“It is most certainly our pleasure to have you here, Evans. No one likes to do their own dishes. Am I right?” The Doctor smiled the condescending smile of one who would never stoop so low as to do his own dishes.
Kent raised his hand, notching a point in the air with his yellow-gloved finger, and smiled back. “Right you are, Doctor.”
“Well, carry on with your . . . uh . . . duties then. I’ll be off.” With a perfunctory wave, Doctor Wittmann left the lab.
Kent released the air he’d been unconsciously holding inside his lungs. If he found a casual conversation with a university colleague stressful, he had to wonder whether he had the mettle to risk imprisonment, to actually infect a herd with a disease as yet undetermined.
* * *
After spending a couple weeks at the University Lab, Kent had learned a great deal. Aside from longstanding and pervasive worries about overuse of antibiotics and the drug-resistant bacterial mutations the practice engendered, the state of American livestock health was pretty darned good. No contagions on the horizon. No intractable parasitic infestations. The gamble livestock producers had taken in reducing preventative medicine for their herds seemed to have caused the animals no ill effects – at least not on a scale that mattered.
This discovery was bad news for the veterinary drug industry – and not just in the short term. If farmers and feedlot operators could raise healthy stock without all the vaccines and preventative antibiotics they’d been purchasing in large quantities before the economic recession, why would they choose to buy these products again even after the financial crunch had ended? Kent doubted whether those sales would ever come back.
In short, Kent’s new information made the long-term profitability of his career choice seem even less likely than he had imagined . . . and the success of a plan to stimulate sales, of paramount importance.
But of all the disease candidates likely to infect a livestock herd in the U.S., Kent had found none that would cause the industry enough concern to dramatically impact his product sales. North America was a veritable haven for healthy livestock production.
For Kent, the conclusion was inevitable. If U.S. farm animals were well insulated from domestic health threats, he needed to introduce a foreign pathogen . . . something the U.S. livestock industry hadn’t experienced in a very long time, if ever. Something that had the capacity to ignite an epidemic – actually an epizootic, he reminded himself – of unprecedented scale, large enough to gain the attention of an entire industry. And he knew just where to go to get a sample of such an agent.
* * *
Finding a charge card company that would increase his credit line enough to cover the $1,500 of travel expenses wasn’t easy. And explaining to his wife, Jeannie, why he would be unreachable for several days was even harder. But two days later, Kent was ticketed to board a plane bound for Johannesburg, South Africa.
“I don’t understand why, if your cell phone won’t have service in west Texas, you can’t at least email me once a day. Or call me collect on a landline.”
“Hon, you know I’ll miss you and the kids. But Sanofi is covering the cost of this trip so I can promote their new anti-parasitic. I can’t risk losing their good faith by running up hotel bills or long distance charges. And heaven knows we can’t afford to cover those extras ourselves right now. You understand. Right?”
He was persistent and she had finally relented.
* * *
One plane ride and forty-eight hours later, after visiting a remote South African tribal farming area, Kent Evans was at his hotel, busily packing a small pottery vase for shipping home to Iowa. In lieu of Styrofoam packing peanuts, he cushioned the inside of the cardboard box with dozens of plastic baggies stuffed with crumpled facial tissue. The padded baggies would protect the vase from breaking while in transit to the U.S., and would also insulate the parcel’s more important contents from the frigid temperatures it might otherwise experience during air travel.
Hidden inside one of the baggies were two facial tissues containing saliva specimens from a local farmer’s cow. Though not a particularly elegant, nor scientifically recommended, vessel for transporting a living organism around the world, that wadded up, slobbery Kleenex, Kent knew, held enough picornavirus to infect hundreds of cattle. And he had confidence in the hardiness of the samples. This virus was tough to kill. It would arrive home safely.
CHAPTER 5
Ottawa County, Minnesota.
“What do you suppose inspired us to spend forty dollars and half a morning to participate in Rodney Holton’s latest money maker?” Beth mused as we navigated the gravel roadways on our way home from the meteor exhibit.
“Too much time and money on our hands?” I said.
Beth laughed.
“All jokes aside, though, you have to give Rodney credit for creativity,” I continued. “In just the past couple years he’s been struck by lightning, his corn crib fell into a sinkhole, a bear attacked him in his kitchen . . . . Is that about it?”
“He taught his dog to say, ‘I love you,’” Beth said.
“That’s right. ‘Wry ruv rue.’ That one was totally legit.”
Beth laughed again. “Where does he come up with these crazy ideas?”
“Well,” I said, “he probably watches the news on TV. If it catches his eye, he thinks ‘I can do that,’ and a scam is born. As P.T. Barnum was so fond of saying . . .”
“I know,” Beth interrupted. “There’s one born every minute. So what does that make us?”
“Customers,” I said. “Definitely not the other thing.”
“Right,” Beth said dubiously.
“Right,” I confirmed, as I steered the Pilot from the gravel onto a stretch of pavement. “But did you find anything curious about the meteor display?”
Beth raised an eyebrow at me. “Was there part of it that wasn’t curious? The charred bowling ball and the hole he’d obviously dug for it to sit in seemed suspicious to me. Then there was the burnt grass. Rodney draws a nice circle.”
It was my turn to laugh.
“He does have a tendency to overplay a bit, doesn’t he? But I was thinking about something he said. That he hadn’t actually seen the meteor hit the ground. If you were Rodney, wouldn’t you have seen the meteor strike from your kitchen window? Or barely avoided being hit while mowing the lawn? The fact that he only heard it hit is . . . well . . . it’s just not Rodney. It makes me think that, just maybe, his meteor really did fall out of the sky.”
“Hmm.” Beth patiently considered my observation. “I don’t know, Babe. Do you think he maybe just messed up a little? It must be hard to be perfectly slippery all the time.”
“I would agree with you one hundred percent, O Wise and Beautiful One, if Rodney wasn’t such a natural. I mean, he doesn’t play act these weird scenarios. He lives them. I really think he convinces himself before moving on to anybody else.”
“Maybe that’s true,” Beth said. “It would explain his amazingly successful career as a snake oil salesman. But I don’t believe for a minute that Rodney’s black horse egg is really a meteor, no matter how poorly he tells the story.”
Black horse egg . . . I just love Beth’s sense of humor.
“I’m sure you’re right, Hon. It’s just a nit I couldn’t resist picking.”
“You’ve got a knack for that, Babe,” Beth said as she watched the farm fields slipping past her window.
Beth was correct, of course. I was seldom satisfied until I had sharpened the pencil all the way to the eraser.
“Definitely, a knack,” I said. “But I’m going to see if I can get a closer look at the meteor another day anyway. What can it hurt?”
Beth considered.
“I’ll confess that it seems one of your less perilous undertakings. As you say, ‘What can it hurt?’”
CHAPTER 6
Ames, Iowa.
The flight home from South Africa had been uneventful. As it turned out, Kent Evans could have brought the v
irus-laden cow slobber in his carry-on luggage. He answered the Customs questions correctly – No, he hadn’t visited a farm while traveling. No, he wasn’t bringing any agricultural products into the United States – and the agent had taken him at his word.
Still, he was glad he had chosen to ship the virus as a separate package via courier service. That way, even if the parcel had been opened and inspected, they would have been looking for drugs, or guns . . . not cow spit. And given the resemblance between the tainted Kleenexes and the scores of others he’d used to pack the vase, the chances of parcel inspectors detecting the virus seemed slim.
Even if by some miracle of Customs inspection genius, the pathogen was discovered inside the package, he was only the box’s addressee. There was no way to prove he had sent it. If agents attempted to pin some USDA violation on him, he would deny any knowledge of the vase or its packing materials. Perhaps it was a gift from a tribesman he had befriended, he would say, or a comp from the tiny hotel where he had slept during his visit? With no return address on the package, how could he possibly know who had mailed it to him.
He smiled at his own cleverness.
By the time the green Subaru wagon pulled into his driveway in Ames, Iowa, Kent’s west Texas cover story was rehearsed and ready for delivery to Jeannie. The flower bouquet – allegedly a perk from Sanofi for a job well done – would help, too.
* * *
Three days later, the DHL driver delivered the parcel from South Africa to the Iowa State University Microbiology Lab, addressed to Kent’s attention. It was waiting in his University mail cubby that evening when he arrived to teach a night class.
Before returning home that night, Kent visited a garbage dumpster behind the Animal Sciences building. After checking to make sure he was alone, he opened the package, smashed the vase and disposed of everything – everything, that is, except the baggie containing his hope for a better future through science.
CHAPTER 7
Red Wing, Minnesota.
It was the day after Beth and I had viewed the meteor exhibit at Rodney Holton’s farm, and the tiny glitch in Rodney’s story had been niggling at my brain ever since. If he had manufactured the entire meteor story, why wouldn’t he have seen it hit?
My experience on the Team had taught me never to ignore niggling details. But small town Minnesota was a far cry from the militarized streets of Damascus, or the conspiratorial conference rooms of Mumbai. It seemed likely that my inability to shake this gut feeling about Rodney’s meteor was a vestigial twitch left over from my former career.
I hadn’t visited Gunner in a while. Maybe he could talk some sense into me.
Gunner was Ottawa County’s Chief Deputy Sheriff, Doug Gunderson. Gunner and I had known each other since high school, and other than Beth, he was the only soul in Ottawa County who had any inkling how I had spent my life during my twenty-year absence from Red Wing. I had never planned to let Gunner in on my secrets. But he can be an assiduous investigator, and eventually, I had decided sharing a few details with Gunner would be preferable to his constant inquisition. He had promised to keep my secrets. And to date, he’d proven trustworthy in that regard.
It was a few minutes past 10:00 a.m. when I swung the Pilot into the parking lot at the Ottawa County Law Enforcement Center – or LEC to those who preferred acronyms. According to the uniformed receptionist/dispatcher behind the bulletproof glass window, Gunner was in his office.
“Please let him know James Becker is here to see him,” I said.
The clerk obliged by buzzing him on her phone.
“He’ll be with you shortly,” she said. “Please have a seat.”
I glanced behind me at the rows of yellow molded plastic chairs. I’d sat in those before. I doubted my lumbar region was a match for their George Jetson-like curvature.
“Thanks. I think I’ll stand.”
I checked the walls of the reception area to see if the County had invested in any new artwork. Nope. I swiped two fingers across the top of the metal rectangle that framed head shots of Sheriffs from times gone by. Dusty.
I turned to the clerk who’d apparently been watching my every move. They train them to do that at the academy.
I raised my filthy digits in her direction.
“I’m sure nobody noticed,” I said, making an excuse for whoever’s job it was to dust this place.
If anyone actually said “harumph” in real life, it would have been the desk clerk at that moment. Instead, she just raised an eyebrow and answered an incoming call – eyes still trained in my direction.
No need to shoot the messenger, I thought.
Some folks have no desire to achieve excellence. A fair number of them seem to be in government employ. That’s too bad, too, because the underachievers give a bad rep to those of us civil servants who take pride in our work.
“Becker.” It was Gunner’s voice from behind me. “You coming or what?”
I turned to face the Chief Deputy and smiled. He was holding open the door to the inner offices, where all the police work gets done.
“Morning, Gunner,” I said as I crossed the reception area and slipped past him through the open door.
I knew the way to Gunner’s office, so I led and Gunner followed. When we arrived outside his door, I allowed him to enter first. He eyeballed me as he walked past.
“Did I do something wrong?” I asked after he’d passed by.
Gunner maneuvered behind his olive green, 1950s style, metal desk, and sat down in a matching desk chair. I followed him inside, closing the door behind me. Gunner hadn’t as yet answered my question.
I stood watching as Gunner straightened a stack of manila files on one corner of the desk then jammed a yellow pencil into his electric desk sharpener. The sound sent a shiver up my back. When the pencil was pointed enough – or short enough, it’s hard to know – Gunner blew the wood shavings off its tip and tucked it inside his top middle desk drawer.
“Trying out a new interrogation technique?” I asked. “Pencil-boarding?” I smiled.
Gunner squeezed both cheeks between his hands until his lips puckered. I have no idea whether that maneuver was intended to express frustration, boredom, psychotic tendencies, or something else.
After a few moments, Gunner motioned me to sit in one of the vinyl and metal side chairs across the desk from him. For no reason I can think of, I suddenly wondered why they were called side chairs when they were almost never on the side of the desk. Maybe they were actually other side chairs?
“So to what do I owe the pleasure?” Gunner said finally, offering no clue to his earlier off-putting behavior. Sometimes he can be an enigma.
“Glad you asked.” I glanced across the room at the Mr. Coffee. The carafe was nearly full. “Mind if I pour myself a cup?” My eyes were on Gunner as I extended an arm in the direction of the pot.
“Might as well. If this is going to be a long story, maybe you can get me one, too.” It didn’t sound like a request.
“As long as you asked so politely . . .”
I poured us each a Styrofoam cup of black java and returned to the desk, passing Gunner’s coffee his way and sampling my own. I judged the viscosity of today’s batch to be roughly equivalent to thirty-weight motor oil. Not bad for Cop Shop brew.
“Anyway . . .” I continued, “I was wondering whether you’ve heard about the meteor strike out at Rodney Holton’s farm?”
Gunner chuckled. “Yeah. I heard.”
“Well, Beth and I went out to see it yesterday.”
“Cost you twenty bucks?” Gunner asked.
“Apiece.”
“Ouch.” Gunner felt my pain. “So . . .”
“So what?”
“So what was it? What was ol’ Rodney passing off as space rock?”
“Good question.” Did I mention Gunner was an assiduous investigator? “It looked a lot like a jumbo charcoal briquette, or maybe a bowling ball.” I sipped some more coffee.
“Did it have finger ho
les?”
“Not that I saw. But they might have been on the bottom. Visitors couldn’t touch the meteor on account of the Caution tape around the ‘Strike Zone.’”
“Okay,” Gunner said. “Now you got my curiosity piqued. Where’d the flaming Brunswick from space ‘strike’?”
“It was actually pretty convenient . . . for viewing, I mean. It landed right in Rodney’s side yard. There was a little crater there and everything.”
Just then the coffee I’d been drinking made my mouth pucker involuntarily. That was unusual.
“Well, L-O-L!” Gunner offered, a jolly smile on his face.
“Huh?” I said.
The smile disappeared and Gunner folded his arms across his chest. “It means ‘Laugh Out Loud.’ Everybody writes it on emails and stuff. Don’t you give me no guff.”
“Yeah . . . on emails,” I said. “Nobody actually says L-O-L with their mouth.”
Gunner looked wounded.
“You got more on this story or not?” he said, choosing not to discuss his gaffe further.
“Well, other than one thing Rodney said, his exhibit was pretty much what you’d expect – lots of melodrama and overblown special effects. But when I asked him if he actually saw the meteor hit, he said he heard it, then turned around and saw it sitting there, smoking and glowing and playing the National Anthem and yada yada yada.
“My point, though, is that he admitted he didn’t see it hit. Now why would a guy like Rodney almost get hit by a meteor and not claim to have seen it with his own eyes? That stupid question kept me awake all last night and ruined breakfast for me this morning. Am I crazy? Or what?”
Gunner smiled and choked down a laugh. “You need somethin’ real to worry about, Beck. Pretty soon you’ll be frettin’ over the laundry pilin’ up.”
“So you don’t think it’s unusual for Rodney to play down his story like that?”
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