There is no fool like a careless gambler
who starts taking victory for granted.
Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005), American gonzo journalist
Since the MDZ C-130H was already tarted up with expensively applied Tigers colors and logos anyway, Charlie Bird and General McCandless decided the World Series would get its patriotic opening-ceremony HALO and fly-over after all.
MDZ laid on a dozen more jumpers from among folks they knew back in the day—including Tigers’ marketing vice-president Steve Harris, who had already dropped eighteen pounds in the Tiger workout room—and they executed a glorious jump into Comerica Park, flags waving and oblivious fans cheering, on national television. The television production of the World Series opener would later go on to win an Emmy.
Christmas Kieszek and Candy Clark did a powerful, crowd-stopping low-and-slow fly-over with the Herk, flaps big as barn doors and landing gear extended, precisely at the moment the last strains of The Star-Spangled Banner echoed over the stadium and the World Series umpire crew chief screamed Play ball! The plane might have been just somewhat lower to the stadium than the thousand-foot minimum the FAA demands.
Like Steve Harris had predicted it would, the demonstration killed.
The Tigers would go on to win the World Series over the Cubbies, four games to three. Steve Harris ensured that everyone who had worked with MDZ—including General McCandless, Major Crosby, the DIA and CID body men, Poppy Benedict, Deb Hemme, Amber, Tracey, and Xavier Cloud—were invited to all the championship parties and celebrations. There were many, and delirious ones, including the joyous victory parade down Woodward Avenue with hundreds of thousands of spectators and live TV coverage.
Just a few months later, team owners the Ilitch family formally presented them all with the same custom-made Major League Baseball championship rings the Tigers players received.
Amber and Tracey were relaxing in the DPD homicide squad bay when Baby Ruth received a visitor dressed in all-black abaya kaftan-style Islamic attire. The woman spoke quietly to Ruth, who turned and pointed to Tracey in the bullpen at her desk. Ruth touched a buzzer that unlocked the half gate and the woman walked into the squad and directly for Tracey’s desk.
“Miss Lexcellent?”
“Yes ma’am. How may I help you?”
“Asalam alaikum. I am Fatima al-Taja. I am Mohammed al-Taja’s wife.”
Amber stood and vacated the wooden office chair next to the desk. “Please sit down, ma’am,” Amber said. The woman nodded appreciatively and took the seat.
“Wa-alaikum salaam,” Tracey said, “How may we help you?”
“I am headed to City Airport with my husband. The government has provided one of those helicopter-airplanes. My husband will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.”
General McCandless donated his MV-22 Osprey to transport al-Taja’s flag-shrouded coffin, a ceremonial honor guard, and the funeral group to Washington.
“I am told that you are the detective who solved his murder.”
“No, it was a big team effort, for sure—including my FBI friend and colleague here, Special Agent Amber Watson.”
“Thank you as well for what you have done.”
“We were just doing our jobs,” Amber said.
Fatima held her head high, but her face was awash in pain.
“Yes. People always say that, don’t they? Just doing their jobs. It sometimes is more than that. It was more than that to me.”
Fatima carried a bag of her husband’s effects, just retrieved from the medical examiner. She reached inside and pulled out his golden U.S. Navy ring.
“Perhaps my husband was just another name on a victim list in the city, but I wanted you to know he was much more,” Fatima began. “He was a long-time Naval officer, did you know?”
She held the brilliant gold ring with its green stone and the golden fouled anchor.
“This was his gift to himself when he joined the Navy. He was so very proud to be American. I am naturalized now, but when I came to this country, long ago, I was alone and frightened. I hadn’t yet met Mohammed. I had distant relatives in Dearborn who took me in, but it was this country who adopted me. My husband was born American, and the importance of that, its responsibility, never left him.”
Tracey reached forward and took Fatima’s hands in hers. Arabs in some places in America were sometimes as downtrodden as Black Americans had been in the worst days of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. By the similar comparison, no one could deny that Arabs—Muslim or otherwise—now were challenging the bottom of the racial pecking order in some cities.
“As much as Mohammed loved his Navy, he was always driven to do more. That’s why he decided to leave the Navy early and work for the federal government, because he wanted always to do more for his nation. Always more.”
If Fatima knew her husband had been NSA, and later CIA, she wasn’t saying. It was entirely probable that she did not know.
“He was a good man, a patriotic man,” Tracey said. “A warrior. We know this. And his grateful nation knows it as well.”
“Your words honor him, and honor me,” Fatima said. She was breathless and suppressed her sobs, a proud, grief-stricken woman who longed for the sound of her husband’s lost voice, and longed for the music of children and grandchildren’s voices that she would never hear.
Fatima thrust al-Taja’s Navy ring into Tracey’s palm, closing Tracey’s fingers around the object.
“I want you to keep my husband’s ring,” Fatima said, on the teetering edge of tears that filled her eyes. “He would be proud to know you have it. It will feel like he is still in the fight.”
Tracey raised the Navy ring into the light, where the glancing afternoon sun coming through the squad’s western windows reflected brilliantly from the golden surface. She knew she would never succeed in declining the offer, and honestly, she didn’t want to. This was a remarkable object, central to everything that had occurred with her and the anti-terror team.
It would be a meaningful talisman for the future.
“You honor me beyond my ability to thank you, madam,” Tracey said, now on the verge of tears herself.
Fatima stood and paused for a moment, her water-filled eyes piercing Tracey’s. When Tracey extended her handshake, Fatima bowed and kissed her hand, holding it tightly in both of hers until it was covered with tears. Then, without another word, she turned and left the squad.
“Can I see that?” Amber asked. Tracey handed her the ring and then, sniffling, rummaged around in her messy desk drawer for a small packet of Kleenex she was sure was in there somewhere.
“As awesome gifts go, this is pretty damned awesome, lady.”
Tracey couldn’t answer, because she was snorting into a slightly used tissue found in the drawer.
“Hey, look at this.”
Amber angled the ring into the conical desk light, and both women pressed their heads together to look at the inside band of the ring. Engraved deep in the smooth golden surface were the phrases #ONETEAMONEFIGHT and the slogan SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS.
The latter is a Latin phrase meaning “thus always to tyrants,” but it’s a shortened version of the longer phrase Sic semper evello mortem tyrannis, which means, “Thus always I bring death to tyrants.”
It was an entirely fitting epigraph for Mohammed al-Taja.
It was nearly sunset and too chilly to have the Corvette’s convertible top down. It was that time of the year when the days pretended to be summer, but the afternoons and evenings were full-on cool fall and people talked about the change of seasons being one of the many reasons to live in Michigan.
These were some of the best weeks in Detroit. The World Series win invigorated the city and people were becoming optimistic again. Dan Gilbert and his companies were erecting new towers and restoring others all over downtown. The sports complex venues for Tigers, Lions, Red Wings, and Pistons made sports fans delirious, and the city’s energetic resurgence was making headlines all over the world.
The thing Amber and Tracey fixated on was a drive down to Hart Plaza and the best hot dog cart in the city. But there was a secondary reason.
There is no public parking in the plaza area. Amber backed into a police-only slot in front of the UAW-Ford Building and flipped down her sun visor with a POLICE placard rubber-banded to it, then she and Tracey walked up to the fountain area and their favorite hot dog cart.
“Corvette Watson!” the cart man said. Amber hugged the man warmly.
“Big Lou, how you been, man?”
“I been good, missy, good. Had a good summer out here this year. You musta been making the world safe for democracy. Ain’t seen you since Jesus lost His sandals. Waved at you some weeks ago, ’cross the street.”
“Yeah, saw ya. We have been busy. One for each of us, please, and a coupla Diets?”
Big Lou dug into the steamy stainless steel bin with long metal tongs, pulled out two dogs with one expert grab, and in a single smooth move, gracefully inserted them into fresh buns swaddled in waxed paper.
“Ketchup’s on the table,” he said, extending the food in one hand and tipping his old newsboy’s cap with the other. Amber paid him extra and hugged him and wished him well on his Florida hiatus from street commerce. She grabbed two frigid cans of Diet Pepsi from a tub of ice and she and Tracey sat to eat at a picnic table a few steps away.
“You think she’s out here?” Amber took a small bite of her hot dog, thought better of it, and then slathered the top with ketchup.
“Maybe,” Tracey said. “She sees a clinic in the GM Building three times a week. Today is one of her therapy days.”
As if on cue, Maggie Prynne strode purposefully up the sidewalk toward the picnic table.
She stood before Tracey with her hands pushed into a stylish pastel pink North Face parka. She was clean, her blue jeans had no holes in the knees, and she wore a fun knit cap that failed to conceal freshly cut and colored blonde hair. Tracey didn’t know how old Maggie was, but she looked fifteen years younger than when Tracey put her in that taxi to Wayne County Hospital.
“My name is Margaret Havelka,” she said, extending a handshake, “and I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober forty-seven days. May I join you?”
Tracey scooted over, eyes wide and incredulous, and Maggie sat down. Amber’s mouth hung open in amazement at the utter transformation in the woman.
“I want to thank you both for all your help,” she began. “When you sent me up to Wayne County, your friend Amalia put me in the rehab ward again, but it was just going to be overnight. Checking me in, she found my old rehab record in the system and called my sister. Man, I didn’t even know I had a sister then, I was so far gone.”
Margaret’s sheepish smile underscored the obvious. “You may recall that condition I had. Kim came down and got me the next morning and took me directly to Henry Ford Hospital to dry me out. This time, I stayed.”
Tracey put her hand on Margaret’s arm.
“You look amazing. How did this happen? I mean, no disrespect, but you were nearly catatonic last time I saw you.”
“Yes, anxiety disorder, complicated by alcoholism. Some therapy, some Librium for the panic and alcohol withdrawal, sweetened by Diazepam to stabilize. Lots of group therapy. I stay with my sister and her family now. The environment calms me. The doctors say I might fully recover if I can stay away from dat ol’ debbil rum.”
She laughed, and the sound was pure and happy.
“I think I might even try to get my law license back.”
Tracey and Amber were genuinely speechless.
“Forty-seven days clean as of today. So, Tracey, and you too, Amber, I wanted to thank you for giving me my life back. For bringing me back from the dead.”
Tracey and Margaret hugged again for several seconds. When they pulled back, both women needed tissues.
“As it turns out,” Tracey said, “I have something else to give you.” She reached into her large handbag and pulled out a Michigan vehicle license plate that read 4CE N01.
“Oh my God!” Margaret said. “I thought I’d dreamed it all.” She cradled the artifact in her hands. “Believe it or not, I remember this so clearly.”
“You do? Can you tell us what it means to you?” Amber asked.
“I actually can. I’d lived on the street a long time, you know. You saw me. Pitiful. I was always drunk, but you know how that works. I was mostly transactional. Ish. Sometimes, not so much.”
Tracey nodded, embarrassed to completely understand what Margaret was saying.
“Before my disconnect, as the doctor calls it, I’d been down here surfing the trash cans for returnables. A large man with tan skin and his hair pulled back in a dork knob drove up to the plaza in a black station wagon, and he asked me where the City-County Building was. I gave him the finger with my left hand and pointed across the street with the other. I noticed this odd license plate as he drove away.”
Saladin, Amber thought.
Margaret held the plate at arm’s length and stared at it, still disbelieving its existence.
“A few hours later, it was starting to get darkish. I was stumbling around over there, and a tall, thin man came out of the building and got in that tan man’s car.”
Benoit. Casing the building, maybe? Fascinated, Amber rested her chin in her hand and leaned forward to hear the rest of Maggie Prynne’s story.
Margaret pulled a clean tissue from her pocket and wiped tears from her eyes as the cascade of memories threatened to overwhelm her.
“A few days later, I was so drunk! I was just collapsed against the City-County building, waiting for my head to clear up so I could, you know, go get more booze. But I dozed off. Then I heard a sound, like a loud pop sound. It woke me up, I guess, and it was getting dark. I was confused, ’cause I didn’t know how long I’d been passed out.”
Margaret was embarrassed by this behavior. Tracey touched her arm as she continued.
Her breath became short and tears again filled her eyes. She choked out her words with sobs.
“The first thing I saw was that poor man on the concrete behind the Spirit statue, his head all crashed in, blood all over. On me. I had no concept of time, or how long either of us had been there, and it just freaked me out. When I ran around yelling for help, there was the thin man in the black car, with the tan man. I screamed bloody murder and they drove off. I don’t know what happened next. Docs told me all I could say for weeks was ‘force no one.’”
She hugged the license plate to her chest.
“I thought I dreamed it all up.”
“How do we stay in touch with you?” Amber asked. She gave Margaret one of her FBI business cards. “We might need you to tell that story to some people in a few weeks. Maybe not, but maybe so.”
Margaret pocketed the card. “Take down my cell number.”
She rattled off a ten-digit number, proud as a new sixteen-year-old with her first cellphone.
“You can text me!”
Xavier Cloud, Poppy Benedict, Deb Hemme, General McCandless, Tommy Crosby, Tracey Lexcellent, and Amber Watson sat at a table in a dark corner of the Sweetwater Tavern having what Poppy referred to as a “hot wash.” They went over the highlights of everything that had transpired in the preceding weeks to see if anything could have been done better or differently. The consensus was that, considering the many variables they’d contended with, there probably were always going to be ways they could have done things differently, but no better ones.
“Amber, jungle drums say you are on a countdown calendar to retirement from the FBI?” Poppy asked.
“Yeah, two-digit midget,” she said, meaning under ninety-nine days, though she was closer to thirty days. “Hangin’ it up.”
She stole a look at Cloud that everyone at the table thought was just a click enlightening.
“I’ve been a badge-toter my entire adult life. I think I’ll take some time off and decide what I want to be if I grow up.”
“Well, considering all that has transpired among this august group in the recent past, and how well we’ve all worked together, I was kind of hoping we might keep the band together, you know?” Poppy smiled inscrutably. “Maybe go on tour, so to speak.”
Exasperated, Tracey asked, “Have you ever spoken plainly in your whole life?”
Poppy laughed. “It really isn’t my style, you know.”
He raised his shell of Stroh’s in a silent toast and Tracey grinned at him. She was starting to think Poppy was more than just the little government troll she used to think he was. She was also starting to think maybe he was kind of cute, and how sexy she thought smart was. Poppy was very smart. She resolved to investigate that before much longer.
General McCandless turned to Amber. “Did you ever figure out where you know me from?”
It was Amber’s turn to be cagey.
“Mmm, not sure, general. Where do you think it was?”
“You were in Germany the first time, a fresh Spec-four back before the term changed to just Specialist. You were a traffic accident investigator in Butzbach then, pre-MPI.” He stopped and smiled. “Anything yet?”
“General, you probably know the U.S. Army installation at Butzbach Kaserne was closed sometime in the mid 90s—and I was there before that. That’s many years and two careers behind me. Can you be more specific?”
“Ha, indeed I can. I remember every moment like it was yesterday. I was a brand-new second lieutenant in the military intelligence detachment, never been out of the U.S. in my life. Never had a beer down my neck until I got to Germany, back when there still was a West and an East. We used to chase those damned Soviet Military Liaison Mission guys all over the countryside when they got spotted out of their authorized zones, and we almost never caught any.”
The general looked into his beer like it was a crystal ball as he called up the memories.
“And then one day we did catch one, blocked their Lada in on the autobahn on three sides and wedged ’em tight up against the guardrail. Nothing else for us to do about it, of course, but jump out and take dozens of pictures. They hated having their pictures taken. Then we called for backup and German Polizei, who just checked the Soviets’ papers and escorted them back to their side of the East German border. But that was a huge victory for us, and we went back to town and got some serious drinks.”
“I haven’t seen you have as much as two beers since I’ve known you, sir,” Crosby said. The general tapped his glass with his West Point ring.
“I know. Been that way a long time now. I learned something that day … from a young MP traffic investigator who pulled me over on the way back to the BOQ.”
Amber was struck dumb by the sudden vivid memories now flooding her brain.
“Holy friggin’ shit, are you kidding me right now?” she exclaimed, and laughed out loud. She looked at the general with wide, fresh eyes.
“Shall I take it from here, sir?”
The general smiled. “Please.”
“Holy Christ, am I old. So, I’m pretty new in-country myownself and patrolling solo traffic in an MP jeep, you know? I mean, one of the prehistoric ones, the M151A1s we used in Germany, way pre-Humvee and all that. The regular patrols had a couple Ford sedans, but mostly we still worked the road in those combat jeeps. Canvas sides, won’t heat for crap, and it was cold. I was trying to go off shift, and I really had to pee ’cause I’d been swilling coffee to stay warm. Then, coming around the turn in the opposite lane, comes this road-commission orange Volkswagen Squareback and crosses into my lane.”
Amber raised both hands and flew them in formation, depicting her jeep and the oncoming Volkswagen.
“I had to evade or we might still have been head-on into a ditch out there in Bad Nauheim somewhere. I whip around and chase it down, all blue lights and Martin horn, and I get it stopped off the road.”
“One-Adam-twelve, see the man …” Cloud said.
“Right? So, I’m pissed—and I still have to pee like a Russian race horse. I stomp out of my jeep and walk up to the car. The driver, this sorry-ass butter-bar second lieutenant, already has his window down and is handing me his documents. He starts talking about being sorry for crossing the center line, he’s new here, he wasn’t paying attention like he should, and how he had never had German beer in his life until that night but he only had two and wow, was he sorry. I know his whole short career went before his eyes so fast he had to call for a second showing.”
Everyone around the table laughed and then looked at McCandless to make sure it was all right. He was grinning, too.
Amber gestured to the general.
“Well, that cat was our esteemed later-to-advance-to-General John Glenn McCandless. He was so pitiful, and I had to pee so bad, I couldn’t possibly write him up. I mean, he was only flirting with not-even-tipsy, and I used my discretion to cut him some slack.”
She looked into her beer glass as if she expected to find her answers there too, like McCandless had tried to do. There weren’t any for her either.
“He was new, didn’t know shit from Shinola. None of us did back then, really. I felt he was sober enough to follow me back to the BOQ at Ayers Kaserne, where he promised me faithfully he would stay in the rest of the night, amend his behavior in the future, and be more careful while he got used to driving in Germany. And he let me use his bathroom, so. Win-win.”
In a rare gesture of familiarity, McCandless reached forward and clasped his large hand over Amber’s small one. Amber appreciated it in the gentle, brotherly way it was offered. She put her other hand over his.
“I thought you were going to be a good officer,” Amber said. “We were all so very young then, weren’t we? Damn, that was a long time ago. We were feeling our way forward blind in life using the Braille system, trying to find the bumps in the road. Looking out for each other as best we could.”
A flicker of a dark memory crossed Amber’s face then, but no one recognized it and it passed.
“We made mistakes. We took chances.” Some things from those days she still regretted. Sorry, Jamie. “They didn’t all work out.”
But then Amber brightened. “You didn’t give me a bunch of crap, you weren’t drunk-drunk, thank God, and I couldn’t get off that roadside fast enough. It seems to have been the right decision, all these years later.”
“I am and remain grateful for your kindness, staff sergeant,” he said. Amber looked surprised. Staff sergeant, the paygrade of E-6, had been her last rank before leaving the Army four years later.
She wasn’t supposed to have been permitted to accept it, because she either had to extend for a year or reenlist to have minimum time to promote. Neither of those things were going to happen. But then the orders came down from higher and she got promoted anyway, only eight months before getting out of the Army. She figured it was a classic Army admin error.
It wasn’t.
“Yes, I have followed your career from a discreet distance ever since. I am in the information business, after all. I knew each time you were promoted the rest of that tour—I was even able to jump-start you to E-6 before you got out; my little going-away present to you. I knew you would continue to contribute all the rest of your life. And looks like I was correct, too.”
Tracey started singing softly, “Kumbaya, my lord, kumbaya …”
“You never knew how important that singular act of generosity became to me,” the general said. “You know how the Army is. A DUI on my record would have gotten me canned even then, when every other soldier was drunk most of the time. At minimum, I would have lost my security clearance and my job, and if I wasn’t chaptered out with a less than Honorable discharge, the rest of my Army career would have been dull and unpleasant. You saved my actual ass that day, and by extension over the years in my occupation, you have saved actual lives. Nothing, and no one, can ever repay the debt I owe to a heads-up young woman who was in the right place at the right time.”
McCandless squeezed Amber’s hand gently, and sat back.
“Thanks for telling me that, general,” she said. She blinked rapidly to diffuse her suddenly watery eyes. Military brotherhood and sisterhood knows no rank structure. Amber had scored numerous awards and accolades over a law-enforcement career spanning three federal departments and as many decades, but when a four-star Army general thanks you for saving his ass, that’s big.
McCandless nodded and raised his glass to her.
“Well, this is a helluva team we have here,” Poppy said. “Be a damned shame to let it break up.”
“Will you please spit the sweat socks out of your mouth and tell us what you’re talking about?” Tracey blurted. “I gotta go solve some crimes and whatnot.”
Poppy looked directly at Amber.
“Zave already works with me on-staff. When you retire, I’d like you to think about working with us, too.”
“Are you nuts, Poppy? I am no kind of spy.”
“No, you’re better—you’re a thinker. You’re organized, you have presence, and you can bend into any objective, I believe, such that you’d make a damned fine exec in the new department we’re setting up. Broad portfolio, fewer rules of engagement. We call it STORM CELL.”
“Catchy,” Tracey poked. “You make that up yourself, or you got people for that?”
He raised a flat hand as Amber drew breath to object.
“You don’t have to decide today.” He side-glanced at Cloud and tried not to smile. “Take some time, blow off some steam.”
Amber instantly shot back, “Oh, you’re a comedian now too, huh?” Poppy giggled to himself, and Amber reached out to grab Cloud’s hand. He grabbed back.
“You could do a lot worse than to pitch in with this crowd,” McCandless chimed in. “And we can use you.”
“The best I can say is I’ll think about it,” Amber said.
She was skeptical, but it was good to be wanted at this late stage of her career. Amber always believed that, as the saying goes, age was just a number. She told Tracey more than once that she must have had brain death at nineteen, because she felt no different today than she did then.
She looked like she was in her early forties, though she was two decades older than that according to her driver’s license. “Maybe federal retirements don’t go as far as they used to.”
Poppy sipped his beer, then said, “This is true. You don’t have to stand up to full-time if you don’t want to, either. I think once you look at some project-based options I’ll provide, you will agree that my freelance rates are, ah, very competitive. But however you decide to participate, we’ll put you to good use. And I promise you will never be bored.”
Cloud’s cellphone vibrated and danced across the wooden table. He picked it up.
“Now he checks in?”
“What?” Amber asked.
He showed the phone to Poppy, who smiled, and handed the phone to McCandless.
“Better late than never, I guess,” Poppy said. “I mean, he is retired …”
On the screen was a text from Xing Jianjun, inviting Xavier Cloud to meet at the Red Flag. It ended with the term 9-1-1.
Everyone at the table got up at once and headed for the door.
As they cross the bar, General McCandless and Poppy Benedict look up to see a large backlit shadow filling the doorway. They are mildly surprised to see the shadow is thrown by their old Mossad friend Shimon Kriegsman. And Kriegsman is a long way out of his usual zone of operations.
“Shimon?” McCandless says, extending his hand and a quizzical look. “Good to see you. Odd to see you.”
“Yeah, what are you doing here?” Poppy Benedict asks with obvious suspicion.
“Johnny,” Kriegsman says, shaking McCandless’s hand and nodding. “Poppy.”
He isn’t smiling.
“There is a fire.”