Oath of Office

by Michael Palmer

  “To be honest, Dr. Welcome—”

  “Lou, please.”

  “And Darlene. I’m a pediatrician, so I should be able to understand anything the ER doc over here understands.”

  “To be honest, Dr. Lou … and Dr. Darlene,” Humphries said. “I didn’t look very hard.”

  “Because you found one?” she asked.

  “Because they don’t exist. At least not naturally.”

  “Could they have been another sort of flesh-eating insect?” Lou asked. “An unusual species of the Dermestid beetle perhaps?”

  Humphries’s eyes brightened. “I admire anyone who comes to my office prepared. The skin beetle is a good guess, but unfortunately, all known species are scavengers.”

  “By that you mean they don’t live off live flesh?” Darlene interjected.

  “That’s correct. The Dermestid beetle is often used in taxidermy and some natural history museums to clean animal skeletons. There’s also a medicolegal aspect to the beasties’ handiwork, helping forensic investigators determine time of death. But I’ve never come across any accounts of this particular beetle consuming live flesh. Besides, they don’t fit the description of the insects you saw, Lou. The adult beetles have oval-shaped bodies, concealed beneath hard scales.”

  “What about mutation?” Lou asked.

  Humphries pondered the question. Darlene caught Lou’s sidelong glance and nodded her excitement.

  “A mutation that transforms a detritivore into an omnivore…” His voice trailed away in thought.

  “Detritivore?” asked Darlene. “Like detritus?”

  “Precisely. Your Latin hasn’t deserted you, Doctor. Organisms that obtain nutrients from decomposing organic matter. Garbage eaters. It appears that everything I read about your intelligence is accurate.”

  “Why, thanks, Oliver,” she replied with her ice cream–melting smile. “I’m afraid I’m much more used to reading about my waistline or makeup or wardrobe than my intellect.”

  Humphries took a moment to compose himself and continued. “In any event, I can’t fathom an environmental factor that would cause such a mutation. I’ve studied entomology for most of my life and have been to every continent except Antarctica studying bugs—termites especially. I’ve discovered at least two new species, but never encountered anything close to what you’ve described. It’s one of the reasons I was so eager to meet with you. If such an insect were naturally occurring, well … it would certainly generate a lot of buzz in the industry.” The entomologist chuckled.

  “Nicely done,” Darlene said, picking up on the play on words before Lou. “But you just said ‘naturally occurring.’ What about a nonnatural environmental shift of some sort?”

  “Something man-made?”

  “Yes,” Lou said, perking up at the thought. “A man-made airborne contagion of sorts.”

  Humphries slipped back into his contemplative mode. “There’s certainly evidence of insect behavioral shifts as a result of, let’s say, light pollution, or thermal factors, or air pollution, or various forms of radiation. Have you followed what’s been happening to the honeybee population?”

  “I have,” Darlene said while Lou was shaking his head. “Colony collapse disorder.”

  “Right on, ma’am. The explanation for CCD is still widely disputed. The number of Western honeybee colonies have been declining quite impressively for a couple of decades, but more rapidly over recent years. Some of my colleagues are blaming biotic factors such as viruses or mites, but others purport that environmental shifts—cell phone radiation, pesticides, even genetically modified crops are to blame.”

  Lou’s face lit up. “So, it’s possible that GMO crops caused the bees’ colony collapse?”

  “Evidence for that is slim and certainly not proven as far as I know. It’s still a controversial subject at best.”

  “Could the pollen from GMO crops be a contributing factor?” Darlene asked.

  Humphries shook his head—a firm warning not to jump to any conclusions. “It’s almost impossible to say. If that were the case with your termites, I’d expect there would have been a corresponding mass kill event, or perhaps a dramatic reduction in the termite population. A full-on mutation would be something quite startling.”

  “But assuming what I observed is fact, how would you explain it?” Lou asked. He felt like he was feeling his way down an endless pitch-black corridor.

  “I couldn’t,” Humphries replied. “That’s my point. Not by nature, anyway.”

  “Or by mutation,” Darlene added.

  “Or by mutation.”

  “So, what now?” she asked, unable to mask her disappointment.

  “I’d say the best thing for us to do now is have a look at those bugs,” Humphries was saying, apparently unaware of the subtext going on between his visitors. “Dr. Lou, you promised to bring me some samples?”

  Lou nodded, and he hoisted his briefcase from the carpeted floor.

  Darlene’s eyes widened. “You had those flesh-eating bugs with you this entire time?”

  Lou grinned sheepishly. “I didn’t want you to get creeped out before the expert was around to assure you that these guys can’t eat through glass.”

  Lou handed Humphries two large covered baby food jars. In one of them, the bottom was nearly coated with termites. The other contained a single gigantic bug, pumpkin in color, with a segmented body, long scimitar-shaped pincers, and pure white disks where its eyes might have been.

  “Joey, the collector I spoke to you about, assured me that the huge, puffed-up one is a queen.”

  Darlene shivered and hunched her shoulders, perhaps again imagining the bugs were crawling up her arms. She glared at Lou but could not hold the reproving look very long. “No secrets next time,” she said, her eyes glinting.

  “No secrets, pal,” Lou replied. “Next time I’m carrying carnivorous termites, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Oh, she’s the queen, all right,” Humphries was saying. “The queen of queens. My lab is next door. Let’s go there and have ourselves a closer inspection.”

  Humphries took great care to maximize the limited space in his windowless lab. A Corian-covered counter extending out from the far wall provided enough surface area for three distinct workstations. There were microscopes, centrifuges, and other lab equipment resting on a table.

  Glass-fronted cabinets contained shelving stocked with glass beakers, jars, flasks, and coils of plastic tubing. Dozens of scientific tomes were neatly arranged in a bookcase on one wall. At least three of them, Lou noted, were written or co-authored by Humphries himself. On the opposite wall stood several specimen cabinets, holding containers with various insects inside them, some living and some not.

  Again, Darlene caught Lou’s eye and shivered.

  Humphries crossed to the cabinets, where he retrieved a jar containing a small battalion of fairly large live ants. After slipping on a pair of latex gloves, he transferred the termites Lou had brought to a large flask and closed the opening with a rubber stopper. Next, he skillfully used a large dropper to remove half a dozen ants and deposited them into the flask. There was an instant rush of activity as the termites’ amber bodies swarmed the ants, which were nearly the size they were.

  The attack was as ferocious as the one on the mouse in Joey’s bizarre terrarium.

  Within seconds, there were no remnants of the ants whatsoever.

  It took Lou most of a minute to realize he’d been holding his breath. He let the air out slowly. A glance at Darlene told him she had been doing the same thing.

  Using a large magnifying glass, Humphries silently studied the termites with a child’s wide-eyed enthusiasm. “Just what I thought from the pictures you texted to me,” Humphries said. “Macrotermes bellicosus.”

  “That’s their name?” Darlene asked. “It’s almost as scary as they are.”

  “Macro means ‘large’ and bellicosus means—”

  “Warlike,” Lou and Darlene said in unison.r />
  “You got it. M. bellicosus is an African breed. But these were found in Virginia?”

  “That’s right,” Lou said. “In a town named Kings Ridge.”

  “Well, obviously somebody imported them … illegally, I suspect. Or, I guess, accidentally. Macrotermes are builders—architectural masters.” Humphries put a stopper on the flask and set it back down on the table. “The African sun is a brutal force, which the bellicosus termite has managed to tame. Their mounds are the largest non-man-made structures in the world. They build thermoregulated chambers inside them that maintain a temperature of precisely eighty-eight to eighty-nine degrees, with ventilation ducts that continuously refresh their air supply. The temperature is critical because their primary food source, a fungus, won’t grow in any other temperature. I spent six months in Africa studying these critters. Marvels, really. Absolute marvels.”

  “Ever see them eat a lion?” Lou asked. “Because the swarm I witnessed could probably do just that.”

  “No,” Humphries said dismissively. “Their primary food source is that fungus, or else they chew up wood and digest whatever nutrients they can.”

  “So how do you explain what you just saw?”

  “That’s just it!” Humphries exclaimed with youthful exuberance. “I can’t!”

  Lou and Darlene exchanged excited looks.

  “So what’s next?” Lou asked.

  “I’m going to dissect Her Majesty, if you don’t mind. I need to look at the queen.”

  Within minutes, Humphries had the queen termite under a microscope. His fingers moved with remarkable delicacy and economy of motion. On occasion, he would pause to wipe sweat from his brow, a move that made the tattooed insects on his arm appear to come alive.

  Lou and Darlene huddled close by and watched in silence.

  “This is odd,” Humphries said, mostly to himself.

  “What? What’s odd?” Lou asked.

  He and Darlene had moved in closer. Their arms were touching, but neither attempted to pull away.

  Humphries looked up from his microscope, his expression bewildered.

  “This queen is about twice as large as the average M. bellicosus queen. This one here is more than ten centimeters. Her egg-laying capacity seems to have been doubled as well. Maybe tripled.”

  “What does that mean?” Darlene asked.

  “It means that if these insects exist in the natural world, they would probably have more egg-laying capacity than any creature on the planet. The fecundity of these termites suggests they could cause a very serious environmental imbalance.”

  “So, do you think it’s a mutation?” Lou asked.

  “No … I don’t,” Humphries stated. “If this were a naturally occurring mutation, at some point I, or one of my colleagues, would have seen these insects in the wild. Their breeding would be massive and impossible to contain. We’re talking a major shift to Mother Nature’s already tenuous balance. I think these insects were engineered in a controlled environment.”

  “Engineered? How?” Darlene asked.

  “My guess is radiation,” Humphries said. “I’d have to run some tests on the samples you brought, but my bet is I’ll find high levels of ionizing radiation that produced an abundance of free radicals within the termite’s cell structures.”

  “You think somebody mutated these termites to increase their size and egg-laying capacity?”

  Humphries nodded. “I do. And I further suspect that the radiation and hybridized breeding resulted in the mutation that altered the termites’ natural diet. I think that’s how these herbivores became flesh-eaters.”

  “Why would anybody want to breed a termite that produces more eggs?” Lou wondered aloud. He looked over at Darlene and saw that she had turned pale.

  “Lou,” she said, “the corn. You told me it was bigger than a normal ear and had a lot more kernels on it, too.” She pointed to the jar of termites. “What if that’s how they’re growing corn like that?”

  Lou understood immediately. “Oliver,” he said. “Could the DNA from this termite be inserted into the nucleus of a corn seed?”

  “Of course,” Humphries said. “The DNA transfection process would allow cross-breeding with any number of species.”

  “What would you call corn that was cross-bred to include the DNA of a mutated termite?”

  The entomologist laughed at the notion. “I don’t know what I’d call it,” he answered. “But I know what it isn’t.”

  “What’s that?” Darlene asked.

  “It isn’t corn,” he said.

  CHAPTER 42

  While waiting for Joey to emerge from the staff entrance to Millie’s, Lou checked over the large piece of equipment Oliver Humphries had lent him. The ground-penetrating radar system looked like a jogger’s stroller, minus the canvas seat where the infant would go. It had a twenty-inch front wheel and two twenty-four-inch rear wheels, making the contraption reasonably easy to transport. The 270 megahertz antenna was encased inside a bread box–sized container and secured to the underside of the carriage. The antenna was capable of broadcasting subsurface images to an eight-inch display screen mounted between the handlebars.

  Perfect for locating termite tunnels.

  Humphries felt confident that a single termite tower did not preclude the possibility of there being others nearby. In fact, the tattooed entomologist thought it strange that only a single tower existed in a given area. If these termites had escaped from a lab where they’d been radiated, as Humphries believed to be the case, then there should be a ventilation shaft connecting the isolated mound to the rest of the colony.

  The Macrotermes bellicosus species were strange, almost mystical creatures. Their huge towers, Humphries had explained, did not provide habitation for the colony. Instead, scientists believed the elaborate Tolkeinesque structures were built for the thermoregulation vital for growing the fungus essential to their diet. The ground-penetrating radar might not provide answers to any perplexing questions, but it would help to find other mounds by detecting the subsurface ventilation shafts joining one colony to another.

  Lou was leaning against the machine, rereading the manual, when Joey slammed open the screen door and, blinking against the glare, bounded into the bright early afternoon sun. He looked dressed for a safari—tan khaki shorts, knee-high socks, and a wide-brimmed sun hat. Lou was pleased to see that he had been taking good care of his surgically repaired hand.

  “Hey, big guy,” Lou said, “that wound dressing looks great.”

  Joey’s freckled face crinkled in a broad grin. “Millie and Tommy, the head chef, drove me back yesterday to have the thumb checked again. It looks really scary, all black and blue and greenish, but Dr. Kurdi says it’s doing terrific and that it’s going to work as good as my other one. So, what’s that thing?”

  “It’s a device to help me locate other termite mounds,” Lou said, pausing before adding, “if there are any others.”

  “Well, I hope you pumped up the tires real good, because it’s a few miles’ walk from here to the mound—maybe four.”

  Lou sighed, pulled off his Nationals cap to wipe sweat from his brow, and looked out at the shimmering heat rising up off the road.

  “Four miles, eh? Can’t we just drive there?”

  “I only know how to get there by walking,” Joey said.

  “Do we need a map?”

  “Wouldn’t know where to look on it. The directions are all up here.” He tapped his forehead with his good hand. “One of the things I really enjoy doing is exploring the cornfields.”

  “And you think you can find the mound by walking?” Lou grunted as he pushed the cart hard enough to build up some momentum.

  Joey marched ahead as they passed the Dorm and then left the vinyl-sided apartments behind.

  “I spent two years walking every bit of the cornfields,” Joey said, loud enough not to have to turn his head. “Acres and acres and acres. That’s how I found my special termites. I know these fields like t
he back of my hand.” He held up his heavily bandaged arm and laughed.

  Lou imagined how difficult it was going to be pushing the contraption through the deeply furrowed fields.

  So much for AA’s golden admonition not to project.

  He recalled Joey’s obsession with knot tying and Millie’s acknowledgment that he got fixated on certain things. As Lou trudged along, grateful for all the hours he spent training in the ring and on the bags, he hoped Joey’s navigation obsession also included the shortest and easiest route to get to where they wanted to be.

  Forty-five minutes later, Lou’s sweat-drenched T-shirt was plastered to his chest like a second skin. Of all the cornfields Joey took him through, this one was proving especially difficult to negotiate. Loose soil and tall stocks from Chester Enterprises’ genetically modified corn crop made for extremely slow going. Joey offered to help push, but there was no way Lou would risk anything happening to the thumb he had helped to save.

  If there was a positive aspect to the difficult and dusty passage, it was that his attention was largely fixated on moving ahead. Still, thoughts of Darlene were never far from the surface. Between reestablishing himself in the ER, demonstrating his work ethic at Physician Wellness, spending time with Emily, getting to meetings, and working out with Cap, he had precious little opportunity to meet women. AA was famous among its members for having a saying to fit every situation or occasion. The one he liked to fall back on when it came to having a social life, was Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.

  Unfortunately, there was no saying that applied to what was happening between him and the president’s wife.

  As much as Darlene dared, she had decided to confront her husband when he returned from his campaign trip later in the day regarding Double M, Russell Evans, William Chester, the bellicosus termites, and the elusive trainload of corn. Her goal was to set up a meeting between the president and Lou to review the bizarre and sometimes deadly pattern of behavior that Lou had observed among the citizens of Kings Ridge.