Will Staeger - Public Enemy

Inside, her guide pass-keyed their way to a conference room bereft of decoration-unless, Laramie thought, you counted the collection of broken phones and ancient computer monitors stacked against the back wall as interior decor. Her guide unlocked a drawer in a small file cabinet, withdrew an insect-looking device about eight inches in diameter, and plugged it into a jack at the base of the rear wall. He punched the small red button on the lower-right corner of the device and a dial tone blared, the noise sounding like a Who concert in the silent, empty room.

Her guide leaned over the phone and dialed a number he blocked Laramie from seeing by the way he stood. It took two rings for Lou Ebbers’s Carolina lilt to hit them from the speaker.

“I’m assumin’ you’ve got her with you,” he said.

Laramie’s guide nodded as though Ebbers could see him. “Yep.”

“All right, then, Miss Laramie,” came Ebbers’s normally friendly tone, sounding garbled and sinister on the speaker. “You’re on.”

Laramie found herself wishing she’d forced her guide to make a pit stop at the 7-Eleven so she’d have the additional java boost of a third cup-might have helped keep her on her game, and she figured she was going to need all the help she could muster. Without the aid of a bonus cup, she felt an all too familiar sinking sensation-it always seemed to happen this way, and no matter how much time she’d spent arranging her thoughts in the room, it was happening again. She was bold and brave in private, devising her grandiose theories on the evil that lurked in the world-usually while studying satellite images in the lab-but emerge from your motel-room library and the bottom falls out. Her faith in her theories evaporating before she’d even started in on them-Laramie feeling that twinge of fear that her boss would see right through her rookie interpretations and grasp how big a mistake he’d made in hiring her.

Shut up and get going, Laramie. She decided she’d get right to the point, rather than working her way to the punch line.

“As you promised,” she said, “the task force was pretty accommodating. I’m not convinced they showed me everything, but I had access to enough. Enough to tell you I believe the investigation is proceeding under at least two fundamentally flawed assumptions.”

A crackle of static popped from the speakerphone.

Then Ebbers said, “All right.”

The sounds that came from the speakerphone had an odd digital quality to them, Laramie thinking of whatever Cher song it had been that took the singer’s voice and ran it through a synthesizer. Maybe it had been all of them.

“One assumption I’ve made,” Laramie said, “is that you’re not interested in seeing a ‘terror book’ from me-that you want nothing from me in writing. I’m prepared, of course, to put everything I will tell you today, and more, into a report if you so choose. I’m also assuming you know more about this case than I do, or at least just as much. So I’ll keep the background short-even skip it altogether.”

No answer came from the static-ridden phone line, which Laramie took to mean, Then why are you giving me so much background, Miss Laramie.

“The first flawed assumption,” she said, “is that the greater Miami metropolitan area was Benny Achar’s intended target. I agree it seems the obvious choice due to its population density and basic proximity to the blast site-the filo spreads beyond the hundred-plus victims it killed and infects any part of greater Miami-Dade County and you’ve got a few hundred thousand casualties, maybe more. Achar didn’t get his whole stash airborne, of course-if he had, or so the theory goes, he’d have delivered his evolved viral hemorrhagic fever serum to the entire population of Miami. Therefore it must have been his target.”

“Go on,” Ebbers said.

“Like the much-discussed potential seen in the avian flu, however, the Marburg-2 filo infects both humans and a number of animal species. All humans it comes into contact with die; for many animal species the same is true. The virus spreads from one infected species to the next with no apparent resistance. My point is that when you examine the geographical choice of Achar’s blast site, there is a strategic positioning to it that is worse, from a casualties perspective, than Miami. Lake Okeechobee.”

Laramie paused, half expecting a sarcastic comment along the lines of, His target was a lake? Getting none, she launched into an abbreviated version of what the freelance biologist had explained about Lake Okeechobee providing the Everglades with its water supply.

“Even if it isn’t the case, we need to consider this scenario as a possibility,” Laramie said, “because if an unobstructed waterway feeding the Everglades had been breached by the M-2 virus, that’s pretty much all Achar would have needed to take out the whole state. Virtually every animal touched by the ecosystem that is the Everglades would act as a carrier of the filo, and that means just about every animal and human in Florida. It’s possible that if this scenario were executed properly and quarantines were put into place a few days too late, a death rate among the human population here could run in the high ninetieth percentile.”

Noisy digital silence came from the speakerphone. Laramie decided not to wait to find out whether Ebbers had any comments in response to her theory.

“I’m not saying that looking at Everglades wildlife as the target is going to get us anywhere special right away-but what it gives us, if in fact he wasn’t acting alone, is a number of other regions in which to look for other sleepers. Say there are ten others. One may be assigned the Colorado River; another goes after the Mississippi; another the Hudson. I was never much for geography, but give me ten minutes and even I can come up with a scenario by which ten or eleven sleepers, placed correctly and armed with the equivalent stash of M-2 Achar kept in his basement, could bring down seventy-five to ninety percent of the population of the entire country by infecting areas of high animal population that overlap with the human population of nearby cities.”

Ebbers spoke up again.

“Not sure,” he said, “I want to hear about the second mistake.”

Laramie felt a sudden tingle of fear. It hit her veins like a shot of espresso and moonshine: Christ, he might just think I’m right…and what if I am?

“The second, well, not mistake, but my opinion on the second flawed-”

“Fuckup, then,” Ebbers said, almost yelling to make sure she heard him over her own voice. “Tell me where they’re wrong, Miss Laramie.”

Laramie blinked. “Well, if you’re a cop, you’re supposed to bust somebody based on evidence. Not just a hunch. But my hunch is that Benny Achar did not make a mistake at all. He is not a ‘perp.’ This is what the task force believes, and it is the way they refer to him: as a perp. Instead, I believe him to be a deep cover agent gone native.”

A silence ensued, the digitized snap, crackle, and pop of the encrypted line the only audible emission from the phone. Laramie tried to picture Ebbers sitting there doing the math on what she’d just told him.

His voice came level and flat from the phone.

“I’m familiar with the term,” he said, “but considering he killed over a hundred American citizens by suicide bomb and pathogen dispersal, I’m having trouble grasping how the idea of his ‘going native’ applies.”

Time to get in as much as you can.

“I think it’s not only possible,” Laramie said, speaking quickly, “but likely that he turned on his employers. Or his country-or whoever it is he was ‘sleeping’ for. I think that instead of the perp he’s been characterized as, Achar was a turncoat-for our side. I think he did exactly what he planned to do. I think he carefully and deliberately calculated exactly how much filo to disperse, and when to do it-in particular, right after his wife and son took off from Miami-in order to achieve three objectives.”