Free HOWLERS by Kent Harrington Page A

looked back at the girl. He would excuse himself and leave. He wasn’t in the mood for gene-splicing conspiracy nuts, even attractive tall ones with great legs.
    “The colonel’s recipe off?” he asked.
    “Goddamn it, this isn’t a joke! People are horribly sick, a lot of them.” They both watched another reporter slip out of the auditorium and head toward the bathroom. The girl waited, not speaking again until the hall was clear. “Will you come with me, please ?” she said and walked away.
    He watched her rear, the pants suit pressed against some fancy underwear. He decided to follow only because she was pretty and he was bored.
    You’re a hopeless sleazebag , he told himself, who is engaged to be married .

    “My name is Susan,” she said. “I want you to promise not to use my name.” She picked her name tag up off her desk and pinned it to her jacket. “Susan Crown.”
    “Okay, tell me all about it, Ms. Crown,” Miles said. She’d closed the door to her office.  Miles looked around. The office was in keeping with the Genesoft collegiate esthetic.
    “I called the paper. They said you were going to be here. They told me what you looked like. That’s how I knew who you were,” she explained. Miles picked up a photo of the young woman dressed in a military uniform standing by a mud building somewhere.
    “Okay, what’s wrong with the product?” Miles asked.
    “We all—” Crown closed her eyes and broke down.
    This wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he followed her. He put his cup of coffee down on a file cabinet.
    “Susan, why don’t you take a deep breath and then tell me what’s going on, and I’ll try and help you,” Miles said. He tried to sound reassuring.
    “We all had some of the new product at a company party a week ago. That’s when they started sending the R19 line out to supermarkets.”
    “I thought that they were starting shipping today ?” Miles said.
    “No. No, they started shipping a week ago. The irradiation unit has been working on R19 for three weeks. The irradiation plant is in Sacramento.”
    “But they said this morning that they’d just gotten approval from FDA to ship?”
    “No, the FDA approved the line last week.” Crown sat down in her desk chair. “I get dizzy. I’m sorry. The investment bankers were here a month ago—JP Morgan, their top brass showed up here. JP Morgan convinced management to release early. The bank had our IPO to launch. That’s where I work, investor relations. They wanted the next quarter’s report to reflect the R19 line’s earnings. They wanted to ignore the hold-up with the FDA so they got approval, somehow. The bank has people inside the FDA who they said they could use to make sure we got approval and not to worry. And they did.”
    “You’re saying they bought an FDA approval?”
    “Yes. But something is wrong with the R19 line of products. I’m sure of it now.”
    “How do you know all this?” Miles said. He noticed that there was a wash of sweat on the girl’s pretty face.
    “My boyfriend works in executive row. He’s sick too. A lot of people who ate R19 - treated food are sick. You’ve got to warn people. I can’t. I could lose my job.”
    “What do you mean sick ?”
    “Acting strange. Not normal. That’s why I want you to come with me.  I want you to come see my boyfriend. I want you to write about what’s happened to my boyfriend.” She got up from her desk, a little wobbly, and grabbed for her purse. “We can go now. I want to take him to the hospital, but he won’t let me,” she said.
    “You said half the people here were sick? How do you know that?” Miles said.
    “You didn’t notice? Look outside. It’s Tuesday morning. We are supposedly launching a hundred-million dollar product line all over the U.S.” She went to the window and pulled open the blind back, angrily. “Look! Look at the parking lot. Look !”
    Miles walked to the window. The new five hundred-car employee parking lot lay