Dust Up: A Thriller by Jon McGoran Page A

again. We went back to Saint Benezet—this time Ron came with us—and now it was crawling with Energene security teams. We gave out more inhalers and took more samples. That’s when the word came down—Energene was sending us back to the States. They said the political situation was too unstable. We barely had time to pack our stuff and say a quick good-bye to Regi. We couldn’t take samples with us, so Ron wrote up a list of tests for Regi to conduct in his lab. Then we came home.”
    She paused, fidgeting, looking around nervously. “The day after we got back, Ron got the lab results from Regi. There was clearly some sort of extreme allergic reaction. It was striking that it was such a distinct geographical area, just this one tiny village, and so pervasive within it. Everyone had it.”
    She paused again, lowered her voice again. “This was right after the Soyagene shipment was stolen and not too far from where it happened. We realized it could be a reaction to the Soyagene soyflour. The Energene people had said we weren’t supposed to tell anyone about the theft, that it was a trade secret or whatever, and that it could compromise their investigation. But if the allergic reaction was because of the Soyagene, something was seriously wrong with it.”
    “Did you tell anybody?”
    She shook her head. “Ron tried to talk to his boss, Vinson, about it, but he couldn’t get in to see him. Vinson’s useless, anyway, but Ron got the feeling he was avoiding him. He finally got in to see him, and Vinson’s got Bradley Bourden there, the CEO, and this guy Royce, one of the security guys we’d seen in Haiti. Ron made up a story about some other project they were working on and got out of there.”
    “Was this Royce the guy who handles security at the building on Thirtieth Street?”
    “Might be. He seems to be everywhere all of the sudden.”
    “Red-faced guy? No sense of humor?”
    “Yeah, that’s him.” She almost smiled. “Anyway, after that we decided to go to the authorities, the feds. Like, whistle-blowers. We were terrified. I mean, that’s hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. Maybe billions. But if it was true, thousands of people could get sick from eating the Soyagene soybeans—people could die.”
    “What happened?”
    “We were freaking out, wondering if Vinson and Bourden already knew about it. We were trying to decide who to go to—USDA, FDA, FTC—we couldn’t find anyone who wasn’t totally in bed with Energene already. Ron knew them all, because they all worked for Energene at one point or another. They were all good friends of Bradley Bourden.”
    “What did you do then?”
    “Ron was afraid for his professional life, you know. Nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news. But as he kept digging deeper at Energene, he became even more convinced there was a connection between the Soyagene hijacking and the illness at Saint Benezet. He got really scared. He didn’t want me helping him, he didn’t want me having anything to do with any of this. He said we were in danger.” She looked over at me, the fear and vulnerability in her eyes accentuated by a tiny flicker of hope. “Then he decided to come see you.”
    We shared a sad, ironic smile, like, look how that turned out.
    “Why me?”
    She shook her head, as if looking back maybe it hadn’t been the smartest idea. “Ron did some work with Energene’s insect genetics department. He’d been looking into Stoma’s Bee-Plus program when he read about what happened on Martha’s Vineyard. He said the official story was guaranteed bullshit, that he couldn’t be sure what really happened, but bottom line, you stopped some powerful people from doing some bad things.”
    Then her eyes sharpened. “While he was digging, he learned some of what went down in Dunston, too. He said in both cases you took on guys like this, you got the feds involved, and you won. So maybe you had connections there that weren’t in Energene’s pocket. You