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One of the agents pressed his earbud and then said, “Let them in.”

Four U.S. Marshals came into the office, signed the necessary paperwork, and took Hala into their custody.

“Good-bye, Cross,” she said as they wheeled her out. “I hope to meet you again.”

“Probably sooner than later,” I said, and watched her go.

I heard diesel engines starting, looked out the window, and saw the Crescent light up.

“Dr. Cross?”

I turned to find Captain Johnson, who’d stepped up to the window beside me. “I wanted to thank you. Without your bravery-”

“Without a lot of people’s bravery, including yours.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” he said, his eyes watering as he gestured out at the terminal and the trains. “But what if she’d managed to get something big in here? What if it had gone off?”

“We can only guess at that kind of thing, Captain,” I said as the last car in the freight train disappeared from sight. “But for now, Christmas goes on.”

CHAPTER 84

If I’d moved quicker, followed Hala Al Dossari and her armed guards out of Union Station, found a taxi or a patrol car to take me back to my family, I might have made it home before midnight.

But Mahoney caught me crossing the main hall. “I need you, Alex.”

“No,” I said. “I’ve got to sleep, Ned. I’m a zombie, no help to anyone.”

“I’ll get you a B-twelve shot,” Mahoney said. “Maybe with a kicker of caffeine and sodium benzoate.”

“What?”

“You never took a pick-me-up when you were with the Bureau?”

“No. Never did.”

“Works like a charm,” Mahoney said, sounding like he’d just gotten ten hours of sleep. “We’ll take care of you. We’ll go to Alexandria, have another chat with Hala Al Dossari.”

“I don’t think she’ll be talking at any point soon. Time in the cell will loosen her up. More than enough time for me to rest and join you tomorrow afternoon, say.”

“No say, Alex,” Mahoney complained. “I’ve arranged for a little show, something I think is guaranteed to open her up now.”

“Okay, then go run your show. I don’t need to be there.”

“Actually, you do. You’ll be the one to tell me if we’re going too far.”

CHAPTER 85

Omar Nazad turned off the flashlight and emerged from the mouth of the tunnel to find the storm had eased somewhat; there were just a few random flakes now. He waded into the snow, his eye weeping behind the bandage, his burned skin twitching at each contact with the frozen flakes.

Above him on the elevated freeway, more cars were moving, which meant more streets and lanes had been plowed. It was good. It was a blessed thing. As traffic built, they would blend into the traffic, and-

He heard a soft trilling sound, the call of the desert; he smiled and immediately gave a response back. His last two men, Saamad and Mustapha, were fearless Bedouins from the rugged dry mountains of southern Algeria, warriors for God who would not abandon him no matter what.

Even with the one eye, the Tunisian spotted his brothers in arms standing there on the bank, and he struggled up through the snow to them.

“What has happened to you, brother?” Saamad asked. “Where is Aman? Hala?”

“Allah took my eye,” Nazad replied, hearing the slight slur in his voice. “But I am happy to give it for our cause. Hala has been captured, but she will never speak of what we will unleash twenty-six days from now. And Aman is on the train and will make sure it gets far away from here before he makes his escape.”

“Allahu Akbar,” Mustapha said.

“God is great,” Nazad agreed. “Now, let’s get out of here, brothers.”

CHAPTER 86

The plows had been busy the past few hours, pushing lanes clear along many of the main routes of the nation’s capital. But they’d thrown up huge banks of snow that sealed off driveways and roads and that buried cars, making some streets look like they were lined with odd-shaped igloos.

My right butt cheek was sore from the B12 shot, but, as Mahoney had promised, despite almost forty hours with minimal sleep, I felt alert. Mahoney drove, following a plow as it exited the Southeast Freeway onto 295 and took the Eleventh Street bridge to Virginia. It was slow going, but we had as good a driving surface as could be found that night.

“I wonder why she never tried to contact him again,” I said.

“Who?”

“The guy she called. The one who was somewhere near the other end of this bridge.”

“I dunno. But you’ll get the chance to ask her in a few minutes.”

Still following the plow, we left the bridge and headed south on the Shepherd Parkway toward 495, Alexandria, and the detention center where they’d taken Hala Al Dossari to be interrogated and to await arraignment.

I checked my watch. Pushing ten thirty. Last night around this time, I had been outside a mansion in Georgetown, trying to get a psychotic to answer the phone. Now I was on my way to watch Mahoney interrogate a sociopath. I felt tired of my profession right then, wondered what it would be like to change, to put a complete end to coming face-to-face with deranged people, to begin seeking out the good, sane folks, and only the good, sane folks.

That caused me to think of Bree and wonder if I should call her to tell her of my likely delay. But what was the point? She had to be almost expecting that by now. The problem was that when other women in my life had finally come to expect my absence, they had gone on to make it permanent, something I was determined would not occur with Bree.

“This absolutely has to happen now?” I asked, yawning.

Mahoney nodded. Up until then, he hadn’t been willing to tell me what he planned for Hala Al Dossari, but now he said, “She’s tired, confused, in custody, figuring out she’s fucked for life, and she’s coming down off painkillers. Looks like Oxy, from the blood work they did on her.”

I squinted. “You’re saying she’s a jihadist and a junkie?”

“I don’t know about that,” Mahoney said. “But she had a bunch of pills with her, including Oxy, antibiotics, and muscle relaxants.”

“Like she was expecting to be wounded.”

“Or was just being a prepared doctor,” Mahoney said.

CHAPTER 87

The van’s rear wheels spun in the snow, digging deeper and deeper troughs that almost immediately glazed over with ice.

Omar Nazad pounded the wheel, furious, an emotion compounded and turned into homicidal rage by the shooting pains and twitches that had suddenly started all around his blinded eye. They’d been at this solidly for the past hour, trying to get the van free without attracting attention. It was eighty, maybe ninety, yards out to M Street. You could see the snowed-over tracks they’d laid down coming in. But the van hadn’t moved more than six feet in that direction since he’d returned from the tunnel.

Saamad and Mustapha were exhausted. He told them to take some of the pills Hala had given them and try again. But even that had not helped. There was nothing they could do really, except…

He jumped out of the van, turned it off, trudged around the back, and said, “We dig our way out.”

“With what?” Mustapha grumbled. “Our hands?”

“This is a construction site,” Saamad said. “We find shovels!”

“Shovels?” Nazad said scornfully. “I’m hoping bulldozer or backhoe.”

The Tunisian went around the construction site and looked in the cabs of the John Deere backhoe loaders and the Cat D6K bulldozer, but he found no keys. However, as he was climbing down off the second backhoe, the Algerians showed up with tools. They’d broken into a shed at the rear of the site and discovered shovels and picks.

At a quarter to twelve, they began to dig the seventy yards to freedom.