This visit brought him back to the true reality, and he welcomed it, despite the uncomfortable emotions it had raised.
Duty. That was something he understood.
He opened the door to the room of one of the true heroes, and his heart ached as he stepped inside.
“Madam Director,” he said softly. “I brought a little something for you.”
Monica Ridley lay in the hospital bed, her once strong and proud body reduced to wasted flesh stretched over bone. The artificially accelerated attack of Lou Gehrig’s disease had done in the course of days what it normally would have taken years to do. She was totally paralyzed now, except for her eyes: she could still move and focus them, and blink to communicate yes-or-no responses, but that was all.
Her systems were rapidly shutting down as the disease destroyed her body, and she had steadfastly refused any sort of artificial support beyond an IV to keep her hydrated.
Richards had gotten the call from her primary physician this morning: “I don’t have a crystal ball,” he had said sadly, “but I think today is probably the day.” The day Monica Ridley would pass from this life.
Richards had cleared his schedule, putting off his regular duties for a far higher one. He had retrieved something from Ridley’s office – she remained the director, and no one had touched anything – before making the drive up to Baltimore. He hadn’t taken a car with a driver, as he easily could have. Instead, he drove his black Impala, alone with his thoughts.
Looking at her now, he knew that she wouldn’t acknowledge his presence with a smile or a wave, a word of greeting. She couldn’t, and the knowledge was like a white-hot knife driven into his gut.
He walked to the side of the bed and pulled over a chair, seating himself so she could see him. Someone else might have thought she looked pitiful, but Richards spared pity for no one. And certainly not for a woman who’d had the courage to face this particular fate.
He began to speak and found he couldn’t. He had to pause a moment to regain his voice. Pity wasn’t in his vocabulary, but pride was. And at this moment, he was overcome with it.
“I brought something for you,” he finally managed to repeat after clearing his throat. He held up what he’d retrieved from her office: a battered book that was a fixture on her desk, a collection of poems by Robert Frost that he knew was one of her most treasured possessions and that she read from every day. “I take it you kind of like this Frost guy?”
She blinked slowly, twice. Yes. The heart rate monitor beeped in the background, seemingly in time with her reply.
“Well, I’m not exactly into poetry,” Richards said, forcing a smile. “It would be bad for my image.”
Yes.
Richards tried to imagine the words that might have gone with that tiny reply. He suspected she would have had a few choice phrases for him. That warmed his smile.
“Okay,” he went on, “you’ll just have to bear with me then as I stumble through this. They don’t normally put poetry in the sports section of the paper.”
Yes.
He imagined her laughing at that.
“Well, let’s do this,” he told her, turning to a page that had the biggest and most-worn dog ear. “The Road Not Taken,” Richards said, more softly now, trying to keep his voice steady. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both...”
As he read, Monica Ridley’s eyes closed, and Richards liked to think that she was imagining the places and images conjured by Frost’s words, that they were taking her far away from this reality to a better place.
He didn’t know how long he’d been reading to her when her pulse rate monitor stuttered, then went to a flat line as her heart finally gave out.
Wiping away a tear that threatened to fall from his eyes, Richards closed the book. He wanted to stay here for a while, to try and sort through his own feelings, but that wasn’t his way.
Leaning over the bed, he kissed Ridley on the forehead and placed the book in her hands. Then he quietly left the room.
Duty called.
***
Major Elaine Harris stood in front of the mirror in her quarters at Minot Air Force Base. Wearing her Class A dress uniform, she gave herself a critical appraisal, making sure everything was perfect.
Her life had been a surreal nightmare since the day she had dropped the bomb over California. When the blast wave shook the plane, she had circled around Sutter Buttes and, in violation of her own rules, peeled back the blast curtain to look outside. Her heart had nearly stopped at the sight of the black and orange mushroom cloud that rose from where the bomb, her bomb, had detonated.
She had spent the next few hours, for as long as the plane’s load of fuel would give her, orbiting the buttes, staring at the mushroom cloud while her crew tried to help clear air traffic from the area over the radio. She finally descended into a state of near-catatonia, and her copilot had been forced to fly the plane back to Minot by himself.
The court of inquiry that inevitably followed had cleared her and her crew of any wrongdoing, and presented her with the surprising scenario that terrorists had somehow been responsible, and that she and her crew simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But she knew better. She had looked at the radiological data, the fallout dispersal patterns and, most tellingly, at imagery of the site after the blast. Had a bomb gone off at or below ground, there would have been a crater. A big one. But there wasn’t. It had clearly been an air burst, and there was no way the terrorists could have somehow flung a nuclear weapon high enough into the air.
The subsequent investigation into security breaches that had allowed nuclear weapons to be loaded aboard aircraft without proper authorization only confirmed her suspicions. It was a practice that, to everyone’s shock and dismay, had been going on for years.
No. The bomb had been dropped from her plane. It didn’t matter how it had gotten aboard. She had been the pilot in command. It had been her responsibility. And thousands of innocent people had died.
She had been exonerated, although she’d been taken off flight status until the flight surgeons were confident that she was psychologically prepared to fly again.
She already knew when that would be: never. She had dreams every night, and they were filled with nightmares of the one thousand three hundred and seventy-five souls who had died from the bomb. Her bomb. The court had cleared her, but her conscience hadn’t, and never would.
Looking in the mirror now, she saw what she wanted to see, what had once been: a distinguished young officer who had a bright future in the Air Force, and in life.
Before the image could fade from her mind, she put her service Baretta 9mm pistol under her chin and pulled the trigger.
***
Renee turned from her laptop to watch the news. She was a fledgling FBI agent now, of a sort. Richards had asked her to fill in as a consultant to follow up on what EDS had been doing unilaterally, but that was now a government responsibility. Pending the official stand-up of the new agency that Jack and Naomi would lead, once their personalities had been sanitized, the FBI had the bulk of the responsibility for tying up as many loose ends as possible. As for Richards, she liked him, even though he was an ass, and had a sneaking suspicion that he might feel the same way toward her. It could make for an interesting combination, she thought idly.
Suddenly, she spilled the coffee she’d been holding into her lap as the news commentator relayed some breaking news.
“The Justice Department announced today that the CEO, Mr. Aaron Steinbecke, and the board of directors of New Horizons Corporation have been arrested by the FBI and the company’s assets and records seized in a series of massive raids across the country this morning.” The video switched from the commentator’s talking head to a series of clips showing FBI agents and local police SWAT teams battering down doors and entering labs and company offices, and of Steinbecke being hauled away in cuffs. “The Justice Department announcement that was relea
sed only thirty minutes ago charges that Steinbecke and the others were responsible for developing genetically modified agricultural seeds that were intended as weapons of mass destruction, and that they were working in concert with the terrorist group known as the Earth Defense Society, which was responsible for the nuclear explosion in central California last week that claimed over a thousand lives.”
“Fuck you,” Renee said under her breath. She had to stick with the story that she had been at the beach that day, and had never heard of EDS, New Horizons, or any of the others. It was a supreme injustice, but something she and the others couldn’t argue about.
“In what is believed to be a related action,” the commentator went on, the video now shifting to a view of President Curtis in the Oval Office with his cabinet, “President Curtis has ordered a full investigation of all members of the government who formerly worked for New Horizons. As of this morning, the head of the Food and Drug Administration and several other senior civilians and military officers handed in their resignations. In addition, the President has penned an executive order for the Food and Drug Administration, mandating that all products containing genetically modified organisms be banned until or unless the product has been fully evaluated for health concerns by an independent review group...”
“Looks like the President’s got a new broom and isn’t afraid to use it,” she heard a familiar voice say from behind her.
She turned to look at Richards, who sauntered up to her workstation. She was about to make a wise-ass remark until she saw the chat message that had popped up on her screen while she’d been watching the news broadcast on the larger monitor hanging from the ceiling. It was Marion Henderson, the team leader at one of the disposal sites they’d diverted the New Horizons trucks to. The good news had been that, with Curtis seeing the light, the “terrorists” of the EDS no longer had to take care of disposing of all the seeds they had redirected: they were now working with teams of military and civilian specialists to safely and completely destroy them.
But there was a problem.
“Oh, shit,” Renee whispered as she looked at what Marion had sent her.
One bag is missing from 378.
“What is it?” Richards said, leaning over her shoulder.
“We accounted for all the trucks that left the plant,” Renee told him as she called up Marion over the Internet. “Every single one of them. And each one had a shipping invoice listing the number of bags of seed that had been loaded. Every truck’s inventory has been accounted for. This one, truck 378, is the last to be counted, and we’re missing a damn bag.”
The number only rang once before Marion answered it. “Renee?”
“It’s me,” Renee confirmed.
“We’ve counted four times,” Marion told her, “and every time we’ve come up one bag short of what’s on the manifest.”
“This is Deputy Director Richards,” Richards interjected, ignoring Renee’s frown. “Did the driver make any stops?”
“No, sir,” Marion answered. “He says he didn’t, and the tracking information on the truck that we pulled from the central monitoring center confirms that. The truck didn’t stop for anything longer than a traffic light before it arrived here.”
“And the trailer was sealed?” Richards asked tensely, exchanging a worried look with Renee. One bag, they were both thinking. How many seeds were in a bag? Thousands? Tens of thousands? And every one of them could produce a plant that could in turn produce...them.
“Yes, sir,” came the answer. “With a heavy duty padlock. The drivers weren’t given the keys, because the trailers were to stay sealed until they arrived at their distribution points. It was still intact when the truck got here. We had to get a torch to cut it off so we could open the trailer. It must be an error on the manifest. Or the bag was never loaded and is...somewhere else. We may never know.”
“Hell,” Richards growled.
A sliver of ice ran down Renee’s spine. Hell indeed.
***
Six months later, Bryce Moore sat in a rocking chair on the back porch of his home just outside of San Antonio, Texas. The sun was just going down, and the sky was every fiery shade of red and orange. Behind him, two cats, a big Siberian male with a tuxedo coat and a white Turkish Angora with a long scar down her flank, watched him from the big window of the living room. The Siberian lived with him, while the Angora was a frequent visitor.
“Here,” the woman sitting in a rocker right next to his said, taking his wine glass and refilling it. Her name was Angelina Matheson. They were coworkers, joint heads of a government think-tank that had been established here to study the long-term effects of soil erosion on agricultural productivity. Or so their friends and neighbors outside of work were led to believe. It was a topic that was important, but that most people wouldn’t want to pursue for more than thirty seconds in the course of casual conversation before switching to the far more interesting details of the news or the mundane events of everyday life. It was a good cover for their real work, which was to quietly keep humanity safe, to protect the world from monsters. Parents told their children that monsters were only the stuff of nightmares, that they weren’t real; Bryce and Angelina knew better.
“God, that’s beautiful,” Angelina sighed at nature’s display before taking a sip of wine.
Turning to look at her, Bryce suddenly knew what his next painting would be. Fixing that image of her in his mind for later, he smiled and reached out to take her hand. “Not nearly as beautiful as you,” he said. They had become more than friends over the months since they had begun their new lives, and he thought there was a good chance that someday she might become Mrs. Angelina Moore. Someday.
She smiled and squeezed his hand, her blue and brown eyes gleaming in the sunlight before she turned back to the blazing horizon.
They sat in companionable silence, waiting for the glow of sunset to give way to the stars of night.
AFTERWORD
My inspiration for this story was drawn from the research my wife, Jan, and I did on that most mundane of every day topics: food. In the process of conquering some health issues a couple years ago, we became much more conscious of what we ate and, more importantly, what we fed to our kids.
Genetically modified (or engineered) organisms, GMOs, of course came up in the course of our self-education on what was going into our bodies. I’m not going to stand here and jump up and down (well, or try and throw words from the page at your eyeballs), shouting “GMOs are evil!”
But you do have to wonder. GMO products, particularly in the United States, are a big-ticket item, with companies making profits in the billions of dollars and big chunks of market share. Take soy, for example. Today, it’s very difficult in the United States to get soy products that aren’t GMO-based. Corn, wheat, and other basic sustenance foods used for both human and animal consumption are also very high on the GMO production scale.
I also learned a new term during my digging around: substantial equivalence. What that means is that GMO-based food should be considered the same as – and as safe as – its non-GMO cousins if it has the same basic characteristics. For example, if a GMO strain of corn looks and tastes like “natural” corn, it’s substantially equivalent, even if its DNA has genes that were tailored from bacteria (don’t laugh: bacteria, including some rather nasty varieties, are a frequent source of genetic material for the GMO food we eat).
The tight connections between federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and some of the large agribusinesses that produce GMO crops came as a bit of a shock. There has been a great deal of discussion on the web about the “revolving door” for officials moving between government positions and these companies that, were I a cynic, I might consider a potential conflict of interest.
With the government’s blessing, the GMO companies have been working tirelessly to ensure that you don’t know if you’re eating a GMO product. Despite the long and loud protestations of numerous consumer groups, there’s n
o requirement for labels on food products to say if the product contains GMOs. In fact, at one point, there was a strong push to allow GMO foods to carry the “organic” label, again based on the concept of substantial equivalence. And in what I have to confess has been a rather shameful act for the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, the United States has been trying to browbeat the European countries into changing their food labeling, which currently requires GMO products to be labeled as such, to be more in line with U.S. labeling standards.
It was also interesting to discover who really determines if these GMO products are safe: the companies that produce them. There isn’t a third-party “honest broker” testing the products, and there’s a substantial body of evidence on the web indicating that scientists who try to perform independent testing often have sudden “career issues.” Or worse.
The companies do, however, put their products through an expensive testing process. While this looks great on paper, the net result is that they provide “proof” that their GMOs are safe, and the government rubber stamps it. The only real effect of requiring these expensive tests is that it’s extremely difficult for new companies to join in the fun unless they have very deep pockets. It’s like a high-stakes game in the back room of a shady night club. If you want to play, you’d better be ready to pay.
Even more interesting was the discovery that GMOs are patented products, and the companies that make them have a ferocious reputation for going after anyone who may be infringing on their patent rights. Even if GMO seeds were to accidentally spill out of a passing truck into a farmer’s field (where non-GMO crops were being raised, in our hypothetical case), if the seeds took root and were “discovered” by a company representative who just happened to later wander through that farmer’s field, the company could sue the hapless farmer for infringing on the company’s patent rights. From what I learned during my research, this wasn’t a rare occurrence: it happened (and still happens) a lot.
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