’s west end, Hala leaned back and hurled the grenade up and over the nearest MARC train; she heard it hit and clatter well back by the rear platform.

She ducked behind the front end of the locomotive, head down, protecting her ears and eyes from the blast that shook the terminal. She waited for a count of four, to let any flying debris land, and then threw a second grenade toward the engine of the dark commuter train. It landed on the roof.

Hala was already running east toward the Crescent when that grenade blew. Gun in one hand, tool bag in the other, she fed ravenously on the adrenaline coursing through her, hardly feeling the torn muscle in her hip at all.

“Union Terminal is under attack,” I heard Captain Johnson yell into his radio after the first explosion. “Stop all incoming traffic. I repeat, shut all rail traffic in vicinity of-”

Another voice bellowed, “Man down!” I scrambled to my feet and looked out through the loading dock door. Special Agent Bobby Sparks was sprawled bleeding and unmoving between the rail tracks. Two of his men were already tending to him.

“Where the fuck is she?” Mahoney hissed at me just before the second blast went off, to our right, on the other side of the closest commuter train. A third explosion flashed and thundered off the top of one of the locomotives.

Out beyond Bobby Sparks and the men working on him, two HRT operators crouched and ran toward the latest explosion, automatic weapons leading. Three Amtrak police officers paralleled them, pistols drawn, leaving the rear platform, moving north onto the loading platform between the MARC trains.

I was looking at the fallen HRT leader, wondering where Hala could have thrown the grenade from, when Mahoney seemed to sense something. “Trap.”

“What?”

“Booby traps,” he said. “She’s drawing…” He shouted into his radio: “HRT, stand your-”

The hostage rescue operator closest to the commuter train broke a delicate fishing line and set off the fourth grenade. He was killed instantly, and his partner seriously wounded, a split second before the fifth bomb went off, between the two commuter trains where the Amtrak police officers had gone.

Two minutes before the first grenade went off inside Union Station terminal, Omar Nazad fishtailed the van in the deep wet snow clogging Twelfth Street where it crossed over Water Street and began to drop toward M Street.

The Tunisian knew from prior trips to the area that there was a construction site beneath the elevated freeway to his immediate left, an office building that held community college classrooms on his right, and beyond that, at M Street, a second office building that was headquarters to some kind of marine engineering company. But it all looked completely different now, blanketed in snow, the buildings dark and deserted. It would be one of the last parts of the city to see a plow.

This was both a blessing and a curse.

At the bottom of the ramp, the snow had drifted so deep that the van bogged down, and his men had to jump out the back and push.

“One minute fifty!” one of his accomplices called from the van’s rear.

“If God wills it, we’ll make it, brother,” Nazad said between gritted teeth that he clenched tighter when his tires caught and they began to move once more.

Approaching the engineering firm, they almost got stuck again, but he threw the van in low gear and kept it moving, and they slid sideways out onto M Street. The Tunisian could see nothing to his right, but he knew that somewhere there in the darkness was the incomplete infrastructure of a ramp that would eventually connect the Eleventh Street bridge with the Southeast Freeway. Beneath it was all manner of earthmoving equipment, cranes and the like.

It was in there, into that construction site, that Nazad needed to go, as deep into it as he dared. But the place was buried under seventeen inches of snow, and if he parked on M, the van would mostly likely be seen.

And they’d be questioned.

And that would not do.

“One minute!”

Nazad looked in his rearview, saw no cars; looked out his windshield and saw nothing but the glow of streetlamps on the falling snow. Something Hala had once said echoed in his mind: In times of crisis, Allah rewards the bold.

That’s when he saw how he might get close to where he needed to be.

“Fifty seconds!”

The Tunisian pulled the van hard to the left, almost up against the median strip that divided M Street in that part of the city. Then he threw the vehicle in reverse, tore back the drapes, and yelled at his men to open the rear door so he could see. The second the door opened, he stomped on the gas.

With all the combined weight in the rear of the vehicle, the van accelerated much faster than Nazad thought it would. It blasted through a cut in the curb that the freeway builders had made and bounded up onto the raised dirt road that ran back into the construction site. Wind had blown the snow around quite a bit here, causing it to drift up against the machines: two backhoes, a dump truck, and a bulldozer. But there was little more than six inches of it on the dirt road.

Praise Allah! the Tunisian thought as they plowed deeper and deeper into the site, so close he could see a few lights on the Southeast Freeway, and then a stronger light, coming nearer. The van stopped.

“Twenty-five seconds!”

Nazad flicked off his headlights and sat there a moment, still looking out the open back doors of the van. Panting, sweat pouring off his brow, and smiling like he’d just won the lottery, the Tunisian heard a train whistle blow and saw, down a steep bank, on the other side of a chain-link fence, the headlight of a locomotive pulling a long line of boxcars toward the entrance to a tunnel that bent to the right at First Street and ran beneath Capitol Hill to Union Station and all points north.

“Count them!” he ordered.

He heard his men counting the boxcars as they passed. Nazad spotted the twenty-ninth car, a green C. Itoh shipping container, just before the snowy night was cut by the wailing of brakes and the screeching of steel wheels on the rails. The entire train came to a slow, mournful halt.