Will Staeger - Public Enemy

“True. One of our agents checked her out, grilled her pretty hard, as you probably read in the transcripts. I’m assuming you have most or all of the interviews. But more important, affair or no, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of foreign contact-between her and some outside foreign national, or possible representative of such. Still, it’s interesting you asked me about this. The comment from the driver bothered me, and still does.”

“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.

“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.”