“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.”
Laramie thought about this.
“I get the remaining portions of the Everglades being south of here,” she said. “But why would the same thing happen if you blasted the filo into the wind an hour to the east?”
The biologist nodded-a scientist in his element, laying out the facts. “Lake Okeechobee’s one of the main faucets keeping the Everglades wet. The water supply runs south into the ’Glades from the lake. A little over twenty miles away-to the east. And it isn’t so much the water, but the creatures that inhabit, or frequent it-kind of works like an infection spreading pipeline.”
“So if Benjamin Achar’s garage were on the banks of Lake Okeechobee, the filo would still be spreading.”
“Among animals? No doubt.”
“What about people?” Laramie said.
“Them too.”
17
Maybe even two or three weeks ago, Janine Achar had been very attractive. Now her hair was a flattened grease stain, and her formerly bright blue eyes had darkened to a dreary kelp, lost in a sea of blackish skin sacs beneath. Laramie thinking it was less the look of a woman who hadn’t slept in sixteen days, and more what you’d see from someone who’d just learned that God didn’t exist. Takes some serious shit to get you this far over the cliff-such as your husband blowing himself up and revealing his fake identity, plus the fact that he was a terrorist, in so doing.
Janine smoked a cigarette from her seat in the Hendry County sheriff’s interrogation room, the coagulating smoke lending greater pallor to the already pallid chamber. The woman’s son, Carter, held court in a shorter chair some deputy had scrounged up, eating chicken nuggets and French fries out of the cardboard nuggets container. An unopened burger, chicken sandwich, and soft drink sat beneath the haze of cigarette smoke on the table before Mrs. Achar.
Worked on me when Ebbers tried it-doesn’t seem to be doing the trick here.
“My deepest condolences,” Laramie said.
Janine kept hold of the perch she’d made at the edge of the table, smoke curling to the ceiling from her Pall Mall, eyes unfocused. According to one of the memos in the terror book, one week ago, Mrs. Achar, in a screaming fit of rage, had demanded that her son be kept with her at all times; the task force had obliged, isolating a wing of holding cells where she and Carter could reside together under physical conditions suitable for an eight-yearold, while still remaining under lock and key.
May as well get started.
“If you could, Mrs. Achar, please take me through the days leading up to and following your husband’s-”-glancing first in Carter’s direction, she quickly decided Janine had been the one to insist on her son’s presence, and that demand shouldn’t dictate direction in the interview-“his suicide bombing,” she said. “I’m aware you’ve been through it dozens of times with multiple interrogators. But I don’t care. I’d like to hear it again. I came because I wanted to hear what you have to say. I wanted to hear it directly from you.”
Laramie didn’t add the words she was hoping Janine would infer: woman to woman.
I want you to tell me what happened, woman to woman.
Janine took a drag on the cigarette and exhaled slowly, allowing some of the smoke to journey through her nostrils. She punched out the butt in the ashtray Laramie had provided, opened the pack she’d kept beside the burger and chicken sandwich, fired up a fresh one with the matchbook stored at her elbow, took another long drag, completed exhale number two, and then-engaging in her first actual expression of any kind-she shrugged.
“That’d make a hundred and forty-two, then,” she said, and flipped her hair back, doing it in a way that made Laramie remember the pictures taken of her a couple months ago-a woman who’d been poster-sexy, a displaced auto show model holding down the domestic fort for Benny and Carter Achar there in the Emerald Lakes housing development. Maybe the kind who knew how to use that hair flip, and a couple other tried and true methods, to get what she wanted.
Janine told her story again, Laramie staring into the woman’s glazed, angry eyes while she told it.
Benny Achar had purchased airline tickets for his family-via CheapTickets.com-for a round trip to Seattle from Miami. They’d planned to spend six days with Janine’s mother at her home in Kent, the Seattle suburb Bill had mentioned in the task force session. Two days before they were scheduled to leave, Benny told Janine he wouldn’t be able to make the outbound flight-that an illness in the UPS driver rotation required him to work two out of the five vacation days he’d put in for. At a cost of $290, Janine had changed Benny’s reservation so he could fly out and meet up with them two days after they’d headed west on the original itinerary. They kept the back end the same-they planned to return home together.
One day before Janine and Carter’s flight, Achar made multiple trips to The Home Depot and an additional stop at a liquor store. Janine noted, as she had in prior interviews, that her husband acted strangely most of the evening, speaking little, head drooping, mood uncharacteristically sullen. After dinner, Benny offered to put Carter to sleep, something he rarely did. Once the boy had gone down, Benny cracked the bottle of Stolichnaya he’d picked up at the liquor store, poured them each a shot, and sat down with Janine at the dining room table to share a toast-this, between a man and wife who did not normally drink-and to tell Janine he would miss her and Carter for the two days they’d be in Seattle without him.
According to Janine Achar in both her prior interviews and here in the interrogation room now, that was all Benny had said to her. Janine repeated her prior recollection that this, along with his odd mood and The Home Depot runs, were the only indications that anything had been amiss.
This testimony, Laramie knew, among other factors, had led the task force theorists to conclude-logically-that Benny Achar the deep cover “sleeper” had received his sign, the trigger telling him it was time to act. Probably, the theory went, he’d caught the sign on the day he’d told Janine about the shift change. Laramie knew from the terror book that nobody had taken ill at UPS, as Achar had told his wife-that he had never been asked to work the vacation days he’d put in for. Somebody had informed Janine of this along the way, one of many tidbits she maintained she had not known.
Laramie listened as Janine told her the rest: Benny kissed her and Carter goodbye the morning of their flight, she drove with Carter to the airport in their Altima-agreeing that Benny would hitch a ride to the airport from one of his fellow UPS drivers and they’d take the Altima home together. She said she’d called Benny as the plane was boarding to say goodbye.
Janine had maintained in each of her interviews that she hadn’t found it odd that Benny had refused to take her to the airport. He needed to get to work early, and Janine didn’t want to wait around the airport with Carter for three-plus hours.
Word of her husband’s act of destruction had come just after six o’clock that night, Pacific time, in the form of a cryptic call placed by an FBI agent to Janine’s mother’s home. The agent had asked Janine a number of pointed questions, but hadn’t given her much in return. Janine had not been able to determine what was going on. Two hours later, she received another, less cryptic call from the FBI man, in which he asked another set of questions, then informed her the FBI required she return immediately to Florida. She learned later that the bomb had been detonated while she and Carter were in the air on the way to Seattle.