Warren Murphy: Deadly Seeds

"Yeah," he said, lifting the phone and resting the base on Willoughby's stomach.

"Oh, hello, darling." It was a woman's voice. "I know I'm not supposed to phone but the garbage disposal is stuck. It's been stuck since dinner, Ozzie. I know I'm not supposed to call. Should I get the repairman? I'll get the repairman. It's the cauliflower that does it. And we don't even like cauliflower. You like it. I don't know why cauliflower. I don't even know why they told you not to give me the number. I mean, who have these few phone calls I've made hurt? Right? Who have they hurt? Ozzie… are you there?"

Remo tried to answer but the only suitable answers were lies and he pressed down the receiver button terminating the conversation. He left the phone off the cradle, buzzing a useless dial tone.

What was he going to tell her? That her phone calls had ruined Willoughby's only protection, the secrecy of his whereabouts? She had enough grief coming. By the time the dial tone turned into a continuous out-of-order whine, Remo found a stack of notes in the kitchen. They were in an old Eaton Corrasable Bond Box and there was a title page: "Testimony of Oswald Willoughby."

Remo took the box. Outside, the driver of the hit car was discovering that he only had a broken bone. He leaned against the fender of the smashed-up car, pressing tight his injured shoulder with his free hand.

"Hey, I'm not gonna die. You're a damned liar, fella, a damned liar."

"No, I'm not," said Remo and with an ease of motion that made his right hand seem hardly to move at all, he let his index and forefinger out, penetrating the skull, which jerked the man's head back as if it had met a crane-hoisted wrecking ball. The feet flew over the head and the man slapped into the dust, silently and finally, without even a twitch of the spine.

Chiun, noticing that even to the breathing the blow had been without flaw, turned back to his trunks. They were undamaged. But they might have been and he told his pupil that such carelessness as his car driving could not be tolerated.

"We've got to get out of here and your trunks are slowing us down, Little Father. Maybe I'd better do this assignment alone," Remo said.

"We are coequal. I am not only your superior in training but on assignments now, by order of Emperor Smith I am on the same level. My judgment is of equal weight to yours. My responsibility is equal to yours. Therefore you cannot say anymore, go home, Master of Sinanju, I will do this or do that alone. It is we. We do this or we do not do that. It is we. Never you anymore, but we. No more you's. We."

"Willoughby, the man we're supposed to keep alive, is dead," said Remo.

"You failed," said Chiun.

"But there's some crucial evidence in this box," said Remo.

"We have saved the evidence. Good."

"It's not as good as Willoughby himself."

"You aren't perfect."

"But for the first time though, there's a lead on the source which just might be the core of the whole thing."

"We have the solution."

"Possibly," said Remo.

"Fate takes strange patterns at times," said Chiun. "We may succeed gloriously, as is the tradition of the House of Sinanju, or you may fail, which would not be the first time in your life."

In the matter of the trunks, Chiun explained that they had to take them along because their mission was to honor the Constitution of the United States and to wear one kimono continuously would be to dishonor the document by which Remo's nation lived. Chiun understood these things now, being coequal.

The driver of a pickup truck understood the need to get the trunks to the closest airport immediately and to forget about the wrecked cars and the two dead bodies he saw when his country's history was shown to him. Fifteen portraits of Ulysses S. Grant, printed in green.

"You fellas want a lift, well, I'll show you, the spirit of cooperation is not dead. That's fifteen of them little fellers. Thirteen… fourteen… and fifteen."

The Piper they rented circled over the Mississippi River town of East St. Louis because Chiun wanted to see it from the air.

"That is a fine river," said Chiun. "Who owns the water rights?"

"No one exactly owns the water rights. It belongs to the country."

"Then the country could give it to us in payment?"

"No," said Remo.

"Even if we glorify the Constitution?"

"Not even then."

"You were born in an ungrateful country," said Chiun, but Remo did not answer him. He was thinking about Willoughby's testimony. Willoughby did not give his life for it. He gave his life because he let his wife know where he was. People died, not for causes, but for stupidity or bad luck, which was another form of stupidity, caused by incompetence. This was the essence of what he had been taught for more than a decade. In the world there was competence and incompetence and nothing else. Causes were frills and came and went with each age. Luck was only the cloudy explanation for things people did not perceive. In this, the Master of Sinanju, more than fourscore in years, stood alone, atop the world.

A man like Willoughby had worked his entire life without knowing what he did. He took orders and he executed orders and nowhere in his testimony did it ever show that he understood more than a minimum about how food was grown and gotten to market. He had laced the testimony he had hoped to give with words like "hard futures" and "soft futures" and the market strengthening. Remo knew in his stomach that this was not how his country had become the greatest food producer in the world.

There was talk today about his country being selfishly food-rich, but all those talking like that made it seem as if the food just grew by itself because the land was rich. This was not so. Men planted seed, and sweated over seed, and tried to outsmart the weather. Men invested their lives in the soil, from the laboratories where Americans sought constantly improving grains and fertilizers, to the iron shops of Detroit where men improved the substitute for the ox, the tractor. America had invented the automatic reapers. America had made the first real changes in agriculture since man had left the caves and put seed in soil. America's food wealth was the fruit of its character. Genius, hard work, and persistence.

It deeply offended Remo when he heard it compared to coal or oil or bauxite, generally by some man in a university who had never broken sweat on his brow.

What made a country developed or underdeveloped was its people. Yet these men who knew not of labor referred to the natural resources of undeveloped countries as something belonging, by some divine right, solely to the people who happened to live over them, while at the same time they said the proceeds of those who worked for food belonged to the whole world. If it were not for the real workers of the world, the oil and bauxite and copper lying under sand and jungle would be as useless to the underdeveloped nations as they had been at the first tick of noticed time.

As Chiun had so well taught, there was only competence and incompetence.

Willoughby happened to be one of the ones taking a free ride. Nearly one hundred pages of written testimony and the man only suspected that he was stumbling onto the greatest man-made disaster in history.

"I don't know how," concluded Willoughby's written statement, "but these peculiar investment patterns forebode, I believe, a master plan of destruction. The depression of the winter wheat market futures at planting appear computer-timed to highest impact for maximum potential in minimizing food growth." Whatever the neon wool that all meant. All the testimony lacked was advice to get into this wonderful thing with your money while the getting was good.

Willoughby had made eighty thousand dollars a year as a commodities analyst, according to Smith's information.