Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

CHAPTER 78

Beneath the last car on the crescent, Hala listened to the dogs baying. She thought of how quickly Cross had identified and attacked her one weakness. She heard the different barks coming at her; it was almost as if they were triangulating in on her. Her mind conjured images of them coming after her, ripping at her skin, and she became totally panic-stricken, crying out to God for mercy and deliverance, and finding none.

The children.

Hala swore she heard Tariq’s voice calling to her again.

You must fight for them, Hala.

It was Tariq’s voice. Her dead husband talked to her from beyond the grave. Fight for our children, Hala.

The image of her son and daughter surfaced in her drugged and terrorized mind. She saw her children threatened by dogs. In an instant, Hala felt all fear and all pain drain from her, leaving her trembling, blinking, as if her spirit had been slipped back into her body somehow.

The dogs’ barking was closer now. The only possible way to freedom was straight ahead, toward the far north end of the terminal and the Ivy City Yard. But she knew she’d be in the open, and she’d probably face dogs and gunfire there as well. It would be a lone martyr’s suicide.

Hala would not let that be her fate. If she was going to die, she wanted enemies of God to die along with her. That was the death of a holy warrior. That was the ending she wanted.

Ignoring the dogs, Hala crawled out from under the train car, slammed her back against it, stuffed one grenade in the open top of her blue jumpsuit, and pulled the pins from the remaining two. She saw headlamps cutting to the west. The trackers were almost on her. She heard a bark over her right shoulder, no more than fifty, sixty yards behind her.

Hala whipped the two grenades underhand, one left, one right, both at ninety-degree angles to her position, toward the rottweiler and toward the raised loading platform. Pressing her face against the back of the train car, digging out the pistol and the remaining grenade, Hala felt outside of herself, already spirit, no longer tethered to the husk of her body, an avenging instrument of heaven.

The grenades went off within a second of each other, throwing dust and debris, leaving a caustic smell in the air and making a sound so deafening that for a beat, Hala could hear nothing but the echo of the dog’s bark that had come the instant before the first grenade exploded.

The dog had been to her left. Closer than she’d expected. Almost on her.

Fight, Hala.

She saw herself as that little girl going after the dogs with the stick, saw the whole scene as if it were playing on screens all around her.

Hala suddenly threw herself to her left, up to the loading platform and onto her knees, the pistol in her left hand, the grenade in her right.

A female police officer covered in dust knelt next to a whimpering white German shepherd with a growing red stain on its side. Hala’s instinct was to shoot the cop and the dog and save the grenade to take as many enemy lives as she could. But then she spotted a large figure crouched in the lingering dust behind the policewoman and the dog.

Alex Cross was aiming a pistol at her.

“Drop it, Hala!” he roared.

“Catch, Cross,” Hala said, and lobbed the grenade at him.