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.

16

“Among humans, the infection rate of Marburg-2 is approximately the same as we find for the H5N1 virus in animals,” the biologist said from his seat at the little table in Laramie’s room. “M-2’s symptoms are far more severe and progress more savagely-although the forecasted avian flu mutation could do similar damage.”

The task force called the local filo Marburg-2-M-2 for short-due to its similarity to and evolved improvements over the Marburg filovirus. The biologist seated before Laramie was an infectious diseases specialist who did freelance work for the Centers for Disease Control.

Laramie thought of something.

“Marburg-2 hit animals,” she said, “just as hard as people?”

“Yep-I’d say this is your basic avian flu doomsday scenario, but with more deadly results once the symptoms kick in.”

“So how wide did it spread in the animal kingdom-birds, rabbits, deer? Frogs? Crickets? Cicadas?”

“It killed just about everything it came into contact with.”

“What about ants?”

“Ants?” The biologist shifted in his chair. He was a little heavy, a tight squeeze at the little table. “We haven’t really had the time to fully analyze the impact on the insect population, but my guess would be no.”

“Why not?”

“Ants, scorpions, and cockroaches aren’t typically susceptible to viral in fection. In fact, they aren’t susceptible to much of anything. Cockroaches and scorpions, for example, would be the primary surviving species following a global thermonuclear war. Ants aren’t that hardy, but they’re pretty tough.”

“But whatever consumes ants,” Laramie said, “would have died.”

“Pretty much across the board within the infection zone,” the biologist said.

Those ants, Laramie thought, took over the Emerald Lakes housing development, and took a few chomps out of my ankle while they were at it, because no predator survived to eat them.

Their population was probably multiplying geometrically.

“According to your report,” Laramie said, “M-2 infected animals, and spread across species, following the gathering places of those animals-swamps, streams, pine barrens. Geographically speaking, how far did it reach? In the animal world, I mean.”

“It spread across a slightly wider range-about double the human infection zone. The quarantine we set up was engineered to stump the spread of the filo on animals too; it took a little longer than the human quarantining, but it worked-mostly due to the preponderance of housing developments and golf courses.”

“What do you mean?”

“The wetlands over here are mostly landlocked, so an infected fish couldn’t, for instance, swim more than a couple miles south before bumping into a berm designed to keep the swamp water off the fairway of the eighteenth hole, or somebody’s backyard.”

“‘Over here’?”

“Sorry?”

“You said something about the ‘wetlands over here,’” Laramie said.

“Oh,” he said, “I’m not sure exactly what I meant. I suppose it’s my fear of what could have happened if we didn’t contain it, or if the perp disseminated M-2 twenty miles east or south of here.”

“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.