Public Enemy

12

Laramie arrived in the freshly built Southwest Florida International Airport terminal and followed the signs to the exit. Hoofing it past the baggage claim, she wondered whether they’d had somebody on the flight, or sent somebody to keep an eye on the gate. Somebody who’d tell the guide, whoever the guide was, that she was here.

Less than a minute after she stepped out into the humid heat, a Jeep Grand Cherokee nosed into the crosswalk stripes nearest her. The Jeep’s passenger-side window zipped down, and when nobody else on the sidewalk made a rush for the car, Laramie stepped to the curb and leaned down for a look inside. She saw behind the wheel a man in a corduroy baseball cap pulled low on his forehead. The color of the hat was a muted pastel falling somewhere between pink and orange. He wore a clean white T-shirt and worn blue jeans, his skin a sunbaked version of what looked to Laramie like Mexican heritage. There was a subtle athleticism and wear and tear to the man-he looked, Laramie thought, like a migrant farm worker who’d come to own the farm.

“Welcome to Fort Myers,” he said, speaking across the seat through the open passenger-side window.

Laramie nodded, bag still strapped over her shoulder.

“Ever been here before?”

Laramie looked around. “Florida? Yes. Fort Myers? No.”

“Old people, golf courses, a few beaches, one hell of a lot of oranges, and a lot less swamp than there used to be. Hop in.”

Laramie decided not to be a nervous Nellie-there was no reason to think the farm-owner sitting behind the wheel was anyone but the “tour guide” sent by Ebbers. She opened the door, tossed in her bag, and climbed in.

The guide eased off the brake and the Grand Cherokee slipped out into the traffic loop.

“Drive’s about an hour,” he said, eyes on the road. “More than enough to bring you up to speed. Not that there’s much to talk about yet. Not that’s been figured out, anyway.”

Laramie watched the airport’s landscaped palm beds switch over to pines and ponds as they moved off airport property and climbed a ramp to I-75 North.

“So what exactly are we talking about, then?” she said.

Her guide looked over at her.

“We’re talking about a ‘flight school clue,’” he said.

Laramie thought she understood but asked him to clarify anyway.

“Somebody made a mistake,” he said. “Blew himself up a little ahead of schedule with the ammonium nitrate car bomb he’d put together in his garage. Blew up his house while he was at it, and dispersed, in the process, a miniscule percentage of the airborne filovirus serum he’d been storing in his basement freezer. When we say ‘flight school clue,’ we’re saying what you think we’re saying. We feel we have in our suicide bomber today’s equivalent of the clue left by the 9/11 hijackers, which was fumbled, when they enrolled in various flight schools to learn how to fly a 767 into a skyscraper.”

Laramie noticed his use of the term we, her “tour guide” deploying the word in the same way Ebbers had. Except, that was, when he’d referenced the 9/11 flight school clue being missed.

“Key difference being,” he said, “is if our bomber had succeeded in dispersing the whole batch of the pathogen he was keeping, a lot more thousands of people than took the hit in 2001 would be dead already. With more on the way.”

“Who was he?”

“Name was Benjamin Achar.” The guide pronounced the ch as though it were a k. “However, based on his Social Security number, Mr. Achar appears to have resurrected himself from a case of SIDS he came down with thirty-six years ago.”

“As in sudden infant death syndrome?”

“One and the same.”

The guide flipped on his blinker, changed lanes to pass a semi, turned off the blinker, and slid past the rig.

Laramie looked out the front windshield as they exited the turnpike at State Road 80. Once they left Fort Myers behind, SR-80 became somewhat more barren, the strip malls and golf communities on either side of the highway switching over to pine barrens and driving ranges, then orange groves-lots of them.

“You’re saying he was a sleeper, then,” Laramie said. “A deep cover terrorist.”

“That’s the theory.”

“Working for who?”

The guide smiled a compact, tight-lipped grin.

“Believe that’s why I was told to pick you up at the airport.”

“We don’t know,” Laramie said.

“Nope.”

The highway lost its extra lanes and narrowed to one lane in each direction. Laramie thought about the things he was telling her. She considered thirty or forty questions she could ask, then thought that it would probably be a busy seventy-two hours between now and the time she’d need to give her findings to Ebbers, and that maybe the better idea would be to play it by ear.

They passed through the city of LaBelle, followed by an endless residential development called Port LaBelle-each looking utterly bereft of activity-and then Laramie saw a sign indicating he’d turned them onto State Road 833 South. Orange groves and a patchwork of other farms gave way to some very small homes in terrible disrepair, followed by a roadside trinket shop, gas station, and short bridge. The bridge took them over a narrow stripe of water, the skinny waterway straight as a canal, stretching to the horizon in both directions. Over the bridge a stretch of swamp came, then more pine trees.

A berm blocked the swamp water from the pines; the trees looked emaciated, bereft of green outside of the occasional branch or needle. The stretch of trees didn’t last long. At its back end, rapidly approaching, Laramie could see the identical roofs of a number of houses.

The guide slowed the Jeep. Ahead of them stood a set of orange pylons and two Florida Highway Patrol cruisers parked lengthwise across the road. The guide lowered his window as the state trooper standing against the hood of the nearest cruiser approached, hand resting lazily on his firearm. Her guide pulled what looked to Laramie like a pair of credentials from a pocket on the door-the kind of credentials VIPs wore at sports events, clipped to a lanyard you could keep around your neck. The trooper took the credentials, peered inside the Jeep for a look at Laramie, then, wordlessly, retreated to his cruiser, withdrew a clipboard, copied some information to the sheet on the clipboard, replaced the clipboard in his cruiser, and returned the guide’s credentials.

A second trooper roamed over from his own cruiser to move one of the orange pylons out of the way, and the first trooper waved them through.

The guide turned into the entrance of the housing development that was home to the stretch of identical tile roofs Laramie had spotted from the pine forest. The entrance boasted a sign with raised green letters nailed into a beige slab of what looked to Laramie like plywood: in a glorious burst of optimism, the sign announced that the name of the housing development was EMERALD LAKES. Laramie couldn’t see any water along the road. She wondered if maybe they’d find the lakes inside the development.

As the guide negotiated the simple street grid, Laramie observed that no one was home. They passed duplexes first, then single-family homes, the uniformity of the structures alarming. There were no cars in the driveways, no lawn mowers running, no sprinklers in operation; nobody tinkered with anything in a garage, watered a lawn, or walked a dog. They were driving through a dead town.

The guide turned a corner onto a street called Gem Road, at least according to the bent-over street sign on the corner. As they made the turn, Laramie was confronted by at least one reason behind the apparent evacuation: on both sides of the street, starting about fifty yards in, the homes had been leveled. In the searing white-hot sunshine, Laramie thought immediately of Iraq: it looked, albeit in abbreviated fashion, like a war zone. Some twenty homes on each side of the road had been reduced to rubble, the concrete foundations holding firm in jagged chunks, the remainder of what had once been walls and roofs strewn across Gem Road and the surrounding real estate. A vehicular path had been cleared down the middle of the street, but squat cliffs of rubble otherwise ruled the day.

He parked near a shallow crater midway through the damage.

“Ground zero,” he said. “You can get out and sweat for a while if you like, but you can probably see all you need to see from here.”

Laramie said, “I’ll go take a look,” unlatched the door, and stepped into the soupy heat.

She was hit by a scent she couldn’t place, something between fern and marijuana, and wondered whether it was the fragrance of the swamp on which they’d built the neighborhood, steaming its way to the surface through the crater now that the buildings on its surface had been blown away-or just some cleaning agent they’d used on the blast site.

She poked around the edge of the crater. Among other revelations, the exposed strata of the six-foot cliff edge of the crater’s interior outed the development’s contractor as a cheapskate-there was no more than an inch of asphalt forming the roadbed, without a single chunk of gravel to facilitate drainage. She wondered idly whether sinkholes the size of garbage trucks might eventually have appeared, with or without explosion.

There was little else of note to observe, though Laramie had long since discovered it was difficult to determine what would turn out to be of interest in such situations-especially if nobody was telling you much about any of it to begin with. Something she could tell was that the blast had unleashed its wrath mostly horizontally. The crater that marked ground zero from the explosion was relatively shallow, only a little deeper than Laramie was tall, occupying a space that would logically seem to have been the garage of one of the homes along the street. Other than to carve out a crater of this depth, the explosion’s effects had refused to go deep, instead taking out a football field’s worth of homes in all directions. Not a single wall remained standing for the length of the street.

She walked around the edge of the crater and examined the remnants of the foundation of the “ground zero” house. Chunks of the structure still stood, reaching somewhere around mid-basement before the cheap cinder blocks had been torn from their spadework, sheared like wool from the sheep of the first layer of foundation. It was oddly quiet. Laramie heard only the sounds of her muffled footsteps in the rubble and the distant roar of the air conditioner at work beneath the hood of the Jeep.

She saw shards of burnt metal, orbs of rock and cinder block, and reddish dust strewn everywhere. The dust seemed to be shifting, maybe blowing in the breeze, only there wasn’t really a breeze, just the thick, still, ugly heat. She felt a sharp, stinging pain on her leg, looked down, and frantically whacked away at her ankles-realizing it wasn’t dust, but ants. Millions of them. Fire ants, or red ants, or whatever kind of ant was red and bit you. The bites hurt like hell, Laramie suddenly feeling as though she’d joined the cast of a straight-to-video horror flick-a helpless femme fatale stranded in a Martian landscape populated by deadly, if unrealistic creatures. She had the overwhelming sense of nature commencing the process of taking back the land.

Turning back toward the street, she felt a twinge of embarrassment-the rookie, having a look at the site, getting chomped by the resident critters in front of her new boss. By the time she came around the crater, though, the shame had moved out of the way to make room for the shot of anger that took its place.

She opened the door of the Grand Cherokee, planted herself within the chilled confines of the car’s interior, and jutted her chin in the direction of her taupe-skinned host.

“You could have told me about the ants,” she said.

A smirk creased the lines of his face beneath the baseball cap.

“They get you?”

“They got me.”

He shrugged.

“Sorry about that. Ready for tour stop number two?”

“Depends,” she said.

“The ants haven’t taken over task force headquarters, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “At least not yet.”