Deadly Seeds Read online

  Chiun had but one question before he took a short cue stick.

  “Yeah, what is it?” said Waco Boy.

  “Which is the nine ball?”

  “The yellow one.”

  “There are two yellow ones.”

  “The striped one with the nine on it.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Chiun, for the nine had been on the underside of the ball.

  Those around would later say the old Oriental man had held the cue stick in a peculiar way. Sort of one hand in the middle, kind of. No bridge. Like a nail file almost. Alls he did was like flick it. Just flick and that cue ball’d got wham–bam spinnin’ like you never seen. Drove right into the center of the rack and like zap. Clipped that nine and smacked it dead into the left corner pocket.

  “Jeeezus,” said Waco Boy.

  “No. Not him,” said Chiun. “Arrange the balls again.”

  And this time, because the rack was pressed with more tightness than the first, Chiun sent the white ball first into the rack to release the nine, so that the white ball coming off the left cushion caught it properly and propelled it into the right corner pocket.

  In such a manner, he won seven games with seven strokes and all around wished to know who he was.

  “You have heard in your lifetimes that no matter how good you are, there is always someone better?” said Chiun.

  Everyone allowed as how they had heard that.

  “I am that person. The someone better.”

  Remo, meanwhile, attended to business. In a forthright manner, he asked Pete simply why he had promised five thousand dollars to two men to kill Oswald Willoughby. Pete answered forthrightly. He had gotten ten thousand for it and paid out five. The money had come from Johnny “Deuce” Deussio who had proprietary interests in numbers, gambling, and narcotics in East St. Louis. Deussio, it was said, worked for Guglielmo Balunta, who had a proprietary interest in all St. Louis. Pete noted he would be killed for saying this about Johnny Deuce. Of course, Deussio might be too late. Pete also noted that it would be nice if Remo could possibly return his intestines to his body cavity.

  “They’re not gone. It only feels like that. Nerves.”

  “That’s nice,” said Pete. “It’s good to know it only feels like my stomach’s been ripped out.”

  Remo worked the muscles near Pete’s ribs taking pressure off the intestinal tract.

  “Oh, my god, that feels good,” said Pete. “Thank you. It feels like my stomach is back in.”

  “You won’t tell anyone I’ve been here, will you?” asked Remo.

  “Are you kidding? Mess with you?”

  · · ·

  John Vincent Deussio, president of Deussio Realty and Deussio Enterprises Inc., had a steel–link fence around his estate just outside St. Louis. He had electronic eyes near the fence and what might charitably be described as a herd of Doberman Pinschers. He had twenty–eight bodyguards under command of his capo regime who was his cousin, Salvatore Mangano, one of the most feared men west of the Mississippi.

  So what was he doing in his alabaster–tiled bathroom about three A.M. with his face in the flushing toilet? He knew it was about three A.M. because on an uplift which felt like his hair was coming out of his head, he saw his watch and one of the hands, which was probably the hour hand, was pointing toward his fingers. What was he doing? He was waking up. That was first. Secondly, he was answering questions which came rapidly now. He liked to answer those questions. When he did so, he could breathe and John Vincent Deussio had liked to breathe ever since he was a little baby.

  “I got fifty grand from a friend of mine in a coast public relations agency. Feldman, O’Connor and Jordan. They’re big. I was doing a favor. They wanted this guy Willoughby. I’ve done a lot of work for them lately.”

  “Commodities people?” came the next question. It was a man’s voice. He had thick wrists. He was flushing the toilet again.

  “Yes. Yes. Yes. Commodities.”

  “Who gave you the contracts?”

  “Giordano. Giordano. That’s Jordan’s real name. It’s a big agency. They got some kind of wonder grain. Gonna save the world. Make a fucking fortune.”

  “And what about Balunta?”

  “He’s gonna get his cut. I wasn’t gonna hold out on him. For a crummy fifty grand. He didn’t have to ask like this.”

  “So Balunta didn’t have anything to do with this?”

  “He’s gonna get his cut. He’s gonna get it. What is this shit?” And John Vincent Deussio saw the toilet flush again and everything became dark and when he awoke it was four A.M. and he was retching. He yelled for his cousin, Sally. Sally hadn’t seen anyone, maybe Johnny Deuce had dreamed it, sort of sleepwalking like. No one had gotten in during the night. They checked the fences and checked the men who handled the dogs and checked the bodyguards and even called in this Japanese guy they had hired once as a consultant. He smelled the ground.

  “Impossible,” he said. “I gave you my word that even the greats of Ninja, the night–fighters of the Orient, could not penetrate your castle and I stand by my word. Impossible.”

  “Maybe somebody better than Ninja?” asked Johnny Deuce, who was now getting quizzical looks from his cousin Sally.

  “Ninja is the best,” said the Japanese.

  “Maybe you dreamed it, like I said,” said Sally.

  “Shut up, Sally. I didn’t dream my head into a fucking toilet bowl.” And turning to the consultant, he asked again if he was sure that there was nothing better than Ninja.

  “In the world today, no,” said the muscular Japanese. “In the martial arts, one art breeds another art and thus today there are many. But it is said, and I believe, that they all came from one, the sun source of the arts it is called. And the farther from the source, the less potent. The closer, the more potent. We are almost direct from this source. We are Ninja.”

  “What’s the source?”

  “Some claim but I do not believe that they have even met him.”

  “Who?”

  “The Master. The Master of Sinanju.”

  “A yellow guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw a wrist. It was white.”

  “Impossible then. No one outside this small Korean town has ever possessed Sinanju.” He smiled. “Let alone a white person. But it is only legend.”

  “I told you you was dreaming,” said Sally, who didn’t quite know why he got a slap in the face just then.

  “I know I wasn’t dreaming,” said Deussio, as he phoned his contact on the coast and, in veiled words because you always had to assume someone was tapping your line, told Mr. Jordan that something had gone wrong with the recent account operations.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “WHAT WENT WRONG?” asked James Orayo Fielding from his Denver offices. He glanced at his two-faced digital calendar clock. The inside figure read three months, eighteen days. He had stopped looking at the outside figure when the fainting spells had started two weeks and five days before.

  “I don’t have time for anything to go wrong,” he said into the telephone receiver. The office was air-conditioned yet he was sweating.

  “Are the fields all right? Someone’s gotten to the fields. I know it.”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” came the voice of William Jordan, vice president of Feldman, O’Connor and Jordan. “In the overview, you’re still in a highly positive launch position.”

  “I know what that means. You haven’t done anything yet. Is the Mojave Field all right? That’s the most important one.”

  “Yes. As far as I know,” said Mr. Jordan.

  “Is the field in Bangor, Maine, all right?”

  “Bangor is top-notch.”

  “The Sierra field? There can be mountain floods, you know.”

  “Sierra is high.”

  “And Piqua, Ohio?”

  “Buckeye beautiful.”

  “So what could have gone wrong?” Fielding demanded.

  “I can’t talk about it on the phone
, Mr. Fielding. It’s in that sensitive area,”

  “Well, get over here and tell me.”

  “You couldn’t come here, sir? I’m rather chockablock with work.”

  “Do you want to keep this account?” said Fielding.

  “I can wedge in time this afternoon.”

  “You bet you can,” said Fielding. “If you want to make millions.”

  He hung up the receiver and felt better. He had Feldman, O’Connor and Jordan just where he wanted them, just under his heel. If he had paid them a fancy retainer, they would have given him fancy footwork. But he had hung a piece of sweet bait just out of reach of their quivering tentacles, and that kept them scurrying where he wanted them to scurry. They smelled a monumental fortune and they had already killed for it.

  Fielding swiveled his chair to face the large picture window filled by the Rockies, the new playground of the mindless. The Rockies had killed men since the Indians came down across the Bering Strait. Froze them like flies in the winter, let them thaw out and stink in the summer. White men came, built their little protected nests, briefly stuck their fur-wrapped faces into the air, and said how beautiful nature was. Beautiful? Nature killed.

  Fielding looked at the Rockies and remembered the first meeting with Feldman, O’Connor, and Jordan nearly eight months before. Everything had been so Christmassy in December. The commodities market had taken that dip and there was less winter wheat growing under the snows of America’s plains than at any time since the Thirties.

  Feldman and O’Connor and Jordan had greeted him personally for their presentation. Lights of red and green and blue hung from palm trees. A ceramic Santa Claus which dispensed scotch from its groin leaned against a bookcase. Feldman nervously explained it was left over from the office Christmas party. He had a smooth tan with manicured gray hair and a pinky ring with a diamond big enough to send sun signals half way across the country. O’Connor was pale with freckles and large bony hands that worked themselves together. His blue striped tie was knotted tight enough for a penance. And then there was Jordan, even-capped white teeth, black hair so neatly billowing it looked as if it had come from a cheap plastic mold. Eyes like black immies. He wore a dark striped suit with too-wide shoulders and too-flaring lapels and, of all things, a buckle in the back. The buckle was silver.

  Fielding entered the room like a modest lord among gaudy servants.

  “It is truly an honor to have you here, sir,” said Feldman. “And I might add, a pleasure.”

  “A real pleasure,” said O’Connor.

  “A deep pleasure,” said Jordan.

  “There is no pleasure for me, gentlemen,” said Fielding as Feldman took his coat and O’Connor his briefcase. “I am in mourning for a beautiful person. You may never have heard of him. No history books will carry his name to future generations, no songs will praise his deeds. Yet truly this person was a man among men.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Feldman had said.

  “The good die young,” said O’Connor.

  “Most distressing,” said Jordan.

  “His name was Oliver. He was my manservant,” said Fielding.

  “A good manservant is better than a rotten scientist,” Feldman had allowed. O’Connor thought so too.

  “A good manservant is the closest thing to Christ on earth,” said Jordan. Feldman had to agree with that. O’Connor noted that in his faith it was the highest honor to be called handmaiden of the Lord.

  “I am determined that his name will be remembered. I am determined that men will say Oliver with respect, reverence, and yes, even joy. That is why I am here.”

  “We can set it to music,” said Feldman and he began to hum a Negro spiritual and then created the words to the music. “Anybody here see my old friend, Oliver?”

  Fielding shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “You’re not focusing for prime thrust,” said Jordan to Feldman.

  “Not at all,” said O’Connor.

  “I have a better idea,” said Fielding.

  “I like it,” said Feldman.

  “I have set up a foundation with an original endowment of my entire fortune, fifty million dollars.”

  “Beautiful,” said Feldman.

  “Solid,” said O’Connor.

  “Beautifully solid base,” said Jordan.

  “It’s more than a base, gentlemen,” said Fielding and he signaled for his briefcase. “As you gentlemen know, I have been involved in industry, successfully involved, except for a few minor tax losses in the southwest.”

  “And a leader of the Denver community,” said Feldman.

  “A solid leader,” said O’Connor. “As were your parents and grandparents.”

  “The sort of client we would be proud to represent,” said Jordan.

  Fielding opened the briefcase. Carefully he took from it four plastic boxes with metal latches. The boxes were clear plastic and contained grain of white and brown and golden colors. One was labeled “soybean,” another “wheat,” another “rice,” and another “barley.”

  “These are the basic grains of man’s sustenance,” said Fielding.

  “They have a natural beauty,” said Jordan,

  “I feel better since I’ve started eating granola,” said Feldman.

  “The staff of life,” said O’Connor.

  “First I have a small request. Please refrain from comments until I ask for them,” said Fielding. “You are looking at four miracles. You are looking at the answer, the final answer to man’s problems with famine. These grains were grown in a single month’s time.”

  There was silence in the room. Fielding paused. When he saw the three partners’ eyes start to wander uncomfortably, he went on.

  “I don’t think you are aware of what a month–grown gram is. It is more than a faster process. It’s twelve crops a year where a farmer had only one or two before. Through my process, we can increase the food yield a minimum of six times on earth. In all weather and in all conditions. I need only one thing now. A demonstration, well publicized, to commit the world—especially the underdeveloped world—to this process. It is important, vitally important now, because I hear the winter wheat crop this year will be a small one.”

  “Who owns the patent?” asked O’Connor.

  “It is not patented. It is a secret process I intend to give to all mankind,” said Fielding.

  “But for your protection, don’t you think it would be wise to have some sort of patent? We could arrange it.”

  Fielding shook his head. “No. But what I will do for your services is give your firm 20 percent of the profit on every soybean, every grain of rice, grain of wheat, or barley grown in the world.”

  O’Connor’s tie knot bobbed, Feldman salivated, and Jordan, his eyes glowing, breathed heavily.

  “The entire world is going to use what I call the Oliver Method, in tribute to my noble servant.”

  The three men bowed their heads and Fielding passed out pictures of Oliver, taken by a sheriff’s office after the air accident. He said he would appreciate it if they would keep those pictures in their offices. They agreed. But it was when they saw the demonstration that they vowed ultimate fidelity to the memory of Oliver.

  In Rocky Mountain winter, they saw a twenty–yard patch of snowy mountainside planted with wheat treated by the Oliver Method, as Fielding had called it. Saw workmen pickax into the soil and cover the seed with rock–hard pieces of ground and returned thirty days later to see stalks of wheat growing in the sub–zero wind.

  “The weather is only a slight hindrance to the Oliver Method,” Fielding yelled above the wind. O’Connor pocketed a stalk with his gloved hand. Back in Los Angeles, they got the verdict from a biologist.

  “Yep. This is wheat all right.”

  Could it have been grown on a mountainside in winter?”

  “No way.”

  If it could be, grown full in just one month, what would you say?

  “Whoever knew how to do it would be the riches
t man in the world.”

  That report from the biologist had come seven months before. Fielding had waited two days for them to get the biologist’s report, as he knew they would, and then he had brought his little problem to Jordan. In an effort to make the market more receptive to fast–grown grains, Fielding had sold winter wheat futures massively with funds from the Oliver Foundation. He was troubled by this. A couple of commodities brokers suspected something. Some were trying to blackmail him. A third might be considering telling the government. There was nothing else to do but confess all and give the formula for Wondergrains—Feldman, O’Connor and Jordan had changed what they called the packaging concept from the Oliver Method to Wondergrains—to the public. Just announce it and give it away. Free.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything, Mr. Fielding. Just you protect our little project, eh?” said Jordan, which was what Fielding knew he would say, which was why he had selected Feldman, O’Connor and Jordan, whom he knew to be Giordano with many cousins who could make people disappear.

  And there were a few more people who had threatened to get in the way, people who had intruded upon the orderly plan to bring Wondergrains to the world. And Fielding had presented their names to Jordan in a kind of laundry list for mass murder, and Jordan had said he would take care of everything.

  It had worked so well, thought Fielding. He had combined his public relations element with his killer–arm element and with luck, he would live to see the fruits of his project—the vast and utter destruction of entire civilizations. Without luck, it would happen anyway. It was too late to stop it.

  His digital desk calendar predicted he had three months, eighteen days to live. The project itself should be finalized in a little more than a month.

  The intercom intruded upon his reverie. It was his new secretary. He always had new secretaries. They didn’t stay more than a week.