Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

CHAPTER 92

Mahoney raised his hand and said, “You’ll never see me in court because there will be no evidence of what you are about to witness, Dr. Al Dossari. And I’ll just have to take my chances with Allah.”

With my uneasiness building quickly toward horror, I studied the screen: a terrace and part of a beautiful garden where purple and red anemones grew tall and stood floppy in a wide section of grass. There was a table in the foreground with a plate of pastries on it and an icy pitcher of water, or perhaps lemonade. In the background to the right of the garden was a high whitewashed wall. Two hooded men holding AK-47s flanked three wrought-iron chairs that were pushed up against that wall, facing the camera.

An older woman in traditional Arabic dress sat without her veil in the middle seat, tied to its arms and legs. She was gagged and looked petrified. A young girl sat to her left, an older boy to her right, each of them lashed to the chair and gagged as well.

Hala glared at me. “You speak of fair!” she screamed. “You let him do this to my mother? My children?”

“I had nothing to do with this,” I said, turning to Mahoney. “Stop this, Ned. I won’t be part of this.”

“I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to,” the FBI agent replied. “This is not something we condone. It is not something we sought.”

“Liar!” Hala screeched. “You can stop this.”

Mahoney shook his head. “No more than al-Qaeda could stop its people from chopping off the head of that Wall Street Journal reporter. I have reason to believe these are Saudi secret policemen. The only people they take orders from are much higher up the food chain, men with mindboggling power.”

“In the hall, now, or you can forget my involvement,” I said; I stood and went out the door.

Mahoney followed me.

“Are those children going to be tortured?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” my old friend said. “It’s out of my hands.”

“You asked for this!” I shouted. “You said you were going to wake somebody up, for God’s sake!”

“Turns out, most of them were already up,” Mahoney shot back. “They were contacted by the Saudi government right about the time the good doctor was entering Union Station. The Saudis intercepted an encrypted e-mail from two high-ranking members of the Family earlier today. So far they’ve been able to decipher only three words in the whole thing: Dossari, train, and gas.”