Warren Murphy: Deadly Seeds

After arranging for Chiun, his trunks, and his television set to be quietly shipped to a new hotel, Remo went to the Vandalia Airport. A quick jet flight and a helicopter ride brought him to the edge of the Mojave and a rented Yamaha motorcycle brought him out into the desert.

Mile after mile, following the narrow road, as straight as a weighted string hanging inside a well, Remo rode on into the heat and sand. Far ahead, on the rise off to the left, he saw the hurricane fencing surrounding Fielding's experimental farm, and he saw tire tracks through the sand.

He ran ahead another mile, then made a sharp left off the road and dug his bike twistingly through the sand, sputtering and spitting, following the other tire tracks, until he reached the fence.

A uniformed guard surveyed him from inside the fence.

"I'm Remo Barker. I work for Mr. Fielding. Where is he?" Remo could see a small pickup truck with rental plates parked inside the compound.

"He's over inspecting the field," the guard said lazily. He unlocked the wke gate by pressing a button built into a panel on an inside post.

Remo propped up the motorcycle and walked inside. "Must be kind of lonely duty out here," he said.

"Yeah," said the guard. "Sometimes." He nodded toward the small wooden shack inside the compound. "Me and two other fellows around the clock." He leaned over to Remo and said softly, "Strange. Who'd want to steal wheat?"

"That's what I keep asking myself," Remo said walking toward the area in the back, covered by the almost black plastic sun shield. The compound itself was almost a hundred yards square. The planting field took up one-quarter of the space. The only other thing inside the hurricane fencing was the guard's small wooden shack.

There was no sign of Fielding. Remo went to the edge of the planting area, then lifted up a corner of the plastic sun shield and stepped inside.

It was a miracle.

Thrusting up from the arid, barren sand of the Mojave was a field of young wheat. To the left was rice. In the back, barley and soybeans. And there was that strange smell Remo remembered from the first time he had been there. He recognized it now. It was oil.

He looked around, but could not see Fielding. He walked through the field, through a miracle of growth, expecting to find Fielding crouched down, inspecting some stalk of grain, but there was no sign of the man.

At the back of the planting area, Remo lifted an edge of the sunscreen to find that it had been erected right against the hurricane fencing. There was no place for Fielding to be. He looked between the sunscreen and the fencing, left and right, toward the angled corners of the hurricane fencing but saw nothing, not even a lizard.

Where could Fielding have vanished to? Then he heard a truck's motor start and tires begin to drive off through the heavy sand.

Remo went back through the planting area, stuffing samples of the grains in his pockets. At the gate, he saw the truck speeding off in the distance. "That Fielding?"

"Yeah," said the guard. "Where'd he come from?"

The guard shrugged. "I told him you was here but he said he was in a hurry and had a plane to catch."

Remo walked out through the gate, hopped on his Yamaha, and took off through the sand after Fielding.

Fielding was driving along the narrow road at seventy miles an hour and it took Remo almost two miles to catch up to him. He pulled up alongside Fielding's open window and then thought himself stupid for startling the man, because Fielding jerked the wheel and the truck spun left and sideswiped Remo's motorcycle.

The cycle started to lean to its side and Remo threw his weight heavily in the other direction and pulled back on the bike, but the front wheel lifted as Remo regained its balance, and the motorcycle did a fast wheelie, standing up on its end, while Remo guided it through the deep sand to a safe stop off the road.

Fielding had stopped on the road and looked out the window, back at Remo.

"Hey, you startled me. You could've been hurt," he said.

"No sweat," said Remo. He looked at the dented bike and said "I'll ride in with you if you don't mind."

"No. Come on. You drive."

Driving back toward the airport, Remo said, "Some disappearing act back there. Where were you?"

"Back at the farm? In the field."

"I didn't see you."

"I must have come out just as you were going in. It's coming like a charm, isn't it? Is that what you came for, to see how my crops are doing?"

"No. I came to tell you I think your life is in danger."

"Why? Who would care about me?"

"I don't know," said Remo. "But there's just too much violence about this whole thing."

Fielding shook his head slowly. "It's too late now for anybody to do anything. The crops are coming so good that I'm moving up the schedule. Three more days and I'm going to show them to the world. The miracle grains. Humanity's salvation. I thought they'd take a month to grow, but they didn't even take two weeks."

He looked at Remo and smiled. "And then I'll be done."

Fielding would not hear of Remo accompanying him to the other planting fields.

"Look," he said. "You're talking about violence but all the violence seems aimed at you. None at me. Maybe you're a target, not me."

"I doubt it," said Remo. "There's another thing too. A girl went to your Denver warehouse." He felt Fielding stiffen on the seat. "She died. Radiation poisoning."

"Who was she?" Fielding asked.

"A Cuban, trying to steal your formulas."

"That's a shame. It's dangerous in Denver." He looked at Remo hard. "Can I trust you? I'll tell you something no one else knows. It's a special kind of radiation that prepared the grain so it can give such miracle growth. It's dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. I feel sorry for the poor girl." He shook his head. "I haven't felt this bad since my manservant, Oliver, was killed in a tragic accident. Would you like to see his picture?"

In the mirror, Remo saw Fielding's lips pull back in a grimace. Or was it a grin? Never mind. Many people smiled when under tension.

"No, I'll skip the pictures," Remo said. As he parked the truck at the airport later, Fielding put a hand on his arm. "Look. Maybe you're right. Maybe these attacks are eventually aimed at me. But if they think the way to me is through you, then it's best we're separated. You see my point?"

Reluctantly Remo nodded. It was logical, but it made him uneasy. For once, he had found a job he wanted to do. Maybe in decades or generations, if Remo's life ever became known, maybe he would not be rated by the people he had killed but for this one life he had saved-the life of James Orayo Fielding, the man who had conquered hunger and starvation and famine in the world for all time.

He thought this while he watched Fielding's plane take off. He thought of it on his own plane back to Dayton and he thought of it when, just on a whim, he remembered his pockets filled with grain and stopped at an agricultural lab at the University of Ohio.

"Perfectly good grain," the botanist told Remo. "Normal, healthy specimens, of wheat, barley, soy, and rice."

"And what would you say if I told you they were grown in the Mojave Desert?"

The botanist smiled, showing a set of teeth that were discolored by tobacco stains.

"I'd say you'd been spending too much time in the sun without a hat."

"They were," said Remo.

"No way."

"You've heard of it," Remo said. "Fielding's Wondergrains. This is it."

"I've heard of it, sure. But that doesn't mean I have to believe it. Look, friend, there's one miracle nobody can do. Rice cannot be grown in anything but mud. Mud. That's dirt and water. Mud, pal."

"In this process, the plants draw their moisture from the air," Remo said patiently.