James Patterson - Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

“Yes.”

“Where?”

Hala shrugged, said, “Somewhere outside the First Street tunnel before it goes under Capitol Hill and through Union Station to the Ivy City Yard.”

I knew exactly where she was talking about. As young teenagers, Sampson and I had climbed the fence and gone into the tunnel a couple of hundred yards before we heard a train coming at us. Wasn’t that the fastest I’d ever run?

Mahoney asked, “So, what, you stopped the train long enough for someone to steal the barrels?”

She shook her head a little too quickly and said, “I stopped it long enough for a PhD student in chemistry to attach a timed system that will convert the compound to nerve gas when triggered.”

“And?” I asked. “Who is going to trigger it?”

Hala shrugged. “Whoever is in the van that is supposed to meet the freight barge tomorrow afternoon.”

“Driver’s name?” Mahoney demanded.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t need to know. It’s better that way.”

“So the van driver meets the freight barge, and then what?” I asked.

She smiled. “He places the barrels in his van, triggers the system, puts on a gas mask, and drives around the city letting the gas escape, starting with Wall Street right after the markets close.”

I flashed on the freight train that I’d seen after Hala was caught, coming from that tunnel and heading toward the Ivy City Yard, and remembered how it had made me think that some semblance of normalcy had returned to Union Station.

Actually, I’d been watching a chemical weapon pass right under everyone’s nose.

I checked my watch: 12:31 A.M. Christmas had come and gone, and so had my promise to Bree, along with an innocence that I had not known I had left to lose. But of course, although I’d heard testimony about it, had gathered evidence in its wake, I had never personally seen children tortured before.

The freight train had gotten at least a three-hour head start. But it was traveling in the wake of a nor’easter barreling toward New York. We’d catch the train, stop it, and disarm that triggering device.

Mahoney seemed to think the same thing. He got up and left the room to arrange for the Critical Incident Response Group to mobilize while he made plans to intercept the train.

I studied Hala, who was staring at the table as if she couldn’t believe she was in this position: a traitor to her cause.

I said, “Which freight car carries those organophosphates?”

Hala looked at me as if she had one last card to play. “Twenty-ninth behind the engine,” she said. “It’s green with CSX and C. Itoh markings. You can’t miss it.”

Fifteen minutes later, at a quarter to one in the morning, I stood in the snow on the roof of the detention center with Ned Mahoney, waiting for a U.S. Marine helicopter that was coming in from Quantico loaded with members of the Critical Incident Response Group.

“We’ve got a location on the train,” Mahoney said. “It’s almost to Trenton. We’ll stop it somewhere north of there, someplace rural.”

“What if it’s booby-trapped?” I asked.

“Believe me, we’ll be wearing full HAZMAT gear,” Mahoney said. “Sounds sporty, doesn’t it? I can’t believe you don’t want to be there to see this through.”

I’d known Mahoney for nearly fifteen years, worked side by side with him for several of those years, had been to his home too many times to count, knew all the doings of his wife and children. And yet right then, he seemed a stranger to me.

“I didn’t like what went on in that room, Ned,” I said.

“You think I did, Alex?” he shot back.

“It’s beneath us.”

“It is,” he agreed, pain rippling through his face. “Shows you that you’ve got to meet people like that on their own turf, using their rules. It’s a sad thing to say, but true.”

“They were kids.”

“They were leverage against an insane scheme.”

I heard the thumping of the helicopter coming, saw the spotlight on its belly. “What if her attorney finds out, Ned? Demands to see a tape of the interrogation. Everything Hala told us will be fruit of the poisoned tree, disallowed in court.”

“Not everything has to play out in court,” Mahoney replied coldly. “Besides, when I raised my hand there just before we began, the battery pack on the camera in the observation booth mysteriously fell off. Anything that went on beyond that is baseless hearsay on Dr. Al Dossari’s part, her word against ours, and who is a judge going to trust, Alex? A twenty-year veteran of the FBI and the legendary Dr. Alex Cross, or a madwoman willing to send nerve gas into Manhattan?”

I gazed at him as if he were transforming before my eyes, seeing new dimensions to his character. “I never pegged you as a master strategist, Ned.”

He raised his arm to block the snow being thrown up by the helicopter, yelled, “I have my moments. You can take my car home if you’re good to drive.”

“I’ll make it,” I said and accepted the keys as the chopper settled into the snow. “Ned?”

“What’s that, Alex?”

“Be careful,” I said. “You’ve got a lot of people to come back to.”

Mahoney locked gazes with me, understanding. He shook my hand. “Thanks, Alex. It means a lot.”

I made it home at two in the morning on the day after Christmas. Everyone had gone to sleep, though the lights on the tree still glowed in the front window, a beacon left on for me, I guessed. Where had the holiday gone?

I kicked off my shoes, climbed the stairs, listened at the doors of my children and my grandmother, and felt drowsy at the rhythm of their breathing. Not even Nana’s gentle snoring could keep me awake.

I slipped into my room, dropped my pants, and slid into bed, feeling the heat of Bree’s body. Her smell was there too, all around me. She rolled over, laid her head on my chest, murmured, “You okay, baby?”

“I’m good now,” I said, and closed my eyes, telling myself to compartmentalize, to take refuge in my own bed with my wife holding me, and rest.

But as I hugged Bree, my mind slipped back and forth between images of the Al Dossari children under torture and the details of the story Hala told us.

Just before I plunged into sleep, I remembered something I’d said to Mahoney the evening before: Confessions made under torture can’t be taken seriously. They’re half-truths mixed with what the tortured person thinks the torturer wants to hear.

For an hour and a half, i slept with no dreams of anything. but then, from the inky depths of my brain, images began to roll. I saw Hala lobbing the grenade at me. I saw Henry Fowler holding a gun to his ex-wife’s head and kicking at his children, who became Hala’s kids strapped to the torture chairs.

The Saudi secret policemen in their hoods were there as well, one carrying the battery, the other holding the ends of the jumper cables. The one with the battery pulled off his hood, revealing himself as Mahoney. The second hooded man tried to get away, but Mahoney grinned grimly and tore the hood off his head.

It was me. I was the one who held the jumper-cable clamps. Mahoney and I were laughing, enjoying ourselves the way we’d done dozens of times at backyard barbecues and other family get-togethers.

My dream self opened the red clamp’s jaw wide, looked at the children, and seemed fascinated by the terror they displayed. I clamped the cable to Aamina’s chair, expecting the arch and trembling I’d seen her exhibit during her torture before.

Instead, I heard a rhythmic buzzing noise that broke the spell and roused me from sleep. I was drenched with sweat. Bree rolled over and slept on. I looked at the clock groggily: 3:40 a.m. I needed at least ten, fourteen more hours, but my bladder felt full. And what was the noise that woke me?