James Patterson: Kill Alex Cross

“Tariq, no!”

But it was too late. He shoved the capsule into his mouth and bit down on it. She saw him wince, as the glass cut into his gums. Then the trickle of blood from his lips. Now it was just a matter of time before he was dead. Her Tariq was already dying.

Hala turned to face the old man. She looked from the suicide pill in her hand back up to his pathetic, wrinkled face. The arrogance in his eyes.

“There was one thing you said before,” she told him. Her voice broke more than she would have liked, but she pressed on. “One thing, anyway, that was true.”

“Yes?” Jiddo said solicitously. “And what was that, my child?”

“I was very well trained,” she said.

Hala turned all at once and landed a grip on the other woman’s wrist. She snapped it easily with one clean motion. The woman screamed.

When the gun dropped from her hand, Hala was right there to catch it. Her finger found the trigger, and she shot the woman. Point-blank. In the face. No hesitation.

There were no idle or slow thoughts now. Only intentions. And fast actions.

She fired again, into the younger man’s chest as he came at her. Jiddo had started toward the cover of his car, but Hala put a round into the back of his head before he could get there.

He sprawled onto the hood, sending the laptop flying, then he slid off the Mercedes’s expensive finish to land next to it on the dusty ground. Only a broad paint stroke of red was left behind.

By the time Hala turned back to Tariq, he’d already sunk to his knees. The convulsions had begun. His head hitched with every attempt at a full breath.

“Go!” he wheezed at her. “Go... now!”

“I can’t!” She knelt next to him. For the first time since their so-called mission had begun, she was frozen, unable to act.

Then something moved behind her.

Tariq’s eyes went wide. “Hala!”

She rolled and fired instinctively. The bullet caught the younger man in the temple.

Blind rage took her. Hala was back on her feet. A wild, animal scream sounded in her ears as if it were coming from someone else while she emptied her magazine into their bodies.

Then she kicked and railed at their torsos, their limbs, their heads — even their faces. There was no amount of damage she could do to pay them for their sins, but still, she didn’t stop. They would arrive in the afterlife looking nothing like themselves .

Finally, she fell back to the ground, panting and sobbing as she took Tariq up in her arms.

He lay half on his side where he’d gone down. His wide eyes seemed to be focused on the sky. It was as if he were still regarding the heavens, and it struck Hala that maybe God had been the last thing he’d looked for before he died.

Time slipped away. Later, Hala wouldn’t be able to remember how long she had stayed there with Tariq, but slowly, her senses came back to her.

She had to keep moving now. That much was clear. Grief was one thing, but weakness was quite another. Hala was anything but weak. She was trained to be a warrior — to survive at any cost. That’s what she would do.

Without even standing, she moved over to the others on the ground. She ran her hands through the young man’s pockets until she found the car keys. She took everything else they had, too — cash, credit cards, even the dead woman’s long black coat.

Jiddo’s pockets were empty. The only thing Hala took from him was the laptop computer. There was no knowing when or if the information it held might prove useful. Maybe it could be used to ransom her children.

Finally, she stood up again but felt like she was moving underwater. Everything seemed to flow slowly by as Hala climbed into the 4Runner, backed it up, and pulled out toward the road.

Drive slowly, Hala. Do nothing out of the ordinary .

Coming to this country, she’d been prepared to die at any time. And in a way, she realized, she just had. Hala Al Dossari’s life was over. Another one would have to begin.

Somewhere. Somehow. Her life as a warrior would continue.

But who , Hala wondered, will I fight?

When I received permission to interview ethan and zoe, it came from the same place as my last invitation to the White House — straight out of the East Wing. It had been a week since the rescue, and the media circus was going full tilt. I’d never seen so many reporters outside the White House, and that’s saying a lot, for Washington.

Security on the other side of the fence was something else again. It took forty-five minutes for Mrs. Coyle’s deputy to get me from the East Visitors Gate up to the residence.

When we reached the second floor hall, Mrs. Coyle was there to greet me herself. She came right up and took both of my hands.

“It’s good to see you, Alex,” she said. “I’m not even sure how to say what I’m feeling. There are no words.”

“Thank you for having me” was all I said. Getting this interview had been no easy thing. I don’t imagine anyone but the First Lady could have gotten me here.

She walked me up the hall in the opposite direction as the last time, while two Secret Service agents followed at a respectful distance.

“Zoe will probably be a little reticent,” she told me, “but Ethan’s actually been eager to talk about the kidnapping. I’ve gone over everything with them, and with their care team. You can ask what you need to.”

We passed the famous Yellow Oval Room and came to a large, sunny den, with a view of the South Lawn. Ethan and Zoe were sharing one of the couches, watching Despicable Me on a huge wall-mounted TV. I recognized the president’s mother, knitting by the window. She smiled and nodded but didn’t get up.

“Ethan? Zoe?” Mrs. Coyle said. “Can you turn that off, please? This is the detective I told you about. This is Alex Cross.”

The kids both looked over their shoulders at me. Interested, but not too much.

“Hi,” they said together quietly.

“Come in. Please.” Mrs. Coyle motioned me farther inside and we came around the couch to sit down.

I started the interview slowly, asking closed-ended questions at first, then opening it up to whatever they might remember or want to tell me.

Zoe was as quiet as her mother thought she might be. She pulled her feet up under her and drew little circles with her finger on the arm of the couch, mostly with her eyes down.

Ethan was nearly the opposite. He watched me closely, and always answered first, with the kind of quiet clarity you get from kids sometimes after a crisis.

“We just kept talking to each other,” he told me at one point. “I knew we had a chance since we were still... you know. Alive.”

The blessing, if there was one, was that neither of them remembered a whole lot about their time in that cellar. Given the levels of Rohypnol in their systems after the rescue, that was no surprise.

Neither of them could say much about their captor, either. Everything they’d been given to eat or drink came through a sliding panel in the door. There had been no conversation at all.

“He just ignored us the whole time,” Ethan said. “Like we weren’t even there.”

“You knew it was a man, though?” I asked. They hadn’t been told a word about Rodney Glass, particularly the fact that he’d been released from custody for a lack of evidence.

“I saw his hands a couple of times. Man’s hands. And sometimes, I could hear him talking on the other side of the door,” Ethan said.

“Talking?”

He nodded. “I think he thought we were asleep, and sometimes we were. But sometimes I’d only pretend.”