I gestured angrily at the duct. “Where could it go? Or, better, what places would be vented by this ductwork?”
Captain Johnson thought a second, said, “Sbarro, the pizza place that’s around the corner here, and then the U.S. Postal Service facility, I guess.”
“How big is that?” Bobby Sparks asked.
“Big enough to handle everything coming off Capitol Hill, House and Senate side, and all the federal agencies around here.”
“There’s no chance anyone from the U.S. Postal Service is working on Christmas,” Mahoney said.
“As a matter of fact, there’s a skeleton crew in there right now,” Johnson said. “I saw them on the loading dock. They’re on until ten.”
I thought about that a second, then said, “Does the loading dock face First Street or the terminal?”
“Both,” the Amtrak officer said. “There’s a single steel roll-up door facing the street, and a double that allows access to the tracks.”
“She’s either escaping to the street or trying to get to the trains,” I said, moving toward the door. “Get men to the west end of that terminal, inside and outside. Tell them she’s dressed as a male, an Amtrak worker, and should be considered armed and dangerous.”
Captain Johnson began to sweat again as he barked orders into his radio. So did Mahoney and Bobby Sparks and I as we all sprinted to the security entrance that led down to the terminal, the loading platforms, and the train tracks.
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.
CHAPTER
62
THE PAINKILLERS HAD KICKED IN. HALA POCKETED THE SPOOL OF THIN, ultra-strong fly-fishing tippet line, picked up the tool bag, and limped in the dark shadows on the other side of the suburban MARC trains, heading toward two longer Amtrak trains that were sitting dead and barely lit in the middle of the huge terminal.
She heard screeching and rumbling at the east end of the station. A freight train was leaving the First Street tunnel, which ran under Capitol Hill toward the CSX tracks and the Navy Yard. She felt a thrill go through her at the idea that this might all proceed according to plan, snow delay or not.
Hala made it to the northernmost end of the first dead Amtrak train, more than one hundred and fifty yards from the U.S. Postal Service loading dock. She rested for a second against the snub nose of the massive locomotive, watching the last few cars in the freight train disappear through the terminal mouth, heading toward the Ivy City Yard that was somewhere out there in the snowy darkness. Another train approached the station now.
The Crescent, bound for Atlanta and the Big Easy, Hala thought, feeling the narcotic buzz building and a moment of regret that she would never get to see where jazz was born. Still, she was alert enough to know she needed to duck beneath one of the locomotives so she would not be caught in the southbound train’s headlamp.
At 7:02:46, according to her phone, Hala thought she heard something above the din of the approaching train. Crawling to her right, she peered along the platform, catching glimpses of men with guns way back toward the security gates, maybe ten of them, all spreading out and moving east and west of her location. Was that Cross with them? She couldn’t tell for sure. Were they on to her? They had to be. They were going toward the MARC trains and the postal facility.
It was 7:03:10 now.
The southbound Crescent squealed into the bay between the F and G loading platforms. There were hardly any people on board, at least not in the rear cars. But after all, it was Christmas night.
Hala crawled back to the tool kit and fished out two of the remaining seven hand grenades, nestled like eggs in the ripped Christmas paper. She held them, looked up at the giant steel roof supports high overhead, and prayed that the infidels would not set off one of her booby traps before it was time.
CHAPTER
63
WE REACHED THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE LOADING DOCK WITH JUST OVER A minute to spare. Bobby Sparks took one look at the three dead bodies and signaled his men that they should spread out again, move north and east through the terminal, and get to hunting.
Captain Johnson, rattled by the sight of the bodies, called over his radio to tell his men to guard the rear platform while the FBI team went to work. Mahoney and I climbed up on the loading dock. A small television, a portable device probably belonging to one of the postal workers, sat on an overturned crate. It was playing the local news, which had been delayed by the Lions football game, and the broadcast featured a recap of the hostage crisis in Georgetown.
The video showed Henry Fowler in cuffs and leg chains. Fowler’s former wife was climbing into the back of an ambulance with her new husband. I was being interviewed by some newswoman. Below me it said:
DC DETECTIVE ALEX CROSS
GEORGETOWN HOSTAGE-CRISIS HERO
I shut the TV off, then noticed my reflection in a window. I sure as hell didn’t look like a hero. My hair was wet and I had some ugly stubble on my face. My clothes were soaked with perspiration, and my eyes were red with fatigue.
I had noticed on the news report that my hands were shaking a little and that I kept swallowing hard as I spoke. I also looked unpleasantly thin—not the trimness of a healthy person, but the gaunt, haggard look of a guy who was living life way too hard.
The Fowler situation had wrapped up less than twelve hours ago. Right then, it felt to me like it had happened thirty years ago. Tonight was turning into a much, much bigger nightmare. That was as plain as the bodies of the dead postal workers. Seeing the way their corpses lay broke me out of my thoughts. I did some quick trajectory calculations and then looked up the east wall and saw the gaping hole of the ventilation system.
How in the hell had she—?
Mahoney showed me his watch: 7:04:50. Mahoney said, “We’re—”
To the right and not fa
r beyond the railcar the postal workers had been filling, I caught a brilliant flash followed by a stunning explosion. Shock waves hit me, hot metal whizzed by my head, and I dove for the ground.
CHAPTER
64
TEN SECONDS TOO SOON, BUT NOT A DISASTER, NOT A GAME CHANGER, HALA thought after she heard the blast—the bomb she’d set closest to the front of that railcar at the loading dock.
Hala heard people yelling as she bit down on the steel clip that ran through the grenade’s safety mechanism. She pulled the device away from her, spit out the clip, held the firing lever tight. Wanting to keep them convinced as long as possible that she was attacking from the terminal’s west end, Hala leaned back and hurled the grenade up and over the nearest MARC train; she heard it hit and clatter well back by the rear platform.
She ducked behind the front end of the locomotive, head down, protecting her ears and eyes from the blast that shook the terminal. She waited for a count of four, to let any flying debris land, and then threw a second grenade toward the engine of the dark commuter train. It landed on the roof.
Hala was already running east toward the Crescent when that grenade blew. Gun in one hand, tool bag in the other, she fed ravenously on the adrenaline coursing through her, hardly feeling the torn muscle in her hip at all.
CHAPTER
65
“UNION TERMINAL IS UNDER ATTACK,” I HEARD CAPTAIN JOHNSON YELL INTO his radio after the first explosion. “Stop all incoming traffic. I repeat, shut all rail traffic in vicinity of—”
Another voice bellowed, “Man down!” I scrambled to my feet and looked out through the loading dock door. Special Agent Bobby Sparks was sprawled bleeding and unmoving between the rail tracks. Two of his men were already tending to him.
“Where the fuck is she?” Mahoney hissed at me just before the second blast went off, to our right, on the other side of the closest commuter train. A third explosion flashed and thundered off the top of one of the locomotives.
Out beyond Bobby Sparks and the men working on him, two HRT operators crouched and ran toward the latest explosion, automatic weapons leading. Three Amtrak police officers paralleled them, pistols drawn, leaving the rear platform, moving north onto the loading platform between the MARC trains.
I was looking at the fallen HRT leader, wondering where Hala could have thrown the grenade from, when Mahoney seemed to sense something. “Trap.”
“What?”
“Booby traps,” he said. “She’s drawing…” He shouted into his radio: “HRT, stand your—”
The hostage rescue operator closest to the commuter train broke a delicate fishing line and set off the fourth grenade. He was killed instantly, and his partner seriously wounded, a split second before the fifth bomb went off, between the two commuter trains where the Amtrak police officers had gone.
CHAPTER
66
TWO MINUTES BEFORE THE FIRST GRENADE WENT OFF INSIDE UNION STATION terminal, Omar Nazad fishtailed the van in the deep wet snow clogging Twelfth Street where it crossed over Water Street and began to drop toward M Street.
The Tunisian knew from prior trips to the area that there was a construction site beneath the elevated freeway to his immediate left, an office building that held community college classrooms on his right, and beyond that, at M Street, a second office building that was headquarters to some kind of marine engineering company. But it all looked completely different now, blanketed in snow, the buildings dark and deserted. It would be one of the last parts of the city to see a plow.
This was both a blessing and a curse.
At the bottom of the ramp, the snow had drifted so deep that the van bogged down, and his men had to jump out the back and push.
“One minute fifty!” one of his accomplices called from the van’s rear.
“If God wills it, we’ll make it, brother,” Nazad said between gritted teeth that he clenched tighter when his tires caught and they began to move once more.
Approaching the engineering firm, they almost got stuck again, but he threw the van in low gear and kept it moving, and they slid sideways out onto M Street. The Tunisian could see nothing to his right, but he knew that somewhere there in the darkness was the incomplete infrastructure of a ramp that would eventually connect the Eleventh Street bridge with the Southeast Freeway. Beneath it was all manner of earthmoving equipment, cranes and the like.
It was in there, into that construction site, that Nazad needed to go, as deep into it as he dared. But the place was buried under seventeen inches of snow, and if he parked on M, the van would mostly likely be seen.
And they’d be questioned.
And that would not do.
“One minute!”
Nazad looked in his rearview, saw no cars; looked out his windshield and saw nothing but the glow of streetlamps on the falling snow. Something Hala had once said echoed in his mind: In times of crisis, Allah rewards the bold.
That’s when he saw how he might get close to where he needed to be.
“Fifty seconds!”
The Tunisian pulled the van hard to the left, almost up against the median strip that divided M Street in that part of the city. Then he threw the vehicle in reverse, tore back the drapes, and yelled at his men to open the rear door so he could see. The second the door opened, he stomped on the gas.
With all the combined weight in the rear of the vehicle, the van accelerated much faster than Nazad thought it would. It blasted through a cut in the curb that the freeway builders had made and bounded up onto the raised dirt road that ran back into the construction site. Wind had blown the snow around quite a bit here, causing it to drift up against the machines: two backhoes, a dump truck, and a bulldozer. But there was little more than six inches of it on the dirt road.
Praise Allah! the Tunisian thought as they plowed deeper and deeper into the site, so close he could see a few lights on the Southeast Freeway, and then a stronger light, coming nearer. The van stopped.
“Twenty-five seconds!”
Nazad flicked off his headlights and sat there a moment, still looking out the open back doors of the van. Panting, sweat pouring off his brow, and smiling like he’d just won the lottery, the Tunisian heard a train whistle blow and saw, down a steep bank, on the other side of a chain-link fence, the headlight of a locomotive pulling a long line of boxcars toward the entrance to a tunnel that bent to the right at First Street and ran beneath Capitol Hill to Union Station and all points north.
“Count them!” he ordered.
He heard his men counting the boxcars as they passed. Nazad spotted the twenty-ninth car, a green C. Itoh shipping container, just before the snowy night was cut by the wailing of brakes and the screeching of steel wheels on the rails. The entire train came to a slow, mournful halt.
The green container car was less than one hundred feet away.
The Tunisian’s face blossomed into another joyous grin and he pounded the wheel of the car. She’d done it! That crazy Hala had done it!
“Out!” he cried to the men in the rear of the van. “Everyone out!”
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.
CHAPTER
68
I WENT UP INTO THE STATION, WHERE PEOPLE WERE FRANTIC, DESPITE THE efforts of officers on hand to calm them. They’d heard explosions. Five of them, and they wanted out. I didn’t blame them. A part of me, a very big part of me, wanted out too.
Two husky guys in their early twenties began pushing one of the officers guarding the exit near First Street. The cops grabbed the guys by their shoulders, spoke softly, and calmed them down.
A middle-aged man wearing a fancy black cashmere coat accosted me.