Heartland (26 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Heartland
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Dybrovik stood a few feet back, in the shadows of a clump of trees. He looked scared witless.
“Turalin wasn't telling the truth, was he?” Newman asked.
Dybrovik shook his head. “No. It was mostly all lies.”
“Then it will be a market manipulation. Another Great Grain Robbery?”
“It's not that either. It's worse. It's …” Dybrovik stopped in midsentence. He was staring across at the hotel.
Newman turned. The husky man who had watched the cab take his luggage was starting across the street.
“It is Danilov. He is coming for me,” Dybrovik said. He slipped farther back into the shadows, then took off running.
Newman hesitated a moment, then jumped up and started after Dybrovik. But he had waited too long. Danilov had spotted him; he shouted something and raced forward.
The park was fairly busy with tourists and lovers ambling hand in hand.
Newman made it to the other side. Dybrovik was nowhere in sight. To the left was Papaspirou; to the right, the park angled back toward a gathering of street vendors with their carts. Across the avenue was the American Express Building.
He sprinted to the right, toward the vendors. There was a small crowd of people there, and he hoped to lose himself among them.
He pushed his way through the knot of people and ordered a sweet tea from a vendor. As he dug in his pocket for money, he looked over his shoulder.
The big man emerged from the park at a run and pulled up short at the curb. Slowly he scanned the area across the street, and then looked directly toward Newman. But a moment later he turned toward the sidewalk cafe and started that way.
Newman paid for his tea, but left it there as he
sprinted around the vendor and hurried down the block, then across the street and down the avenue behind the American Express Building.
He'd take a cab out to the airport and get the hell away from Athens. Turalin had been lying to him. Even if Dybrovik had not confirmed it, the man chasing them had.
It was a lie, Dybrovik had said. Turalin was lying. It was worse than a market manipulation. But what did that mean?
Newman stopped about half a block away from the square and turned around. It wouldn't be so easy for Dybrovik to escape. He didn't have anywhere to go, and unless he had money he was in very big trouble. Turalin evidently had some kind of powerful hold on him. And yet he risked everything to come from the hotel and tell Newman that Turalin had been lying.
Newman started back toward the square. What the hell could he do against a large, well-armed Soviet secret service agent? Probably not a lot.
Someone careened around the corner, lost his balance, and scrambled to his feet. Newman frantically looked around, then stepped into the dark doorway of a small shop.
He could hear a man running toward him, and then he passed, and Newman almost stepped out. It was Dybrovik.
A second later there was a faint popping sound, and Newman heard someone coughing twice, and then for a moment nothing.
He pushed a little farther back into the shadows of the doorway. Someone else was out there. He heard the solid slap of shoe leather on the sidewalk. A minute
later Danilov passed the doorway. He was holding a gun in his right hand.
Newman peered out of the doorway. Danilov was bending over Dybrovik's form sprawled out on the sidewalk. He raised his gun.
Newman stepped out of the doorway and, moving as quietly as he could, raced the ten or fifteen feet to where Danilov was hunched over. Clasping his hands together into one fist, he raised them high and slammed them down on the man's neck.
Danilov went down like a felled ox, but then started up again. Newman kicked him in the head, the point of his toe connecting with the man's temple, and he went down and stayed there.
Dybrovik's legs were moving as though he were trying to swim underwater, and Newman knelt down beside him.
“Can you get up, Delos?” he asked.
“It's Bormett. The Bormett farm. Iowa. Bormett. It's the key. The farm …” Dybrovik said, then he stiffened in Newman's arms, and slumped to the side, his eyes open, a great sigh escaping from his body. Then he was still.
Newman laid him down, then stood up. Danilov was beginning to stir. The Bormett farm. Iowa. What the hell did he mean?
Danilov began to rise, the gun in his hand. Newman stepped back, and with all of his might, all of his anger against Turalin and everything that had happened, he kicked out, connecting solidly with the man's temple. This time, Newman didn't think Danilov would ever get up.
Bormett stood at the edge of his east field, staring down the long rows of corn that marched away from him in military ranks. The sun was getting low behind the hill that stood between him and the house, leaving him very much alone. Catherine was preparing to go to church in Adel for Wednesday night choir practice, and she would not be home until after ten. When he didn't show up at the house to say goodbye, she would worry that he was working too hard, but she'd forget about it at church. He was always like this around this time of the year.
“It's finished,” Joseph had said to him Friday night, and Bormett remembered now that he had almost replied, “It sure is.” Of course he had said nothing of the sort; instead, he had thanked his old friend for a job well done, and they had had a couple of beers.
He stepped off the access road, into the first three windbreak rows of corn. It seemed as if he could see forever down the long, leafy green tunnel. It felt like home to him. He worked here. He hunted pheasant and rabbit here. And his existence and the pasts of his father and grandfather were tied up here. This place meant life to him, and growth, and all that was good and clean in the world.
Ten or fifteen yards into the row, he noticed the odor of rotten eggs. He stopped and fingered the large leaves. They felt substantial to him, already slightly moist from the beginning evening mist.
Five days ago this field had been sprayed. His spirits had sagged. He had waited for the fields to turn brown, for the stalks to droop, for the leaves to shrivel. But it hadn't happened. Each evening, after he finished his regular chores, he came out here to his favorite field, to where it had all begun, and walked up and down the rows searching for signs that he had killed his life. But there was nothing. Nothing that is, but good, healthy-looking corn.
He had also waited for the university to call him with their report, but they had not done so until late this afternoon. Then he sincerely wished they hadn't.
“Mr. Bormett? This is Dr. Murray Gray, from the University of Iowa, School of Agriculture.”
“You've tested my samples?”
“Yes, sir, and to tell you that we are concerned would be the understatement of the year. We'd like to come out to your farm immediately.”
“Come out to my farm? Why?” Bormett asked.
“The chemicals you gave us to test. They were all fine, normal pesticides, corn-borer poisons, rust and
blight inhibitors. But one, the chemical in the milk jug. My God, Mr. Bormett, we still don't know what it is, but it's alive with bacterial organisms. If you sprayed that on your fields …”
Bormett's insides were churning. “Spray on my fields?” he asked, laughing. “Good Lord, Dr. Gray, of course I didn't spray any of those chemicals on my fields, at least not in years.”
“I don't understand,” the professor said.
“Those were chemicals that have been lying around the farm for years. I thought I'd clean them all out and find out just what kinds of things we had back there.”
“Thank God,” Dr. Gray said. “The chemical in the milk jug. Is there more of it out there?”
“Not to my knowledge,” Bormett said, sick at heart. “It was just lying back there on a shelf with a lot of other junk.”
“I'll destroy this, then. But you certainly gave us a fright, I can tell you that, Mr. Bormett. I was all set to call the Department of Agriculture and get your fields burned.”
“Well, I'm sure glad you didn't do that,” Bormett had said.
“I'd still like to come out and look around, sir, if you don't mind.”
“I do mind,” Bormett snapped, the fright rising in him like a dark monster.
“We just want to make sure there are no other contaminated sprays.”
“I tell you that I cleaned out my chemical shed. You people got it all. The only other chemicals I have are fresh.”
“If this organism had caught hold, it would have
spread like wildfire.”
“Just mind your own business, Gray, and let a man get to work.”
Looking at his corn now, he could not see what all the fuss had been about. There was nothing wrong here. Nothing at all.
He turned around and headed back toward the access road. Bacterial organisms, Dr. Gray had said. So he wasn't out of the woods yet. But five days with nothing … well, it was heartening, that's all he could think. It was damned heartening.
Near the end of the cornrow, Bormett stopped again to examine one of the stalks. It looked good. Healthy. The ears were already more than six inches long, and from this point on they would fill out, and grow very fast to fourteen or even eighteen inches in length.
He pulled an ear off a stalk, and immediately knew that something was wrong. Drastically wrong. The ear was soft. And very light. He could dent it with only a slight pressure from his thumb and fingers. It was rotting on the stalk.
He dropped the ear, then pulled several others from neighboring stalks. But they were all the same. Soft to the touch, and very light.
Maybe it was just as this edge of the field.
He turned and raced down the row, stumbling to a halt a hundred yards along, where he snatched four ears off as many stalks. But it was the same. The cobs felt mushy.
Oh, God. It was happening. His fields were dying.
He pulled another ear off its stalk and raced with it back out of the row, up to the access road, where he could see better in the waning light.
This ear was as soft as the others. Whatever was
wrong with this one was wrong with the entire field.
He grabbed the husk and pulled it down, exposing the cob and kernels. A powerful smell of rot assailed him, and for several long seconds he stood there, staring at the terrible thing his corn had become.
Something had eaten at the corn. The kernels were blackened and rotted on the cob. Instead of beautifully even rows of kernels, there was nothing here but putrescence.
He made to throw the terrible thing down on the ground, but then he thought about Joseph and the. others. They'd be out here in the morning. They'd see it lying here in the open. They'd know what was happening.
Instead, he turned and threw the infected ear back out into the field as far as he could, a noise like a wounded animal's cry escaping from his throat.
He stumbled back away from the field, as if it were a malevolent, living creature now, bent on destroying him.
“No,” he cried, the sound strangely weak from a man so large, and he scrambled back up into his pickup truck.
He started the engine and spun the truck around in front of the tank farm, but stalled the engine before he could start up the hill. He managed to get it started again, then raced away from the field, up the hill, over the crest, and then down the other side into the farmyard. He parked behind the big barn.
He sat there behind the wheel for a long time, trying to understand. But there was no reason for it. Kedrov and the little man had no reason to do this to him. No reason at all.
He thought about the girl, Raya, but as hard as he
tried, he could feel no animosity toward her. None of this had been her fault. No doubt she had merely followed orders. If she knew what was happening, and how much it meant, she would feel guilty, he thought. But he was a foolish old man.
What had he done or said to attract the Russians to him? He had done nothing. He had done nothing. He was nothing more or less than an Iowa farmer. A successful corn farmer, but nothing more than a heartland farmer.
The United States has become the breadbasket of the world
, he had told the Russians.
Was that what they had objected to? Could they have gone to such extremes out of mere envy?
He got out and started up toward the house. He could clearly see Kedrov's sickly sweet smile as well as Dr. Lubiako's sympathetic expression when he had introduced the farm journalist.
Well, I, for one, am worried about hybrids. I think we should move away from them.
Kedrov had not minced his words. Nor had the little man in the military uniform minced his words the next day.
“I've come to see you this morning because I would like to do a little horse trading with you,” the little man had said.
“What do you want?”
“I need a favor, Mr. Bormett. Not a very large favor, and certainly nothing illegal by your own country's laws. I'm not, as you may fear, trying to recruit you to spy for the Soviet Union. But you can be of some small help to me.”
“I don't know what you're talking about.”
“I'm talking about an experiment that I would like you to help me with.”
“What kind of an experiment?”
“Oh, it is harmless, I assure you. Harmless. But it does require your absolute cooperation.”
Bormett said nothing. He was too frightened. He could only think of Catherine, and her reaction if she saw the photographs. It would kill her.
“Am I going to have your cooperation, Mr. Bormett?”
He had nodded. What the hell else could he do?
“Someone will be coming to see you. Follow his instructions to the letter. No questions asked. Do I make myself clear?”
Again he had nodded. The little man held all the aces.
“When you are finished, the negatives will be returned to you, and we will forget that we ever heard your name. Simple.”
The negatives would be destroyed, the photographic record of his misdeeds erased. But what of the memory? It would endure. It was something he was going to have to live with for the rest of his life. That, and the fact he had killed his fields.
The porch light was on. As Bormett mounted the front steps, he had a vision of Katy coming out and saying, I've seen the pictures. What have you done? Why did you do it? What were you thinking about?
Inside, the house was quiet, except for the grandfather clock out of sight in the living room. He stood just within the vestibule listening, holding his breath.
After a minute or two, he went into the kitchen and turned on the light over the electric range. He got himself a drink of water at the sink, and then took down
a bottle of bourbon from a cabinet and poured a stiff shot into his water glass.
He leaned against the counter, straightening up every now and then to take a sip of his drink as he tried to think this all out.
He had done what they wanted, because it would have been impossible to live without Katy. And he was sure that the pictures would have killed her or driven her off. So he had done what they wanted. He had sprayed his fields. But now he was faced with a second, and in some respects worse, dilemma. He had killed his corn. Dr. Gray would remember his tests. He would remember warning Bormett about the bacteria in the milk jug. When it was discovered that the corn was dead, they'd blame him. There'd be no insurance, no federal aid, nothing. He wouldn't go bankrupt, not quite, but his reputation would be destroyed. Next year, when there was a good crop, no one would bid on it. They'd be afraid of his corn.
Which meant he was ruined. How in hell could he explain to anyone what had happened? If the real reason for what he had done ever came out … . No matter the outcome, he was the loser.
He poured himself another stiff shot of bourbon, then left the kitchen and slowly trudged upstairs to his and Katy's bedroom.
He stood in the doorway, the only light in the room from the dials of the bedside clock radio. She'd be back in a couple of hours. He'd already be in bed, and she'd crawl in next to him and snuggle up close. They'd talk for a while, until they both drifted off to sleep.
It was a comforting routine that suited both of them. But it was based on trust, which in turn was based on
truth, something he had been unable to tell his wife since Moscow.
Why? he cried to himself. What in God's name had he done?
He turned away in shame and stumbled back downstairs, where he stopped in the hallway, unable for the moment to decide what to do, or even in which direction to go.
The house itself seemed to be closing in on him. Katy was in every room. Her eyes were watching him, accusing him, and he had no defense for it, because he was guilty.
He let the glass slip from his hand and fall to the floor, where the liquor spilled on the carpet runner. Then he went outside, leaving the front door open behind him, stepped down off the porch, and headed toward the barn.
Albert Straub, one of the shift foremen, was just coming out of the lit machine shed. He waved when he spotted Bormett. Bormett didn't see him.
Straub called, “Got the gear box in number seven.” Still Bormett did not seem to notice him. “Hey, Will,” Straub tried once again.
Bormett knew that Straub was calling to him. But he just didn't give a damn. He went inside the barn.

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