* * *
Secretary McInerney picked up the phone and dialed Jack Swofford’s extension at the EPA. While it was connecting, Elias skimmed through the report regarding the latest crop yields one last time. He always knew something was off about the GMO produced studies and reports. The results from Bathemore and the CDC concerning how EC31 reacted with the GMOs, and the surrounding environment, had just confirmed it. He had read the report a dozen times already that morning. Elias continued to be astounded with each re-read. He needed Jack on board. The two government agencies would need to present a united front if they were going to make the report public knowledge. After three rings, Jack’s office admin answered.
“Administrator Swofford’s office. How may I –“
“Connie, this is Elias McInerney. Is he in?” he asked quickly.
Receiving a call from the head of the USDA personally had stymied her. “Uh, yes, sir. He’s in conference with your Deputy Secretary.”
“Great!” he exclaimed. “I’m coming over. Whatever you do, do not interrupt their meeting and do not let them know that I am on my way.”
“But sir, I,” she began to object, but was quickly cut off again.
“Connie, this is a huge cluster and I’m about to right some serious wrongs,” Elias said in slow even tone.
It wasn’t that he was concerned about being overheard, but rather it was more for her to understand that some stuff was about to hit the fan.
“Sir, will I lose my job over this? I’m only three months away from full retirement,” she practically whispered.
“No, Connie, you won’t lose either. Just keep her there, okay?” he said as he tried to reassure her.
“All right,” she stated hesitantly, “they should be in there for another twenty minutes or so given the block on his calendar. Can you get here by then,” she asked.
“Be there in ten,” he said and then abruptly hung up the phone.
The half-mile walk between the agencies was quick. Elias cut out the back of the USDA building, went through the National Mall, and up 12th Street Northwest. Jack Swofford’s office was located on the third floor of the EPA East structure.
As was his norm, Elias took the stairs. Once there, he walked through the open ornate wood French doors and into the waiting area of Jack’s office. Connie was sitting there behind her oversized antique desk looking mortified.
“Are they still in there,” he asked barely out of breath.
“Yes, sir,” she replied in a meek tone.
Not stopping to fully hear her reply, Elias grabbed the handle. In one fluid movement, he turned the knob, pushed it open, and burst into the room.
When he entered, he was totally unprepared for what he found. In front of him on the floor were Mary and Jack mid coitus. Mary was sitting on top of Jack, straddling his groin. Her skirt was hiked up above her waist and her blouse was unbuttoned. Mary’s breasts were rhythmically rising and falling with each vertical grinding movement she made.
Seeing this, Elias reversed his grip, grabbed the interior handle of the door, and slung it backward. It slammed shut with a loud crash the two lovers were immediately jolted back to reality.
Mary let out an audible scream and hurriedly rolled off of Jack. She quickly began fumbling with the buttons on her blouse as she dove behind Jack’s desk.
“You know they have hotels in this city for just such a purpose,” Elias said calmly as the pair tried to discreetly get dressed. It was clear that he wasn’t about to leave the room and afford them any degree of privacy.
“Would you like to tell me why the two of you are fornicating on the floor of your office,” he rhetorically asked the two, as Jack hastily pulled his trousers back up and began fastening them.
Jack began to answer with a halfhearted, “Well, we, um –“
“Don’t bother, Jack. I don’t really care. Neither of you are married, but you should be if you’re gonna do that. I was starting to wonder about Mary here.”
Mary shouted incredulously, “What!”
“What do you mean ‘what’, Mary. You never speak of dating in the office. I haven’t been asked by you to leave early for a date, ever. What else am I supposed to think when you offered to mentor Mara? Then my niece tells me about clandestine meetings between you and Jack here so I slowly put it all together.”
“Well, for starters, it’s none of your damn business who I see. Or whether or not I prefer men or women, you old bastard! I took an interest in her because –”
“Just stop, Mary. Whatever you’re about to say is a load of crap! I should have smelled something from the start. I figured you guys were up to no good, but I didn’t know what. So I decided to let it play out.”
“What? We’re not up to anything aside from an innocent little office romance,” Jack offered hoping Elias wasn’t aware of their end run on the study increases.
“Did you honestly think I wouldn’t find out that you and Jack were colluding to increase the field count from two thousand to five thousand for EC31?” Elias asked.
Jack’s heart sank. “We’re screwed,” he whispered to Mary.
“You are a naïve fool Mary,” the Secretary thundered.
Jack began to protest and feign ignorance, but Elias cut him off as well.
“I don’t want to hear it, Jack. The two of you are such conniving bastards that it boggles the mind,” Elias said matter-of-factly.
“Us? What the hell are you talking about Elias?” Jack shot back. “We are the ones trying to make things go faster around here. You’re the captain of the S.S. Bureaucracy in this town. If we left it up to you, nothing would get approved with any sort of appreciable speed. All of the food generated in this country would be grown from heirloom seeds and bugs, pests, and disease would ravage them. We’d have no food, no organized agriculture... zip, nada, niente. It’d be a bunch of hunter gatherers and little old ladies with victory gardens!”
“That may be, Jack. However, did it ever occur to you that my conservativeness and trepidation with these GMOs and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is simply a byproduct of fulfilling the USDA mission of preserving public safety? Ironically, it’s the FDA mission as well, Jack. Or, did you forget that part while you were fooling around with my second in command? If we let every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a chemistry set start experimenting with our food supply, we’d all be screwed.”
“You don’t actually still believe that do you,” Mary said as she jumped back into the fray, now fully dressed. “I mean come on, seriously. It’s that type of mentality that keeps Africans eating sand.”
“Mary, ‘Africans are eating sand’, as you call it, because of hundreds of years of drought, an ever expanding desert, and a serious lack of irrigated crop lands. Don’t be a fool,” Elias snapped. “The African plight notwithstanding, if you two would have waited for the second year results, and the private study I commissioned, you would have known that the GMOs are genetically altering anything that consumes them over a prolonged period. EC31 exposed the GMOs for the genetic time bomb that they truly are.”
“That’s quite the leap, Elias,” Jack said. “How do you figure that?”
“Had you waited, you’d have learned that the GMO crops have only served to heighten the probability for about twelve types of cancers, birth defects, and a number or mental disorders.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Elias? We had them remove the gene that codes for the Bt toxin back in 2013 after it was proven to have caused the colony collapse,” Jack interjected. “That cancer stuff though. What’s that?”
“Oh, piqued your interests now, did I, Jack?” Elias retorted. “I know we had the Bt gene removed, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. All of our previous tests were preliminary, but now we have empirical data. This study shows that the prolonged consumption of GMOs, by itself, won’t cause cancer. However, consuming GMO laden products continuously will drastically increase the likelihood for these issues. When the geneticists altered the plan
t’s DNA, it didn’t stop with the seed.”
Jack stood stock still, bug eyed, staring at the folder that Elias was waving around in his hand when Mary attempted to defend their actions. She barely got a word out before Elias cut her off with his continued argument.
“Here’s a question for you, Mary. What is cancer?” he asked.
“What is cancer?” Mary repeated.
“Yes, Mary, at its most basic level, what is cancer?” Elias clarified.
“It’s when your body grows cells abnormally,” Mary stammered.
“Now you, Jack. Here’s an easy one. What causes cancer? What would be the cause of this abnormal growth?”
“Anything can cause cancer. Heredity and exposure for sure,“ Jack quickly answered like an over eager student.
Elias touched his finger to his nose to indicate a correct answer and said, “Bingo, heredity.”
As he took a seat in one of the oversized leather chairs in Jack’s office, the Secretary explained, “When I was at Texas A&M, a classmate of mine asked our pathology professor what caused pancreatic cancer. Now, everyone in the class knew that the young man had just lost his father to the disease so the instructor answered the boy’s question very delicately. I’ll spare you the sermon, but like you said, Jack, it basically all boiled down to heredity, or genetics, and environment.
He told the boy that his dad had most likely inherited a bad piece of DNA from one of his parents, the boy’s paternal grandparents. So if a child receives one good gene and one altered gene, over time, even the good copy may become irreparably harmed. When both genes in a pancreas are fried, the result is pancreatic cancer.”
“And the father’s environment?” Mary asked in a concerned tone.
”Apparently, the father drank and smoked heavily. It was these environmental factors that aided in the destruction, or damaging, of the good gene. Once it’s damaged, there’s no going back.”
After a moment of reflection, the Deputy Secretary questioned, “That’s a very sad, but how does that have anything to do with the GMOs crops and EC31?”
“Mary, did it ever occur to either of you that after three plus decades of the GMOs being the norm in our food supply, the autism rates went from roughly one in a hundred-thousand to one in eighty-eight? In 2000, the number of people in this country with Alzheimer’s related mental issues was around four and half million. In 2020 the number was six million. Hell, ten percent of the U.S. population has a food allergy. Don’t you two ever stop and ask why these things are occurring?”
“Now hold on a minute, Elias,” Mary began. “The human race has never come close to living as long as they do today. Science has a great deal to do with that. Did it ever occur to you that the incidence rates went up because of life expectancy or advances in diagnosis or a broadening of the scope for classification? Some leading researchers have stated that it was an evolutionary shift in our genetic code. Others might even go so far as to say that the scientific community, the GMOs, and all of the progress we’ve made in disease and pest control had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was simple natural selection.”
“Seriously, Elias,” Jack said as he began to regain his composure. “Parents in the prime of their life that have a child with autism isn’t a fluke. It’s because one, or both, of them are carrying the gene. The severity observed in the child is attributable to a number of factors. You know this. Hell, Elias, it could be because of the lead fillings in their teeth, or they used their cell phone too much, or the mercury in the inoculations, and maybe they stood to close to a microwave for too long.”
“Yeah, that’s what they say,” Elias began a reply. In a soft, somber tone he followed with, “It could be a host of things in any combination or order; defective genes coupled with the shots, or a family that cooked exclusively with metal utensils on non-stick cookware. It could be a litany list of items and situations either separately or mashed together. Nevertheless, you’re missing my point, Jack. I’m saying that maybe they didn’t have to have the genetic defect to begin with.”
Elias removed himself from the deep cushion leather chair he had been sitting in and stood. He turned slightly to address Mary standing behind the desk, raised his tone and thundered, “I think that the cocktail this nation has been fed led to a molecular mutation. I sure as hell don’t believe it was natural or evolutionary.
“By definition, evolution is an adaptive method needed in order to survive. How the hell is an increase in the likelihood of having a child with autism an evolutionary leap, Mary?”
Jack slowly began to make his way over to Mary in an attempt to show solidarity with her when Elias addressed them both.
“To tell you the truth, it feels like a never ending vicious cycle in this country. Companies and industries think they’re on the cutting edge with some new whiz-bang product and then, BAM! Turns out that prolonged exposure causes cancer, birth defects, you name it. Non-stick cookware poisoned people for thirty years before we finally got it pulled and the formula retooled. Geez-oh-Pete, Jack,” he continued passionately. “Even the liners inside of canned goods were killing folks.”
“You’re both probably too young to remember DDT. That little number did wonders for the environment. Now fast forward a couple decades and you have the dawn of the genetically modified plant and the advent of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, which you approved the majority of by the way, Jack. Add it all up and you have a recipe for pain and suffering on a scale that we’ve never seen before. Here Jack,” he said as he tossed the report at Jack’s chest. “Read it for yourself.”
Jack began leafing through the report and reading various sections of the data. Mary tried to catch bits and pieces over his shoulder as he turned the pages. Elias stood there patiently waiting for the contents of the report to sink in for the two of them.
After a few silent minutes, Mary responded, “Where did you get this information?”
“Like I said, I commissioned a private study.”
“You know they will try and sue you, the USDA, the U.S. Government, or all three. Don’t you,” Jack said.
“Yep.”
“Oh my God, Elias, your conclusions,” Mary said as she read the Executive Summary again. “Are you calling for the tilling under of all GMO fields and starting over?”
“That’s exactly what he’s saying, Mary,” Jack said dejectedly.
Chapter 3
January 8th, 2022
Sheriff James Watson pulled off of County Highway 18 onto the sand drive and headed into the woods. At the end of the secluded lane was the cabin and farm of Josiah “Josh” Simmons. Jim Watson had been Sheriff of Vinton County for over twenty years. He and his deputies had seen their fair share of crimes and misdemeanors. The residents may be country folk, but they still believed in an eye for an eye. That suited him just fine.
This wasn’t Jim’s first encounter with Josh. Their introduction a decade or so earlier had been facilitated by Josh’s application to harvest some deer that were making a nuisance of themselves. The county Natural Resource office had asked the local lawman to verify that Josh hadn’t processed the animal. When he got there, not only had Josh butchered it, but he was in the process of smoking the various cuts of meat. The non-prime portions were soon to be jerky.
If a rural county Sheriff knows anything, it’s when to look the other way. That, and Josh gave him five pounds of venison for his trouble. Josh never bothered to ask permission again. He’d just show up at the Sheriff’s office with a hunk of something wrapped in butcher paper.
In all, Jim had visited the farm on ‘official’ business over a half dozen times throughout the years. It was usually at the request of Josh’s neighbor. Every time she complained, it was always for the same thing, ‘strange lights’ and construction noises. The Sheriff would always laugh whenever he got one of those calls because she made it sound like an alien landing.
More than a decade earlier, Josh’s life began to unravel as he learned of his wife’s addi
ction. He had been a hard worker with a wife and two kids living in suburban America. After leaving the Marine Corps, he had been an IT Project Manager while Amanda was a nurse. In fact, she had been one of his nurses at the VA. As far as Josh could discern, Amanda’s adultery led to guilt which took her back into her dependency. Those addictions were easy enough to satisfy in a hospital. She and her family had successfully kept the secret of her past issues from him for their entire marriage. It wasn’t until the kidnapping of his daughters that Josh discovered their betrayal.
Josh spent two months on trial for what he did to the two men that had abducted his little girls.
Once the divorce was finalized, Josh had cashed out his 401K savings and purchased the acreage in southeastern Ohio. The farm itself was a little over one hundred and fifty acres in the middle of rolling hills and forest. For two years after the kidnapping, Josh and his childhood friend, Dallas, home schooled Layla and Katherine. The girls were in college now and the visits and phone calls were less frequent. They had finally started a life outside of the protective world their father had created for them.
Josh had just exited the shower and was preparing to head to bed when he heard the driveway alarm chime go off. He grabbed a clean pair of jeans, a well-worn flannel shirt, and quickly put them on.
He had installed several wired vehicle detector systems shortly after purchasing the property. They didn’t cost much and they weren’t inadvertently triggered by the abundant wildlife in the area. They only sounded when metal passed between the sensors. He swore that intruders would never surprise him again.
The detectors were placed at regular intervals throughout the length of the half-mile long driveway. Each was concealed behind strategically planted evergreens and connected to a harness. In all, there were five sensors programmed to a specific tone. As each was tripped, they would chime in the cabin.
In addition to the metal detecting driveway security precaution, Josh had also installed a closed circuit television system, or CCTV. Taking full advantage of the open utility trenches during the construction of the cabin, all of the necessary wiring had been run to the cameras he mounted in the trees lining the drive. They were so small they wouldn’t be noticed by anyone unless they knew where to look. In truth, Josh thought about employing a lot more tech at the farm, but the costs for anything more became a deterrent. In the end, he decided that the inexpensive safety blanket was a satisfactory first line of defense.
When Rome Stumbles Page 3