Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

CHAPTER 94

My stomach soured and turned. All sense of order in my brain had become disrupted. I thought of my son Ali in that situation and wanted to puke.

I waited for Hala to break. A sob. A tear. Anything. She turned away and looked at the wall, her jaw set.

Mahoney reached over, hit the mute button on the computer, and said, “This can end right now if you tell us about the gas.”

She said nothing.

“Turn the camera on us,” I said. “Let Fahd see us and her.”

Mahoney tapped a couple of buttons, and a small image of the interrogation room appeared in one corner of the screen. “Fahd?” I said. “Can you hear me? Can you see your mother?”

Hala was trying not to glance at the screen. The boy’s hysterics had slowed, but when he saw his mother, they began again. “They are everywhere in the house.” He sobbed. “Men and women everywhere. In the washrooms and the pantry and the servants’ quarters.”

Hala spoke coldly to him. “That is why I have always taught the two of you that the most important thing in life is bravery.”

“Listen, Fahd,” I said. “Sometimes bravery has nothing to do with guns or pain or bullets. Sometimes bravery is just doing the right thing. And at this moment, the right thing would be to help us, so we can help you. Please ask your mother to tell us what we need to know so we can keep everyone safe, and then those people there can go home.”

I turned my head toward Hala, who looked at me with utter hatred. One of the men released the gag on her daughter. They’d moved behind her with the battery and cables.

“Tell them what they want, Mama,” Fahd said. “Tell them, or they’re going to hurt Aamina.”

The girl began to squirm, trying to look back over her shoulder to see what the men were doing. They had the black clamp already affixed behind her. The red clamp was inches from joining it.

“I cannot tell them my secrets…because they are evil men,” Hala said to her son.

“Mama, please help, please!” Aamina cried.

The hooded man snapped the red clamp to the metal chair, and the girl stiffened and arched toward the camera, straining every muscle in her face, wanting to scream but utterly unable to do it. Her brother was screaming for her, petrified that the men would return to him. I wanted to cry when they took the clamp off the chair, and the girl collapsed into hysterics.

Sweat soaked the armpits of Hala’s jail jumpsuit. It had begun to form on her upper lip too. But otherwise she was back to that warrior expression that revealed nothing.

“Mom?” Fahd said. He hiccupped. “Please help us.”

“Help them, Doctor,” Mahoney said.

The hooded men moved back behind her son, who began craning his neck around, whimpering, and begging his captors to stop as they clamped the negative line to his chair a second time.

The boy looked back to the camera, lost and bewildered, and blubbered out words in Arabic, the same ones, over and over. If they’d been punches, they’d have been knockouts. The shock in Hala’s expression was complete and devastating. She began to shrink in her chair, opening her mouth but unable to speak, as Fahd kept repeating those same words.

In my earbud, the translator interpreted. “‘Mommy? Why don’t you love us?’”