Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (14 page)

“That’s not far from the truth,” she
said as she picked up the carafe and poured Jack some water, then
handed him the glass. “You’ve been sedated for a bit over
twenty-four hours,” she explained. “I’m sorry again for stunning
and sedating you, but we had to move quickly and didn’t have time
then for twenty questions.”

“Where are we?” he asked as he
handed the glass back for a refill.

“California,” she told him as she
gave him more water, “not far from a place called Live Oak, if you
know where that is.”

“No,” Jack told her before he drank
the rest of the water, which was finally making a dent in his
thirst. He had been to some of California’s major cities, but Live
Oak didn’t ring any bells. “So, did you shanghai me out here on a
plane after knocking me out?”

“Basically,” she told him, leaning
back and crossing her blue jean-clad legs. “You’re hard to carry
and weigh a ton when you’re unconscious, Special Agent Dawson,” she
told him with a grin. “Did you know that? Especially up the steps
of an executive jet. It took the three of us plus the pilot to get
you into the plane. Getting you down was easy, though. We just
dumped you out on the ground.”

Jack snorted, which elicited a
reproving look from Alexander, who was still purring loudly next to
him. “I’ve suffered worse,” he said.

“I know,” she told him quietly, her
face softening. “Sheldon told us a lot about you. He thought the
world of you, Jack. I’m so sorry about what happened to him. We all
are.”

Jack looked at her, his face rigid
with renewed anger at his friend’s death. “So, I take it you had
nothing to do with his murder?”

“We didn’t kill him, Jack,” she
said, aghast. “Sheldon was working with us. He had been for weeks.”
At Jack’s clear expression of disbelief, she explained, “He had
been tracking down our attempts to hack into the New Horizons lab
networks. We have some very bright people, Jack, but he was better.
Much better. We knew someone was onto us, but we didn’t know who it
was.” She shook her head. “One of our...sources finally figured it
out, and we decided to try and recruit him, you might say, to get
him on our side before he went to his superiors with what he knew.”
She shook her head. “It was a close thing, Jack. Sheldon almost had
us, and had he blown the whistle on our operation, it would have
been a disaster of biblical proportions.”

Seeing Jack’s skeptical expression,
she went on, “I know it sounds melodramatic to you now, but by the
end of the day you’ll understand that it’s not an overstatement.
Not at all.”

Alexander put out a paw in her
direction, demanding her attention, and she leaned forward and
scratched him under the chin. Jack caught a whiff, just a trace, of
a lavender scent.

“Of course,” she went on, “just like
you, Sheldon wasn’t willing to believe us at first, but after we
showed him certain things...” She shrugged. “After that, he became
a true believer in our cause. He turned the tables on New Horizons,
and was able to succeed where we had failed. We knew that the key
was the lab at Lincoln Research University, but we didn’t know
exactly where to look. He volunteered to break into the lab,” she
said, her eyes brimming with tears now. “He knew he was the only
one who could find what we were looking for in the computers.” She
reached out and took Jack’s hand. “And thanks to you, he didn’t die
in vain. We have the corn samples and the other data he found. We
have everything we need, now.”

“Everything
for
what
, Naomi?”
Jack said, frustrated. He couldn’t imagine what Sheldon could have
seen to make him go rogue and throw in his lot with the likes of
the Earth Defense Society. But Jack also couldn’t deny that he
believed what Naomi was telling him. That scared him almost as much
as anything else. “And who the hell killed him?” he
demanded.

“You’ll see soon enough, Jack,” she
said cryptically, letting go of his hand. “We have the security
monitor recordings of the lab. I’ll show them...and other things to
you soon.”

Jack opened his mouth to protest, to
tell her that he wanted to know now, but she put her fingers to his
lips.

“I promised you that I’d tell you
everything, Jack,” she said, “and I will. I won’t lie to you or
hold anything back. We need your help, just as much as we needed
Sheldon’s. Maybe more, now that he’s gone.” She shook her head.
“But there are certain things you need to understand first. I know
it’s hard to be patient after all that’s happened, but you’ve got
to trust me. Please.”

“I’m not going to say I trust you,”
he told her, “because right now I don’t trust anybody but this
silly cat.” Alexander ignored him, his attention focused on Naomi,
who was still scratching him under the chin. “But I don’t exactly
have much choice, do I? If nothing you tell me or show me convinces
me to support your little operation and I wanted to leave, you
wouldn’t let me go, would you?”

“No,” she told him quietly. “We
couldn’t, Jack. There’s simply too much at stake.”

“Would you just kill me if I didn’t
cooperate?”

“I wouldn’t support it, but there
are others who would want to.” She paused. “But we’ve never had to
do that, Jack, and I pray we never will. What you’ll see here will
transform your view of the world, believe me.”

Jack said, “Okay, start
talking.”

“First,” she began, “you need to
understand that we’re at war, Jack. Like most wars, this one is for
dominance, for control. The difference is that very few people
realize that they’re caught up in it, and most of those who do
don’t understand what it’s really about, or who the enemy truly
is.” She sat back, folding her arms under her breasts, shivering
slightly as if she were cold. “Everyone today is focused on the
threat of terrorism. Before that, it was Saddam Hussein. And for
decades before that we were consumed by worry over the Cold War and
nuclear holocaust. The irony is that the corn that Sheldon found in
that lab in Nebraska, if it ever gets loose in our biosphere, will
be far more devastating to humankind and the Earth as a whole than
all the nuclear weapons ever made.” Her eyes took on that haunted
look again that made Jack’s skin crawl. “We’ll be wiped out if we
aren’t able to stop it, Jack. The human race will be
exterminated.”

“How?” Jack asked, shaking off the
willies. “It’s just corn, for God’s sake. And not much, at that:
how are four little kernels of corn going to do us in?”

She shook her head. “These are just
some of the prototypes, Jack,” she told him. “New Horizons got the
rest back when they...killed Sheldon. Even if they hadn’t, they
would have been able to recreate them. They have the genetic
blueprints. Within a year there will be seed to produce corn like
that, thousands of tons of it that will be shipped to every corner
of the world. And wheat and other crops will be following right
behind to help spread the devastation.”

Jack shook his head. “I say again,
so what? Is it laced with poison? Is it carnivorous, the corn cobs
chasing after people to bite their ankles? I’m sorry, Naomi, but I
just don’t buy this. If what you’re saying was true, New Horizons
would be shut down in a heartbeat, and the FDA and special agents
from the Bureau would be in there, tearing those labs and offices
apart and burning every bit of the stuff.”

She cocked her head, looking at him
as if he had just said something incredibly dim-witted. “In an
ideal world, that’s exactly what would happen, Jack. But our world
isn’t ideal, is it? Your time in Afghanistan should have shown you
that. And even if it hadn’t, the ordeal with Sansone should have
been a wakeup call.” She paused, considering. “There’s a good
reason that New Horizons hasn’t been shut down. Do you have any
idea how many senior government and military officials have close
ties to that company, either from prior or promised future
employment, receiving major campaign contributions, or just good
old-fashioned bribes?”

Jack shook his head. He didn’t like
where this was going.

“We’ve been able to link twenty-six,
Jack,” she went on. “That number includes the vice president, the
deputy secretary of defense, five senior officers in the military,
two supreme court justices, the head of the FDA, the chief of staff
for Homeland Security...” She paused, looking pointedly at him.
“...and the Director of the FBI.”

He felt like the
world had suddenly fallen away, spinning off into space as he fell
down the proverbial rabbit hole.
Someone
in the Bureau handed you over to Sansone and her
goons
, he thought bitterly. He hoped it
wasn’t Richards, and prayed it wasn’t Clement. But if the director
was caught up in this madness, it could have been
anyone.

Then there was Kilburn at the lab:
he had come from New Horizons, and Jack would have bet a year’s pay
that he had played a role in Jerri’s death.

“Those are just the big fish, Jack,”
Naomi continued. “There are a lot more out there, the people who
carry out the policies that those senior officials make. All of
those people do whatever is necessary for New Horizons to fulfill
its agenda.”

“Which is?” he asked, not sure now
that he wanted to know the answer. He felt like he was under water,
his body being squeezed, crushed, his lungs unable to
breathe.

“There are two parts to it, Jack,”
she answered. “The first is to control as much of the world’s food
supply as possible. The second, as I already told you,” she said
grimly, “is to kill us.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Before Jack had a chance to respond,
an intercom set into the wall next to where he was sitting
chimed.

Naomi stood up and reached across
the bed to answer it, her face drawing close to Jack’s as she did
so. He couldn’t help but breathe in her lavender scent, and when
his eyes met hers, she held them steadily. It seemed to take a long
time for her fingers to press the button.

“Naomi,” she said, still holding
Jack’s gaze.

“You need to come see this,”
Thornton’s voice, even more agitated than it was before, rasped
through the grill, destroying the moment. “Right now.”

“On my way,” she sighed, giving Jack
a wry smile. She stood up and told him, “Come on.”

“Where to?” he asked, more confused
than ever.

“The command center,” she answered
as she opened the door, which took quite a bit of effort to move.
He quickly saw why: it was three-inch thick steel plate, and if he
wasn’t mistaken, the walls were made of concrete even thicker.
“It’s upstairs.”

As Jack slid forward on the bed to
stand up, Alexander gracefully jumped to the floor and trotted out
the door.

“Alexander!” Jack called, starting
to chase after his feline friend, but Naomi caught his
arm.

“He’s fine,” she told him with a
quick smile. “Alexander had a chance to explore a bit while you
were sedated. He can go where he likes here. Animals are welcome,
and necessary, as it turns out. The others here will watch out for
him.”

“Oh, jeez,” Jack sighed, wondering
what mischief the big cat would get into as he stepped out of the
room.

He found himself in a hallway that
looked like it might have been in a modest hotel, except that it
emptied into the yawning mouth of a brightly lit tunnel a dozen
feet wide. There were doors along the hallway to rooms similar to
his, along with a dining area near the tunnel entrance that could
seat twenty or so people.

Where the hell is
this?
he wondered. He might be in
California by rough location, but he’d never seen anything like
this place.

As he closed the
massive door behind him, he noticed a small name plate next to the
door frame. Naomi Perrault.
Christ
, he thought,
I was sleeping in her bed
. That brought a set of images to his mind that he hurriedly
shoved aside.

Tan, as Jack had suspected, had been
standing next to the door, and he fell into line as Jack followed
Naomi to a spiral staircase, trying to focus his attention on his
feet rather than on her shapely lower body as she quickly took the
steps ahead of him.

He was totally unprepared for what
he saw upon reaching the top of the stairs. It was a circular room
about seventy feet across that looked like the combat information
center, or CIC, of an aircraft carrier he had once been on during
his tour in Afghanistan. Computers and flat panel displays were
arrayed in clusters that faced in toward a raised dais at the
center. The walls curved inward to form a dome, with enclosed
fluorescent fixtures hanging from shock mounts around the periphery
and a matrix of sound baffles in the center of the ceiling. A dozen
men and women were at the various consoles, and all of them were
staring at Jack as he followed Naomi toward where Thornton stood at
the central console.

He suddenly realized they weren’t
staring at him, exactly, but behind him. Turning around, he saw
that about a quarter of the room had been partitioned off by a wall
that held a couple of doors and three floor-to-ceiling projection
displays.