Merry Christmas, Alex Cross (Alex Cross 19)

I picked up the microphone that connected me to the terminal’s public address system and said, “Can you hear him, Hala? His name is Pablo. He smells you. You can’t see him yet, but that dog’s salivating, wild with the idea of tracking you down. So are the others. There’s an absolute monster dog named Jasper here next to me. He’s dying to meet you too.”

Mahoney looked at me, amused. “You’re kind of enjoying that, Alex.”

I shrugged. “You always say, if you’re gonna do something, do it right.”

“Now?” Carstensen said.

“We’re following your lead from here on out,” I replied.

The K-9 officer listened for the barking of the tracking dog and then gave her animal partner an order I did not understand. But Jasper certainly did. If the dog had been a football player, he’d have been a safety, up on his toes, alert, excited, ready to cut in any direction. Jasper’s ears stood straight up, swiveled like mini satellite dishes. He raised and lowered his head, halted, quivered, and then surged against the leash and barked.

“He hears something,” Carstensen said.

“You gonna let him go?”

“Didn’t you say there could be booby traps?”

I nodded.

“Then I’ll be holding him until I get a visual,” she said, gripping Jasper’s leash with both hands. You could tell the dog wanted to run. You could also tell Carstensen loved the dog too much to let him. We followed her lead, heading out onto platform F, the Crescent to our left. Amtrak had opened all doors on all trains in the terminal so the dogs could scent-check each car.

Four or five cars along, Jasper paused, listening to the sound of the other two dogs barking in the terminal. Then he nosed around the exit to the sixth car and began progressing at a brisker pace, as if he were ignoring things he knew to be ignorable, moving to his own music.

I don’t know if this makes sense, but Jasper seemed so sure of himself that I was confident that Hala Al Dossari was as good as subdued, cuffed, and on her way to the federal lockup across the river in Alexandria.

What the hell was I thinking?

CHAPTER

77

OMAR NAZAD MOVED EASILY IN THE SPACE BETWEEN THE FREIGHT CARS AND the tunnel wall, listening to the dry crunch of the coarse gravel under his boots, such a change from the snow. The soft echoes of Aman’s footfalls came to him from the other side of the train. Aman wore a headlamp that glowed a soft red, just enough for him to see the way ahead, not quite strong enough to attract attention.

The Tunisian, however, carried Robby’s flashlight and wore the dead rail worker’s hat and coat. He wanted to attract attention. He wanted Tony, who he figured was the engineer in the locomotive cab, to be focused on him and how at ease he seemed.

Nazad had no choice in the matter. The original plan had called for leaving the train intact and letting it chug north with the engineers having no idea that the load had been hijacked and substituted. But the dead railroad worker had changed everything. They needed to improvise, make sure that the freight train continued north.

He and Aman kept pace in the tunnel, adjusting to each other when they passed between cars. At last Nazad saw the halo of light thrown from the cab. He did not hesitate but went straight to the ladder and began noisily climbing up the side of the locomotive to the narrow steel platform by the door. A soft light in a metal protective housing glowed above and to the left of the door.

The dead rail worker had had a key card in his pocket, and Nazad had given it to Aman. He prayed the fool of a Turk was climbing quietly. Keeping below the window, he got to the left of the cab door. Nazad reached up, twisted the bulb dark, and then knocked.

“Use your key, for Christ’s sake, Robby,” a voice yelled back. “I’m pouring us some holiday grog here.”

The Tunisian rapped his knuckles on the glass again.

“For Jesus’s sake, Robby, I love you, but you’re an imbecile sometimes.”

He heard a creaking noise and thought he saw a shadow before a pie-faced man wearing a white shirt, Christmas-green suspenders, and a Santa hat appeared in the door window. He was carrying a coffee cup and a fifth of Johnnie Walker, and he peered out with confusion before he flipped some kind of switch or pressed some kind of button.

The door slid back with a sigh. Nazad flipped on the Maglite and swung it and the gun around and into the doorway, expecting to find Tony on the other end of the muzzle. But in the next instant, he realized that the engineer had stepped back and to the right.

The Tunisian also saw that there was a second man in the cab, sitting in front of what looked like the instrument panel of a modern jet airplane. Instinct took over. Nazad began to pivot the pistol toward Tony, yelled, “Down on the—”

But the engineer was too quick for him. With a flick of his wrist, Tony hurled scalding-hot coffee at Nazad’s face.

Blinded in one eye, the Tunisian screamed and dropped the gun.

The pain was excruciating, far worse than the knee to the stomach and the blow to the back that quickly leveled him. He heard Tony say, “Call Union, Pete. Tell ’em we’ve got our own nutcase down here. And a man missing.”