Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (20 page)

Renee laughed, satisfied. “Typical
male,” she chided. “Never willing to commit. Hey, speaking of
typical males, there’s Alexander and his new best
friend.”

Jack looked down to find Alexander
and Naomi’s cat, Koshka, milling around his chair. While Jack
didn’t consider himself a cat fancier, he figured that she must be
a Turkish Angora, and he had to admit that her white coat and regal
appearance were a beautiful complement to his own feline companion.
With his leg bandaged up, Alexander couldn’t jump up on his lap,
and stared up at Jack while giving a plaintive meow. Jack reached
down and picked him up, and the big cat instantly curled up in his
lap and began to purr. Koshka flicked her tail in disdain, then
jumped up on Renee’s desk.

“Jesus,” Jack whispered as Koshka
turned around, preening as Renee petted her, and he got a look at
her right flank. There was a terrible scar, only partly concealed
by her white fur, that went from above her right shoulder blade,
curved down across her ribs, and disappeared under her right hip.
“What the hell happened to her?”

“It was a stupid accident,” Renee
said darkly. “One of our...former prisoners escaped and almost got
Naomi. Koshka and some of the other cats attacked and distracted
it...him...long enough for Naomi to get away. But four of the cats
and two of our people were killed, and Koshka almost died. That was
really hard for Naomi. She felt terrible about the people we lost,
but that cat is all she has left of her former life.” She turned
sober, frightened eyes on Jack. “Like I said, having more
gunslingers is never a bad thing for us. Not in my book,
anyway.”

“How did ‘it’ escape?” he asked,
setting down his coffee so he could pet both cats. He’d caught her
slip with the pronouns. “And what the hell was it?”

“I’m not allowed to tell you, Jack,”
she said apologetically. “You’ll find out soon. I know Naomi said
she’d tell you everything, and she will. But only she and Gregg are
authorized to take you the whole way down that path. Trust me: you
don’t want to go there any sooner than you have to. There’s no pot
of gold at the end of that particular rainbow.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jack
saw Tan suddenly stiffen. He peered intently at his workstation,
then picked up his phone and after a short pause spoke urgently to
whomever was on the other end of the line.

“We’ve got
incoming,” Tan said, hanging up the phone. He hit a button on his
console, and a bright yellow bar flashed across the bottom of the
big screens at the front of the command center, with an audio
warning that went off through the complex saying the same
thing:
Portal Access In
Progress
.

“I’ll get Naomi,” Jack said as he
gently set down Alexander and then stood up.

Tan shook his head. “She’s already
on her way.” Turning to Renee, he said, “He needs a
badge.”

“I’ve already got it,” she said.
Digging through a pile of clutter on her desk, she pulled out a
photo badge and handed it to Jack. “Here. I was going to give you
this when we finished our little chat, but you need it now. You
can’t get through the portal safely without it.”

Jack took the thin plastic badge,
which had a lanyard to go around his neck. It had a magnetic strip
on the back, and on the front was a picture he recognized as one
Sheldon had taken of him the year before. Renee must have taken it
from the photo frame Sheldon had given him.

“I thought that was a good one,”
Renee said. “A lot better than the one in the database for your
driver’s license, Jack. Good heavens.”

He looked up as he heard Tan’s voice
over an intercom that must have echoed through the entire complex.
“Security team, to the portal.”

“Do you guys always go through this
drill when you open up this portal thing?”

“Yes,” Tan said brusquely as he held
out a Heckler and Koch G36C carbine. It fired the same 5.56mm
ammunition as the venerable M-16 assault rifle, but at twenty
inches with the stock folded, was far more compact and would be
easier to handle in tight quarters like the tunnels. “It helps keep
us alive. Here, take this. You know how to use it?”

Jack took the stubby rifle. He’d
fired other H&K weapons, and this one operated much the same
way. “Yeah, I can probably figure it out,” he said, unfolding the
stock to its open position. He preferred to aim at whatever, or
whomever, he was shooting at, rather than spraying ammunition while
firing from the hip.

Tan only grunted before turning
away, moving quickly to the stairs to the first level of the
command center with one of the compact rifles in one
hand.

Turning back to Renee, Jack was
surprised to see that she was strapping on a shoulder holster with
an automatic pistol.

“I told you, Jack,” she said, as she
moved over to Tan’s console, which Jack saw was a security
monitoring station, “we’re in a war and we don’t screw around with
stuff like this. Everyone in the base is given weapons training. We
do this for every portal opening, but this one’s unusual: it’s not
one of our scheduled deliveries or changeovers that we normally do
at night. It’s broad daylight, which means that it’s a bit of an
emergency. Hurry up. Tan won’t wait for you.”

Doing as she said,
he hurried after Tan, just getting through the command center’s
blast door as it was cycling closed behind him.
Changeovers that we normally do at night
, Renee had said.
God, I don’t even
know what time it is
, he thought absently
as he ran down the tunnel toward the main junction. He saw a dozen
men and women, all heavily armed, standing around the huge blast
door to the portal that Naomi had pointed out to him on their tour
earlier.

As he came to a stop outside the
ring formed by the grim-faced security team around the portal
entrance, Jack noticed that there were at least ten cats, including
Koshka and Alexander, who had darted out of the command center
right behind Jack to join the assembly. After seeing Alexander’s
reaction to Sansone, he understood why they’d use cats this way as
part of their security process. He just didn’t know what triggered
their violent reaction to someone like Sansone, and he was afraid
to find out.

Not sure what else to do, he
followed the lead of the security team and pointed his rifle at the
portal entrance, wondering what to expect.

“Renee, are we secure topside?” a
woman’s voice asked from behind them.

He turned to see Naomi striding into
the junction. Jack knew that she must have sprinted to get here so
fast, but she wasn’t even breathing hard. She was also heavily
armed, with her own G36C slung over her shoulder and a pump-action
shotgun in her hands. She flashed him a quick smile as she made her
way to the front of the group.

“Confirmed, Naomi,” Renee’s voice
said from overhead speakers. “Outer personnel door is closed and
locked. The revolving blast door is secure. No alarms for airborne
contaminants. Topside activity appears to be normal. I show one
individual standing outside the junction blast door. Her badge ID
matches her facial profile, and the thermal scanner shows a normal
body profile.”

“Open the door,” Naomi ordered
tensely, and everyone brought up their weapons.

“Portal door opening,” Renee’s voice
echoed in the junction. Jack heard dull thunks as the huge locking
bolts slid back and the double-sided door, controlled by two
massive hydraulic rams on each side, began to cycle open. This
door, Jack saw, was the full height of the vestibule that connected
the portal to the junction, a good eight feet high and as many
wide, and fully two feet thick.

As the doors parted, Jack saw a
woman who looked to be in her late twenties standing on the far
side, staring wide-eyed at the rifles pointed at her and holding
her hands high. Behind her, he could see a latticework of girders
and metal stairs that circled around the inside of the portal
structure, which itself was a huge concrete cylinder that was
nearly thirty feet across and rose over seventy feet to the
surface. In the center was a massive freight elevator that dwarfed
the woman standing before them.

Under the watchful eyes of the
humans, the cats wandered forward in their own good time, which in
itself caused the security team to relax. Slightly.

Tan slung his rifle and approached
her with a device that he held up to her right eye. Jack could see
the blue luminescence of a laser that scanned her retina. A green
light winked on the back of the device.

“Confirmed,” Renee said,
relieved.

“Welcome back, Ellen,” Naomi said,
walking up to the woman and giving her a hug. “We’re so glad you
made it back safely.”

“I’m sorry I took so long,” the
woman told her shakily.

Naomi turned to Jack. “This is Ellen
Bienkowski,” she said. “She helped Sheldon get into the lab at
LRU.”

She’s the one
Richards was looking for
, Jack suddenly
remembered. Ellen was on the university’s security staff, and had
mysteriously disappeared the night of Sheldon’s
murder.

“Yes,” Ellen said in a quivering
voice as tears welled up in her eyes, “and I know how he
died.”

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

“Everything was going according to
plan,” Ellen was saying. She was sitting at the head of the table
in the command center’s packed conference room, clutching a cup of
hot tea. Everyone around her was tense with
anticipation.

Jack sat next to Naomi at the table,
across from Ellen. He was shocked when Tan had reached out to take
Ellen’s hand in a subtle but tender display of affection, and
realized that they were probably a little more than friends. Jack’s
own hands were balled into fists that were pressed hard into his
thighs as he waited to hear what had happened to
Sheldon.

Thornton couldn’t be there in person
without risking his cover, for he had several important corporate
meetings scheduled for the day. He had insisted that Naomi debrief
Ellen as soon as possible, and he would watch the recording of the
session when he returned to the base.

“I was able to deactivate and spoof
the security systems, and got Sheldon into the lab undetected,”
Ellen went on. “I was monitoring him to make sure he was okay; I
could see him through the lab’s security cameras, and had voice
contact through his radio link.

“He accessed the standalone machine
that we knew was there. That’s where he found the location of the
prototypes in the freezers and the gene map files, just as we
expected.” She paused, looking around the room before her eyes
settled on Naomi. “But there was another machine there, a laptop
that I didn’t remember seeing before. I...I told Sheldon not to
bother with it, that it wasn’t part of the plan, but he insisted on
taking a look at it.”

Jack nodded to
himself.
That was
Sheldon
, he thought sadly. He had to mess
with every computer and gadget he saw.

“Was he able to get into it?” Naomi
asked.

Ellen nodded her head in a quick,
jerky move. “Yes,” she said. “It took him a while, probably ten
minutes. That put him behind schedule, but he was able to break
into the file system.” She paused. “It was Kempf’s personal
laptop.”

“Holy shit,” Jack breathed into a
chorus of similar exclamations being made around the
room.

“What was on it?” Renee asked after
shushing the others.

“He...he wouldn’t say,” Ellen told
them, shaking her head. “I tried to get him to tell me, but all he
said after he found out that it was Kempf’s machine and had checked
through a few files was that he had to concentrate and to leave him
alone until he was finished. He acted very strange about it; it was
very unlike him.”

“Then what happened?” Jack asked.
Naomi had told him to let her lead the debrief, but he didn’t care.
He needed to know.

Ellen shrugged. “After he’d finished
downloading the files we were after from the standalone machine, he
took his thumb drive and put it into the laptop to retrieve more
files.” She looked at Naomi. “I was getting worried by then: he’d
been in there too long. Then he took Kempf’s laptop over to one of
the networked machines, pulled out the network cable, and plugged
Kempf’s laptop into the university network.”

“
What?
”
Renee gasped, her face a mask of horror. The system administrators
would be able to trace whatever he did on the network. “In God’s
name, why?”

“He wouldn’t tell me!” Ellen cried.
“I could see what he was doing on the video monitor, even though he
wasn’t telling me that he was doing it. I told him not to, that he
had to finish what he’d come for and get out of there, but he just
ignored me.” She shook her head. “While the laptop was connected to
the network, he went to one of the freezers and got the samples,
then started trashing the place.”

Jack glanced at
Naomi, and she nodded. “That was part of the plan,” she told him.
“We were hoping to put off New Horizons at least a little while by
trying to conceal what we were doing as an act of vandalism. We
knew they’d immediately suspect what had happened, but they
wouldn’t
know
until they’d sorted through the mess and found certain
samples missing.”