Over the next few years, other, similarly unpopular candidates had made some sort of deal with the shadowy diamond merchants working out of Cleveland-candidates that weren't supposed to win. Their positions would evolve as well.
Then, in 2042, morey communities across the country exploded into a week of riots and burning that took the National Guard to control. Led by the psychopathic rhetoric of a morey tiger named Datia Rajas-than.
The violence created a convenient wave of anti-moreau sentiment that catapulted most of MLI's candidates to office.
MLI had about seventy hard-core puppets in the House now, all incumbents. They only had a few men in the Senate, though, and a large percentage of their men, including Binder, wanted to be Senators.
The rogue agents in MLI, without Smith's knowledge, recruited the Zipheads to step in to create their own 'Dark August.' The Zipheads were happy to comply, considering the profits they made on flush on the street level.
Daryl Johnson knew or suspected all of this. At first he must have condoned it. You couldn't keep that kind of conspiracy secret from the campaign manager. The whole Binder inner circle must have known about the illegal financing. That's why it was so tight. Harrison, Thomson, Johnson, and Young stuck with Binder through his radical shift to the right. They all had been bought.
Johnson was the first to have second thoughts. Nohar suspected that it would probably have originated with the whole duplicitious situation with Stephie.
It must have grated badly. He stewed for years. Even tried to drug himself out of an untenable situation.
MLI must have thought they had him under control because he was hooked on flush that they supplied— though indirectly. If he did anything to break the silence, his supply would be cut.
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S. ANDREW SWANN FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
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Three weeks before his death Johnson found a new supplier, Nugoya.
That wasn't what got him killed. The flush still came from MLI, they still controlled his supply even though Johnson didn't know that. What killed Johnson was why he was trying to get out from under the thumb of his supplier. Johnson's problem was curiosity. He thought too much.
He had thought too much about NuFood.
He thought too much about Kathy Tsoravitch's letter.
Johnson made the mistake of wondering, as I sham had just a few hours ago, why MU would be interested in preventing NuFood from succeeding. Tsorav-itch lobbied to prevent PDA approval. Denial of that approval bankrupted NuFood. Whereupon, MLI bought out the company, and the patents.
Why?
The question must have nagged at Johnson for years. Especially when MLI simply sat on the company. He might even have realized that MLI was using NuFood as its flush lab. A very expensive drug lab.
He finally figured out the real reason. When he did, he made his second, and last, mistake. He told Young. And Young had told the creatures running MLI— That's when the shit went ballistic. That's why Young was so scared, as well as guilty. He knew MLI's secret—they would have killed him once he had served his purpose, IDing the people in the campaign whom Johnson had talked to, those who read the letter.
But Young toasted himself, so MLI had to use their agents—Hassan and the Zipheads—to waste anyone who could have read that letter.
All from Kathy Tsoravitch's letter, and her pleading that the DA reject NuFood's application to mass market their dietary supplements. Supplements that were based on synthetic proteins derived from mirror image dextro amino acids. Proteins a creature based on a
levo amino acid biology—like the fat pinks at whom the food would be targeted—couldn't metabolize.
Johnson had looked too closely at MLI's agenda. He saw NuFood, moreys as a hot issue to be counted on to get MLI's people elected, and the budget. And the letters about government waste always mentioned NASA.
Johnson must have seen the creatures running MLI— the humanoid things that could only be franks. Otherwise, Nohar doubted Johnson would have come to the conclusion he must have. Because the truth was quite a leap.
Nohar's Maduro had glided into the suburbs again. He began watching the left side of Mayfield. NuFood's R&D complex was at 3700 Mayfield, near the minimum security prison he had passed earlier. NuFood's plot was cheap property, little-traveled.
The conclusion was simple, if hard to accept. Johnson must have asked himself the same question as Nohar did when Smith told him MLI supported Binder.
Why were a bunch of franks backing right-wingers like Binder?
They weren't franks.
Why the hell were they involved with something like NuFood?
Johnson must have inferred what Nohar had told Stephie. These things were based on a dextro amino acid biology. Manny had discovered that from Smith's remains. Manny had known, but he had never gotten the chance to double-check the results. He never got the chance to make sure the analyzer wasn't broken. That was what MLI had to cover up.
The prison came up on the left.
Nohar pulled the Maduro over and parked on the sidewalk across from it. NuFood was next to the prison's barbed wire topped chain link. It sat in the midst of a grove of trees and bushes that nearly hid the two lab buildings from sight. They couldn't let anyone know they were based on
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S. ANDREW SWANN a mirror image biology. It was because of that they needed NuFood. They literally couldn't live without it. Normal living things couldn't metabolize NuFood's products, but the converse was true. NuFood's production was the only thing they could eat.
No gene-tech, even as an experiment, would give their work such a bizarre handicap. Johnson would know that. It left one conclusion.
These things weren't bioengineered.
They had evolved naturally.
It was a fifty-fifty chance life on Earth ended up stabilizing around the one type of amino acid. Life elsewhere, if it evolved as it had on Earth, would end up stabilizing around one form or the other, dextro or levo. Same chance, fifty-fifty. Even odds. It was just bad luck, for everyone concerned, that these guys came from a planet that was based on the wrong type.
They were aliens.
Nohar hobbled across the street.
CHAPTER 26
The storm that had been threatening all night finally came as Nohar crossed Mayfield. It was a sudden deluge that washed some of the blood off of him. His makeshift cane was thumping an erratic counterpoint to the click of his claws. It was slow progress, but it was nearly three in the morning and there wasn't any traffic. The street was dead.
He made it across. To his right was the prison hiding behind its electrified chain link. Its yard was bathed in arc lights.
To his left was a line of shrubs and trees that almost hid an old, low slung, office complex from the street. Ahead of him, between the overgrown shrubs and the five-meter-tall electric chain link, was a dirty-gravel driveway. It looked like a landscaping afterthought.
He began worrying about the pink guards at the prison. They weren't involved in this, but it wouldn't be good if they noticed a morey with a shotgun skulking just outside their grounds.
He limped a dozen meters down the gravel path, all the while cursing his knee and wishing he could move
