James Patterson - Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

I slid out of bed as carefully as I could, stood, felt wobbly, and then noticed the message light blinking on my mobile. I picked it up, staggered to the bathroom, and sat down on the toilet because I did not think standing was such a good idea. Before I could check the message, the phone began buzzing in my hand, the sound that had wrenched me from sleep.

It was Mahoney.

I accepted the call, peed, and grumbled, “You a vampire or something? Never need sleep.”

“Yeah, I’m a new character in that Twilight series my kid’s always reading,” he replied, and I could hear wind blowing hard.

“Get the nerve gas?”

“We got in a firefight with one of Hala’s coconspirators,” Mahoney said. “He’d been holding engineers at gunpoint. Sniper got him, and we freed the rail workers. One had been mutilated, his eyeball boiled.”

That got me more awake. “What? An engineer’s eye?”

“In revenge, because the engineer had done the same thing to the dead guy’s partner, with hot coffee. It’s a long story for another time. But they, the engineers, said the partner left the train in the First Street tunnel and went back toward the entrance, where the third man in the rail crew, a Robby Simon, had disappeared.”

“You find the organophosphates and the triggering device in car twenty-nine?”

“There were three blue barrels with Pinkler Industries labels in car twenty-nine,” Mahoney replied. “But when we opened them, we found sand and gravel.”

I remembered the enthusiasm Hala had shown when she’d described the plot.

“She fed us half-truths mixed with what we wanted to hear,” I said, furious at myself for wanting to believe her confession so much that I’d set aside my suspicions.

“My instincts were right,” Mahoney said. “She stopped the train so other Al Ayla members could steal the chemicals.”

My hand shot to my temple. “And they’re here. In DC.”

“Last known whereabouts: two miles from Congress.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“We’re going back to Hala,” Mahoney said.

I flashed with dread on the image of her kids being tortured.

“You’re going, Ned,” I said. “I’m done with that.”

I ended the call and shut the ringer off. I intended to return to bed. But then I realized that I was no more than fifteen blocks from where Hala’s accomplices had stolen the organophosphates.

So was my family.

My first reaction was to wake them all, move them from the area until the three barrels were found and neutralized.

But then old habits reasserted themselves. Snow on the ground, I thought. They had to have left evidence around there somewhere.

I picked up the phone and called the man I trusted more than anyone in my life.

Omar Nazad sat in the cab of the van, feeling his stinging hands and feet begin to thaw, and stared through the windshield at the one hundred and twenty cubic yards of snow and ice that still lay between him and M Street.

He and the Algerians had broken up and removed at least that amount in the past three hours. They were still only halfway to the road. They hadn’t eaten in twelve hours. And they hadn’t had anything to drink for six. The snow they put in their mouths seemed to make them even thirstier.

“Inshallah,” the Tunisian kept muttering to himself. The will of Allah. It is God’s will that we must suffer and sacrifice and suffer again in order to defeat His enemies. This is a gift, somehow. A blessing.

“We should leave, brother,” Mustapha said from the passenger seat.

“I agree,” Saamad said. “Leave while we still can.”

Nazad looked at them like they were mad. “Leave the best weapon the Family’s ever had? No. That is not what God wants.”

“But what if Allah wants us to get caught and sent to prison?” Saamad demanded.

“Shut up,” Nazad said. He was sick of the Algerians, how quick they were to cut and run. It had to be the French influence.

“I have to eat something, drink something,” Mustapha complained.

“I can’t help you.”

“Maybe there was food in that shed,” Saamad said. “Water too.”

Nazad looked at him again. “You didn’t search the entire place?”

Mustapha shrugged. “The shovels and picks were right by the door.”

Moments later they were all following the path the Algerians had taken to the toolshed earlier. The door hung open on its hinges, flapped in the wind. They went inside, flashed their lights, and saw a portable generator, half a dozen power tools, a jackhammer, three sledgehammers, more picks, a row of hard hats, a surveyor’s transom, and a cooler. Mustapha and Saamad went straight to the cooler, yanked it open, and cried out in delight.

Saamad grabbed a granola bar and a frozen bottle of Gatorade, shook them at Nazad. “Allah be praised! Food and drink, brother.”

“And a jackhammer!” Mustapha cried.

But the Tunisian paid them no mind. He was staring at a metal box attached to the wall and sealed with a Master Lock. On instinct, he retrieved one of the sledgehammers and tried to break the lock, but he couldn’t. He looked closely at the other tools now at his disposal and smiled.

Nazad started the generator. Then he plugged in a Benner-Nawman rebar cutter. He fit the hasp of the lock into the jaws of the cutter and flipped it on. The jaws bit and snapped it in less than a second.

The Algerians had been gnawing on frozen granola bars while he worked. Only when Nazad set the cutter down and pulled open the door to the box did Mustapha become interested.

“What do you find in there, brother?” he asked.

The Tunisian was beaming already, feeling blessed once again by God. The first thing his headlamp had revealed in the box was a row of keys hanging on hooks, all neat and orderly and tagged.

The first key on the right said CAT D6K.

“You woke me out of a perfectly good sleep to ride in a sardine can?” John Sampson groaned, trying to get his massive frame into Mahoney’s Subaru at around four in the morning. He wore a snorkel jacket, hood up, and peered at me blearily from inside the fur trim. He took the travel cup of coffee I offered him.

“Need help checking out a potential crime scene before I call in an evidence team,” I said, putting the Forester in gear. All-wheel drive and weighed down with Sampson’s and my combined four hundred and thirty pounds, the car moved like a mini tank into the tracks other cars had made going up and down Sampson’s street.

“Potential crime scene?” Sampson asked, annoyed.

“I don’t know exactly where the crime scene is, John,” I explained. “That’s why I need you. To help find it.”

He groaned, drank the coffee. “Why do I feel like I’m two hundred moves behind you, Alex?”

“Because in this case you are,” I said, and I filled him in, finishing with the information that members of Al Ayla had likely pulled nerve-gas components off a freight train stopped near the entrance to the tunnel system.

“I know where that is.” Sampson grunted. “Remember running out of there when we were kids?”

“Probably the only time I’ve ever beaten you in a race,” I said.

“Found a body in the right-of-way there six or seven years ago.”

I’d forgotten, but now I nodded and said, “Emily Rodriguez.”

“Poor little thing,” Sampson said. “What was she, seven? Son of a bitch tortured her something awful before he killed her.”

I flashed on Hala’s daughter, also seven, arching against the electric current, and said, “But what do you think? Freeway side of the tracks, or M Street?”

“Freeway,” Sampson said. “M Street, you’re gonna need boots. It’s a good walk to the tracks and they’ve got construction going there on that off-ramp they’ve been building forever.”