With all the combined weight in the rear of the vehicle, the van accelerated much faster than Nazad thought it would. It blasted through a cut in the curb that the freeway builders had made and bounded up onto the raised dirt road that ran back into the construction site. Wind had blown the snow around quite a bit here, causing it to drift up against the machines: two backhoes, a dump truck, and a bulldozer. But there was little more than six inches of it on the dirt road.
Praise Allah! the Tunisian thought as they plowed deeper and deeper into the site, so close he could see a few lights on the Southeast Freeway, and then a stronger light, coming nearer. The van stopped.
“Twenty-five seconds!”
Nazad flicked off his headlights and sat there a moment, still looking out the open back doors of the van. Panting, sweat pouring off his brow, and smiling like he’d just won the lottery, the Tunisian heard a train whistle blow and saw, down a steep bank, on the other side of a chain-link fence, the headlight of a locomotive pulling a long line of boxcars toward the entrance to a tunnel that bent to the right at First Street and ran beneath Capitol Hill to Union Station and all points north.
“Count them!” he ordered.
He heard his men counting the boxcars as they passed. Nazad spotted the twenty-ninth car, a green C. Itoh shipping container, just before the snowy night was cut by the wailing of brakes and the screeching of steel wheels on the rails. The entire train came to a slow, mournful halt.
The green container car was less than one hundred feet away.
The Tunisian’s face blossomed into another joyous grin and he pounded the wheel of the car. She’d done it! That crazy Hala had done it!
“Out!” he cried to the men in the rear of the van. “Everyone out!”
CHAPTER
67
“SEND AMBULANCES TO THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE LOADING DOCK ON FIRST Street,” Mahoney shouted into his radio. “We’ve got seven dead, three wounded. Suspect remains at large inside the Amtrak terminal, which has been booby-trapped. I want this place surrounded and as many bomb squads as you can muster. In the meantime, no one—I repeat, no one—gets in or out of here without my say-so.”
I didn’t envy my old friend that night. Mahoney had been sitting on Union Station with a full HRT team for more than twenty-four hours. He and Bobby Sparks were supposed to have stopped Hala Al Dossari from bombing the station, and now one of the most highly trained agents in the FBI was dead.
Then I remembered something I’d read in the dossier on Hala Al Dossari.
“Dogs,” I said to Mahoney. “I’m calling in the K-Nine patrols.”
The FBI agent nodded. “Good idea. We’ve got her
boots and jacket. That’s enough to key them on her.”
“I want them for another reason as well. Hala’s afraid of them. Pathologically afraid of them, evidently.”
As Amtrak and Metro police set up protective lines around the dead, I wondered whether the random poisoning, the shootings on the loading dock, and the five explosions would be the full extent of the attack. Was that all, or was there more to come, some bigger weapon we hadn’t seen yet?
Before I could evaluate that possibility, my frazzled attention turned toward the remaining FBI HRT operators, who were using powerful headlamps and flashlights to search the immediate area for other trip wires.
Yawning, desperate for caffeine, I thought, Is this what Hala wants? To have the people hunting her feel like they’re the hunted?
I was fairly confident that that was indeed the idea, or at least part of it.
But I could not stop the nagging feeling that, unless she was bent on a pure suicide mission here, we were missing something, that there was more to this than a fanatical woman with access to cyanide, bullets, and bombs.
CHAPTER
68
I WENT UP INTO THE STATION, WHERE PEOPLE WERE FRANTIC, DESPITE THE efforts of officers on hand to calm them. They’d heard explosions. Five of them, and they wanted out. I didn’t blame them. A part of me, a very big part of me, wanted out too.
Two husky guys in their early twenties began pushing one of the officers guarding the exit near First Street. The cops grabbed the guys by their shoulders, spoke softly, and calmed them down.
A middle-aged man wearing a fancy black cashmere coat accosted me.
“You’re Detective Alex Cross, aren’t you?” He asked the question as if he were accusing me of something.
“Yes, I’m Alex Cross.”