Spy Thriller: An Involuntary Spy: An espionage thriller (Involuntary Spy Espionage Thriller Series Book 1) (5 page)

    “You’re gonna have to do better than shrunken rat’s balls, Seth,” said Bill, irritatingly.

    “Bill, the rats have this after ten days.  Imagine the cancers they could develop in six months.”

     “Rats get cancer from anything,” said Bill.  “They all get organ damage.  I thought I told you how important this project was, and I told you that it has already been tested and found safe.”

     “You did.  That’s why I’m giving you my preliminary results.”

     “I want final results, Seth.  Just get me a full report Seth, and don’t fuck this up.”

     “I won’t.”

     “I thought I was clear about this from the beginning.  We just need independent data for our records.”

     “Right.  But what about the government?”

     “What about the government?”

     “Don’t they weigh in on safety?”

     “Seth, you’re a loyal employee to Germinat, right?”

     “Right.”

     “And you get a paycheck every two weeks, right?”

     “Right.”

     “Well so does the government, you get my drift?  They work for us, not the other way around.  We are the USDA, the FDA and the EPA.  ”

     “Okay.  Got it.”

     “I hope you do.”

     “I do.  I do.”

     “Great.”

     And with a big toothy phony smile, Bill brushed Seth off.  To Seth, politicians were a lot like toilets.  They were all full of crap and when they got too full, they had to be flushed.

     This was all settling uneasily for Seth, who was the team leader, because he didn’t like what he was seeing.  Being a relatively new technology, compared to the billions of years of evolution that had produced the plant, whatever was altered could have serious effects on the future of the plant life itself and anything in its ecosystem.

     Everything in each ecosystem is interrelated.  The process of evolution has created an intricate balance between the plant and animal life in the system.  The plant, being immobile, depends on insects to pollinate it, so they develop beautifully colored flowers and sweet nectar to attract the insects.  The plant also needs to be able to distribute its seed, so, through evolution, it developed a specialized seed distribution system. 

     Surrounding the seeds with succulent fruits attracted animals, who would ingest the fruit and express the seed by spitting it out, or the seeds would come out through their waste.  This process has developed over millions of years and now we come along and play God with it. 

     God didn’t need to create man to improve nature and all that man had managed to do in the 200,000 years he has been here is to drive a mass extinction of species.  Extinction of one to five species occurs naturally.  Human activities were currently pushing extinctions at 1,000 to 10,000 times the normal rate.

    These ecosystems aren’t just pretty little forests that are fun to look at and play in.  They provide essential services that we could not possibly perform for ourselves; like absorbing carbon emissions from human activity, thus having a cooling effect on the world’s climate, decomposing tons of waste, returning it to the soil, providing oxygen for the atmosphere, filtering water, flood control, and producing food and fuel.  Whatever Seth and the company did now could affect the environment for the next seven centuries, or even longer.  Seven centuries was the short time that it took to rebuild a full rainforest.

     But it wasn’t Seth’s job to figure out the effects of GMOs on the ecosystem; only that they were safe for human consumption.  Do the job, collect the check and benefits and don’t worry about anything else.  Let someone else moralize about it.  He could do that.

    
Genetic engineering was messy.  To force a sequence of foreign DNA into a plant, you couldn’t just snip the desired gene from the bacteria and sew it on to the plant’s DNA sequence like an old woman working on a quilt.  The foreign intruder was loaded onto tiny shards of gold and shot with a “gene gun” into a dish of plant cells. 

     This blasting created a lot of damage to most of the cells.  The ones that “took” the foreign DNA were identified by an antibiotic resistant marker gene that is attached to the mix.  The dish is doused with antibiotics and the cells that emerge alive are the ones with the new form of DNA.  This isn’t the only way to identify whether the shot was successful, but it’s the easiest one.

     One of the concerns that Seth naturally had was whether ingestion of the GMO foods could cause resistance to common antibiotics.  But there was no way he could test for that in the time that he had been given.  Another problem was that his test subjects were coming up with elements of neonicotinoid pesticides.

     “Shirley, don’t we have any samples of Bt corn that aren’t contaminated?  I’m getting conventional insecticide in the cells of my subjects.”

     Seth was visibly irritated.

     “I’ll ask for them, but I think they treat every seed.”

     “God damn it, how they hell can we test for anything when this shit is contaminated?”

     “Seth, what’s wrong?” asked Robin.

     “What’s wrong?  This is a joke.  We need corn that’s not treated with neonicotinoids.  Why the hell do they spray them when they’re supposed to create their own pesticides?”

     “Because the Bt doesn’t kill all of the bugs,” said Robin as she ushered Seth into his office and closed the door behind them.

     “God forbid if we don’t kill all the bugs,” Seth said, facetiously.

     “Seth, you are always the first one to say it – there is no emotion allowed in the lab.  It compromises impartiality.”

     “You really think this testing is impartial?  You really think they care?  It’s a joke, Robin.  They already have their fucking shit approved.  This is a god damned trap.”

     “Look, I’m sure everything is not as it appears.”

     “Exactly.  Nothing is.  That’s the problem.  I’m not going to verify a lie.”

     “Seth, I’m not sure I like where this is going.”

     “Robin, they douse the Bt stuff with neonicotinoids and the non-Bt stuff with Cleanup.”

     “I know.  It makes it easier now for farmers to manage weeds.”

     “But that just makes farmers use more glyphosate on their crops.  We’re supposed to be reducing dependence on pesticides, not using more.”

     “Seth, I need my job.”

     “Your job?  That’s all you care about?”

     “Well, don’t you?”

     “Yes, but, take glyphosate for example…”

     “But we’re not supposed to test for glyphosate.”

     “I know, but we have to separate the effects of the Bt from a foreign competing toxin, right?  That means we have to separate the effects of the neonicotinoid pesticides from the Bt.  I’m just using glyphosate as an example because I know more about it than Bt.  I wrote a paper on glyphosate.  That’s how the company noticed me. Look, the stuff was originally proposed by the company as an anti-microbial agent.”

     “So?”

     “That means they know it kills bacteria in the gut.  I’ve seen studies linking it to cell death, birth defects, miscarriage, low sperm counts, DNA damage; kind of like the stuff I am seeing in my rats.  A foreign substance like that could invalidate our entire study”

     Seth’s paper was about glyphosate's inhibition of CYP enzymes, which play crucial roles in biology, one of which is to detoxify harmful substances introduced through the diet that are not naturally present in the body.  The study showed that glyphosate enhances the damaging effects of other food borne chemical residues and environmental toxins. The destructive effects manifest slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body.

     “Glyphosate kills beneficial bacteria in the gut, but not the bad ones, like Clostridium botulinum, Salmonella, and E. coli.  The "good bacteria" in your digestive tract, such as protective microorganisms, bacillus and lactobacillus, are killed off.”

     “And…”

     “And that could damage the protective lining of the gut, allowing for toxins and bacteria to enter the bloodstream. This causes the body to send off an immune response to attack the wayward bacteria, potentially sparking autoimmune diseases.  I’m seeing the same kind of stomach and intestinal damage in my rats.”

     “That means we either have to start all over again with seeds that aren’t treated, or try to isolate the effects of the neonicotinoids to eliminate them from the equation.”

     “Which is impossible.”

    Germinat was treating every GM seed, even the Bt ones, with neonicotinoid pesticides.  When the seed grew into a seedling, the toxin passed throughout every cell of the plant through its vascular system.  It was all through the plant, at levels that were so high that Seth vowed after this experiment never to eat GMOs again.  The toxin was embedded in the plant.  You couldn’t wash it off.

     Seth was getting more and more comfortable in his adopted Russian home, especially now that he had somewhat of a social life, if you could call it that.  Khabarovsk was a nice looking town, and was by no means a tiny village.  It was a real city, with restaurants and night clubs and a beautiful downtown area.  The golden domes of the churches glistened during the day and the Disneyesque beautifully sculptured ice city in the main square was particularly alluring at night, when it was colorfully lit.  All the traditional Russian stereotypes that Seth expected were missing.

     His apartment was not much to look at from the outside.  In fact, it resembled old tenement housing or perhaps even a bomb shelter because of the lack of homeowner’s associations, but inside it was quite comfortable and had all the modern conveniences.  And it was never cold.  Central heating worked during the cold months and you didn’t even need to wear a long sleeved shirt inside it was so warm.  Quite a contrast to the States where, if you got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, your feet met an icy cold floor, followed by chilly air.  Russia was much warmer – well, inside it was.

     The warmth also extended to his new social life.  Spending time with Natasha made the time go faster.  Everything was fun.  They went out together practically every night.  But, of course, Yuri was always lurking in the shadows somewhere and Seth thought that was kind of creepy, but when he was with Natasha, he forgot completely about Yuri.  At some time, and he was not quite sure when, she had become an important part of his new life, and he couldn’t imagine it without her.

     “George, why do you always carry that briefcase around with you?” Natasha asked one evening at dinner.

     “I don’t know, it’s just habit I guess.  Plus, my mom gave it to me and it makes me feel close to home when I have it.”

     “You should get it fixed.”

     “What?”

     Of course, she was speaking about the bullet hole in the leather.  It looked like someone had stabbed it with a screwdriver or something.  It was true that Seth always had his briefcase with him and he supposed that was drawing some sort of suspicion.  He brought it every day to class and whenever he went out with Natasha, he also brought it with him.  In fact, since that day he was clutching it on the plane, he had never left it out of his sight.

     “When are you going back home?”

     “Oh, I don’t know.  I still have to finish out my contract at the school.”

     “Yes, but aren’t you going to visit, on the holidays, maybe?”

     “I don’t know, we’ll see.”

     “So tell me what you would do during the holidays when you lived in Canada.”

     “Well, I had a friend with a villa on the beach in St. Tropez, so I used to go there quite often.”

     “Wow, he must be really rich.”

     “Yes, he’s a rich and important man.  Has a yacht, too.  It was a great place – always a lot of fun.  The South of France is amazing.  It just feels good there.  It’s sunny, the people are nice, and there are a lot of cool places to hang out at.”

     “Like where?”

     “Well, they have restaurants right on the beach.  You order local fish, which you could swear they just caught for you, it was so fresh, and the waiters would come to your table and put on a kind of show to prepare it.  At night the whole town of St. Tropez turns into a party, and you just kind of walk around and enjoy it.”

     “Sounds great.  I actually went to France right after I graduated from the university.”

     “Really?  Where did you go?”

     “A friend and I took a tour to Spain, France and Italy.  We spent about a week in Paris – that was fantastic.”

     “I used to live there.”

     “Really?  Paris?”

     “Yeah, in my college days.”

     “So do you speak French?

     “Mais oui, bien sur.”

     It was actually one of the reasons the Russians had decided to make him a fake Canadian, not that many of them speak French in Vancouver.

     “How did you like Paris?” he asked her.

     “I loved it.  I love the architecture and the art.  There’s always something going on.”

     “Yeah, it’s kind of like a Disneyland for the adults.”  Natasha laughed.

     “I used to go to the butcher or the fish market and pick out what I wanted for dinner, then over to the wine store to get the perfect matching bottle of wine,” he said.  Natasha giggled.  “Then next door to the bakery for a nice dessert if I was having company over, and, of course, to the fromagerie for the perfect after dinner cheese.”

     “What a production, and just for dinner!  You probably had a better one at home than we have here in this restaurant.”

     “That’s Paris.  Everything is always first class, always proper.  Everything has its own place, and its own silverware.  For example, did you know that we are eating our cheesecake with fish knives?”

     “What?” she said, looking surprised.

     Seth held up the silverware they had been given with their desert.  The small, pretty but oddly shaped knives had little notches in the top, and they had matching forks.

     “We have fish forks too.”

     “That’s hilarious.  I guess they don’t know what they are here, but they looked fancy, so they gave them to us for our dessert,” she said.

   “Why not – the dessert is fancy,” said Seth.

     “I’m sure in Moscow they would not do the same.”

     “No?”

     “No way.  Moscow is very sophisticated.”

     “I heard it was one of the richest cities in the world.  Everything seemed quite expensive when I was there.”

     “Everything is expensive there.  Someday we have to go there and eat the fish with our dessert knives.”

     That had Seth bursting out laughing, and, like catching a yawn, Natasha chimed in to the point where people around them were staring.  As Victor Borge had said, “the shortest distance between two people is a laugh.”  Seth and Natasha were closing all distances between them at great speed, getting closer and closer to each other.  Seth was falling, through space and time, in love with Natasha, and he hoped to fall deep enough to stay there forever.