Field Agent

by Dom Testa

  “What about Culbertson, the agent from the USDA?” I asked. “He shared your suspicions, probably.”

  She didn’t answer right away, and turned to look out the window. Then she said, “Look, I don’t want to speak ill of the dead.”

  I chuckled. “And I don’t want to speak out of school here, but I’ll tell you there’s no shortage of people speaking ill of Agent Culbertson. That’s just between you and me, by the way. But tell me what you know. He had to be giving you updates on his investigation.”

  She scoffed. “Investigation. Didn’t seem like one. Seemed like he was on vacation.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “He didn’t learn anything?”

  “Maybe he did. We were supposed to meet the morning he was found murdered. But up to that point his investigation was pretty thin, at least the stuff he shared with me. I encouraged him to look into Jason Deele, and all I ever heard from him were glowing reports of a brilliant researcher.” She lowered the tone of her voice, obviously to imitate Culbertson. “This is a young man who’s doing wonders in plant pathology and crop sciences.”

  In the back of my mind I began assembling some of the links in the chain. Culbertson, his propensity for blackmailing people and organizations for his own gain, and a potential bombshell of a case. He could’ve quickly grasped the enormity of it all and seen it as a ticket to not only paying off his mob debt, but funding a full retirement.

  And in order to do that, he’d have to play everything slowly, and certainly not let on to Sarah Eklund, her step-mother, or his own bosses at the USDA that something was afoot. At least not yet; not until he’d had time to squeeze his intended victim, to milk him for everything he could get.

  Culbertson, I realized, could’ve seen Jason Deele as the biggest play of his career. And he may have been correct.

  Right up until the first bullet entered his brain.

  “So he didn’t suspect anything at all?” I asked Sarah.

  Eklund sighed. “Listen, Mr. Swan—”

  “Eric.”

  “Eric. I think you might be starting to see how difficult it’s been getting anyone outside of Iowa to take this seriously. First the USDA thought it might only be a limited, one-crop anomaly. Then my step-mother had to raise hell to get the FBI to show up. Then you were obviously skeptical in our meeting yesterday.”

  There was no sense playing dumb. “Yeah, you’re right. I was. But I’m taking it seriously now.”

  “And I’m glad. I’ve got a feeling we’re going to see another outbreak of this fungus somewhere, and soon. And it won’t be long before it does start spreading.”

  The food showed up, and for the next minute we were quiet. The thoughts going through my mind were now scary enough to dampen my enthusiasm for the pancakes. Which takes a lot.

  After getting a tea refill I wiped my hands on a napkin and looked at Eklund. “Suppose for a moment all of your fears are spot-on. Suppose that Deele—or someone—has created a mold requiring a special strain of soybean to survive. How bad could it get?”

  She set her spoon down and considered the question.

  “You’ve heard of the famous Irish potato famine, right?” she asked.

  “Well, I’ve heard of it. I don’t know details. Killed a lot of the potato crops, right?”

  Her smile was a sad one. “Well, it did more than that. It wiped out crops to the point that things didn’t recover for a decade. Starvation resulted. More than a million people died. More moved away just to survive. That was 1845, Eric, and to this day the population of Ireland still hasn’t recovered to pre-famine levels.”

  I stared at her.

  “If this fungus got out of control,” she said, “it could potentially spread to other crops. Not just soybeans. It could wipe out the entire country’s farm supplies.” She paused, then added: “And we have way more people to feed than Ireland had in 1845.”

  9

  I do some of my best thinking while I’m on a run. For years I did the usual earbud-and-music routine, which works quite well when you have sublime taste in music, which I do. I’ll put my playlists up against anyone’s.

  But these days I save the music for my long drives. On a run I’ll let my thoughts provide the soundtrack. There’s something about the adrenaline kick and the fresh air that spins the rotors and provides a healthy boost to my frontal lobe. That’s where all our deep thoughts, planning, and problem solving originate, so whatever you find to give it a turbo-boost, do it. For me it’s running.

  It was late afternoon and Sarah Eklund’s grim vision of a nationwide blight on the food supply had me more than a little concerned. When I’d landed in Iowa I’d been a cocky, cynical secret agent. Now I had better data and I was nowhere near as cynical. Still cocky, but less cynical.

  Even with the additional data, however, there was still the issue of confronting Jason Deele. Just walking into his office and saying, Hey dude, what’s up with the fungi? didn’t strike me as a winning formula. I needed a way to engage with the man without putting him on high alert. It meant using a badge was not the right play. I needed Deele to open up and gush about his project; he wouldn’t do that unless he was anxious to sell me on his work. And there was only one way to do that:

  Walk into his office as a prospective buyer, not someone looking to put him in a cell for 25 to life.

  The brainiacs on the second floor at Q2 would need to get right on it. Of their numerous talents, creating fictional lives was my favorite.

  You might think that meant coming up with a fake identity and supplying the necessary documents to go along with the new name. And sure, they do that—but so much more. In order to really fool people in this century, you need to have a digital history. Whether it’s a job interviewee, a prospective blind date, or just naked curiosity, we look people up online all the time. If I waltzed into Deele’s office and said my name was Little Boy Blue, I’d better have a substantial footprint on Google, including photos of me and my horn.

  That’s the kind of stuff coming out of the second floor. The only thing that chapped my ass about the whole procedure was they never let me pick my own fake name. It was probably for the best. They could, after all, sculpt a better profile when given free reign, whereas I’d probably clown around and pick something like Ty Mashieu. Don’t think I haven’t called an airport paging system and requested that Ty be summoned to a paging phone immediately.

  By the time I’d finished four miles, I had a pretty good scenario laid out for my Houston trip. The only thing I needed now—besides the new identity—was for Mr. Deele to get his butt back into the country. Of course, if I represented myself as a potential customer, someone with big bucks to spend on a fancy new strain of soybean, he might even change his flight plans to accommodate me. People may not fly back from overseas for Cousin Ashley’s wedding, but they’ll damn sure fly back for a multimillion dollar contract.

  Back in my room I showered and dressed, hungry after leaving more than half of my breakfast untouched. Just as I was getting ready to leave the room and hunt down some fish and chips, my phone hummed. It was a text from Fife.

  May have caught a break on the Culbertson murder. Sending you security footage.

  A minute later I got an email from him: Hotel security camera, Culbertson.

  There was a video attachment.

  I opened it on my tablet. The image was a little grainy, but otherwise of decent quality, and obviously lifted from a security camera in Culbertson’s hotel parking lot. It was a night shot.

  I watched a car pull into a space. The USDA agent emerged, but hadn’t walked six feet before another man approached and got right up on him. I saw Culbertson glance down, and, although I couldn’t make it out, I’m sure that meant a gun was poking him in the stomach. After a few seconds Culbertson climbed back in his car while the other man ducked into the passenger seat.

  The car left the lot.

  These would be the last images of David Culbertson alive.

  Moments later I got a f
ollow-up: Visual ID.

  It was a different photo of the man from the parking lot. The FBI’s lab people are pretty good. They’d zoomed in on the gunman, analyzed it, and found a matching photo in their database.

  I studied the image. Average height and physically fit. Maybe 35 years old. Dark hair, short and well-styled, no facial hair. Otherwise totally indistinguishable from any other face in the crowd.

  At the bottom I clicked on the link, which opened a profile page on a man named Conor Wood. I sat down to take it all in.

  Age turned out to be 36, former college track athlete, four-year stint in the Army, dishonorably discharged for insubordination.

  Well, I couldn’t hold that against him. I’d been insubordinate several times while in the special ops unit. You just have to be smart enough to know who you can mouth off to and who you can’t.

  A couple of minor scrapes with the law through age 32. And then nothing.

  As in nothing. As in fell-off-the-face-of-the-Earth.

  Until he turned up in a midwest town, four years later, kidnapping—and probably murdering—an agent from the USDA. Now wasn’t that strange?

  I texted back to Fife: Whats his connection with everything?

  He immediately sent back: Good question. Can you ask Poole for help?

  I responded with a thumbs-up, the laziest of the emojis.

  Then I left the room and began my search for fish and chips.

  By the time I returned, Poole and the crack squad on the second floor had all sorts of goodies for me. For starters, the fake identity I’d use for setting up a meeting with Deele was actually not too bad. Ryan Thomas. Q2 often used names that could overwhelm an online search, offering up thousands of people with the same name. It allowed me to almost get lost amongst the digital noise.

  In this case, though, Ryan Thomas was an executive with agricultural giant D.M. Cash. This multinational organization, based in Europe but with a substantial presence in the U.S., was the perfect cover. They had their tentacles into everything from crop management and consulting, to farm equipment, to pesticide production. For the time being a nice bio and my history with the company lived on a detached web site that, from the outside, looked like it belonged to D.M. Cash, but was actually housed with the Q2 nerds. It was more than convincing to outside eyes.

  It would take about 12 hours for everything to populate the Internet, but, when it did, the story of Mr. Ryan Thomas, of Alexandria, Virginia, would stretch back more than fifteen years. I especially liked the notice of an award from the South Dakota Farmers Union for “encouraging the healthy application of bio-sciences in grain production.” Whatever that meant.

  They’d even managed to create a photo of me shaking hands with some guy as I accepted my award.

  What the second floor was capable of doing should scare the shit out of you.

  Poole had been busy, too. On my tablet I now had an updated file on Jason Deele. I piled up the pillows on my bed, got comfortable, and dove into the abridged version of his life story.

  Like me, he was a college dropout, but that’s where the similarities ended. He’d left Stanford with only one semester to go. Started two different tech companies in the Silicon Valley area, both of which went belly-up within six months. But the third time was most definitely the charm.

  Deele and a partner created a social media site that could be highly refined so people with very specific interests could associate with fellow enthusiasts, hit on each other, then talk trash after it didn’t work out. At least that’s how I always looked at that particular site. His niche media, as opposed to mass media, struggled at first, and then exploded. Before his 30th birthday he unloaded his share in the company to a giant in the social apps world, pocketing more than a billion dollars.

  Instead of retiring to a small island, he took his billion and launched another niche tech company, this time specializing in helping young entrepreneurs start their own companies. Having his name attached to it helped lure top talent, and the business competed well enough with the heavyweights in the industry that one of those Goliaths bought him out. That meant two successful start-ups, two acquisitions, and a shit-ton of money for a young man still in his mid-30s.

  Jason Deele wasn’t a household name, not to the degree of those tech icons people have worshipped through the years. But he wasn’t entirely an unknown, either. He fell into a category that many of the world’s super-wealthy appreciated the most: More money than God, but still relatively anonymous.

  And now here he was . . . selling soybeans? I must’ve furrowed my brow trying to make the connection because I realized I was lying on my hotel bed, scowling. More than anything I wanted to meet with the guy just to ask him what inspired this startling deviation from his path, especially when he was not only set for life, his great-great-great grandchildren were set, too. I mean, I could do the math: Even with ‘only’ two billion dollars, his family could spend a million bucks a year for two thousand years. And Deele had way more than that.

  Yet . . .

  I didn’t get to the good stuff about Deele until I scanned Poole’s later notes. Sure, all of it was rumor and innuendo, but it began to at least prop up some of the concerns Sarah Eklund had. And it might’ve even lent credence to the idea that Deele could be involved in Culbertson’s murder.

  The roaring success behind the companies he’d sold coincided with a change in his business style. During the early days, while struggling, he played nice. Then there were little things here and there—blog posts, magazine articles, social media posts—suggesting Jason Deele had turned cut-throat in his dealings. Poole found one source who claimed there was an investigation into the first start-up to find out why three different people with connections to the company had committed suicide. One was a senior executive within the walls, while two were CEOs of companies that Deele’s organization later absorbed.

  Coincidence? Possibly. Although the wife of one victim and the husband of another both insisted there was no way their spouses would’ve killed themselves. It was considered a tragic mystery, while some claimed it was merely evidence of the enormous pressure that comes with running a Silicon Valley business. Deele, for his part, publicly mourned.

  But he also cleaned up on the deals.

  I set down the tablet for a moment and thought about that. Could it be the college dropout tried to play nice and got humiliated in the process? And that experience led him to try an approach where he played dirty . . . and won.

  Depending on the personality, it was certainly possible that it became a matter of cause and effect. Be a good boy, lose your shirt. Be an asshole, own the entire goddamned shirt factory.

  There was no proof of any of this. But sitting in a hotel room in Des Moines, trying to fit the jigsaw pieces together without a picture to go by, it didn’t sound too farfetched.

  Picking up the tablet again, I clicked on the notes Poole had left regarding Conor Wood, the parking lot gunman. He had no official records from the last few years—no employment data, no tax returns, no credit card information—which is suspicious by itself. But Poole ran his photo through the special ID program we use for mystery people like Wood. A handful of matches came up, only one of which seemed important or relevant.

  It was a press report outlining the meteoric rise of a certain young tech wizard who’d profited nicely through another major acquisition. His personal net worth had swelled to more than six billion dollars. The accompanying candid photograph showed Jason Deele walking out of an office building, holding up a hand in a futile attempt to ward off the camera. But it was definitely him.

  And trailing him, an expressionless look on his face, was Conor Wood.

  No coincidence there. It was basically proof that Wood worked for Deele. But doing what? Company security? Bodyguard? Or did he carry out other deeper, darker assignments? Like maybe removing nuisance USDA agents who threatened blackmail?

  I got up and paced the room. My next move was now clear: Go to Houston, meet with Deele
, and get to the bottom of this bizarre case.

  I sent a text to Fife, letting him know about the Deele-Wood connection. I also reached out to Poole, requesting a flight for the next day. The time had come to creep into the lion’s den.

  It was still fairly early and I felt like a walk. But I decided to do a quick upload of everything first; I’d be too tired later, and probably wouldn’t have enough time in the morning.

  I popped the horse pill, rearranged the pillows, grabbed my gear and a different magazine, and chilled out. This time it took only about 70 minutes. Maybe God Maker’s improvements really were kicking in.

  When I finished, I put everything away, put my shoes back on, and headed for the door. I debated whether or not to call Christina, but figured it was crunch time at the restaurant. I’d try later.

  Outside it was dark, the air crisp and clean. I headed for the back of the parking lot and a path I’d noticed earlier. Looked like it led to a small park. As I strolled past the parked cars I thought about Culbertson, and how he must’ve been shocked to find a gun barrel sticking into his belly. Even with all of the dirty deals he’d been involved with, he still probably never thought things would go this bad.

  What would’ve been going through his head as Wood forced him to drive out of town? True to his nature as a bullshit artist he probably tried to talk his way out. For that matter probably tried to bribe his way out.

  Did Wood tell him anything? Did he at least let Culbertson know who had ordered his death?

  My phone rang. It was Fife.

  “Howdy. How’s Big D?” I asked, reaching the path and starting toward the park.

  “Spread out,” he said. “Lots of pickup trucks and sweet tea.”

  “Nice work on the security footage. The confirmation I needed to stop looking at Chicago and start focusing on Houston. Which is where I’ll be tomorrow.”