Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

CHAPTER 61

Fewer than four miles to the south, across the river in Anacostia, a white panel van sporting a sign that said CSX TRANSIT SUPPORT crept through the snow toward the Eleventh Street bridge, heading north into Washington.

The driver was dressed in work boots, a blue one-piece work suit similar to the one Hala wore, and a dark blue insulated Carhartt coat. There was a patch on the chest of the coat that said CSX MAINTENANCE SERVICES. Below that patch, the name HERB had been embroidered.

His real name was Omar Nazad, but he carried the Maryland driver’s license and employee ID of Herbert Montenegro of Falls Church, Virginia. A Tunisian who looked more Eastern European than Maghrebian, Nazad had entered the United States on a student visa to study for his doctorate in chemical engineering at Purdue University. But he had left the school almost immediately, disappearing into this new identity courtesy of Al Ayla and Hala Al Dossari.

They’d met six months before in a safe house run by a theater major at Syracuse University. Hala was older than Nazad by almost ten years, but she captivated him with her beauty and her passion for the cause. This plan had been their idea, conceived during the long, wet upstate New York spring and expanded and refined during the summer and early fall. Tonight they and the others would see it through, no matter the consequences.

“Brother?” came a male voice from behind Nazad, back in the interior of the van, which was dark but for the glow of a computer screen.

“I hear you, brother,” Nazad answered.

“Six minutes,” the man replied.

“We’ll just make-” Nazad stopped, cursed.

“What is wrong?”

“Police ahead. They’ve blocked off the left lane to the bridge. Quiet now.”

Nazad pulled shut dark drapes that separated the front seats from the van’s rear. He rolled slowly by a police officer waving a flashlight.

“Officer,” he called. “Is the exit plowed down onto Twelfth Street? I have to check the tracks as it enters the tunnel.”

“Exit’s plowed, but nothing beyond it,” the officer replied. “Hope you’ve got chains. It’s a mess down in there.”

“I take my chances,” Nazad said, and drove on.