Authors: Catherine Palmer
“To the highest bidders.”
“Of course. Why should we sell to the low bidder? Capitalism doesn’t work that way.”
Matt tried to think clearly.
Supply, demand, capitalism…
they sounded like words printed on one of his board games—a test of strategy where little plastic pieces moved around on a sheet of colorful plastic. Not real life.
Everything inside the taxi felt surreal, unexpected. None of this had ever crossed Matt’s mind when he was sitting with Mr. Banyon and discussing his term paper. Feeding the
hungry had been an idea, a workable concept. But it hadn’t involved all these terrible things—things that were so out of his control. They couldn’t actually be happening to Matthew Strong from Artesia, New Mexico. And yet they were, and he had to do something. Say something.
“You should sell to the low bidders because they need the food,” he told the man across from him. “They can’t afford to pay high prices. They’re too poor, and you’re starving them.”
“Do you hear the boy, Pierre? Such passion.”
The driver glanced over his shoulder. “Passion will never allow you to succeed, Monsieur Strong. Power is what you must seek. To the powerful belongs the victory.”
Matt was breathing too hard, nearly hyperventilating. He had to calm down. But how? These men had him in the palms of their hands. They were going to take the USB key away. Mr. Banyon would have died in vain. Nothing would come of his efforts. And people would go on starving.
“It’s not about passion or power,” he told the Agrimax men. “It’s about right and wrong. The world isn’t a business—it’s a battleground. Good versus evil. And I’m on the side of good.”
“How quaint to see the world in black-and-white,” Dr. Sloane murmured. “You’ve been reading too many books, my naive young friend. Heroes and villains, right and wrong, good and evil—this is the stuff of fairy tales.”
“It’s the stuff of the Bible, which is the only book I’ve been reading these days, and I can tell you that the forces of good belong to God, and the forces of evil—”
“Calm down, Mattman,” Billy said, reaching for him.
“No way!” Without stopping to think, Matt grabbed the chrome door handle. The taxi door swung open, and he hurled himself out onto the street. He landed hard on his shoulder, his head glancing off the pavement and a layer of skin scraping from his arm. Around him, tires screeched,
horns blared. Dazed, he lifted his head to see a small blue car bearing down.
This was it. He would die like Mr. Banyon, for the cause of Christ.
Scrambling to his feet, he made a frantic attempt to leap to safety. Too late. The car’s fender caught his hip and tossed him into the air. He hit the blue roof, slid across it and landed on solid ground again, his elbow slamming into concrete. He lay on a sidewalk. Cars braked, a waiter dropped a tray of dishes, people ran to see. Coming for him. Reaching.
Matt pushed himself up. A woman with warm brown eyes and bright red lipstick gave him her hand.
“Monsieur, comment allez-vous?”
“It’s the USB key,” he said. “They…I have to…”
“Au secours!”
she shouted at a man standing nearby.
“Appelez l’samu!”
“No, no.” Matt was on his feet now, watching Pierre drive the taxi toward him. It had made a U-turn. They were coming back for him. He had to get away.
He grabbed the woman’s arm. “I’m in trouble. Can you help me?”
She stared at him.
“Pourquoi?”
“That taxi. Right there! Those men are trying to kill me!”
She studied the taxi for a moment, and then she looked at Matt again, her coffee eyes assessing.
“Oui,”
she said. “Come, please.”
Grabbing his shoulders, she pivoted him toward the crowded bistro.
“Tout droit,”
she urged. “Straight ahead, we go.”
The sea of onlookers parted, and Matt hobbled on his bruised hip through the clutter of café tables and chairs on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.
“Arrêtez!”
someone called from behind as the woman hurried Matt into the cool darkness of the dining room, where patrons looked up from their midmorning coffee,
pastries and cigarettes. He glanced over his shoulder to see Billy just ahead of the two Agrimax men, all racing toward him.
“C’mon, Billy!” Matt shouted as the woman shoved him through swinging doors into a busy kitchen.
“Pardon!”
she called, giving the chef and his assistants a fluttering wave of her red fingernails.
Hurrying behind, Dr. Sloane and Pierre yelled commands in French, but no one made a move to help.
“Mattman, don’t leave me!” Billy called out.
Matt thought about pausing for his friend to catch up. How many times had Billy protected him? But he couldn’t risk losing the USB key. Besides, Agrimax had no reason to harm Billy, so his friend was better off without him.
The brown-eyed woman led Matt through the back door of the bistro and into a narrow alley. She moved with surprising speed, her sharp-heeled black shoes clattering on the cobblestones. “Come! Come,
monsieur!
”
Matt gritted his teeth and ran through the pain in his hip and arm. He had to get away. Had to keep the key safe. Had to find the right person to give it to.
Lord, help me!
he lifted up a prayer as he raced around a corner and back out onto the street.
“Mattman, wait up!” Billy’s voice carried down the alley. He sounded forlorn, like a little boy.
The woman double-timed it up a set of stone steps, shoved a key into the lock on a tall, gray door, and vanished through the opening. Matt followed, and she slammed the door behind him.
Instead of standing inside a house as he had expected, he found he had slipped into another world. Like Lucy who wriggled through a coat-filled wardrobe into the mystical land of Narnia, Matt had left the smog and traffic of Paris and stepped into the Garden of Eden. A marbled courtyard surrounded him, a large open area with a round fountain in
the middle and a statue of a fat naked man spewing water from his mouth. Lanterns hung from trees, and a table with two chairs made an intimate grouping in one corner. Stunned, Matt gaped at the array of potted fruit trees, flowers, hanging baskets, trailing blooms and rows of red-and-pink roses.
A woman’s voice interrupted his reverie. “
Voilà!
They will pass.” His rescuer brushed a hank of thick brown hair from her eyes and blew out a breath. “Why do you run from these men, eh?”
Matt suddenly felt the pain in his hip, the sting on his arm, the loss of Billy. He lifted his arm to find a swath of reddened, torn skin that was oozing blood. Rats! He had blown it again. Big-time. He had the key, but he didn’t have Billy or Josiah Karume. And he didn’t have the slightest idea what to do next. Why did God let these things happen to him? Matt was doing the right thing, wasn’t he? He had prayed about this almost every minute. So why did nothing ever go the way it was supposed to?
“Monsieur?”
The woman stepped closer. She frowned at his arm, then let out a cluck of dismay. “Genevieve! Genevieve!”
A plump older woman wearing a black uniform and a white apron bustled into the courtyard. The brown-eyed woman gave her maid a set of instructions in French, and moments later Matt was ushered into a huge room with long panes of glass, gold couches, gold chairs, deep red rugs, a chandelier with a thousand crystal droplets, and big bouquets of fresh flowers everywhere. Dazed, he stared at the furnishings until Genevieve the maid came back into the room with a tray that held a pitcher of water, a tube of medicine and a white bandage. Before he knew it, she had washed his arm thoroughly and bandaged it up.
“Better?” The thin, brown-eyed woman entered the room and waved him into a chair. Seating herself on one of the
sofas, she drew out a long cigarette and lit it from a tabletop lighter. Then she inhaled deeply, tossed her head back and blew the smoke upward. Matt wondered if she was a movie star or a fashion model. She slipped off her black, pointy-toed, pointy-heeled shoes and tucked her long legs under her. The outfit she had on—a brown sweater and tight brown skirt—made her look elegant.
Matt suddenly wished he weren’t so scruffy. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for helping me. Uh…mercy.”
“Merci!”
She shook her head and rolled her eyes at his attempt to speak French. “Your name, please?”
“Matthew Strong,” he answered before realizing he should have made something up.
“
Enchanté,
I am Clotilde Loiseau. I live here.” She swept her hand around the room, and he got the impression there were a lot more rooms in this fancy house that hid behind a plain gray door. “I take my morning
café
at the bistro where you fell out of the taxi.”
“Okay.” Matt knew he ought to say something polite, but he wasn’t sure what. So he just nodded.
She pursed her lips, and he could tell she wasn’t impressed with him in the least. But who ever was?
“Now please explain to me, Monsieur Strong. Why do you fall out of the taxi, and why do the men chase you? Are you a thief?”
“No.” He shrugged. “Well, sort of.”
“You come all the way from America to steal from taxi passengers? You are a pickpocket?”
He couldn’t help but smile at the image. “No…see, I have some data. My friend downloaded it onto a USB key.” He didn’t know why he trusted the brown-eyed woman, but he slipped the small apparatus from his pocket. “A company—a business—has done some wrong things, you know? And I have the evidence here.”
“Let me see.”
For some reason, he handed her the USB key. She looked it over. “For the storage of computer
technologie?
”
“Yes,” he said.
“Oui.”
“Your friend copied the information about the bad company? And where do you take it?”
“I came to Paris to give it to Josiah Karume. He’s the chairman of I-FEED. It’s an organization that—”
“Food. Aha.” She waved her cigarette around in the air. “A big conference was here in Paris last week. But now, they go.”
“You know about I-FEED?”
“
Oui,
of course. My husband is…how you say?—His company is making helicopters. Not helicopters, eh? Only the…” She spun her finger around and around in a circle.
“The blades?”
“
Non.
The part inside. The machinery to make it turn,
oui?
”
“The rotor.”
“These helicopters are purchased by military, private, also I-FEED and other humanitarian organizations. You understand? I-FEED and the others, they use the helicopters for transporting food. We meet these clients sometimes. They come here, or to our home in Provence. It is business only,
oui?
But we hear what they are doing.”
She waggled the USB key, and Matt really wished he hadn’t let her hold it. “So tell me, Monsieur Strong, why does I-FEED need this
technologie?
And why do they use a young boy to transport such information?”
Matt moistened his lips, his eyes on the key. “I-FEED doesn’t know I’m the one who has the information. I’m doing this because…” He realized his whole explanation was going to sound lame to this elegant lady. All the same, he sucked down a breath and launched into it.
“God wants us to feed the hungry. Three big food companies control the world’s food supply—Agrimax, Progrow
and Megafarm—and all they care about is making money. They make sure the rich get to eat, which leaves the poor to starve. That’s wrong.”
“Oui,”
she said.
Heartened by her response, Matt continued. “Jesus said, ‘I was hungry, and you fed Me. When you did it to one of the least of these My brothers and sisters, you were doing it to Me!’ I believe the only way to really feed the world’s hungry is to get these big food companies to stop withholding supplies.”
The woman stared at him, her brow creased as she puffed on her cigarette.
“They don’t care about Jesus,” Matt went on, “and they sure don’t care about the starving children. So to get their attention, we have to threaten to expose their practices to the public. Agrimax is planning to merge with the other two companies and take over management of their resources and subsidiaries. This will give Agrimax complete control over the global food supply. And that means they’ll have tons of power to do whatever they want.”
“Oh, my.”
“The trouble is, Agrimax does just enough humanitarian work to look good. Not enough to solve the problem, but enough to get the good PR—that means public relations.”
“This I understand.”
“My friend Mr. Banyon, he knew what they were up to, because he used to work for them. So he downloaded the evidence, but they killed him before he could get it to the public. They shot him and made it look like suicide. I went to his house and…and…found him. He was dead.”
His eyes filling with the dreaded tears, Matt focused on Mrs. Loiseau. She was staring at him like he was an alien or something. As if she’d never met anyone so strange in her whole life.