Public Enemy

15

Laramie loaded up on coffee with Sadie, Bill, and Sid in a place called the Circle Diner, to which Bill had driven them in one of the black-on-black Suburbans. The diner was four miles up the two-lane highway from headquarters, and Laramie took note of the fact there was actually some activity here-customers, waitstaff, people eating and serving dinner to the clink of dishes and silverware.

While Sid and his senior staff were perfectly polite and informative, Laramie learned little at the caffeine-intake session outside of the fact that the task force meeting in the ballroom of the Motor 8 Luxury Motel had more or less been staged for her benefit, at the order of some senior administration official or other. Admitting as much, Sid told her the bottom line on the progress made by the task force since their last fully attended session was close to zilch: they were pretty much where they had been a week ago, when they’d stood pretty much where they had one week before that.

Enter me, Laramie thought-emissary from God knows where, here to show these twenty-year veterans of counterterrorism how it’s really done.

Following a lift back to the Motor 8 in Bill’s urban assault vehicle, Laramie retreated to her room, where, just after dark, a series of files was delivered to her. She answered a knock at the door and a young male agent, clean-cut and suited up like everyone else, wordlessly handed over a tall stack of three-ring binders. He withdrew something resembling a UPS man’s delivery pistol and, with it, swiped the bar-code sticker affixed to the spine of each binder. Laramie waited calmly; the little gun beeped each time it got a reading, and then the agent departed without so much as a nod. Laramie was quite familiar with the classified-intel-logging device; it was used in Langley too.

Since she didn’t plan to study the files on caffeine alone, Laramie had taken some advice proffered by Sid during their meeting at the diner and called room service to get a meal sent up. She found the room’s ice bucket on the bathroom counter, headed down the hall to fill it, and came back to her room and kicked off her shoes. It was only another couple of minutes before a second suited-up young fellow arrived to deposit a Cobb salad, bereft, by Laramie’s request, of eggs and cheese, dressing on the side, packaged in a clear plastic enclosure with accompanying Saran-wrapped plastic utensils. She jammed into her ice bucket three of the six-pack of Diet Cokes she’d added to the tab, and popped a fourth.

Then she came over and sat at the room’s lone, circular table to confront the binders.

As Laramie understood it, investigations of international terrorist acts played out pretty much the same as ordinary homicide cases, only with more people, more organizations, and-ostensibly-greater secrecy. The investigators assigned to either sort of case did mostly the same things, primarily because they were looking for the same things-evidence, suspects, motive-and, by definition, acts of terror typically involved homicide anyway. This meant, among other things, that a terrorism-incident version of the homicide detective’s “murder book” was usually created by antiterror investigators.

From what Laramie had heard, even following the intelligence reform enacted by Congress in 2004, rarely was the “terror book” held in its entirety in one place, and whichever agency housed it rarely shared its contents with other agencies. This, however, did not appear to be true for the Emerald Lakes incident. By Laramie’s count, there were 3,697 pages in the three binders combined, and if there were pages missing, or kept somewhere else, she had some difficulty determining what the content of those pages might have involved.

The task force, she found, had been thorough. Every cubic inch of the Emerald Lakes blast site had been scoured, accounted for, studied. The entire curriculum of any number of graduate forensics programs could have been taught from the work performed on the casualties; the page count on the binder packed with interview transcripts-emergency room doctors, friends of the Achar family, Achar’s widow, in-laws, eyewitnesses to the explosion, local law enforcement and civic officials-tripped the meter at just over one thousand sheets of single-spaced printouts, give or take a few interrogations.

Laramie read all of them. In the area where it seemed the task force had focused their investigation-the forensics piece-Laramie concluded these guys had watched too many reruns of CSI. She skimmed her way through these voluminous sections. The last 124 victims of the outbreak died the same way the first had, so how many different photographs of orifice hemorrhaged corpses did she need to see? The pages provided by Sadie, the Centers for Disease Control’s designate, made it pretty clear that all 125 had died from the same pathogen-the “filo,” as task force investigators seemed to relish calling it.

It took her a few hours, but Laramie got through all three binders before dawn, spending at least some time on every page. Salad long gone, Diet Coke supply dwindling, she took a restroom break-splashed some water on her face, mashed her cheeks into one of the barely absorbent towels on the rack-then came back to the table for a second read.

This time she took aim on two specific parts of the terror book. She plucked pages from the binders and set them out on the bed, the floor, the laminated cabinetry holding the television. She set them out in order of what she cared about, what occurred to her, what she couldn’t figure out. Most of her selections focused on Benny Achar-everything she could find that the task force had gotten on him, from interview transcripts to cell phone and credit card statements, all the way through to his career-long UPS delivery schedule, tracking number by tracking number. She also pulled the pages on the conspiracy theory stuff: the doomsday scenarios, the extrapolations and forecasts on what could have happened had Achar’s complete stash been disseminated-what could still happen if there were other Benny Achars, living in other suburban housing developments around the country under false identities stolen from Mobile, Alabama’s town hall, or wherever else one stole identities.

Sometime around five-thirty, she found herself nodding off. She closed the binder she’d been looking through, pushed a few of the checkerboard of papers aside, reached for the phone, requested a wakeup call for eight-fifteen, dropped the phone on its cradle, and let herself fall back onto the bed.

Eyes drooping, Laramie fell asleep under the spell of a familiar sensation. A puzzle unsolved, an itch unscratched-the sense of incompletion, of un-wholeness, that, when exposed, drove her nuts…and, when solved, made her tick.

She flipped on the coffeemaker that came with the room, took an extremely hot shower, and worked through two cups of coffee-half a packet of Equal, a thimble-size container of half-and-half in each-while she suited up like the rest of her newfound colleagues. She decided to go with the black pantsuit one of Ebbers’s people had packed for her, picking a gray tee to wear underneath.

She found Bill on the cell number he’d given her and logged her interview requests for the day. Today, she’d decided, would be agent-debriefing day: she’d meet with individual members of the task force to start with. Mainly those she thought could clarify certain questions she’d generated upon consuming the terror book.

Once he’d taken down the names, Bill asked whether she wanted them in any particular order.

“Nope,” she said. “Whatever works.”

Bill suggested a room at the Motor 8 they had used for most of their interrogations.

“Actually,” Laramie said, “I’d rather hold the interviews in my room.”

He said he’d have the first agent there in thirty minutes.

Laramie returned the papers to the binders in the order they’d arrived, stacked the binders on the table, called the number Sid had told her to use for library purposes, and handed off the documents to the agent with the tracking gun when he came to retrieve them. She switched the A/C console to MAX/COOL, put away the blow-dryer and the selection of clothes she’d decided not to wear, then headed into the parking lot with a third cup of the room’s very bad coffee. She sat on the cinder-block wall on the far side of the parking lot, leaned her head back with her eyes closed, and let her pores soak up the sun.

It must have been fifteen or twenty minutes she’d been sitting like that when she opened her eyes to observe, strolling across the hot parking slab, the first subject in the long list of interviews she’d set for the day: Mary, the profiler.

Coming across the parking lot, Mary looked to be about a head shorter than Laramie, four-eleven tops-Laramie sympathizing with the woman, considering Laramie didn’t consider herself much more than a runt to begin with. Mary shook when Laramie offered a hand and Laramie led her into the room, closing the door but leaving the curtains open. When Laramie motioned for her to do so, Mary took one of the two seats at the little round table.

“Diet Coke?”

“Why not,” Mary said.

Laramie pulled a can from the ice bucket, popped it for her, and slipped it across the table. Laramie sat on the edge of the bed near her side of the table. Mary took a delicate sort of three-gulp swig of the soda, Laramie thinking the profiler looked a little overheated, maybe from walking over from her room-where she’d probably sat in a prep meeting with Bill, Sid, or some designated interview coach.

Laramie decided to start with some small talk-see if she could loosen Mary up before getting into it.

“Where you based?” she said, thinking, Nice opener, Laramie.

Mary set the can on the table.

“Quantico.”

“You live nearby, or you commute an hour like the rest of us?”

The profiler nodded. “Manassas-around forty minutes.”

“It’s a little longer for me.” At least it was, Laramie thought.

“I’m hooked on it. Can’t stand being on these road trips.”

Laramie turned a little sideways, waiting for Mary to clarify.

“Audio books,” the profiler said, grinning a calm, pleasant, clean smile. “I’m a junkie. Mostly nonfiction.”

In the brief flash of smile, Laramie saw that Mary had maybe the whitest rack of teeth on the planet, a walking toothpaste commercial. It made her slightly self-conscious, Laramie fighting the urge to reach for her teeth and see if she’d missed anything with her toothbrush.

“Haven’t tried them,” Laramie said. “I pretty much just do the NPR thing.”

“Probably have a hundred CDs of books in my trunk-find me after and I’ll send you some when we’re out of this and back in the groove.”

Laramie stretched her arms then pushed her hands under her thighs.

“Do you find it odd he didn’t own a truck?” she said.

“Pickup truck, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Mary thought for a moment.

“I see what you’re saying,” she said.

“You live in suburban Virginia like I do,” Laramie said, “you see SUVs everywhere. But a low-income Central Florida housing development?”

“Normal guy living there, you’re right-he’d be more likely to own a truck.”

“You said yesterday his disguise was too pat,” Laramie said, “and in reading your report, I agree. It just occurred to me as I was reading your profile that you could add ‘no pickup truck’ to the list.”

Mary nodded and took a swig of Diet Coke.

Laramie said, “You think there’s any chance Achar was an American?”

Mary said, “Pulled a Timothy McVeigh under a fabricated identity?”

“Yes.”

“It’s possible. The profile I put together has mostly to do with his not being real. His disguise was a good one but, as we agree, too good in some ways, maybe missing a piece or two. But as to where he’s from-if you read my full report, you’ve seen I took a couple guesses, with my favorite being the one I mentioned yesterday-frankly, out of sheer racial profiling, or at least profiling based on his likely ancestry. Central or South American heritage, at least partially. Of course he certainly could have been from here, but he’d have been putting on a disguise that hid his background either way.”

Mary paused, thinking for a moment, during which time she tilted her head to the side a notch. “And I’m not sure somebody living here would skip the pickup truck part of the disguise,” she said.

Laramie nodded. “Tell me about the woman at UPS,” she said.

“The dispatcher, yes,” Mary said. “We’ve been over this, but it isn’t taking us anywhere. As you know, I only included in my report the one statement from one of Achar’s fellow drivers. I interviewed them all, and this was the only mention of her, the only comment on the two of them seen together. Based on the driver’s remark, I think it’s safe to say Achar and the dispatcher, whose name is Lori Hopkins, were friendly. I remember exactly what he told me: ‘The way they joked, you could tell they had a little something going.’ He didn’t elaborate, said it more or less the same way in a second interview, but he seemed to have, well, written off his own suspicion by then. This is pretty normal-you look back on a victim or suspect’s life after he’s dead, you check all the phone records and the e-mail accounts the way we did here, and you’ll usually know beyond a reasonable doubt he was sleeping with somebody, presuming he was. In fact, you’ll usually find a lot more evidence of flirting between coworkers, affair or no, than we found between Hopkins and Achar. Amazing what people say and do when they think nobody sees what they’re doing. But we found absolutely nothing between them. No e-mails, no corroborating suspicions, no flirtatious conversations on the tapes of the dispatch communications, which UPS holds for a few weeks at a time. Nothing-zilch.”

“A deep-cover sleeper would probably be good at hiding an affair,” Laramie said.

“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.