“I like to think so, Dr. Al Dossari,” I said. “The fair one, at least.”

“Fair,” she said as if she were spitting the word. “You used dogs on me.”

I shrugged. “I knew dogs frightened you. I used it. You would have done the same thing.”

She glared at me.

“Why’d you kill your husband?”

“I did not kill him. He killed himself at the order of a crazy man.”

“Whom you in turn killed?”

Hala said nothing.

“Your dossier makes interesting reading. And the Saudi embassy has promised to ship over everything it has on you.”

“So?”

“So I’m sure I’ll find other things in there, ways to get inside your head.”

Her chin rose, and she looked down her nose at me as if she were of noble birth and I were a slave. “You could spend every day of the rest of your life studying me, Cross, and you would not come close to an understanding of who I am.”

“Some people are inexplicable,” I agreed. “But not you, Doctor. You are easy to explain. Even without more information about your shitty childhood or whatever drove you to the Family, I know yo

u will ultimately be defined by your fanaticism. That is how people will understand you, and how they’ll condemn you: as an insane doctor, a terrorist willing to poison and bomb innocent people for her own twisted ends.”

CHAPTER

89

THE SMILE THAT HALA GAVE ME RAISED THE HAIR ON THE BACK OF MY NECK and almost made me shiver. “I can live with that,” she said. “Because I know there are two sides to every story. And I promise you, Cross, for every American who believes your version of events, there will be five Muslims who accept my story: that because of a deep and abiding faith, I decided to live the words of my Prophet and take up arms against the infidels right inside their own center of power. Am I crazy? Or brilliant? Honestly, I don’t mind either interpretation.”

She didn’t. I could see it plain as day in her expression and in the cold tone of her voice. Hala Al Dossari was one of the most disturbing criminals I’d ever tangled with, super-smart but almost reptilian when it came to questions of life and death, able to extinguish a human as easily as she would a bug, as long as it was done in God’s name.

“Where have you been the past ten months?” I asked.

“Visiting old friends,” she said. “You?”

I ignored the question. “I can help if you let me.”

Hala laughed scornfully. “What can you do for me, Cross?”

“Let you see light,” I replied.

“I have already seen the light.”

“Yes, and that’s what will make not seeing the sun so debilitating for you,” I said. “You’re used to a life spent in powerful sunlight, Dr. Al Dossari. Where you’re going, there will be no sunlight, and eventually it will affect your serotonin levels and you’ll fall into despair, a state you’ll remain in the rest of your life.”

She looked at me, blinking but expressionless. “Or?”

“You tell me what this was really about,” I said. “What you were really doing inside Union Station.”

Hala cocked her head, said, “How many times do I have to tell you, Cross? I was fighting for Allah. It is as simple as—”

The interrogation room door opened. Mahoney returned, carrying a laptop computer with a seventeen-inch screen, and sat beside me. “Any progress?”

“We’re establishing a bit of mutual understanding,” I said.

Tags: James Patterson Alex Cross Mystery
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