Project Moses - A Mystery Thriller (Enzo Lee Mystery-Thriller Series) (26 page)

He realized he was sweating like a fiend. He felt like turning around and hightailing it toward the highway in the distance. At the same time, Lee was curious about the rice paddies in the desert. As his heart stopped pounding, the urge to run lessened. The fact that he had miraculously avoided becoming buzzard bait didn’t change the fact that Lee still had to find out what AgriGenics was up to. Spending the night hitchhiking to Phoenix wasn’t going to advance the ball at all.

Lee got to his feet and headed back to the house. He climbed the stairs cautiously and pulled open the wood and screen door. A single table lamp lit the living room. The driver sat in a short upholstered chair near the lamp.

In the light, Lee could see he had close cropped blond hair and was well muscled. He was wearing jeans, hiking boots and a University of New Mexico T-shirt. He looked like the All American young man.

The other two looked like they also were in their middle to late 20s. They sat on a gold colored sofa against the far wall. A stocky guy with acne and curly black hair, wearing khaki pants, deck shoes and a polo shirt, held a cloth to his nose filled with what looked like ice. The third man had a medium build and a mop of unruly blond curls. He wore jeans and a work shirt and had a ludicrous grin on his face.

Lee saw an overstuffed chair on the wall next to the doorway he was standing in. He sat in it while the three watched.

“You know who I am. Who are you?” began Lee.

“I’m Bob,” said the driver. “The guy whose nose you broke is Chris. And that’s Rick.”

Lee nodded toward Chris.

“‘Sorry about the nose,” he said.

“Not half as sorry as you would be if I had my way,” snarled Chris. The other two said nothing. Apparently he was rehashing an issue that had already been settled.

“You all work for AgriGenics.” Lee said it as a statement, not a question. “Are you involved in the genetics work?”

Bob shook his head.

“We have ag backgrounds. We take what the genetics people produce and grow it. You know, start with the test plots and work up to large scale cultivation to develop seed stock.”

“And, that’s what you’re doing here?”

Bob nodded.

“Why here?” said Lee. “I mean, why are you growing rice here? Why not California or Texas?”

“That’s a good question,” said Bob. “You saw the paddies. All that water comes from wells. The cost of growing rice here is incredible.”

“Yeah,” said Rick, still grinning. “The electric bill is just insane, not to mention what is happening to the water table.”

“We’re pretty sure it’s because of the spraying,” said Bob.

“The spraying?” said Lee.

“Hey,” interrupted Chris, leaning forward on the sofa, moving the ice from one hand to the other. “Why are we telling him this? Why don’t we just turn him over to security and let them deal with him?”

Bob held out a hand to silence him.

“We’ve talked about this,” he said to Chris. “We decided we wouldn’t do that.”

Then, Bob directed his attention to Lee.

“They have security guys running around here who are real goons. They’ve got guns and dogs. They spy on us. We’re pretty sure they bug the phones. They told us you might be snooping around. It sounded like they wanted to feed you to the coyotes.

“I don’t want to be responsible for that,” Bob continued, shaking his head. “I can’t believe I’m actually talking about people being killed. I didn’t sign on for this kind of thing.”

Rick was nodding his head. Chris held his nose in silence.

“This rice that we’re growing is made of up many different varieties,” said Bob. “They’re all supposedly modified to be resistant to a certain type of fungus. They’ve been created for that specific purpose. In addition to growing it for seed purposes, we’re spraying the plants, trying to infect it with this fungus to make sure it really is resistant.

“And that’s why we’re out here, we think,” continued Bob. “We think they wanted us to run the test where there would be no chance of infecting any other rice. The spores would have to travel 500 miles to the next rice plant, maybe more. It’s a long way.”

“Okay,” said Lee. “That makes sense, I guess. So, what is it that’s bothering you? Obviously, there’s something about this that doesn’t seem right to you.”

“Yeah,” said Bob, glancing at the other two on the sofa for affirmation. “Well, they told us that the fungus was genetically engineered. They told us what to look for in case the fungus takes hold. We’ve researched the literature. This is different than anything in the literature. Worse.

“Another thing is that we’ve seen the projections for growing more seed rice,” he continued. “They’ll take stuff from here and contract with farmers to grow more, a lot more. I mean, the projections call for thousands of tons. There would be enough to replace the seed supplies all over the world and then some.

“Finally,” said Bob. “The different varieties we’re growing include types from all around the world. But, some of them are only grown in the United States.

“You add it all up, and it seems to us like someone is gearing up for a disaster that hasn’t happened yet,” he went on. “We’ve been talking about this for a couple of weeks now. It’s not what we signed on to do. It’s not right. We just feel like we ought to tell somebody.”

Rick, and even Chris, were nodding their heads in agreement.

•   •   •

IN THE THIRD floor conference room at the AgriGenics headquarters, Brian Graylock sat at one end of the table with his arms folded. He wore a dove gray suit with a yellow tie that had a perfect knot. At the other end, in shirt sleeves and with their ties loosened, were Gary Jacobs, AgriGenics vice president of production, and his chief assistant, Peter Silver.

“Don’t tell me what
can’t
be done,” said Graylock. “Tell me what
can
be done.”

“Brian,” said Jacobs. “What we’re saying is that we can meet the targets for rice and corn. But we’re six months behind on wheat and rye.”

“Right,” said Silver. “We would be eight months behind, but we can use greenhouses with fluorescent lights for the initial stage. That should shave off some time. But, beyond that, we can’t make the plants grow any faster.”

“You are telling me that we will miss an
entire
growing season,” said Graylock. “That is
unacceptable
. That will cost this company hundreds of millions, maybe billions.”

“Brian,” said Jacobs. “If we had gotten the seed on time, we would be sitting pretty. You can only hurry nature so much. We’re still waiting for some seed even now.”

“All right,” said Graylock. “What we’re really concerned about is the domestic market in the first year. It will take another year for the rest of the world to be affected. What happens if we scale back the targets to just the American market?”

Jacobs and Silver exchanged glances.

“Well, that’s something we can work with,” said Silver. He flipped up the screen on a laptop computer and began inserting numbers into a spreadsheet program.

“I think we might be pretty close,” he said a few minutes later. “Here, let me print this out so we can look at the spreadsheet.”

Silver popped a small disk out of the laptop and walked out of the conference room. When he returned four minutes later, he had copies of a spreadsheet that he slid across the table to Jacobs and Graylock.

“And this came out of the printer after I put some paper in,” Silver held up a single sheet of paper with a column of numbers on it. Graylock held out his hand and Silver flipped the page toward him like it was a Frisbee.

It slid to a stop in front of Graylock. He let it sit on the table while he studied the numbers. Then, he picked it up slowly, still studying it as he stood up and began walking toward the door.

“We’ll go the production problems tomorrow morning,” he said as he walked out of the conference room, still staring at the page.

Graylock walked into his massive office. During the day, it had a fantastic view of the rolling foothills. His desk was huge and made of teak. The walls were bare except for six oil paintings by Dutch masters.

Graylock picked up one of his three telephones. He dialed the number for the guard house at the entrance of the employees’ parking lot. The guard was surprised to get a call from Graylock himself.

“Who else came here tonight?” asked Graylock. He was silent while the guard ran through the short list of names.

•   •   •

SAM SCHWARTZ HAD put the dirty glasses into the dishwasher and switched it on. He was in his pajamas. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a container of Ben and Jerry’s Oreole Cookie ice cream. It was his usual bedtime snack, an indulgence he justified by speed walking two miles almost every morning.

He hummed to himself as he scooped the ice cream into a clear glass bowl. He was relieved that the evening visit to AgriGenics had gone without a hitch. It was great to see Arthur again. He and Arthur had been communicating electronically for some time and recently he had been funneling Sendaki selected internal records and electronic messages. But, taking the young woman into the company and sneaking out with sensitive records was another matter. Exhilarating, but nerve wracking, too. Brian Graylock terrified him. He was as ruthless as he was devious. Schwartz hoped that what he had help find would help bring Graylock down.

When the front doorbell rang, Schwartz put away the container and left the bowl on the counter with a spoon stuck in the ice cream. He wondered if Sendaki and Sarah had returned to ask him more questions.

He almost opened the door, but then remembered all the stories he had been reading about robberies and home invasions. So, he decided to look through the eye port in the middle of the door to see who it was.

Through the fisheye lens, Schwartz saw a swarthy looking man with a mustache. He looked Middle Eastern. Then, something covered up the eye port. Schwartz was still trying to figure out what it was when a .38 caliber bullet blasted through the port, tore through his brain, and exited through the back of his head. He was dead when he hit the floor.

Chapter 33

G.W. FISH STOOPED in the rich loam in the plot at one end of the long greenhouse. The plot held six rows of mature corn, twenty-four separate varieties in all. Fish looked like a surgeon wearing a green smock, matching protective pants, latex gloves, and coverings for his feet and head. He also wore what looked like a pair of glasses with a jeweler’s magnifying glass in place of the right lens.

He inspected a leaf that had been tagged around the stem with a plastic yellow tie. The leaf was a mass of black fungus growth and dead, brown plant tissue. Fish jotted down a few notes in the skinny notebook he carried in his back pocket.

He moved to the other leaves of the same cornstalk. He found large black spots everywhere. The plant was riddled with it. Fish then moved away from the plant that he had originally infected on the single leaf with the fungus known only as J-287. He examined the other cornstalks, getting farther and farther away from the original infection site. He found spots of the black fungus on every plant. He measured the spots and took copious notes.

After Fish finished inspecting the corn, he moved on to the important part of his survey. He moved to the plot at the far end of the greenhouse, 200 feet away from where he started. The plot held several types of wild grasses, including the varieties that forced corn farmers to use herbicides because they constantly threatened to invade their fields. Most of the grasses also showed the signs of J-287 infection despite the considerable distance from the initial infection site and the fact that the greenhouse protected everything in it from the wind that sometimes blew ferociously at Mendocino on the northern California coast.

The only wind in the greenhouse was generated by fans at the top which sucked air out of the greenhouse. This kept the greenhouse at a slightly negative air pressure and ensured that the reproductive spores of the fungus would not drift out an open door. The fans that blew the air out had special filters to trap the spores.

As Fish had expected, J-287 had successfully infected in the greenhouse a good sampling of the varieties of corn grown commercially in the United States, including strains specifically developed to be resistant to fungi. It had accomplished this despite treatments of various fungicides.

What pleased Fish the most, however, was the fact that J-287 thrived on the grasses as well as the corn. Fish had transplanted a key gene from a similar fungus that used the grasses as its host. That had been Fish’s true inspiration in creating J-287 and what distinguished J-287 from earlier generations of the fungus that Fish had created. It had transformed the fungus from a nasty problem to an agricultural nightmare. What it meant was that destruction of infected fields would not stop J-287. It would spread through the grass, making an end run around the most drastic field burns.

Short of dropping a hydrogen bomb, then, there was no way to deny J-287 the host plants it needed to flourish and expand its conquered territory once it was off and running. Until new chemicals and new strains of corn were developed, J-287 was unstoppable.

As he pulled away from the greenhouse in his pickup for the long drive back to Palo Alto, Fish felt a supreme sense of satisfaction. His only regret was that he wouldn’t be able to name J-287 as should have been his privilege. That honor would fall to some poor bastard who would isolate J-287 in a futile attempt to stop it.

•   •   •

IT WAS MIDDAY when Lee returned to Phoenix. He had only slept for a few hours in a spare bedroom provided by the AgriGenics farmboys, as he now thought of them. His face was sore and his left eye was turning black. His kidneys hurt where Chris had pummelled him. They had driven him back to the converted hangar outside of Cartwright where Lee retrieved the Tempo. The farmboys had provided him with samples of the rice plants they were growing. In the glove compartment there also sat a small bottle with a screw-on top filled with the fungus solution that was being sprayed on the rice.