by Josie Brown
When we’re beyond six of the silos, he starts losing steam. He stumbles to the backside of the nearest silo.
By the time I get to it, he’s climbed halfway up the ladder.
My first shot whizzes past his ear. He pauses, but then goes hand-over-hand on the rungs even more quickly, until he’s at the door on top of the silo.
There’s nothing I can do but follow him. At least up there, he’ll be cornered.
“Who are you, really?” Thomas asks. The question bounces through the silo.
“Does it matter, Thomas? Game over.” I can’t pinpoint him by the sound, and the inside of the silo is pitch black.
From what I can see, a three-foot catwalk spans the length of silo, but what little light there is comes in through the open door and only shows a third of it before recessing into the black abyss beyond. I draw my gun. Then slowly, I step through the doorway.
An overhead light blinds me, but I hear the door closing behind me.
And I certainly don’t see the punch to the gut coming.
Damn it, my gun drops out of my hand, into the corn kernels below. As for me, I fall forward and nearly roll off the catwalk, but I catch hold just in time.
Thomas’s arms reach around my waist. He heaves me up, only to slam my head into the wall before dropping me back on the catwalk. I’m too stunned to do anything but rise onto my knees.
I feel his forearm on my back, bracing my face and shoulders against the catwalk. “It’s a wonderful position for a woman, almost like praying for mercy,” he murmurs. I try not to shiver when he licks my ear. “Ever tried anal sex?”
When I don’t say anything, he takes that as a no.
“Sweet, a virgin! Okay, word of warning: I’ve heard it feels like a hard turd going in backward. But you’ll be happy to know that it doesn’t feel like that on this end. Let me tell you, the sphincter is the tightest muscle in the human body, especially when it tries its damnedest to stay closed.” He laughs. “You better hope I ride you long and hard, because once I’m done with you, I’m tossing you in there.”
He shoves my neck over the edge of the catwalk so that I’m staring down into it. “You won’t see it in the employee video, but we’ve actually had a few poor guys fall off the catwalk. Everyone tries to fight their way out, but no one’s made it yet. It takes five minutes, tops, before they suffocate.”
He slams me back onto the catwalk. He uses his free hand to knock my knees apart. When he tries to pull down my pants, he finds my cuffs.
“Oh, my God, how nice is this?” he crows. “You brought your own play toys!”
He rips them off my belt loop, then jerks me up by my hair in order to cuff my hands in a praying position, before slamming my wrists back onto the catwalk.
I snort. “Really? Do you really believe that tiny thing of yours will reach beyond your gut?”
He smacks me hard on the backside. “You’re about to find out. Giddyap, cowgirl!”
He pulls my pants down onto my thighs. “Nice thong.” He twists it tight. “What say I work around it? It’ll give me something to look at, besides all the blood.”
To ride me, he still has to pull down his pants. I can’t see him, but I can hear him unbuckling his belt, but only with one hand. When he smacks me on the back with it, I flinch, but I don’t groan.
Wait for it…Wait for it.
He unbuttons with one hand again, but he needs two to move the zipper.
I bear down on my forearms and release a high kick with both legs.
It catches him right in the gut.
He falls backward, on his ass. As he struggles to sit up, he gets another kick—this time, in the teeth.
It puts him flat on his back again.
I land on his chest, hard, with both knees. While he gasps for air, I take my elbows and slam his head into the catwalk. He whimpers in pain.
Suddenly, the door opens. I look up to find Jack standing there. Seeing my hands cuffed in front of me, he shrugs. “I took a wild guess that you were all tied up.”
He kneels in order to put the barrel of his gun to Thomas’ forehead. “No sudden moves. No one likes brains with their cornflakes.”
I get up. Jack hands me his handcuffs. “Would you like to do the honors?”
“Do you even have to ask?” I kick Thomas. “Sit up slowly, then put your hands—behind your back.”
He knows better than to disobey. I cuff one hand, then the other. When I’m done, Jack pulls out the key and unlocks my cuffs.
“Now, get up, nice and easy, Dr. Wellborne,” Jack warns him.
The bad doctor rises slowly, and rolls to one side so that he can get onto his knees, then rise on one leg. When he rises on the other, he charges me—
Jack shoots.
Thomas is just inches away when the bullet pierces his back. The light goes out of his eyes. He topples forward—
Onto me.
I try to sidestep his grasp, but I can’t. I flail my arms to get my balance, but I’m caught in the forward momentum of his now-dead body. We both go over the side—
A cloud of corn dust rises as Thomas slaps into it.
On the other hand, I’m dangling in mid-air, upside down, by my ankle.
“I thought you were dieting,” Jack mutters as he heaves me back up onto the catwalk.
I smile. “Why mess with perfection?”
He shrugs. “You’ve got a point. By the way, since I’m already down on one knee, will you marry me?”
“There’s a dead body below us ready to be fast-frozen in a bag of corn kernels, and who knows how many trucks of killer seeds out there on their way to who knows where. I’d say your timing is a little off.”
“You have a point. Business before pleasure.” He gets off his knees.
He heads out the door.
Maybe I was too hard on him. It would have been easy to just have said yes.
But no. This isn’t how I envisioned his proposal would happen. Doesn’t he realize that?
There will be a better time, and a better place, but first things first. When your business is saving the world, everything else has to wait. That’s just the way it is.
Abu and Dominic have already taken the drivers back to Acme’s holding pen.
When we get back to headquarters, Ryan is watching the camera monitor broadcasting from inside the interrogation room. “Where’s Thomas?” he asks.
Jack grimaces. “Dead.”
Ryan frowns. “What part of ‘take him alive’ wasn’t clear to you two?”
I shrug. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the part where he tried to rape me, then toss my body into a silo of corn where I’d suffocate to death.”
Being fluent in Ryan’s grunts, I’m able to make out his apology.
“There’s one bit of good news. The Acme lab rats have compared the seeds to the DNA diagram on one of the cards that was confiscated from the MSS handoff. It’s a match.”
“So, we have the killer seeds right here,” I murmur. I shudder at the thought.
“But not for long,” Ryan assures me. “The FDA is sending a security detail to pick it up and destroy it. Tomorrow, there will be a raid on SeedPlenish. The corn and seed in every silo will be searched, and every corn stalk in the research field will be tested. If it proves to be part of the Exodus strain, it will be confiscated and then destroyed as well.”
“What about the drivers?” Jack asks. “Do they know anything?”
“They’re being held in separate soundproof cells. They’re Mexican illegals, hired by Wellborne for late night deliveries,” he informs us. “They presumed you were an Immigration Service patrol, which is why they took off and ran.”
“In other words, they know nothing about the seeds other than the destinations for their deliveries,” I reason.
“We were able to confiscate their manifests. We can interrogate the receiving entities too,” Jack adds.
“Abu and Dominic are on it, first thing tomorrow,” Ryan replies. “All are Big Agra fa
rms whose corn is distributed to food manufacturers of all kinds. Chances are they didn’t know what they were getting—and wouldn’t, until it was too late.” He pauses to wipe the fatigue from his eyes. “Now for the bad news. Apparently, this wasn’t a first run, at least for one of the drivers. He did another delivery almost two months back, to an independent farmer in Dixon, right up the road.” Ryan scribbles down the address and hands it to me.
It says Clover Hill Farms. “We’ll check it out now,” I promise.
Ryan nods. “Good idea, since it’s still dark. George is standing by, ready to take you by helicopter.”
“Does the corn have any identifying marks?” Jack asks.
Ryan nods. “Its color is almost as much orange as it is yellow, and the stalks have a blue tinge to them. Also, the kernels and husks are larger than normal.”
“Talk about genetically modified,” I mutter.
“The one bit of good news is that this driver also rounded up the other three, so I presume it may have been the first time the Exodus strain made it out of the silo,” Ryan says.
“Let’s hope so,” Jack mutters.
“Unfortunately, two months is just long enough to grow a field of corn, depending on the strain and the temperature conditions,” I explain. “A few years back, we grew a few stalks in the back yard. It was one of Mary’s fifth grade Geography projects.”
“Then that crop should be ready for harvest right about now,” Jack reasons, “if it hasn’t been, already.”
There’s a knock on the door. Hearing Ryan’s bark, Emma enters, pushing a stroller where her infant son, Nicky, sleeps peacefully. Rocking it side to side, she murmurs, “I combed through Jilly McIntosh’s personnel file, and did a background check as well. She’s clean as a whistle: raised in Lodi, basketball star for her high school team, and earned her degree in Genetics from UC-Davis. Unfortunately, she graduated during the Great Recession. She was surviving on minimum wage jobs before she got hired at SeedPlenish. She was certainly overqualified to be a file clerk, but it paid better than anything she had before it, and at least it put her in a field where she could use her training.”
“She must have thought working under Wellborne would be a dream come true. But from the correspondence I saw, it was more like a nightmare.” I shudder. “So, where is she now?”
“Nowhere, from what I can tell. It’s almost as if she’s dropped off the grid.”
“If I’d learned what she had about the Exodus seeds, I would too,” I declare. “Still, she’s going to surface for some reason. And it may be close by, since she’s only been gone a couple of days.”
Emma frowns. “Um…no. She left over a month ago.”
“Are you saying Jilly wasn’t his last file clerk?” I ask. “Odd. But Wellborne did mention two clerks before me. He said one had been there six months, and another just a little under a month.”
“Then Jilly would have been the former,” Emma assures me. “She quit over a month ago. From what the SeedPlenish employee roster shows, another woman—Serena Lee—was hired to replace her.”
Jack shakes his head. “Jeez, I wonder what happened to her?”
“Emma, what can you pull up on this Serena person?” I ask.
“Let me see.” She pulls an iPad from the stroller bag.
A moment later, she exclaims, “Bingo! I started with her SeedPlenish personnel file. Take a look at this!”
Her screen is open to Serena Lee’s employee badge picture: Only it’s Liang Xia.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Jack declares.
“If she showed up the same time Jilly disappeared, maybe she had something to do with it,” I declare.
“Obviously, Jilly was on to Wellborne’s shenanigans,” Jack reasons. “If Xia was his MSS contact, he may have called her in to clean up his mess.”
“Sadly, you’re right,” Abu says. “And here’s the proof.”
We turn to find him standing in the doorway. He holds a picture in his hand. In it, a woman’s head can be seen in a SeedPlenish seed bag. Her eyes are wide open. There is a bullet wound through her forehead. The bag is large enough to hold the rest of her.
“What a shame,” I murmur. “Who is it?”
“She’s the woman you replaced in Wellborne’s office: Jilly McIntosh.” There’s an edge to Jack’s voice.
I know what he’s thinking: I might have met the same fate, if he hadn’t gotten to Wellborne and me.
There’s a good chance that he’s right about that.
But who killed her: Wellborne or Xia? I guess we’ll never know.
“The one link that will uncategorically tie Wellborne to MSS is the money that came into the Caymans bank account,” Jack reminds us. “We should retrieve it.”
“I’ve got operatives pulling Wellborne from the silo as we speak. We’ll copy his prints. Once we get them, I’m sending Dominic to the Caymans to claim the funds and close it down.” Ryan nods toward Jack and me. “In the meantime, you should hit the road for Dixon. And take some matches and butane. The sooner Exodus is annihilated, the better.”
Chapter 7
Crop Circles
Crop circles are large patterns created by people who think it’s fun to flatten the stalks of a farm’s crop, be it corn, oats, grass, or rapeseed.
Typically, these formations are quite intricate.
That being said, if you’re a farmer whose livelihood depends on what you raise and sell, you may not exactly appreciate a bunch of drunken bozos wandering through your field and ruining your crops, let alone be awestruck at the beauty of their handiwork.
The paths they make zigging and zagging through your crops as you spray them with buckshot may not be half as pretty, but you’ll certainly find it a lot more satisfying.
Clover Hill Farms runs east along Interstate 580, just below the Northern California town of Dixon. Arnie has been able to access the SeedPlenish sales file on the farm’s owners, Kerri and Kurt Clement. They not only purchase corn seed from SeedPlenish, but soy as well.
Like most of SeedPlenish’s accounts, the Clements have enjoyed quantity discounts based on how much seed they order. However, one order in particular stands out like a sore thumb because the discount makes it a negligible purchase: it is listed on their billing account as EX-0001.
“For Exodus, perhaps?” Jack asks.
“We’ll find out when we get there,” I reason.
Also in the Clements’ dossier is intel gathered from social media. The Clements’ Facebook and Instagram accounts show their pride in their fifteen-hundred-acre farm, which Kurt’s family has owned for five generations. In one photo, Kurt, jacked and blond, stands tall beside a row of corn, his arms crossed proudly at his chest. Another photo shows Kerri, slim-bodied but round-faced with strawberry-blond plaited pigtails, cradling a large watermelon under each arm. Both are in their mid-thirties.
They have no children. Their social media postings aren’t personal, but specifically about the farm’s prosperity: things like harvesting yields of their crops, or photos of their fields. In other words, their farm is not just their livelihood, but their life as well.
Acme’s pilot, George Taylor, lands our helicopter in a meadow close to Clover Hill Farms’ field of corn, but outside of the fence that surrounds the property. It’s not yet sunrise, but there is a light on downstairs, in the kitchen of the two-story clapboard house beside the barn.
Jack and I make our way to the back door. His knock gets Kerri’s attention. She stops her pot-scrubbing in order to dry her hands before coming to the door to see who’s there at this ungodly hour.
When she gets to it, she doesn’t open it, but stares out at us through the door’s four-pane window. Her face is a mix of confusion and concern. “Can I help you?” she asks.
“Federal agents,” Jack tells her. He holds up an official badge to prove it.
Perplexed, her eyes shift from his face to mine. She hesitates for a moment, then opens the door. “Why are you here? We only use document
ed workers on this farm, and we won’t even hire for another month or so.”
“Hasn’t harvest started for you?” I ask.
She blinks twice before answering—a sure sign that what she’s about to say won’t necessarily be the truth. “Next week sometime.”
“We’re not here about undocumented workers,” Jack explains. “Is Mr. Clement home? He’ll also want to hear what we have to say.”
“He’s…ah, checking on something in one of the back fields. It’s at least two miles down the road. I don’t expect him back until lunchtime.”
Again, the two blinks. I’d love to play poker with this woman. I’d clean up.
Jack raises a brow, so I know he catches it too. “Unfortunately, we have some bad news, and I’m sure he’ll want to hear it. You see, we have reason to believe that a particular corn seed purchased by you—perhaps already planted for the upcoming harvest—includes a strain of toxins that are deadly for human consumption. It goes by the name of Exodus.”
Hearing this, Kerri takes a step back. Her face loses all color. “But—you must be mistaken! I mean, sure, we were told that it’s experimental, but Dr. Wellborne said that what makes it so wonderful, beyond its extraordinary yield capacity, is its ability to repel pests.”
Perhaps pests have an innate ability to avoid plants that are toxic to them, but this is not something I need to share with Kerri Clement while she’s having a meltdown.
“Dr. Wellborne talked to you directly about it, as opposed to your SeedPlenish sales rep?” Jack asks.
“Yes. I thought it was strange that he made the trip here, to the farm. But he told us that he wanted to personally invite us to be the test farm for Exodus, since we have an ideal growing situation. You see, we use only natural pesticides, but at the same time, we aren’t opposed to using GMO strains. Dr. Wellborne also guaranteed that our full crop would be purchased upon harvest by a specific broker who distributes to a variety of food manufacturers. That way, SeedPlenish would get specific feedback regarding the end-use quality.”