Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (4 page)

As he stroked the big cat’s soft
coat, Jack began to relax. He thought about how uncanny Alexander
was: he could be a royal pain in the ass when he felt like getting
into trouble, which seemed to be most of the time. But when Jack
felt down, Alexander always knew that his human needed some
therapy.

Damn
cat
, Jack thought, a small smile coming to
his face despite his melancholy mood.
Who
needs Valium?

Pushing his frustration aside, he
focused more closely on the details of the crime scene. According
to the field reports, Sheldon had been found in one of the service
tunnels running under the lab complex. The on-site team had found a
trail of blood, believed to be Sheldon’s, leading upstairs to one
of the second floor labs.

The entrance to the lab where the
blood trail terminated was through a heavy steel fire door set into
the concrete-core walls. The door was controlled by a lock that
required both a coded access card and five-digit entry key to open.
It would have taken a small explosive to blow the lock, but there
was no sign of forced entry. So Sheldon, or his assailant, must
have had at least one card, and had known the code. Unfortunately,
the digital access logs for the door had conveniently been erased,
as had the previous twenty-four hours of recordings from the
building’s security cameras, four of which were in this particular
lab.

Someone had gone to a great deal of
trouble to conceal what had happened there, and it almost certainly
had to be someone on the inside. Who else would have that sort of
access to the university’s security systems?

From the digital images that had
been forwarded over FIDS from the investigating agents and
forensics technicians in Lincoln, Jack could see that a life or
death struggle had taken place in the lab. In fact, it looked like
a bomb had gone off in the middle of the large room, with what was
no doubt incredibly expensive scientific equipment knocked over or
flung from the heavy metal benches lining the room. Several laptops
and workstations had been smashed, as if someone had rolled right
over the top of them. Along one wall, a bank of huge stainless
steel freezers stood open, their contents – hundreds of small
containers of corn kernels and other biological samples, the report
said – strewn across the floor. On the floor near the door that led
out to the main hallway were traces of blood.

Most significant, Jack thought as he
read through the attached document, glancing periodically back at
the images, were the cartridge cases that had been found scattered
over the floor by the door. Fifteen of them had been recovered, all
from .40 caliber rounds that were probably fired from Sheldon’s
Glock 22 pistol. The forensics team had found two slugs, probably
.40 caliber, lodged in the walls and a third in the ceiling, but
there was no trace of the other twelve. The immediate conclusion,
pending confirmation from the forensics and ballistics experts, was
that Sheldon had hit whatever he had been shooting at.

But the only blood
found at the scene seemed to be his
, Jack
thought. A DNA analysis would be run to make sure, but initial
on-site testing matched Sheldon’s blood type.

Jack sat back, a chill running down
his spine, his hand momentarily frozen in mid-stroke on Alexander’s
back. Sheldon had never been in the military or seen combat, but
he’d been involved in two shootouts in his career, and had been as
calm and cool as one could expect in such a situation. He wouldn’t
have panicked, even if he’d been surprised by an assailant. He
wasn’t nearly as good a shot as Jack, but he was no slouch, either.
At the distances that must have been involved in the lab, a couple
dozen feet at most, given the layout of the equipment and the
various lab tables, Jack knew that Sheldon would have hit his
target with most of his shots.

But Jack couldn’t get around the one
major gap in his theory: there didn’t appear to be any trace of
blood from anyone but Sheldon. Jack was well aware that body armor
could certainly stop .40 caliber rounds at close range, but it was
a long stretch for him to believe that Sheldon’s opponent had
absorbed twelve bullets without leaving a single drop of blood
behind. How likely could it be that not a single bullet had hit a
part of Sheldon’s opponent’s body that wasn’t protected by armor,
which typically only covered the chest and back: an arm or a leg,
or the head. Even if a bullet didn’t take down the target, it would
have left traces of blood behind.

Yet, there was nothing.

The shootout appeared to have
happened amidst a physical struggle across the lab that had also
left traces of Sheldon’s blood and various fibers on the sharp
edges of several pieces of equipment. There was remarkably little
in the way of other evidence aside from fabric fibers that the
forensics team had tentatively identified as being from the
standard lab clothing worn by the people who worked there. It was a
controlled environment where anyone entering was required to wear
sterilized scrubs, caps, masks and gloves, just as if they were in
an operating room. The only fingerprints or other questionable
physical evidence found so far had been from Sheldon.

The same was true of the small
electrical equipment alcove where the body had been discovered
early that morning by a maintenance worker. Three more bullet
casings, believed to be from Sheldon’s gun, had been found, but
there were no bullets lodged in the walls, no traces of ricochets.
And the range this time, even if his target had been across from
the alcove along the tunnel wall, would have been point blank: he
could hardly have missed.

What the hell
happened, Sheldon?
Jack asked
himself.
It’s like you were shooting at a
goddamn phantom that could absorb bullets
.

Alexander, annoyed that Jack had
stopped petting him, began licking Jack’s hand, trying to get his
attention focused on more important matters like feline ego
maintenance. Jack absently began petting him again, but his mind
was twelve hundred miles away, trying to visualize Sheldon’s
encounter at the LRU lab.

Staring at a blank spot on the wall
and clearing his thoughts, he tried to visualize the lab in his
mind. It was a technique for associative analysis that he had
developed while he was in Afghanistan. Sometimes you could go
analytically from A to B in an orderly, logical way, given the data
you had on hand. Other times you couldn’t, and Jack had found that
his subconscious could often help him “see” things that his
conscious mind missed. It didn’t always work, and then he had to
resort to more traditional analysis. But when it did work, it
worked damn well. His commander in Afghanistan had thought Jack was
full of shit the first time he had done it while planning for an
operation to take down some suspected Taliban targets. That
attitude changed after Jack’s analysis and “staring at the wall
bullshit” led him to believe that his unit was being baited into an
ambush. The commander was unconvinced, but he was a prudent man: he
prepared for both contingencies. It was indeed a trap, but when the
jaws sprung, the American troops were ready, and wound up taking
down nearly twice as many Taliban fighters as they had expected to
find, at a cost of only two of their own soldiers lightly wounded.
After that, Jack’s commander gave him all the time he wanted to sit
and stare at the wall.

Now, sitting in his kitchen, the LRU
lab as he’d seen in the photos slowly came into focus and the movie
in his mind began to play.

Using a badge and key access code
that he’d gotten from someone who works at LRU, Sheldon enters the
lab. His LRU contact has access to the security systems and has
shut them off to cover Sheldon’s illegal entry. Sheldon’s a cyber
expert, investigating network attacks against facilities like this.
He looks around and sees what he’s come for: the computers. They
have data that he wants, but he can’t access or hack these systems
remotely, or he would not have taken the risk coming here: they’re
isolated from the rest of the university’s intranet. Physically
secured in this lab.

He takes out the USB flash drive
containing hacking programs that he lovingly refers to as his
“toolbox” and gets to work, breaking into the computers. He has to
do this because his inside contact at LRU who gave him physical
access to the lab does not have access to the computers, or doesn’t
have the knowledge to get at the data.

Time passes, and Sheldon finds
something. The data he came here for now points him in a new
direction. He looks up at the big stainless steel freezers along
the wall. There. Quickly covering his tracks in the computers,
erasing all signs that he had accessed them, he gets up and goes to
a particular freezer. The data on the computers is maintained by
some of the most gifted scientists in the world, working for one of
the world’s most powerful corporations. Everything maintained here
is orderly and precise. The data has told him exactly where to look
for the prize, the true reason he has come here.

Taking a set of mitts to protect
his skin from the extreme cold, he opens the freezer and slides out
one of the many shelves, each of which holds dozens of tiny sample
containers. He sets the tray on a nearby lab table and carefully
picks up a particular container. It looks exactly the same as the
others, and the writing on the label indicates it is in sequence
with the others on the tray. But something about this one is
different. The computer data told him so.

He could simply take the sample
container, but that would be too suspicious. Instead, he takes
another container, perhaps a small bag that he has brought with
him, and extracts some of the contents from the sample container he
has taken from the freezer. Corn kernels. He carefully puts the
corn into a pocket.

The meticulous scientists who work
here would know exactly what was in each sample container; this
would be logged in the computer. They would know quickly that
something was missing from this container, for this item was the
main focus for the research here. Sheldon considers substituting
samples from another container, but abandons the idea: the
scientists will know soon enough. Too soon. He needs to conceal his
theft for as long as possible.

He looks at the sample tray and the
dozens of containers it holds, all of which look exactly alike
except for the small labels. Coming to a decision, he upends the
tray, dumping the containers onto the floor.

Moving quickly, he does the same to
the remaining trays in this freezer, then moves on to the others.
Soon the white linoleum tile is covered with plastic containers,
and Sheldon kicks and scatters them across the lab as he moves from
freezer to freezer. It will take the scientists who work here weeks
to undo this simple act of vandalism and discover what was taken.
Or so he hopes.

This is when things go wrong.
Whether drawn by the noise, the security monitoring system being
shut off, or perhaps just by chance, someone enters the lab.
Sheldon goes through the motions of informing the newcomer – or
newcomers – that he is an FBI special agent, showing his badge and
trying to bluff his way out. But the newcomer knows that Sheldon is
on his own: he has no warrant, no authorization. No backup. He is
alone.

They struggle. Sheldon opens fire,
and keeps shooting as they careen across the lab, further spreading
the mess on the floor, knocking equipment from the benches,
smashing things to pieces. He empties his weapon’s magazine, firing
at his assailant.

Then...something happens. Something
that allows Sheldon to break away. But he does not escape cleanly:
at the last moment, just as Sheldon can reach the door and freedom,
his assailant somehow injures him, the wound serious enough to
leave a clear trail of blood as Sheldon escapes the lab.

He heads downstairs to the
maintenance tunnel; perhaps this is how he entered the otherwise
secure building, or perhaps he knows he is cut off from the other
exits. His injury is more severe than he thought, and he is
bleeding badly. He would have called someone, would have called
Jack, for help, but could not. Perhaps there was no signal, or he
had lost his cell phone during the struggle. He is all alone
now.

Exhausted, scared, and slowly
bleeding out, Sheldon holes up in the dark alcove. He reloads his
empty weapon, knowing that his pursuer or pursuers will find him;
the trail of blood will see to that. He knows they will find what
he has taken, the precious, mysterious sample from the lab. Having
come this far, he would not simply give it up, allow them to find
it easily. Sheldon is smart: swallowing the stolen material would
be the logical thing to do, the obvious thing. He must find another
way.

He takes some precious time to hide
some of the kernels...somewhere, in a place that his pursuers will
not think to look. The rest, he swallows: he will let his enemy
find what they expect to find, drawing attention away from the
other hidden cache.

Having done what he can, he waits,
waits for his assailant to come as more blood drains from his
body.

When his enemy arrives, Sheldon
fights to the last, firing three more rounds before he is overcome.
After that, there is only agony as his enemy cuts into his flesh
and cracks his bones apart, a sea of pain until darkness finally
falls...