Public Enemy Page 13

  “In what way?”

  “It could be they spent some time on the radio, or in the dispatch center, joking around, tossing out the occasional innuendo, and none of it got recorded. Only this one driver noticed anything at all. But the way the guy put it…it just sounded as though Achar and Hopkins knew each other better than the rest of the evidence suggests. A familiarity that went beyond the water cooler. I don’t feel we should clear her just yet.”

  “All right, then,” Laramie said. “I’m public enemy number one. I’ve got ten sleepers planted around the U.S., ready to disperse filo serum on my command. I teach them the ways of all things American-except we follow the SUV sales statistics instead of heeding the blue-collar credo of owning your own pickup truck.” Laramie scratched a shoulder and went on. “Doing my planning from my cave in Pakistan or wherever it is I’m from, I see at least two moments of vulnerability in each of my sleepers’ useful life spans. The first is the moment he or she takes delivery of the ‘pathogen,’ or the ‘filo.’ The longer they own it, the more vulnerable they’ll be, so I’ll probably get it to them late in the game. Second is the Manchurian Candidate moment. You see the movie?”

  “The original,” Mary said, “not the remake.”

  “What I mean is the playing cards-the signal. Getting the message through: Time to blow yourself up.”

  “Understood.”

  “Here’s my question,” Laramie said, “and I ask you because you’ve studied Achar the person, rather than the ‘perp,’ or the fragments of his body, more and better than anyone on the task force. At least by my read. As public enemy number one I’m trying to get this delivery to Benjamin Achar. Once I succeed, I’m then trying to send him the signal. How do you think I should do it?”

  Mary looked at her for a second then shrugged.

  “We’ve talked about that,” she said. “At the request of-well, I took a pretty hard look at his routine and marked some places where he could take delivery of goods, or messages, without detection.” Laramie hadn’t seen this breakdown in any of the binders, but let this go, thinking it would have been naive to expect that everything had been included in the version of the terror book they’d provided her. “Suffice to say,” Mary said, “there are few professions better suited to receive such packages or messages than a UPS driver. Achar could have received thousands of deliveries and hundreds of activation messages every week, more or less undetected. But you asked the question in a slightly different way, I think.”

  “Yes.”

  Laramie was getting to like Mary the profiler.

  “I’d have somebody tell him something in person, with nothing in print, no e-mail, no record. Or maybe even set the date a few years in advance. Tell him to move forward on September 12 of such and such year unless he gets a signal to the contrary. In any case, I don’t think I would use a person the sleeper is known to spend any time with.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Be better,” Mary said, “to send somebody he’s never seen before, has never been seen talking to at the water cooler, who might deliver a simple verbal code, or a business card of a certain color-whatever. Anyway, there’s less chance for detection if it’s a randomly appearing person.”

  Laramie thought about Mary’s answer. She kept thinking she was going about this the wrong way-that they all were. That she was asking stupid, standard questions, looking at all the same, wrong things. The only problem being, she didn’t know what sort of different approach she should be taking, or which questions were the stupid ones.

  Neither, it seemed, did the esteemed members of the multijurisdictional task force.

  Laramie stood.

  “Thanks for stopping by, Mary,” she said.

  “Thanks for the Diet Coke.”

  Mary offered Laramie a flash of her bright white smile on the way out.

  16

  “Among humans, the infection rate of Marburg-2 is approximately the same as we find for the H5N1 virus in animals,” the biologist said from his seat at the little table in Laramie’s room. “M-2’s symptoms are far more severe and progress more savagely-although the forecasted avian flu mutation could do similar damage.”

  The task force called the local filo Marburg-2-M-2 for short-due to its similarity to and evolved improvements over the Marburg filovirus. The biologist seated before Laramie was an infectious diseases specialist who did freelance work for the Centers for Disease Control.

  Laramie thought of something.

  “Marburg-2 hit animals,” she said, “just as hard as people?”

  “Yep-I’d say this is your basic avian flu doomsday scenario, but with more deadly results once the symptoms kick in.”

  “So how wide did it spread in the animal kingdom-birds, rabbits, deer? Frogs? Crickets? Cicadas?”

  “It killed just about everything it came into contact with.”

  “What about ants?”

  “Ants?” The biologist shifted in his chair. He was a little heavy, a tight squeeze at the little table. “We haven’t really had the time to fully analyze the impact on the insect population, but my guess would be no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ants, scorpions, and cockroaches aren’t typically susceptible to viral in fection. In fact, they aren’t susceptible to much of anything. Cockroaches and scorpions, for example, would be the primary surviving species following a global thermonuclear war. Ants aren’t that hardy, but they’re pretty tough.”

  “But whatever consumes ants,” Laramie said, “would have died.”

  “Pretty much across the board within the infection zone,” the biologist said.

  Those ants, Laramie thought, took over the Emerald Lakes housing development, and took a few chomps out of my ankle while they were at it, because no predator survived to eat them.

  Their population was probably multiplying geometrically.

  “According to your report,” Laramie said, “M-2 infected animals, and spread across species, following the gathering places of those animals-swamps, streams, pine barrens. Geographically speaking, how far did it reach? In the animal world, I mean.”

  “It spread across a slightly wider range-about double the human infection zone. The quarantine we set up was engineered to stump the spread of the filo on animals too; it took a little longer than the human quarantining, but it worked-mostly due to the preponderance of housing developments and golf courses.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The wetlands over here are mostly landlocked, so an infected fish couldn’t, for instance, swim more than a couple miles south before bumping into a berm designed to keep the swamp water off the fairway of the eighteenth hole, or somebody’s backyard.”

  “‘Over here’?”

  “Sorry?”

  “You said something about the ‘wetlands over here,’” Laramie said.

  “Oh,” he said, “I’m not sure exactly what I meant. I suppose it’s my fear of what could have happened if we didn’t contain it, or if the perp disseminated M-2 twenty miles east or south of here.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Well, ‘over here,’ so to speak, we’re cut off from large portions of the Everglades. But if you were to disperse more of the perp’s stash of Marburg-2 a half hour to the south or east-no quarantine’s going to shut down that epidemic anytime soon.”

  Laramie thought about this.

  “I get the remaining portions of the Everglades being south of here,” she said. “But why would the same thing happen if you blasted the filo into the wind an hour to the east?”

  The biologist nodded-a scientist in his element, laying out the facts. “Lake Okeechobee’s one of the main faucets keeping the Everglades wet. The water supply runs south into the ’Glades from the lake. A little over twenty miles away-to the east. And it isn’t so much the water, but the creatures that inhabit, or frequent it-kind of works like an infection spreading pipeline.”

  “So if Benjamin Achar’s garage were on the banks of Lake
Okeechobee, the filo would still be spreading.”

  “Among animals? No doubt.”

  “What about people?” Laramie said.

  “Them too.”

  17

  Maybe even two or three weeks ago, Janine Achar had been very attractive. Now her hair was a flattened grease stain, and her formerly bright blue eyes had darkened to a dreary kelp, lost in a sea of blackish skin sacs beneath. Laramie thinking it was less the look of a woman who hadn’t slept in sixteen days, and more what you’d see from someone who’d just learned that God didn’t exist. Takes some serious shit to get you this far over the cliff-such as your husband blowing himself up and revealing his fake identity, plus the fact that he was a terrorist, in so doing.

  Janine smoked a cigarette from her seat in the Hendry County sheriff’s interrogation room, the coagulating smoke lending greater pallor to the already pallid chamber. The woman’s son, Carter, held court in a shorter chair some deputy had scrounged up, eating chicken nuggets and French fries out of the cardboard nuggets container. An unopened burger, chicken sandwich, and soft drink sat beneath the haze of cigarette smoke on the table before Mrs. Achar.

  Worked on me when Ebbers tried it-doesn’t seem to be doing the trick here.

  “My deepest condolences,” Laramie said.

  Janine kept hold of the perch she’d made at the edge of the table, smoke curling to the ceiling from her Pall Mall, eyes unfocused. According to one of the memos in the terror book, one week ago, Mrs. Achar, in a screaming fit of rage, had demanded that her son be kept with her at all times; the task force had obliged, isolating a wing of holding cells where she and Carter could reside together under physical conditions suitable for an eight-yearold, while still remaining under lock and key.

  May as well get started.

  “If you could, Mrs. Achar, please take me through the days leading up to and following your husband’s-”-glancing first in Carter’s direction, she quickly decided Janine had been the one to insist on her son’s presence, and that demand shouldn’t dictate direction in the interview-“his suicide bombing,” she said. “I’m aware you’ve been through it dozens of times with multiple interrogators. But I don’t care. I’d like to hear it again. I came because I wanted to hear what you have to say. I wanted to hear it directly from you.”

  Laramie didn’t add the words she was hoping Janine would infer: woman to woman.

  I want you to tell me what happened, woman to woman.

  Janine took a drag on the cigarette and exhaled slowly, allowing some of the smoke to journey through her nostrils. She punched out the butt in the ashtray Laramie had provided, opened the pack she’d kept beside the burger and chicken sandwich, fired up a fresh one with the matchbook stored at her elbow, took another long drag, completed exhale number two, and then-engaging in her first actual expression of any kind-she shrugged.

  “That’d make a hundred and forty-two, then,” she said, and flipped her hair back, doing it in a way that made Laramie remember the pictures taken of her a couple months ago-a woman who’d been poster-sexy, a displaced auto show model holding down the domestic fort for Benny and Carter Achar there in the Emerald Lakes housing development. Maybe the kind who knew how to use that hair flip, and a couple other tried and true methods, to get what she wanted.

  Janine told her story again, Laramie staring into the woman’s glazed, angry eyes while she told it.

  Benny Achar had purchased airline tickets for his family-via CheapTickets.com-for a round trip to Seattle from Miami. They’d planned to spend six days with Janine’s mother at her home in Kent, the Seattle suburb Bill had mentioned in the task force session. Two days before they were scheduled to leave, Benny told Janine he wouldn’t be able to make the outbound flight-that an illness in the UPS driver rotation required him to work two out of the five vacation days he’d put in for. At a cost of $290, Janine had changed Benny’s reservation so he could fly out and meet up with them two days after they’d headed west on the original itinerary. They kept the back end the same-they planned to return home together.

  One day before Janine and Carter’s flight, Achar made multiple trips to The Home Depot and an additional stop at a liquor store. Janine noted, as she had in prior interviews, that her husband acted strangely most of the evening, speaking little, head drooping, mood uncharacteristically sullen. After dinner, Benny offered to put Carter to sleep, something he rarely did. Once the boy had gone down, Benny cracked the bottle of Stolichnaya he’d picked up at the liquor store, poured them each a shot, and sat down with Janine at the dining room table to share a toast-this, between a man and wife who did not normally drink-and to tell Janine he would miss her and Carter for the two days they’d be in Seattle without him.

  According to Janine Achar in both her prior interviews and here in the interrogation room now, that was all Benny had said to her. Janine repeated her prior recollection that this, along with his odd mood and The Home Depot runs, were the only indications that anything had been amiss.

  This testimony, Laramie knew, among other factors, had led the task force theorists to conclude-logically-that Benny Achar the deep cover “sleeper” had received his sign, the trigger telling him it was time to act. Probably, the theory went, he’d caught the sign on the day he’d told Janine about the shift change. Laramie knew from the terror book that nobody had taken ill at UPS, as Achar had told his wife-that he had never been asked to work the vacation days he’d put in for. Somebody had informed Janine of this along the way, one of many tidbits she maintained she had not known.

  Laramie listened as Janine told her the rest: Benny kissed her and Carter goodbye the morning of their flight, she drove with Carter to the airport in their Altima-agreeing that Benny would hitch a ride to the airport from one of his fellow UPS drivers and they’d take the Altima home together. She said she’d called Benny as the plane was boarding to say goodbye.

  Janine had maintained in each of her interviews that she hadn’t found it odd that Benny had refused to take her to the airport. He needed to get to work early, and Janine didn’t want to wait around the airport with Carter for three-plus hours.

  Word of her husband’s act of destruction had come just after six o’clock that night, Pacific time, in the form of a cryptic call placed by an FBI agent to Janine’s mother’s home. The agent had asked Janine a number of pointed questions, but hadn’t given her much in return. Janine had not been able to determine what was going on. Two hours later, she received another, less cryptic call from the FBI man, in which he asked another set of questions, then informed her the FBI required she return immediately to Florida. She learned later that the bomb had been detonated while she and Carter were in the air on the way to Seattle.

  When Janine declined to return to Florida of her own volition, a pair of federal agents had been dispatched to her mother’s home, only to learn that Janine and Carter Achar had fled. Laramie knew that this had initially cast a cloud of suspicion on Mrs. Achar, but the task force later learned that Janine had surfed the Internet immediately following her second call from the FBI agent, learned in a news story that her husband had been one of the victims in a “gas main explosion,” and supposedly panicked. She used cash, Janine told Laramie, to get a room in a motel in Tukwila, near Kent but closer to the airport. They stayed there for ten days-until the cash she’d traveled with ran out-and then Janine had used her ATM card at a nearby Key Bank. Not the most savvy move by somebody on the lam, and certainly, the task force judged, not the move of a deep cover sleeper: following her use of the ATM, an FBI canvas of the neighborhood where she’d made the withdrawal netted Carter and Janine that morning, during their daily breakfast stop at the McDonald’s across from the motel.

  They were taken into federal custody and held in Seattle for seven days, primarily because issues with the filo outbreak didn’t warrant a return to LaBelle. Once the quarantine contained the spread of the M-2, the feds had flown Janine to Fort Myers and taken her and Carter here-to the holding cell f
acility in the Hendry County sheriff’s offices.

  Mother’s tale complete yet again, Carter poked his head up from his meal and asked if he could go to the bathroom. Laramie used the phone on the wall to summon a deputy and told Janine they’d resume as soon as Laramie could get her hands on a cup of coffee.

  “I think you’re lying.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “After reading up on you, and now, hearing you out in person, I’m prepared to recommend that the task force reconsider their assessment,” Laramie said. “To tell them they got you wrong. Completely. I don’t know if they’ve told you this, but they were ready to clear you. Did you know that? But I’m going to recommend they hold you indefinitely.”

  Janine glared silently at Laramie over the cigarette in her hand. Laramie didn’t wait for further reaction or response.

  “It’s the motel room, Mrs. Achar. You took enough cash with you to pay for ten nights-at least fifteen hundred bucks based on the rate of the hotel you chose-and you had that much on you before you received the call from the FBI. Ten nights-long enough for the small amount of pathogen dispersed by your husband to run its course and be all but contained. You’ve been lying. He told you something, warned you, gave you instructions, who knows, and you knew enough to travel with sufficient cash in your purse to spend a week or two in a motel-anonymously.”

  Janine violently snuffed out her cigarette.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” she said. “You think I knew? Who the hell are you, coming in here offering me your condolences-the first interrogator to do that, so I thought you might be somebody decent. Then trying to tell me I knew something more about my husband? Something that isn’t true anyway? Goddamn you-goddamn all you people. Fuck you. You can’t imagine what I’m going through-what we’re going through. Or maybe you do, since it’s all lies anyway, and you’re the people making up the lies. First the papers call it a gas main explosion. Then your people tell me that wasn’t it at all-that he blew himself up! And now he’s a terrorist-a terrorist? Benny? A suicide bomber? Do you know how ridiculous that is? And then you tell me he wasn’t Benny at all and that I’m not even Mrs. Benjamin Achar-that Benny wasn’t even real? Let me ask you something. Do you know why I have my son with me?”