The Cure

by Freddie Villacci Jr

  “Who’s Bic Green?”

  Her chin fell to her chest. “I already explained. He’s my uncle,” she said softly.

  “Gracie…” His voice was even softer.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Gracie, look at me. You know there is no Bic Green. The man who was your guardian after your mother died was named Forrest Jenkins and he died two years ago.”

  “What?”

  "Gracie, I’m getting tired of this game you’re playing.”

  “Forrest who? I don’t even know who that is! Bic Green is my uncle.”

  The agent shook his head while she spoke.

  “Gracie, these patents are garbage, and you know it. Your so-called research is garbage. Your uncle is dead. Come on. Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “No, I don’t think—”

  His voice rose. “Then why are you treating me like I’m some kind of idiot? Because you’re a fake scientist? A kid who grew up in the ghetto with something to prove? Always taking crap because she wasn’t who she thought she was? You wanted to be a superstar, didn’t you?”

  “No, stop—”

  “You’re a smart girl, there’s no doubt about that. But you’re a little too big for your britches, you know what I mean?”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You’re not too big?”

  “No, that’s not—”

  “Then why don’t you come clean with me?”

  Her voice broke. “Can’t you see what’s happening? Someone’s erasing my whole life, changing it to make me look like a terrorist!”

  “Why would they do that, Gracie? Why would someone want to go through all the trouble to make you, a little scientist, look bad?”

  “My cure,” she said defiantly.

  Again, the shake of the head. “Isn’t that just another example of you thinking yourself more important than anyone else?”

  “Not true.”

  “You couldn’t get FDA trials. The federal government knew your research was faked.”

  Gracie looked into the man’s eyes. A realization took hold of her. Not being able to get into the FDA trials, all those roadblocks she thought were just part of the tough path to success, they were more than that.

  “Somebody framed me,” she stated flatly. “Someone doesn’t want me to cure cancer.”

  The man scoffed with a smile. “Come on, Enough.”

  Gracie shook her head. “No. There are six multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies that derive 50 percent or more of their revenue from their cancer drugs.”

  “Oh, I see. This is the Big Pharma conspiracy.”

  “You want to put it like that? Fine.”

  “And what’s next? The lizard people from Neptune are pissing fluoride in the reservoirs?”

  Gracie sat back and turned her head. “I’m not saying another word.”

  “You know, I misjudged you. I looked at you and thought, here was this girl who had to fight for everything in life. Had nothing but her brain. And she did get somewhere with that brain, but something went terribly wrong. But you know what, Gracie? I was mistaken. You know what I think? I don’t think you have an ounce of brainpower working in your favor. I think you really are that cold-blooded terrorist—”

  “No—”

  “Anti-American. Someone who hates our country because she has to blame everyone but herself for her own shortcomings.”

  “The Constitution allows me due process.”

  “You’re a cold-blooded terrorist.”

  “I’m entitled to my rights as a citizen.”

  “What was next on the agenda? A plane-load of passengers and a box cutter?”

  Gracie leapt to her feet, causing Kessinger to jump back in his seat and the burly guard to rush to his defense, restraining Gracie.

  “It’s okay, Jim. I’ve got it from here,” Agent Quinn said as he walked into the room.

  Jim shot a death glare back at Gracie as he exited the room, muttering, “Feebs.”

  “I have nothing else to say,” Gracie snapped.

  Quinn smiled and held up his hands. “I come in peace.” He sat down in Kessinger’s chair. “I like you better without the dried blood and skull fragments in your hair.”

  His light blue eyes drew her in. “Yeah, they were nice enough to let me shower without shackles”

  Quinn looked at the file of worthless patent applications on the table. “Gracie, I gotta level with you. This doesn’t look good.”

  “Bic said they would frame me, but I didn’t want to believe him.”

  “I read the report of the CIA agents first on the scene, and they killed two of the terrorists and said two escaped in the van, and you in a pickup truck, after two of their men were ambushed and killed. They said nothing about another man. From your description, this other man doesn’t sound like the type that someone would forget easily.”

  “If that’s what the CIA report said, then they’re lying. I saw Bic shoot one of the terrorists right in the head just before they were going to execute me.”

  “Gracie, you have no proof. Even your uncle Bic—by the way if you’re talking about your legal guardian, his name was Forrest Jenkins—he doesn’t even exist. Everything you’ve said up until this point has been a lie and we both know that.”

  Gracie glared at Quinn, thinking that there must be something, before long it hit her. “If the CIA killed the two terrorists, then how in the world did I have the brains of one of them sprayed all up in my hair? You saw the nasty matter yourself. That proves they’re lying.”

  “At 5:09, we received intel on your location, and we have the satellite images of a pickup truck and a white van leaving the farm after the CIA got there. You claim ‘Bic’—which we know there is no Bic—left in the van. If so, the CIA operatives would have seen this other man, and so would the satellite.”

  “They are flat out lying,” Gracie spat. “Quinn, people need me, all these suffering people with no hope—you have to believe me! I have the cure.”

  “Where is this cure?”

  Here Gracie paused, wanting to say something to Quinn, but not willing to show all her cards just yet.

  Quinn leaned in and spoke with a soft sincerity as his eyes became moist with an awful pain. “Gracie, there’s no one who wants to believe you more than me.”

  “Then try to prove me right.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. We’re going to test the DNA on your clothes, but if this doesn’t match, there are two terrorists on the loose. I need you to give me something in return. Fair?”

  After a long stare, Gracie nodded. Quinn nodded back, then left the room.

  24

  From high above, the land plots in central Iowa look like a puzzle made of nothing but square and rectangular pieces of only a few varying sizes. Within each piece is a plot of farmland. If one were to descend upon one of them, one would see stalks of corn six feet high stretching out in a vast sea of wind-waving green. During September’s cooling days, and the beginning of the corn harvesting season in Iowa, the ocean of stalks soon to be cut down waved in the gentle winds. The cutters will have a six-to-eight-week window in which to do it. Then their yellow gold will be sent all over the world.

  Brad Thomson—the name he bought to start over—knew this as well as anyone. He crooned along to Hank Jr.’s A Country Boy Can Survive as he drove his John Deere combine with its eight-row corn header attached. Honey and a greenish floral smell filled the humid air, and he wiped at his neck with a do-rag.

  He had bought the secondhand machine along with the modest farm six years ago. He liked the farming life, having grown up in it along with his brother, whom he called Kid, and he enjoyed the fourteen-hour days. He needed the long days to keep his mind occupied.

  Brad sang decently in tune as the combine’s header munched the massive rows of corn like some huge metal Pac-Man. To his left were the 200 acres he’d already mown down, and to his right were about 700 more w
aiting to be harvested. Short of any maintenance issues, he’d be done with the harvest in about two and a half weeks.

  A disturbance in the stalks caught his eye. There was a straight line being cut through the field about 100 yards away—coming straight toward him. He’d heard stories of kids driving trucks through the fields for kicks, but this seemed unlikely considering it was early afternoon. Then the straight line broke into three lines. One was still coming right at him, the second going to his rear flank, and the third toward his front. From his past, he recognized this for what it was: a military tactic.

  Brad downshifted the combine, placed it into park, and reached behind the seat. He kept an old camo backpack there, filled with goodies. He turned up the song and sang it loud and proud as he pulled the pin on a smoke grenade, opened the tractor door, and dropped the grenade to the ground. The white cloud continued to spew out of the grenade, quickly creating ample cover as one Humvee came to a stop with 15 yards of corn between them. Four men in Desert Storm fatigues jumped out of the vehicle with MP5 and laser sights turned on. The other two vehicles smashed out of the corn, then cut their wheels to a quick stop, one in front and one behind the combine.

  Twelve men in total, flanked from three sides, pointed their lasers into the dense fog consuming the tractor and combine.

  “Federal agents. We want to talk to you,” yelled one of the men, cautiously standing behind his Humvee… As if anyone ever sent three heavily-armed assault squads “just to talk.”

  We’ll talk then, thought Brad Thomson. And he grabbed his camo pack and leapt out onto the ground.

  From 200 yards away, Jaco Ivanov watched his men through his sniper scope. The white cloud rolled towards them.

  This wasn’t going to be pretty.

  Being the eyes of the operation, he spoke into his radio and into all his men’s earpieces: “Roll back, you’re losing visibility fast.” Then muttered to himself, “Jesus. Dunces.”

  The difference between a killer and an agent is that an agent is trained to assess then react. It is at their core. Killers simply act, and with lethal intent.

  Before his men could react, he saw three small black balls fly out of the cloud, one after another, right toward the vehicles. When they hit the ground, three explosions boomed out in near-unison.

  Instantaneously the vehicles, and several of the men who’d occupied them, were engulfed in flames.

  The few that survived the explosions opened fire at the smoke cloud. Bullets spattered in all directions. Some of it was friendly fire. He yelled into his radio to cease fire as he witnessed them picking each other off.

  After several attempts to get the men to stop, finally things went silent.

  Jaco barked out, “Get into the corn and form a perimeter!”

  25

  Brad quietly hummed to himself to keep his anger in check. He wasn’t sure how they’d found him, but he sure didn’t appreciate them coming onto his property to tie up their loose ends. He loved this farm, and now that they knew his location, he’d have to walk away. And so, though he could have fled into the 700-acre cornfield, he decided instead to send a little message for the next crew to think about before they decided it was a good idea to pay him a visit.

  Brad crouched still as death, a silenced Beretta in each hand, nestled beneath his combine within the cover of the dense smoke. The song having ended, he now listened for movement in the corn, trying to gauge his surviving adversaries’ numbers and positions.

  By his count, there were five of the twelve men left—they had formed an arched perimeter within the corn, clearly trying to stop him from escaping into the field. Silently, still enshrouded by the dense smoke, Brad climbed back up into the cockpit and eased the door shut. Knowing each man’s location like a bat with radar, he abruptly put the combine in drive and floored it toward the closest man, turning the corn header back on.

  The combine lurched out of the white cloud of smoke like a serial killer from a dark corner. Stalks flew into the air as the diesel engine roared with a bestial sounding bloodlust. It drowned out the dying screams, which was a pity.

  As they were eaten by the jaws of the combine, the men tried to fire shots at the machine. Brad let out a “Yee haw!” Outfitting the combine with bulletproof glass wasn’t paranoid after all.

  The final and fifth man ran out of the cover of the corn and into the open field.

  “Get along, li’l doggie!” Brad laughed as he put the combine into street gear. He caught up to the man after about a hundred feet. Instead of running him over, though, he decided he deserved to have a little bit of fun, and bumped the man with one of the machine’s large tires.

  When the game was no longer fun, Brad opened his door, leaned out, and shot the man in the back. He then turned his tractor and ran the front tire over the man’s torso, stopping with the tire on top of him. he jumped out of the machine, walked over to the man, and admired his work. The body was smashed in half. Brad bent down and grabbed the poor bastard’s earpiece and radio.

  He put the earpiece in, then spoke. “I just saw Herzer’s head rolling around in my corn header, Jackoff.”

  “Hello Farmer,” came Jaco Ivanov’s cool voice.

  “Name’s Brad.”

  Jaco laughed at the notion.

  Brad clenched his fist. “Tell me where you’re at so I can kill you, Ivanov.”

  “I have something for you.”

  “You should’ve let me be,” Brad said as he scanned the area. “I’m retired.”

  He saw the glare of a scope over a couple hundred yards away. In a fluid motion, he dropped to a knee and unloaded the clip in his right-hand Beretta in that direction.

  “Whoa there, big guy,” came Jaco’s voice. “If you don’t start playing nice, I’m gonna have to put one in your chest.”

  “I’m not going back.”

  “I’m not asking you to.”

  Brad put his mouth directly to the radio. “I earned this farm, and now you bloodsuckers have taken even that away from me!”

  “Farmer, when did you become such a drama queen? It’s quite annoying. I’m here to bring you the one thing you crave more than anything.”

  “You’ve found him,” Brad said, as something snapped, and he marched straight toward Jaco.

  “I need you to put that gun in your left hand down,” Jaco demanded.

  The Farmer picked up his pace as he dropped the gun in his left hand to the ground.

  When he got to Jaco, he kept on walking. Right past Jaco, who said, bewildered, “Where the hell are you going?”

  The Farmer didn’t look back. “To get a weapon, Jackoff.”

  “I meant what I said. I’ve got everything you could ever want.”

  The Farmer turned, his eyes a devil’s glare. “I’m going to kill him with my brother’s gun.”

  “Fair enough,” Jaco said, as he watched the Farmer walk toward his house.

  26

  It had been well over 24 hours since Gracie had been moved to ADX. She ached to touch something on the outside, to smell a flower, or feel a breeze. To feel anything but the cold, unyielding concrete that surrounded her. Even the light in here seemed to scream “captive”.

  Perhaps the one saving grace, if she could call it that, was that confinement afforded her ample time to consider her circumstances. The effect wasn’t pretty. With horror that grew by the minute, she realized that whoever had set her up to look like a terrorist had to have been very well connected indeed. If they could make her patents disappear, they could probably do just about anything. She had to figure something out, or she would be locked away in here for the rest of her life.

  The outer steel door to her cell clicked open, and two guards let in Agent Quinn. Still between them were the steel bars that allowed the guards to enter the room and have access to the prisoner without being in danger. Gracie stood and went up to those bars.

  “I don’t have much time,” he said in an urgent but s
oft voice.

  “What’s happening?”

  Quinn looked back at the guards, then leaned in. “The blood on your clothes. It’s Anna’s.”

  Her stomach sank. “That’s impossible! How could I have killed her if I had her grey matter and skull fragments splattered on clothes I changed into at the farmhouse?”

  “I know,” he said. “I took a small sample from evidence and had it retested.” He lowered his voice to a hair above a whisper. “It’s not her blood. Wrong type.”

  “So, you can prove my innocence.” She reached through the bars and grabbed Quinn’s hands.

  “Hey!” the guard yelled.

  She quickly withdrew her hands.

  “It’s alright. I’m fine,” said Quinn. He leaned in again.

  “This clinches it,” said Gracie. “You can prove I’m—"

  He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Gracie, I obtained the sample illegally. It’s inadmissible. Worse, when I went back to get them with a request to retest, your clothes were… gone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Gone. Disappeared.”

  “You can’t be serious,” she said, clutching the bars for support. She felt her knees weaken as the heaviness in her gut pulled her to the ground. She was on her knees, too oppressed even to tremble.

  Quinn knelt to maintain level eye contact. “Listen, I want to help you. You understand that, right?”

  Gracie looked at him. “Why?”

  Quinn reached into his inside pocket, pulled out his phone, and showed her a picture. It was a little girl, about eight years old. She was in a hospital bed and surrounded by stuffed animals. She was emaciated, pale, and bald. Her eyes seemed oversized, as if pleading. She was smiling though, clutching a Harry Potter wand, apparently in mid-spellcasting.

  “That’s why,” he said.

  “Who is she?

  He looked at the phone, a moist-eyed smile on his face. “My goddaughter.”

  “What…?” She looked at him, unable to finish.