Ed said, ‘Your Spread From The Sky, Inc., was responsible for spraying my crops with Vorar-D. As well as most of the other wheat farms in Kansas. And you want me to believe that it was a cover name for the FBI? And that you’re a legitimate FBI agent?’

He stood up. ‘Did you really call the FBI office when you were outside of Wichita? Or were you just making it all up? Come on, Della, I think it’s time you came clean with me, don’t you? Why are you really holding on to Shearson Jones? You don’t have any serious hopes of arraigning him. Maybe you never intended to. So why have you brought him all this way, and guarded him so well? What’s your connection with Your Spread From The Sky, Inc.? What the hell’s going on?’

Della smiled at him, and put her head on one side, in a winning Shirley Temple kind of a gesture. ‘Ed,’ she said, ‘you don’t seriously doubt what I’ve told you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ed snapped angrily. He found that he was quivering, from exhaustion and shock, and from a sudden vertiginous sensation that the floor had disappeared from under him, ‘I just want you to tell me what all this is all about.’

‘How much do you actually know about Your Spread From The Sky?’ asked Della.

‘I know what Jack Marowitz found out. That they were flying over almost every farm in Kansas, just before the Vorar-D virus broke out And that’s too much of a goddamned coincidence to be true.’

Della carefully laid the pump-gun down across the desk. Ed didn’t miss the significance of the gesture, but he didn’t take his eyes off Della’s face, and he didn’t change his intense, unhappy expression.

‘Well,’ said Della, softly, ‘you’re right. They did overfly those farms. But the reason they did it wasn’t to spray any poison virus on them. The reason was that they had a tipoff about the blight, and they were reconnoitring the farms in the least sensational way they knew how, to see if they could detect who was doing it, and how.’

There was a long, taut silence. Then Ed said, ‘You expect me to believe that? You’re trying to tell me the FBI knew about the blight in advance, and they didn’t warn anybody? Not the Department of Agriculture? Not the President? Not even Shearson Jones?’

‘Until the blight actually broke out, Ed, they weren’t sure it was going to happen at all.’

Ed stood up, and walked across to the office window. He parted the lopsided Venetian blinds and looked down into Hollywood Boulevard. He couldn’t see the convoy of cars and wagons, but he could see Sam Gasiewicz on the other side of the street keeping guard, his rifle over his shoulder.