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.”