Kill Alex Cross (Alex Cross 18)

“I’m sure The Family’s plan is the correct one,” said Tariq, who was a good man, but not a complicated one.

“President Coyle’s thinking will be clouded. That’s good for us,” Hala said. “We should eat something. It wouldn’t hurt to get some air, so our thinking doesn’t get clouded.”

When she rose from the bed, Tariq stood up to follow. Hala was in charge in America.

Back home, marriages were still arranged in some families — including their own — and Tariq knew exactly how well he’d done for himself. Hala was a medical doctor, while he was merely an accountant. She was beautiful, especially by Western standards. He was plain and fat, by just about any standard one used. His wife had even come to love him, in time, and had given him two beautiful children, Fahd and Aamina.

Will we ever see our children again? Tariq wondered. It wasn’t a question he allowed himself too often, but all this waiting around was driving him crazy. It felt good to get up and leave their stuffy hotel room for a little while.

Outside, the streets were almost empty. On Twelfth Street they had trouble finding anything acceptable to eat. They passed McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Dunkin’ Donuts, and then Taco Bell, whatever it was they sold there. What would bells taste like?

“Junk food and nothing else,” Hala said with derision. “Welcome to America.”

They were standing beneath an overhang to an office building, when a man suddenly stepped out from the shadows. He had a pistol in his hand and waved it at them. “Give me the pocketbook. Wallet. Loose change, watches,” he growled.

Hala put her arms across her chest and spoke in a high-pitched voice. “Please, don’t hurt us. We’ll give you our money — of course. No problem there. Just don’t hurt us!”

“Shoot you both dead, motherfuckers!” said the thief.

In their country, there were few men as desperate as this, Hala thought. A criminal like him would have his hand cut off if he were caught.

“No problem, no problem,” she answered, nodding. She offered up her knockoff Coach handbag with one hand, and then with the other — pepper spray! She doused the young fiend’s eyes with it.

He screeched and raised both hands to his face, trying to scrub away the burning poison. But his pain was only just starting. Hala dropped the spray and easily grabbed his gun.

She was so angry now. She sent a sharp kick to the boy’s kneecap, buckling it in the wrong direction. He went down screaming, and she kicked at his chest, fracturing a few ribs while she was at it.

Hala’s movements were fast and instinctual and athletic. She never seemed to be more than a foot or two away from the boy. He moaned on the ground — until her foot snapped into his throat. She kicked him in the forehead. The jaw. She broke bone there, too.

“Don’t kill him!” Tariq said, placing a hand on her arm.

“I’m not going to,” she said, and she stepped back. “A dead body would raise too many questions. We mustn’t draw attention. Not yet.” She leaned down to speak directly to the boy on the ground. “But I could have killed you — easily! Remember that the next time you put a gun in somebody’s face.”

They left the moaning boy in the shadows and crossed the street, then hurried back to the Wayfarer. There was nothing decent to eat out there anyway. This country was like the desert — just an arid wasteland that ought to be destroyed.

Without a doubt, it would be soon.

THE FBI’S STRATEGIC information operations center was overflowing with somber, stressed-out police personnel that Sunday afternoon. This was a full-court press if there ever was one. The main briefing theater on the fifth floor of the Hoover Building was standing room only.

Ned Mahoney rocked back on the heels of his black boots and tried to take the situation in. He could feel exhaustion taking over his body, but his mind was running full tilt. Odds were good that everyone in the room felt the same way. Ethan and Zoe Coyle had been missing for fifty-two hours and twenty-nine minutes, according to the red-digit count clock on the wall.

The Bureau director himself, Ron Burns, had insisted it go up and stay up, front and center, until they got the kids back. One way or the other.

There were live camera feeds from the Branaff School playing on several of the big screens, and area maps of a fifty-mile radius of Washington. Some of those had blinking red flags on them, though Mahoney wasn’t sure what they meant. The Bureau was operating like the well-oiled octopus it could be, with everyone on a strictly need-to-know basis.

The briefing came to order as soon as Director Burns arrived, trailing half a dozen harried-looking ADs and addressing the room even as he came in the side door at the front of the theater.

“Okay, I want a rundown from section heads right now,” he said. “Have we got Counterterrorism here yet? Ops Two?”

“Over here, sir.” Terry Marshall, the deputy section chief from that branch, held up her hand and hurried to the front. When she pointed a small remote at the wall of screens, Mahoney was surprised to see two grisly morgue photos come up. They were from the double suicide at Dulles.

“Farouk and Rahma Al Zahrani,” Marshall said. “Both Saudi citizens, educated at UCLA. He taught in the physics department at King Saud University; she worked for a small import-export house in Riyadh. No criminal records, no known criminal or terrorist associations, no known aliases.

“We’ve double-checked all threat lists, repeat, all, and they’re not on any of them. Same goes for every other passenger on their flight.”

“Yes, and?” Burns said. Thirty seconds in the room, and already he was impatient and demanding of his staff. Burns was infamous around the Bureau for the line “If you don’t come in on Saturday, don’t bother to come in on Sunday.”

“On paper, these are still separate incidents,” Marshall reported. “But the timing is suspect, to say the least. The Al Zahranis flew in Thursday afternoon, approximately eighteen hours before Zoe and Ethan disappeared. Given that nobody’s claimed responsibility for the abduction, or for the Al Zahranis, for that matter, we can’t afford to rule out a connection between the two.”