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.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Straub muttered to himself, and went back into the machine shed.
A single light shone in the back of the barn, and Bormett walked toward it, only dimly aware of the hulking machinery stored in here. There seemed to be a humming in his ears, and it was getting louder and louder.
At the back of the barn he took out his keys and unlocked a small cabinet hanging on the wall above the workbench. On the shelves inside were several bundles wrapped in oily rags. He selected one, and put it on the workbench. Then he slowly unwrapped it. It was a military .45 automatic.
The gun gleamed dully in the overhead light. He had had it for a long time. Had used it occasionally for target practice. Couldn’t hit a thing unless it was up close. But whatever one of those big 45-caliber slugs plowed into, it sure destroyed in a hurry.
A detached part of him was amazed at how calm he was as he reached up for the box of ammunition, removed the clip from the automatic, and began loading it. Amazed, because he was more frightened than he had ever been in his life.
He snapped the loaded clip in the handgrip, put the box back on the shelf, and then closed and locked the cabinet.
He could stop this right now, one part of his mind told the other. The thing to do would be to burn the fields. Get rid of the corn. Tell the truth to Katy. She’d understand. But even if she didn’t, he’d be no worse off than he was right now.
He pocketed the .45, turned away from the workbench, and went outside to where he had parked his truck.
It was only about eight-thirty. Still an hour and a half or longer before Catherine was due home.
He wanted to talk to her now. He wanted to hold her in his arms, and hear her tell him that it would be all right, that everything would turn out for the best.
For a long time the Bormetts have been farming this land, Will, and they’ll be farming it for a long time to come. So don’t let one little setback bother you so much.
“I could have stopped it. It was my fault,” he said out loud.
Katy would smile. Don’t you know, Will, that almost every bad thing that ever happens to us, we usually bring on ourselves? We’re the cause of most of our own misery.
“It shouldn’t have to be that way.”
No, it shouldn’t, but it is. You just have to live with it.
“No,” he said, holding his hands out in front of him as if to ward off a blow.
But Katy wasn’t there. After a minute he blinked and looked around. Then he turned away from the house, climbed up into his truck, started the engine, and drove off.
He went back up the hill, then down the access road to the tank farm, where he stopped and shut off the lights and engine. He laid the ignition keys on the dash.
Dusk was falling. The crickets and cicadas were singing up in the stand of trees, and he could hear the big bullfrogs coughing in the creek on the other side of the hill.
He shook his head sadly that it had to end this way, then walked along the access road, pushed his way through the windbreak rows, and trudged down among the corn, careful not to touch any of the infected ears.
They’d find his truck, and then they’d come looking for him. When they found him, they wouldn’t bother to look at the corn. Not then. Sooner or later, Albert or Joseph would be back out here, and think to check, and then they’d find out. But it would be too late. It was already too late.
He stopped about two hundred yards in, and pulled the .45 out of his pocket.
He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to think about Moscow, or about the photographs, or about Catherine, or about what he had seen when he had shucked the ear of corn. He didn’t want to think about anything ever again.
He levered a round into the chamber, clicked the safety off, and placed the barrel of the automatic to his temple.
“Katy,” he said calmly. He pulled the trigger.
ALAS, BABYLON
And those who husbanded the Golden grain,
And those who flung it to the winds like Rain,
Alike to no such aureate Earth are turn’d
As, buried once, Men want dug up again.
It was early evening, and Curtis Lundgren felt a smug sense of satisfaction as he rode through the west gate at the White House. The last time he had been here for anything other than a routine Cabinet meeting was shortly after the inauguration, when the President had offered him the job. Since then he had been a center-fielder in a game of very short hitters.
An aide opened the car door and helped Lundgren out. “Good evening, Mr. Secretary,” he said.
Lundgren nodded and went inside. Michael McCandless was waiting in the outer reception room with a short, very thin man who looked as though he belonged on a college campus.
McCandless introduced them. “Curt, I’d like you to meet Raymond Yankitis, the President’s special adviser on criminal justice. Ray, I think you know of Secretary Lundgren.”
“I certainly do,” Yankitis said, shaking Lundgren’s hand. “And it certainly is a pleasure to meet you, sir.”
Lundgren beamed. He liked being stroked.
“Bob LeMear will be joining us any minute now,” McCandless said.
Yankitis took them back to his small office, where he sat down behind his desk. There were three other chairs. It was one of the smallest offices Lundgren had ever been in. Gave him claustrophobia.
“You said you had something on Newman and Dybrovik,” he said when they were settled.
“Would anyone like some coffee before we get started?” Yankitis asked.
“Not for me, Ray,” McCandless said. “Curt?”
Lundgren shook his head.
“Well, we’ve certainly found out a lot about Kenneth Newman,” McCandless said. “And I’ll tell you one thing right off the bat: until now I never had the slightest conception of how involved the international grain trade is. There are virtually no controls on those people. None.”
Lundgren had to smile. McCandless was bright, but he didn’t know the half of it. A two-hundred-year-old government was trying to oversee an industry that had been developing for more than two thousand years.