Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(97)
“We got twenty-seven minutes until we land at the Grand Prairie base on Mountain Creek Lake, Ranger,” Tepper said over his headset, which was just loud enough to be heard over the engine and rotor sounds. “That’s how long you got to tell us less fortunate souls what you figured out.”
“Comes down to fungus, Captain.”
“Fungus?”
“Corn fungus, specifically,” Caitlin told them all, recalling Cray Rawls’s revelations and ready to gauge Young Roger’s milk-white face for a reaction. “Also known by its Aztec name of cuitlacoche. Looks like a gray, stone-shaped growth when the corn’s picked, and turns into a gunky, tar-like mush when cooked.”
“Did I pass out from exhaustion, or did you just call a fungus the weapon of mass destruction that ISIS is after?” Tepper groused, shaking his head.
Young Roger answered him before Caitlin had the chance. “Mexican farmers also call it el oro negro, or black gold.”
“Thanks, son, I truly appreciate the agricultural perspective here.”
But Young Roger wasn’t finished yet. “The fungus grows inside corn husks. Cuitlacoche flourishes when droplets of rain seep into a stalk of corn and the kernels begin to rot. The fungus can grow over, or side by side with, the kernels themselves.”
“So just how,” Jones chimed in, “do we go from there to a genuine weapon of mass destruction?”
“I’d be guessing, without an actual specimen to analyze.”
“So guess, son.”
“A catalyst.” Young Roger shrugged, as if he wasn’t totally convinced himself. “Something that altered the genetic structure of the fungus to create a mutation that can be weaponized.”
“Forget can be,” Jones said. “Try has been and will be.”
“Not if we can help it,” Caitlin reminded him.
“Figure of speech, Ranger.”
“And you’re forgetting something, Jones, the wild card in all this: Cray Rawls wasn’t after what created that fungus because it’s a weapon; he was after it in the belief he’d found the cure for cancer.”
“So how can something be deadly and medicinal at the same time?” Jones wondered.
“Because plenty of the most effective drug therapies are, at their core, toxic,” Young Roger told him. “And the likelihood is that the Comanche developed a natural immunity and resistance to the toxic effects of this particular cuitlacoche. While this strain might kill anyone exposed to it in concentrated forms, like the people in that Austin diner, it extended the lives of these Comanche to a dramatically quantitative degree and basically eliminated cancer from their existence.”
“So Native peoples have been eating this shit since the time of the Aztecs.” Jones nodded. “Only, not all of them lived forever and, last time I checked, they never created a weapon of mass destruction. One of you want to try telling me what’s different here?”
“I believe I may have an idea,” said Pierre Beauchamp of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
94
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS
Dylan stroked Ela’s hair, continuing to say anything that came to his mind, in the hope she’d open her eyes again. When she didn’t, he just kept stroking, speaking, and hoping.
He wished he’d never taken that damn Native American studies class, wished he’d never met her or got involved in all this.
What was I thinking?
He wasn’t. Again. Dropping out of school, temporarily or not, to take part in an adventure for a greater cause that had turned out to be a crock of shit. He was only here because he was part of a grand scheme that Ela had ultimately abandoned. But for some reason that didn’t bother him, beyond the fact that he’d let himself be played for a fool.
Again.
It was like he had “Sucker for Love” tattooed across his forehead. Was it really that obvious?
Dylan was a prisoner of his emotions, just as Ela was of her beliefs. In both cases, their vision had ended up skewed; they had seen what they wanted to be before them, instead of what was really there.
“We’re going to stop this,” he heard himself saying. “No one else is going to get hurt.”
He had no idea how the shit piled in that limestone storage chamber worked, only that it had to be the source of whatever Ela and the Lost Boys had really been up to—whatever the schematic, kind of a map, of some area of Houston was really about.
Dylan …
He heard his father’s voice in his head, wanted to tell Cort Wesley that he had been right all along and that Dylan only wished he could do it all over again.
“Dylan.”
This time the voice was accompanied by a gentle but strong grasp of his shoulder. He looked up to see Cort Wesley Masters leaning over him, eyeing Ela sadly.
“She’s dead, son.”
“I … think I knew that.”
Dylan retrieved the schematic, map, or whatever it was from the ground and extended it upward.
“What’s this?” his father asked him.
“You tell me, Dad,” he said, feeling the tears welling in his eyes. “But whatever it is, it’s not good.”
95
DALLAS, TEXAS
“Rawls pretty much confirmed my thinking when he finally came clean about the fact he’s there for water and not oil,” Pierre Beauchamp continued, inside the Black Hawk cabin, as they streaked through the sky toward Dallas. “That Inuit village where the residents all died was located on a volcanic plain, directly over a fault line, accounting for high acid levels from time to time in the river they drew their water from. Before I came down here, I did some checking and learned there’s a similarly ancient volcanic plane located in the general area beneath that Indian reservation as well.”