“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.”