Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (18 page)

Jack barely understood what she was
saying and wanted to disbelieve every word of it, but he remained
silent.

“Just think, Jack: we could have
targeted genetic defects or cancer with tailored retroviral
packages delivered through food. We could have done nearly
anything, and not through expensive treatment of a single
individual: we could have treated entire populations. Humans,
livestock, fish – anything. The possibilities were endless. As were
the potential horrors.

“The night that the breakthrough was
made,” she told him, “three of the team members died in a car
accident. They’d been out celebrating, and the police report said
that the driver, Dr. Jaswant Singh, had been drunk and drove the
car off an embankment. I was sick that night and didn’t go with
them. I never thought that I’d be saved by the flu.” She shrugged.
“I knew Singh well, and he didn’t drink anything but water and tea.
The police report was a fabrication, or the autopsy was doctored.
With those three dead, only myself and Dr. Kempf were
left.”

“Kempf?” Jack asked. “LRU’s
dean?”

“Yes,” Naomi said. “She was the
university dean more in name than fact; the assistant dean took
care of all the day to day business, while she spent most of her
time in the lab working on the Revolutions project. I hadn’t heard
about the deaths of the others when I went to the university lab
the next morning. I was still feeling terrible from the flu, but I
was so excited that I went in, anyway.” She wrapped her arms around
herself, and Jack could see goose bumps on her flesh. “I joined her
in the lab and she...propositioned me.” She stopped and looked up
at Jack, and he could see the terror in her eyes, lingering from
that day over a year ago. “She told me that the project was about
to be taken into its final phase, and the others hadn’t been able
to accept it. She stood there and told me that she’d killed them,
Jack!”

Before he could think, Jack had
wrapped his arms around her, drawing her shivering body close. “You
don’t have to say any more,” he whispered into her hair as she
wrapped her own arms around his waist, holding him
tightly.

Naomi shook her head. “No,” she
rasped. “You have to know this. You have to understand.” Taking a
breath, she went on, “She said that I had the talent that she
needed, that the others had been useful tools, but nothing more.
She said she would make me rich, far richer than I could imagine,
working on the final phase of the project. I could have whatever I
wanted, Jack. Anything. All I had to do was to keep on being
brilliant, working with her, the two of us alone, in secret,
developing targeted strains of the retrovirus. She didn’t say
exactly what they would be for, but I knew it couldn’t be good.”
She shuddered. “I had no idea what to do, Jack. I was trapped in
the lab with her. I thought she was insane.”

“So what happened?” Jack asked
softly.

“I agreed,” she whispered. “I told
her that it sounded like a wonderful idea and rolled out every
avaricious desire I could think of.”

“And she believed you?” Jack asked,
shocked.

After a brief pause, she said,
“Yes.”

“Why?”

Naomi pushed herself away and looked
up at him. “She believed me because I’d been spoiled and greedy,
Jack. By that time I was easily worth twenty million dollars. I
knew I was a hot commodity and never made any bones about making
the company bleed green for my services, especially after working
like a slave to position myself to be on the staff at LRU. Yes, I
had dreams about doing some good things. I think we all do. But I
expected to be well paid for making those dreams come true, and
Kempf was appealing to that part of me, the part she thought was
strongest.” Naomi shook her head as he opened his mouth to protest.
“I’m not saying I was a devil, Jack; maybe more like a spoiled
brat. I’d never really had to grow up, even after my parents died.
I’d always been self-centered in a lot of ways, even more after
they died. But I grew up that morning. Fast.

“I was actually lucky,” she
continued, “that I’d had the flu. I could feel the blood draining
from my face as she spoke, but I was so pale and washed-out that my
reaction didn’t register with her. Kempf told me that I’d be
watched closely to make sure I didn’t go back on my word, then she
let me go.”

“What happened after that?” Jack
asked. “I know from what Special Agent Richards, the agent in
charge of the LRU investigation, told me, that your house was
abandoned: you just disappeared.”

She took his arm
and guided him along the seemingly endless tunnel, toward what
looked like another blast door up ahead. “I never made it home,”
she told him. “Gregg’s people had been watching the lab. They knew
what Kempf really was, and knew about the deaths of the other
researchers on my team. Gregg knew they had to move quickly if they
wanted to get me, to get what I knew, before I could do anything
that would get me killed.” She gave him a wan smile. “After the
other night at your house, you can probably appreciate what they
did. I drove home, scared to death and feeling terribly ill. I
noticed a car that followed me out of the university parking lot.
Kempf’s watchdogs. They didn’t even make a pretense about it, just
got up right behind me and stayed there. Along a stretch of
isolated farmland that I drove through to get home, a big SUV
suddenly pulled alongside the car trailing me and blasted the car
off the road with shotguns and assault rifles. I floored it and
just took off.” She chuckled. “I own...
owned
a Tesla, an electric sports
car that makes a Porsche look like a covered wagon. I left the SUV
in the dust. Then my phone rang. It was Gregg, telling me that he
knew about the lab and Kempf, and offered to get me out of the fix
I was in.”

“I’ll bet he didn’t zap you with a
cattle prod and drug you to sleep,” Jack grumbled.

“Actually,” Naomi told him, “he did,
if it makes you feel any better.” She sighed. “I miss my stupid
car. I hate driving rental minivans when I get to go
topside.”

Unable to help himself, Jack started
laughing, and a moment later, Naomi did, too. It didn’t last long,
but it felt good.

“It’s just lucky
for Gregg that he saved Koshka, too,” she said, “or I would have
zapped
him
with
an electric prod.”

“Koshka?” Jack asked as they came to
another huge door marked Blast Lock #2.

She smiled. “She’s my
cat.”

He suddenly remembered the white
long-haired cat in the photograph he’d seen of her.

“She and Alexander have been getting
along quite well,” Naomi said with a grin.

“Oh, jeez,” Jack muttered. “He
hasn’t been any trouble, has he?”

“No, Jack,” she told him with a
quick smile. “He’s sweet. And as you’ll see, cats are more than
welcome here.”

“So, where are we now?” he asked
her. The blast lock formed a wall in the tunnel and had two
entrances. One was a massive blast door not unlike the one to the
lab and control center domes, although not as big. Next to it was
part of a cylinder made of steel that was nearly six inches thick
and perhaps three feet across, clearly designed to roll back into
the concrete wall of the small junction they’d reached.

“This is Blast Lock Two,” she told
him as she quickly ran through the same entry routine with her
badge, a six-digit combination, and a retinal scanner that were in
the wall next to the cylindrical door. “When the site was built,
this and another lock like it were designed to partition off the
missiles from the rest of the complex. In case of an accident, or
if a nuclear blast destroyed one or more of them, the rest of the
complex would be safe. Now it’s one of our main physical security
points, modified a bit. We normally just use this smaller entrance
to go to this part of the complex, and only open the main door if
we need to move something larger.”

The cylinder hummed open, rotating
into the wall. But unlike the other doors he’d seen so far, this
one opened into a man trap: whoever entered couldn’t get to the
other side without standing inside it while the door rotated and
closed off the main tunnel again.

“Come on,” she told him. “It’ll be a
little tight, but shouldn’t be a problem.”

Shrugging, Jack entered the cylinder
behind her.

Holding up her badge to a camera
mounted in the ceiling, she said, “It’s Naomi and Jack Dawson. Open
up, please.”

“Roger, Naomi,” a man’s gruff voice
came from the speaker next to the camera. “Rotating
now.”

Jack looked over his shoulder as the
man trap’s door began to rotate closed.

Naomi turned around and pulled him
away from the closing door. “The first rule of doors in this place,
Jack,” she said as she pulled him up against her, “is to never get
caught in one.”

His breath caught in his throat as
he looked at her, so close now that their lips were almost
touching. His chest tingled where her breasts pressed against him,
and he felt a flush of heat and desire as his body immediately
began to react. He halfheartedly tried to back away to keep from
embarrassing himself, but her hands, still on his waist, pulled him
even closer. For a long moment, he was lost in her blue and brown
eyes as she looked at him with a mixture of appraisal and
invitation.

Then the door hissed to a stop, the
other side standing open now, and the moment was over. Slowly,
Naomi let go his waist and turned to step out of the man trap into
the tunnel.

Jack, at a loss, stood there for a
moment, trying to sort out his feelings and failing
miserably.

“Come on, Jack,” she said softly.
“We’ve got one more stop for now.”

With a shake of his head as he
gradually regained control of his rebellious body, he moved to walk
beside her as she took him down a tunnel that branched off the main
one.

“Naomi...” he began, not quite sure
what to say.

She held up a hand, stopping him
from saying anything else. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t be a
tease. Like I told you, I’m still a spoiled brat at heart.” She
grinned, but it was tinged with sadness. “Living here, and knowing
what I know, knowing what’s out there in the world, has given me a
different perspective. It’s like living under the sword of
Damocles, living in fear. Wondering if we can stop what’s
happening, and hoping we don’t get killed in the process. I haven’t
really had anyone to share anything with for a long time.” She
chuckled. “I’m also dead tired. You’ve been knocked out the last
twenty-four hours, while I’ve been awake the whole time, working my
ass off in the lab. I guess I’m getting a bit punchy.”

“Well, I’m not
necessarily complaining,” Jack said with a smile. He couldn’t help
but be attracted to her, but part of him knew it was nothing more
than stress and the lack of close female companionship since he
ended his relationship with Jerri years before.
Still
, he thought to himself,
you could do a lot worse,
brother
. “I just...need to get my head
around all this,” he told her finally. “I still feel like I’m in
some sort of bizarre dream, waiting to wake up.”

“The dream’s going to get worse
before it gets better, Jack,” she cautioned him.

“What’s that supposed to
mean?”

“There’s something else I have to
show you that you’re not going to like,” she said. “That’s the
‘everything’ that Gregg meant when we left the command center. But
we’re going to do that after I get some sleep. I just can’t face it
now.”

“Sansone,” Jack said, and Naomi
nodded.

They came to a small junction, and
Naomi turned right. “To the left is the old propellant terminal,”
she said, “where they used to store the fuel for one of the
missiles.” They walked past another tunnel that branched off to the
left. “That’s the silo, one of our deep freezers. I’ll show you
what’s in there a bit later.”

Straight ahead of them was a sign
that read “Apartment One,” but Jack didn’t notice. He had been
turning over in his mind the things she’d told him, and realized he
was still missing a vital piece of the puzzle. “Naomi, if you
helped develop this retrovirus delivery system, you must have known
all about it. So why did you send Sheldon in there? What was he
really after?”

“The prototype retrovirus that Kempf
created after I left,” she said grimly. “We learned from one of our
insiders that she had finished her work on the prototype seeds that
were infused with the first functional retrovirus. Sheldon went in
to try and get samples so we could see exactly what the retrovirus
was intended to do.”

“So you never knew what the
retrovirus might really be?” he asked, and she shook her head.
“Just playing devil’s advocate for a minute, what if it’s benign?
And what about all the stuff on the EDS web site about the Earth
being terraformed by some evil extraterrestrials?”

She frowned. “You don’t believe it
now, Jack – there’s no way that you could, not yet – but we believe
it’s true. But our only proof up to now has been anecdotal
information that we’ve never been able to back up with anything
that would stand up to scrutiny in the scientific community or
wouldn’t come across as a hoax. What we find in that corn, the
retrovirus itself, will be indisputable scientific proof of what
New Horizons and its allies have in store for us.”