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CHAPTER 88

The Alexandria Detention Center sits just west of the 495 freeway, a couple of miles from the U.S. federal court and the local office of the American Civil Liberties Union, which monitors this jail, where terrorists are often held awaiting arraignment or trial.

The U.S. Marshals Service contracts with the Alexandria sheriff’s office to hold suspected terrorists in custody, which they do incredibly well. It’s one of the cleanest, most humane houses of incarceration that I’ve ever visited.

We found Hala Al Dossari chained by the ankles to a chair in an interrogation room that had the requisite Formica-topped table and one-way mirror with an observation booth behind it. A translator sitting in that booth would interpret anything Hala said in Arabic and report it to us through earbuds we wore. Hala had been cleaned. Her wounds had been treated. Her clothes had been taken for processing. She was dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit that said FEDERAL on the back. Her left arm hung in a sling.

Hala had evidently been acting in a belligerent manner since being taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals. Despite her wounds, she had refused to cooperate with doctors or jail personnel. They had had to forcibly lift and move her through the medical examination and treatment, and then through the body and cavity search conducted at her intake. She’d refused food and water and had to be carried into the interrogation room by two deputies who’d been defensive linemen at Old Dominion.

She ignored Mahoney and focused on me with an expression that revealed neither surprise nor fear.

“We meet again, Cross,” she said. “So soon you want to talk? I do not think this is smart for me to do. I want my lawyer.”

“Federal public defender’s on his way,” Mahoney said agreeably. “But it might be awhile. The snowstorm, you know.”

“I say nothing to you anyway. So go ahead, we stay here all night.”

“I’ll arrange that,” Mahoney said with a plastic smile, and he left the room, which was what he had told me he was going to do.

I said nothing, just sat down and watched her watching me. It was still hard for me to believe that someone with such intelligence, training, and classic beauty had turned out so ruthless and cold-blooded.

The silence, as I expected, finally unnerved her. “You the good cop?”

“I like to think so, Dr. Al Dossari,” I said. “The fair one, at least.”

“Fair,” she said as if she were spitting the word. “You used dogs on me.”

I shrugged. “I knew dogs frightened you. I used it. You would have done the same thing.”

She glared at me.

“Why’d you kill your husband?”

“I did not kill him. He killed himself at the order of a crazy man.”

“Whom you in turn killed?”

Hala said nothing.

“Your dossier makes interesting reading. And the Saudi embassy has promised to ship over everything it has on you.”

“So?”

“So I’m sure I’ll find other things in there, ways to get inside your head.”

Her chin rose, and she looked down her nose at me as if she were of noble birth and I were a slave. “You could spend every day of the rest of your life studying me, Cross, and you would not come close to an understanding of who I am.”

“Some people are inexplicable,” I agreed. “But not you, Doctor. You are easy to explain. Even without more information about your shitty childhood or whatever drove you to the Family, I know you will ultimately be defined by your fanaticism. That is how people will understand you, and how they’ll condemn you: as an insane doctor, a terrorist willing to poison and bomb innocent people for her own twisted ends.”

CHAPTER 89

The smile that Hala gave me raised the hair on the back of my neck and almost made me shiver. “I can live with that,” she said. “Because I know there are two sides to every story. And I promise you, Cross, for every American who believes your version of events, there will be five Muslims who accept my story: that because of a deep and abiding faith, I decided to live the words of my Prophet and take up arms against the infidels right inside their own center of power. Am I crazy? Or brilliant? Honestly, I don’t mind either interpretation.”

She didn’t. I could see it plain as day in her expression and in the cold tone of her voice. Hala Al Dossari was one of the most disturbing criminals I’d ever tangled with, super-smart but almost reptilian when it came to questions of life and death, able to extinguish a human as easily as she would a bug, as long as it was done in God’s name.

“Where have you been the past ten months?” I asked.

“Visiting old friends,” she said. “You?”

I ignored the question. “I can help if you let me.”

Hala laughed scornfully. “What can you do for me, Cross?”

“Let you see light,” I replied.

“I have already seen the light.”

“Yes, and that’s what will make not seeing the sun so debilitating for you,” I said. “You’re used to a life spent in powerful sunlight, Dr. Al Dossari. Where you’re going, there will be no sunlight, and eventually it will affect your serotonin levels and you’ll fall into despair, a state you’ll remain in the rest of your life.”

She looked at me, blinking but expressionless. “Or?”

“You tell me what this was really about,” I said. “What you were really doing inside Union Station.”

Hala cocked her head, said, “How many times do I have to tell you, Cross? I was fighting for Allah. It is as simple as-”

The interrogation room door opened. Mahoney returned, carrying a laptop computer with a seventeen-inch screen, and sat beside me. “Any progress?”

“We’re establishing a bit of mutual understanding,” I said.

“In other words, no,” Mahoney said. “Sorry, Alex, but I need to take over the questioning here.”

“All yours,” I said, and made as if to leave.

Mahoney put his hand on my arm, and I settled back into the chair. Hala shifted uncomfortably in hers.

“I understand you are in pain?” Mahoney said.

She nodded. “I am.”

He fished in his jacket pocket, came up with two small white pills, each stamped OC on one side and 10 on the other. He put them on the table where she could see them but not reach them.

CHAPTER 90

Hala looked at the pills, and I could feel her leg jiggling on the other side of the table. “So, what? You withhold medical treatment so I talk? I think your ACLU will be interested to hear this.”

Mahoney smiled. “Who said anything about withholding treatment?” He slid the tablets over in front of her. “We’re not tribal savages a generation out of the desert here.”

Hala scowled at him but took up one of the tablets. I pushed a plastic water bottle across the table. She swallowed the painkiller but then said, “If you think I will talk because of these pills, you do not know me.”

“Hey,” Mahoney said, arms wide: Mr. Nice Guy. “We want to know you, Doctor. We want to hear what you have to say in your defense.”

“I’m saying nothing in my defense. I’ll wait for the lawyer.”

“Let us check a few things that are verifiable,” the FBI agent said, as if he were a clerk taking insurance information. “Where do you live in Saudi Arabia?”

Hala did not reply, but she watched him closely.

Mahoney typed on his keypad, rolled his lower lip between fingers, said, “Al Hariq? No, that’s where you were born, right out there on the edge of the erg, the sea of sand, right?”

He looked up at her. She said, “A place of terrible beauty.”

I said, “That where you became afraid of dogs?”

She smiled sourly at me. “I have no idea where that came from. It’s always just been there.”

“You’re smart though,” Mahoney observed, returning his attention to the screen. “King Saud University for one year and then four years at Penn, courtesy of the Saudi royal family. Impressive. Medical degree from Dubai. Children. A career. And then a sudden radicalization. But that’s what happens when God talks to you, right?”