The fiery sensation spreading through her hip had not lessened by the time she reached the edge of the loading dock. She flinched as she got down and then crawled backward off the edge of the dock, the cold night breeze on her cheeks, knowing how much it was going to hurt to drop just three feet.
What I feel doesn’t matter, she thought as she pushed off.
But when she landed beside the postal railcar, she felt the pain like a knife shoved into her. Hala gasped and stumbled, dropped the canvas bag, squeezed her eyes shut, and bit her lip to keep from screaming.
CHAPTER 58
We ran to the men’s restroom where I was sure Hala had gone in disguise. Halfway there, Mahoney heard something in his earbud and slowed to a stop, holding up his hand to me and Bobby Sparks.
“She made a call about eleven minutes ago,” he said, looking up at a clock on the station wall. It was 6:36, which put the call at 6:25.
Bobby Sparks grumbled, “It took us eleven minutes to-”
“I can’t control the National Security Agency,” Mahoney snapped, cutting him off. “In the call, an unidentified female said in Arabic: ‘Why?’ Unsub male replied in Arabic: ‘Four and zero.’ End of conversation. We have a rough idea of unsub male’s location: not far from where Suitland Parkway meets the Anacostia Freeway.”
“He could be coming toward us,” I said, looking at the clock.
“Possibly,” Mahoney agreed, and he started to move again.
“‘Four and zero,’” I said. “What did the unsub male say the first time?”
“‘One, four, and zero,’” Bobby Sparks replied.
“How long ago was that?”
“Just after she entered the station,” Mahoney said. “It was at five twenty-five.”
“So they dropped the one, and an hour has passed,” I said.
Both FBI agents slowed. “Again,” Bobby Sparks said.
“An hour and forty from five twenty-five is seven oh-five,” I said. “Forty minutes from six twenty-five is seven oh-five. I think we’ve got their timetable.”
Mahoney paled. “Which means we’ve got less than twenty-nine minutes to find her.”
CHAPTER 59
It took Hala a good twenty seconds before she could get her muscles to relax and her eyes to open. She gritted her teeth at the burning pain in her hip as she looked all around her.
To her left and down the tracks, red lights glowed at intervals all the way to the snow-blanketed mouth of the terminal. Hala could make out, about fifty feet ahead of her, the dark hulks of the suburban MARC trains. She smelled diesel exhaust and heard the rumble of the Acela’s engines warming and the chatter of the last few grateful travelers boarding the train bound for New York City.
Hala got out her phone and checked the time: 6:47 p.m. She had eighteen minutes to get into position and get ready. Limping toward the far end of the dark commuter train, she heard the Acela’s wheels begin to squeal across the tracks, pushing north.
She stood in the darkest shadows, feeling the effects of the painkillers start to seep through her as she ripped open the first of the Christmas presents and watched the train leave the terminal. Weary travelers were visible in the lit windows.
Hala wondered if these train passengers would look back on this day and feel the way people who’d been late to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11 did: confused and haunted by the random circumstances that had led to their survival.
CHAPTER 60
Seeing that the grate above the stall in the men’s restroom had no screws holding it to the wall, I stepped up on the toilet and yanked at it. It was exactly 6:57. It had taken us that long to clear the restroom and search it.
The grate didn’t budge. I used Mahoney’s flashlight and shone it through the slats before looking back at him, Bobby Sparks, and Captain Johnson. “Where do these ducts go?” I asked Johnson.
The Amtrak cop squinted at me in disbelief. “You think she got in there?”
“I don’t know how else to explain that the grate’s been wired shut from inside. So where do they go?”
Johnson looked confused. “I don’t know. And I don’t think there’s anyone from maintenance who can tell us until-”
“Wait, why don’t you know this?” Bobby Sparks asked incredulously.
“We control the gate areas and the tracks,” the Amtrak cop retorted hotly. “The station’s interior is the responsibility of a private management firm in Virginia, but everyone there’s got the night off. It’s Christmas, for God’s sake.”
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.