Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (3 page)

“My God, Ray,” Jack said hoarsely,
looking again at the folder in his hand, “they didn’t just kill
him. They fucking tore him apart!”

He forced himself to open the folder
again. The top photo was a shot that showed Sheldon’s entire body
at the scene. It looked like someone had performed an autopsy on
him. A deep cut had been made in his torso from throat to groin.
The ribs had been cracked open to expose the heart and lungs, and
the organs from his abdomen had been pulled out and dissected, the
grisly contents dumped onto the floor. Then something had been used
to carve open his skull just above the line of his eyebrows, and
the brain had been removed and set aside. Another shot that he
dared not look at again showed what was done inside the skull: his
killer had torn his nasal cavities open.

Another photo showed Sheldon’s
clothing. He had been stripped from head to toe, and his clothes
had been systematically torn apart, with every seam ripped open. In
the background, on the floor next to the wall, was his
gun.

Jack had seen death enough times and
in enough awful ways that it no longer made him want to gag. But he
had never, even in the hateful fighting in Afghanistan, seen such
measured brutality as this.

The last photo he had looked at had
been a close-up of Sheldon’s face and his terrified expression. “He
was still alive when they started...cutting him up.”

“I know,” Clement said, his own
voice breaking. “I know he was.”

“What was he doing out there?” Jack
asked, sliding the photos back into the folder with numb fingers.
“This couldn’t have just been some random attack. What the hell was
he working on that could have driven someone to do this to
him?”

Pursing his lips, Clement looked
down at his desk, his face a study in consideration. “This is
classified, Jack,” he said finally, looking up and fixing Jack with
a hard stare, “as in Top Secret. The kind of information you have
to read after you sign your life away and go into a little room
with thick walls and special locks on the door. Even the SAC in
Lincoln doesn’t know the real reason Sheldon was there, and the
only reason I’m telling you is because you held high-level
clearances in the Army and you can appreciate how sensitive this is
and keep your mouth shut about it.”

Jack nodded. He had been an
intelligence officer in the Army, and knew exactly what Clement was
talking about. He also appreciated the fact that Clement could lose
his job for what he was about to say. That was the level of trust
that had built up between them.

Satisfied that Jack had gotten the
message, Clement told him, “Sheldon was investigating a series of
cyber attacks against several research laboratories doing work on
genetically modified organisms, mainly food crops like corn. The
FDA was also hacked: someone took a keen interest in what the
Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition was doing along the
same lines. And before you say, ‘So what’s the big super-secret
deal,’ there was also a series of attacks against computers, both
at home and work, used by specific individuals across the
government, including senior officials in the Department of Defense
and the military services. Sheldon was convinced the perpetrators
were from a group known as the Earth Defense Society, and that
they’re somewhere here in the U.S. He’s been out in the field for
the last three weeks, tracking down leads.” He frowned. “Apparently
he found something in Lincoln.”

“What the hell are they after?” Jack
asked, perplexed. It seemed an odd potpourri of targets for hackers
to be going after. He could understand someone going after one
group of targets or another, but what common thread could run
through such a mixed bag, from labs working on how to improve crops
to the military?

“That’s the sixty-four thousand
dollar question, isn’t it?” Clement said. “So, now you know what
Sheldon was doing. Just keep your mouth shut about it and pretend
this conversation never happened.”

Standing up and coming around his
desk, Clement continued as Jack rose from his chair, “I want you to
take some leave. Get out of here for a few days until you’ve pulled
yourself together. Then come back in and we can talk. And I promise
you, I’ll keep you informed of what we find.”

“Yes, sir,” was all Jack said as he
shook Clement’s hand. He turned and walked out of the office,
closing the door quietly behind him.

As Jack left, Clement saw that he
still had the copy of Sheldon’s case file in his hand. With a
satisfied nod, he returned to his desk and checked his phone, which
was blinking urgently. It hadn’t been ringing because he had
ordered his secretary to hold all of his calls. Quickly scanning
the recent caller list on the phone’s display, he saw that the
director had called him. Twice.

He grimaced, then pulled out the two
smart phones that he carried. He used one of them for everyday
personal communication. That one the Bureau knew about. He had
turned it off before talking to Dawson to avoid any interruptions,
and now he turned it back on.

The other smart phone, the one he
flipped open now, was used for an entirely different purpose, and
something of which his bosses at the Bureau would not approve.
Calling up the web application, he quickly logged into an
anonymizer service and sent a brief, innocuous-sounding email to a
particular address. Then he activated an application that would
wipe the phone’s memory and reset it to the factory default,
effectively erasing any evidence of how he had used it.

Putting it back in his pocket, he
picked up his desk phone and called the director.

CHAPTER TWO

Jack didn’t remember the drive to
his small two-bedroom home in Alexandria. He sat at the kitchen
table, drinking a beer in a vain attempt to help numb the gnawing
agony inside him. He looked around the kitchen, then out into what
he could see of the living room through a cutout in the wall that
sported a breakfast bar. One of Sheldon’s many girlfriends had
insisted on helping Jack decorate the house, and she had actually
come up with ideas that appealed to him. The furniture was
masculine, mainly dark leather and sturdy dark wood, with some of
his own paintings on the walls. Sheldon had made a big deal out of
Jack’s painting, and had insisted on taking several that he liked
to be framed for his girlfriend to hang up in strategic locations
throughout the house.

Painting was Jack’s main passion
outside of work. He didn’t consider himself any good at it, but
everyone who visited the house had embarrassed him by gushing over
the work. He outwardly dismissed the compliments as people just
being polite, but a part of him, deep down, enjoyed the praise.
Most of the paintings were still lifes, ranging from an apple
sitting on a table, lit by the glow of a setting sun through the
window, to his memory’s view of some of the rugged hills of
Afghanistan. They couldn’t be called cheery or dark, nor did they
follow a particular theme. But each one seemed to evoke an
emotional response in those who saw them. Jack painted because he
found it inwardly satisfying, and it had been good therapy after
Emily’s death. That others might enjoy looking at his work had
never really occurred to him.

Tonight, his easel sat in the corner
of the living room with a bare canvas. That was how he felt inside
as he listened to the rain drum against the roof in the darkness.
Bare. Empty.

He took another swig of beer and set
the bottle down on the table before flipping open the folder
containing the initial field report on Sheldon’s murder.

Next to the folder was the digital
photo frame that Sheldon had bought for him a month ago, and Jack
sadly watched the images fade in and out as they had day and night
since Sheldon had given it to him. It was an outrageous gadget that
Jack never would have bought for himself, but it was the perfect
gift from a gadget nut like Sheldon. The frame not only had a tiny
storage card that could hold thousands of photos, but even had
Wi-Fi wireless networking, and Sheldon had insisted on hooking it
up to Jack’s home network so Sheldon could remotely upload his
latest ridiculous photos for Jack to enjoy. He was a true
character, the perfect complement to Jack’s role of straight man,
and Jack desperately missed him.

Unable to look at the photos
anymore, he turned off the frame and carefully set it down on a
shelf next to the table. There would be a time for grieving and
remembrance, but not now. Not yet.

He opened up his laptop and logged
into the FBI Intelligence Information Reports Dissemination System
(FIDS) to check on any updates on the case. It didn’t take him long
to determine that the special agents in Lincoln hadn’t found
anything that leaped out at him as being terribly significant. The
forensics team was still hard at work gathering physical evidence,
and the small army of special agents was interviewing anyone and
everyone who could have had access to the Lincoln Research
University building, a special genetics research facility, where
Sheldon had been found. So far, no leads had turned up. No one
who’d been interviewed remembered ever having seen Sheldon
Crane.

Fine, he thought, frustrated, let’s
see what we can figure out on our own. Jack didn’t consider himself
brilliant, but he had a knack for looking at a pile of seemingly
unrelated or contradictory information about a case and coming up
with a story of what happened. It was all about making associations
between the different elements and seeing the underlying patterns.
In a way, it was akin to painting, and the “pictures” that he came
up with were usually spot on.

Unfortunately, he had very little to
work with so far, but that was real life: you never had all the
answers you wanted, especially right off the bat. So he started
with what he had.

He normally used paper for his
initial brainstorming, idly doodling on the page as his mind
processed information, later typing things up on the computer.
Pulling a sheet of paper from a small stack, he took a pencil and
began to write.

Murder scene:
Lincoln Research University genetic research labs; maintenance
tunnel
. Lincoln Research University. He’d
never heard of it. A quick search on the web told him that “LRU”
had opened its doors only two years before. He had assumed that it
was an extension of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but it
wasn’t. Digging deeper, he found that LRU was a graduate
institution that had been largely funded by a grant from New
Horizons, a huge agribusiness whose main focus was on producing
insect- and herbicide-resistant commercial crops like
corn.

LRU’s web site
touted its genetics research labs as the most advanced in the
world, and a key asset in developing the next generation of
genetically modified, or GM, products in the New Horizons line. If
nothing else, the school had certainly attracted a breathtaking
array of talent, based on the lofty-sounding bios for the faculty
and the incredibly steep entry requirements for student applicants.
While it was billed as a learning institution, it was clear that
anyone short of a genius would have a tough time getting their foot
in the door, which seemed to have driven potential applicants into
a frenzy of competition. If the web site could be believed, LRU
accepted only one percent of the applicants who met the admission
requirements. Having earned a
summa cum
laude
in your bachelor’s program meant
nothing at LRU.

The dean was Rachel Kempf, Ph.D. The
photo on her bio page showed a formidable-looking middle-aged woman
with an expression that would have been at home on a drill
sergeant’s ID card. Toward the bottom of her long list of
impressive accomplishments was a mention that she was also on the
board of directors at New Horizons.

No big surprise
there
, Jack thought as he scribbled more
notes on his first sheet of scratch paper. He paused a moment and
looked over what he’d written, surprised at how much he’d come up
with and how few doodles there were. Most of it was probably
academic (Bad pun, Jack, he scolded himself), but it was generally
better to have too much data than too little.

But whatever had drawn Sheldon to
LRU didn’t fit with the cyber attacks against other genetics
research labs that Clement had told him about. Checking FIDS again,
he couldn’t find any incident reports of malicious attacks against
computers of LRU’s facilities or staff. So, Sheldon had probably
gone there for some other reason.

Jack’s chain of thought was
interrupted by a plaintive mewling noise. Looking down, he saw a
pair of brilliant green eyes staring up at him from a black, furry
face. It was Alexander, his cat. Alexander’s long hair had a tuxedo
pattern, glossy black except for his belly, chin and paws, which
were pure white. His long whiskers were also white, and stood out
nearly five inches on each side of his muzzle.

“Don’t tell me you’re hungry,” Jack
said, darting a glance at the stainless steel bowl on the floor
near the refrigerator. He didn’t remember feeding Alexander, but
there was still food in the bowl, so he must have. Jack leaned back
and moved his arms aside, and twenty pounds of sinewy Siberian
forest cat leaped nimbly into his lap. Sitting up so he could
supervise Jack’s work, Alexander began to purr, the surprisingly
loud and deep rumbling filling the kitchen over the sound of the
rain.