No answer came from the static-ridden phone line, which Laramie took to mean, Then why are you giving me so much background, Miss Laramie.
“The first flawed assumption,” she said, “is that the greater Miami metropolitan area was Benny Achar’s intended target. I agree it seems the obvious choice due to its population density and basic proximity to the blast site-the filo spreads beyond the hundred-plus victims it killed and infects any part of greater Miami-Dade County and you’ve got a few hundred thousand casualties, maybe more. Achar didn’t get his whole stash airborne, of course-if he had, or so the theory goes, he’d have delivered his evolved viral hemorrhagic fever serum to the entire population of Miami. Therefore it must have been his target.”
“Go on,” Ebbers said.
“Like the much-discussed potential seen in the avian flu, however, the Marburg-2 filo infects both humans and a number of animal species. All humans it comes into contact with die; for many animal species the same is true. The virus spreads from one infected species to the next with no apparent resistance. My point is that when you examine the geographical choice of Achar’s blast site, there is a strategic positioning to it that is worse, from a casualties perspective, than Miami. Lake Okeechobee.”
Laramie paused, half expecting a sarcastic comment along the lines of, His target was a lake? Getting none, she launched into an abbreviated version of what the freelance biologist had explained about Lake Okeechobee providing the Everglades with its water supply.
“Even if it isn’t the case, we need to consider this scenario as a possibility,” Laramie said, “because if an unobstructed waterway feeding the Everglades had been breached by the M-2 virus, that’s pretty much all Achar would have needed to take out the whole state. Virtually every animal touched by the ecosystem that is the Everglades would act as a carrier of the filo, and that means just about every animal and human in Florida. It’s possible that if this scenario were executed properly and quarantines were put into place a few days too late, a death rate among the human population here could run in the high ninetieth percentile.”
Noisy digital silence came from the speakerphone. Laramie decided not to wait to find out whether Ebbers had any comments in response to her theory.
“I’m not saying that looking at Everglades wildlife as the target is going to get us anywhere special right away-but what it gives us, if in fact he wasn’t acting alone, is a number of other regions in which to look for other sleepers. Say there are ten others. One may be assigned the Colorado River; another goes after the Mississippi; another the Hudson. I was never much for geography, but give me ten minutes and even I can come up with a scenario by which ten or eleven sleepers, placed correctly and armed with the equivalent stash of M-2 Achar kept in his basement, could bring down seventy-five to ninety percent of the population of the entire country by infecting areas of high animal population that overlap with the human population of nearby cities.”
Ebbers spoke up again.
“Not sure,” he said, “I want to hear about the second mistake.”
Laramie felt a sudden tingle of fear. It hit her veins like a shot of espresso and moonshine: Christ, he might just think I’m right…and what if I am?
“The second, well, not mistake, but my opinion on the second flawed-”
“Fuckup, then,” Ebbers said, almost yelling to make sure she heard him over her own voice. “Tell me where they’re wrong, Miss Laramie.”
Laramie blinked. “Well, if you’re a cop, you’re supposed to bust somebody based on evidence. Not just a hunch. But my hunch is that Benny Achar did not make a mistake at all. He is not a ‘perp.’ This is what the task force believes, and it is the way they refer to him: as a perp. Instead, I believe him to be a deep cover agent gone native.”
A silence ensued, the digitized snap, crackle, and pop of the encrypted line the only audible emission from the phone. Laramie tried to picture Ebbers sitting there doing the math on what she’d just told him.
His voice came level and flat from the phone.
“I’m familiar with the term,” he said, “but considering he killed over a hundred American citizens by suicide bomb and pathogen dispersal, I’m having trouble grasping how the idea of his ‘going native’ applies.”
Time to get in as much as you can.
“I think it’s not only possible,” Laramie said, speaking quickly, “but likely that he turned on his employers. Or his country-or whoever it is he was ‘sleeping’ for. I think that instead of the perp he’s been characterized as, Achar was a turncoat-for our side. I think he did exactly what he planned to do. I think he carefully and deliberately calculated exactly how much filo to disperse, and when to do it-in particular, right after his wife and son took off from Miami-in order to achieve three objectives.”
She kept on, barely taking in air as she went.
“First: cause the least number of casualties while still displaying the pathogen’s effects. Second objective: reveal to such people as you and me his role as a deep-cover sleeper agent. And third: make it likely the M-2 epidemic that results remains, in size and scope, an outbreak that would be contained within the length of time he told his wife to hide. Seven-plus days, or thereabouts. So she could survive, and his son could too, while he nonetheless accomplished his other objectives.”
Laramie left it at that.
It took a while, but at length the tinny, double-encrypted voice of Lou Ebbers said, “He told his wife to hide for a week? I didn’t see that in the book.”
Laramie didn’t waste any time-since he’d bitten, it was time to set the hook.
“He told her to hide for ‘no less than seven days.’ She told me in my interview with her in the Hendry County sheriff’s interrogation room. She admitted that he warned her-I’m fairly certain he didn’t tell her what he was up to, but he warned her before she left town that ‘if something should happen,’ she would need to hide out for that period of time. Which she did-armed with enough cash to stay at a motel anonymously for that length of time.”
“So he knew what he was about to do? That proves nothing.”
“I think what he told her proves he knew approximately how far the virus would reach. How long it would continue spreading before it might run out of gas, particularly assuming the kind of response the CDC would enact in our terror-prone time. He spreads the whole batch with nobody positioned to quarantine its effects, the epidemic would still be active to this day. He knew it wouldn’t happen like that-because the amount he chose to disperse could be contained in a week to ten days. Bottom line: if you assume Achar warned his wife in order to save her life, then you must conclude he intended to disperse only the amount of M-2 filo that he actually did disperse.”
“If.”
“If I’m right, then he didn’t intend to kill the people of Miami at all. He didn’t even plan to infect the entire Everglades, though I do believe this was his original mission. What he did plan to do was to send a signal. To us.”
“If that was his intention,” Ebbers said, “wouldn’t it have been easier to walk into his friendly neighborhood FBI office and confess?”
“There’s at least one explanation why he wouldn’t have done that,” Laramie said.
“Which is what?”
“He’d have gotten his wife and son killed. Let alone the skepticism he’d be met with.”
“Got them killed how?”
“If his employer knew he’d sold out-gone native-it could be there was a threat on his family or the likelihood of retaliation. But if he succeeds in pulling it off the way he did, it might just seem to his employer that he made a mistake. This is exactly what we thought, at least to start with. It’s still what the task force thinks. But if you see it my way, Achar has succeeded in sparing his wife and son the wrath of the ‘bio-dirty bomb’ he was sent here to detonate, while still revealing to Lou Ebbers & Company that the enemy’s troops are out there.”