Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (25 page)

Sheldon’s smile faltered for a brief
moment, and Jack thought he saw a trace of wistful sadness. “Yeah,”
he said, giving Jack’s shoulders a squeeze. “Just don’t ever forget
those words, Jack. Promise?”

Puzzled by Sheldon’s sudden
seriousness, Jack said, “I promise…”

***

Just don’t ever forget those words,
Jack...

Jack came awake with a gasp, sitting
straight up in his bed.

Fumbling with the intercom, he
finally figured out the right buttons to push to call the command
center.

“Jack?” Renee answered. “You
okay?”

“Renee,” Jack told her, “I think I
may have the pass phrase you’ve been looking for.”

“Then get your ass up here,” she
said urgently. “I’ll call Naomi.”

Ten minutes later, the three of them
were glaring in frustration at Renee’s computer screen.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Renee sighed,
“but that isn’t it. I’ve loaded up every possible permutation of
the words in that quote and they all strike out. Breaking it down
to random letter combinations will take a lot longer, but...” She
shrugged.

“Dammit,” Jack cursed. “I know
that’s it. It has to be. That was the only thing he ever made a big
deal over that would fit what we’re looking for. He thought far
enough ahead during the time he was in the lab to figure that they
would come after me, and that you’d eventually come for me. The
data would be safe in the photo frame, but he had to use a key that
only the two of us might know, and that I’d eventually remember.
And it wouldn’t have been just a simple name or something like
that.”

“Yeah, we’ve already tried all the
typical things,” Renee said, leaning back and folding her arms.
“Your name every which way, his, the cat’s, birthdays, all that
stuff. And in combination. Zip.”

“Sheldon would never have done
anything that obvious,” Naomi murmured, staring at the screen. “I
agree, Jack, that he would’ve expected you to know the key, but
what if it’s not just a set of alphabetic characters?”

“Shit,” Renee muttered, smacking her
head with her hand before she leaned over her keyboard and started
carefully typing in numbers. “I’ll bet he used a basic
substitution. He wouldn’t have had time for anything really fancy.
He had to do it in his head on the fly, but he could have easily
replaced the letters with numbers in the sequence of the alphabet:
1 for A, 2 for B, and so on through 26 for Z.”

The tension rose as she neared the
end of the sequence, carefully double-checking the numbers as she
typed.

“Have you found anything?” a woman’s
voice said.

They looked up to see Ellen and Tan
standing there.

“We think we found the pass phrase
for the file Sheldon super-encrypted,” Naomi told her, her voice
nearly shaking with excitement.

Jack kept his own expression neutral
as he carefully watched Ellen. She smiled at Naomi’s words, but
there were clear lines of worry around her eyes.

“Shit!” Renee spat. “That doesn’t
work, either. Damn you, Sheldon, I thought the world of you, but if
you were standing here right now, I’d kick you in the
balls.”

“Maybe we’ll never know what the
pass phrase is,” Ellen said quietly.

“Yes, we will,”
Jack said evenly. “Renee, he knew this would eventually wind up in
your lap. I know in my gut that quote is my piece of the key. It
has to be. Whatever he did to change it, he knew you’d be able to
figure it out, either from something that the two of you knew
together, or some bunch of mathematical mumbo-jumbo.
But you can solve this
.
I know it.”

“Jesus, kid,” she said, looking up
at him, an expression of wonder on her face, “I think you’re right.
It’s like a two-part key. Even if they got hold of you and got the
pass phrase – that you didn’t even know at the time – it wouldn’t
help them without knowing whatever else Sheldon had done to it. But
I can’t for the life of me think of what it could be.”

“I didn’t either, remember?” Jack
said.

“Why wouldn’t the harvesters just
destroy the file if they got it?” Tan asked. “Why should they
bother trying to figure out the key to open it, when Kempf must
already know what it contains?”

“It’s not the harvesters Sheldon was
worried about,” Jack said quietly, looking at Naomi. “If that was
the case, he wouldn’t have super-encrypted this particular file. It
was meant to keep one or more of us from seeing it.”

Renee sat back, stunned. “Jack,” she
said slowly, “do you have any idea what you’re saying?”

“Yes, I do,” he said firmly. “The
harvesters have someone here on the inside.”

“We already had this discussion,”
Naomi said coldly, “and I thought we had agreed to let it
go.”

Jack held her gaze until Renee spoke
again.

“I’m sorry, Naomi,” she said
quietly, her eyes focused on the domed ceiling as she concentrated,
“but I think Jack’s right. There’s no other explanation that fits.
Sheldon would’ve stuck to the plan unless he saw a good reason to
deviate from it. And he had Ellen watching his back, so...Oh, God,”
she whispered, turning to stare at Ellen as she came to the same
conclusion that Jack had about why Sheldon had stopped talking to
Ellen in the lab.

“What?” Ellen,
cried. “You think I’m a traitor?
Me?
”

“I won’t stand for this, Naomi,” Tan
said fiercely as he scowled at Jack. “We risked our lives to save
you, you bastard, and this is how you repay us? By accusing one of
our most trusted people of treason?”

Jack said nothing. There wasn’t much
he could say. But he was gratified, in a tragic way, that he wasn’t
the only one who had seen the connection between Ellen and what had
happened to Sheldon.

“That’s enough,” Naomi said icily
before Tan could say anything more. “Jack, would you leave us,
please? I’d appreciate it if you’d go back to your room and stay
there.” She didn’t look at him.

Feeling like he’d been slapped in
the face, he exchanged a glance with Renee, who still wore a
horrified expression, before he turned and silently left the
command center.

***

After Jack had left, Naomi had done
her best to calm down Ellen and Tan, then sent them back to their
room. Even though she was wanted for questioning by the FBI, Naomi
planned to send her topside with Tan when his shift was up. Her
photo hadn’t been circulated outside of law enforcement channels,
so it was unlikely she’d be picked up as long as she stayed at the
house and out of sight for a while.

Turning her mind back to Jack, she
was furious over his now-public accusation. Yet, a part of her
brain had been circling around what he’d said, ruthlessly examining
it for weakness, but so far had found none. She couldn’t – wouldn’t
– believe that Ellen had been turned. And if she had, why had she
come back? All she had to do was tell the harvesters where the base
was, and they would take care of the rest. The truck park topside
would have been swarming with federal agents or soldiers by
now.

“Damn you, Jack Dawson,” Naomi
muttered as she shoved those thoughts aside and fought to
concentrate on her work. She was examining the preliminary workups
on the retrovirus, and didn’t at all like what she was
seeing.

Naomi didn’t have the resources to
completely map the genome of the harvesters, but she knew enough to
recognize patterns of their DNA in the retrovirus. She looked over
report after report that had been put together by the research team
in the short period of time they’d had to analyze the samples
Sheldon had died to obtain, but all she got for her effort was a
splitting headache. She was one of the best geneticists in the
world, but the retrovirus and the beyond-brilliant engineering that
had gone into creating it mocked her own intelligence. All the
reports boiled down to one simple and chilling conclusion: without
a great deal more time to study it, the only way to find out what
the retrovirus did would be to infect an animal host and see what
happened.

“Vlad,” she called to an
exhausted-looking young man with limp brown hair who wore a rumpled
lab coat, sitting at the computer next to her, “I want you to prep
one of the rhesus monkeys. Grind up one of the specimens of the
corn and put it in the food. Let’s test the entire vector process
from consumption to gene transcription and see what the devil this
thing does.” She would much rather have done a more detailed and
controlled series of experiments, but she knew that time wasn’t on
their side. They had to find out what this thing was, and
quickly.

“Right away, Naomi,” he said with a
thick Russian accent. After a few more mouse clicks to save what he
was working on, he got up and began to shuffle toward the far side
of the dome where the animal area was located.

“And Vlad,” she called after him,
“be damned sure you put it in one of the level four biosafety
containment chambers. We don’t want that monkey running around
loose.”

He gulped, trying
to wipe the frightened expression from his face.
“
Da
,” he said
quietly, bobbing his head in earnest agreement.

As Vlad went to fetch the test
monkey, Naomi continued to stare at the mysterious gene matrix on
the screen, wondering what horrors it contained.

***

Renee sat at her
workstation, her mind spinning from the possibility that Ellen had
been turned by the harvesters. They were good friends, and she
simply couldn’t believe that Ellen had turned traitor.
There was no reason for her to
turn
, Renee thought.
What could the harvesters have offered her in exchange for
Sheldon’s life, and probably for ours, as well?

On the other hand, Renee couldn’t
escape the conclusion that Sheldon had found something in the
mysterious file that he hadn’t wanted to reveal to Ellen. That was
based on the assumption that what Ellen had told them of Sheldon’s
actions in the lab was true. Jack seemed to think it was, and Renee
was inclined to go with him on that: she instinctively trusted him.
But if it were true, everything they had struggled for, and their
very lives, might now be in danger.

Naomi, angry and hurt after the
scene with Jack and the others, had gone to the lab to lose herself
in her work, leaving Renee alone in the command center while the
others worked in other parts of the complex or got some sleep. As
long as Renee had coffee, she had no problem staying awake and
alert for a full twenty-four hour shift or even longer, although
getting someone to spell her for a quick trip to the bathroom now
and then was always a challenge.

Speaking of
challenges
, she thought sourly as she
stared at the screen and the mocking dialog box asking for the pass
phrase for the stubbornly encrypted file, which Sheldon had named
“secret.”
What did you do, Sheldon?
she begged her dead friend.
Jack’s so sure I can figure this out, but I’ve tried
everything I can think of, and–

“Renee?”

She looked up to find Ellen standing
there, next to her workstation. The young woman’s cheeks were wet
with tears. And she was holding a pistol fitted with a silencer,
aimed at Renee’s chest.

“Ellen...” was all Renee had time to
say before her friend shot her twice in the chest. Her mouth
forming an “O” of shocked surprise, Renee was knocked backward out
of her chair, her limp body rolling to a stop near the steps to the
command dais, face-down to the floor.

“I’m so sorry,” Ellen murmured over
and over as she dragged Renee’s body by the ankles into the small
utility room next to the conference room.

After making sure the door to the
utility room was locked, Ellen ran to Renee’s console and brought
up the security monitoring system. Taking a thumb drive from her
pocket, she inserted it into the workstation’s USB port. Several
keystrokes and mouse clicks later, she had electronically altered
the security camera recording of Renee’s murder. Anyone who
reviewed the video would see Renee at her workstation for the next
fifteen minutes, after which it would show Ellen entering the
command center and shooting her. The other security cameras would
show what they normally did: empty tunnels and the occasional cat
or two. Ellen was gambling that no one else would show up in the
command center before she could get back from what she now had to
do. She was fairly certain no one would: everyone had been so upset
about Jack’s accusation that she was a traitor that they had all
found some place or reason to be alone. No one even considered the
possibility that she really was a traitor.

Except for Jack and Renee, of
course. It had broken her heart to kill Renee, but she’d had no
choice. She would kill Jack, too, but there were other things she
had to do first.

She brought up the command systems
for the portal elevator and blast doors, and neutralized their
fail-safes. Then she did the same for the security systems in the
prison where the harvester was being held. She nearly vomited at
the thought of what she was doing, at what she had already done.
Months ago she had released the second harvester that had been
captured, but instead of trying to escape as Ellen had planned, it
had tried to kill Naomi. Ellen had barely been able to cover her
tracks that time. The harvesters had not been pleased with her, but
Ellen had shown Kempf the security video of the battle the thing
had chosen over escape, and that had mollified her and the others,
whoever they might be. She hoped that this harvester, Sansone,
would be smarter. She prayed it was, because Ellen knew that this
was it. Not because she was afraid she would be caught, but because
she was running out of time for the harvesters to fulfill their end
of the bargain she had made months ago. She had sold her soul, but
she knew in her heart it was a worthy cause, no matter the
price.