James Patterson - Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

The green container car was less than one hundred feet away.

The Tunisian’s face blossomed into another joyous grin and he pounded the wheel of the car. She’d done it! That crazy Hala had done it!

“Out!” he cried to the men in the rear of the van. “Everyone out!”

“Send ambulances to the U.S. Postal Service loading dock on First Street,” Mahoney shouted into his radio. “We’ve got seven dead, three wounded. Suspect remains at large inside the Amtrak terminal, which has been booby-trapped. I want this place surrounded and as many bomb squads as you can muster. In the meantime, no one-I repeat, no one-gets in or out of here without my say-so.”

I didn’t envy my old friend that night. Mahoney had been sitting on Union Station with a full HRT team for more than twenty-four hours. He and Bobby Sparks were supposed to have stopped Hala Al Dossari from bombing the station, and now one of the most highly trained agents in the FBI was dead.

Then I remembered something I’d read in the dossier on Hala Al Dossari.

“Dogs,” I said to Mahoney. “I’m calling in the K-Nine patrols.”

The FBI agent nodded. “Good idea. We’ve got her boots and jacket. That’s enough to key them on her.”

“I want them for another reason as well. Hala’s afraid of them. Pathologically afraid of them, evidently.”

As Amtrak and Metro police set up protective lines around the dead, I wondered whether the random poisoning, the shootings on the loading dock, and the five explosions would be the full extent of the attack. Was that all, or was there more to come, some bigger weapon we hadn’t seen yet?

Before I could evaluate that possibility, my frazzled attention turned toward the remaining FBI HRT operators, who were using powerful headlamps and flashlights to search the immediate area for other trip wires.

Yawning, desperate for caffeine, I thought, Is this what Hala wants? To have the people hunting her feel like they’re the hunted?

I was fairly confident that that was indeed the idea, or at least part of it.

But I could not stop the nagging feeling that, unless she was bent on a pure suicide mission here, we were missing something, that there was more to this than a fanatical woman with access to cyanide, bullets, and bombs.

I went up into the station, where people were frantic, despite the efforts of officers on hand to calm them. They’d heard explosions. Five of them, and they wanted out. I didn’t blame them. A part of me, a very big part of me, wanted out too.

Two husky guys in their early twenties began pushing one of the officers guarding the exit near First Street. The cops grabbed the guys by their shoulders, spoke softly, and calmed them down.

A middle-aged man wearing a fancy black cashmere coat accosted me.

“You’re Detective Alex Cross, aren’t you?” He asked the question as if he were accusing me of something.

“Yes, I’m Alex Cross.”

“Do you by any chance know who I am?”

“Yes, sir. I do. Congressman Richard Holt of Delaware.”

“That’s right,” he said. And then his voice moved into the too-friendly tone of a man running for reelection: “It really is necessary for me to be out of the station in the next thirty minutes. Do you think that can be arranged?”

“Congressman, if I could arrange it, I’d have you and everyone else out of here in the next thirty seconds, and I’d be at home in my wife’s loving arms.”

“Excellent,” said the congressman. “How long?”

Typical politician. Only listened to himself.

“Mr. Holt,” I said. “Read my lips. I would like to have you out of here in the next half hour, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”

Holt smiled a standard candidate’s smile and said, “If anyone can do it, you can. After all, you’re Alex Cross.”

“Doesn’t seem to be impressing many people these days,” I said as I turned and walked away.

Yeah, I was Alex Cross…without a lead, without a clue, without Hala.

And everywhere I looked, there were angry, frightened people trying to get their needs met:

“My little boy has medication he has to take.”

“My cell phone isn’t getting any reception. What is this, Nazi Germany?”

“This is exactly the kind of shit I expect from the Metro police. You guys hate black people. You hate us.”

“Just stay calm, dear. There’s nothing we can do.”

“That’s always your stupid advice, Barbara. Stay calm. Just stay calm.”

I rubbed my temples, tried to find a place of quiet, a moment of sanity, so I could call home again.

Nana answered on the first ring. “You coming home, Alex?”

“Soon as I’m able.”

“You okay?”

“I am. I just wanted you all to know that. Bree there?”

“She and Jannie have gone to the corner for milk and eggs.”

“I’ll try her cell.”

“You be safe now,” my grandmother said. She paused, and then added in a worried tone, “Alex, I don’t feel good about whatever you’re doing.”

“Having visions these days?”

“I’m telling you what I am feeling,” she said, hurt. “What we’re all feeling.”

I hesitated, willing myself not to fall into the trap of thinking too much beyond the task at hand. When someone is lobbing grenades, you want to be single-minded, even if it hurts the people closest to you.

“I promise you I’ll be safe, Nana,” I said at last. “And I’ll call again when we’ve wrapped this up and I’m coming home.”

“Please do that, Alex. I mean, come home.”

“Always,” I said, and I hung up.

Snow began to fall again as one of Nazad’s men set down his bolt cutters after clipping out an entire section of the chain-link fence that separated them from the train tracks. He and the other two members of the Family were all wearing the same fake CSX repairman uniforms as their leader.

“Get the substitute barrels,” Nazad hissed to two of them, and he told the third, “Bring the tank.”

The Tunisian charged down the steep bank in the knee-deep snow as the flakes grew thicker and fell faster until it was almost as if he were in one of those Christmas movies that the infidels so adored and he so despised. Almost there, he glanced to his left along the boxcars. He was unable to see the two locomotives at the head of the freight train, which was good: he wanted them deep inside the tunnel, blind to what was about to happen twenty-nine cars back.

He reached the green C. Itoh container car and went to its rear doors, which were locked. To ensure the integrity of the cargo, whoever had loaded the car had sealed the locks with heavy-gauge steel cables and crimped metal plates that bore the date and time the doors were closed.

One of Nazad’s men appeared, lugging what looked like a scuba tank. Nazad reached inside his coat and pulled out an apparatus that included two rubber hoses, a brass connector, and the thin neck and head of an acetylene torch.

They had it attached in seconds. Nazad glanced up the north bank toward the freeway. No one would ever see them down here. Who would look anywhere but the road in a crazy storm like this?

He got out a flint striker, turned the gas on, and lit the torch with a sound like a cork popping. With three slow, deliberate slashes, he severed the cables from the sealing plates. They fell, hissing, into the snow at his feet.

Nazad shut the torch off and handed it to his helper, who set it aside and started to claw his way back up through the snow toward the repair van. Nazad retrieved the sealing plates and pocketed them. It was snowing so hard now that he kept blinking at the infernal flakes as he opened the door.