We were standing back out in the main hall by then. I looked around, orienting myself to the camera’s angle, and let my eye travel in the direction the workman had taken, seeing the tail end of a line of people clearing security and climbing down the stairs to Amtrak gates A through L.
“There’s an Acela leaving soon,” I said, running toward the line while Mahoney called out to the command center out on Louisiana Avenue, asking for all footage of the security gate since it had opened for boarding.
We had it in less than thirty seconds. I replayed it at four times the normal speed and quickly spotted the workman with the canvas bag. But he wasn’t in line for the Acela. He skirted the gate and walked all the way to the other end of the station, where he entered the men’s restroom.
We began to run. My phone rang. Bree.
“Alex?”
“I can’t talk,” I said. “I want to talk. More than you know, but I can’t.”
“What’s going on?”
“All I can say is that there is a very, very bad person in Union Station.”
“Give me a great Christmas present. Stay away from him.”
“It’s a woman, and I promise you I’ll try.”
CHAPTER 57
Hala took a slow, deep breath, dropped the tension from her shoulders, and dwelled within the sight picture she had over the barrel of the suppressed pistol. The big Hispanic postal worker with the muttonchops turned from the open railcar and took two steps before she squeezed the trigger.
The pop the suppressed gun made going off seemed loud to her in the duct. But neither of the other two postal workers reacted until Muttonchops fell to his knees, hands trying to stop the blood from gushing out of the hole she’d put through his windpipe.
The second postal worker was bald. His pale skull made an easy target for her next shot, which went through the back of his head. The third worker, a thin black guy, seemed to have figured out he was next, because he ducked and ran zigzags across the loading dock, screaming for help.
He didn’t get any. Hala’s third shot shattered his pelvis as he tried to climb the stairs leading to the main postal facility. His legs buckled, leaving him howling at the bottom of the steps. Her fourth shot hit him in the chest, and he sagged forward.
Hala returned the gun to the tool bag and got out a power screwdriver fitted with a tungsten-coated drill bit. In less than two minutes, she’d reamed out the mounts holding the four screws and gripped the grate by the slats.
She felt the grate come free of the wall, moved it out, and then flicked it hard to her right. It clanged to the floor. After grabbing the tool bag, she wriggled her arms and shoulders free of the duct, looked right below her, and realized she wouldn’t need the thin rope she’d brought along.
Hala tossed the tool bag to her left, saw it land in one of the mail hampers. She focused on the hamper fifteen feet directly below her and squirmed free of the hole up to the top of her hips, then rotated so her back faced the wall. She let herself hang down it, felt her hips and legs begin to slide free of the duct.
The instant Hala felt the edge scrape the backs of her calves, she arched her spine, pushed her belly forward, and then let all that tension go in a snapping action. Her legs flipped her out and over the duct. As she fell, she rotated her legs around, as if she were dismounting off the balance beams of her childhood; her head glanced off the wall before she landed in a jolting squat that pulled something sharply in her left hip.
Hala grunted, fought the pain, rolled over the metal rim of the hamper’s frame, and got to the floor. A moment later, she had the tool bag. She winced as she went by the dead postal workers, trying to compensate for a torn muscle; the psoas or the iliacus, by the feel of it.
This would not do. She stopped, set the bag down by Muttonchops, dug in her pocket for a baggie with pills she’d stuffed there. She found one ten-milligram OxyContin tablet and an eight-hundred-milligram ibuprofen. One for pain. One for swelling.
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.
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
