Merry Christmas, Alex Cross (Alex Cross 19)

“This absolutely has to happen now?” I asked, yawning.

Mahoney nodded. Up until then, he hadn’t been willing to tell me what he planned for Hala Al Dossari, but now he said, “She’s tired, confused, in custody, figuring out she’s fucked for life, and she’s coming down off painkillers. Looks like Oxy, from the blood work they did on her.”

I squinted. “You’re saying she’s a jihadist and a junkie?”

“I don’t know about that,” Mahoney said. “But she had a bunch of pills with her, including Oxy, antibiotics, and muscle relaxants.”

“Like she was expecting to be wounded.”

“Or was just being a prepared doctor,” Mahoney said.

CHAPTER

87

THE VAN’S REAR WHEELS SPUN IN THE SNOW, DIGGING DEEPER AND DEEPER troughs that almost immediately glazed over with ice.

Omar Nazad pounded the wheel, furious, an emotion compounded and turned into homicidal rage by the shooting pains and twitches that had suddenly started all around his blinded eye. They’d been at this solidly for the past hour, trying to get the van free without attracting attention. It was eighty, maybe ninety, yards out to M Street. You could see the snowed-over tracks they’d laid down coming in. But the van hadn’t moved more than six feet in that direction since he’d returned from the tunnel.

Saamad and Mustapha were exhausted. He told them to take some of the pills Hala had given them and try again. But even that had not helped. There was nothing they could do really, except…

He jumped out of the van, turned it off, trudged around the back, and said, “We dig our way out.”

“With what?” Mustapha grumbled. “Our hands?”

“This is a construction site,” Saamad said. “We find shovels!”

“Shovels?” Nazad said scornfully. “I’m hoping bulldozer or backhoe.”

The Tunisian went around the construction site and looked in the cabs of the John Deere backhoe loaders and the Cat D6K bulldozer, but he found no keys. However, as he was climbing down off the second backhoe, the Algerians showed up with tools. They’d broken into a shed at the rear of the site and discovered shovels and picks.

At a quarter to twelve, they began to dig the seventy yards to freedom.

CHAPTER

88

THE ALEXANDRIA DETENTION CENTER SITS JUST WEST OF THE 495 FREEWAY, A couple of miles from the U.S. federal court and the local office of the American Civil Liberties Union, which monitors this jail, where terrorists are often held awaiting arraignment or trial.

The U.S. Marshals Service contracts with the Alexandria sheriff’s office to hold suspected terrorists in custody, which they do incredibly well. It’s one of the cleanest, most humane houses of incarceration that I’ve ever visited.

We found Hala Al Dossari chained by the ankles to a chair in an interrogation room that had the requisite Formica-topped table and one-way mirror with an observation booth behind it. A translator sitting in that booth would interpret anything Hala said in Arabic and report it to us through earbuds we wore. Hala had been cleaned. Her wounds had been treated. Her clothes had been taken for processing. She was dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit that said FEDERAL on the back. Her left arm hung in a sling.

Hala had evidently been acting in a belligerent manner since being taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals. Despite her wounds, she had refused to cooperate with doctors or jail personnel. They had had to forcibly lift and move her through the medical examination and treatment, and then through the body and cavity search conducted at her intake. She’d refused food and water and had to be carried into the interrogation room by two deputies who’d been defensive linemen at Old Dominion.

She ignored Mahoney and focused on me with an expression that revealed neither surprise nor fear.

“We meet again, Cross,” she said. “So soon you want to talk? I do not think this is smart for me to do. I want my lawyer.”

“Federal public defender’s on his way,” Mahoney said agreeably. “But it might be awhile. The snowstorm, you know.”

“I say nothing to you anyway. So go ahead, we stay here all night.”

“I’ll arrange that,” Mahoney said with a plastic smile, and he left the room, which was what he had told me he was going to do.

I said nothing, just sat down and watched her watching me. It was still hard for me to believe that someone with such intelligence, training, and classic beauty had turned out so ruthless and cold-blooded.

The silence, as I expected, finally unnerved her. “You the good cop?”