Final Winter

by Brendan DuBois

  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.

  ‘Very good,’ Adrianna said. ‘Fedayeen who martyred themselves outside Kabul last year, by driving their pickup trucks into Bradley fighting vehicles. Score, Bradley fighting vehicle one, fedayeen pickup trucks nil. And we appreciated their martyrdom valor so much that we froze their bodies for later and decided to honor them by setting up a return engagement.’

  The helicopters lifted off. Brian knew that he wouldn’t have to wait long, and he didn’t.

  Another, larger flare of light. When the wind finally cleared away the smoke there was a crater in the desert floor, and scraps of blackened metal and what had once been bodies.

  Adrianna reached over to her laptop, pressed a button. The plasma screen went blank.

  ‘Yemen?’ he asked.

  ‘Doing well today, Brian. Yes, Yemen.’

  ‘And when whatever Yemeni authorities get to the wreck-age, all they’re going to find are some scraps of metal and charred bits of flesh. They’ll eventually figure out whose Mercedes-Benz that is, and they’ll count up the body parts and make an educated guess as to what happened. They won’t be in a position to do a DNA analysis of whatever’s left.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And the evil nephew and his cohorts...their comrades will think that they’re up in heaven, sipping strawberry smoothies and banging seventy-two virgins, when in fact they’ll be in Gitmo, getting sweated out, offering up leads and other intelligence.’

  Adrianna nodded. ‘Exactly again, Brian.’ She gave him a large smile and Brian had felt good, having made that cool and composed woman smile. He suddenly decided that he needed to see her smile again.

  Then he had a thought. ‘The old woman. His aunt. Is she Gitmo-bound?’

  Adrianna closed the laptop cover, shook her head. ‘Why pick on an old Yemeni woman? No, we’ll leave her be. But she will have to pay the price for her actions.’

  ‘And what price is that?’

  Adrianna looked at him, her gaze fixed and composed. ‘Her lawn will probably die in the near future. You got a problem with that?’

  ‘Not a bit,’ he said.

  ‘I thought you’d say that. Brian, welcome to the team.’

  That comment nailed him, and he clenched his hands, just for a moment.

  ‘A setup? A test?’

  ‘No, no,’ Adrianna said quickly. ‘Not a setup. We just knew something wasn’t right with that woman. Scores of interviewers had gone in and out of there without anything substantial. But you did, my friend. Went in there with your detective’s eyes and detective’s suspicions, and because of that five bad guys have been taken off the board. Permanently.’

  Brian thought about that for a moment, and said, ‘Okay. Not a setup. But a test.’

  She shrugged. ‘It could be said like that.’

  ‘Any other tests out there for me?’

  There, again, that damnable smile that seemed to light up something inside him.

  ‘Brian, every day is a test. Every goddamn day.’

  ~ * ~

  So now, on this testing day, the Predator was following the white Toyota with rust stains on its roof in Damascus traffic. Adrianna said, ‘Darren?’

  Darren said, ‘A couple of months ago, somebody in Damascus made a mistake. One phone call. That’s all it took.’

  Monty laughed. ‘Man, one phone call sure can fry your ass. What happened?’

  ‘It was from a satellite phone that we’ve been monitoring in a neighborhood near Suq Hamadiya in Damascus. It was one of a parcel purchas
ed by al-Qaeda members or supporters. The phone had not been used much, and when it was used the chatter was brief and low-key.’

  Monty said, ‘What’s the mistake? Somebody use it to order some couscous?’

  Darren managed a smile. ‘Close. Somebody used it to call a local garage. Said he was tired of waiting for the transmission to be fixed. Wanted it fixed that afternoon or the mechanic’s head would be on a pike, and his children would be forced to beg from the streets. So that was the break we got. Easy enough from there to find out who the car belonged to, and what it looked like. Put a tracking device in one of the tires. Easy enough again to put the car in the daily tasking orders for the Predators deployed in that area. And then...well, Adrianna?’

  ‘Just watch,’ she said. ‘Just watch.’

  Brian rubbed at his eyes, looked at the car, inching its way through traffic. Then it stopped at an intersection. A cop or traffic guy, standing on a little concrete island, tried his best to direct traffic, and it looked like he was being ignored. Then, strangely enough, vehicles in front of the Toyota moved, but it stayed still, just for a second. Then a hand appeared from the front passenger window, just for a moment, as it dropped something onto the sidewalk.

  The car moved. Brian said, ‘Can you freeze that, right there?’

  Frozen. The car, the traffic, the frantic white-gloved hands of the traffic cop. Not moving.

  Brian said, ‘Play it back, slow.’

  Like some comedy newsreel from the 1930s, the traffic moved backwards, and Brian stood up, leaned into the plasma screen, tried to see what was happening. Something flew up into the outstretched hand, and—

  ‘Reverse it, right now.’

  And the object was dropped.

  Brian sat down. ‘Okay. You can keep playing it.’

  The tape ran for another thirty minutes, and twice more the white Toyota stopped at an intersection, and the passenger’s hand reached out to drop something on the sidewalk. The bustling lines of people, pressed up against the walls of the buildings or the edge of the crumbling sidewalk, seemed to pay no mind for what was being dropped at their feet.

  The plasma screen went blank. Brian turned and was surprised to see the team members looking at him, especially Adrianna. She said, ‘There was something there you noticed, Brian.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What was it?’

  He paused for a moment, wondered if he was being tested again. If so, what the hell. ‘The guy in the passenger side of the Toyota. Looked like he was dropping something off.’

  ‘What was it?’

  He rubbed at his face, realized he had missed a spot on his chin while hurriedly shaving that morning. ‘If this was in the States, and if there was a radio car on its ass, lights flashing and siren sounding, then I’d guess it’d be a couple of drug perps. And that they’d be dropping off little baggies of whatever it is they were selling that day, to dump the evidence. But these clowns weren’t being chased, near as I could tell.’

  A pause. The group still looked at him. Made him still feel like he was trying to prove something to them, that even a non-Fed like himself could do the job, and he pressed on. ‘Another thing, too. Perps in a situation like that, they’re panicking. They’re tossing out their merchandise, tossing it far, hoping that the cops on their ass won’t find it. These guys weren’t doing this. It was deliberate. It was—’

  There. It came to him.

  Brian looked over to Adrianna, now feeling slightly nauseous, wishing he hadn’t had those two cups of coffee this Sunday morning on an empty stomach, and he said, ‘They’re deliberately dropping these plastic baggies. At intersections. Knowing that traffic and people walking will move over the baggies, rip open the plastic, distribute what’s in there.’

  Monty whispered, ’Holy shit.’

  Victor said in a shaky voice, ‘The perfect delivery system.’

  Now everyone was looking at the doctor, whose face seemed even more pale. Victor went to his laptop and said, ‘You get weaponized anthrax. You have a lot of weaponized anthrax. All right. What’s the delivery system? The US Post Office? Good if you want to create panic like the fall of ‘01, not good if you’re looking for mass casualties. Crop dusters over cities? Not good enough. Too much of a wide distribution, too much dispersal. A few people get sick and that’s it. A bit of a panic but life goes on...Good Christ.’

  Victor waited, and then bulled on, his voice coming quick now, syllables rolling over each other, as he looked up at the blank plasma screen, as if recalling what had just been viewed up there. ‘That’s how you do it. You have a crew, ten, thirty, forty guys. Whatever number you need. You immunize them before they go in. They each get twenty or thirty baggies of anthrax. Respiratory kind. Anthrax spores weaponized so it’s finely milled. Drive out to the middle of cities, Manhattan, Boston, LA, maybe three or four teams per city. Christ. Drop off the baggies at crowded intersections, during lunch. Baggies get broken, clouds of anthrax spores rise up, get spread around the streets. Infect scores -shit, no - hundreds, maybe even thousands. In a single day. The perfect delivery system. Time it right and you get respiratory-anthrax outbreaks in a dozen major cities, tens of thousands of causalities within a week. Maybe more. Holy fucking Christ.’

  Now the silence was thick, still, just the hum of the laptops working merrily along. Brian had a sudden thought, the four of them clustered around this table, wheezing themselves to death, while the laptops merrily went on with their powered lives, outliving their owners by years.

  Adrianna said, ‘Monty?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he grunted. Brian thought the man looked ill.

  ‘Seems to be a likely scenario, doesn’t it? Question is, how can we defend against it?’

  Monty looked at all of them and then shook his head.

  ‘Bottom line, we can’t.’

  ‘Come on, there has to be something that we can do,’ Brian said. ‘I mean, look at it—’

  Monty turned to him, glaring. ‘Don’t lecture me on my job, ‘kay? Here’s the deal, and you all know it, even if I have to spell it out for you. You heard what the good doctor said, what we’re up against. Okay. Maybe ten, fifteen teams out there. Ready to hit us in less than a month. What do we do? Close down the borders? Do person-by-person, vehicle-by-vehicle searches for everything coming up through Mexico and down through Canada? Is that it? Clog up the airports? Or the seaports? And that’s assuming these assholes aren’t here already. Maybe they came here last year. Maybe they all got jobs at 7-Eleven and the local gas stations and they’ve blended in so well, they’re acting like good citizens. What do you do then?’

  Adrianna said quietly, ‘At about four a.m. this morning, I left a department meeting of the Tiger Team director. There’s a full-court press to pick up those Syrians, start interrogating them, start looking at what other intercepts and records might be out there. We even got the Canadians on board. One working theory is that the gentleman dumped at the Vancouver hospital was exposed to the respiratory anthrax before being fully immunized. But even if we do get some breaks, there’s a good chance that we’ll miss a number of these teams. It just stands to reason.’

  Darren shook his head. ‘Dark Winter.’

  Brian said, ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Dark Winter,’ Darren said, and Brian noticed that Adrianna seemed to flinch. ‘Terrorism scenario, run by the National Security Council, the summer of 2001. Before September eleventh.’

  Brian said, ‘Talk about timing.’

  ‘Yeah, talk about it,’ Darren said, now bent over his laptop, fingers moving rapidly along the keyboard. ‘Scenario was held at Andrews Air Force Base in Virginia and was hosted by the John Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. Reps from most federal agencies and three hospitals were in attendance. Former Senator Sam Nunn played the role of the president. Even had the governor of Oklahoma there. Scenario started with the usual Middle East bullshit. Rising tensions, threats here and there. And one fine day, smallpox outbreak in three areas: Okla
homa, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Started off small and then spread quickly. Didn’t have enough vaccine for the population at large. There was conflict over who’d get the vaccine. People living near the outbreak areas, or National Guard and health-care workers? Casualties started to mount. Schools were closed and public gatherings were banned. Tens of thousands were infected within a month. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Shit.’

  Brian’s mouth was dry and he suddenly felt thirsty, but nothing before him was appealing. He had the feeling that if he drank another cup of coffee, water or orange juice, he’d puke up his guts under the conference-room table.