Public Enemy Read online

  A second trooper roamed over from his own cruiser to move one of the orange pylons out of the way, and the first trooper waved them through.

  The guide turned into the entrance of the housing development that was home to the stretch of identical tile roofs Laramie had spotted from the pine forest. The entrance boasted a sign with raised green letters nailed into a beige slab of what looked to Laramie like plywood: in a glorious burst of optimism, the sign announced that the name of the housing development was EMERALD LAKES. Laramie couldn’t see any water along the road. She wondered if maybe they’d find the lakes inside the development.

  As the guide negotiated the simple street grid, Laramie observed that no one was home. They passed duplexes first, then single-family homes, the uniformity of the structures alarming. There were no cars in the driveways, no lawn mowers running, no sprinklers in operation; nobody tinkered with anything in a garage, watered a lawn, or walked a dog. They were driving through a dead town.

  The guide turned a corner onto a street called Gem Road, at least according to the bent-over street sign on the corner. As they made the turn, Laramie was confronted by at least one reason behind the apparent evacuation: on both sides of the street, starting about fifty yards in, the homes had been leveled. In the searing white-hot sunshine, Laramie thought immediately of Iraq: it looked, albeit in abbreviated fashion, like a war zone. Some twenty homes on each side of the road had been reduced to rubble, the concrete foundations holding firm in jagged chunks, the remainder of what had once been walls and roofs strewn across Gem Road and the surrounding real estate. A vehicular path had been cleared down the middle of the street, but squat cliffs of rubble otherwise ruled the day.

  He parked near a shallow crater midway through the damage.

  “Ground zero,” he said. “You can get out and sweat for a while if you like, but you can probably see all you need to see from here.”

  Laramie said, “I’ll go take a look,” unlatched the door, and stepped into the soupy heat.

  She was hit by a scent she couldn’t place, something between fern and marijuana, and wondered whether it was the fragrance of the swamp on which they’d built the neighborhood, steaming its way to the surface through the crater now that the buildings on its surface had been blown away-or just some cleaning agent they’d used on the blast site.

  She poked around the edge of the crater. Among other revelations, the exposed strata of the six-foot cliff edge of the crater’s interior outed the development’s contractor as a cheapskate-there was no more than an inch of asphalt forming the roadbed, without a single chunk of gravel to facilitate drainage. She wondered idly whether sinkholes the size of garbage trucks might eventually have appeared, with or without explosion.

  There was little else of note to observe, though Laramie had long since discovered it was difficult to determine what would turn out to be of interest in such situations-especially if nobody was telling you much about any of it to begin with. Something she could tell was that the blast had unleashed its wrath mostly horizontally. The crater that marked ground zero from the explosion was relatively shallow, only a little deeper than Laramie was tall, occupying a space that would logically seem to have been the garage of one of the homes along the street. Other than to carve out a crater of this depth, the explosion’s effects had refused to go deep, instead taking out a football field’s worth of homes in all directions. Not a single wall remained standing for the length of the street.

  She walked around the edge of the crater and examined the remnants of the foundation of the “ground zero” house. Chunks of the structure still stood, reaching somewhere around mid-basement before the cheap cinder blocks had been torn from their spadework, sheared like wool from the sheep of the first layer of foundation. It was oddly quiet. Laramie heard only the sounds of her muffled footsteps in the rubble and the distant roar of the air conditioner at work beneath the hood of the Jeep.

  She saw shards of burnt metal, orbs of rock and cinder block, and reddish dust strewn everywhere. The dust seemed to be shifting, maybe blowing in the breeze, only there wasn’t really a breeze, just the thick, still, ugly heat. She felt a sharp, stinging pain on her leg, looked down, and frantically whacked away at her ankles-realizing it wasn’t dust, but ants. Millions of them. Fire ants, or red ants, or whatever kind of ant was red and bit you. The bites hurt like hell, Laramie suddenly feeling as though she’d joined the cast of a straight-to-video horror flick-a helpless femme fatale stranded in a Martian landscape populated by deadly, if unrealistic creatures. She had the overwhelming sense of nature commencing the process of taking back the land.

  Turning back toward the street, she felt a twinge of embarrassment-the rookie, having a look at the site, getting chomped by the resident critters in front of her new boss. By the time she came around the crater, though, the shame had moved out of the way to make room for the shot of anger that took its place.

  She opened the door of the Grand Cherokee, planted herself within the chilled confines of the car’s interior, and jutted her chin in the direction of her taupe-skinned host.

  “You could have told me about the ants,” she said.

  A smirk creased the lines of his face beneath the baseball cap.

  “They get you?”

  “They got me.”

  He shrugged.

  “Sorry about that. Ready for tour stop number two?”

  “Depends,” she said.

  “The ants haven’t taken over task force headquarters, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “At least not yet.”

  13

  Fourteen agents-special, investigative, and otherwise-sat around eight rectangular tables somebody had arranged in a square. The makeshift war room occupied a gym-size space that until a month ago had composed the cocktail lounge of the Motor 8 Luxury Motel, a one-story lodge nestled between mobile home parks along one of the endless supply of seemingly identical two-lane highways Laramie now understood to crisscross the state. The $38-a-night establishment had been adopted as the operational headquarters for the multijurisdictional pig fuck to which Ebbers had alerted her-and her guide had then delivered her.

  As they’d pulled into the motel lot, Laramie wondered how the country’s law enforcement community had managed to survive before the creation of SUVs, since it was evident that the Emerald Lakes incident had resulted in, among other things, an invasion of black-on-black Suburbans, Envoys, and Expeditions, with no window left untinted.

  Inside the former cocktail lounge, the task force’s biweekly powwow came to order. A man stood near the L formed by a pair of the tables and cleared his throat. He looked about fifty, and projected a demeanor befitting a Fortune 500 exec more so than a G-man; the charcoal suit he wore caused Laramie to realize there wasn’t anybody in here outside of her guide who wasn’t suited up. This made her note further that there appeared to be no representative of the local constabulary present, not unless some sheriff’s deputy or other had elected to abide by the feds’ dress code in order to gain an invite.

  “Let’s get it rolling,” Head Fed said. The murmur of conversation and shuffling of paper relented. “Bill, you want to start? One second-” He extended an arm in Laramie’s direction. Laramie noticed that his eyes shifted, a bit uncomfortably, to take in her guide, who leaned against the bar along the side of the room, well back from the proceedings. “Give a warm welcome to the newest member of the task force.”

  He did not give her name. Laramie’s guide had recommended she not identify herself personally to any of the task force members; perhaps the Head Fed had been given similar instructions.

  “Our new friend is here on behalf of the president. Special investigator.” Laramie blinked and tried to avoid stealing a glance in the direction of her guide. Neither he-nor Ebbers before him-had described her assignment the way the Head Fed just had. “She’ll be debriefing some of you over the next forty-eight hours. Make yourself available. Bill.”

  A man who Laramie presumed to be Bill jamme
d a pen behind an ear and stood a few seats to her right. He carried fifteen or twenty pounds more than the anonymous Head Fed and stood about three inches shorter, but he was suited up and clean-cut just like everybody else in the room.

  “Couple of you haven’t been here for a while-welcome back to the Motor 8.” From behind his ear he drew, then uncapped his pen, which looked to be a dry-erase marker. “With some of the task force out of the loop of late and due to the presence of our new friend, Sid asked that I take it from the top.” He extricated himself from the table-and-chairs setup and approached the white board hanging on the wall behind his seat.

  “We pretty much all know what we’ve got,” he said, “and what happened, but I like using this goddamn board, so nobody fuck with me while I do it.” He uncapped the dry-erase marker to a muted chuckle or two. In the upper-left corner of the board, he drew a circle, then wrote Emerald Lakes in the middle of the circle. Underneath the circle, he wrote, Achar. He then drew a series of outward-fanning lines that made the circle look like a child’s depiction of the sun.

  “So the perp,” Bill said, “‘Benny’ Achar, as his wife calls him, blows his Chevy Blazer sky high with a fertilizer bomb he put together in his garage, living, as he was, in the formerly bankrupt though lovely community of Emerald Lakes. Still haven’t found the lakes-any of you spot one, let me know and I’ll draw it on the board here.” Bill composed a trio of arrows running from his sunshine illustration toward the middle of the board, where he drew a box. He filled the interior of the box with the words LaBelle (125). “Turns out Achar,” he said, “in detonating himself and the neighborhood, has earned the honor of being the first terrorist to detonate a ‘bio-dirty bomb’ within the borders of the United States. Benny’s dispersal of our mystery pathogen”-he wrote Pathogen X across the three arrows-“results, as you know, in the publicly referenced outbreak of a wicked flu, killing a hundred and twenty-five residents of Hendry County before our quarantine puts on the brakes.”

  Alongside Pathogen X he drew an = sign and the words Filovirus (new).

  “Wasn’t the flu, of course,” he said, “but a heretofore unencountered strain of filovirus, similar to Marburg, only more potent, possessing, as it seems to possess, the added quality of airborne transmission. You sneeze, you give this thing to whoever you sneeze on, which is not the case with the known filovirus strains. This one flies.” He drew a makeshift set of wings around the words Filovirus (new), then drew an arrow from his LaBelle (125) square pointing toward the left edge of the board, where he wrote and underlined the word Filo.

  “Also infects animals and people without prejudice one way or the other, and is transmittable from one to the other, much like the oft-discussed potential avian flu mutation. Sadie will give you more on the filo,” he said, “but let’s hit the perp first.”

  Beside his original Achar sunshine illustration, Bill wrote and underlined Perp. Beneath the underlined heading, he wrote SSN, Mobile, Bonita Springs, Wife & Son, Seattle, LaBelle, and 1995-1996. Yawns came from at least two of the agents seated at the table.

  “Benny’s married-Janine-with an eight-year-old son-Carter. Achar’s prior residence was in a similar housing development outside of Bonita Springs, Florida, where he lived when he met his wife. Got married in 1998. She’s from Seattle-or, more accurately, Kent, sort of a ‘Seattle-adjacent’ locality. The newlyweds moved into the home in Emerald Lakes just prior to Carter’s birth. Achar was employed by UPS-drove the truck. Had the job since 1997. Convenient job, as we know. And speaking of dates, the real Benjamin Achar was born in Mobile, Alabama, on February 4, 1969, where he also died, only much more tragically, at eleven months of age. Cause of death, sudden infant death syndrome. We’ve got nothing on the ‘current’ Achar prior to February 1995.” He pointed to one of two women, not including Laramie, seated at the table. “Mary has some more on our perp.”

  “Mary,” came a voice, which Laramie determined to be the Head Fed giving Mary her cue.

  Mary, who wore a black jacket over a puffy white blouse, stayed in her seat. To Laramie she looked about the way you might expect an FBI profiler to look: pallid, sagging skin beneath the eyes, mildly inhibited. She cleared her throat before speaking.

  “The current Benjamin James Achar is of diluted Hispanic origin,” she said, “with strong Caucasoid features. Based on photographs, we can make the call that he’s of Central or South American heritage. From our access to home videos and so forth, it’s clear Achar did not have a foreign accent. Actually he sounded exactly like someone born in Mobile and relocated to Bonita Springs is supposed to sound. So if he’s a sleeper as we postulate, he could have come from Colombia, or Chile, and had extensive language training, or he might just as easily have been born in Nebraska, or adopted in Mississippi, and simply happens to have had parents of Central or South American descent-maybe a John Walker type, living here and joining the other side, whatever the other side might be. Beyond this, the news flash on my profile of Achar is that there is none. Not the serial-killing kind, or any other sort that would point us anywhere significant.”

  Laramie noted the way Mary referred to both Achar and the wife: she called them by name, as though Mary knew each of them personally. The word perp did not appear to be in Mary’s vocabulary. Something occurred to Laramie about the way Mary was seeing Achar-something involving the sympathetic angle of it-but she lost the thought as quickly as it came.

  “He was a blue-collar guy,” Mary said. “Spent most of his time after work with his son or out in the yard with the lawn mower. From all accounts, good husband to Janine, understanding guy, loved by his in-laws. No evident visits to the Bonita Springs or LaBelle strip joints, no massage parlor girlfriends, no odd, telltale hobbies or habits he was keeping from Janine. In short, Benjamin Achar was no Scott Peterson, with some secret life he was keeping on the side.” Mary scratched her head just behind the ear. “There are two points about this otherwise unexciting news I’d like to emphasize. One, it may be worthwhile for you to pay attention to the fact that Achar was not of Middle Eastern descent or of the, uh, Muslim persuasion. And two, though this is just a hunch of sorts-I found him too well put together. Almost to an unrealistic extent.”

  The Head Fed, whom Laramie assumed Bill had meant when he’d used the name Sid, spoke up.

  “Explain that,” he said.

  Mary turned to face him. “I’m certain I was prejudiced by knowing, in advance, that he had stolen somebody else’s identity, but regardless, I found too few flaws in the picture. Even the best man, or woman for that matter, has a flaw. Even you, Sid.”

  Nobody laughed at Mary’s attempt at humor. Sid smiled but didn’t seem to mean it.

  “In the case of somebody like Achar, it’d be normal to find, upon digging through the things you only find in the course of a criminal investigation, that he drinks too much, surfs Internet porn sites after his wife hits the sack, was said to have struck his wife at a party-whatever. In Achar, we’ve found no such flaw. Only the stereotype to a T: drove the Blazer, leased a Nissan Altima his wife preferred to use, had four grand on three credit cards, built mostly from purchases at The Home Depot and Best Buy. No evident problem with authority figures at the job, no substance-abuse issues-nothing. It’s as though he climbed into a blue-collar Halloween costume but didn’t notice that a few pieces of the costume were missing.”

  When Mary added nothing further for a few consecutive seconds, Bill gave her an inquiring look and got a nod in reply.

  “That’s it,” she said.

  “Don’t skip over Mary’s first point,” Bill said, addressing the group again. “Achar was not of Middle Eastern descent, and he isn’t a Muslim extremist. Welcome to post-9/11-post-Iraq. We have the list of hostile regimes and most-wanted terrorist financiers compiled by the intelligence reps on the task force, and obviously some of them are from Central or South America. Point being, however, it appears Mr. bin-Laden may have lost his perennial ranking as public enemy number one.”
r />   Beneath his Perp heading, Bill wrote Open Road #1, followed by another three words: Identity, Heritage, Affiliation. Then he circled the whole line.

  “Anyway, this is what we’re calling ‘open road number one’ in our investigation,” he said. “The identity, heritage, and affiliation of our perp all remain a question mark. We don’t have the answers on this guy prior to ninety-five, and we need to find them. Once we do, we ought to be able to determine who’s behind him, and therefore what the new kids on the block, whoever they happen to be, might have in store for us. Sorry to say that outside of Mary’s scoop and the records of his whereabouts dating back to 1995, we’ve got nothing more on Achar since our last session. Oh, there is one update.”

  He underlined the spot where he’d written Wife & Son earlier.

  “Not exactly a breakthrough,” he said, “more the opposite. On the wife, we’ve assumed he had to have shared something critical with her, something real. Pre-costume, I guess you might say. So we’re still holding her, been cycling interrogators through, going after everything there is to go after with her. She’s given us a lot on the current Benjamin Achar, but unless she’s real good, it does not appear he told her anything. That she had any idea. We’re just about ready to make the official call that Janine Achar, maiden name Marino, does not herself appear to be a sleeper. The background check on her is done, we’ve got a real history on her and her family. No legal troubles-one episode of shoplifting in college. Realty license with Century 21, last commission March of 2005, for fifteen hundred bucks-soccer mom, folks, with Italian-American roots going back for at least a few generations. So we’re about ready to make the call that she isn’t good for it.”