“Sure,” Newman said. They were coming to an exit, and he began to slow down. “I’ll just pull in for some gas. I want to stretch my legs.”
Janice said nothing.
Just off the ramp was a Mobil station. He pulled up to the full-service pumps and got out, telling the attendant to fill it up. Then he went around the side and into the men’s room.
He had been gone for less than three minutes when someone began honking a horn outside. He finished washing his hands and went back out. The station attendant was arguing with Janice. She was beeping the Mercedes’ horn.
Newman sprinted across to them. She stopped honking when she spotted him. “Hurry up!” she shouted.
“I don’t know what’s going on here, mister…” the attendant was saying, but Newman ignored him.
“What the hell is wrong?”
“Bormett,” Janice sputtered. “It’s Bormett. He’s dead. It was just on the radio.”
“Oh, my God,” Newman breathed. He turned back to the attendant. “That’s enough gas!”
“You said fill ’er up.”
Newman grabbed the nozzle, flipped it off, and hung it up, then put the gas cap on himself. He pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, threw it at the attendant, jumped in the car, and headed back onto the Interstate as fast as he could go.
“What happened?” he asked.
“His name is William Bormett. His farm is west of Des Moines, near the town of Adel. They said he was found dead last night.”
“Murdered?”
“He shot himself. They found him in his fields.”
“Cornfields?” Newman asked. “Was he a corn farmer?”
“One of the biggest in the state,” she said. But there was more, he could see it in her eyes.
“What is it, Janice? There’s something else.”
She nodded. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she said.
“What is it?” Newman shouted.
“Bormett and his wife… they just returned from Moscow a couple of weeks ago. He spoke about farming at a university there.”
“Turalin,” Newman said, half to himself, and suddenly he had a fair idea of what was happening, although it was so monstrous it nearly took his breath away. But it fit. It all fit.
“Turalin killed him?” Janice asked, picking up his mood.
Newman shook his head. “Unless I miss my guess, he didn’t have to.”
“What are you saying, Kenneth?”
“There’s a map in the glove compartment. Get it out and find out how to get to Adel.” His mind was racing far ahead. If Turalin had called Bormett to Moscow to set him up, and if he had done so, then the farmer’s suicide probably meant he had done whatever it was he had been ordered to do. It gave Newman a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. He hoped he was wrong. But if he was guessing right, it would already be too late to do anything about it. And then, God help them all.
There was no shortcut to Adel. The most direct route was around Des Moines on I-35, and then west on Highway 6. It was a few minutes past 12:30 P.M. when they turned onto the secondary highway. A sign said ADEL 12 MILES.
They passed through the small town of Waukee, and then a few miles beyond that the county road led up to the town of Dallas Center. They had just passed a sign that said ADEL 2 MILES when on the right, over a wide driveway, was a sign: BORMETT FARMS. Newman pulled up at the side of the road.
Cornfields stretched in every direction. The paved driveway curved around a low hill to the right, then dipped down into a hollow where there was a house and a collection of farm buildings. There were a lot of cars parked down there, and a number of people moving around.
Newman got out of the car, but he left the engine running.
“Where are you going?” Janice asked nervously. She didn’t get out of the car.
“I want to look at something. Stay there,” he said. He went around the car, walked a few yards down the driveway, then stepped off the road, over the drainage ditch, and into the cornrows. Instantly he was enveloped in a dark green, cool tunnel, which smelled faintly of rotted eggs. His heart was thumping against his ribs and his stomach kept turning over.
He stopped a few yards in, and looked at the corn stalks. They looked good. Healthy. He had seen a lot of corn in his life, and this looked as good as, or better than, anything he had ever seen.
He reached up and pulled an ear off a stalk, and immediately knew something was wrong. The ear was soft, almost liquid, to the touch.
Carefully holding the stalk away from himself, he pulled down the husk, and his stomach lurched. The ear was black and rotted. It had a very bad odor. He threw it down, and backed up a couple of paces.
He pulled another ear from a different stalk and shucked it, but it was the same.
Why in God’s name had Turalin wanted this?
After a moment or two, he turned and went back to the driveway, where he looked down toward the house.
Something had happened to Bormett in Moscow. Turalin had probably set him up somehow so that he could be blackmailed. Then, back at home, Bormett had done something to his fields, probably sprayed them with something. When it began to develop, and he could no longer stomach what he had done, he had shot himself.
Newman realized that he was guessing, but he didn’t think he was too far off. Somehow, though, he didn’t think Turalin’s plan had been merely to ruin this one farm.
Janice had gotten out of the car, and she waited as he came back. “What’d you find?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said.
They got in.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? What did you find?”
“Just exactly what I said,” he snapped. He drove the rest of the way into Adel in silence, and then turned north. After a few miles he stopped the car beside another cornfield.
“Why are we stopping here?” Janice asked. “Christ, can’t you tell me what’s going on?”
Newman looked out across the field, conscious of his beating heart, of his aching stomach, and of his shallow breath.
Janice said something else, but he didn’t hear it as he got out of the car. He stepped across the drainage ditch and entered the field.
There was no reason to suspect that whatever had gone wrong with Bormett’s corn had spread to his field. Bormett’s fields were at least five miles away from here.
The stalks and leaves all looked good, just as they had back at the Bormett farm. But there was that faint odor of rotten eggs.
Newman stopped about ten rows in. In the distance somewhere he could hear a crow cawing, and he thought he could hear the distant thunder of a jet airplane, probably taking off from the · Des Moines airport.
He wondered whether Bormett had known all along what was happening, or if he had found out about it just last night. Whatever the case, it must have been a terrible shock to him to see the devastated ears.
Newman reached out and touched one of the corn leaves. It felt good. Then, hesitantly, he reached out for an ear and pulled it off the stalk. It was bad. He didn’t have to open it to know. But he shucked it anyway, exposing the obscene rotted mass.
He threw the ear down. Five miles, he thought, backing up. Fifty miles? Five hundred miles?
“Kenneth?” Janice called from back up on the highway.
Turalin had ruined the corn crops here in this part of Iowa. The same corn he wanted to buy. Much of this crop had, in fact, already been sold to Newman Company subsidiaries through Des Moines trading houses.
That meant Dybrovik was correct. There would be no starvation in the Soviet Union. Turalin had never wanted the corn. He wanted to ruin the Newman Company.
Newman rejected the thought. That wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all. Turalin was thinking bigger than that. He wanted Newman to go on a buying spree as a cover. If everyone was watching Newman, no one would be paying attention to what the Russians were really doing. Which was growing corn… a lot of corn. A record amount of corn. Corn that the Russians would be able to sell to whoever needed it.