Merry Christmas, Alex Cross (Alex Cross 19)

Hala hesitated, glanced at the computer screen and her children with her mother. She said, “It’s on a train heading north.”

Once Hala began talking, she seemed to enjoy our reactions to an audacious scheme designed to kill thousands and instill panic once again in New York City. She said that men loyal to Al Ayla worked janitorial services at Pinkler Industries, a chemical-manufacturing concern in South Carolina. The Family members discovered that Pinkler had developed a radical new compound belonging to the organophosphate family of chemicals.

“The basis of all modern pesticides and of nerve gases, such as sarin and VX,” Mahoney said, sitting forward.

Hala nodded. “The new compound could be processed precisely enough to eliminate a single species of insect in a field while allowing others to live. But it could also be used to create a gas far more deadly than either sarin or VX. We learned there was to be a shipment of the organophosphate, three barrels of it, going to a pesticide-manufacturing facility in New York. We found out it would be on a train heading north on Christmas Eve, that it would pass through Union Station and end up at a freight facility on the west shore of the Hudson River. Someone loyal to our cause would see all of it transferred onto a barge bound for Manhattan.”

I frowned, not sure if I bought the story. “Back up a second. What was your job?”

“I stopped the train.”

I glanced at Mahoney, whose initial confusion gave way to understanding. “All of that was just to stop the train?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

Hala shrugged, said, “Somewhere outside the First Street tunnel before it goes under Capitol Hill and through Union Station to the Ivy City Yard.”

I knew exactly where she was talking about. As young teenagers, Sampson and I had climbed the fence and gone into the tunnel a couple of hundred yards before we heard a train coming at us. Wasn’t that the fastest I’d ever run?

Mahoney asked, “So, what, you stopped the train long enough for someone to steal the barrels?”

She shook her head a little too quickly and said, “I stopped it long enough for a PhD student in chemistry to attach a timed system that will convert the compound to nerve gas when triggered.”

“And?” I asked. “Who is going to trigger it?”

Hala shrugged. “Whoever is in the van that is supposed to meet the freight barge tomorrow afternoon.”

“Driver’s name?” Mahoney demanded.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t need to know. It’s better that way.”

“So the van driver meets the freight barge, and then what?” I asked.

She smiled. “He places the barrels in his van, triggers the system, puts on a gas mask, and drives around the city letting the gas escape, starting with Wall Street right after the markets close.”

I flashed on the freight train that I’d seen after Hala was caught, coming from that tunnel and heading toward the Ivy City Yard, and remembered how it had made me think that some semblance of normalcy had returned to Union Station.

Actually, I’d been watching a chemical weapon pass right under everyone’s nose.

CHAPTER

98

I CHECKED MY WATCH: 12:31 A.M. CHRISTMAS HAD COME AND GONE, AND SO had my promise to Bree, along with an innocence that I had not known I had left to lose. But of course, although I’d heard testimony about it, had gathered evidence in its wake, I had never personally seen children tortured before.

The freight train had gotten at least a three-hour head start. But it was traveling in the wake of a nor’easter barreling toward New York. We’d catch the train, stop it, and disarm that triggering device.

Mahoney seemed to think the same thing. He got up and left the room to arrange for the Critical Incident Response Group to mobilize while he made plans to intercept the train.

I studied Hala, who was staring at the table as if she couldn’t believe she was in this position: a traitor to her cause.

I said, “Which freight car carries those organophosphates?”

Hala looked at me as if she had one last card to play. “Twenty-ninth behind the engine,” she said. “It’s green with CSX and C. Itoh markings. You can’t miss it.”

CHAPTER