A whoosh. “Drop the gun, or I blow your brains out!” Aman shouted.
Nazad heard a gun clatter to the floor. He raised his head, looked around with his good eye. Aman stood in the doorway, shaking from head to toe, swinging his pistol from one railroad worker to the other, screaming, “And no one calls anyone!”
CHAPTER
78
BENEATH THE LAST CAR ON THE CRESCENT, HALA LISTENED TO THE DOGS baying. She thought of how quickly Cross had identified and attacked her one weakness. She heard the different barks coming at her; it was almost as if they were triangulating in on her. Her mind conjured images of them coming after her, ripping at her skin, and she became totally panic-stricken, crying out to God for mercy and deliverance, and finding none.
The children.
Hala swore she heard Tariq’s voice calling to her again.
You must fight for them, Hala.
It was Tariq’s voice. Her dead husband talked to her from beyond the grave. Fight for our children, Hala.
The image of her son and daughter surfaced in her drugged and terrorized mind. She saw her children threatened by dogs. In an instant, Hala felt all fear and all pain drain from her, leaving her trembling, blinking, as if her spirit had been slipped back into her body somehow.
The dogs’ barking was closer now. The only possible way to freedom was straight ahead, toward the far north end of the terminal and the Ivy City Yard. But she knew she’d be in the open, and she’d probably face dogs and gunfire there as well. It would be a lone martyr’s suicide.
Hala would not let that be her fate. If she was going to die, she wanted enemies of God to die along with her. That was the death of a holy warrior. That was the ending she wanted.
Ignoring the dogs, Hala crawled out from under the train car, slammed her back against it, stuffed one grenade in the open top of her blue jumpsuit, and pulled the pins from the remaining two. She saw headlamps cutting to the west. The trackers were almost on her. She heard a bark over her right shoulder, no more than fifty, sixty yards behind her.
Hala whipped the two grenades underhand, one left, one right, both at ninety-degree angles to her position, toward the rottweiler and toward the raised loading platform. Pressing her face against the back of the train car, digging out the pistol and the remaining grenade, Hala felt outside of herself, already spirit, no longer tethered to the husk of her body, an avenging instrument of heaven.
The grenades went off within a second of each other, throwing dust and debris, leaving a caustic smell in the air and making a sound so deafening that for a beat, Hala could hear nothing but the echo of the dog’s bark that had come the instant before the first grenade exploded.
The dog had been to her left. Closer than she’d expected. Almost on her.
Fight, Hala.
She saw herself as that little girl going after the dogs with the stick, saw the whole scene as if it were playing on screens all around her.
Hala suddenly threw herself to her left, up to the loading platform and onto her knees, the pistol in her left hand, the grenade in her right.
A female police officer covered in dust knelt next to a whimpering white German shepherd with a growing red stain on its side. Hala’s instinct was to shoot the cop and the dog and save the grenade to take as many enemy lives as she could. But then she spotted a large figure crouched in the lingering dust behind the policewoman and the dog.
Alex Cross was aiming a pistol at her.
“Drop it, Hala!” he roared.
“Catch, Cross,” Hala said, and lobbed the grenade at him.
CHAPTER
79
I SAW THE GRENADE LEAVE HALA’S HAND AND TURN END OVER END, ITS SAFETY lever flipped, and everything about me seemed over.
My life did not pass before me. I did not see Bree, the kids, Nana, my friends, or my Lord and Savior. There was just the grenade and the end of things somersaulting toward me at last.
I’ll never know why my body did what it did then. There was no thought involved, no voice screaming at me to act in a certain way. My only explanation is that my subconscious was hyper-aware of my surroundings, saw things that my conscious self did not. It took control and made me do something approximating a move I’d seen only once, at a jai alai game Sampson had dragged me to in Atlantic City a few years before.
It all seemed to go down in slow motion then, the way I accepted the grenade with my right hand as if I were catching a fragile egg, the way my feet pivoted hard left, the way my legs uncoiled, hurling my upper body away from Hala, Officer Carstensen, and the wounded dog. My right arm whipped over. My fingers released. The grenade flew fifteen feet into the open door of the train car. I flung myself down on the cement platform, threw my arms up over my head.
I heard a gunshot before the explosion blew out windows on both sides of the Crescent, the sound almost rupturing my eardrums. I felt glass shards slicing into my scalp and hands but knew I had been saved from the brunt of the blast. I lay there no more than a beat before the adrenaline in my body surged again, and with my service pistol leading, I swung myself up into a sitting position, ignoring the tiny streams of blood dripping down my face and off my slick hands.