The Weed Agency Read online

  Palmer’s office suite was quiet, diligent, not a thing out of place. The secretary said Palmer was running late, and when the tall, black, perfectly groomed lawyer emerged from his office several minutes later, he offered Humphrey an apology that didn’t seem apologetic at all.

  They entered Palmer’s office, where the walls were covered with awards, a photo of him with the president here, a photo with Janet Reno there. Palmer had already laid out a variety of documents and spreadsheets on his desk.

  “I’ll get straight to it, Humphrey,” Palmer began. “The travel budget for your agency’s senior staff is … considerable.”

  “Well considered, I would argue,” he said with a smile. Palmer didn’t smile back. Instead, he simply looked through a series of photocopied records where he had marked certain lines with adhesive notes.

  “Last April, University of Tokyo. Spain, early May, International Organization for Biological Control of Noxious Animals and Plants. June, Victoria, British Columbia, Society for Ecological Restoration. August, International Workshop on Grapevine Trunk Diseases, Valencia, Spain. September, New Zealand Biosecurity Institute’s Seminar, Wairakei Resort Hotel, Taupo, New Zealand.”

  He removed his glasses.

  “I’ve seen diplomats who rack up fewer frequent flyer miles than you, Humphrey,” Palmer said, as serious as the end of happy hour.

  “Mr. Palmer, I admit, I’m a bit surprised that you find this to be an issue,” Humphrey began. “The very name of our agency explains the necessity of this travel. ‘Invasive,’ as in ‘invading,’ as in ‘from somewhere else.’ If we could do all of our work from this building, we would be happy to. But our work involves weeds and pollen-spreading insects and all of God’s creation coming across our borders from somewhere else—in an era of international trade and air travel, oftentimes someplace quite far away—and thus our mission requires us to develop working relationships with experts from all around the globe.”

  “I also notice that the conferences you host here in America are … pretty expensive by government standards. And I can’t help but notice they’re in … nice destinations: Miami, Las Vegas, San Diego, Honolulu. Warm weather, winter dates. A suspicious mind might look at these conferences as taxpayer-funded vacations for you and your staff.”

  Humphrey’s insincere smile dropped like a shattered window. He began to return fire, drawing his sarcasm as if it were a sheathed knife.

  “We work with farmers, Mr. Palmer, and you’ll find that many of us do this here at the Department of Agriculture. Farmers tend to be busy in the spring, summer, and autumn months. Something about planting, growing, and harvesting crops. For some strange reason, they seem to have the most time to attend a conference in the winter months. Perhaps you could uncover those secrets with an extensive investigation. Besides, if you examine all of our records, you’ll see we hold regional conferences at other times of the year in plenty of other cities. We always hold one in Manchester, New Hampshire, usually in late September or early October—”

  “Fall foliage season.”

  “New Orleans in late winter …”

  “Mardi Gras.”

  “Our end-of-the-year meeting in Manhattan.”

  “Christmas at Rockefeller Center.”

  Palmer smelled a snow job.

  “Nice hotels, too, Humphrey.”

  “Mr. Palmer, just who do you think we invite to these conferences? Our ability to achieve our mission depends greatly upon the quality of the expertise we draw upon. If I’m going to ask the top biologists and agricultural science professors from Oxford University, Kyoto University, McGill, Edinburgh, Australian National, or Singapore to get on a plane for ten hours and spend time briefing and updating our top agricultural minds on their latest findings, I had better put them up at a nice hotel with fun things to do after hours. Otherwise, they won’t come. Perhaps you would prefer I hold it at the Holiday Inn outside Dulles Airport?”

  Palmer was unmoved. “Of course, in the process, you and your senior staff end up staying at the government per diem rate at these luxury resorts.”

  “You will find every figure in order, every i dotted, every t crossed,” Humphrey hissed indignantly.

  “It’s not just the figures, Mr. Humphrey, it’s the frequency of the travel and the overall expense of the conferences. Look, my job is not just to sniff out misconduct, fraud, theft, waste, and so on. It’s also to flag circumstances that could become problems down the road. If any of this ended up on the front page of the Washington Post, you would be getting a lot of grief. And at that point, it might be too late to do anything.”

  Humphrey detected a not-so-veiled threat.

  “Will you be assembling an official report on this?”

  “Would that … worry you, Mr. Humphrey?”

  “I would merely like time to assemble … all of the relevant information. To help give you a full picture of our work,” his insincere smile returned.

  Humphrey immediately summoned Wilkins and Jamie to his office, and instructed Carla they were not to be disturbed.

  Within the office, Wilkins had gone from his usual trepidation to anger.

  “I cannot believe this!” Wilkins fumed again, holding a Diet Coke against his forehead. “We finally get the Hill calmed down, and now our own IG is breathing down our necks?”

  “Think of all the hours we wasted in this effort to sniff out wastes of money,” Humphrey sighed.

  “You’re sure he was threatening to leak it to the Washington Post?” Jamie asked.

  Humphrey reviewed the notes he had written down immediately after the meeting.

  “He had marked the conference spending that interested him in his spreadsheets with adhesive notes, but did not have anything written down. That, my dear Ms. Caro, is the key moment in all this. Perhaps that or the moment his fingertip hits the button to ‘save document.’ Once it gets written down on paper—or screen—it can get printed, photocopied, passed around, shown, read, repeated … at that point, we’re chasing paper airplanes all around any possible connection between this Department and anyone with access to a printing press. Inspectors General exist to expose problems. If they don’t expose problems, they don’t feel like they’re doing their job.” He looked over his own copy of the travel records. “This is the choke point, the moment where we can deter all manner of headaches from this. If we can somehow instantly persuade him that all of this travel is so justified, so natural, so needed, that questioning it would be stirring up a hornet’s nest for himself …”

  Wilkins drank down his soda. “Let’s find some other office to distract him. Find some other juicier example of potential waste for him to shine a spotlight on.”

  “No good comes from federal agencies and offices turning on each other,” Humphrey said curtly. “No, we need to get him to see what we do as absolutely imperative …”

  He thought for several moments, then burst into activity: “Wilkins, this agency has been tracking and mitigating weed outbreaks in just about every state for nearly twenty years. It is time we laid out for him every detail of every action we’ve taken that has ever required travel.”

  For nine straight days, Agency of Invasive Species staff appeared in the doorway of the Inspector General’s office, pulling handcarts full of cardboard boxes, packed to the gills with photocopied documents and receipts and records and every other conceivable piece of paperwork. They came several times during a day. Palmer’s secretary faced the increasingly frequent question, “Where do you want these?” with steadily increasing dread.

  Throughout the Department of Agriculture’s offices, staffers wondered why their previous extra copier and printer toner had disappeared. The agency had actually worn out its photocopier, and staffers were now wandering into other offices just to use their photocopier.

  Palmer noticed that document boxes were starting to line the walkways between cubicles. “There must be some mistake,” he told the hapless intern lugging the boxes around. “I’m only reviewin
g travel for the past four years.”

  The intern checked a note. “Yeah, Mr. Humphrey said you might ask that. He said, let me see here—these are records for trips that were planned within the preceding physical year—”

  “Fiscal year,” Palmer corrected.

  “Oh yeah. Previous fisk-able year, but occurred in the period under review. Also, he said some of the trips from four years ago were follow-up investigations to events in the years before those, so he’s sending the records for those, too.”

  “I don’t need those records,” Palmer sighed.

  “He told me that if I didn’t get these to you I could get in big trouble.”

  Palmer sighed. “Fine.”

  Two weeks later, Humphrey had requested another meeting with Inspector General Palmer. The deluge of records continued unabated, and Office of the Inspector General staffers now grimly joked they were preparing to build an Ark.

  Humphrey attempted to stride confidently into Palmer’s office, but found the door could not open the entire way, banging up against a stack of document boxes. Wilkins joined him this time, but instead of carrying his usual briefcase, Wilkins gingerly held a plastic carrying case with opaque sides. He offered Palmer’s secretary a thoroughly unconvincing smile, but she merely skeptically measured him and his mysterious case, wondering why he was handling it like it was a nuclear bomb.

  “Mr. Palmer, I appreciate you taking the time to see me again,” Humphrey began as he settled into his chair, and pushed it, ever so slightly, about two inches further away from Palmer’s desk. “This is our assistant administrative director, Jack Wilkins. Let me begin with apologies; our last meeting took a much more combative tone than warranted. I failed to appreciate the diligence and drive you bring to your mission, and understand that in all of this, you’re merely doing your duty.”

  “I appreciate that, Humphrey, and I have to say you’ve gone way beyond what I asked in turning over documentation,” Palmer nodded. “In fact, I don’t think we’re going to need—”

  “Before you go any further, Mr. Palmer, permit me to offer a second apology, for assuming you were dismissing the importance of our work. Sometimes I forget how our efforts can seem so antiseptic, abstract, and difficult to grasp on memos and spreadsheets. People hear the ‘Agency of Invasive Species’ and picture space aliens or giant plant-monsters, or …” Humphrey paused, and watched Palmer’s eyes closely. “Or plagues of locusts.”

  “I cannot imagine why someone would associate you with plagues,” Palmer said with a straight face.

  “I wanted you to see our work with your own eyes, to appreciate our need to get out into the field,” Humphrey continued, getting the confirmation he had sought. “Jack has brought you a most vivid example of some of our recent important work, dealing with the crops of the Midwest. You see, up to one billion dollars in crops are lost each year from the Western corn rootworm—”

  Wilkins carefully unlocked the latch and opened the lid—and a slew of black-and-yellow beetles crawled within, several attaching themselves to the lid and then starting to drop to the floor and desk.

  Palmer pushed himself back in a distinctly unmasculine fashion upon the sight of the bugs.

  “What … are those things and why did you just put them on my desk?!” Palmer asked, failing to hide the tension in his voice.

  “I’m sorry, I’ll get them back in here, it’s just they’re … you know, small, and pretty fast, and—damn—hang on, I’ll get that guy,” Wilkins removed rubber gloves and attempted to grab the bugs, failing to put the lid on quick enough to keep a few more from crawling out onto the desk.

  “Diabrotica virgifera virgifera, scourge of the Corn Belt,” Humphrey said, trying to keep his voice even but not-so-subtly inching away from them. He put a picture of the bug magnified a thousand times onto the desk; up close, the mandibles, horns, and spiky legs resembled the radioactive giant ants of the 1950s sci-fi Cold War nuclear monster thriller Them!

  “That’s fine, Humphrey, I don’t need them on my desk!” Palmer said, grabbing a paper and starting to roll it up for a swat.

  “Do be careful, Mr. Palmer, I understand these beetles can be aggressive when they feel provoked or threatened, with stings and bites,” Humphrey cautioned, inching back again. It wasn’t really true, Humphrey knew; the bugs were harmless to humans, but Palmer appeared to be rapidly succumbing to a medical condition technically diagnosed as the heebie-jeebies.

  “Now, in the crate marked 3A-6B, you’ll find a series of records involving our travel to Chicago, Illinois, and Kansas City, Missouri, in the aftermath of infestations of this particular species.” Humphrey looked around, trying to ignore the crawling beetles in front of him, noticing that a good half-dozen crates were taking up space in Palmer’s office. “Do you have those records handy?”

  Humphrey, Wilkins, and Jamie had sent constant messages to Palmer lamenting that they had tried to send the files in reverse chronological order, but also sending them as they found them to avoid concerns that any particular documents were being withheld. To clarify which records were in which box, they devised an unnecessarily complicated alphanumeric system that left every box sounding like a droid from Star Wars. Palmer’s staff had found going through the files an enormous ordeal, often wondering how their life’s twists and turns had left them examining a photocopy of a receipt for a sandwich purchase from O’Hare Airport in 1992.

  “Three what? Look, it’s going to take me a while to dig out—I’m sorry, you said these bugs bite when they feel provoked?”

  “That’s what the literature says,” Wilkins shrugged, “but the odds of any of us having an allergic reaction are pretty small, as I understand it.”

  Palmer shifted his chair as far back as it could go. “Allergic?”

  “Yes, well, the beetle is particularly relevant to our battle against the weed menace, as it is also a common carrier of ragweed pollen—”

  “I’m allergic to ragweed!” growled Palmer, eyes glaring.

  He noticed one of the beetles crawling on the armrest of his chair, and Palmer leaped out, stumbling and throwing himself into an adjacent metal filing cabinet.

  “GET THESE”—many more expletives—“OUT OF MY OFFICE NOW, HUMPHREY!”

  “Absolutely, sir, but first I’d just like to point out that these insects are an example of why my senior staff may attend biological research conferences that don’t seem directly applicable to our effort against weeds. You see, today I wanted to ensure that the importance of our work is clarif—”

  “OUT! NOW! HUMPHREY!” The inspector general’s eyeballs seemed disturbingly close to bulging out of their sockets.

  “Of course, my friend,” Humphrey smiled. “Wilkins.” He looked a bit unnerved as one of the larger beetles began crawling across the desk toward him. He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Wilkins!”

  “Working on it!”

  Finally the butterfly net dislodged itself from the satchel.

  “DO YOU HEAR HISSING?”

  The remainder of the meeting was … brief. Once the bugs had been netted and redeposited into the plastic crate, Palmer practically pushed them out the door.

  “So, I trust your upcoming report—if any—will reflect the importance of the invasive species threats that we assess and mitigate?” Humphrey asked in a jovial tone that masked the men’s near–nervous breakdown after the Battle of the Bugs. “You’ll emphasize that while our travel and conference budget may seem high to the untrained eye, they represent a wise and necessary investment in the agency that is, after all, all that stands between us and these little buggers—”

  “Oh, you’ve made that abundantly clear, Humphrey,” Palmer fumed, feeling the back of his neck, unsure if his periodic sensation of tiny little legs crawling on him was psychosomatic. “Listen, never bring anything with more than two legs into my office again. In fact, never come into my office again.”

  “As you wish, Mr. Palmer, but know that my staff and I are always at your serv
ice,” Humphrey said with a beaming smile, quite confident that the Inspector General wanted nothing to do with Humphrey and his agency ever again.

  They departed the office suite and stood outside the hallway. Humphrey could not quite stifle a smirk.

  “Okay, it worked,” Wilkins admitted. “It worked terrifically, but I still think there had to be an easier way to get Palmer off our backs than renting a box of beetles and making me play Marlin Perkins to the mini-Mothras here.”

  “Oh, Jack,” Humphrey chuckled, pressing the elevator button. “You’ve been with me long enough to understand my belief in the influential power of the sudden, unexpected, visceral reaction. We could have used tiny bugs, but I doubt that would have … stirred the heart of Palmer in the way we desired. He’ll probably never come near our office again!” He stifled a bit of louder laughter, then noticed Wilkins was looking at his plastic case quite intensely.

  “What, are you growing attached to them now?”

  Wilkins looked up at Humphrey with a look of barely repressed horror. “I’m pretty sure we left a bunch of them in there.”

  The two exchanged an unnerved look, glanced back at the door to Palmer’s office suite and then at each other again.

  “Let’s take the stairs.”

  DECEMBER 1997

  U.S. National Debt: $5.49 trillion

  Budget, USDA Agency of Invasive Species: $146.9 million

  Nick Bader’s wife, Anne, was not enjoying life as a congressional spouse.

  They were packing up a portion of their house; she and their three children had decided to relocate from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to McLean, Virginia. Nick Bader found that every congressman lived in two places simultaneously, both in Washington and in their home district. Miss a vote and the opposition would claim you’re neglecting your duties; spend the weekends in Washington and you were accused of going native and forgetting the folks back home. Bader suspected that very few constituents really cared where he was; some folks just wanted something to complain about.