James Patterson - Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

“What has happened to you, brother?” Saamad asked. “Where is Aman? Hala?”

“Allah took my eye,” Nazad replied, hearing the slight slur in his voice. “But I am happy to give it for our cause. Hala has been captured, but she will never speak of what we will unleash twenty-six days from now. And Aman is on the train and will make sure it gets far away from here before he makes his escape.”

“Allahu Akbar,” Mustapha said.

“God is great,” Nazad agreed. “Now, let’s get out of here, brothers.”

The plows had been busy the past few hours, pushing lanes clear along many of the main routes of the nation’s capital. But they’d thrown up huge banks of snow that sealed off driveways and roads and that buried cars, making some streets look like they were lined with odd-shaped igloos.

My right butt cheek was sore from the B 12shot, but, as Mahoney had promised, despite almost forty hours with minimal sleep, I felt alert. Mahoney drove, following a plow as it exited the Southeast Freeway onto 295 and took the Eleventh Street bridge to Virginia. It was slow going, but we had as good a driving surface as could be found that night.

“I wonder why she never tried to contact him again,” I said.

“Who?”

“The guy she called. The one who was somewhere near the other end of this bridge.”

“I dunno. But you’ll get the chance to ask her in a few minutes.”

Still following the plow, we left the bridge and headed south on the Shepherd Parkway toward 495, Alexandria, and the detention center where they’d taken Hala Al Dossari to be interrogated and to await arraignment.

I checked my watch. Pushing ten thirty. Last night around this time, I had been outside a mansion in Georgetown, trying to get a psychotic to answer the phone. Now I was on my way to watch Mahoney interrogate a sociopath. I felt tired of my profession right then, wondered what it would be like to change, to put a complete end to coming face-to-face with deranged people, to begin seeking out the good, sane folks, and only the good, sane folks.

That caused me to think of Bree and wonder if I should call her to tell her of my likely delay. But what was the point? She had to be almost expecting that by now. The problem was that when other women in my life had finally come to expect my absence, they had gone on to make it permanent, something I was determined would not occur with Bree.

“This absolutely has to happen now?” I asked, yawning.

Mahoney nodded. Up until then, he hadn’t been willing to tell me what he planned for Hala Al Dossari, but now he said, “She’s tired, confused, in custody, figuring out she’s fucked for life, and she’s coming down off painkillers. Looks like Oxy, from the blood work they did on her.”

I squinted. “You’re saying she’s a jihadist and a junkie?”

“I don’t know about that,” Mahoney said. “But she had a bunch of pills with her, including Oxy, antibiotics, and muscle relaxants.”

“Like she was expecting to be wounded.”

“Or was just being a prepared doctor,” Mahoney said.

The van’s rear wheels spun in the snow, digging deeper and deeper troughs that almost immediately glazed over with ice.

Omar Nazad pounded the wheel, furious, an emotion compounded and turned into homicidal rage by the shooting pains and twitches that had suddenly started all around his blinded eye. They’d been at this solidly for the past hour, trying to get the van free without attracting attention. It was eighty, maybe ninety, yards out to M Street. You could see the snowed-over tracks they’d laid down coming in. But the van hadn’t moved more than six feet in that direction since he’d returned from the tunnel.

Saamad and Mustapha were exhausted. He told them to take some of the pills Hala had given them and try again. But even that had not helped. There was nothing they could do really, except…

He jumped out of the van, turned it off, trudged around the back, and said, “We dig our way out.”

“With what?” Mustapha grumbled. “Our hands?”

“This is a construction site,” Saamad said. “We find shovels!”

“Shovels?” Nazad said scornfully. “I’m hoping bulldozer or backhoe.”

The Tunisian went around the construction site and looked in the cabs of the John Deere backhoe loaders and the Cat D6K bulldozer, but he found no keys. However, as he was climbing down off the second backhoe, the Algerians showed up with tools. They’d broken into a shed at the rear of the site and discovered shovels and picks.

At a quarter to twelve, they began to dig the seventy yards to freedom.

The Alexandria Detention Center sits just west of the 495 freeway, a couple of miles from the U.S. federal court and the local office of the American Civil Liberties Union, which monitors this jail, where terrorists are often held awaiting arraignment or trial.

The U.S. Marshals Service contracts with the Alexandria sheriff’s office to hold suspected terrorists in custody, which they do incredibly well. It’s one of the cleanest, most humane houses of incarceration that I’ve ever visited.

We found Hala Al Dossari chained by the ankles to a chair in an interrogation room that had the requisite Formica-topped table and one-way mirror with an observation booth behind it. A translator sitting in that booth would interpret anything Hala said in Arabic and report it to us through earbuds we wore. Hala had been cleaned. Her wounds had been treated. Her clothes had been taken for processing. She was dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit that said FEDERAL on the back. Her left arm hung in a sling.

Hala had evidently been acting in a belligerent manner since being taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals. Despite her wounds, she had refused to cooperate with doctors or jail personnel. They had had to forcibly lift and move her through the medical examination and treatment, and then through the body and cavity search conducted at her intake. She’d refused food and water and had to be carried into the interrogation room by two deputies who’d been defensive linemen at Old Dominion.

She ignored Mahoney and focused on me with an expression that revealed neither surprise nor fear.

“We meet again, Cross,” she said. “So soon you want to talk? I do not think this is smart for me to do. I want my lawyer.”

“Federal public defender’s on his way,” Mahoney said agreeably. “But it might be awhile. The snowstorm, you know.”

“I say nothing to you anyway. So go ahead, we stay here all night.”

“I’ll arrange that,” Mahoney said with a plastic smile, and he left the room, which was what he had told me he was going to do.

I said nothing, just sat down and watched her watching me. It was still hard for me to believe that someone with such intelligence, training, and classic beauty had turned out so ruthless and cold-blooded.

The silence, as I expected, finally unnerved her. “You the good cop?”

“I like to think so, Dr. Al Dossari,” I said. “The fair one, at least.”

“Fair,” she said as if she were spitting the word. “You used dogs on me.”

I shrugged. “I knew dogs frightened you. I used it. You would have done the same thing.”

She glared at me.

“Why’d you kill your husband?”

“I did not kill him. He killed himself at the order of a crazy man.”

“Whom you in turn killed?”

Hala said nothing.

“Your dossier makes interesting reading. And the Saudi embassy has promised to ship over everything it has on you.”

“So?”

“So I’m sure I’ll find other things in there, ways to get inside your head.”