Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (19 page)

“When will you know?” he asked as
they came to the normal-looking metal door for Apartment One, which
opened quietly on well-oiled hinges.

“It’ll probably take two or three
days, working around the clock,” she told him as they stepped into
a hallway that was about twenty feet long, with an elevator in a
vestibule area on the right side. There were three doors along the
length of the hallway. “This is one of the three ‘apartment
buildings’ we’ve got in the complex,” she told him. “They used to
be the equipment terminals for the three missile silos. Each one is
a huge four-story reinforced concrete cylinder, forty feet across.
We put in three apartments on each floor. Most aren’t occupied
right now, but probably will be soon.” She headed to the first door
on the left and opened it. “This one’s yours.”

As Jack stepped inside, the lights
automatically came on. He saw that the apartment was furnished much
like Naomi’s room in the command center, but was somewhat larger.
It had a nice, if compact, bathroom with a shower, and there was a
microwave and small refrigerator in one corner. A large flat-screen
television was mounted along the curving outside wall, facing a
queen bed and a comfortable-looking arm chair.

“God, I’m tired,” Naomi said quietly
as she leaned against the door frame, eying the bed as Jack
explored the room. “Having my room in the command center usually
saves a lot of walking, but these rooms sure are a lot
nicer.”

In the more even light here in his
new home, as opposed to the stark overhead illumination in the
tunnels, Jack could clearly see the rings under her eyes. She
looked as if she was ready to fall over from exhaustion. “Come
here,” he told her, reaching for her hand.

“Jack...” she said,
uncertain.

He smiled at her sudden coyness
after how she’d acted with him in the aptly-named man trap only a
few minutes ago. “Lie down,” he told her, and she finally took his
hand and let him lead her to the bed. “You’re whipped, and there’s
no reason to walk all the way back to the command center. Besides,
I got to sleep in your bed, so fair’s fair.” He pulled the covers
back. “And I won’t attack you in your sleep. I promise.”

“Damn. That’s no fun,” she muttered
with a grin as she sat down on the bed, slipped her shoes off, and
then lay back on the clean sheets and pillow. She was so tired that
she didn’t bother trying to take her clothes off.

Jack was partly relieved, and partly
disappointed. “Maybe later,” he told her softly as he pulled the
covers up around her.

“Now go away so I can sleep,” she
told him.

“Well, I would if I could,” he said,
“but I think I’m stuck in here with you. I can’t get through any of
the doors.”

“Uh-uh,” she murmured. “Just use the
intercom. Ask Renee to let you back through to the command center.
You should check on Alexander, too.”

“Okay,” he said, gently pulling the
blanket up around her shoulders and brushing a wisp of hair from
her face. “I’ll do that.”

Naomi didn’t say anything more. She
was already fast asleep.

CHAPTER TEN

After calling Renee on the intercom,
Jack wandered his way back through the tunnels to the command dome.
He passed a handful of other people who nodded politely at him, but
he also noticed that their eyes almost instinctively glanced at his
chest, looking for a badge that he didn’t yet have. None of them
made any comment, however, and he kept on going.

He felt displaced, totally out of
sync with reality, as if he were in a bipolar dream world that
alternated between the horror of this secret war that he had fallen
into and the totally unexpected pleasure of Naomi’s
company.

Naomi
, he thought.
Talk about an emotional
roller-coaster
. First he thought he should
hate her for being involved somehow with Sheldon’s death. Then she
saved his life.
And now...Now,
what?
he wondered. Part of him felt like
his emotions and pent-up desires were just carrying him along,
while the logical part of his brain cried,
Whoa! Slow down, boy!
Maybe Naomi
was interested in him, maybe she wasn’t.

He couldn’t deny his own attraction
to her. But he’d barely even met her, and he didn’t believe in love
(or even infatuation) at first sight. It was like time had been
compressed, a relativistic effect of the madness he’d fallen into,
making it seem like they’d known each other far longer than they
really had.

With a sigh of frustration, he
looked up at the security camera outside the blast door to the
command center and was rewarded with a loud beeping as it began to
cycle open. He made his way upstairs to Renee’s station and
gratefully sat down in a spare chair that she had wheeled over for
him.

“Welcome to Oz, kid,” she said,
handing him a cup of coffee. “Hope you like it black.”

“Thanks,” he said, taking a sip of
the bitter but excellent tasting brew. He looked around, but
Thornton was nowhere to be seen.

Tan, however, was working at one of
the other stations, and had positioned himself so he could both
work and keep Jack in his peripheral vision at the same
time.

“Gregg’s off shift,” Renee told him,
knowing exactly who he was looking for. “Don’t mind him, Jack. He
really doesn’t mean it personally.”

“He sure fooled me,” Jack told her
bluntly.

“He’s got the world on his
shoulders,” she explained. “He and Naomi. Before she came along,
Jack, this was all Gregg’s show.” She gestured at the command
center around her. “All this, and a lot more, really, is because of
Gregg, his determination and organizational genius. He had a lot of
help, of course, but he was one of the first ones to learn the
truth of what was happening, and took the lead in organizing a
resistance. He lined up the funding, set up the front companies,
got this place put together.” She shook her head in undisguised
wonder. “He did all this in just five years.

“The reason he was upset about you,”
she went on, “was that he’s always handpicked the people who come
into EDS, and he hates taking in ‘strays,’ as he calls them. I
thought he and Naomi were going to slug it out over her going after
you.” She took a swig of coffee from her mug. “Knowing we can trust
everyone is vital for one simple and important reason: all of our
lives, and humanity’s survival, depends on our operation remaining
a secret. That’s a pretty hefty burden. Sometimes we get stuck with
a charity case like you.” She smiled. “But I’d say we lucked out on
that deal.”

Jack held his hands up in mock
surrender. “Okay, okay,” he told her. “The guy pissed me off, but
it’s not like I hold a grudge. I just still can’t believe all this,
Renee. I don’t want to believe it. I mean...” He paused, looking
around the command center, imagining all that lay beyond it, buried
deep underground. “I know it’s real. I know what happened to
Sheldon was real, and everything that’s happened since. But I still
feel like I’m just imagining it all.”

“I know, kid,” she said, patting his
knee as if he were a child. To some people such a gesture would
have come across as patronizing, but from Renee it seemed genuine
and reassuring. “It’s like being fired down the rabbit hole,
strapped to one of the old Titan missiles that used to be here.
Alice didn’t have anything on us!”

“I just wish Sheldon would have told
me,” he said quietly. “I know I probably wouldn’t have believed
him, but I wish he would have, anyway. And how he
died...Jesus.”

“He was a good man,” Renee said. “He
talked a lot about you, you know. Especially to Naomi. The two of
them got to be pretty close, and his death hit her damn
hard.”

“Oh,” Jack said,
suddenly feeling very uncomfortable. “Naomi didn’t mention that
they were, ah, involved.”
That
figures
, he thought.
Sheldon, you always did have a way with
women
. But it made Jack’s situation with
Naomi a bit more complicated in his mind.

Her eyebrows shot up in surprise.
“Involved?” she asked. “Like boyfriend and girlfriend?”

“Well, yeah,” Jack said, confused at
her response. He was even more confused when she started laughing.
Tan looked up from his console, his face as stony as
ever.

“Oh, no, kid,” Renee said after
she’d regained her composure. “He was gay as the day is long. He
and Naomi got to be close, but not like that.”

Jack’s mouth dropped open.
“What?”

“I guess he had another little
secret that he didn’t bother to tell you.”

Shaking his head, Jack said, “Come
on, that’s not possible. He had a ton of girlfriends!”

“Of course he did, Jack,” she
explained, “but they were friends who happened to be women. He
cultivated the appearance that they were lovers, but they weren’t.
He kept that part of his life well-hidden.”

“But why?” Jack asked, knowing
instinctively that what she was saying was true, but feeling hurt
nonetheless by another secret that his dead friend had kept from
him.

“He didn’t want to screw up his
career, and he also didn’t want to risk losing your friendship.
Those two things were incredibly important to him, Jack, and he
made a lot of personal sacrifices to keep things that way.” She
leaned forward and took hold of his hand. “He was a good man, Jack.
And a good friend.”

“
Yes, he was,” Jack said, a
small grin breaking through his glowering expression, “but if he
was here right now I’d still kick his ass for not telling me this
stuff.” He looked down at his coffee for a moment before he asked,
“So...what’s the story with Naomi?”

“What do you mean?” Renee asked, but
Jack could tell from the smile on her face that she knew exactly
what he meant, but was intent on torturing him over every scrap of
information.

“Come on,” he said, amazed at how
comfortable he felt talking to this woman, “you know what I mean.
She seems to almost...know me, I guess, and she has me a bit
off-balance.” Renee cocked her head at him. “Okay,” Jack admitted,
“I feel like I’ve been knocked on my ass and run over by a semi.
Happy now?”

Renee chuckled. “Yeah, that’s our
Naomi,” she told him. Then, more seriously, she went on, “She does
know a lot about you, Jack. Sheldon talked about you a lot, about
how he wished we could get you on the team, but Gregg didn’t see
the need for another hired gun.” She nodded toward Tan. “We’ve got
a fair number of those, probably some of the best in the world,
although personally I think Gregg’s wrong: we could always use
another good one, or a hundred.” She paused. “I think Sheldon sort
of hooked her on you. I monitor all in- and outbound computer
traffic to make sure nobody’s doing anything they shouldn’t – it
satisfies the gossip in me! – and I saw her doing a lot of personal
research on one Jack Dawson.”

“She was checking up on me, huh?”
Jack wasn’t sure how he felt about that. In a way it was
flattering, but in another way it seemed a little
creepy.

Knowing what he was thinking, Renee
shook her head and told him, “She wasn’t prying, Jack. I think you
were sort of an escape for her. Not in a little girl fantasy way,
but as a young, brilliant woman having to live like a hunted animal
way. A lot of us, me included, even Gregg, believe it or not, still
have homes topside. We work down here in shifts under cover of the
local front companies Gregg set up, then go home to mow our lawns
and bitch about our neighbors. We can pursue semi-normal lives
while we try to save the world. We’re still under the radar with
New Horizons, and our faces aren’t on the most wanted lists. You
just joined that august group, Jack, and I know you’re having a
hard time accepting it, especially having come from the FBI
yourself.

“But Naomi’s been at the top of the
bad guys’ hit list since she found out what Kempf was doing at LRU,
and they’ve been hunting her ever since. You have no idea of the
risk she took in rescuing you. That’s only the fourth time she’s
been topside since Gregg brought her in a year ago. They would give
anything to get her, because she’s the only one still alive who was
directly involved in the final phase gene research.” She frowned.
“We have our own eyes and ears in the enemy’s camp, plus the
digging that I and some of the others do through cyberspace, and we
know that there’s nothing that the powers-that-be at New Horizons
would like more than to kill her, except maybe wiping this place
off the map.” She looked over toward where Tan was working. “Most
of the men here are either totally focused on the job, like your
best buddy Tan over there, or only have an interest in getting into
her pants. That’s one reason why she was really close to Sheldon:
he was a nice guy who didn’t have any ulterior motives. He was a
safety valve for her, one that I think she badly needed after being
cooped up down here so long. That’s what I think she sees in you,
Jack: a good guy who’s not going to try and take advantage, if you
know what I mean.” She looked at him, but this time there wasn’t
any humor in her expression. “I hope she’s not wrong.”

Leaning back, Jack tried to imagine
how horrible it must have been for Naomi to have been down here,
cooped up in this place for a year. Then he realized that his own
plight was now the same: the FBI would never stop until they found
him. At last, he said, “Like you said earlier, I feel like I’m
riding a rocket down the rabbit hole. I owe Naomi my life, and
sure, I find her very attractive. But if Sheldon told you, or her,
anything, it’s that I don’t exactly rush into relationships.” He
shrugged. “She may have to wait a while for a proposal.”