Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (17 page)

“How the hell did he find
it?”

She laughed. It was a sound that
Jack thought he could definitely get used to. “Would you believe he
bought it from an on-line auction site? The government sold it to a
private owner years ago, and it had changed hands several times.
The last owner couldn’t get rid of it – no one wanted to deal with
the hazardous waste down here – and Gregg picked it up for a
song.”

Jack’s jaw dropped in amazement.
“You’re kidding, right?” He looked around him as they continued
through the junction toward another blast door marked “Main
Lab.”

“No,” she said. “It’s absolutely
true. I imagine the seller must have fallen to the floor in
surprise when Gregg bid on it, and then actually paid!”

“But how did he...I mean what did he
say he was going to do with it?” Jack asked, perplexed. “I imagine
he didn’t pay for it with a check that said ‘Earth Defense
Society.’”

“No, no,” she told him. “He bought
it through one of our front companies, a trucking business that
needed some property to expand. It’s completely legitimate, and
helps us get around a lot of logistical problems supporting our
operations here.” She looked up toward the surface. “We’re sitting
under about a hundred or so trailers, with semi trucks coming in
around the clock to drop some off and pick up others. That’s how we
get our food, supplies, and equipment brought in without us
standing out like a sore thumb to anyone who might be looking for
us.” She looked at Jack and grinned. “They bring in our people,
too.”

Jack looked up, trying to imagine
tractor trailer rigs moving around somewhere above his head, and
said, “I don’t hear a thing.”

“Like I told you, Jack,” she said,
“we’re buried deep.”

Stepping up to the door to the lab,
she took hold of the badge that Jack had noticed hanging on a
lanyard around her neck. She swiped it across a magnetic reader
next to a small keypad, entered a six-digit code, then looked into
a retinal scanner. “What’s in here is really what this whole thing
is about.”

With two loud warning beeps, the
foot-thick blast door was slowly pushed open by a set of hydraulic
rams.

Jack followed her into the lab dome.
“Good Lord,” he breathed, wondering how this had all been built.
“This place is huge.”

The dome they were in now was one
hundred and thirty feet across and more than fifty feet high.
Painted white and brightly lit, the lower level where he and Naomi
were standing was a maze of medical and scientific equipment, with
two dozen people in white lab coats sitting at or moving among the
various work stations. The room had a second level over fifteen
feet above them, a mezzanine that ringed the dome and extended
about twenty feet in toward the center, and was open to the lab
area below.

Similar to the command center,
roughly a quarter of the lab dome’s area to Jack’s right was walled
off, and he saw a sign over a huge door that read, “Power
Room.”

“Backup power,” Naomi told him,
following his gaze. “For us, electricity is life for our operation,
everything from the lab equipment to the air filtration units that
keep the air breathable. We can’t even get to the surface without
power to open the blast doors. An outage, even a brief one, would
be a disaster. The main power room here supplies our backup power
with two eight-hundred kilowatt diesel generators. We really only
need one to keep our critical systems up, but we have two for
redundancy. This dome used to be the site’s power house, and had
four gigantic generators that turned out a megawatt each, but we
don’t need nearly that much electricity.” She pointed up to the
mezzanine level above the power room, and Jack could see another
tunnel mouth beyond the stacks of supplies that took up most of the
space on the upper level. “That tunnel houses the fuel for the
generators. The original site had two sixty-seven thousand gallon
diesel tanks, twelve feet in diameter and eighty feet long, plus a
smaller five thousand gallon tank.” Jack shook his head in wonder
at the scale of things in this underground fortress. “We only use
the small one and one of the big ones now; that’s enough fuel to
provide diesel power for over two months. We converted the space
used by the other big tank to an emergency battery array that can
keep us in business for a week. But we normally just use local
power that we lease from another one of our front companies, a
small regional wind turbine farm. That way nobody asks questions
about why a trucking company uses so much electricity.”

“What about fresh air and exhaust?”
Jack asked, knowing that running any sort of internal combustion
engine in a confined space like this, huge as it was, would quickly
asphyxiate everyone down here.

She pointed toward the tunnel mouth
above the power room, and Jack saw a set of large pipes snaking up
from where the generators were, disappearing down the tunnel. “The
exhaust goes out through the tunnel in the direction of the fuel
and battery storage, drawn by a huge fan and blown out an exhaust
vent at the surface level,” she explained. “Fresh air comes in over
there,” she pointed to a tunnel on the opposite side of the
mezzanine, “through a nuclear-biological-chemical filter. Normally
both the intake and exhaust vents are closed by massive blast
valves. We only open them when we have to run the generators.” She
gestured around the mezzanine. “Up there is our main storage area.
Pretty much everything that isn’t perishable or hazardous is stored
up there. Sometimes it’s not very convenient, but there’s plenty of
space.”

“Yeah,” Jack said, again shaking his
head in wonder. “No kidding.”

“But this,” she told him, leading
him into the lab area, “is the heart of what we’re doing here.
We’ve got one of the most advanced genetics research labs in the
world under this dome. We can do any type of karyotyping, we’ve got
FISH stations–”

“Fish?”

“Fluorescence
in situ
hybridization,” she explained. “FISH is one of
the ways that we study chromosomes. We can do virtually any type of
gene-related analysis here, from DNA sequencing to tailoring DNA
and injecting it into cells with a gene gun. ”

“I’ll take your word for it,” he
told her as they walked up to the outer periphery of the
equipment-laden workstations arranged around the huge lab. He
couldn’t recognize most of what he saw, but even in his ignorance
he could tell that Jerri’s lab at the FBI Laboratory in Quantico
hadn’t been this well-equipped.

Several people waved at Naomi, who
waved back while Jack gawked.

“They’re working on the corn samples
you brought,” she told him, nodding toward a cluster of seven
people on the far side of the lab, “matching it against the
blueprints in the data Sheldon sent you.”

“What do you expect to find?” Jack
asked as he watched. “You’ve told me how devastating this stuff
could be, but I still don’t really understand why.”

Naomi looked at him. “How much do
you know about genetically modified organisms,” she asked him,
“especially crops like soybeans or corn?”

Jack shrugged. “Not much, really,”
he told her. “It’s not something I’ve given any thought to. I never
saw any reason to before my world blew apart.”

“They’re in almost everything,
Jack,” she told him. “At least here in the U.S. Some countries in
Europe and in Asia grow or import them, too, but here it’s hard to
find crops now that aren’t genetically engineered.” She shook her
head. “Over eighty percent of all the corn, soybeans, and cotton
grown here are engineered strains, and almost all of it is
controlled, directly or through license arrangements with other
conglomerates, by New Horizons. There are also strains of rice and
wheat, but they haven’t gained a majority share of the market yet,
thank God.”

Figuring that Jack had seen enough
of the lab, she led him back toward the blast door and repeated the
same steps to open it as when they’d come in.

“Many of the crops are engineered to
be more resistant to insect pests and herbicides, or to have a
higher yield,” she went on as they stepped back out into the main
junction. “The original idea was to create crops that wouldn’t need
a lot of pesticides or herbicides, and when they did have to be
sprayed to kill bugs or weeds, the chemicals wouldn’t harm the
crops. And some strains were engineered to produce more, so you
could get more cotton, for example, per hectare of
land.”

She sighed as she led Jack through
the junction and entered the tunnel that would take them to what
used to be the base’s three missile silos. Jack couldn’t make out
the end of it, it was so far away. “It was a good dream, Jack,” she
said wistfully. “I devoted my life to making that dream come
true.”

“I take it that things didn’t work
out like you’d hoped,” he said.

“No,” she said, shaking her head.
“At first it was my dream come true: I was a young star on an
all-star team, doing some of the most cutting-edge research on the
planet and being paid a mint for it. But I had no idea what was
really going on, or that I and the others in my field were being
used to fulfill an agenda we never could have guessed at.” She
looked up at him. “The crops have had lots of problems, Jack,” she
told him. “Have you ever heard of the law of unintended
consequences?”

He shook his head.

“It basically says that any
intervention in a complex system may or may not have the intended
result, but will inevitably create unanticipated and often
undesirable outcomes.” She sighed. “That’s what’s happened. DNA is
a very complex system in itself, not to mention the biosphere that
the plants are in, and the place they occupy in the food chain with
respect to livestock and ourselves. It doesn’t matter if you
believe what people say about the problems, ranging from food
allergies to overt toxicity,” she told him. “What matters is that
the government relies on the companies to provide proof that the
crops are safe, without any independent verification.”

A sudden realization hit Jack as he
remembered what Naomi had told him earlier. “And a lot of the
senior people in the government who would be responsible for giving
the green light are in New Horizons’ pocket,” he said.

“Very good, Jack,” she told him with
a wry smile, but her expression sobered quickly. “So, New Horizons
and a couple of other biotech conglomerates now control most of the
world’s food supply. In many places, farmers can’t even buy non-GMO
seeds, because they’ve been wiped out of the local market, or are
so expensive the farmers can’t afford them. And even if they could,
the farmers around them are probably spraying herbicides that will
kill the non-GMO crops. Not to mention that the chemicals are also
toxic to humans and livestock.” She stared down the tunnel. “There
have been a lot of unintended consequences, Jack, that all could be
written off as more of humanity’s hubris, seasoned with corporate
greed.

“But the truth is that those
companies have positioned themselves to be the perfect vector for
the next generation of genetically engineered organisms that will
be marketed as the be all and end all for farmers everywhere,
resistant to insect pests and to several different types of
herbicides, plus a little extra twist.”

“And it’s the twist that’s the big
catch,” Jack surmised.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “This new
line is being called Revolutions, Jack. And it will do everything
that the company claims it will. I should know. I helped create
it.” She frowned. “They also plan to share the technology with the
other conglomerates under liberal licensing agreements. We even
know from our sources in government that there are congressmen
lined up to support federal subsidies to make these particular
crops affordable to the most destitute of foreign countries.” She
walked along in silence for a moment before saying, “And the twist
is this: embedded in this particular line of crops will be a
retrovirus capable of modifying the DNA of the host that consumes
it.”

Jack stopped and stared at her. “So
what does that mean?” he asked. “That you eat some of this new corn
or whatever, and it’ll just start changing your DNA?”

Naomi nodded, and Jack felt a shiver
run down his spine at the pain etched on her face. “That’s exactly
what I mean, Jack,” she told him bitterly. “We were never able to
do anything quite like this before. Gene therapy is an up and
coming medical technology that’s enjoyed some success, but it’s
still in its infancy. Revolutions could have really lived up to its
name. And then I learned what it was really for.”

Jack watched as she blinked tears
from her eyes before going on.

“I was on a small, highly secret
project at LRU that was working on this, and we had a tremendous
breakthrough,” she went on. “We were able to saturate corn cells
with what you might call a retrovirus placebo, and were able to
engineer a delivery system for it that allowed it to be absorbed
into the host during digestion. It would even survive cooking and
other types of processing commonly used in the food industry if it
wasn’t too prolonged or at too high a temperature.

“After the host consumed it, it was
carried throughout the body in the bloodstream, and wherever it
wound up, the retrovirus particles successfully penetrated the
host’s cells. The placebo didn’t alter any DNA, but it proved what
we could do, that the delivery system would work.” She wiped her
eyes again as she started to walk onward down the
tunnel.