Will Staeger - Public Enemy

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.”