Labyrinth (32 page)

Locke felt confusion sweep over him. “But I thought it was the Committee that kept me alive.”

“It was.”

“Then you're—”

“That's right.”

“Why?”

“Long story I can't even start now. Things are changing, crumbling. It may be too late already to set them right again. We've got to act fast. You've already helped us unknowingly. Now you're going to have to with full awareness.”

“What makes you think I will?”

“Because we're not your true enemies, not all of us anyway. There's lots going on here you don't understand. You will in time, but for now you'll have to trust me.”

“Then you better give me a damn good reason to.”

“The life of your son.”

Locke almost slipped from his chair.

“Stand up, it's time to move. I said stand up! If you want to save your son, we've got no time to waste!”

Chris started to rise. “You know where they're holding him?”

She nodded. “Our next stop: Bruggar House in Cadgwith Cove.”

Chapter 25

DOGAN FOUGHT TO CLEAR
his head as the stewardess announced they'd been cleared to land at Leonardo Da Vinci Airport in Rome. San Sebastian weighed heavier and heavier on his mind.

He had carried the boy back to the jeep, then swabbed and bandaged his wound as best he could with the first aid kit. Next came a nerve-racking ninety-minute drive to the next town of reasonable size, the jeep threatening to give out a number of times. He took the boy and the other three children straight to the town doctor and proceeded to make a series of phone calls, trying to reach someone who could help him make sense of what he had learned in San Sebastian.

By late Tuesday night he was sitting in the still stifling heat of an office belonging to a U.S. Agriculture Department representative on temporary assignment to Bogotáas an adviser to the Colombian farming industry. His name was Tom Halloran, and the assignment seemed to have both bored and disgusted him. He was fair-skinned and had done his best, though futilely, to avoid the South American sun. His flesh was burned red, his nose peeling off in layers. Sweat poured from his brow in a steady stream as a ceiling fan sliced through the hot, thick air. His freezer made ice cubes, which turned back to water almost as soon as they were lifted from their tray. Dogan could barely find a trace of them in the glass of soda Halloran handed him.

“Christ,” the agriculture expert muttered when Dogan had finished highlighting those parts of his story directly related to Halloran's expertise. “No wonder you want to keep this off the record.”

“It never happened, right?”

“Oh, sure,” Halloran said with a wink. He guzzled half his cola down, then held the still-cool glass up to his cheek. “I don't want to get involved anyway. You ask the questions.”

“The mist that wiped out the crops,” Dogan started. “What could it have been?”

“A fungus, most likely. They reproduce like crazy, exist purely to grow.”

“But I doubt even an ounce of the mist was released. What had to be a hundred acres of crops were … gone in less than an hour.”

Halloran waved his forearm, already wet from swiping at the sweat on his face. “This fungus is obviously some sort of hybrid. The mist released millions of individual fungi spoors which produced toxins as they divided. The toxins are what killed the crops down wherever the hell you were. As more spoors were created, more toxins spread. It's a geometric progression. The fungus gets stronger and stronger as it goes along. Picture billions and billions of tiny eating machines doubling in number with each bite. That's what you've got here.”

“Then that explains why they burned the fields,” Dogan concluded. “The spread of the fungus had to be stopped.”

Halloran's gaze was noncommittal. “Fire would have knocked most of the spoors out by denying them a food supply, but these little bastards are smart. They travel with the winds in weather systems. There had to be something more.” He thought briefly. “This town you've described, was it surrounded by mountains?”

“Yes, on all sides.”

“There's the rest of your answer,” Halloran said. “Mountains in these parts can block winds plenty long enough for the rest of the spoors to die for lack of food supply—that is, of course, because so few of them were released in the first place. A little more of that mist and the stuff would be all over South America by now.”

“That fast?”

“Four to six days. Winds and weather systems, remember?”

“Oh, Christ …” Suddenly the room felt even hotter to Dogan. He reached down for his cola to find that he had drained the glass without realizing it. The ceiling fan swirled noisily above. He gulped down some stale air. “And what if this same … fungus was released in the United States?”

“How much?”

“A lot more.”

“If the logistics were right, there wouldn't be a damn field crop left in the whole country within ten days, two weeks at the outside.” Halloran paused. “This part's just theoretical, right?”

“Sure. What happens next, after all the crops are gone?”

“To begin with, lots of people will go hungry for more reasons than one. The United States controls more than sixty percent of the world's exportable grain and other foodstuffs basic for human existence. We maintain more of a monopoly on food exports than all the OPEC nations combined have over oil exports. So if we lost our crops, it's not an exaggeration to say our balance of trade wouldn't exist anymore. We'd suddenly have to become a
food-importing
nation. And, even given the vast stockpiles we keep, the first impact of that would be staggeringly inflated prices for all farm-based products. Before long, white bread will end up costing more than caviar.”

“But wouldn't it get better once the imports started coming in?”

Halloran shook his head. “Coming from where? The reserves of other food-exporting nations aren't nearly as strong as ours, and what little they could get to the U.S. would be subject to the equally pressing problem of distribution. We're just not set up for that. What criteria are we going to use to decide who gets the food and how? If you leave it to a market of drastically inflated prices, only the rich will be able to eat. Americans will starve, Ross, lots of them.”

“With no relief in sight?”

Halloran's cheeks were dripping with sweat now. “The worse would be yet to come. Remember, we're not just talking about farmers here. What about the dairy and poultry industries, not to mention beef ranchers? The quantity of field crops animals require is staggering. Cut back on their food and you end up with less meat, less chicken, and less dairy products. And don't forget that field crops are actually grasses, so we're also looking at the loss of all grazing land. Need I tell you the results?”

“Massive price rises in all food-related areas,” Dogan replied softly. “People would be priced straight out of eating.”

Halloran nodded, licked the sweat from his lips. “And inflation would continue to skyrocket as supplies continued to diminish. The farm belt states would face immediate bankruptcy. Defaulting on loans would cause panic and runs on banks that could not possibly meet the demand for cash. The government would be forced to step in with massive stopgap spending measures, which would push inflation off the board. Under these conditions you can forget all about Washington's capacity to provide long-term relief.”

“Depression,” muttered Dogan. “But it would be temporary, right? I mean, the farmers would just have to start over from scratch.”

Halloran dabbed a rumpled piece of notebook paper against his face. “Nope, that's the clincher. Soil that cannot sustain crops will erode immediately. It would be useless for a hundred years or more. Much of the middle U.S. will literally become a giant mud slide and will end up being washed down the waterways. The effect of this hyper-fertilized water packed with lingering pesticides rushing into the Ohio, the Missouri, and especially the Mississippi River would be an oceanic algae boom in the Gulf of Mexico. Hundreds of square miles of ocean would be turned into a sludge of green, choking off the direct oxygen needed to sustain marine life. Our coastal fishing industry would become virtually nonexistent, worsening the food scarcity all the more.”

“I imagine the rest of the world won't be faring much better,” Dogan said lamely.

“Even worse, if you can believe that. Without us to supply them with food at drastically reduced prices or through direct aid, developing and Third World countries will be
totally
unable to feed their people. England, France, and Japan won't be far behind either, nor will the effects be limited to our allies. Last year we exported fifty million tons of grain to the Soviet Union and another twenty to other Warsaw Pact nations. People starve just as quickly behind the Iron Curtain as in front of it.”

“But say someone else was able to supply them—and us—with crops.”

“What do you mean?”

“What if a powerful force was able to organize all of South America into a vast food-exporting consortium? What if they had discovered a means to genetically increase crop growth enough to turn this whole continent into a greenhouse?”

Some of the red seemed to fade from Halloran's face. “Then that force would be in a position to hold the rest of the world hostage. The results would be a massive swing of global economic power over to it, political power too; for, in effect, the whole world would know where its next meal was coming from … or not coming from.” Halloran hesitated. “But don't expect any of this to make things any easier for the boys and girls back home. The good old U.S. of A. would still be facing drastic economic realignment.”

“Economic
what
?”

“Realignment. If a system doesn't work anymore, it's got to be thrown out and replaced. Regardless of what happens in South America, we'd still lack even the semblance of an economy as it's known today. No trading, no commodities, no stock exchanges, no banks as they function now, and cash itself would become increasingly worthless.”

Then something suddenly occurred to Dogan. “But how could crops be grown in South America or anywhere else once the fungus is released? It would spread across the whole globe, wouldn't it?”

“Not necessarily. This fungus of yours could easily be engineered to be chemotrophic, meaning exposure to sunlight and oxygen causes it to gradually break down. It might have a built-in time clock of, say ten days—plenty of time to knock out the United States, Canada, and parts of Central America, while sparing South America and the rest of the world.” Halloran ran another piece of crumpled paper over his face. “But don't worry because ten days would be plenty of time to plunge half our population into very real poverty. You'd see the evolution of a new two-class system divided simply into those who can afford food and those who can't. You'd need martial law, curfews, holding pens for the millions of homeless driven to live in the streets. There'd be more people unemployed than working, with the gap continuing to widen because the resources and capital wouldn't be available to reverse the trend. I could go on forever with this, but then so can you. Just use your imagination.”

Dogan had been doing just that for much of the flight, trying to see what the world would be like as Halloran described the Committee's vision. Now, as the 747 streaked for the runway, his mind turned to more immediate concerns. After he had spoken to Halloran, Dogan had initiated a series of calls through usual channels in an attempt to make contact with his own people apart from Division Six. None of the conversations had gone well. There was hesitance, uncertainty, contrivance in the responses of his contacts, and only one explanation was possible: Since Dogan had failed to comply with his orders, he had been quarantined. Field operatives would have been warned not to cooperate with him, especially those he'd worked with in the past. And if the quarantine order was restricted, as he fully expected it was, isolation was just the beginning. Qualified field agents would have an open mandate to take him out.

And there was more. Dogan tried to recall the final words of the woman he had killed in the shack overlooking San Sebastian.

The Committee is changing and there is nothing you can do to stop it. It‘s too late. You can‘t fool me with your words. I know they sent you
.

The last sentences seemed to indicate a charge that
he
was part of the Committee. But if so, who did she represent? Perhaps a faction of the Committee had broken off. But what would such a faction have to gain? The operation was well underway. U.S. crops were going to be wiped out while the Committee began the process of turning South America into the greatest crop producer the world had ever seen. So why would there be need for change? What was it he couldn't stop?

The 747's tires grazed the runway. Dogan rejoiced to be back on the ground, ready to pick up the elusive trail once again. His trip had filled in all the missing pieces of Locke's story. He recalled the college professor's rendition of Lubeck's final words on tape.

I‘m in a position overlooking the fields now. It appears that … Oh, my God. This can‘t be
. It can't be!
I‘m looking out at—

Lubeck must have been looking at the very sight the boy had described for Dogan in San Sebastian: a few fertile rows of crops standing amid utter destruction. The shock of that would have triggered his final, panicked words. Lubeck had known all along the key was food. He must have realized instantly the true significance of San Sebastian. And his report would have detailed it, but they had gotten to him. Yes, it made sense.

What didn't make sense was that on top of all this, something else was going on, as hinted at by the woman in the shack.

The 747 came to a halt at the terminal building.