Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

CHAPTER 95

Hala’s cheek quivered as if she’d been slashed there. Then her composure simply crumpled and slid away, like dirt down a riverbank.

She began to sob, saying in Arabic, “Mommy does love you! Mommy loves you both more than anything on earth.”

“No,” her daughter said and started to cry again. “You don’t.”

“Aamina! Please, you’re too young to-”

The hooded man squeezed the red clamp. Fahd screamed, “Mommy, if you love us, please tell them!”

The clamp lowered, almost made contact.

Dr. Al Dossari watched through her tears, trembling, and then she shouted, “Stop! Stop.” She looked at me with an expression I’d seen only once in my life, more than thirty years before, in North Carolina-it was on the face of a mother so driven by love that she was able to lift the front end of an old jeep off the back of her ten-year-old daughter.

“I’ll tell you,” Hala said piteously. “Make them stop.”

“A smart choice,” Mahoney said softly.

I hung my head and felt ashamed, guilty, disgusted by what I’d been party to. I thought about Henry Fowler, the man I’d coaxed out of murdering his entire family what seemed a lifetime ago, and wondered if this was what he felt when he won those lawsuits. I could see clearly how a man might develop self-hatred by doing the wrong thing to achieve the desired end.

“Dr. Al Dossari,” Mahoney said. “When we are finished with our business, I will let you talk with them one last time.”

He closed the camera that showed our image but he kept the screen up so she could watch her children being released from their bonds and going to their grandmother.

“Tell us about the gas,” I said.

Hala wiped at her eyes. “Nerve gas. It will be used in an attack.”