“You said you wanted to pick my brain. If I understand that idiom, then for you my brain is always ready to be picked.”
“Well.” Clyde thrust his hands into the pockets of his uniform’s trousers and balled them into fists, then stared fixedly at Terry Stonefield’s telescope for a good minute or so. “Been noticing a few things, is all.”
Fazoul raised an eyebrow. He had sized Clyde up in the months since they had met and had apparently realized that when Clyde took to noticing things, and bothered to mention those things to someone, a lengthy conversation might be in store. So he backed up a couple of paces and lowered himself gingerly to a window seat, made himself comfortable, and waited for Clyde to continue.
“I think something funny is going on in Forks County. I think it’s serious. I think it has something to do with foreign students—probably ones from Iraq. And it has to do with botulin toxin.”
Fazoul nodded at him reassuringly until Clyde spoke the final words. Then he did a double take, as if he could not believe Clyde had said what he’d said. He heaved a deep sigh and ran one hand across his gnarled scalp, pulling what was left of his hair back from his forehead. He shook his head and closed his eyes in deep thought. “Please continue,” he said quietly.
“Well, a little earlier you were voicing some opinions about Saddam. And it so happens that I’ve been studying up on old Saddam ever since he started threatening to kill my wife. And I can’t claim to be a big Saddam expert by any means, but I do know he’s been working like mad on nukes and Superguns and missiles and biological and chemical warfare. To hear all the things he’s been working on, you’d think Iraq must be just one big laboratory, and all the Iraqis must have Ph.D.’s. But I’ve seen Iraq on TV, and I know it’s not a big laboratory. So where does he keep all his scientists? Well, when Dean Knightly told me that there were fifty-three Iraqis right here in Wapsipinicon, I started to put it together. EIU isn’t even that big of a university. There are dozens like it. If Saddam has fifty-three propeller heads here… well,you can work out the math. I cruise through the university a couple times a night, because the campus cops are short-staffed and they’ve asked us to pick up some slack for them. And I’ve seen the foreign students through the windows of the academic computing center at three, four in the morning. I’ve heard they can use computers to exchange information with friends in other states or countries.
“So I got to thinking, just to be paranoid for a minute, what if all these Iraqi grad students were actually part of Saddam’s big plan to kill my wife? When I started thinking of it in those terms, it got me kind of worked up emotionally.”
“Of course it did,” Fazoul said. Clyde thought Fazoul’s eyes were glistening just a bit.
“So let’s think it through. What would the Iraqis be up to here in Forks County? EIU’s got a decent engineering school, or so they claim, but what it does better than anyone is veterinary medicine. Now, if I was Saddam, why would I send my propellerheads to vet-med school? Well, the first thing that popped into my head was anthrax. That’s a veterinary disease, but ever since August the media can’t stop talking about how Saddam is going to use it as a biological weapon.
“You might have heard that at the beginning of August, almost on the same day as the invasion of Kuwait, we lost a deputy. He was running down a runaway horse from the vet-path lab that had been cut up by cattle mutilators. He died of a coronary. I tried giving him CPR but it didn’t work. For some reason the FBI was real interested in this case.