“Because in this case you are,” I said, and I filled him in, finishing with the information that members of Al Ayla had likely pulled nerve-gas components off a freight train stopped near the entrance to the tunnel system.
“I know where that is.” Sampson grunted. “Remember running out of there when we were kids?”
“Probably the only time I’ve ever beaten you in a race,” I said.
“Found a body in the right-of-way there six or seven years ago.”
I’d forgotten, but now I nodded and said, “Emily Rodriguez.”
“Poor little thing,” Sampson said. “What was she, seven? Son of a bitch tortured her something awful before he killed her.”
I flashed on Hala’s daughter, also seven, arching against the electric current, and said, “But what do you think? Freeway side of the tracks, or M Street?”
“Freeway,” Sampson said. “M Street, you’re gonna need boots. It’s a good walk to the tracks and they’ve got construction going there on that off-ramp they’ve been building forever.”
“But the freeway side is super-steep going down to the tracks,” I reminded him. “Fifty-five-gallon drum weighs a lot, and being up on the freeway is just too visible, even in a blizzard. I’m thinking they went in on the M Street side, big walk or not.”
“Hell, what do I know?” Sampson said. “I’m just along for the ride.”
The snowbanks along Eleventh Street were as high as I’d ever seen them, like in pictures of Anchorage or Nome. Sampson and I had to strain to spot the security fence where Eleventh Street crossed over the tunnel’s mouth.
I parked right in the middle of the street above the tunnel, threw on the hazard lights, told Sampson to move the car if someone came along. Before he could grumble about that, I got out, went to the snowbank, and crawled up it to the fence.
I got out my Maglite, shone it down through the chain links, and immediately saw footprints on both sides of the track where it entered the tunnel. Farther back on the bank facing M Street, the snow had been pounded down, leaving a path five or six feet wide.
I snatched up my cell phone, called Metro dispatch, and requested an evidence wagon and full team to join me at the corner of Eleventh and M Streets. Lucy, the dispatcher, a friend of mine, said it might be an hour before they could get the team there, what with all the snow.
“John Sampson and I will secure the scene and wait for them,” I said. “Thanks, Lucy.”
Snapping shut my mobile, I sat down on the snowbank and edged out, then started sliding. I hit the pavement, landed upright, and was walking back to the idling Subaru, cleaning the snow off the seat of my pants, when I heard a heavy engine backfire and then rumble to life southeast of me, toward M Street.
CHAPTER
104
PRAISE ALLAH!
When the bulldozer had fired up after he’d found a can of ether under the seat and sprayed it into the fuel tank, Omar Nazad wanted to weep. Instead, he thanked God over and over for blessing him, eased off on the choke until the engine ran smooth, and studied the diagram of the control levers until he thought he understood them.
The Tunisian looked overhead, saw a toggle switch, and flipped it. Small spotlights on top of the bulldozer cab lit up the area directly in front of him. He pulled a lever back, and the blade came under his control, groaned, and rose. The Algerians, who’d been standing off to the side, began to cheer and shake their fists.
Feeling possessed now, Nazad studied the diagram once more and threw a second lever forward. He felt something engage. He pressed the throttle. The bulldozer bucked, broke free of the ice holding its treads, and began to grind forward through the snow, past the van and toward the hundred and twenty cubic yards of frozenness that separated them from M Street and escape.
“Saamad, get in the van!” Nazad shouted. “Mustapha, get up on the bank where you can see the road, make sure I’m aiming in the right direction.”
Saamad nodded and ran to the van. Mustapha seemed annoyed at the request Nazad had made of him, but he trotted along in front of the bulldozer blade, toward the wall of snow and the road.
Nazad slowed just shy of the huge snowbank, dropped the blade, and set the transmission in a lower gear. He watched Mustapha climb the snowbank. Then he saw headlights swing off Eleventh Street into the eastbound lanes of M Street.
Until that moment, the Tunisian had been nearly pathological about avoiding attention. He’d kept the van well back from the road, and as they’d dug through the night, every time a vehicle had approached, he’d ordered his men to dive down onto their bellies and wait until the headlights passed.
Now he did not care, especially when the Algerian informed him that the approaching car was a little white Subaru Forester, a commuter vehicle, certainly no police squad car. Nazad pressed down the throttle again after the Forester went by, focused on the blade as it struck the snowbank. It bit and pushed, and then the entire front end of the bulldozer began to climb, pushing snow ahead of it.
Here we go, the Tunisian thought. There is nothing that can stop us now.
CHAPTER
105
“WHAT THE HELL IS THAT DOING HERE?” I SHOUTED AT SAMPSON, LOOKING over my shoulder as I tried to get a better view of the bulldozer that had surged up on top of the snowbank and was pushing snow out onto M Street.
As the bulldozer backed down the other side of the snowbank, Sampson said, “Construction company that’s building the off-ramp probably sent him out to clear the site before the rest of the crew arrives.”
“At four fifteen in the morning on the day after Christmas?”
“Didn’t you read that piece in the Post last week? They’re getting all sorts of heat on this thing. People say that ramp is way over budget and should have been done two years ago.”
“Well, we’ve got to get him to stop,” I said, driving into the traffic rotary by the Washington Yacht Club and heading back.
I pulled over and parked well away from the bulldozer, hazard lights blinking. Sampson and I got out just as the bulldozer crested the bank a second time, pushing more snow out across M Street and completely blocking the westbound lanes. Then it backed down until we could barely see the top of it.
The bulldozer’s spotlight beams lit up a guy standing on top of the snowbank who was dressed in a blue work jumpsuit of some kind. He seemed to be directing the machine operator and did not notice us coming down the street toward him. We plodded up to him through the rubble field the bulldozer was creating, punching through snow up to our shins.
I waved my hands at him, shouted, “Hey! Tell the driver to stop!”
The man stiffened, took a few steps toward us, put his hand to his ear. “What?”
“Shut off that bulldozer!” Sampson yelled, and he shone a flashlight on the badge he was holding. “Metro DC Police!”
The bulldozer surged up again. The man froze, and then nodded. He ran toward the cab. I couldn’t make out any details of the driver.
“Police!” the man yelled. “They said stop!”
The machine ground to a halt atop the snowbank. The engine dropped into an idle.
“What is the matter?” the man on the snowbank called.
“Sir, could you come down here?” I called back. “We believe this is a crime scene. Who told you to clear the construction site?”
The man hesitated, tapped his ear as if to indicate he could not hear me with the dozer so close, and then crouched as if he were going to butt-slide down the snowbank to me. I heard the whine of hydraulic lines engaging and glanced up and over at the bulldozer blade starting to rise.
“CSX?” Sampson said.
Sampson trained his Maglite on the chest of the guy sitting on top of the snowbank. The patch on the jacket said CSX. Why would train workers be clearing out a federal construction site at four fifteen in the morning?
I started reaching casually for my service pistol, wishing that I was not standing in deep snow, and readjusted the beam of my own flashlight un
til it shone up and through the windshield of the bulldozer. Just before the blade got high enough to block my view, I saw a man wearing a blue CSX coat. His right eye was covered in bandages.
CHAPTER
106
“GUN!” SAMPSON ROARED. HE LEAPED TO HIS RIGHT AND GOT DOWN INTO A combat shooting crouch, clawing for his weapon.
My Glock came free of its holster and I saw the man lying prone on the snowbank just before he shot. The round hit low in front of me and sprayed chips of ice everywhere.
Up to our knees in that chunky snow, vulnerable due to the high ground, Sampson and I were the proverbial fish in the barrel. But Sampson didn’t seem to feel that way. He squeezed off two shots at the gunman on the snowbank just as the bulldozer engine roared. Both rounds hit left of the prone man, and he immediately returned fire. I was aiming the Glock when I heard the crack of his bullet passing an inch from my head. My shot hit beneath him.
The bulldozer clanked into gear and came straight down the snowbank at us, blade up, blocking any shot at the windshield.
Both Sampson and I are tall. I’m six two. He’s got three inches on me. Which means we have long legs, which we used to run in opposite directions. Sampson went straight at the one shooting at us, firing nonstop, driving back the man on the snowbank.
I tripped and sprawled in the last deep snow before the plowed road. My shoulder smashed hard against an ice boulder, and I felt bones break and things tear apart.
The pain of the impact and the shock that blew through my system were indescribable. Eyes closed, gritting my teeth, I moaned and felt my pistol fall from a hand that no longer worked.
“Alex!” Sampson yelled above the roar of the bulldozer.
I forced open my eyes, peered through the spots that danced there. Sampson was sixty feet from me, less than ten feet from the bulldozer blade, scrambling toward the plowed road to Eleventh Street.
He slipped, stumbled. The blade closed the gap.
“John!” I croaked, trying to get to my feet, realizing that my entire right arm was useless and dangling at my side.
My oldest friend had been a great athlete in his day, a man with deceptively fluid moves and an uncanny sense of balance. But Sampson was DC through and through, not used to running in snow. When the blade was less than three feet from him, he stumbled again, and I thought he was about to take the hit of his life right there on M Street.
CHAPTER
107
THE GUY UP ON THE SNOWBANK SHOT AT SAMPSON WHEN LESS THAN A FOOT separated Sampson from the bulldozer blade. The bullet hit the upper back part of the blade, ricocheted, and shattered the bulldozer’s windshield.
The machine lurched hard left, as if the driver had ducked and pulled the steering wheel. Now the blade was coming right at me from about fifty feet away. I got to one knee and then up to my feet, gasping at the pain shooting everywhere around my right shoulder.
Gun.
The butt of my Glock was right there in the snow, the barrel buried all the way to the trigger. I grabbed at it with my left hand and pulled it from the snow as the bulldozer closed on me. I heard someone shoot, and someone scream.
I stood unsteadily, my right arm swinging stupidly at my side. But my survival voices were taking over: Wait until he’s right there, and then jump to the side, just off the blade. Clear the steel treads, and you’ll have your shot at him. Left-handed, but you should be close enough.
But then a louder voice screamed, Snow! You’ve got snow in your barrel. Pull the trigger, and your barrel explodes!
The bulldozer was right on me then, no more than ten feet away, and I was sure my entire body was about to feel like my right shoulder. But then it dawned on me that the driver could no longer see me, that the blade was blocking him, that he was driving blind.
I jumped. The upper corner of the blade just missed my head. I landed, jumped again, pivoted, hoping to aim the gun at the driver and tell him I’d shoot if—
Sampson’s gun went off behind me. I heard the bullet ping inside the cab. The driver did what I absolutely did not expect. He jumped out of the cab, landing awkwardly in the snow about three feet away, while the bulldozer kept on, climbing the snowbank on the median strip, headed toward an office building across the street.
I raised my gun at the one-eyed man even as he raised his gun at me.
CHAPTER
108
OUR WEAPONS WERE LESS THAN TWO INCHES APART. THE ONE-EYED TERRORIST and I were in a Mexican standoff that looked like a no-winner for me any way it went down. If he pulled the trigger, I was dead. If I pulled the trigger, my barrel would explode and I was dead. Maybe he was dead too, but I was definitely in a black body bag with a grieving wife and family.
The man’s uncovered eye was wide and glistening. “Inshallah!” he whispered to me.
I got it. We were both in the hands of God now, about to discover His will.
The sound of the bulldozer crashing into something was followed by a gunshot that came from behind and above me. Both the driver and I instinctively cringed and ducked, but I recovered much quicker.
My arms were longer than his. I probably had three, four inches of reach on him. My right arm was useless, but my left had been bent as I aimed my plugged gun at him, not extended at all.
My left hand jabbed at him, setting him up for a straight impossible-to-deliver right cross. Instead, I slapped the side of his pistol hard to his left with the barrel of my gun and then stepped into his very, very large blind spot.
The terrorist shot wildly. Sampson fired at virtually the same time, and I heard the sound of a hit and the cry of a wounded man somewhere up on the snowbank before I chopped down with my pistol, hitting the man right in the bandages, right on the bone above the socket of his scalded eye.
His knees left him, and so did everything else. He crashed onto his side, out cold.
CHAPTER
109
A WEEK LATER, IT WAS RAINING AND WARM; THE DEEP FREEZE THAT HAD gripped the city so severely was gone, and the snow had turned into slush and puddles. But that would not stop me from taking my wife out for dinner and dancing on New Year’s Eve. We were going to double-date with John Sampson and his wife, Billie. We’d done it up right, rented a car and driver to chauffeur us to our dinner at the rooftop-terrace restaurant of the W Hotel—best view in the city—and then across the river to the Havana Breeze Latin Club in Fairfax for a little salsa, a little merengue.
Why not? We were all in a mood to celebrate, and a jazz club just wasn’t going to do it. After all, we’d not only put Hala Al Dossari and her coconspirators in prison, we’d also foiled their ultimate plot, which was a doozy.
Documents that we’d discovered in the terrorists’ van laid out the plan: The stolen chemicals were to be held for twenty-six days in a basement apartment Nazad had rented on Capitol Hill. Early on the morning of January 20, Nazad, a trained chemist, would mix the organophosphates in a rented five-hundred-gallon water tank. Then he and his accomplices would put the tank full of the crude nerve-gas agent in the back of a pickup truck and skirt the closed roads in the city until they got upwind of the Capitol.
Then they would all don masks, do the final mix, and spray the chemicals up into the prevailing winds, in the hope that the toxic vapor cloud would drift over the massive crowds gathered on the National Mall and across to the back steps of the Capitol, where the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court would be swearing in the president of the United States.
It was so crazy, it might have worked. Hundreds, maybe thousands might have died. The president might have died, and the justices, and every member of Congress. It was so crazy, I didn’t want to think about it anymore, I decided at around six that New Year’s Eve as I waited in the kitchen for Bree to finish with her hair and finally choose the dress she was going to wear for our big night out on the town.
My younger son, Ali, and Jannie and Ava were devouring a plate of fried rabbit, one of my grandmother’s specialties. Ava had balked at t
he idea at first, but once she saw Jannie and Ali tearing into it, she’d tried it, and now she was on her second piece.
“Good, huh?” I asked.
“Better than good,” Ava said. “I had no idea rabbit could taste this amazing. Like chicken, but way, way better.”
“It’s the buttermilk,” Nana Mama said, looking pleased as she scrubbed out the cast-iron skillet she’d used to fry the rabbit. “I soak the meat in buttermilk overnight to make it tender like that.”
“Damon’s gonna be mad when he hears you made fried rabbit after he went back to school,” Jannie remarked.
“Damon could have stayed home until tomorrow,” my grandmother responded. “He chose to go back early.”
“To get ahead on his studies,” I reminded her.
“Can’t fault him for that,” Nana Mama allowed. “But even the best choices sometimes have adverse consequences.”
“Like missing fried rabbit,” Ali said.
Nana smiled and pointed at her great-grandson. “See there? Always said you were a smart, smart boy.”
Ali grinned from ear to ear and reached for the last piece of rabbit, but Ava got to it first. He groaned.
“I’ll split it with you,” Ava said.
My grandmother squinted in my direction. “How you doing?”
“Twenty-four hours since my last pain pill and it doesn’t bark at me unless I move it,” I said, glancing down at my right arm, which was in a sling.
I’d broken my clavicle, dislocated my shoulder, and cracked the head of my humerus bone falling as I tried to get out of the way of the bulldozer. A surgeon had put me back together four days ago. In three months, he’d said, I’d be good as new.
Bree came into the kitchen wearing a very flattering black cocktail dress and a pair of black stiletto heels.
Nana Mama whistled at her. So did I.
“You really going to go out with Alex looking like that?” my grandmother asked in a playful tone.