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?’