Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

CHAPTER 67

“Send ambulances to the U.S. Postal Service loading dock on First Street,” Mahoney shouted into his radio. “We’ve got seven dead, three wounded. Suspect remains at large inside the Amtrak terminal, which has been booby-trapped. I want this place surrounded and as many bomb squads as you can muster. In the meantime, no one-I repeat, no one-gets in or out of here without my say-so.”

I didn’t envy my old friend that night. Mahoney had been sitting on Union Station with a full HRT team for more than twenty-four hours. He and Bobby Sparks were supposed to have stopped Hala Al Dossari from bombing the station, and now one of the most highly trained agents in the FBI was dead.

Then I remembered something I’d read in the dossier on Hala Al Dossari.

“Dogs,” I said to Mahoney. “I’m calling in the K-Nine patrols.”

The FBI agent nodded. “Good idea. We’ve got her boots and jacket. That’s enough to key them on her.”

“I want them for another reason as well. Hala’s afraid of them. Pathologically afraid of them, evidently.”

As Amtrak and Metro police set up protective lines around the dead, I wondered whether the random poisoning, the shootings on the loading dock, and the five explosions would be the full extent of the attack. Was that all, or was there more to come, some bigger weapon we hadn’t seen yet?

Before I could evaluate that possibility, my frazzled attention turned toward the remaining FBI HRT operators, who were using powerful headlamps and flashlights to search the immediate area for other trip wires.

Yawning, desperate for caffeine, I thought, Is this what Hala wants? To have the people hunting her feel like they’re the hunted?

I was fairly confident that that was indeed the idea, or at least part of it.

But I could not stop the nagging feeling that, unless she was bent on a pure suicide mission here, we were missing something, that there was more to this than a fanatical woman with access to cyanide, bullets, and bombs.