“Then I heard through my in-laws that the government was recruiting old horses to bleed for their countr yat the vet-path lab. And I heard from Desiree that the Army had plenty of anthrax vaccine but was short on botulin antitoxin. And I talked to an old fellow who’s a botulin expert, and he explained that the way they made that antitoxin was by injecting horses with botulin so that they built up a powerful immunity to it, then drawing their blood. I looked it up in the library and learned that botulin toxin kills by paralyzing muscles—especially the heart and breathing muscles.
“So putting two and two together, I figured that my friend the deputy didn’t die of a coronary like we thought. That horse he was chasing was one of the Army’s four-legged antitoxin factories, and its veins were full of enough toxin to kill a thousand men, and that toxic blood was streaming out of it because it had been mutilated. When Hal was chasing it around, he got some small cuts on his hands from vaulting over barbed-wire fences, and when he finally got that horse calmed down and was stroking its neck or whatever, he got some of the horse’s blood into those cuts, and suddenly his heart and lungs became paralyzed. The coroner didn’t think to do a test for botulin toxin and naturally assumed that it was a heart attack. When the government heard that one of its two botulin horses had been assaulted, it sent out the FBI to investigate. They must have known that Hal didn’t really die of a coronary, but they aren’t talking about it because it’s a national-security thing.
“So that leaves us with the question of who mutilated that horse and why. We’re supposed to think it was satanists. But I think that the whole spate of cattle mutilations was just a blind that someone dreamed up so that they could mutilate the botulin horse without drawing too much attention.
“Why would someone want to mutilate a botulin horse? Well, maybe they wanted to obtain a sample of that horse’s blood. If they could do that, they’d have a sample of the antitoxin that the Army is going to use to protect Desiree and all the other soldiers if war actually breaks out. According to my professor friend, there are many different strains of Clostridium botulinum. So having a sample might enable thissomeone to pick out a strain that would produce a toxin against which the government serum was less effective. Then this someone could produce large amounts of the toxin in a fairly simple factory.
“Well, Fazoul, if that was all there was to it, I wouldn’t have much more thinking to do. I would conclude that the samples had just been Federal Expressed to Baghdad and production was under way there. But there’s more to the story.”
Through most of this narration Fazoul had been staring out the window at the lights of Wapsipinicon, nodding frequently, as if he agreed with Clyde but did not find the information especially new or interesting. But at this moment he startled just a bit and turned to look Clyde in the eye. For the first time in the conversation, it seemed, he did not know what Clyde was going to say next.
Clyde continued. “I have this crazy idea that no one except me is ever going to believe. No one except me, and maybe you, because I just have the feeling you might be crazy enough.”
“What is your idea?” Fazoul said, slightly provoked by Clyde’s sudden reticence.
“That Saddam has a biological-weapons production facility under construction—maybe even up and running—right here in good old Forks County.”
Fazoul did something surprising: he smiled. He tried not to, but he could not keep the smile from spreading onto his devastated face. “May I hear your thinking?”
“I don’t have this one nailed down as well as the first part,” Clyde said. “But, to begin with, it just makes sense. He’s got his rocket scientists here. Why not make the stuff here? It’s easy to get hardware in Iowa, and he doesn’t have to worry about satellite photos, or getting bombed by the Israelis. Dr. Folkes says that the stuff is so potent, if you had, say, a truckload of it, you could change the direction of the war. And moving a truckload of stuff from Iowa to the Middle East isn’t very difficult for a guy like Saddam.”
“I agree with you that the idea is plausible,” Fazoul said in a soft, reassuring tone. Then, more urgently: “What is your evidence?”