Locke moved into the room, noting the woman’s ghastly pale face and empty stare. Obviously, she had been expecting him too, but why?
Chris stopped in his tracks, seized by a chilling realization of something both awful and incredible. His eyes fell on the woman in the bed just as Nikki’s voice reached him.
“She’s your mother,” Nikki said.
Chapter 30
Locke floated, unable to move, barely managing to breathe. His whole body was tingling. He might have even passed out for an instant; he wasn’t sure. He just kept staring.
“Come closer,” the old woman beckoned him.
“You know who … I am?”
She managed a weak nod, the motion obviously a struggle for her. “And now you know who I am … or was.”
Locke did nothing but stand there.
“Stop dawdling and come closer,” the old woman ordered. “I’m in no condition to shout.”
Chris found his feet and shuffled forward, stopping just out of reach. He could see the bandages covering the old woman’s entire midsection. She looked so old and frail, such a contrast with the young and vibrant mother who sometimes came to him as a stranger in his dreams.
“I have little time, Chris,” the old woman muttered through dry, cracking lips. “None to spare on apologies or explanations. There is much you have to learn and none of it concerns personal things. The past must be put aside, if there is to be a future for anyone.”
Locke wanted to say something but there were still no words.
“It was all many years ago,” the old woman said, eyes drifting, voice fading. “If I had it to do again, I would have changed much, all perhaps. I loved your father, I truly did. But times were so different then. We all had our duty, and that duty had to come first. He understood that.”
“He never understood!” Was that his voice? Had he said that?
“It was not easy for me to leave him or you. And it was even harder never to contact you after my escape was complete.”
“They caught up with you at a farmhouse.”
“There was an escape runnel that was never discovered. For me the war was over, for Germany too. I knew it; others didn’t. I used the time to arrange for the requisition of funds. Years later, when the world was ready, that money gave birth to the Committee.”
“You were its founder,” Locke said.
“And only leader these many years.”
Chris looked at his mother, wanting to feel bitterness, hate, sadness, anxiety, even affection. But he felt nothing. He stood there transfixed, feeling overloaded. Too much was coming in too fast.
“We searched for methods of control,” Audra St. Clair said. “We sought from the beginning to succeed economically where the Nazis had failed militarily. We came close a few times — the oil embargo, the wave of international terrorism unsettling governments everywhere. But only with the latest operation did we see the opportunity to truly realize our goals.”
“Tantalus,” Locke muttered.
The old woman nodded weakly. “Food became our weapon. We would destroy America’s crops and dangle our own grapes beyond their reach.”
“And you used me to help you!” Chris charged. “From the very beginning you used me!”
“But the risks you faced were minimal.” The old woman’s dying eyes tilted toward Nikki. “Nikki was around to protect you. I had a brief love affair some years ago and from that she emerged. I was so grateful for the chance to have another child. Abandoning you had left a hole in my life.”
Locke felt his knees wobble. “Then she’s—”
“Your half sister.” She struggled for breath. “Weeks ago, when we learned of your involvement from our Washington representative and elected to … use you, I dispatched her to keep you alive. With Nikki in your shadow, I never feared for your safety. She’s quite good at what she does. I’ve made sure she’s had the best training available.”
“You turned her into a killer.”
“To survive, one becomes what one must.”
Chris shook his head. “You want me to accept all this but I won’t. I’ve seen too much, been scared too much these past weeks. My son, your grandson, had a finger chopped off and I couldn’t even stay long enough to comfort him when he came out of shock. Not that I would have known what to say. All of you seem the experts when it comes to explanations.”
Audra St. Clair’s eyes moistened. “That was Mandala’s work,” she said softly.
“So was this,” Locke told her, showing her his hand.
The old woman’s features squeezed together in anguish. “Retaining his services was the one mistake I made,” she said distantly. “But he was an expert in fields we needed covered. We hoped that through him we might avoid direct entanglements with authorities. He was our cover. The strategy seemed sound.”
“Because it allowed you to keep your hands clean of the blood he spilled,” Chris charged. His feelings confused him more than anything. He couldn’t look at the old woman as a stranger, yet she was nothing more. Anxiety knotted his stomach.
“No, you don’t understand,” St. Clair said. “It was never meant to be like this. Mandala exceeded his parameters. I should have put an end to it earlier. I should have known what was coming after the massacre.”
“San Sebastian …”
“It was the key to everything, but I didn’t see that in time. He killed an entire town acting totally on his own. He loved death; we knew that and accepted his actions. We still needed him, you see. Something else was involved, though, something he had to hide. He had done more than subvert Tantalus. He had remolded it to fit his own goals. He was out of control. We had given him the rope he needed to hang us.”
“And the United States.”
“More than just the U.S.,” the old woman said with a sudden burst of energy. “He’s after much more now, and you and Nikki are the only ones left who can stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“There are things you must hear about Tantalus before you can understand. Years of exhaustive and expensive research paid off some months ago with the discovery of a fungus that destroys all field crops in an amazingly short period of time. The fungus, through a toxin it produces, kills them almost on contact and is spread both through the air and the soil. It is swept over the earth remarkably fast by weather systems. If the jet stream cooperates, all American and Canadian crops would be affected within a week, dead within two at the outside.”
“Oh, my God!”
“Nothing can stop the fungus once it’s released. It’s unkillable, a perfect organism. It regenerates and multiplies at an incredible level. We developed it in a vacuum. It contains qualities literally not of this world. The only way to destroy it once the spoors are active would be to deny it a food supply, roughly a hundred square miles for every ounce released into the atmosphere.”
“Which explains why San Sebastian had to burn.”
“Exactly. But keep in mind what I said about the potency of one ounce and then consider that nearly one thousand canisters containing a hundred and twenty-eight gaseous ounces each are going to be released over the United States. The whole country would have to be burned to destroy the fungus.”
“Over America,” Locke muttered. “The gas will be released by airplanes?”
“Cropdusters taking off from the center of the nation. A place in Texas called Keysar Flats. A chain will be set up through the country’s center. Each set of cropdusters will handle a hundred-mile segment, then land and pass the remains of their canisters over to the next set. The switching process will not take more than an hour. In the course of little more than a single day, then, the whole of America’s central portion, the nation’s breadbasket and Corn Belt, will be infected.”