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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Wrathful Grapes
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Dagney slept in late, and even though Clara woke up with the sun, she stayed quiet. Just before noon, Dagney woke up. Nelson was on the couch, but looking over the back of it, through the blinds. “There was a man parked outside most of the night. Old boyfriend?”
Dagney looked out the window. “Shit,” she said. She’d met the man once before, former police, now a PI. He was a friend of Sharpe, and by friend that meant he was the one who found out Sharpe’s wife was cheating on him, then made sure the marriage ended quietly. She handed Clara to Nelson and walked out onto the street, still in her pajamas. “What the fuck, Malcolm?” she asked, but he hadn’t gotten his window rolled down fast enough, so he pantomimed confusion until she repeated herself. By then the window was far enough down he could start to answer. “Your boss seemed worried. Asked me to watch your place. Ain’t hospitable, asking an old man to stay up all night in a car.” He smiled, and it should have put her at ease, but it didn’t. “He figured you’d be asleep until one, so you’ve got a little time to kill, with the family, before you have to catch your plane.” Malcolm pointed at Nelson, and Clara, and she made a face- mostly because of the implication that Nelson was family. She spent her morning with Clara, made malt o meal, then got on a plane. She was surprised so see Sharpe in California, waiting for her. “I came here last night, after I dropped you off. I knew we had a longer conversation coming, one we can’t have over the phone.” “So when are you going to tell me what this is about?” “That boyfriend cop of yours- he turned up dead. Officially, an officer-involved shooting gone awry. Something about it didn’t feel right. I had Malcolm sniff around it, but so far nothing- which he says is actually more suspicious, since there’s pretty much always something somebody screwed up on- but with what happened in Appalachia- I couldn’t take chances.” She could tell by the tone in his voice he felt like shit for putting her in that position. “DARPA are both pissed off and… humbled by the fact that you found out one of their secret projects, and managed to disable it and haven’t gone on Oprah to talk about it yet. So standard protocol in these instances is to bury you in either more secrets so you’re too deep to talk, or to find a way to make sure you can’t talk. So for both of you this is a win win. I know it was one of their lab projects that came after you in Appalachia, but I don’t have reason to think they’re the ones who let it off the chain. And this thing they’ve asked for is in that same ballpark.” “What thing?” “I’m... not sure, actually. But what I do know is that they need you in the field this morning, briefing after that.” “Okay, so what do they need?” “You’re going undercover at a vineyard.” “So, you want me to pick fruit?” “Basically. To sweeten the deal, we’ve got it worked out that not only do you get to keep whatever the pay you at the vineyard, plus your normal salary, plus per diem. Less taxes, of course.” “Joy.” She’d picked enough berries as a kid to know the bitch that fruit-picking was. “We convinced one of the managers there to hold a spot open for you- in exchange for looking the other way on a couple of fines- but nobody else knows that he’s left the slot open for most of the day. He’s doing your day’s picking for you, but you need to be there to get there for weight-out. Name’s Charlie. He looks like a lumberjack mated with a frog. Can’t miss him.” Sharpe dropped her off at the vineyard. Charlie met her at the main gate. “Charlie, I presume.” “Shut up. You’re supposed to be working. We have to go around the side.” He pushed through some vines. “You have any experience, any at all? Or is this going to be another pampered college drop-out roughing it for a week until you break a nail and then quit on me?” “I picked berries as a kid.” His tone shifted. “Family farm?” “Just for fun. But my mom liked to make preserves and jams, and we’d spend weeks picking, all day long.” “Hmm.” He eyed her a moment. “It’s tough work, not moment to moment, but the totality. It’s piece-rate work. Management picks a section of the field for an hour the day before we give it over to you, to get a feel for a reasonable per-hour rate. It’ll take you a few days to get the right feel for it, work into a rhythm, so you’ll be a little light, and it’ll take longer for you to adjust to the heavy work.” She caught him looking at her fingers, and she realized they weren’t at all the hands of a laborer- even though she didn’t keep them polished, or even all that well maintained. “If you have questions, need help, ask the other workers. They know the job. But don’t waste their time, because their time is their money, and they will not appreciate it. Oh, and one last thing, close your eyes.” He bent over and lifted up a handful of loose earth. “I mean it,” he said, raising the dirt near his mouth, and she did, just as he blew it over her face. “Not perfect,” he said, “but it’ll do for today. Now, there’s about an hour until the weigh out. I left a piece of red twine around your row, and it should be pretty obvious where I stopped off. Go get seen, and try to keep up a decent pace.” Dagney worked for three quarters of an hour when she heard a woman screaming as loud as a human being can. She ran just a few rows over. The woman was writhing in the dirt. Dagney grabbed the woman and dragged her away from the grapes. Once she was clear, she recognized that the woman was developing chemical burns on her face, arms and hands. “It’s just a sunburn. I don’t know what she’s wining about,” said another of the workers. But Dagney insisted they call an ambulance. She spent her last twenty minutes arguing, first with the supervisor, then with the woman herself. “It’s not that bad, really,” she pleaded. But her eyelids had swollen shut, and she spoke brokenly, through sobbing gasps. When the paramedics came she gave up the argument to let them convince the woman she needed help. As she walked away from her first hour of work, Dagney ached already, parts of her that hadn’t ached since she’d tried to be a distance runner for a week in high school. She hated Sharpe even more than she had before. She also hated school-children who ate jelly sandwiches, and everyone who drank wine. Sharpe was waiting for her at the gate, grinning like an idiot. “You should stop that, the grinning. I really want to hurt you already- and the grin isn’t helping.” He opened the passenger door for her then got inside himself. He drove her to a crappy hotel room. A short, stubby red-haired man opened the door. He was wearing a white terry cloth robe over shorts and a t-shirt. “I heard about what happened at the vineyard. You should shower, now, and leave your clothes. I’ll send sergeant Kline out to get you something to wear home.” She looked at him strangely. “Trust me. You want to do this before we start talking.” She glanced at Sharpe, who shrugged. She showered, wanting to get answers now, but unable to tear herself away from the soothing, ache-killing water. She found a set of military issue exercise clothes folded on the counter of the bathroom and put them on. “I’ve got some paperwork for you to sign before I can actually talk to you. It gives you enough of a security clearance to hear at least some of what you’ll need to know- um, still I might have to fudge a few things.” Dagney spent a few seconds skimming the pages, and realized they were pretty standard government boilerplate, and scratched a quick, illegible signature near the bottom. “How much do you know about mustard gas?” “Uh, that it doesn’t come from mustard seeds.” “The reason I had you shower was I- we, really- think you were exposed to it today. The woman who went to the hospital was probably a bell-weather. Mustard gas exposure isn’t always noticeable for the first 24 hours- she might have even been exposed the previous day. But the longer you’re exposed, the worse it gets.” Dagney blinked at him. “Yeah, you’re probably wondering why there was mustard gas at a vineyard. That’s sort of why I’m here. It was developed as part of a DARPA initiative. It’s an invasive virus that subtly rewrites grape DNA so that the fruits produce mustard gas. There’s also a chemical in there that helps dissolve the skin of grapes, so when the first one bursts, it’ll speed the bursting of the rest of them.” “It was a mechanism to co-opt the food supply while seeding a biological weapon in an enemy’s backyard. And compared to the costs of manufacturing comparable weapons ourselves, this is far more efficient. If we can make the delivery without detection, there’s a very good chance that an enemy population will cultivate the bioweapons for us, watering them, maybe even fertilizing. There’s supposed to be a failsafe, built into the code. The gas is supposed to remain inert until a complementary infection get passed through, writes in a few missing chunks of DNA, but- it seems somehow there’s been a mutation rendering the secondary infection unnecessary.” “And- some of the virus has gotten loose. We don’t know how, or why, exactly. The Wrath grapes were a proof of concept, never intended to leave the laboratory. We have kind of a theory, there, basically two schools of thought, predicated on the two prongs of the weapon’s attack. Either it’s an assault on the food supply, so aimed at all of Americans, or it’s an attack against the growers and pickers- perhaps aimed squarely at illegals who do a lot of that work here.” “There’s an alternate scenario, that is perhaps the more terrifying, and that’s that our sequestration protocols failed and nobody meant for this to get out. Personally, I prefer a cunning evil adversary to incompetent and unreliable friends. Especially since this is by no means the worst of what we’ve got behind lock and key.” “That’s where you come in, actually. The only people who might know work at the Alameda Vineyard. We’re in a bit of a bind, since obviously nobody in DoD can operate domestically without a suspension of posse comitatus, which the President isn’t going to give us for this, particularly since it would tell everyone that a bioweapon got loose on his watch. Local Ag only had one person, a sixty-four year old codger who couldn’t hack twenty minutes in the California heat picking fruit, let alone anything resembling a sting. And because of what happened in Appalachia, your name was on the tip of a lot of tongues. We thought two birds with one stone. Now, if you tell anybody about this classified operation, or the classified experiment you stumbled into at the Masterson mine, you’re breaking the state secrets act and committing treason and they can sell off your kidneys or whatever, I don’t know, not really my department, and honestly, you seem like a professional enough person that I don’t think it was ever much of a worry, anyway.” “There’ve been a couple of exposure cases already, and the lady today makes three, but we can’t close down the vineyard without scaring whoever might be responsible away. And while this outbreak is bad, if they’ve seeded elsewhere, particularly in any considerable quantity, it could be much, much worse. Act of war, kind of worse. The virus is designed to aggressive, to be passed from one plant population to the next. The only reason we’re even willing to take our chances at Alameda is that it’s such an isolated place, shielded like it is by mountains.” “And look, I know for a fact you’re looking at all of us sideways. Understandably. But this helps you, helps us, and in the meantime we’ve got people looking into the Appalachia situation. Neither DARPA, nor the Army, let these things out of the bag- at least nobody in any official capacity. If someone inside is doing this we want to know it as badly as you do. We can’t compel you to work for us; you didn’t sign your life away. But this is a chance for you to do what you usually do, just in a slightly different, perhaps more exotic context.” “Ahem,” Sharpe said, nodded at an envelope sitting on the bed. “Um, right. At the insistence of your boss, we’re providing you with a cover, just in case. Kline works in intelligence, somewhere, honestly I couldn’t tell you where, exactly, just that he’s DoD. He’s personally got you documents, and the three of us are the only ones who will know anything about this. The forgeries will pass muster at the vineyard, and if you get stopped by the local smokies for jaywalking, but they’re of the quality an illegal would be carrying, so INS will likely try to put you on a bus back to Mexico.” “Back?” “Yeah. Pretty much everybody around here gets shipped ‘back’ to Mexico, even if they’re speaking Portuguese. Kind of racist, I guess, but it’s par for that particular course. Assuming you’ll do it. Otherwise, um, actually, I don’t know what plan b is.” Her skin hurt the next day, though she couldn’t be sure if it was a mild chemical burn from mustard gas or just a sunburn, and for that at least she was grateful. Dagney wasn’t Hispanic, and that set her apart. She spoke enough Spanish to be polite, which helped. But it was difficult to separate the people she saw from the numbers she knew from Department of Labor statistics. There are about a million hired farm workers in the country, about half of which are illegal. Median incomes are about 3/5 of the national average. Infant mortality is 125% higher, life expectancy only 2/3 of the general population. Average ages in the mid-30s. 1 in 5 is female. About 5% are under the age of 18. But they saw what she did the day before for Maria, and they knew how bad Maria eventually got, that her doctor said she might have died without intervention. That warmed them to her rather quickly. Even when she asked questions, they answered quickly. So it took her only a few hours to find out Noel handled most of the pesticides at Alameda. At noon she cornered him at the pesticide storage, planning to just watch him and talk casually, see if anything felt strange. But one of the labels caught her eye, and she practically elbowed him out of the way to get to it. “Wait. That’s not Lorsban. Lorsban is a Dow pesticide; the logo has these swooshes that come up under the name, usually white on blue. This isn’t a Lorsban container. I need to know, Noel: has this container been refilled? Or is this how it came?” He swallowed, but was adamant. “No. No refill. I know better. We don’t refill. Strict guidelines,” he finished, pointing to a material safety data sheet binder on the shelf. “Who receives the shipments of pesticides? And who handles them? His eyes got wide, and his voice got quiet. “INS?” “Agriculture.” “Only me. This how it came, I swear it.” “Was there anything different about this shipment? Did it come in a different truck, or with a new driver, or company?” “Driver same,” he thought for a moment, “the truck was different. Usually Cox delivers. This was Pine Bend.” Her eyebrows shot up. That name sounded familiar, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. She heard a commotion outside, quick, excited conversation. And a few people running. She and Noel looked outside the small shed, and a young Mexican boy ran past. Dagney looked at Noel. “INS,” he said sternly. “Shit,” Dagney said. |
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