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 jammed 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.”
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.”
He shrugged, took the dry-erase marker, and beneath his earlier underlined heading of Filo, Bill wrote the words Organic/Synthetic, Source, and The Plan. He drew another circle, this time around The Plan.
Bill gestured toward the second woman in the room, a black-rooted blonde with her hair cut short.
“Sadie,” came Sid’s voice.
Sadie stood and Bill returned to his seat. Sadie was taller than most of the men in the room and, like most of the others, looked a little haggard around the eyes.
“Achar’s pathogen is a combination of microscopic synthetic materials and a heretofore undocumented filovirus that was clearly genetically engineered,” she said. The woman spoke with the sort of assuredness Laramie could tell, from just one speech, that Mary the profiler wished she too possessed. “It’s more complicated than this, but here’s how it’s designed to work: no ordinary microorganism, including known strains of filovirus or even the ‘new’ strain contained in Achar’s serum, could possibly survive the direct impact or heat of a fertilizer-bomb explosion. In other words, ordinarily it would be impossible to effectively detonate a ‘bio-dirty’ bomb-the ‘bomb’ portion of the act of destruction would destroy the biological component. In English: the explosion would kill the virus.”
Sadie went on.
“The ‘Marburg-2’ pathogen Achar dispersed was different. I would call it both frightening and technologically staggering. In studying undetonated portions of Achar’s serum, we’ve learned that uniform-size colonies of the filovirus have been coated with a microscopic polymer sheath. Porous enough to allow the filo to survive within, yet capable of absorbing the shock of a massive impact and temperatures in excess of eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit. In our tests, upon impact or burning, a significant percentage of the sheaths-over fifty percent-disintegrate, but only after absorbing enough of the shock to allow the filo housed within to survive. The other fifty percent of the sheaths caught fire, or suffered a degree of damage that killed the filo colonies within.
“Final note on the technical specs,” she said. “The Marburg-2 filo appears to be capable of surviving for an indefinite hibernation period when stored at temperatures approaching zero degrees Celsius. Achar was storing it between his freezer and fridge, judging from what we were able to pull from the wreckage-that’d coincide with the right temperature range. This quality is similar to but slightly more hardy than a ‘normal’ flu or filovirus.”
Sadie reached down and punched the space bar on the notebook computer she’d been keeping on her section of table. The sound of a tiny whirring fan kicked in and a large blue square of light faded into view along the wall behind Sid. Images that Laramie assumed were shots of individual “filo” cells-or whatever, she thought, you call a single virus-cycled through a slide show on the wall as Sadie spoke.
“Once released from the sheathing, what we’ve got is a genuine filovirus, not a chemical agent. As Bill covered, it is airborne-you can catch it from a sneeze, not just a blood transfusion. We’ve never seen this before. Also it can pass from animal to human or human to human. It does have a short infectious period, so early quarantining, as we accomplished here, should remain effective. We’re working around the clock to test various antivirals for effectiveness, but don’t hold your breath. Filos are fierce, maybe the single most resistant and fastest-acting viral agent known to man, and this one’s the fastest we’ve seen. Forty-eight hours, infection to death. Breakdown of all internal organs, gruesome hemorrhaging-we’ve been through all this, I just want to emphasize that our lab efforts aren’t likely to deliver overnight results.”
The filo slide show ended and the screen returned to its prior blue state.
“We’re recommending continued stockpiling of Tamiflu and Relenza, over and above what’s already under way in anticipation of the avian flu mutation. These antivirals appear to reduce the infectious period. The best hope for an actual vaccine, however remote, will come from the source of a similar outbreak-if the initial human outbreak of a similar filo took place in Zaire, for instance, there may be somebody there who survived it, or carried it into the community to begin with, without incurring the symptoms. We find out why that host survived and we’ve got a starting point. Again, don’t get your hopes up-no such filo vaccine has been found yet.”
Sadie hit a key on her laptop and a map of the world appeared on the wall, decorated by thirteen red dots positioned on various continents.
“Working from a canvas of the past one hundred years, we’ve tracked thirteen localized outbreaks involving similar symptoms and acquisition rates. Four of our thirteen cases have taken place in the past decade. The closest match is an extremely localized outbreak of Marburg in rural Guatemala-seven patients and a medical staff of four, including two Peace Corps volunteers, died at a medical outpost of symptoms as close to those found here as we’ve been able to identify. 1983.”
A male agent raised his hand. “Where’d we get the description of the symptoms?” he said.
Laramie had a pretty good idea he was CIA just by looking at him.
“One of the Peace Corps volunteers kept a journal,” Sadie said. To Laramie her gravelly voice was starting to run out of fuel. “Copies of the journal made their way back to CDC about ten years ago. We have doctors on-site, but again, don’t get your hopes up. The trail is cold.”
The CIA man, Laramie observed, didn’t nod, offer thanks, or otherwise acknowledge the response to his question. Sadie, who didn’t seem to mind, whacked away at the keys of her laptop and caused a map of the United States to appear on the wall where the blue square had been. Sadie motioned to Bill, who stood again. Laramie took the opportunity to steal a glance at her guide, and found him missing. The doorjamb he’d been leaning against was empty. She did a slow swivel and checked around the rim of the room; no cigar. It seemed he’d flown the coop.
“To the plan, then,” Bill said. “Here’s where we are on this: our guy fucked up. Achar blew himself up before he had positioned all the virus serum in the correct spot. Maybe he made a mistake with whatever fertilizer and fuel he was storing in his garage, maybe it just blew up on its own when he wasn’t ready for it-but don’t forget the wife and son. They left town to see the wife’s parents in San Diego on the same day Achar blew himself up, and she’s admitted he booked the trip for her. So for this reason we think he meant to do it on the day he did it, he just got it wrong. He set off the blast prematurely, and the result of the mistake is he failed to disperse even ten percent of the filo he was keeping in the basement.”
Bill paced in front of the image of the map.
“We need to assume Achar wasn’t operating alone, if only due to the sophistication and quantity of the virus. Under this assumption, Sadie has calculated the potential intended effect on the American populace.”
Laramie glanced again at the doorjamb her guide had abandoned, and something caught her eye. On the floor, where he’d been standing, was a black Tumi travel bag. Laramie knew it was a Tumi because it was hers-the bag Ebbers told her they’d pack and deliver here.
Sadie came up with a remote control about the size of a business card. As she strolled to a spot beside the image on the wall, expanding circles began illustrating themselves on the wall from an epicenter in Florida Laramie assumed to be Emerald Lakes.
“If Achar doesn’t make his mistake,” Sadie said, “and instead gets his entire batch of serum dispersed, then just over two hundred times the amount that got airborne would have been up for grabs.” Animated, wavy lines appeared on the map and spread from the initial area covered by the expanding circles until the circles reached the greater Miami-Dade County area, which began to blink. A number appeared near ground zero-125-then zeroes began fading in at the number’s back end, so that 125 became 1,250, then 12,500, then 125,000, then 1,250,000 with a question mark beside it.
“With immediate exposure to this large an airborne filo sample,” Sadie said, “it’s our estimate that nearly ten thousand people would have been infected in the same period it took the hundred and twenty-five to come down with the disease in our real-world case. Infections would have occurred over a wider area, making quarantine efforts initially less effective. If the filo had reached Miami or Fort Myers, it might have spread at a rate that could easily have resulted in a hundred thousand deaths or more. Our conclusion is that Miami was ultimately the perp’s target. His mistake in detonating the bomb when he did resulted in a stunted spread of the filo that prevented it from reaching the urban center he had hoped to strike.”
A second expanding-circle illustration began in Washington state, east of Seattle. The same expansion, followed by the animated wavy lines pushing north, south, east, and west, played out across the Pacific Northwest. A third sequence illustrated itself in the Chicago area, a fourth in Texas, and a fifth in the northeast, near Boston.
“We’ve modeled ten sleepers detonating similar devices, and releasing a full dose of filo with no preestablished quarantine measures to slow the spread of the fever.” More expanding circles faded into view on the map, in the heartland, Rocky Mountains, then Manhattan. “You should know there is the potential effect, assuming there are other sleepers in this network, of ten to fifteen million casualties. Add to this the threat of overlap-meaning,” she said, “if two or more of the bio-dirty detonations occur within the same prequarantine period-say, forty-eight hours-you could see double the number of deaths, or triple, or worse. The effect would be a nullification of any quarantines. A ‘piggybacking’ rate-of-infection effect would likely activate a series of ‘perfect filo storms,’ or super-plague zones, where, within such areas, all are exposed, and no life is spared.”
Hurricane-like shapes visually connected three of the initial virus zones into three ominous-looking and extremely wide swaths of territory on the map. Casualty numbers beside the affected plague zones shifted from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions, then froze. Finally the image on the wall dissolved back to blue. Sadie closed her laptop and the blue square disappeared from the wall. She returned to her seat.
Sid stood.
“Who sent the filo to him?” he said. “How’d it get delivered? The perp’s profession presents both a problem and an opportunity, since every package with which Achar was associated should have had a tracking number. Bill’s group is working from lists of shipments Achar picked up, delivered, or otherwise handled. It’s a big list with no apparent connections to illegal medical labs or terrorist organizations.”
Sid came around the table to the place where Bill was seated. He reached over Bill’s shoulder, took hold of the dry-erase marker Bill had employed, went to the board, and drew a long arrow from each of the words Bill had circled. Sid’s arrows all led to the same place at the bottom of the board, where he wrote and double-underlined Public Enemy #1.
“We are assuming Achar wasn’t acting alone. He was just early, and ineffective. Why was he early? Why did he go maverick?”
Beneath his Public Enemy #1 line, Sid wrote, Time = Public Enemy #2. Laramie thought briefly of the idea that had shown itself, then escaped her earlier-an idea that had to do with Achar, his wife and son, and Mary’s take on them-but then the idea, whatever it was, retreated again into the abyss.
“What if there are nine, or eleven, or thirteen others out there, and they’re laying low for, what, another two weeks? A month? We don’t find out who they are, where they are, and who’s giving the orders before whenever it is they’re planning their D-Day, then Bill, you can kiss your wife goodbye. Sadie, your brother, and your nephew-hemorrhaged out in an emergency ward. Bob-those five rugrats of yours-they’ll die first.”
He encircled the batch of words he’d just written on the board.
“Public enemies number one and two. Session over.”