Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (21 page)

“After that, he took out the hard
drives from the standalone machine and smashed them,” Ellen
continued. “Then he watched whatever the laptop was doing until it
must have finished, because he unplugged the network cable and
replaced it in the machine he’d taken it from, then went to work
taking the laptop apart.” She looked up at Naomi with terrified
eyes. “He had just finished destroying the hard drive when Kempf
came into the lab.”

“Wait a minute,” Jack said,
confused. “I know that Kempf was supposed to be on vacation in
Italy. The special agent in charge at Lincoln told me so. The FBI
liaisons in Italy were trying to track her down, because she didn’t
carry a cell phone and could only be contacted through her travel
service.”

“It was Kempf,”
she told him firmly. “I’ve worked at LRU since it opened, and
everyone knows the dean. It was her. She’s one of
them
, isn’t
she?”

Naomi nodded.

“One of
what?
” Jack asked
angrily. “Stop speaking in goddamn riddles!”

Naomi told him, “You’ll find out
just as soon as we’re done here.” Then, turning her attention back
to Ellen, she said gently, “Go on, Ellen.”

“Sheldon tried to bluff his way out,
telling her that she was being investigated for a long list of
crimes,” Ellen told them, “but she wasn’t having any of it. She
said she wanted what he’d taken, that if he gave it to her
she’d...give him a quick, painless death.”

“He’d never give in,” Jack thought
aloud, and Ellen nodded, her eyes filling with tears.

“She came at him,” she went on. “He
pulled out his weapon and warned her off, but it didn’t matter. He
shot her, but it hardly slowed her down.”

“He didn’t remember the stun baton,
did he?” Tan asked quietly.

“He did, but only after it was too
late. He managed to keep his distance from her, trying to work his
way back toward the door. He was almost there when she began to
change.”

Jack looked at Naomi and saw her
close her eyes and bow her head, a pained, horrified expression on
her face.

“That’s when Sheldon remembered the
stun baton,” Ellen whispered into the deathly silent room. “I don’t
think he really, truly believed until then, even after all we
showed him here. He got close enough to stun it, but not before
it...lanced him.” She was sobbing now, shivering with fear, and Tan
wrapped an arm around her shoulders, his normally expressionless
face now reflecting a look of tender compassion.

She paused for a
moment, trying to regain her composure. When she was able, she went
on with the tale. “He made it out of the lab, and I was able to
follow him to the ground level. I don’t know why he didn’t try to
just leave that way and get back to his car. Instead he went to the
basement where the service tunnel entrance is. That’s where I lost
him.” She looked around helplessly. “There aren’t any security
monitors in the tunnels.” With a shuddering breath, she said, “The
thing...Kempf followed him after it recovered from the stun. That
bought Sheldon a minute or two. After it went into the service
tunnel after him, I destroyed all the security recordings and the
lab access records to cover Sheldon’s entry. Then...then I followed
my escape plan to get back here, renting cars with my bogus credit
cards until I was picked up by an inbound truck that Gregg sent. I
heard on the news while I was on my way back that Sheldon was
killed. It...Kempf would have gotten the samples back. And his
thumb drive with all the data on it.” She turned an anguished gaze
on Naomi. “It was all for nothing,” she whispered. “For
nothing!
”

“No,” Naomi told her, looking at
Jack. “It wasn’t for nothing. Thanks to Jack, we got it all:
samples of the corn and all the data that Sheldon downloaded from
those machines.”

Ellen said, “But that’s–”

In the brief
moment before her next words, Jack saw something the others didn’t:
shocked disbelief. Maybe it was from his time in Afghanistan, or
the FBI, or both, but he’d had a lot of experience at picking up on
lies and deceit. He knew that she had been about to say:
But that’s impossible
.
His gut was telling him that Ellen somehow knew that Kempf had
retrieved the corn samples and Sheldon’s thumb drive. The only way
she could know that is if she’d talked to Kempf after Sheldon had
been killed. He knew he couldn’t say anything about it now, but he
wanted to know more about Ellen Bienkowski. A lot
more.

“–
wonderful news!” Ellen
blurted. She put on a smile that seemed to put everyone at ease.
Jack pasted one on his own face that he knew was just as fake as
hers.

“That’s what he was doing,” Renee
muttered, inadvertently diverting attention away from Ellen’s
act.

“What?” Naomi asked her.

“That’s why he connected Kempf’s
laptop to the network,” Renee mused, nodding to herself. “He must
have found something on her machine that he didn’t expect.
Something so important that he didn’t feel he could even trust
Ellen with knowing about it. The sneaky bastard used Kempf’s own
laptop to encrypt the gene maps and other information that we
expected to find, then super-encrypted the data he found on Kempf’s
laptop. Then he connected it to the university network so he could
get the data to a safe location that even we didn’t know about.”
She looked at Jack. “That fancy little photo frame he gave
you.”

“So...” Ellen began uncertainly, a
sudden flush creeping up her neck to her face, “you got all the
data? Everything that Sheldon found?”

Renee nodded. “Everything, if my
assumptions about what he was doing are right.”

“I think they
are,” Jack said woodenly.
Sheldon didn’t
tell Ellen what he’d found because it had somehow implicated
her
, he thought,
and he was afraid the data and the corn samples would never
get back to us
. A chill ran through him at
the realization that Sheldon must have known then that he was being
set up, and he had gotten the data out the only way he could. Jack
knew the others around the table would consider that nothing more
than ridiculous speculation, but the theory fit all the facts, and
his gut told him he was right. Unable to help himself, he stared at
Ellen.

She glanced at him before asking
Renee, “And what was in the data from Kempf’s laptop?”

“We don’t know,” Renee said with
unbridled frustration. “He never left anyone, even Jack, with a
password or pass phrase. I’m trying to crack the password with
brute force, but I have no idea how long it is. It could take
years.”

“We don’t have years, Renee,” Naomi
said. She wasn’t scolding, simply stating a fact. “Sheldon
sacrificed his life for whatever is in that file, otherwise he
probably would have made it out before Kempf cornered him.” She
shivered. “I had always suspected she was one of them, but was
never sure until now. God, I worked right next to her for a
year!”

“I’m doing what I can, Naomi,” Renee
said levelly. “I can’t change the laws of mathematics.” She looked
again at Jack. “The only thing other than luck that’ll get us into
those files is for someone to come up with Sheldon’s pass
phrase.”

“There’s something else you should
know,” Tan told Ellen, ignoring the others. “We have another
prisoner.”

Ellen gasped with
surprise. Jack, watching her more closely than the others, was
certain she’d faked it.
She’s
good
, he thought, seeing that Tan and the
others had missed the subtle pause, as if she’d had to think just a
fraction of a second before expressing surprise. Her facial
expression was just slightly off, like a photograph that would have
been perfect with just a little more exposure. He knew that he
could be tainting his observations with what had become an
unshakable bias, but he couldn’t help it.
She already knew that Sansone was here
. He looked across at Naomi, but could tell from her
expression that she had no inkling that anything might be wrong
here. Unlike the others, who had known Ellen for some time, Jack
had no preconceptions about her, only his impressions now. And so
far, they weren’t good.

Tan looked at Naomi, then Jack. “We
can’t discuss anything yet, as Jack has not yet been fully
briefed.”

“You should do that right away!”
Ellen exclaimed, turning to Naomi. “He has to know
everything.”

Naomi nodded. “I’m going to take
care of that right now,” she said. “Tan, why don’t you and Ellen go
get caught up on things. I’m sure she could use some rest.” Looking
around the room, she asked, “Okay, people, let’s get back to
work.”

As everyone began filing out, Naomi
told Jack, “It’s time for you to learn what we’re really up
against.”

“I can hardly wait,” he told her
with grim sarcasm as they headed for the stairs to the command
center’s first level.

After leaving the command center
dome, she led him through the junction and into the tunnel that led
to the antenna complex nearly six hundred feet away.

“You ready for a bit of a
walk?”

“Sure,” he said, a chill running
down his spine as they headed into the tunnel’s mouth. He felt
something brush his leg: Alexander, limping, with Koshka beside
him. “I’m not carrying you all that way if your leg craps out on
you, you dumb cat,” he said.

Alexander ignored him, but stopped
and stared down the tunnel. He suddenly laid his ears back, as did
Koshka, and that really gave Jack the creeps.

“Come on,” Naomi told him, taking
Jack’s arm. The cats followed along behind.

They walked in silence for a while,
the cats padding quietly along behind them, before Jack asked, “So
what do you use the antenna silos for now?”

“One is used for storage of our
hazardous materials,” she replied. “Explosives and other things
that we don’t want anywhere near the habitation and work areas.
Both of the silos are seventy feet deep and thirty feet across, so
there’s plenty of storage space. It’s also an auxiliary entrance of
sorts, as it has an elevator where the old antenna platform used to
be, so we don’t have the safety headaches of taking explosives
through the rest of the complex.

“The other antenna silo,” she went
on, “is where we keep our prisoners.”

“Who – what – else do you have
besides Sansone?”

“Sansone is the only live one,” she
said grimly. “We’ve only had two others, and both are
dead.”

“One of them is the one that almost
killed you and Koshka, I assume,” Jack said. Naomi looked at him
sharply, and he explained, “Renee slipped a little when I asked how
Koshka got the scar on her side. She forgot to use the right
pronouns.”

Naomi frowned, then nodded. “Yes,
that was one of them,” she told him. “He was a senior manager at
New Horizons that we found out about, around four months after I
came here. Tan led the team that captured him and brought him
here.”

“How did he, or it, get
out?”

She frowned. “We don’t really know.
Someone left one of the safety interlocks off on the enclosure, and
somehow the bastard managed to get out. They’re incredibly
innovative and determined, Jack. They’re also utterly merciless. If
you don’t believe anything else that you’re about to see, believe
and remember that. We’re nothing but insects to them.”

Jack suddenly had a hunch. “Was
Ellen here when this prisoner got out?”

Naomi stopped and turned toward him,
her face reflecting a puzzled expression. “What does that have to
do with anything?” she asked him. “Ellen has been with us since the
beginning, when Gregg first formed EDS. She’s been priceless.” She
shook her head. “What? Do you think she had something to do with
Sheldon’s death, or that she let the thing here escape?” She looked
at him more closely before angrily saying, “You do, don’t
you.”

“I’ll be honest with you, Naomi,” he
told her evenly, refusing to wilt or retreat under her burning
gaze. “I’ve interviewed a lot of people, people who had reason to
cover something up, who had reason to lie. And I’m telling you that
Ellen wasn’t coming clean with us in that debrief. There’s
something more that she knows, something that she’s holding
back.”

“So, you think she’s lying about the
whole thing?” Naomi accused.

“No,” Jack told her. “That’s the
kicker: I think most of what she told us in there was the truth.
That’s what makes the lie so hard to see.”

“I don’t want to hear any more,
Jack,” Naomi said, shaking her head as she turned and continued on
down the tunnel.

“Naomi!” he called after her,
hurrying to catch up. “Was Ellen here at the base when that thing
got out or wasn’t she?”

“Yes!” Naomi nearly shouted. “Yes,
she was! And so was Gregg. So was Tan and Renee, and a few dozen
other people. Are they all traitors, too? You’d probably say I was,
except that it tried to kill me, so I guess I have a decent alibi.
Jesus.” She looked at him with a combination of anger and
disappointment that made him feel like pond scum, but it didn’t
change the truth of what his intuition was telling him.