Final Winter

by Brendan DuBois

  He stood there, proud that he could stand next to this barbarian who kept his head uncovered. The man said: ‘Cold? This is nothing. I will tell you what cold is, my friend. Cold is when you step outside and you spit into the snow, and you hear a crackle as your spittle freezes before it hits the ground. Cold is when you can shatter metal with a sharp blow of a hammer. Cold is when the slightest bit of exposed skin turns deathly white from frostbite, in a matter of moments. That is cold. This...this is nothing.’

  ‘Bah,’ Imad said. ‘You stay out here if you like. I’m going back inside to try and get warm. If that is possible.’

  ‘Very well. Go back, then, and dream of camels. If that is what you dream of.’

  Imad spat on the metal deck and went towards the lit windows of the main cabins of the ferry. The other man stayed behind, hands in his pockets, feeling the cold breeze around his ears and hair, wondering and thinking. Just how far he had traveled in these years, to finally have the opportunity to come here and do what he had trained to do, years ago, when he had been a proud member of the greatest empire the world had ever known.

  Recently he had been living in some Third World shit-hole country, advising the Health Ministry — and, Mother of God, the laboratories they had there were nothing more than children’s chemistry sets, set up proudly in rooms that had no consistent heat or air-conditioning or pure water - when the first messages had arrived. At first he had thought that it had been an elaborate trap: some enemies of his out there - no matter the news of reconciliation and understanding - still had long memories and even longer-lasting hatreds.

  But the messages had intrigued him. He had answered the first one, waited. And his Caymans bank account had seen a dramatic increase within a week. Then he answered another one, replying to a highly technical question that established the bona fides of whoever was on the other end of the line. And with that answer, another bump in the bank account. One test after another, to see if the message sender had actually been for real, including one particularly deadly request on his part, just to see how serious the message sender was.

  Sure. That had been something. In the Health Ministry was an even more corrupt-than-usual doctor, who had been distilling cancer medications supplied by the United Nations and selling them on the black market. The adviser’s own wife, years ago, had died of cervical cancer, and the sheer greed and evilness of this particular doctor had galled him. So he had requested of his message giver his own test of that person’s abilities. Remove the doctor from the scene.

  And it had happened, just a week later. A car bomb.

  A few more messages, here and there, and here he was now, on the deck of a ferry, heading towards his enemy of so many years, now face to face, with a childish Arab at his side to help him along.

  He coughed, shifted his weight from one leg to another. Strained his eyes, looking out at the fog.

  There. Coming clear. One light, then another, and then an entire constellation, appearing now ahead of the ferry, and, as if on cue, the ferry horn sounded. His chest tightened with glee and pleasure. The enemy he had sworn years ago to smite was finally in front of him.

  ‘Hello, America,’ the man called Vladimir Zhukov, once of the Kromksy Institute of Infectious Diseases, murmured, as the lights of Washington State finally appeared through the fog off to the starboard side of the craft. ‘So nice to finally be here.’

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  At home again, Adrianna Scott took one more shower - for luck, she whispered to herself, as she scrubbed her body clean one more time - and with a towel about her hair and a bathrobe about her body, she went over to the mantelpiece where the photo of herself and her aunt was placed. Even knowing that she was home alone, she looked around to make sure no one was watching. She took the photo down and deftly undid the snaps at the rear, holding the cardboard placement against the frame with her fingers. Now she could stick a fingernail behind the loose cardboard and drag something out.

  The something, of course, being another photo. Of a very young Aliyah Fulenz and her mama and papa, seated on a couch in some photo studio for a formal portrait. Mother and daughter were wearing identical dresses, some white and black lace piece of magic that mama had gotten from Paris, and father was in his Ba’ath Party uniform, standing firm and proud behind the two of them, his protective hands on their shoulders. Father hadn’t been much of a party member - to go anywhere in that society, you had to belong to that gangster organization - and the tales he told could have—

  Enough, she thought. Quite enough. No time for reminiscing. She gently kissed the faces of her dead parents, replaced the photo in the frame, and put the frame back up on the mantelpiece. Another touch to the glass and wood, and then she went down to the basement of her condo unit. The floor of the basement was concrete and it was cool and slightly damp. In one corner was a workbench, unused since she had moved in - the previous owner had had a woodworking hobby, making toys for underprivileged children, how sweet — and most of the rest of the basement was taken up by old moving boxes and bits of furniture that she had never had the energy to sell or donate to Goodwill.

  Adrianna padded across the concrete floor in her bare feet, wincing at the cold. She went around to the other side, behind the stairs. There was a wardrobe bureau standing there, heavy and immovable. She reached behind the wardrobe, flipped a switch. Inside the wardrobe, hidden casters at the bottom were suddenly released. Well-oiled and balanced, the casters allowed her to move the wardrobe easily to one side of the cellar.

  Now revealed beneath the stairway was a small door with a combination lock. Flipping through the combination with ease, she unlocked the door and ducked down, entering the small space underneath the stairway. A light came on and she closed the door. Then she relaxed, sitting down on a small office chair. Before her was a horizontal wooden plank, serving as a desk, and on the plank was a laptop computer. She switched it on, waited for it to power on and boot up. She looked around the small space, which had a network of cables running across the wooden walls and the concrete floor and the ceiling which was also the bottom of the steps. She had spent months putting the wiring in place, working quietly and taking her time, making her own bubble.

  Ah, yes, the bubble. An open secret for many members of the media and readers of obscure books about foreign policy: whenever American diplomats went overseas and were not staying at their own embassy, they would use a bubble -sometimes the size of a small tent - to discuss matters they wanted to be kept secret, knowing that if they were within the bubble, they were impervious to any forms of electronic surveillance. Bubbles were kept close to the chest and weren’t something one could pick up at the local Radio Shack, but someone smart and dedicated (like moi, Adrianna thought) could make one at home.

  Which was what she had done. Which meant no electro-magnetic radiation at all could leave this small space under her cellar stairs. Not a bit. And with sensing devices available to certain intelligence agencies that could record the minuscule signals created whenever a laptop keyboard was used, that meant a lot.

  She moved the laptop closer. It was in a black case and had no identifying insignia at all: no Apple or Sony or Dell or IBM. Zilch, because this particular laptop had been made within the CIA’s own Technical Services Division, and she had stolen it nearly four years ago. Pretty simple: it had been left in someone’s car in plain sight in one of the satellite parking lots at Langley, and Adrianna knew that particular lot’s surveillance camera gear was out for maintenance that month. So, with the skills learned at Camp Perry, she had entered the car and stolen the laptop. Later she learned that the analyst who had allowed the laptop to be stolen had been fired.

  Oh well. Collateral damage.

  But it meant that she had one of the most powerful and secure laptops in the world for her exclusive use, and my, had she put her own little laptop through its paces these past years, even managing to upgrade it here and there by doing some deft access work to one of the CI
A’s mainframe systems.

  There. The screen snapped into focus. She typed in the password that allowed her entry and got to work. So many files, so many records, so many dead ends over the years ...

  Yet look at what she had accomplished, all she had done, from the safety and security of this surveillance-proof cubbyhole in her condo unit. Something that would make a wonderful book or movie, if the world would allow such a thing when she was done.

  There. A file opened up and she stared at the list of names there. She rubbed her chin, shivered some in the cool cellar air.

  Amil Zahrain of Pakistan.

  Ranon Degun of Bali.

  Henry Muhammad Dolan of Great Britain.

  Three men from around the world, three men who had similar things in common: living on the edge, crippled in some way, and all infused with an undying hatred of America and all it represented. Easy enough to locate them - being a Tiger Team leader meant so many case files and intelligence briefings were open for your perusal - and it was also easy enough to figure out what to do with them once you had their locations and their backgrounds in your eager little hands. For one of the perks of being a Tiger Team leader was being able to see what kind of message traffic was flowing among the various terrorist cells out there, and to see what the messages were saying.

  And once you knew what kind of codes were being used, and once you knew the way the codes were passed from one cell to another, from one cell member to another, it was also quite easy to plant fake messages. Fake messages that increased the ‘chatter’. Fake messages that made the cell members think that they were part of some grand, glorious plan.

  And fake messages that let her own people think that an anthrax attack was imminent.

  She had to smile at that. There was no attack. There were no cells. Nothing. It was all made up, made up by one Iraqi Christian woman, working from her cellar.

  Such a life! Such a country!

  A wonderful joke, of course, and what made the joke even more wonderful was that there was going to be an anthrax attack upon this country, in just a few weeks...but it wouldn’t be coming from the ground, from plastic baggies, from Arab men in automobiles.

  It would be coming from the air, and it would be coming from her.

  ~ * ~

  Brian Doyle stepped outside the building at Andrews Air Force Base, cellphone in his hand, returning the page he had just received. A familiar voice answered and Brian said, ‘Darren? What’s up?’

  A slight cough coming from the receiver. ‘Sorry. Rough night. Look, Brian, I’ve got to see you, right away.’

  Brian looked at his watch. Less than two hours to go before their next meeting, and he still had to review Adrianna’s file, and he owed a phone call to his son, the boy’s Little League season was about to start. . .

  ‘Is it important?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A jet roared overhead, and then another. Brian looked up, saw two F-16s crawl their way up into the sky. Any other place, any other time, they would be two Air Force fighter jets, up for a routine patrol, but these weren’t routine times. Brian knew that the two Falcons were going up as part of the CAP - Combat Air Patrol - over the Washington DC area. News accounts rarely reported on their presence, sometimes noting they were dispatched whenever there was an uptick in the Homeland Security threat level. But Brian knew differently. The CAP was always up, and had always been up there since a certain September 11.

  ‘Come on, Darren,’ he said. ‘Can’t it wait until our meeting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s personal, that’s why.’

  Brian said, ‘Look, Darren, I need to know—’

  ‘Brian, how do you think the other Tiger Team members will react when they realize you’re a snitch, reporting on us to the Tiger Team Director? Think they’ll be happy? Do you?’

  Brian lowered the cellphone for a moment, shook his head. Shit. Caught. He brought the cellphone back up and said, ‘All right. I’ll see you. When?’

  ‘Soon as you can get here.’

  ‘And where the hell is here?’

  ‘My apartment, silly,’ Darren said. ‘And don’t say you don’t know where I live. I already know that you know that, Brian, with a lot of other stuff as well. See you soon.’

  And then the call was cut off.

  Damn it. Brian shoved the cellphone back in his coat pocket, started walking to his car, as another brace of F-16s went up into the clear and dangerous sky.

  ~ * ~

  Montgomery Zane went into the garage, just as Charlene followed him out. Her face was puffy and she had been crying, though she tried to hide it. She said, ‘No more questions, hon, except this one. Are you gonna be safe?’

  He grinned at her, gave her a big hug. ‘As safe as I can be, babe. As safe as I can be. Now. You just worry about gettin’ the kids ready and your bags packed over the next couple of weeks. You go on to my aunt’s place and don’t worry a bit.’

  ‘The hell I won’t,’ she said. ‘The hell I won’t.’

  He went to his Jeep Cherokee, black duffel bag in hand, and Charlene, arms crossed, said to him, ‘How long do we stay there for?’

  ‘Until I send for you.’

  ‘A day? A week? A month?’

  Monty shook his head. ‘Less than a week. That’s all I can say. You just keep on packin’, girl, all right?’

  And she nodded and he knew he should go over and give her a big hug. But he was late already, and these days he couldn’t afford to lose any more time.

  Monty backed out of the open garage, waved to his wife, who waved back, trying to look cheerful, trying very hard to look happy, and failing miserably on both counts.

  ~ * ~

  Darren Coover opened the door to his apartment, noted right away the severely pissed-off expression on the face of Brian Doyle. The face in question was reddened and his lips were pursed, and Darren knew he had just a few seconds before the detective started blowing up in his face. Darren had always found himself liking the scrappy New York guy, nothing like the actors on NYPD Blue or any of the other detective shows on television. Brian was the real deal.

  Through the clean kitchen he took him, to the small living room, where one of his laptops was running on a coffee table, next to copies of the Washington Post and Washington Times. Darren sat on a couch and Brian sat down across from him on a chair as Darren said, ‘Okay, I used harsh language there a while ago. I apologize, Brian.’

  Brian nodded, and Darren said, ‘No offense was meant. Seriously. My goal was to get you over here to talk.’

  Now the anger in Brian’s face was replaced by puzzlement. Darren liked what he saw. Brian said, ‘Mind telling me what the hell that’s supposed to mean?’

  He smiled at the cop and said, ‘I’ve always enjoyed having you on our Tiger Team, Brian. Just so you know. There are some - and I’m sure you know who they are - who think having a detective working with us is somehow beneath them and their abilities. So be it.’

  Brian said, ‘Tell me something I didn’t know. Go on.’

  Despite himself, Darren enjoyed this feeling, enjoyed being in charge, knowing secrets that either the person sitting across from him was supposedly holding or had no idea existed. It made up for his lousy childhood, the way he had kept to himself through high school and college, always knowing he was the smart one, the bright one, but also that he was the different one.

  Darren said, ‘I’m used to giving out information in briefings, so please bear with me, all right? Trust me. It’ll be worth your time.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  Darren smiled. He was enjoying this. Most briefings there was always somebody senior in rank or somewhat senior in smarts, putting on bored airs, but this guy seemed to want to know what was going on. He wasn’t going to disappoint him.

  ‘Information is what we play with, day in and day out,’ Darren began, sitting back on the couch. ‘Sometimes that information is dramatic, like an Order of Battle for th
e Medina Armored Corps of Iraq, back when they had an armored division to play with. And sometimes that information isn’t so dramatic, like that misused and popular phrase, chatter. The trick is to identify the sources of your information, and to make a best guesstimate of what it means now, and what it might mean in the future.’

  Brian said, ‘I’ve heard about a dozen different versions of that little speech since I came aboard, Darren. Thought you weren’t going to waste my time.’

  A nod. ‘All right. I’ll get specific, then. Since you came aboard, I’ve known from the start that one of your roles was to play...Rat Squad, I guess is the correct term ... for the Tiger Team Director. The Colonel. Your job was to follow the directives of Adrianna and work for the team, but your other job was to look into the backgrounds of your fellow Tiger Team members. Correct?’

  Brian’s face was colored red again. ‘How did you know?’