GEORGE
DeVAULT WRITER
RETIRED FIREFIGHTER
AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST

 
Synopsis

Honeybees are mysteriously dying in droves. When human bodies start piling up, a crusading reporter comes out of retirement to solve a friend’s murder. He teams up with a tattooed combat veteran. She’s a one-woman Marine platoon. They take on an evil seed company and world powers that are trying to weaponize the world’s food supply with a primordial pollen churned up by underground nuclear testing in the Aleutians. The pollen is programmable — for good — or evil.

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Excerpt

Chapter One

Some foul fiend killed her darlings. Murdered them. Mercilessly mowed them down in regular rows like ripe grain before the Grim Reaper’s sinister scythe.

Peg groans. Her knees give out. She sinks to the ground, sobbing.

As a volunteer township paramedic, she’s seen so-called mass casualty incidents before, but never an honest-to-god massacre. Dead bodies are everywhere. On the grass, under the trees and on top of the flat stones in the fencerow. The scene gives new meaning to the words “no prisoners,” “no survivors.”

A sickening stench punches her in the nose.

What is that gawd-awful smell?

It isn’t the eye-watering ammonia aroma of freshly-spread manure that often blankets the Indiana countryside in spring. It isn’t the rotten-egg stink that always comes from the thousand-hog factory farm down the road when the wind blows from the west.

This is a purely evil chemical smell, somewhere between airplane glue and old gasoline with hints of garlic, kerosene and sulfur.

Peg pulls out her cellphone. She clicks the camera app, points the lens at the scene of the slaughter just as the phone rings.

Caller ID reads, “USA.gov.”

Finally.

Peg’s been waiting for the call for three days. The first thing out of her mouth is a question:

“Have all of you people at the agency totally lost your minds?”

“Well, hello to you, too, Rachel. So nice to hear your cheery voice,” the caller says.

The caller knows Peg’s proper name. “Rachel” is a rude reference to Rachel Carson, author of the environmental manifesto “Silent Spring.” It’s not meant as a compliment.

More than half a century after Carson’s death, conservative think tank pundits and chemical industry flacks still yammer that Carson “killed more people than Hitler” by getting DDT banned. In such circles, Carson is routinely reviled as a communist agent, a saboteur on a mission to ruin the West’s ability to feed itself.

“Sorry,” Peg says. “Caught me at a bad time. I’m in the field. Some son of a bitch just sprayed my best beehive with a high-powered insecticide. Malathion, maybe. Whole damn hive is shot to shit. Dead bees everywhere.”

An amateur beekeeper since middle school, Peg dearly loves her fuzzy friends. Recently, she earned a Ph.D. in entomology. Her specialty is Apis mellifera, the Western or European honeybee. Her current research assignment at the university is documenting the danger to honeybees of neonicotinoid pesticides. Or “neonics,” as the most widely used insecticides in the world today are commonly known.

The caller offers no condolences. After a long pause, the caller finally says, “Why am I not surprised? Sooner or later, something like this was bound to happen. Lotsa powerful people are unhappy with you and your work. But you called me, remember. What’s up?”

“Oh, yeah.”

The caller is a regional administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, one of only ten such environmental czars in the entire United States. All were hand-picked by the president. They came mostly from upper management of the very industries they are supposed to regulate. And they don’t know or care much about EPA’s legal mandate to protect human and environmental health.
As political appointees, their primary goal in life is to eliminate as much government red tape as possible before the political tides and the administration change, and they return to their high-paying earlier lives in the private sector.

“That idiotic press release your people in Washington just sent out,” Peg says.

“What about it?”

“You can’t be serious,” Peg says. “We’ve known for decades that neonics are certain death for honeybees. Many other pollinators, too. Yet you’re going to expand their use onto 165 million acres of cropland? Not only that, you plan to announce this fall that you’ll leave these chemicals on the market, as is, for another fifteen years. Until 2038! What the hell?”

“Hey, you’re a great one to bitch about press releases,” the caller says. “What was the headline on that science fiction you and your crew at Purdue just put out?”

Peg hears the sound of papers being shuffled.“Here it is. 'Corn seed treatment insecticides pose risks to bees, yield benefits elusive. …Nearly every foraging honeybee in the state of Indiana will encounter neonicotinoids during corn planting season, and the common seed treatments produced no improvement in crop yield …'”

More paper shuffling.

“And then there was this little gem last year: 'Honeybee deaths linked to seed insecticide exposure … Honeybee populations have been in serious decline for years, and Purdue University scientists may have identified one of the factors that cause bee deaths around agricultural fields.

“Dust exhausted by air-blast planters showed extremely high levels of the insecticide — up to 700,000 times the lethal contact dose for a bee … the talc persists for months or years. It’s found more than one hundred yards from where it was applied …”

“The data is ironclad,” Peg says.

“That may be, Rachel, but you have to remember there have been more than fifteen hundred studies of neonics over the past twenty years. Results are mixed, at best.

“The American Seed Trade Association is on the warpath,” the caller says. “Bayer CropScience, Syngenta Seed Care Institute, Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, they’re all freaking out about your latest PR stunt. And then there’s DeSantos Seeds International, the world’s largest seed company …”

“Yeah, I know who the hell DeSantos is,” Peg says. “They’re so evil we call them DeSatan’s Seeds.”

“Stick and stones, Rachel, sticks and stones,” the caller says. “Their CEO wants to put out a contract on you and your rat pack of radical researchers. His attorney advises suing you and the university into pauper’s graves.

“Remember, Rachel, you don’t work for Greenpeace, Save the Bees or that wacko, anti-industry conspiracy theorist, the Botanist. Or do you? Sometimes I wonder. Whatever. Mind your own damn beeswax, Rachel. Now, buzz off!”

Click.

No. Peg certainly does not work for Greenpeace. Nor Save the Bees. Nor the Sierra Club. Nor any of the fifteen thousand non-profit groups registered in the United States to save the environment and promote animal welfare.

But … “the Botanist?” Whereinhell did that come from?

Peg’s stomach does a somersault. The breakfast burrito that tasted so good a few hours ago is now on the verge of violent revolt. She suddenly feels as nauseous as a devout vegan at the annual awards banquet of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

Peg has been wondering about the Botanist recently, too.

How does he — or she, no one knows — get hold of some of Peg’s more damning research findings before they’re officially released by the university press office? Is there a mole inside her department? Or a saboteur?

In scientific and government circles, the Botanist’s name is radioactive. The equivalent of a Molotov cocktail in a fireworks factory, the bane of every high-level bureaucrat’s existence in the 2020s.

Botanist bulletins on the internet combine the gravity of gospel with the stinging delivery of a stand-up comic on late-night TV.

A legendary muckraking government gadfly, the Botanist blogs only verifiable truths, much to the embarrassment of whichever political party is in power. The Botanist blows the whistle loud and long over all manner of government malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance in the environmental arena.

The Botanist isn’t just another box of wing nuts on the endless shelf of conspiracy theorists. The Botanist is no QAnon. Makes no claims that 9/11 was an inside job, the moon landing was faked, Paul is dead or the Earth is really flat.

The Botanist speaks only the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. To the legions of K Street lobbyists, the Botanist is the most feared voice in the nation’s capitol. Botanist blogs scuttle more skullduggery than an army of IRS auditors.

That’s why, after Rachel Carson, the Botanist also happens to be Peg’s secret hero.

But why would the feds suggest that Peg was even remotely associated with the Botanist?

Does the EPA know something she doesn’t? Or is the agency merely messing with her?

Who knows?

Peg certainly doesn’t. And that bothers her scientific mind tremendously.

It’s a small world inside the Washington Beltway. Always has been, she supposes. But these days it’s almost impossible to know who you can trust and who you can’t.
Peg’s professional and private lives have taken many strange twists and turns since she started her research on pesticides.

Could any of that possibly be the agency’s handiwork? And, if so, which agency?

Now, it seems that Peg has more to worry about than a hive full of dead bees.

Maybe a lot more.