The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow
from which we refuse to be divorced.
Washington Irving (1783-1859), American writer
“Skipper!” The MDZ’s chief operating officer Kathie Murphy yelled from the breakroom to the kitchen. “That policeman’s funeral is on TV.”
Charlie Bird, Carlos Benavides, Kerry Baker, and Candy Clark came out of the kitchen holding coffees. The rest of the team was either working, training, or off. Candy sat on the couch next to Kathie and they all watched the broadcast in silence.
A gleaming black Cadillac funeral car was at the curb of Most Holy Trinity Church, on Porter Street west of the Lodge Expressway near Downtown Detroit. A couple thousand reverent spectators stood quietly in the soft gray rain as Detroit Police officers carried Sergeant Jefferson O’Brien’s coffin down the concrete steps from the church.
The TV cameras zoomed in on a close-up on the six officers carrying the traffic cop to the car that would take him to a burial inside of the same Gethsemane Cemetery where he used to hide with his traffic radar.
The pallbearers wore crisp dress uniforms for their somber task. The rain fell on them as they walked in slow lockstep. It soaked into their clothes and dripped like tears from the bills of their uniforms caps.
Five men, one woman.
Six hours later, back in dry, comfortable clothes and sitting at her table in the Sweetwater Tavern across the street from her apartment building, Tracey gazed into her beer glass. Amber Watson sat across from her.
“There was nothing you could do, honey. You know this,” Amber said. “Jeff was on his own trajectory from the moment his fingers touched that jerkweed’s bribe money.”
The television behind the bar, its sound turned down to a whisper, replayed the coverage of O’Brien’s full-dress Chief’s funeral. Hundreds of police departments from around the nation had sent officers and patrol cars to escort and participate in the somber procession, and Porter Street was clogged with police cars, people, and media. At one point, the TV camera zoomed in tight on Tracey helping carry the coffin down the church steps to the funeral car. It captured a close-up of her face, her tears blending with the rain.
The news anchor babbled about clues recovered from a second body at the murder scene that authorities thought pointed to terrorist plots, and possibly even armed domestic insurrection. The anchor said Dearborn homicide detectives were working together with their Detroit counterparts on the case. Interviews were being conducted, surveillance cameras were being checked, all the usual things, blah-blah.
No one paid much attention to the report. It was sad enough the first time when it was live.
Tracey shrugged. “I suppose. Jeff was a conflicted man. But that doesn’t speak to the fact that I had to comfort his widow at his gravesite a few hours ago, while she held her sleeping infant and consoled four adolescent boys sobbing for the death of the father they adored.”
“Yeah, it’s tough all around on this deal. Still, what I’m saying is, don’t you take responsibility for this. It isn’t your fault. His death is not on you.”
“I am a creature of guilt, y’know.” She raised her draft Stroh’s in a weak salute and took a small sip. When she returned the glass to the table, she took obsessive pains to place the glass in precisely the same wet circle of condensation it occupied before.
“My buddy in the Evidence Tech Unit sent me a transcript of the phone recording we made.” Tracey looked up at Amber. “I sent it along to you, FYI. But we already know what was in it.”
Amber looked away toward the large windows facing the street. “My buddy the NTAC also yanked the al-Taja case back from me again. I’m locked out for good, looks like. He must smell a resolution in it that we don’t detect at our level. He wouldn’t have pulled it back unless he thought there was something in it for him. Jungle drums say that other body, that Jabara cat, and those Wolverines flyers, stink of a wider terror plot known only in the rare air Benoit occupies. The World Series thing, is what I think.”
She took a swallow of her drink.
“My guess is the next time we see anything about it will be when he goes public with his genius. You know that fucker is asking around the office for volunteers to stand up some damned political campaign? We think he thinks he’s going to be the next Gary Peters.”
Peters is the junior U.S. Senator from Michigan.
Amber’s eyes drilled into her drink. “I would vote for Satan before Benoit.” She took a sip of her beer and looked back to the bar’s front windows, streaked with steady rainfall that looked like tears on the glass.
“Did I tell you I broke up with my boyfriend?”
Tracey’s head rose from her reverie in surprise. “No. Why? I thought he made you feel good.”
“Yes, he does. Did,” Amber said. “But I broke the boy’s brain. He wanted to friggin’ get married. Ain’t nobody got time for that. And I’m a city girl—city bigger’n Traverse City, anyway. I am too young to move up north.”
She smiled knowingly.
“But he retains visitation privileges.”
The door to the Sweetwater opened and in strode three men. One was short and kind of dumpy. One was tall, very handsome, and looked to be in great shape. And one was an older but handsome military officer of some kind who automatically reached up and removed his cover when he entered the bar. Before the door closed, an observer could see another younger military officer sitting outside behind the wheel of a black Suburban. There were dark silhouettes of other occupants in the truck.
The short dumpy one looked around the tavern as his eyes adjusted to the dim light. He spied Tracey and Amber sitting in the corner, and the three men walked directly toward them.
Amber noted the tall man and smirked.
“Hmm. Looks like my rebound just got here. Yours is kinda short, though …”
Then the three stood next to their table and the short man spoke.
“Tracey Lexcellent?”
She looked up with a frown from brooding over her drink. She did not have the time or disposition for any media interviews about the funeral.
“Who wants to know?” Her disapproving stare took in all three men standing before her.
“Detective, we need to have just a few minutes of your time, if you please,” the military man said. Amber saw he was Army, four-star at that, and that got her attention. Then she was surprised when he turned to her.
“Special Agent Watson,” he said, and smiled inscrutably. “Good to see you again.”
He extended his hand and Amber shook it timidly. She was certain she didn’t know any four-star Army generals.
“Sir. Have we met?”
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Ahh, no, sir … I do not remember you,” Amber said.
The officer waved Malik from Malawi over from his place behind the bar for drink orders.
“Ladies, do you mind if we get that larger table over there?” He pointed to the opposite side of the room. “Next round is on us.”
He turned to Malik.
“Three large diets for us, and whatever they’re having.”
Once settled in around their drinks, the short man spoke first.
“We know who you are, obviously, but let me introduce us.” He pointed around the table. “That’s Xavier Cloud. This is General John Glenn McCandless. And I am Paul Benedict.”
He extended his hand to Tracey. She ignored it.
“Call me Poppy.”
The general raised a small wave.
“Zave,” Cloud said.
“Okay, now we know who you are,” Tracey said. Her contempt was genuine. “Who gives a shit?”
“We are a federal government group looking into a number of related matters,” Poppy began. “We think you can help us with some of that. How long did you know Jefferson O’Brien?”
Tracey instantly bristled.
“Are we going to have that fucking song and dance now? You knew who we were when you came in here. Now you are wasting everybody’s time asking bullshit questions that I know you already know the answers to. So why don’t we just suspend the bullshit segment of the program and get down to what the actual fuck this is all about.”
The funeral replay of the live TV coverage still droned on in the background.
“I’ve already had a really shitty day.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Amber thought she detected General McCandless trying to suppress a laugh.
“You know I was in the academy with Jeff, right? You know we had a short relationship at that time. So, you probably also well know that today, and for many years, he was a happily married man raising a now fatherless boys basketball team, and he was a long-standing veteran police officer in the Detroit Police Department. I don’t give a flyin’ fuck right now what he’s done, frankly, or what you think he’s done. He was a good cop for a long time, and he was my friend. And I helped bury him today.”
Poppy laid a color photo on the table and slid it over to Tracey. “Do you know this man?”
She took a fast glance at it and said, “No. Am I supposed to?”
“He’s an Iranian named Abdul Fattaah Saladin. He’s one of the men implicated in the homicide of Sergeant Jefferson O’Brien.”
Tracey clearly remembered Jeff purposely saying the man’s name on the recording of his homicide. She picked up the photo and memorized it.
“Hmm. Still no.” She handed the photo to Amber. She too memorized it, then shook her head, left-right, in the negative.
“Well, what would you say if I told you I knew where this man was right now?”
Tracey powered down her Stroh’s. “Okay, I would say, ‘let’s go.’”
“Not so fast,” the general said. “We understand your eagerness, but there are other issues involved. Would you come with us to our offices? Just over in Greektown.” He looked around the sparsely populated bar. “We can’t talk openly here.”
Tracey stood. “I say again, let’s go.”
In the CIA task force offices on Monroe in Greektown, four men escorted the two women through a series of magnetically locked doors requiring keycards and numerical codes to get through the portals. Once on the second deck, the six walked through a busy cube farm to a conference room where a young woman waited with paperwork.
Poppy entered first.
“Come in, come in,” he said to Tracey and Amber, who took seats on the far side of the long conference room table, facing the door. General McCandless, Major Crosby, and Cloud followed and sat opposite with Poppy and a woman. Poppy closed the door, which automatically locked. A light on the keypad next to the door changed from green to red.
“This is Deb Hemme. She’s one of our intel operators here, but I’ve pressed her into admin duty for this meeting. She has forms for your signature.”
Hemme slid copies of Standard Form 312—the Classified Non-Disclosure Agreement—across the table to Tracey and Amber.
“There is no time to do the background investigations on you two for the kind of field security clearance I’m about to grant, umm, meritoriously,” Poppy said. “As an FBI agent, Special Agent Watson has had a comprehensive SSBI, of course, but her clearance level doesn’t approach what we need today. And Ms. Lexcellent, you don’t have any clearances at all.”
Amber and Tracey scanned their forms briefly, but they were long familiar with mindless paperwork drills. To them, this was just another one. They inked their signatures at the bottoms of the SF 312s. Curiously, their full names, the date, their organizations, and their social security numbers were already pre-printed on the documents. Deb Hemme witnessed the forms and Poppy signed his acceptance on behalf of the United States of America.
“Basically, for the record and your information, your signature on the form affirms that nothing you learn in this room, or about topics we will discuss, can ever be revealed to another person without specific written approval—which will never be given. Or I will put you under the jail.”
Tracey and Amber stared back unimpressed.
“Oooh,” Tracey said with contempt. “So badass. The short ones always think they’re the tough guy.”
Poppy ignored the taunt. He faced issues more pressing than an angry young woman’s misplaced disrespect. Over his CIA career and four ex-wives, he’d been dissed before by experts. Tracey was not one of them.
Poppy stepped to the lectern and pressed a button. The room lights went off and a projector suspended from the ceiling threw an image of Saladin’s Michigan driver’s license on screen; he lived on Beaconsfield near the Detroit-Grosse Pointe Farms border, was six-three, weighed 257, brown and brown.
“This man, Abdul Fattaah Saladin, was in the park in Dearborn when Sergeant O’Brien arrived. Through information we’ve developed, we believe O’Brien was there specifically to see Saladin. We also think O’Brien intended to kill him there.”
Poppy turned to Tracey.
“We know about a bribe, the twenty-five thousand. We agree with your own suspicions about O’Brien falsely implicating the Williams kid by planting the al-Taja murder weapon in his car. That was among a number of bad calls on O’Brien’s part.”
Tracey drew a forceful breath to protest, but Poppy cut her off with an upraised hand.
“Don’t get spun up. I know he was your friend, but he’s gone. These are just the facts, and we’ve got work to do now.”
The imagery on the screen changed to dark, grainy video captured at night. It was a long, wide-angle look across the darkened park with hot globes of streetlights and a traffic signal.
“This was video recorded by a Comerica Bank ATM machine about two blocks away. You can just see O’Brien’s scout car in the shadows on the very far left. After several minutes, two men walk toward two cars on the other side of the playground, then the cars drive away. We know one of the cars was Saladin’s Dodge station wagon, but there’s nothing on the second car. That’s all there is. No real useful information came out of this, regrettably. There are no pictures of the shootings at all.”
The scene changed to late afternoon, on a high angle of the City-County Building in downtown Detroit.
“This is footage accidentally captured by one of our global surveillance satellites. The satellite was being repositioned for our use here. While it was being stabilized over the city, the sweep of the optics as the platform’s azimuth changed happened to cross over downtown. This important accidental footage was discovered by Miss Hemme over there.”
Poppy gave her a nod and a paternal smile. “Watch.”
The building rooftop was in twilight as shadows from the downtown office towers blocked the waning sun. Tracey and Amber immediately recognized the scene as the City-County Building. Data snippets in the margins of the frame noted the time was 2044 hours, 8:44 p.m. The video unspooled in jerky snatches, frame by frame, like old black-and-white silent films do.
It had obviously been recorded as the satellite’s lens swept across the city, because it was still streaky and poorly exposed. Manipulation in a computer had enlarged the images, slowed the frame rate to nearly stop-action, and the clarity and contrast had been enhanced.
What unfolded took Tracey and Amber’s breath away.
“I would kill for some audio here,” Poppy said with conviction. In fact, Deb Hemme had put COLOSSUS on the case of trying to lip-read from the images, but in the twilight, the pictures were too grainy and indistinct to read at the magnification required to get a decent close-up of the faces.
Two men were on the City-County Building’s roof. They walked casually in a random pattern, evidently talking calmly in the complete privacy the rooftop provided. The erratic walking around ended up taking them to the edge of the building that faced Woodward, on the same side as the Spirit of Detroit statue. The thinner man wore an overcoat and gloves in the chill afternoon air.
He gestured wildly, as if upset, and the second man, wearing a dark suit, stood listening with his hands in his trouser pockets. The second man shook his head in a negative manner.
The thinner man looked over the side of the building and pointed at the Spirit statue several times, as if making a point. The second man then looked, too.
The first man took a long-barreled handgun from his coat pocket, stepped back, and pressed the weapon up against the second man’s skull. The second man’s arms instantly shot away from his sides.
Poppy said, “We think that gun is a pink Kel-Tec three-eighty with low-power assassin loads, but here, it has an obviously custom-made silencer on the end of it.”
Amber and Tracey sat bolt upright in their chairs.
The thinner man seemed to say a few more words, only a few, and then pulled the trigger of his gun. The dark-suited man collapsed instantly in a heap, but was held at the edge of the rooftop long enough for the thinner man to put his weapon back in his coat pocket. Then, with both hands on the second man’s shoulders, the thinner man carefully pushed the body over the edge.
“I will just be goddamned,” Tracey said under her breath. Amber sat electrified by what she had seen.
Mohammed al-Taja—The Well-Dressed Man.
The thinner man looked around, and up and across the neighboring streets, as if to see whether he had been observed by anyone in surrounding office buildings. It was unlikely this long after close of business. Evidently satisfied that his crime was safe from prying eyes, he straightened his tie and walked casually back to the rooftop access door, opened it, and disappeared inside.
The stop-action images progressed a few more yards across the top of the roof before swinging out across the city toward Windsor on the Canadian side of the Detroit River.
The video stopped and the lights came back up.
“Does any of that ring any bells with either of you?” General McCandless asked.
“Ah, no … no. None here, sir,” Amber said, but she was still wide-eyed and still thinking about something she wasn’t ready to share.
“Yeah, I got nothin’,” Tracey said. “But I’ll tell you what: You people have some damned fine toys.”
“Al-Taja was a CIA undercover in the Department of Homeland Security,” Poppy said. “He was investigating a serious plan to attack the World Series during the opening ceremonies, real 9/11-type stuff.”
Amber’s head swiveled up in recognition.
“We have since learned a few things about this plan, but we still have had no luck with identifying most of the perpetrators.”
“Perpetrators is a big cop word for a spy,” Tracey said.
“Yeah, I see movies and stuff.”
Poppy tossed Saladin’s color photo back on the table. “This guy, Abdul Fattaah Saladin, is believed to be a principal behind the terror plan, and we think he was also present at O’Brien’s homicide; he was the other side of the conversation you cleverly and helpfully recorded. Al-Taja got the photo when he impersonated a state police detective investigating a fake vehicle license plate matter. The sole goal of that play was to get an image of Saladin.
“Two days later, al-Taja was dead. But as you can probably see looking at this photo, Saladin was not the thin man on the City-County roof who killed al-Taja with a bullet in his head. The effort to crush al-Taja’s head to disguise the gunshot wound was a pitiful failure, obviously. You’d think that was a rookie mistake, but players in this league lost their rookie standings a long time ago. We think it was just spur-of-the-moment to drop our man over the side of the building, causing a commotion on the street while the shooter disappeared in the chaos.”
Deb Hemme rose from her chair and placed a tape recorder on the center of the table.
“We’re going to play some voices for you,” Poppy said. “The first two were recorded from a cellphone call we intercepted. The second two voices were pulled from the recording you two made of O’Brien’s last moments. We have done voiceprint analysis of the voices that aren’t O’Brien’s. It proved conclusively that the unknown men talking on the O’Brien recording are the same ones recorded on the first cellphone call. Listen to this.”
Deb Hemme reached forward and pressed Play on the device.
Something unbelievable was causing Amber’s spider sense to itch. She leaned in attentively.
The call from the ECHELON intercept played in its entirety, then the recording made during Jeff O’Brien’s Dearborn playground event spooled out. The playback stopped and everyone around the table was quiet.
Tracey had only heard her dead friend’s voice. She would mourn his passing for a long time, despite the circumstances of his death. He’d made a mistake. He tried to make it right at the end, even though he would never know whether he succeeded.
But he had.
Amber looked up irritated and said to Poppy, “Is this supposed to be some kind of bullshit test?”
“Why?” General McCandless asked.
“Well, I presume you think the Arab-sounding guy is this Saladin cat, right?” She reached out and tapped Saladin’s color photograph.
“Yes,” Poppy said.
“Well, then why don’t you already know who the other guy is?”
Poppy leaned slightly forward in anticipation.
“What do you mean? Do you think we should know who he is?”
“I’d say so,” Amber said. “That’s my boss—Special Agent in Charge of the Detroit Regional FBI Office, Foster Heath Benoit III.”