"It means the pestiferous critters or whatever they were that ripped through my corn were headed away from the hellish place that spawned them, namely Washington."
"There is something else," said Chiun.
"What's that?" asked Remo.
"The corn has been chewed but not consumed."
"Can't be," the farmer snorted.
"Why not?"
"Insects don't chew through corn for purely mischief's sake. They need to eat. I don't know what new species of bug committed this travesty, but I do know it needs to eat. And if it ripped up my corn without eating any, that means but one thing I can think-"
"What's that?" asked Remo.
"It ain't no insect made by God, but something else entirely."
Remo looked to the Master of Sinanju. Chiun beamed back at him. "Perhaps it was a not-pest," he said to the farmer but really for Remo's benefit.
Neither the farmer nor Remo knew what to make of the Master of Sinanju's comment, so they said nothing.
From the farmer's house, Remo called Harold Smith.
"Smitty, we don't have much, but here it is. Looks like every farmer that was hit grew a new kind of pest-proof corn, called Super Dent."
"Super Yellow Dent. Get it correct," the farmer's voice called from outside.
"Super Yellow Dent. According to a farmer who was hit-"
"And don't call us farmers. My pappy was a farmer. His pappy was a farmer. I'm an agribusinessman. I can not only say it, I can spell it, too."
"-this stuff was the only corn that got hit. Everything else survived. You should check it out," finished Remo.
"That is very odd, Remo."
"Also, I think we need to drop our USDA covers," Remo added in a lowered tone of voice.
"Why is that?"
"Tammy Terrill and Fox are painting the USDA as the fountain of all evil. I had to take a doublebarreled scattergun away from the farmer I just questioned before he could perforate me with it."
"I will look into the supercorn theory, Remo."
"Add this to the mix," Remo said. "According to Chiun, the things that leveled the cornfields out here chewed but didn't swallow. And they traveled from east to west. Only the eastern sides of the cobs are stripped clean."
"What kind of insect is attracted to a plant and does not eat it?" Smith asked.
"Search me. Maybe one that's bred to wreck crops."
"Pesticide-resistant crops, in this case," Smith mused.
Dead air filled the line for too long, so Remo asked, "Anything on the dead talking bee?"
"The USDA laboratory is working on the corpse right now. I hope to have something soon."
"Okay, where next?"
"The FBI has generated another profile. It paints a portrait that fits only one individual my computers can find-Helwig X. Wurmlinger. It is time you paid that visit to his laboratory."
"There goes my date ...."
"You are dating again?"
"Yeah," said Remo defensively. "Why are you surprised?"
"Because you did not request a background or marital-status check from me this time."
"That's right. I didn't. I guess I have a good feeling about this one."
"You said that about the last three."
"This is an extragood feeling. Even Chiun likes her. "
"That is surprising."
"Yeah. I think he has a good feeling, too. Or maybe he's just taken by her last name."
"Which is?"
"Subject to change," said Remo, who then hung up, knowing that when the implications sank in, Harold Smith would start reaching for the Axid AR or Pepcid AC or Tagamet HB-or whatever he was using to ease his chronic heartburn these days.
Chapter 34
The package was marked Rush.
No surprise there, thought USDA entomologist B. Eugene Roache of the USDA Honey Bee Breeding Center and Physiology Research Laboratory in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
By now, everybody was reading or hearing about the new strain of killer bee that had struck on botfi coasts. They were calling it the death's-head bee, and the word was it was a new kind of Africanized Bravo bee.
It struck Roache as pretty strange from when first he heard about it. A new kind of bee appearing on opposite coasts in the same week. Normally, any new bee population entered through a single ecological gateway-and they wouldn't be bicoastal. Up from Mexico like the scutellata, sure. Down from Canada, maybe. But bees were not fond of the cold. The idea of bees coming down from Canada seemed farfetched.
A bicoastal entry suggested the cargo-ship theory. If it were just a Pacific deal, some kind of Asian superbee would be a possibility. With Atlantic attacks, the Asian theory looked thinner.
Those were the thoughts that ran through Roache's head as he waited for the rush package to be couriered from what he thought was another USDA laboratory in New York State. He had been alerted to the incoming package by a lemony telephone voice that said, "Identify this bee as quickly as possible."
That meant FABIS-the Fast Africanized Bee Identification System. They were better, surer methods of identifying a suspect bee to see if it were Africanized, or even a hybrid strain of Africanized European bee.