Yeah, I was Alex Cross…without a lead, without a clue, without Hala.
And everywhere I looked, there were angry, frightened people trying to get their needs met:
“My little boy has medication he has to take.”
“My cell phone isn’t getting any reception. What is this, Nazi Germany?”
“This is exactly the kind of shit I expect from the Metro police. You guys hate black people. You hate us.”
“Just stay calm, dear. There’s nothing we can do.”
“That’s always your stupid advice, Barbara. Stay calm. Just stay calm.”
I rubbed my temples, tried to find a place of quiet, a moment of sanity, so I could call home again.
Nana answered on the first ring. “You coming home, Alex?”
“Soon as I’m able.”
“You okay?”
“I am. I just wanted you all to know that. Bree there?”
“She and Jannie have gone to the corner for milk and eggs.”
“I’ll try her cell.”
“You be safe now,” my grandmother said. She paused, and then added in a worried tone, “Alex, I don’t feel good about whatever you’re doing.”
“Having visions these days?”
“I’m telling you what I am feeling,” she said, hurt. “What we’re all feeling.”
I hesitated, willing myself not to fall into the trap of thinking too much beyond the task at hand. When someone is lobbing grenades, you want to be single-minded, even if it hurts the people closest to you.
“I promise you I’ll be safe, Nana,” I said at last. “And I’ll call again when we’ve wrapped this up and I’m coming home.”
“Please do that, Alex. I mean, come home.”
“Always,” I said, and I hung up.
CHAPTER 69
Snow began to fall again as one of Nazad’s men set down his bolt cutters after clipping out an entire section of the chain-link fence that separated them from the train tracks. He and the other two members of the Family were all wearing the same fake CSX repairman uniforms as their leader.
“Get the substitute barrels,” Nazad hissed to two of them, and he told the third, “Bring the tank.”
The Tunisian charged down the steep bank in the knee-deep snow as the flakes grew thicker and fell faster until it was almost as if he were in one of those Christmas movies that the infidels so adored and he so despised. Almost there, he glanced to his left along the boxcars. He was unable to see the two locomotives at the head of the freight train, which was good: he wanted them deep inside the tunnel, blind to what was about to happen twenty-nine cars back.
He reached the green C. Itoh container car and went to its rear doors, which were locked. To ensure the integrity of the cargo, whoever had loaded the car had sealed the locks with heavy-gauge steel cables and crimped metal plates that bore the date and time the doors were closed.
One of Nazad’s men appeared, lugging what looked like a scuba tank. Nazad reached inside his coat and pulled out an apparatus that included two rubber hoses, a brass connector, and the thin neck and head of an acetylene torch.
They had it attached in seconds. Nazad glanced up the north bank toward the freeway. No one would ever see them down here. Who would look anywhere but the road in a crazy storm like this?
He got out a flint striker, turned the gas on, and lit the torch with a sound like a cork popping. With three slow, deliberate slashes, he severed the cables from the sealing plates. They fell, hissing, into the snow at his feet.
Nazad shut the torch off and handed it to his helper, who set it aside and started to claw his way back up through the snow toward the repair van. Nazad retrieved the sealing plates and pocketed them. It was snowing so hard now that he kept blinking at the infernal flakes as he opened the door.
“Brother,” he heard one of his men say with a gasp. “It is too much!”
The Tunisian grimaced, looked around the door, and saw the other two men with him at the bottom of the bank, a blue fifty-five-gallon drum half submerged in the snow between them.
“We can’t lift it!” the other man said. “Without the snow, yes, we could use the dolly, but it’s too much.”
Nazad lost it. Livid, he ran to them, down the path that had begun to form. “Too much?” he said, slapping one man and then the other. “It’s too much for you to get six barrels one hundred feet through the snow, and not too much for Hala to risk her life to stop this train for you? Think of where she is, brothers. Think of what she’s doing for you and for Allah right now.”
CHAPTER 70
Hala shifted uncomfortably. Her hip was throbbing again, and she’d just taken another painkiller, since she’d been forced to adopt an incredibly awkward position in order to remain up on the axle housing of the rear passenger car of the Crescent.
Melting snow and water dripped all around her. The axle itself was greasy and slick, and it stank of oil. But the metal was surprisingly warm, and she’d been able to straddle the axle, the gun and the tool bag stuffed on a flange above her. She held tight to what looked like part of the brake.
They might come and shine their lights up under each carriage, she thought. But that would take awhile, certainly long enough for Nazad and his men to complete their part of the mission. She could almost hear Alex Cross and the FBI men thinking, She’s booby-trapped the place. Who knows how many devices she’s set up?
They would be slow now, methodical. Hala closed her eyes, praying that Nazad and his men would have enough time.
CHAPTER 71
Nazad and the three other men strained against two nylon straps he’d wrapped around the second barrel that had come down from the truck. They pulled the heavy, awkward load over snow that was becoming packed down and more navigable despite the flakes still falling all around them.
Grunting, they made one last heave, slid the barrel up against the green railcar, and tipped it upright. It had to weigh three hundred pounds, at least.
“Third one comes out first,” the Tunisian said with a gasp as he climbed up onto the buckles that held the train cars together and then up over the transom into the container itself. He flipped on a headlamp and saw three blue barrels that looked almost exactly like the substitutes he’d brought to the door. They were sitting up on a pallet.
Each barrel had a plastic sleeve glued to its side that held documents identifying its manufacturer as Pinkler Industries, and its contents as organophosphates. Nazad carefully stripped the sleeve label off the far right barrel, set it aside, and then, together with his men, muscled the barrel to the door. They wrapped the nylon moving straps beneath the barrel and then eased it out of the container car, two men holding the straps, two men guiding the barrel down.
When they had it sitting upright beside the container, Nazad said, “Hurry. We rest when we are finished.”
In seconds they had the straps beneath the first substitute barrel from the van, and then they reversed the process and loaded it inside. Feeling like he’d soaked his clothes with sweat despite the cold weather, the Tunisian nevertheless pushed on, dancing the replacement barrel up beside the two on the pallet. He got out glue, smeared it on the back of the plastic sleeve, and affixed the sleeve to the substitute barrel.
And so it went, Nazad and his men moving each barrel loaded with organophosphates out of the railcar and putting in its place a look-alike barrel filled with sand. With the lading documents attached to the containers, no one would figure out the organophosphates were missing until it was far too late.
Nazad gestured with his chin toward a cardboard box at the rear of the pallet and said, “Take that one too. Then we’ll lock up and leave.”
One of the men picked it up with a grunt and waddled toward the door.
The Tunisian checked his watch. They’d been working nonstop for almost an hour and a half. Hala had done the impossible, he thought. Hala had stood up for God, and the One had rewarded her for her boldness, rewarded all of them for their boldness. Their purpose was, clearly, a sacred-