by Warren Esby
I didn’t know if Smithfield was serious or just being a ham, a Smithfield ham so to speak, so I asked, “And what book did he tell you he was writing?”
“He said it was to be called All Pigs Great and Small, the Big Boar Made Them All,” So I still couldn’t decide if we were dealing with a genuine Smithfield ham.
“Well, all is not as it seems, Mr. Smithfield,” said Fun, taking him seriously. “There is no book and this man is an enemy of the Crown. He is an imposter and we have to take him in. I hope you will give us no further trouble.”
By this time Fan and Van had approached Dr. Dong who had nowhere to go since he was “penned in” as one might say. But as he started to walk by me, followed by the other two, he tried to stab me with the syringe he was still holding. Fun was standing next to me and grabbed his wrist and removed the syringe from his grip and then slapped on his handcuffs. He handed me the syringe and I went over and picked up the box with the last syringe that was to be used on the last pig. These two syringes would replace the ones that I had used on my two assailants and would be sent to the CIA laboratories back in the States.
We put Dr. Dong in the van with Van and Fan. I came along with a taser. The rest went with Fun in the Rover except for Lorry who did not go in the lorry but followed in Dong’s rental car even though she had come in the lorry. We followed Fun out of the farm and out onto the moor for a good twenty minutes and ended up in a very remote place. It looked kind of like the open range in the western part of the United States. We all got out again and Fan and Van took each of the body bags out of the back of the van and laid them on the ground. With Dong watching, I poked at each corpse with my toe and the liquid remains sloshed out leaving very little behind. I turned to Dong and said,
“It was a very good experiment. It only took about thirty-six hours. Your pig experiment is probably now irrelevant. Do you have any idea if the process will go twice as fast if a double dose is injected? I think there are two doses left and I know that you would gladly volunteer in the name of science. ”
Well I had finally got to him. He was no longer inscrutable. He was very scrutable. He turned white and started to shake and started to sob and agreed to tell us what he knew. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much. He was doing it for the money and he was paid well, but he got all his instructions over the phone or by Internet. All of the results of his experiments were sent to his employer and now that he had all but finished perfecting the method of incorporating the retrovirus into the influenza vaccine, it was his understanding that it would be made in a production facility, but he had no idea where that was or if it even existed yet. We put him back in the van with Van and discussed the situation with Fun and Fan about what they could do with Dong. They said that they were not licensed to kill as some people assumed because they watch too many spy stories about James Bond and believe that sort of thing really goes on, and then they both started to laugh.
And then Fan continued and said, “But we do know someone in MI6 with a learner’s permit who needs some practice in order to get his full license, so we’ll ask him to take Dr. Dong for a ride,” and they laughed again and we joined in to show them we understood their little attempt at humor. They did tell us that they would question him some more and make sure he had nothing else to tell them before his ultimate demise.
They also said they would clean up the litter we had left behind and return Dong’s rental car and take his belongings for evaluation. Lorry would drive us back to York from roving the range in the Range Rover and not the lorry, and we could make arrangements to go back to the States. Unfortunately, we were not at all happy with the results. We discussed it going back. We had come to a dead end because we hadn’t got to the source, the mastermind behind it all. We had eliminated a lot of the people who were testing the system and would have carried out the operation once perfected. We had cut off some of the arms of the operation, so to speak, but the head was still intact to recruit others to continue the effort. We also didn’t know if a production facility existed and where it was located if it did exist, or where they intended to locate it if it had not as yet been built. We also didn’t know how close to the final product they now were. We would have to go back and wait to see what happened next and find out if other balloons, human or otherwise, showed up. It was decided that Anya and I would return to Charleston and continue working there to keep my cover intact in case Al Qaeda decided to resume the effort and not lay low indefinitely. I did not expect them to do that since that did not seem to be their style of operation.
Chapter 28
We got back into York that evening and went gate to gate looking for food. Since it was a pleasant evening and wanting to at least try some British food just to say we did, we stopped at a gate-side stand and had fish and chips, the notable dish the Brits are known for besides tea and crumpets. Well, I found out that chips to an Englishman are French fries to an American. After we ate our very greasy fish and chips, we went into a nearby pub for a beer and found out that potato chips are called “crisps” in England. Of course they had to call it something other than chips since they had misappropriated that word for French fries, I guess because they don’t want to credit the French for anything.
The next day we all got on the train and went to London and did some sightseeing including the Tower of London, which is not a tower at all as far as I could see, and the Crown Jewels contained therein. By this time I was becoming inured to the strange ways of the English and understood immediately why the early Colonists wanted to start over by themselves in a new country and get rid of all the baggage associated with being English and the names that couldn’t be pronounced the way they were written.
That evening we all went to eat at a French restaurant, and I had pommes frites, which is the French name for French fries. I don’t know why they don’t call them by their proper French name in France. Maybe they are just trying to get back at the English. The next day we all flew out of Gatwick Airport, Ben and Edy to Washington, D.C. and Anya and I to Raleigh-Durham Airport. We had a reunion with Muffy who seemed very happy to see us again, especially after we got back to our rental house and removed the pink rhinestone collar, the pink bandanna around her neck and the pink ribbons tied around her ears. She did not have the makings of a poodle no matter how fancy her accessories were. We suggested to our landlady that she might want to get a dog for herself and suggested a mid-sized black poodle so that she would still have a bigger dog than her competitor, and we told her we thought that pink accessories would really stand out on a black poodle. I could tell by her expression that she thought it was a good idea.
We packed up the Expedition the next morning after deciding what we wanted to leave behind. We paid our landlady an extra two month’s rent and asked her to donate whatever we left behind to Goodwill. Then we took off for Charleston. We headed south the way we had come and followed the signs to South of the Border. South of the Border is south of the border of all places. It sits on the exit at the border between South Carolina and North Carolina, what a surprise, and it is a big tourist trap that has restaurants, a gas station, a motel, amusement rides and gift shops, all with a Mexican motif. You can see it as you approach because there is a big Mexican sombrero sitting above it to try and fool you into thinking it really is Mexico, as if you didn’t know the truth.
And leading up to it are billboards telling you just how far you have to go to spend all your spare cash for one thing or another being sold by Pedro. Each billboard tells you about all the delightful ways that Pedro has available to take your money in addition to the number of miles before you got there. Pedro was apparently the main inhabitant of South of the Border. I knew it wasn’t really Mexico because no one tried to shoot at us as we drove by like they had done the last time we had been in the real Mexico.
Needless to say, we didn’t stop. We fled the area and passed right by the rest area where we could have stopped to walk Muffy. She let us know what a mistake we had made further down the ro
ad towards Florence. We pulled off the side of the road onto a grassy area, and Anya got out and took Muffy to do her business. Just as they were walking back to the car, a state police cruiser pulled in behind us but its blue lights weren’t flashing.
The trooper got out and walked towards us. It was Buddy.
“It is you. I thought I recognized y’all but I wasn’t sure.” and then, as he saw Anya walk up with Muffy, he said, “Something new has been added. You didn’t have a dog with you the last time.”
“No, we got it since we saw you last.”
“Hello, Ms. Anya,” he said as Anya came walking up and she gave him a big smile for having remembered her.
“How’s it going?” she asked. “Are you still harassing motorists along here?”
“Only when we have a tip or someone’s speeding. Otherwise it’s the same old same old.”
“You need to inspect us?” I asked. We were all at the back end of the Expedition and the door was open so Muffy could jump back in, and he could easily see inside.
“Nah. It’s okay.” But he did look inside and said, “Aren’t those rifle cases in there? Boy, you’re even better armed than before. What do y’all have?”
He was saying it out of curiosity I knew and because of a general interest in guns. Hunters always like to compare notes with other hunters about what they use, so I unzipped one of the cases and showed him one of the scoped .308 Remington semis.
“Y’all been hunting since I last saw you? What’d y’all go after with these?”
“Wild pigs.”
“Well, that’s a good gun for that. Where’d y’all go hunting the pigs?”
“Northwest Arizona.”
“Arizona? Why’d y’all go all the way out there? Don’t you know we have some of the best pig hunting right here in South Carolina? We have plenty of them from here to the coast. There’s no need to go all the way to Arizona when there’s probably better hunting right here where y’all live.” He sounded almost insulted that we had done that.
“Well we happened to be out there on business and took a break to go hunting. I didn’t know South Carolina had good pig hunting so maybe we’ll give it a try. Anya likes to hunt pigs.”
Buddy turned to her. She was standing there and Muffy had sat down next to her and was looking at all of us.
“You get anything?” He addressed the question to her.
“Yup. I got four. Alex got three. We ate two of them.”
He looked at her and I could tell what he was thinking. He wasn’t about to question the fact she had killed four pigs and had shot more than I had.
“Was that the first time you killed pigs?”
“Oh no. I’ve killed hundreds of them.”
“Whoa. Now I know you’re putting me on.”
“No, she isn’t.” I said. “She used to work for a pig butcher and was in charge of killing them.”
He looked at her again with even more respect and she said, “But that’s the first time I’ve shot them in the wild.”
And then I asked, because I knew Anya wanted to know, “Where do you go to hunt them around here?”
Buddy smiled and said, “As a matter of fact, my uncle has a lot of property near Georgetown with a lot of pigs on it. He allows people to hunt there for a price and he’ll serve as a guide for an additional price. I sometimes act as a guide for him because I’ve been hunting there since I was a kid. I know every part of his land and where all the pigs are likely to be. Y’all should come and hunt with me. It won’t cost y’all that much and I won’t charge for guiding you since I was looking to go hunting there soon myself. You’d only have to pay my uncle his fee and it’s as good a price as you’ll get anywhere.”
“When are you planning to go next?” I asked.
“I’ll have to check to see when I have more than two days off. Why don’t I give you my phone number and you can call me next week after I check my schedule and we can arrange something.”
I thought that it would be a good diversion for us since we would have time to kill while waiting for Al Qaeda’s next move, so I said, “Great, let’s do it.”
He gave me his cell phone number, which I entered into my phone, and I gave him mine. Anya looked pleased. Muffy had wandered off by this time, still attached to the retractable lead. She was nearing Buddy’s squad car when he noticed and started to say something as a dark cloud appeared on his face.
“She’s a bitch,” I said. “She squats when she pees. Your hubcaps are safe.”
He laughed. “I almost put a bullet in old Fritz, you know. Every time he gets near my cruiser during a drug bust, he tries to piss on it. I think those canine boys actually trained him to do that to aggravate the drug runners when they stop them. They usually have black SUVs like yours and they usually keep them shiny. Don’t bite on it if you get stopped.”
I said I wouldn’t. Muffy hopped into the back of the Expedition. I shut the back door and we said our goodbyes and went on to Charleston. I thought as I did that it would be interesting to go up to Georgetown and see a different South Carolina coastal city. I also thought that King George must not have been as heavy as King Charles because I knew they spelled that city Georgetown and not Georgeton. As we drove away, I realized that I had been y’alled more by Buddy in ten minutes than in all the time I had spent in Charleston before then.
Chapter 29
After we got back to Charleston, we settled into our downtown rental and got used to walking Muffy around the historic downtown area. She seemed to like being out rather than having to sit on a doggy bed all day long in an apartment over a garage. She was also pleased that we allowed her to sleep on any damned Made in China reproduction sofa she wanted in the whole house. As we walked around downtown Charleston, we noticed that there were a lot of hyphenated homes of note there. I bet you don’t know what a hyphenated house is, do you? If you do, it’s because you’ve visited Charleston.
Charleston was left pretty much intact after the Civil War, unlike many other Southern cities, and many of the old historic antebellum homes are still standing and have been preserved and are available for people to visit and learn about them and the history of Charleston. And a lot of those houses have hyphenated names like the Edmondston-Alston house and the Heyward-Washington house and the Aiken-Rhett house, where I believe Rhett Butler moved in with the Aikens after he decided he just didn’t give a damn where he lived. I assumed the hyphenated homes must have denoted that the houses had been owned for a substantial period of time by each of the hyphenees. That turned out to be the case except for one of the houses, the Heyward-Washington house. They made George Washington a hyphenee even though he never owned it. I learned just how that had come about during a tour of the house that Anya and I took.
You’ve heard the numerous stories of all the places that George Washington slept. I mean he really slept around. Many colonial era buildings have signs on them saying that George Washington slept here. And it was always the little old ladies that seemed proudest of the fact that he had slept in their house. Have they no shame? Don’t they know he was known as the father of his country for a reason? And maybe it was in their very house that he did some of his fathering. Nevertheless, it gives a house status to be able to say that George Washington slept there.
But the Heyward-Washington house was a cut above the rest. He not only slept there, he rented the place for a whole week so he could do a whole week’s worth of sleeping around in Charleston which was known for its Southern Belles as well as its church bells, all of which made lovely noises when they had their bells rung. And because Washington rented there, even though the Heywards had lived in the house and owned it for ages, the Heywards were forced to share its name with slumbering George and make him a hyphenee because none of the Heywards had slept around quite as much as Rip Van Washington. He was on a tour of the South at the time, but took out time from his sleeping around to sleep in town for a week of renown.
The Heyward-Washington house had the origin
al garden in back of it, and in that garden was the original outhouse. I visited both the garden and the outhouse. I was honored to do so. George Washington had sat in the very spot I did. There should have been a sign on the door that said George Washington sat here, and maybe one inside that discretely said George Washington had sat and shat here. Just like George, I had made sure I had shat before leaving the house. It was very satisfying to do it in the past pluperfect participle. Oops. I made a mistake. I should have been polite and used euphemism instead of shat. No wait. I decided not to use the word euphemism as a euphemism anymore. So I’ll just say that I sat where George Washington sat and did my business. Oh no. There goes one of those euphemisms sneaking in again.
We made arrangements with Buddy to go hunting and went up to Georgetown the following week to have a look around before meeting Buddy at his uncle’s property. Georgetown was named after King George and not George Washington and we didn’t see any signs indicating that our George had done his thing in Georgetown. We met Buddy at the gated entrance of his uncle’s property. He had three hounds in crates in the bed of his four-wheel drive pickup. We followed him into the property and down a dirt road for several miles before we all stopped in a clearing and got out.
As soon as Muffy got out of the Expedition, Buddy’s three hounds came over to greet her. They were all males and Muffy was a neutered female, but they apparently were not smart enough to think it mattered. They all made the usual kind of dog introduction moves by making sure everyone’s faces got licked and everyone’s genitals got sniffed properly and maybe licked a little as well. When the ritual was over and Muffy was tired of it, she growled her guttural growl and they all backed off. They sat in a semi-circle around her and looked at her in appreciation and maybe adoration. They were too dumb to understand that they weren’t going to get any. But in the world of dogs as in the world of humans, hope springs eternal. Muffy seemed satisfied with herself. She looked like she was smiling. Yes, dogs do smile. Have you ever seen what they do when you scratch them in their favorite place like behind their ear or on their belly? They open their mouths a little and pull the edge of their mouths back a little just like we do.