The secret policemen stood behind the children. One carried what looked like a heavy-duty marine battery hitched to jumper cables. The end of the black negative clamp was already attached to the metal chair Hala’s son was sitting in. The second guy held the red clamp above it.
Hala looked at me, enraged. “You cannot do this! He’s a boy!”
“There were plenty of boys here in DC when you tried to poison the water supply,” I said. “But this doesn’t have to happen, Doctor. You tell us about the gas attack, and we let your kids and mom go on with their life without you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking-”
The hooded man barely grazed the back of her son’s metal chair with the clamp. The boy’s entire body jerked hard and he began to scream and cry.
“Fahd!” Hala cried. “Be brave!”
The boy seemed to hear her, but that only upset him more. He began to squirm and make noises like an animal with a broken leg. One of the men released the boy’s gag, and he began to scream in Arabic.
The translator said: “‘Mama! Mama, why are they doing this to me?’”
CHAPTER 94
My stomach soured and turned. All sense of order in my brain had become disrupted. I thought of my son Ali in that situation and wanted to puke.
I waited for Hala to break. A sob. A tear. Anything. She turned away and looked at the wall, her jaw set.
Mahoney reached over, hit the mute button on the computer, and said, “This can end right now if you tell us about the gas.”
She said nothing.
“Turn the camera on us,” I said. “Let Fahd see us and her.”
Mahoney tapped a couple of buttons, and a small image of the interrogation room appeared in one corner of the screen. “Fahd?” I said. “Can you hear me? Can you see your mother?”
Hala was trying not to glance at the screen. The boy’s hysterics had slowed, but when he saw his mother, they began again. “They are everywhere in the house.” He sobbed. “Men and women everywhere. In the washrooms and the pantry and the servants’ quarters.”
Hala spoke coldly to him. “That is why I have always taught the two of you that the most important thing in life is bravery.”
“Listen, Fahd,” I said. “Sometimes bravery has nothing to do with guns or pain or bullets. Sometimes bravery is just doing the right thing. And at this moment, the right thing would be to help us, so we can help you. Please ask your mother to tell us what we need to know so we can keep everyone safe, and then those people there can go home.”
I turned my head toward Hala, who looked at me with utter hatred. One of the men released the gag on her daughter. They’d moved behind her with the battery and cables.
“Tell them what they want, Mama,” Fahd said. “Tell them, or they’re going to hurt Aamina.”
The girl began to squirm, trying to look back over her shoulder to see what the men were doing. They had the black clamp already affixed behind her. The red clamp was inches from joining it.
“I cannot tell them my secrets…because they are evil men,” Hala said to her son.
“Mama, please help, please!” Aamina cried.
The hooded man snapped the red clamp to the metal chair, and the girl stiffened and arched toward the camera, straining every muscle in her face, wanting to scream but utterly unable to do it. Her brother was screaming for her, petrified that the men would return to him. I wanted to cry when they took the clamp off the chair, and the girl collapsed into hysterics.
Sweat soaked the armpits of Hala’s jail jumpsuit. It had begun to form on her upper lip too. But otherwise she was back to that warrior expression that revealed nothing.
“Mom?” Fahd said. He hiccupped. “Please help us.”
“Help them, Doctor,” Mahoney said.
The hooded men moved back behind her son, who began craning his neck around, whimpering, and begging his captors to stop as they clamped the negative line to his chair a second time.
The boy looked back to the camera, lost and bewildered, and blubbered out words in Arabic, the same ones, over and over. If they’d been punches, they’d have been knockouts. The shock in Hala’s expression was complete and devastating. She began to shrink in her chair, opening her mouth but unable to speak, as Fahd kept repeating those same words.
In my earbud, the translator interpreted. “‘Mommy? Why don’t you love us?’”
CHAPTER 95
Hala’s cheek quivered as if she’d been slashed there. Then her composure simply crumpled and slid away, like dirt down a riverbank.
She began to sob, saying in Arabic, “Mommy does love you! Mommy loves you both more than anything on earth.”
“No,” her daughter said and started to cry again. “You don’t.”
“Aamina! Please, you’re too young to-”
The hooded man squeezed the red clamp. Fahd screamed, “Mommy, if you love us, please tell them!”
The clamp lowered, almost made contact.
Dr. Al Dossari watched through her tears, trembling, and then she shouted, “Stop! Stop.” She looked at me with an expression I’d seen only once in my life, more than thirty years before, in North Carolina-it was on the face of a mother so driven by love that she was able to lift the front end of an old jeep off the back of her ten-year-old daughter.
“I’ll tell you,” Hala said piteously. “Make them stop.”
“A smart choice,” Mahoney said softly.
I hung my head and felt ashamed, guilty, disgusted by what I’d been party to. I thought about Henry Fowler, the man I’d coaxed out of murdering his entire family what seemed a lifetime ago, and wondered if this was what he felt when he won those lawsuits. I could see clearly how a man might develop self-hatred by doing the wrong thing to achieve the desired end.
“Dr. Al Dossari,” Mahoney said. “When we are finished with our business, I will let you talk with them one last time.”
He closed the camera that showed our image but he kept the screen up so she could watch her children being released from their bonds and going to their grandmother.
“Tell us about the gas,” I said.
Hala wiped at her eyes. “Nerve gas. It will be used in an attack.”
CHAPTER 96
Omar Nazad could not remember ever having been this exhausted in his entire life. They’d been digging and shoveling for more than an hour and a half in twenty inches of wet snow that had gotten more and more like a massive block of ice as the temperature in DC had plunged and bottomed out at five degrees above zero.
They’d opened a path almost six feet wide and nearly sixty-five yards long.
“I can’t go on,” Mustapha bitched in Arabic. “I must drink, brother.”
“Five yards,” Nazad said, gesturing at the short distance that separated them from M Street, which was unplowed but crisscrossed with tracks. “That’s all that separates us, brother. Put your back into it and we go on. Quit, and it all has been for nothing.”
Saamad was drenched in sweat, but he raised his pick and began chopping at the remaining snow, breaking off big hunks of it that Nazad and then Mustapha shoveled from the path. After about the third shovelful, it dawned on the Tunisian that there was another way, a better way.
“Stop,” he said. “We’re done. We’ll get the van going like hell and just plow through it.”
“What if we get stuck again?” Saamad asked.
“We won’t,” Nazad said. “I won’t allow us to get stuck.”
“But what if we do?” Mustapha insisted.
“We’ll dig it out!” Nazad yelled, wanting to brain the man with his shovel. “We’ll do whatever it takes.”
A minute later they were all in the van, back where they’d left it so it would not be seen from the road. The Tunisian debated whether or not to turn on his headlights, opted to go with running lights, just enough to see the way forward.
He stepped gingerly on the gas, heard the dreaded whine of the tires spinning, and then the treads caught and they crept forward, first at a crawl, and then faster.