Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (11 page)

“You have no idea how much I’ve
loathed working with you people,” he told her. “But you’ve made my
job a little easier by coming here.”

Removing the bomb from its hiding
place, he grabbed one of her hands and forced her fingers onto the
metal casing of the detonator. Jerri struggled, but it was no use:
her body was burning up what oxygen her blood stream had left, her
chest heaving in vain to draw breath. And he was strong, much
stronger than he looked. “It’s a long shot, but with a little luck
the investigators might be able to take partial prints from the
debris. If not, there’s always mitochondrial DNA analysis from any
tiny bits that will be left of you here, where you planted the
bomb.” He grinned at her. “Too bad it went off before you made your
getaway. Sloppy, Dr. Tanaka. Very sloppy. I also took the liberty
of tucking some information about the Earth Defense Society into
your files.” Her eyes widened. “Yes, you recognize them from what
Dawson told you, I see. I overheard him telling you. The network
data center should survive the blast when the bomb goes off, and
I’m sure the investigators will find the incriminating documents.
If not on their own, I’ll help them along, as I plan to survive
this.

“And don’t worry about your friend
Dawson,” he told her as he pulled out the cell phone. “We’ll take
care of him, too.” He sent a text message to a twin of the phone he
held, another that was unregistered and untraceable. The message
said Jack Dawson knows something. Then he set the phone on the
floor and smashed it with his heel.

Unable to speak,
unable to breathe, Jerri could only shake her head.
No
.

He smiled. “The ironic thing is that
I’ll be able to truthfully tell the investigators that I saw you
come in here right before the bomb went off.” She stared at the
detonator as he put it back in place, then she struggled to reach
it. “No, I don’t think you’ll be doing any last-minute heroics,” he
told her. “Goodbye, doctor.” Then he reached down, took her head in
both hands and twisted it savagely, snapping her neck.

With a last look at Jerri, whose
lifeless eyes stared up at the ceiling, Kilburn stood up and left
the electrical closet. He closed the door behind him, acting as if
he had authorization to be there. He wasn’t worried about anyone
seeing him now, as everyone in the nearby labs would be dead in a
few minutes.

As it turned out, no one happened to
be in the hallway to appreciate his acting performance or witness
his exit from the electrical closet. He returned to his cubicle in
the CODIS unit at the end of the hall, where he sat quietly for the
next few minutes until the bomb exploded.

CHAPTER SIX

Jack had just made it through the
door when the phone rang, but it wasn’t the house phone, which is
what he was expecting: it was his cell phone. He glanced at the
caller ID, sure that it would be Clement, but saw with some
surprise that it was Richards, out in Nebraska.

“Dammit,” Jack muttered, hitting the
answer button. “Dawson here,” he said. “Make it fast, Richards. I’m
expecting a call from Clement…”

“Didn’t you hear?” Richards
interrupted him.

Jack stopped in his tracks at the
tone of the other man’s voice. “Hear what?” he asked.

“A bomb went off in the lab at
Quantico,” Richards told him, “a little less than an hour ago.
We’re wrapping things up here and heading back to Virginia right
now, along with half the field agents from the rest of the goddamn
country.”

Stunned, Jack simply stood there,
staring at his reflection in the sliding glass door to the patio.
He felt completely numb, as if every nerve ending in his body had
suddenly died.

“Dawson, are you there?”

“Yeah,” Jack whispered. “Jesus. It
must have gone off right after I left.” He shook his head, trying
to focus his mind. “Do you know how bad the damage was?”

“Really bad,” Richards said. “The
entire wing, the floor where the DNA labs were, is just gone, like
a giant took a fucking bite out of the building. The CODIS unit was
mangled, but a couple people survived.” He paused. “Nobody from
either of the DNA analysis labs made it, Dawson. I’m
sorry.”

“Jerri...” Jack
fumbled with a chair at the kitchen table, practically falling into
it.
First Sheldon, now
Jerri
, he thought, horrified.
What the fuck is going on?

“Listen,” Richards went on. “When
Clement called me to recall our teams, he told me to pass on to you
to stay the hell put and not get involved. He said he was supposed
to call you, but he’s taking the lead as SAC on this himself, and
he’s got more urgent things to take care of right now than
babysitting your ass. You got that?”

“Yeah,” Jack told him, biting back
the anguish that suddenly threatened to overwhelm him. “Yeah, I got
it.”

“And Jack,” Richards said, which got
Jack’s attention because Richards never called other agents by
their first names, “you’re probably going to get grilled over this.
You know that, right?”

“Why?” Jack asked angrily. “Am I a
suspect?”

“If you were in my shoes, what would
you think?” Richards said evenly. “It’s the timing, Jack, and the
fact that you weren’t supposed to be there. Everybody’s going to be
extra paranoid right now, and anything that stands out is going to
draw attention like bees to honey.”

“And flies to shit,” Jack muttered.
“Yeah, I’d do the same.”

Richards paused before saying, “I’ve
gotta go, Dawson. Stay put and don’t do anything stupid for a
change.”

“Thanks, Richards,” Jack said before
hanging up and setting the phone down on the table.

He looked down as
Alexander brushed up against his leg and made a mournful meow,
begging for attention. Jack reached down and picked him up.
Alexander curled up in his lap, and Jack absently stroked him as he
thought about what Richards had said.
Jerri and the others were dead. The only survivors from that
part of the floor were from the CODIS unit.

A surge of anger welled up from his
core as he imagined Kilburn, battered but alive, staggering out of
the smoldering wreckage while Jerri’s broken body lay somewhere in
the debris.

His mind automatically began
churning over possibilities about what happened at the lab. But it
was useless, like an engine running in neutral and going nowhere
because he knew absolutely nothing. He decided that he was going to
follow Richards’ advice and not get involved in this one. He wasn’t
even going to log into FIDS. He was afraid of what he might find
there.

Jack didn’t know how much time had
passed before a chiming ringtone sounded. At first, he thought it
was his laptop, but it was closed, in standby. When he finally
looked at his phone, he saw that it was an Internet chat program
that Sheldon had insisted on loading onto it. It was the same
program they had used to stay in touch with one another on the
computer, but Jack had never used it on the phone: he hated trying
to type on the tiny touch keyboard.

Frowning, he pulled the phone
closer, and felt his stomach turn to ice at what he saw:

feeb_master is requesting a chat.
Accept? Y/N

feeb_master
was Sheldon’s user ID on the chat service. “Feeb”
was a slang term for an FBI agent, and like everything else with
Sheldon, his user name was humorously irreverent but not
excessively obnoxious. “Master,” of course, referred to his
not-so-humble belief that he was the top dog in the Cyber Division
in terms of computer smarts, if not in-house political
savvy.

What chilled Jack to the bone was
that he knew Sheldon would never, ever have compromised any of his
on-line information: he changed his passwords constantly, and they
weren’t anything that someone was going to guess or even break with
a password cracker unless they had a powerful computer and a lot of
time on their hands. Beyond the braggadocio, Sheldon was – had been
– a pro at what he did. So whoever was trying to call Jack now had
either been given the information willingly before Sheldon was
killed, which seemed damned unlikely, or had forced it out of him
with torture or drugs.

An image of Naomi Perrault again
sprang to mind, her blue and brown eyes looking out at him over a
pretty smile as she stood, figuratively or literally, over
Sheldon’s mutilated body.

The phone chimed again, and Jack’s
hands were shaking as he reached for it. He wanted to hit the N key
and terminate the connection, but he had to know. He had
to.

He hit the Y key, accepting the chat
request, and a second later the application’s interface popped up
on the phone’s screen. Then whoever was on the far end, using
Sheldon’s pirated account, began to type:

feeb_master: they r cmng 4 u, jack.
soon.

feeb_master: we r sndng help but
may not arrv in time.

Jack bit back a curse as he typed a
response, which was the question he wanted answered more than
anything, because he felt sure it was the key to the entire puzzle
of Sheldon’s death, and now Jerri’s.

jack_dawson7: who are
you?

feeb_master: u have a
cat.

“What?” Jack exclaimed at the
nonsensical response. He glanced from the phone to Alexander, who
still sat in his lap, purring, his intense green eyes fixed on the
phone in Jack’s hand as if he could read the words
there.

Before Jack could type anything
else, he saw this:

feeb_master: they hate cats. watch
alexander. trust his instincts. trust ur own. have ur shotgun rdy.
glock wont work.

Had he been typing at his computer
keyboard, he would have been hammering at the keys. On the phone,
he was nearly crying in frustration as he struggled with the tiny
touchpad, finally repeating his question, “shouting” it to whoever
was on the other end:

jack_dawson7: WHO THE FUCK ARE
YOU???

There was a pause, and then he got
his answer:

feeb_master: naomi perrault. b
careful jack.

Then the connection was broken. Jack
tried to reconnect using the address book in the chat application,
but the icon showing Sheldon’s on-line status was grayed out. Dead.
Just like Sheldon.

“Goddammit,” Jack cried, slamming
his fist down on the table, wanting to throw the phone against the
wall and smash it to bits. Startled, Alexander leaped out of Jack’s
lap, and he turned to stare accusingly at Jack before lying down on
the floor like a living Sphinx, watching his human
closely.

Jack didn’t know what to do. With
Sheldon and Jerri gone, there was no one he could turn to now. Even
Richards, as surprisingly helpful as he had been, couldn’t help
him, because Jack was going to be near the top of the list of
potential suspects, and Richards very well might be the one who’d
be knocking on Jack’s door. Or knocking it down.

Have your shotgun
ready
, Perrault – if that’s truly who it
had been – had said in the pidgin English often used in on-line
conversations. The Glock won’t work. Had she just assumed that he
had a shotgun, or was it something else she and her EDS friends had
squeezed out of Sheldon? What she had said about the Glock was
chilling: Sheldon’s certainly hadn’t done him any good. And what
was that ridiculous nonsense about watching Alexander and trusting
his instincts?

“If that was her,” he said to
himself, looking at Alexander, “then she’s even crazier than I
thought.” On the other hand, she also said she was sending “help.”
Maybe having his shotgun ready to greet them might not be such a
bad idea.

Determined to do something and not
just sit on his ass, Jack took off his still-wet jacket and draped
it over one of the kitchen chairs. Then he got up, went into his
bedroom and opened the closet. He grabbed his shotgun from the gun
rack and quickly checked to make sure it was loaded. A rarity in
America, it was a Russian-made semi-automatic Saiga-12. Jack had
always hated pump-action shotguns, and had special ordered his
Saiga-12 after returning from Afghanistan. It held a seven-round
box magazine, loaded with flechette rounds. It was an autoloader,
and didn’t need to be pumped: you just kept pulling the trigger
until the magazine was empty. He had gotten it as an insurance
policy if he ever needed something heavier than his handguns, but
had never really expected to use it.

He grabbed an extra magazine, and
then went back to the kitchen. Putting the gun in an easy-to-reach
spot under the counter that looked out into the living room and the
front doorway, he clipped the extra magazine to a holder on the
weapon’s folding stock.

Just as he was sitting back down at
the table, about to break his promise to himself that he wasn’t
going to check any reports that were being passed along through
FIDS, there was a heavy knock on his door.

“Shit,” he breathed, startled. “Why
doesn’t anybody ever use the damn doorbell?”