This would not do. She stopped, set the bag down by Muttonchops, dug in her pocket for a baggie with pills she’d stuffed there. She found one ten-milligram OxyContin tablet and an eight-hundred-milligram ibuprofen. One for pain. One for swelling.
The fiery sensation spreading through her hip had not lessened by the time she reached the edge of the loading dock. She flinched as she got down and then crawled backward off the edge of the dock, the cold night breeze on her cheeks, knowing how much it was going to hurt to drop just three feet.
What I feel doesn’t matter, she thought as she pushed off.
But when she landed beside the postal railcar, she felt the pain like a knife shoved into her. Hala gasped and stumbled, dropped the canvas bag, squeezed her eyes shut, and bit her lip to keep from screaming.
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WE RAN TO THE MEN’S RESTROOM WHERE I WAS SURE HALA HAD GONE IN disguise. Halfway there, Mahoney heard something in his earbud and slowed to a stop, holding up his hand to me and Bobby Sparks.
“She made a call about eleven minutes ago,” he said, looking up at a clock on the station wall. It was 6:36, which put the call at 6:25.
Bobby Sparks grumbled, “It took us eleven minutes to—”
“I can’t control the National Security Agency,” Mahoney snapped, cutting him off. “In the call, an unidentified female said in Arabic: ‘Why?’ Unsub male replied in Arabic: ‘Four and zero.’ End of conversation. We have a rough idea of unsub male’s location: not far from where Suitland Parkway meets the Anacostia Freeway.”
“He could be coming toward us,” I said, looking at the clock.
“Possibly,” Mahoney agreed, and he started to move again.
“‘Four and zero,’” I said. “What did the unsub male say the first time?”
“‘One, four, and zero,’” Bobby Sparks replied.
“How long ago was that?”
“Just after she entered the station,” Mahoney said. “It was at five twenty-five.”
“So they dropped the one, and an hour has passed,” I said.
Both FBI agents slowed. “Again,” Bobby Sparks said.
“An hour and forty from five twenty-five is seven oh-five,” I said. “Forty minutes from six twenty-five is seven oh-five. I think we’ve got their timetable.”
Mahoney paled. “Which means we’ve got less than twenty-nine minutes to find her.”
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IT TOOK HALA A GOOD TWENTY SECONDS BEFORE SHE COULD GET HER MUSCLES to relax and her eyes to open. She gritted her teeth at the burning pain in her hip as she looked all around her.
To her left and down the tracks, red lights glowed at intervals all the way to the snow-blanketed mouth of the terminal. Hala could make out, about fifty feet ahead of her, the dark hulks of the suburban MARC trains. She smelled diesel exhaust and heard the rumble of the Acela’s engines warming an
d the chatter of the last few grateful travelers boarding the train bound for New York City.
Hala got out her phone and checked the time: 6:47 p.m. She had eighteen minutes to get into position and get ready. Limping toward the far end of the dark commuter train, she heard the Acela’s wheels begin to squeal across the tracks, pushing north.
She stood in the darkest shadows, feeling the effects of the painkillers start to seep through her as she ripped open the first of the Christmas presents and watched the train leave the terminal. Weary travelers were visible in the lit windows.
Hala wondered if these train passengers would look back on this day and feel the way people who’d been late to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11 did: confused and haunted by the random circumstances that had led to their survival.
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