Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

CHAPTER 76

The second hand on my watch swept past twelve. A minute had elapsed.

“Her call,” I said, and then I nodded to Mahoney, who spoke into his radio and ordered the dog team at the far west end to pick up her scent.

From my position midterminal on the rear platform, facing the locomotive for the Crescent train, I saw a rottweiler, as dark as Jasper was white, leap off the postal loading dock on a leash. His handler let him sniff the jacket and boots Hala had left in the ventilator duct.

Flanked by FBI HRT personnel, three to a side, the dog started to arc northwest and quickly disappeared from my view. I looked to Officer Carstensen, who was stroking Jasper’s head.

“Will we know when he’s got the scent?” I asked.

Before she had time to answer, an excited howl rose and then broke into baying.

“That Pablo’s a good dog,” Carstensen said.

I picked up the microphone that connected me to the terminal’s public address system and said, “Can you hear him, Hala? His name is Pablo. He smells you. You can’t see him yet, but that dog’s salivating, wild with the idea of tracking you down. So are the others. There’s an absolute monster dog named Jasper here next to me. He’s dying to meet you too.”

Mahoney looked at me, amused. “You’re kind of enjoying that, Alex.”

I shrugged. “You always say, if you’re gonna do something, do it right.”

“Now?” Carstensen said.

“We’re following your lead from here on out,” I replied.

The K-9 officer listened for the barking of the tracking dog and then gave her animal partner an order I did not understand. But Jasper certainly did. If the dog had been a football player, he’d have been a safety, up on his toes, alert, excited, ready to cut in any direction. Jasper’s ears stood straight up, swiveled like mini satellite dishes. He raised and lowered his head, halted, quivered, and then surged against the leash and barked.

“He hears something,” Carstensen said.

“You gonna let him go?”

“Didn’t you say there could be booby traps?”

I nodded.

“Then I’ll be holding him until I get a visual,” she said, gripping Jasper’s leash with both hands. You could tell the dog wanted to run. You could also tell Carstensen loved the dog too much to let him. We followed her lead, heading out onto platform F, the Crescent to our left. Amtrak had opened all doors on all trains in the terminal so the dogs could scent-check each car.

Four or five cars along, Jasper paused, listening to the sound of the other two dogs barking in the terminal. Then he nosed around the exit to the sixth car and began progressing at a brisker pace, as if he were ignoring things he knew to be ignorable, moving to his own music.

I don’t know if this makes sense, but Jasper seemed so sure of himself that I was confident that Hala Al Dossari was as good as subdued, cuffed, and on her way to the federal lockup across the river in Alexandria.

What the hell was I thinking?