Final Winter

Okay. Take a breath, take in the surroundings. A fairly desolate area outside Detroit, tiny one-family homes, butted up right against each other. Waist-high chain-link fences separated each tiny lot from its neighbor. The poorer homes had no garages of any kind, those doing a little better had open carports, and the real up-and-corners had proper garages.

The woman’s home just had a driveway. No garage.

Brian looked around some more. Most of the lots had the usual residential debris scattered around the small front yards: wagons, tricycles, bicycles, baseball bats and gloves, a skateboard or two, bright plastic toy furniture.

The woman’s lawn was empty. Of course it was empty. She lived alone, it would only be strange, would only be out of the ordinary, if there were toys or kids’ belongings on her front lawn, with the close-cropped grass and—

Grass.

Okay, then.

He checked out the other lawns. Most of them were just packed squares of dirt. Maybe two or three were struggling with crab grass, dandelions and brown grass, trying to make do in solid urban dirt.

But not this woman’s lawn.

Her lawn was lush, green, well groomed and well maintained. There were ornamental plants placed along the foundation line of the small house. Brian recalled how painfully the woman had walked from the kitchen to the living room, limping heavily, saying she needed hip-replacement surgery and if God was kind her children would band together to help pay for it. He couldn’t see her out in the yard, sowing fertilizer and weedkiller, or walking along the edge of the driveway, weed-whacker in her gnarled hands, trimming away.

Little money, he thought. Look at the rest of the house. The shingles curling up along the edge of the roof. The oil-stained and cracked driveway. The broken pane of glass in one of the small basement windows, plugged up with a piece of cardboard.

So how come she had a jewel of a lawn?

Brian shook his head, started up the car, and left.

He went one block, where he was sure that he would not be seen by the woman, parked the car, stepped out, and went back to work.

A couple of weeks passed. Brian had learned from the woman’s neighbors about the landscaping company that came every other week to service her yard. Using his spanking brand-new Federal identification and credentials, he learned that a trust fund paid for the yard’s maintenance. More digging showed that the financing for the trust fund came from an offshore account in the Cayman Islands. By then he had alerted Adrianna to what he had found, and he had briefed Darren, the young man from the NSA. And eventually, late one evening, he had been in the very same meeting room, watching the plasma screen, as Adrianna gently squeezed his shoulder and then played a few buttons on the keyboard of her laptop that was set up on the conference-room table.

‘You did good, Brian,’ she had said. ‘That little ball of string you started unwinding has brought us to a very good place.’

‘What was the deal?’ he had asked.

‘The woman grew up in a desert. All her life, all she ever wanted was a lush green yard, with grass and plants and shrubs, and the cool, moist feeling of a bit of paradise.’

‘Near Detroit?’

‘Paradise is where you can find it, and this particular patch of paradise was being fed, watered and groomed from afar by her favorite little nephew. We were able to trace that offshore account to another account in Khartoum, and then from there we just kept on tracing and tracing and tracing. Nicely done, Brian.’

‘The hell you say.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The hell I say.’ Adrianna glanced at a wristwatch, gold and shiny on her slight olive wrist. ‘Take a look, then.’

Up on the plasma screen, an overhead shot from a Predator, showing flat desert. There was a plume of dust in the distance. The dust cloud grew larger, and the picture flickered some, as the Predator changed position. The dust cloud then revealed itself to be a dark blue Mercedes-Benz sedan, speeding along. Brian opened his mouth to say something when—

Flash of light. No sound from the screen but Brian could imagine what it must have been like. The flash of light merged into a black greasy cloud, and the Mercedes-Benz emerged through the cloud, rolling over and over and over. It came to a halt on its side, smoke and steam rising up and—

Men were there. Rising up from the desert floor, it looked like, where they had lain hidden in holes. Men in tan desert-camouflage gear with automatic weapons in their hands. They went to work, quickly enough, and five men were pulled from the wrecked car, stretched out on the desert floor, and then the helicopters came and the men were bundled in and—

Bodies. Taken from another helicopter. Brought over to the Mercedes-Benz. Awkwardly stuffed into the open doors of the sedan, and then the soldiers trotted back to their helicopters.

‘Decoys?’ Brian asked.