Hala allowed herself the barest grin. That had flushed them out, hadn’t it?
She had no idea who the FBI agents were and guessed the sweaty guy was the Amtrak officer in charge tonight. But she totally recognized Alex Cross, the guy who found the president’s kidnapped kids. He’d been all over the papers.
In an odd way, Hala felt honored.
CHAPTER 53
I knelt over the body of Phillip Lamonte, who dressed the gangsta but whose identification showed he was a junior at Catholic University. He had a home address on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and carried a ticket to Penn Station on the Acela that was about to board. The extra-large cup lay on the floor next to him. The ice in it hadn’t yet melted.
I lowered my face over the foam around his mouth and sniffed. I smelled an acrid odor I recognized.
“Cyanide poisoning,” I said.
“Hala?” Mahoney said.
“Has to be,” I replied. “That’s how she killed her husband, right?”
“That’s how he died,” Bobby Sparks agreed.
I looked at the closest patrol officer. “Was this guy with anyone?”
The cop gestured with her chin toward a skinny white kid, late teens, who was also dressed to party with 5 °Cent and Diddy. “Name’s Allen Kent.”
I glanced at the cup. “Phillip drinking from that before he died?” I asked Kent.
The kid nodded, but he was obviously in shock.
“Anyone else get close to that drink, son?” I asked.
Kent shook his head. “Phil got it himself from the fountain.”
I didn’t know how she’d done it, but I was certain Hala Al Dossari had murdered this college kid. And how didn’t seem to matter as much as why.
I looked at Mahoney and Sparks, said, “Close this place down.”
Captain Seymour Johnson, the shift commander of the Amtrak police, a sweaty, unhealthy-looking man, lost more color. “Are you crazy? We’re the only transportation into or out of DC. We don’t even know if this woman is still in here, for God’s sake.”
“Maybe she’s not,” I said. “But if I were you, I’d put men with her picture at every exit. No one gets out of Union Station without proper identification. That goes for passengers who are boarding too. And call in Metro homicide and patrol. There’s deep snow everywhere. If she has made it outside and doesn’t have a car, then she’s on foot and visible.”
Mahoney agreed and started making calls. Bobby Sparks did the same. So did Johnson. I looked around, spotted a guy, early thirties, wearing a chesterfield overcoat, watching. He held an iPad.
I went to him. “You see what happened, Mr.…?”
“Goldberg. Jared Goldberg. And no, I didn’t see anything. I came over when I heard the screaming.”
“You a patriot, Mr. Goldberg?” I asked.
His brows knit. “I like to think so.”
I handed him my card, said, “Alex Cross. I work with Metro DC Police and as a consultant to the FBI. Can you help me?”
Goldberg frowned. “I clerk at the tax court. How can I-”
“Your iPad,” I said. “Work on one of those 4G networks?”
He nodded.
“Backed up in-what do they call it-the iCloud or something?”
The law clerk frowned but nodded again.
“Good, can I use it?” I asked. “I promise you I’ll return it. And if I break it, I’ll replace it with one even better.”
Goldberg looked pained, but he handed it over.
“What are you up to, Cross?” asked Bobby Sparks when he saw me return with the iPad in hand.
“Those guys out in the command center,” I said. “Can they transmit the footage from the cameras at this end of the station?”
The HRT commander thought, then said, “They’ll have to feed it through one of our secure websites, but affirmative, I think they can do that.”
CHAPTER 54
At the opposite end of the rail station, inside the men’s room now, Hala had again taken a stall that featured a duct grate above it. She waited until the stalls adjacent to hers emptied, and then, for the second time in the past few minutes, removed already loosened screws. She turned the grate sideways and pushed it deep into the duct.
She had to stand there for several minutes while an old man came in and urinated, but then he left and the place fell silent.
Slight in stature, Hala had been a highly competitive gymnast as a girl and still maintained her agility and limberness. After shoving the tool kit in after the grate, she stood up on the exposed pipe of the toilet, grasped the stall walls on either side of her, tightened her abdomen, and swung her legs up into a pike position, toes pointed almost at the ceiling.
The split second she felt her hips about to fall, she snapped her heels and calves forward into the open duct. Wriggling, she was completely inside the ventilation system within ten seconds. She kept wriggling and scooting, pushing the tool bag and the grate ahead of her, deeper into the duct.
Three feet in was an intersection of four ducts. She turned her upper body into the right-side passage, pulled herself totally in, and then inched back across the one she’d just left. It took some straining with her left hand, but she was able to retrieve the grate.
Looking toward the light shining in through the open hole in the wall to the restroom, she crabbed back to it and then peered out. A boy was peeing with his father. Hala looked at them from the darkness of the ductwork, wondering if this was something Tariq had ever done with their son, Fahd. Had her boy ever been that young?
When they left, Hala shook off whatever regrets she had and pulled the grate back over the open duct, securing it with an eight-inch length of picture-frame wire she’d brought along for that purpose. Two minutes later, she’d gotten herself turned around again, and she pushed on, straight down the main duct, smelling the odor of pizzas cooking at Sbarro pouring into the air-vent system from her left.
She felt her stomach grumble, ignored it, and kept wriggling. Twenty-five feet farther on, Hala reached a second intersection in the ductwork; she arched and pulled her way into the one that broke right, heading north. When she was fully inside that duct, she stopped, chest heaving, got out the disposable cell from the pocket of the workman’s suit, and hit Redial.
“Why?” she whispered.
“Four and zero,” the male voice replied.
Her allies were close to the target now-it would have taken them no more than twelve minutes to get there on an ordinary day, but the snow had changed everything. Still, she trusted his judgment.
“Go with God,” she said, and hung up.
After stowing the cell phone, she slid on another ten feet, to where the duct made a ninety-degree left turn. In the north wall there was another grate. Cold air was blowing through it. Hala shivered; she paused for only a second to look through the grate, finding herself high above dimly lit loading platforms and two commuter trains sitting dark on the suburban rail tracks.
Hala crawled on toward a third grate. She moved stealthily, as if she were sliding into position for a sniper’s shot, which she was. The last ten feet took nearly ten minutes, leaving her twenty-eight minutes before her role turned crucial.
Irritating Christmas music blared from somewhere. Hala peered through the grate. She was fifteen feet up the east wall of a loading dock platform owned by the U.S. Postal Service. Directly below her were large canvas hampers holding canvas bags that were filled with mail. A skeleton crew of three men worked on the dock, transferring the mailbags from the hampers into an open compartment at the rear of a railcar.
Hala flashed on an image of herself much younger, out in the desert with Tariq, before the children came. He was teaching her how to shoot a pistol. How odd it had been, that aiming and firing a gun came so naturally to her. Then again, shooting was something precise, like medicine, where attention to technique and detail came together to create a little miracle. And wasn’t that what a perfectly placed shot was? A little miracle? A gift from God?