Public Enemy

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.

When Janine declined to return to Florida of her own volition, a pair of federal agents had been dispatched to her mother’s home, only to learn that Janine and Carter Achar had fled. Laramie knew that this had initially cast a cloud of suspicion on Mrs. Achar, but the task force later learned that Janine had surfed the Internet immediately following her second call from the FBI agent, learned in a news story that her husband had been one of the victims in a “gas main explosion,” and supposedly panicked. She used cash, Janine told Laramie, to get a room in a motel in Tukwila, near Kent but closer to the airport. They stayed there for ten days-until the cash she’d traveled with ran out-and then Janine had used her ATM card at a nearby Key Bank. Not the most savvy move by somebody on the lam, and certainly, the task force judged, not the move of a deep cover sleeper: following her use of the ATM, an FBI canvas of the neighborhood where she’d made the withdrawal netted Carter and Janine that morning, during their daily breakfast stop at the McDonald’s across from the motel.

They were taken into federal custody and held in Seattle for seven days, primarily because issues with the filo outbreak didn’t warrant a return to LaBelle. Once the quarantine contained the spread of the M-2, the feds had flown Janine to Fort Myers and taken her and Carter here-to the holding cell facility in the Hendry County sheriff’s offices.

Mother’s tale complete yet again, Carter poked his head up from his meal and asked if he could go to the bathroom. Laramie used the phone on the wall to summon a deputy and told Janine they’d resume as soon as Laramie could get her hands on a cup of coffee.

“I think you’re lying.”

“Excuse me?”

“After reading up on you, and now, hearing you out in person, I’m prepared to recommend that the task force reconsider their assessment,” Laramie said. “To tell them they got you wrong. Completely. I don’t know if they’ve told you this, but they were ready to clear you. Did you know that? But I’m going to recommend they hold you indefinitely.”

Janine glared silently at Laramie over the cigarette in her hand. Laramie didn’t wait for further reaction or response.

“It’s the motel room, Mrs. Achar. You took enough cash with you to pay for ten nights-at least fifteen hundred bucks based on the rate of the hotel you chose-and you had that much on you before you received the call from the FBI. Ten nights-long enough for the small amount of pathogen dispersed by your husband to run its course and be all but contained. You’ve been lying. He told you something, warned you, gave you instructions, who knows, and you knew enough to travel with sufficient cash in your purse to spend a week or two in a motel-anonymously.”

Janine violently snuffed out her cigarette.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she said. “You think I knew? Who the hell are you, coming in here offering me your condolences-the first interrogator to do that, so I thought you might be somebody decent. Then trying to tell me I knew something more about my husband? Something that isn’t true anyway? Goddamn you-goddamn all you people. Fuck you. You can’t imagine what I’m going through-what we’re going through. Or maybe you do, since it’s all lies anyway, and you’re the people making up the lies. First the papers call it a gas main explosion. Then your people tell me that wasn’t it at all-that he blew himself up! And now he’s a terrorist-a terrorist? Benny? A suicide bomber? Do you know how ridiculous that is? And then you tell me he wasn’t Benny at all and that I’m not even Mrs. Benjamin Achar-that Benny wasn’t even real? Let me ask you something. Do you know why I have my son with me?”

As she said this, Janine reached over and touched her son’s shoulder in a way that made Laramie think suddenly that she was a very good mother.

“You know why? I knew you’d ask the same horrible questions that everybody else asked me, and that I’d be making him hear it by bringing him with me, but you know what? I don’t believe you people, and I don’t trust you either. You lie about one thing, then another, you lie to the media, to the public, you lie to me, I don’t even know who you’re lying to on any given day, who can keep track? Maybe you’re lying to everybody. It can’t be a gas main explosion and a suicide bombing, can it? It can’t be the flu and a terrible disease bomb, can it? I don’t believe you that Benny isn’t Benny, and I don’t believe you that he did this. You know what I think? I think you did it. I think somebody ran a test. They made a bomb. The CIA. FBI. Whoever. They wanted to try out their bomb, and they decided to blame Benny. Did he say something you didn’t like, something about the government? Or was he just convenient, you sons of bitches-oh my God, he’s gone…I don’t trust you people! You get it now? For all I know, you’re planning to take my son next. You’ll tell me he isn’t Carter after all, I bet. But you’ll fucking take him over my dead body.”

She suddenly reached over with her other arm and grabbed her son in a bear-hug embrace.

“Fuck you people, it’s not true! None of it! Get out!”

Laramie sat still while this played out, Janine sobbing into Carter’s shoulder for a few minutes running. She felt the urge to join in on the hug, to comfort them in some way, but there wasn’t exactly anything for her to do, particularly anything like joining the hug, so she thought things through instead.

The motel thing had bothered her from the minute she’d read about it. It had bothered the other investigators too, to the point where they’d suspected her of being in on it, until her background check came out clear, and then interrogator after interrogator sat and listened to Janine say the same things she’d just told Laramie, in almost exactly the same way. This bolstered the case for her innocence-had she been lying, it seemed impossible she wouldn’t have got caught up in even the smallest inconsistency given the multiple repeats of her tale.

But the motel bothered Laramie in a different way: it made something register in her analyst’s mind, something that didn’t quite fit the rest of the puzzle. It was the timing. She couldn’t pin down exactly why or where the timing was off initially, but she knew it was.

When the sobs died down, Laramie decided to come at it a little differently.

“Listen,” she said, “if it were true that all this-”

“ARE YOU STILL HERE?”

Laramie let Janine’s shrill bellow hang out there for a moment.

When the noise of the outburst felt to her as though it had faded, Laramie said, “Janine, listen to me. I don’t trust our government any more than you do. In fact I know not to trust it-them-by experience. But just in case it were true-in case it isn’t all one gigantic lie-there’s something I’d like to hear from you.”

“Why should I tell you anything? I told everybody everything already anyway.”

Laramie heard it in the speed of the woman’s second sentence and knew immediately she’d been right about what she was about to ask.

“Mrs. Achar,” she said. “You’re lying.”

“Go to hell. I’m sure that fits your conspiracy just like everything else-”

“You’re lying because you’re trying to protect him.”

This seemed to quiet her down, if only temporarily.

“I think that despite all the evidence-the identity theft, the timing of your trip, all of it-I think that you know, deep inside, that he wasn’t honest with you. And that he did something terrible here.”

“Don’t you tell me what I know or don’t know.”

“Let me finish. You had your say, now I’ll have mine.” Laramie felt like a bully, running an interrogation with a distraught widow and her eight-year-old son by yelling in their faces. Too bad. “In reading everything you said in all the interviews, and in hearing you now, I think you will never believe he did what the government says he did. That your husband would not have tried to kill thousands of people, or a million people, or whatever it was the government is saying he was trying to do. It bothers you, because you think he was lying to you, but you know he wouldn’t have been trying to do what they’ve accused him of. So you’re protecting him.”

Janine just stared at the floor, holding her son.

“What did he tell you before you left?”

Janine didn’t change expression or the direction in which she was looking, but Laramie felt something shift in the room.

“You knew to be ready to disappear. I know that part. You had the kind of cash on you that nobody carries around anymore. Not unless they’re looking to book ten days at a local Holiday Inn under a false name. What I want to know is, What did he say? Was it during dinner? After he put Carter to bed? Over the drinks? Help me out here. Nobody else-”

“Help you?-my God, you are just like the rest-”

Preparing to repeat the question, Laramie suddenly realized what it was that connected the motel and the M-2, and answered her question as to the timing. The feeling was as familiar to her as the sense of un-wholeness that had greeted her that first night in the Motor 8, only this time it was a sense of completion. Of the tumblers in the keyhole racking into place.

When she asked the question, repeating it to compel Janine to focus, Laramie felt some saliva escape from her mouth and spray halfway across the interrogation table.

“What did he tell you!”

Janine said nothing at first, but in a moment, something did come.

Tears.

There were only the tears-Janine didn’t outwardly cry, and there came no sobs, only the dual streams of the silent tears coursing down her cheeks.

“He saved my life,” she said, almost inaudibly. “He saved Carter’s life.”

Laramie nodded slowly.

“I just don’t understand,” Janine said. She was talking to herself, quietly enough that Laramie caught most of it by watching the widow’s lips move as she spoke. “He would never do what they say he did. What you say he did. It just isn’t…possible. You can tell me whatever you want to tell me. Us-you can tell us anything. Show us any evidence. But it won’t matter. It won’t make any difference. I know my husband. We know him. Even if we didn’t know his real name. We know him-him-and he would never have done it. He would never have tried to kill thousands of people. Never. Ever.”

The tears continued in their twin streams down the sides of her haggard face. She was leaning back in her chair now. Her left arm remained draped around Carter’s shoulders. Carter’s chin was pressed against his chest and Laramie couldn’t see his face. With her right hand, Janine wiped away a tear, but it was like trying to divert a river with an oar.

Thinking she might have to assist Janine in connecting the tears and the widow’s thoughts to words, Laramie said, “But you said he saved your lives. How did-I know you don’t just mean Seattle, the trip to Seattle. How is it he saved your lives?”

In due course, Janine looked up at Laramie through her tears.

“He told me-” she said, then stopped, and now the sobs came, the woman taking in a big, heaving, choppy breath of air that sounded almost like a rattle-“he told me that if something happened-”-a kind of wail escaped her throat and merged with the sobbing and crying, Laramie nearly cringing at the raw outburst from this desperate, grieving widow with no source of hope or comfort-“he told me that if something happened while I was gone, I would need to hide. To go away. For as long as I could. But for no less than seven days…oh, Christ…for no less than seven days!”

The piercing wails that followed prompted Carter to burst into tears, the boy calling for her as he grabbed her around the neck and waist.

They cried into each other’s bodies for many minutes. After almost ten minutes had passed without the sobs lessening, Laramie decided she couldn’t take it any longer. She rose, came around the table, reached down, and placed a hand on the widow’s shoulder. Nothing changed-the wails continued, the sobbing cries, Carter burrowing into his mom’s bosom, his cries of “Mommy, mommy,” muted by her storm of wails-but at least, Laramie thought, she isn’t pushing my arm away.

Laramie stayed there, touching Janine Achar’s shoulder, for a while. When the pitch of the wails seemed destined never to shift or end, Laramie decided there was nothing more to be asked or done. She had learned what she needed to learn. She could do nothing more for this person-not that she had done anything for her anyway. Not that anybody could-probably ever.

Laramie opened the door and left the interview room.