Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (16 page)

“If that’s the case,” he asked, “why
did you leave the site up? Why not just get rid of it?”

“Once something gets out on the net,
Jack,” she said, “it’s almost impossible to take it back or get rid
of it. As it turned out, it actually did work in our favor in an
unexpected way: it made us look like a bunch of crackpots, and I
like to think it helped divert some of the scrutiny away from our
operations, at least for a while.” She shrugged. “We also got a few
great recruits out of it, including Renee. She’s got a doctorate
from MIT in computer science, but has been a UFO buff since she was
a little girl.” She took another sip of her coffee. “The only thing
truly constructive that we managed to do in cyberspace was to
eliminate as many visual clues to the senior EDS staff as we could.
That was mostly Renee’s doing, although Sheldon helped a lot after
he came on board.”

“And that’s why every photo that
should be you or any of the others was replaced with one of Gary
Woolsey?” Jack gave her a grin, thinking of the photo of the obese
African American man he had seen in every database where Naomi’s
picture should have been. “Certainly you could’ve found someone
more photogenic.”

But Naomi didn’t smile. If anything,
she suddenly looked on the verge of tears. “It was Renee’s idea,”
she told him softly, looking down into her empty coffee mug. “She
and Gary were good friends. It was a sort of tribute to
him.”

“What happened?” Jack asked. “I know
he confessed to burning down the Outland Genetics lab and killing a
bunch of people, then died right after he was sent to
prison.”

“He didn’t just die, Jack,” Naomi
said fiercely. “He was murdered. We don’t know exactly what
happened, because after Gary was arrested, we couldn’t contact
him.” She looked him square in the eye. “I’ll go over the things
you need to know about EDS with you later, Jack, but one of the
cardinal rules is that if you’re compromised, you’re on your own.
We won’t help you, and you can’t contact us. We can’t risk the
operation for anyone.”

“You saved me.”

She shook her head. “That was
different. We had to intervene to see if you’d found anything at
the lab, which you did, along with the data Sheldon had hidden in
the photo frame, which we didn’t even know about. We went to your
house that night only for that. Gregg wanted me to either kill you
or leave you to your fate to cover our trail, but I
refused.

“Anyway,” she went on, “we think
that Gary found something at the last minute while he was setting
up the network at Outland Genetics, that a...New Horizons special
VIP, let’s call him, would be there, one of the very few that we
knew about. Gary must not have even had time to contact us before
he took matters into his own hands.”

“And wound up burning five people to
death,” Jack said grimly. He had dealt with horrible people and
crimes in the line of duty, and his wife had been killed by one,
but he still believed in justice, even if it was imperfectly dealt
out. Killing five people without a trial was, to Jack, nothing less
than murder.

“What Gary did was an extraordinary
act of courage, especially for him,” she said. “He was a gentle man
who’d never committed a violent act in his life, and I think the
thought of what he’d done made him crack on the witness stand
during the trial. Those who died in that fire were enemies of
humanity, Jack. You don’t believe or understand that now, but you
will. And soon.” She looked away again, gathering her thoughts. “He
recognized a unique opportunity and struck a tremendous blow
against our enemies, Jack. Then, after he was sent to prison, they
killed him.”

“The coroner’s report said he died
of a heart attack,” Jack said. “Let’s be honest here: he didn’t
seem to be in the greatest shape, and what he must have gone
through in the trial and being sent to prison would have put an
incredible strain on him.”

She shook her head sadly. “No, Jack.
We have records from the prison’s computer network showing that
Gary had a visitor the day he died, someone from the FBI. You might
recognize the name: Lynnette Sansone.”

“
What?
”
Jack said.

Naomi nodded. “That’s right. And an
hour after Sansone’s visit, Gary was dead.”

“So, you’re saying that Sansone
killed him?” Jack asked, incredulously.

“Yes,” Naomi replied. “She could
have done so quite easily.”

“What, she just slipped him
something that made him have a heart attack, without anybody seeing
it and the coroner not picking up on it?” He couldn’t restrain his
skepticism.

Naomi nodded, her face momentarily
clouded by the haunted expression Jack had seen on her earlier,
during their talk in her room. “Absolutely.”

“How can you possibly know
that?”

“Because we brought her here from
your house, Jack,” Naomi told him. “And when I take you to see her,
I’ll prove it to you.”

CHAPTER NINE

“I want to see her right now–” Jack
began hotly, standing up from the table.

“No,” Naomi said quietly. She held
up her hand before Jack could say anything else, and told him,
“You’ll see her soon enough. I promise. But there are some other
things we need to do first.”

“Like what?” Jack asked, trying to
quell his anger. “Dammit, Naomi, I’m tired of...” He clenched his
hands into fists, at a loss to describe his feelings.

“You’re tired of feeling helpless,”
she told him, getting up and coming around to stand beside him,
“tired of Fate getting to call all the shots.” Jack nodded. It was
as good an explanation as anything. She gripped his arm gently,
saying, “I know. And that’s going to change, I promise you. But
there are some practicalities we have to take care of. It looks
like you’re with us now, whether you want to be or not. You need to
know a few things before you can function here. Come on.” She
nodded toward the tunnel mouth that led away from the command
center dome. “Let’s take a walk.”

As Jack followed her into the
beige-painted tunnel, which was made out of ribbed steel and was a
dozen feet across, he asked her, “What the heck is this place?” The
floor material changed from the utilitarian but attractive tile of
the command center dome to non-skid steel flooring that had
absolutely no give to it, and that Jack suspected was at least a
quarter inch thick. Arrays of pipes and conduits for what he
assumed must be power and water covered the tunnel’s ceiling and
traveled what looked to be around fifty feet to a junction that lay
ahead.

“Remember my telling you about
humanity’s preoccupation with the Cold War?” she asked him as she
walked along. He nodded. “Well, this is one of the relics from
those bygone days.” Gesturing around them, she explained, “This
used to be a base for Titan I Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.
There were eighteen bases like this built in the early
nineteen-sixties. Each one could launch three Titan I missiles with
multi-megaton warheads at the Soviet Union. This one was under the
851st Strategic Missile Squadron, headquartered at Beale Air Force
Base here in California. We’re right in the foothills of the Sutter
Buttes, believe it or not.”

“Jesus,” Jack said softly as they
approached a junction in the tunnel. “This is huge.”

Naomi laughed. “Jack, you haven’t
seen anything yet,” she told him. “But you’re right, it is huge.
The irony is that these bases were only used for a few years. This
one was commissioned in 1961, and shut down in 1965.”

“Our taxpayer dollars at work,” Jack
said wryly as they stepped out of the tunnel into the junction. It
was another huge cylinder, sixteen feet across. There were more
pipes and conduits, plus larger ducts, covering the
ceiling.

“This is the main junction,” she
told him. “It’s the center of the complex.” Pointing at a diagram
that hung on the curving wall, she explained the facility’s layout.
“The complex is made up of six major sections, all joined by the
main tunnel.” She gestured toward two openings where the tunnel,
twelve feet wide, ran through the junction. “At the south end is
the old antenna complex, with two silos that used to house the
missile control antennas. Now we use them for…other things that
you’ll learn about soon.”

Jack saw her glance at the mouth of
the tunnel that led south to the antenna complex, and he felt a
chill at her expression. It was only there for a moment before she
turned away, but for that instant a look of barely contained rage
was in her eyes.

“How far is that?” Jack asked,
looking at the diagram. “I don’t have any sense of scale from
this.”

“That part of the tunnel is almost
six hundred feet long,” she told him.

“Christ,” Jack said. “That’s two
football fields!”

Naomi smiled. “Now you’re getting
the idea of how big this place is,” she told him. “Okay, so the
antenna complex is the only thing on that section of the main
tunnel, which runs straight here to the junction. Connecting
directly to the junction are the command dome, where we just came
from, and the dome that contains the lab and our generators.” She
pointed to a large blast door, directly across the junction from
the command dome entrance. “The portal to the surface also connects
to the main junction.” She nodded toward a set of massive blast
doors that had been painted in a glaring yellow and black striped
pattern, “I’ll show you the portal sometime later when we have a
chance to go topside, but I wanted you to know where it is in case
we have to evacuate.

“Following the main tunnel north
past the main junction,” she went on, “you first come to what used
to be the old missile fuel storage terminal, which is basically a
huge cylindrical tank. We use it for liquid nitrogen storage
now.”

“What do you need that for?” Jack
asked, looking at the diagram. The tank looked huge. “And how much
does this tank hold?”

“The tank holds about forty thousand
gallons,” she told him. “Like everything else here, it’s big. As
for what we use it for, it’s coolant. You see, what used to be the
three missile silos, we’ve converted to huge deep-freeze storage
units.” She pointed to three sets of three huge cylinders, silos,
which were connected to the main tunnel at the north end. “These
used to be the launch complexes. There was a missile silo, a
propellant terminal, and an equipment terminal for each one. As I
said, we’ve converted the missile silos into huge freezers. We
turned the propellant terminals, which used to store fuel for the
missiles, into support systems for the silos. The equipment
terminals, we converted into living space, like apartments.” She
turned to look at him, grinning. “Just don’t head off to the silo
at the end of the main tunnel without taking everything you need
with you, or it’ll be a long walk back: it’s seven hundred feet
from here.”

“So what’s so big that you need to
use missile silos as freezers?” he asked, puzzled.

Naomi smiled. “You’ll see,” she
answered.

Jack sighed, rolling his eyes in
frustration.

Pointing on the map to what looked
like another junction on the main tunnel, she went on, “The first
two silo complexes are connected to the main tunnel by what are
called blast locks, which were supposed to help contain the damage
from a missile if it exploded. We don’t have to worry about that
now, but we normally keep them closed for physical
security.”

“Security against what?” Jack wanted
to know.

“You’ll see,” she answered
cryptically.

“
Great,” Jack muttered as he
looked at the diagram. The silos were the end of his virtual
tour.

“Wait a second,” he told her. “When
you mentioned the portal earlier, you said ‘when we go topside.’
Does that mean we’re underground?”

“Yes,” she said. “The top of the
control center dome is about twenty feet below ground. The tunnels
here are almost fifty feet down.” She glanced at him. “Remember,
these bases were built to withstand nuclear detonations on the
scale of megatons.” She shrugged. “Everything here is built tough,
Jack. The concrete is several feet thick in most places, heavily
reinforced with steel.”

“Perfect for your little war,” Jack
said.

“It’s not our war, Jack,” Naomi
snapped. “It was thrust on us by an enemy who doesn’t know the
meaning of diplomacy or negotiation, or even surrender.”

“Sorry,” he said
sheepishly.

Naomi shrugged. “It’s okay. I don’t
expect you to understand. Yet.” She pointed to the left as they
walked on, where there were two huge vestibules in the junction
with small access hatches. “That’s our primary fresh water
storage,” she told him. “Two tanks holding thirty-three thousand
gallons each. They’re supplied from two deep water wells in the
power house.”

“Good God,” Jack said. “That’s
enough for a small town!”

“Yes, it is. But that’s not the way
we found it, believe me.” She shook her head. “This place was a
disaster area when Gregg bought it. Asbestos, PCBs, lead paint:
everything that’s been banned as environmentally hazardous in the
last thirty years was down here in appalling abundance. It was a
fright to clean up.”