Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (43 page)

“There’s worse,” Jack went on. “Just
a couple hours ago, the news networks announced that an extremely
virulent strain of influenza has broken out in the U.S., India, and
China. The CDC in Atlanta is still trying to firm up the threat,
but the talking head experts are claiming that this strain may be
similar to the one that drove the flu pandemic in 1918 that killed
somewhere between fifty and a hundred million people. The term
biological warfare came up more than once from the news
commentators. Between the attacks on the genebanks, the resulting
international tensions, and this flu outbreak, people are running
scared.”

Naomi found she was holding her
breath. She knew from the look on Jack’s face there was more. And
even worse. “What else?”

“A New Horizons
affiliate, a pharmaceutical company, is claiming they’ve come up
with a genetic shield from all strains of influenza, delivered by
retrovirus. They claim it’s been kept under tight wraps to prevent
industrial espionage, but jointly announced it with the New
Horizons line of crops engineered to deliver just such a cure. It
won’t cost much more than regular grain seed, and a lot less than
traditional inoculations. And the cure will be permanent.” His
stomach churned at the thought.
It’ll be
permanent, all right
, he thought. “The
President is going to Congress to request a special subsidy to
lower the price to make it available as widely as possible, and
Congress is ready to sign.”

“My God,” Naomi groaned. “Everyone
will want the New Horizons wonder seeds, driven by fear that the
world is going to hell. The company won’t be able to ship them fast
enough.”

“They won’t be able to ship them at
all,” Jack promised her, “because we’re going to blow them to hell
first.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE

“What a load of horse hockey,”
Special Agent Carl Richards muttered between mouthfuls of a thick
pastrami sandwich, followed by a long swig of dark, bitter ale as
he watched the news on the television. He was sitting in his prized
leather armchair, alone in his apartment as was his habit on the
few hours each day he wasn’t at work. He had no social life, nor
did he want one. He lived for his work, and had never questioned
the value it gave to his existence. The things that many considered
sacrifices he had made – a wife, children, family, friends – were
things that had never really mattered to him. Work was his life,
his fellow agents were his family, and the men and women he brought
to justice helped to ease the cries of the ghosts of his brutal
childhood.

He was still bitterly annoyed at the
Lincoln Research University crime scene being reopened without a
more thorough on-site forensic analysis. Even with the disaster at
the FBI lab that followed on the heels of Sheldon Crane’s murder in
Nebraska, Richards knew that more should have been done before the
lab was cleared for operation again. But the word had come straight
from the Director of the FBI herself, and that was that.

As he sat there, his mind steadily
churned through the information he had absorbed. He made no claim
to being an analytic genius like he believed Jack Dawson to be, but
no one would ever mistake him for a fool, either. Looking back, now
that he had a little time to really focus, the wrap-up at the New
Horizons lab had seemed rushed, and even the investigation at the
FBI lab scene had been disturbingly half-assed.

No
, he thought suddenly.
Things had been directed, orchestrated. There was
something artificial about the investigation
there
. What stuck out in his mind the most
was the strange treatment of Dr. Martin Kilburn, one of the lab
survivors, the one who had fingered Dawson’s former girlfriend as
the bomber and Dawson as an accomplice. Richards had wanted to
interview him about Dawson’s visit there that night. But he hadn’t
been allowed access to Kilburn, or even been permitted to submit
questions for him to answer later. After a very public interview
(
if you considered a few hundred FBI
agents the public
, Richards thought
sourly), Kilburn was whisked away. As Richards discovered by using
his main gift of being a relentless pain in the ass, it was again
on the director’s orders.

Then there was the whole thing with
Dawson. Richards would do his duty to his very last breath and hunt
Dawson down without a shred of mercy, but he couldn’t deny that
everything about the man being associated with terrorists felt
wrong. Richards knew he wasn’t a people person, but he knew people,
understood them, extremely well. Dawson simply didn’t strike him as
someone who’d blow up a lab full of his colleagues and a former
lover with whom he was still close friends, then run away to join a
terrorist group that had sprung up out of nowhere. It didn’t make
sense.

On the boob tube, which he
alternately relished and reviled, President Fowler, accompanied by
a smiling Secretary of Defense, was glad-handing a bunch of high
school kids and parents at a political rally in Madison, Wisconsin.
It was an election year, and even with the world going to hell in a
hand-basket, the politicos had to be on the stump, kissing babies
and pimping votes. Richards thought the whole thing was ridiculous:
democracy for him meant voting Republican, and that was that. But
he enjoyed the speeches and the mudslinging the same way that
people enjoyed football games.

The news commentators, who simply
couldn’t shut up long enough to leave a single second of silence in
the broadcast, revealed the obvious: that Fowler’s speech had been
rewritten to focus on recent world events, and the attacks that had
wrought destruction on American soil. The Secretary of Defense
wasn’t expected to say anything, but his presence alone was
intended to help reinforce the President’s message.

There won’t be any
good backbiting in this speech
, Richards
thought, disappointed.

As the television showed President
Fowler mounting the podium, he let the campaigning politician’s
smile fade and put on a suitably grim and determined expression.
“My fellow Americans,” he began.

Then the transmission from the high
school suddenly terminated, the view cutting over to one of the
cameras in the news room.

“Ladies and
gentlemen,” one of the commentators said smoothly, “we seem to be
having technical difficulties. We’re trying to get another video
feed in from a local affiliate. Ah, here we
go...
Oh, my God!
”

The beer bottle and what was left of
Richards’ sandwich hit the floor as he leaped out of the chair,
snatched up his holster and coat, and dashed out the front door,
not even bothering to lock it behind him.

On the television screen the camera
showed a billowing cloud of black smoke and flaming debris where
the high school auditorium had been.

***

“You guys need to hear what just
came up over the satellite radio broadcast,” Ferris suddenly called
over the cabin speakers in a trembling voice.

Naomi, Jack, and the others turned
to look up toward the speakers on the ceiling, as if they could see
the words coming out.

“...repeat, just moments ago there
was a massive explosion at the high school where President Fowler,
accompanied by the Secretary of Defense, was giving a campaign
speech today. We don’t have any confirmation from the Secret
Service, but eyewitness reports indicate that the auditorium where
the President was giving his speech was leveled in the blast, and
hundreds are feared dead. We’re looking at the video footage here
in our studio, and there’s literally nothing left but rubble and
bodies. My God, this is terrible! We don’t know–”

“Turn it off,” Jack called
hoarsely.

With a grunt, Ferris switched off
the audio. Everyone sat still for a moment, stunned.

“It shouldn’t come as a surprise,”
Jack said after a few moments.

“Why do you say that?” one of the
other members of the team asked.

“Because the Vice President is one
heartbeat away from the Presidency,” Jack told him. “And we know
who controls him. If there were any major obstacles to whatever
they’re trying to do before, they’re gone now.”

“It’s just us now,” Naomi whispered
as she looked up at Jack, her blue and brown eyes
glistening.

“Maybe not,” Jack said. “Ferris!” he
called. “I need to make a call over the plane’s satellite
phone...”

***

The carnage at the FBI lab had been
bad enough, Richards thought grimly, but it didn’t hold a candle to
the high school where the President had been speaking. It looked
worse than the devastation at the Colorado State University campus.
The Secret Service hadn’t made it official yet, but Richards knew
there was no way the President or anyone else in the auditorium
could have survived.

“Goddamn them,” he
hissed at whoever had done this. “
Goddamn
them!
”

He was speeding at almost one
hundred miles per hour down I-95 toward Washington, the red bubble
stuck to the top of his black Impala flashing as he headed toward
Ronald Reagan International Airport where a chartered airliner was
being loaded with every agent within an hour’s drive of D.C. More,
many more, would be following behind on other planes, and every
field office east of the Mississippi would be emptied out within
the next few hours, all converging on the latest disaster to strike
the nation.

His cell phone rang, and he
immediately reached out and punched the hands-free talk button on
his stereo. “Richards,” he barked.

“Guess who this is,” a familiar
voice said from the speakers around him.

Richards, totally
surprised, almost lost control of his car. “Dawson,” he grated,
“when I find you, I’m going to skin you alive. The other things you
and your whacko friends did were horrific enough. But killing the
President? We’ll never stop hunting you.
Never
.”

“Listen to me, Richards,” Dawson
told him evenly. “I couldn’t have killed the President, because I’m
on a plane a few thousand miles away. My ‘whacko friends’ and I
just had a firefight with the real bad guys, the ones who are
behind all this. We’ve been trying to stop them. So was Sheldon
Crane. That’s why he was killed: because he found out things no one
was supposed to know.”

Richards had a sharp retort on his
tongue, but paused. His gut instinct about Dawson was warring with
his sense of duty, and it was one of the very few times in his life
that he’d been so deeply conflicted that he couldn’t even
speak.

“I can prove it,” Jack pressed,
sensing that the other man was at least giving some thought to his
words. “But we need your help. Things are going to get worse, much
worse, if we don’t stop them soon.”

“Who’s ‘them?’” Richards asked.
“Little green men from Mars? I don’t believe in little green
men.”

“Neither do I,” Jack told him.
Richards would have laughed were it not for how dead serious Jack’s
voice was. “They’re not little or green, but they’re deadly as
hell. We’ve got one with us that we captured during the fight at
Spitsbergen.” He paused. “You need us, Carl, you just don’t know it
yet. And we sure as hell need you.”

“God help me,” Richards muttered to
himself, “I can’t believe I’m even listening to this!”

“Richards, I swear on my murdered
wife’s name that I’m telling the truth.”

Those words took Richards by
surprise. Like most of the agents who’d worked with Jack, he’d
heard the story of his wife’s murder, and knew that Dawson would
never have said such a thing unless he was deadly
serious.

Shaking his head in disbelief that
he was even thinking of anything other than collaring Dawson and
dragging him off to trial, Richards said, “Okay, Dawson, what do
you want?”

***

“The first thing we’ll need,” Jack
said, “is clearance back into U.S. airspace.”

“Where are you now?” Richards
asked.

Naomi shook her head, and Ferris
grimaced, but Jack went ahead and told him. “We’re over Greenland,
heading toward the east coast. If you check the international news,
you’ll probably see a story pretty soon about a battle involving
Russian and Norwegian troops on the island of Spitsbergen. That’s
where we’re coming from. We didn’t have a flight plan back, and
with the murder of the President the FAA has closed our airspace,
and the Canadians didn’t want to let us through,
either.”

“All right, Dawson, I can swing
that,” Richards told him, picturing in his mind a pair of F-16
fighters escorting Dawson’s plane in. “What else?”

“I want to meet up with you and show
you who the real enemy is.” Naomi’s eyes flew wide. “Wait one,” he
told Richards as Naomi covered his microphone with one
hand.

“Jack,” she told him urgently, “we
can’t risk showing that thing to anyone outside of the confinement
chambers at the base.”

“It’s knocked out with formaldehyde,
right?” Jack asked pointedly. “As long as you can keep it
unconscious, we’ll have to risk it. Listen, this guy’s a hard-ass
and he’s not going to be easily convinced. He’s going to want real
proof, and we’ve got it right here with us. If we can get him to
believe what’s going on, he’ll be a huge help to us. But he’s not
going to just take my word. I’m shocked he even agreed to talk to
me at all.”