Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (45 page)

“Okay, boy,” she murmured, putting
the gun back in her holster. She was reassured slightly by Koshka,
who was now right behind Renee’s legs. But the white cat, clearly
still spooked by something, was staring up at the mezzanine, just
as Alexander had been. Renee suddenly decided that going up there
alone maybe wasn’t such a good idea.

Opening the door to the crate, she
took gentle hold of Alexander as he leaped out and clung to her
like a terrified child. She grimaced as the big cat’s claws
penetrated the fabric of her lab coat and sweater to lance her
skin. He was shivering as if he had a terrible fever.

“It’s okay, big guy,” she told him,
ignoring the pain of his claws as she cradled him. “I’ve got you.
Now let’s get the hell out of here and go get some
help.”

As she turned to go, she caught
sight of something above her on the mezzanine level, an indistinct
shadow through the grates in the flooring. But before she had time
to think about setting down Alexander and drawing her weapon, it
had disappeared.

Into the air intake
tunnel.

Backing out of the lab, keeping her
eyes on the mezzanine, she carried Alexander to what she hoped was
the relative safety of the main junction. Then, with Koshka safely
out of the lab dome, she closed the blast door behind
her.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX

Ferris guided the Falcon to a stop
next to the executive jets at BWI’s general aviation facility in
the northeast corner of the airport. Jack dropped the stairway to
the tarmac before Ferris shut down the engines.

A few yards away was a black Chevy
Impala. Special Agent Carl Richards stood stiffly beside it, his
fists tightly clenched at his sides.

“Stay here,” Jack told the others.
“Let me talk to him first.”

“We’ll cover you,” said Hathcock as
he brought up an H&K submachine gun.

“No,” Jack told him sternly. “We’ve
got to convince this guy we’re the real deal. We’re not going to
kill him. Got it?”

Hathcock shrugged and lowered his
weapon.

With a last glance at Naomi, Jack
went down the steps and walked quickly toward Richards.

Behind him, Hathcock raised the
H&K again and held it steady, the sights centered on Richards’
chest. Naomi nodded in approval, then turned her attention back to
Jack.

Moving into handshaking distance
with Richards, but not extending his hand, Jack said, “The F-16s
were a nice touch. What’d you have the Air Force tell the
pilots?”

“That you were carrying precious
cargo and needed protection,” Richards replied. “You’d better not
make a liar out of me, Dawson. The country has gone completely nuts
over internal security, as you might imagine. Pulling off this
little stunt cost me a lot of favors.”

Nodding, Jack told him, “Come on.
You need to know what we’re up against.”

“Aren’t your friends going to come
down and help with the alien autopsy gag?” Richards asked
sarcastically.

“No. It’s just you and me,” Jack
told him. “Believe me, this is one show and tell you’re not going
to like at all.”

“I can’t believe I’m laying my
career on the line for you,” Richards told him as Jack opened the
luggage door, revealing a tightly-bound bundle that was roughly the
size of a man. “I think I’ve simply gone insane.”

“No,” Jack told him solemnly.
“You’re here because you’re trusting your instincts.”

Jack quickly undid the bindings of
the bundle’s heavy plastic tarp. He paused before pulling back the
plastic to reveal what was underneath.

“You’re not going
to believe what I’m about to show you,” Jack told him. “I sure as
hell didn’t when I first saw one of these things, with it up and
moving around, and it almost got me to let it escape. But
it’s
real
,
Richards. And this thing and others like it are trying to take over
our home, our world, and kill us all in the
process.”

Frowning with impatience, Richards
pushed Jack aside and tore back the flap of plastic.

“God,” he gasped, briefly turning
away. “What’s that smell?”

“That’s how they smell in their
natural form,” Jack told him as Richards turned back to look more
closely at the thing in the plastic. “They’re shape-changers,
Richards. They can control this stuff,” he pointed to some of the
bruise-colored malleable tissue that had pooled around the thing’s
head, “and change their shape and color to anything that’s about
the same size. Like a person. And when they do, the smell goes
away. We don’t know why. Here,” he said, handing Richards a pair of
disposable examination gloves. “Put these on, then you tell me if
you think this thing is just a bunch of latex and
rubber.”

Richards didn’t hesitate. He grabbed
the gloves, expertly snapped them on, and then began to probe at
the creature’s flesh, his fingers disappearing into the mottled,
slimy surface, then running over the exposed and glistening
skeletal structure, even its mandibles.

The body suddenly convulsed. Both
men leaped back, their hands going instinctively to their weapons.
They put their hands on the grips, but didn’t draw the guns; they
didn’t need any unwanted attention from airport security. Richards’
eyebrows shot up when he caught sight of Jack’s gun, a massive .50
caliber Desert Eagle strapped under his left arm.

“What’s with the cannon, Dawson?
Penis envy issues, maybe?” Richards asked sarcastically as he
warily eyed the thing in the tarp.

“No,” Jack told him nervously, his
eyes fixed on the harvester, which again lay completely still.
“Their skeletal structure is like an organic carbon fiber material
that’s incredibly tough, stronger than Kevlar. That dinky 9mm
you’re carrying would barely scratch it.” He glanced at Richards to
make sure he had his attention. “I had to empty five .44 magnum
rounds into one of these things at point blank range to stop it,
and even then it was a close call. After that, I got myself a
bigger gun.” He gestured Richards closer. “You haven’t told me you
think this is a Hollywood stunt.”

“I’ll tell you what I think, Dawson.
I think I’m still back in my apartment, having a nightmare after
eating a bad pastrami sandwich and seeing our President blown to
bits on TV. And when I wake up, I’m going to find you and knock
your block off, just on principle.” He looked at the thing again,
but didn’t touch it. Then he peeled off the gloves and shoved them
in his coat pocket. “Dawson,” he said, his voice suddenly losing
its usual tone of arrogant self-assurance, “this can’t be real. It
just can’t be.”

“It can be,” Jack told him, “and it
is. We don’t know where they came from, and as far as we know
there’s no mother ship or any of that garbage. But we do know
they’ve got a lot of human collaborators in high places, and they
plan to transform our biosphere with the help of genetically
engineered crops from New Horizons.”

Richards glanced sharply at him.
“Those are the guys with the cure for the sudden virus outbreak,
right? I thought that was a little too coincidental.”

“Naomi worked for New Horizons,
remember,” Jack said. “She worked for one of them, but she didn’t
know it until they tried to co-opt her. And when Crane investigated
EDS, she showed him the truth and he believed. That’s when he went
underground, went rogue. EDS needed someone to penetrate the
Lincoln Research University lab, because that was where the crop
strains were being created. Sheldon was perfect for the job. He got
in, found out what they were doing, and they – the enemy, the
harvesters, we call them – killed him for it.”

“And you got suckered into this same
mind game?”

Shaking his head,
Jack told him, “There wasn’t any mind game about three special
agents coming to my door and trying to kill me the night of the lab
explosion, looking for information that Sheldon had sent
electronically that I didn’t even realize I had. One of the agents,
Lynette Sansone, was one of these things.” He gestured at the
creature. “Naomi and some of the others rescued me.” He stepped
closer to Richards. “Carl, their objective is to
wipe us out
. And there
are humans helping them to do it.”

“Oh, come on,” Richards said. “Why
would anyone do that?”

Jack shrugged. “Greed? Power? Who
knows? It’s not like human beings haven’t tried to wipe out other
human beings before. Why not help somebody else do it? For all we
know it could be some sort of brainwashing, but I don’t think so.”
Thinking of Ellen Bienkowski, turning traitor in return for the
promise of a cure for Tan’s cancer, he went on, “I think the
harvesters are using leverage of some kind on most of the people
they’ve subverted. All that matters now is that we stop them, and
the New Horizons seeds are the key: we think they’re at the center
of what’s been going on, the critical element of their operation.
The terrorist attacks, the virus outbreak...” He paused. “Even the
assassination of the President. It’s all part of the plan to
destabilize things and get those seeds in high demand and out into
the world, and it’s working.”

“What are the seeds supposed to do?”
Richards asked, wrinkling his nose as he caught another whiff of
the harvester’s odor.

He’s starting to
believe
, Jack told himself, overcome by a
huge sense of relief. “We’ve got people working on that, but the
honest answer is that we don’t know yet. But you can bet it’s
nothing good.”

He closed the plastic over the
harvester and shoved the reeking thing back into the luggage
compartment, then locked the door. Turning to Richards, he said
grimly, “There’s one more thing. The FBI’s been penetrated by at
least one collaborator, and you’re not going to believe who it
is.”

“Something tells me I’m not going to
like hearing this,” Richards grated.

Jack shook his head. “No, you’re
not. It’s the director herself. There may be more, we have a list
of the human collaborators and are trying to pin everyone down, but
EDS has known about the director for some time now.” He sighed.
“There’s worse.”

“Oh, please, bring it on,” Richards
told him sourly as he leaned back against the plane.

“The new President is a
collaborator, too,” Jack told him, “and I’d wager my next year’s
pay – if I had a job anymore – that he was involved in putting
together the assassination this morning.”

That struck Richards like a hammer,
and his face blanched. For a moment, Jack thought the man might
actually pass out on the tarmac.

“You okay?” Jack asked.

“What kind of a
stupid question is that?” Richards snapped as he rubbed his hands
over his bald head. “Of course I’m not okay. Everything I’ve
believed in my entire life has just been turned upside down, and
the thing that’s really making me angry is that I’m actually
believing this ridiculous, absurd...
shit!
”

“Nothing that you believe has been
turned upside down, Carl,” Jack reassured him. “It’s just that
we’re being lied to and led down a path toward our own destruction.
These things,” he gestured toward the closed cargo compartment
where the harvester lay, “may not even be from another world for
all we know, although the biologists in EDS believe they must be,
because their DNA is so different from ours. But that doesn’t
matter. What matters is that they’re a threat to our country and
our world, and the people we’ve spent our lives defending. That
part of your life, the part that’s been the most important to you,
hasn’t changed at all. Only the source of the threat
has.”

Richards blew out a deep breath and
looked out across the runway for a long moment, his face unreadable
and still except for a vein pulsing at his temple. On the other
side of the airport, a Boeing 737 roared into the sky from one of
the commercial runways.

As the airliner quickly shrank to a
glitter of sunlight reflecting from the jet’s wings, Richards
turned to Jack and said, “All right, hotshot. What’s the
plan?”

“That,” Jack told him uneasily, “is
a damn good question.”

***

“I want them
found.” President Norman Curtis sat behind his desk in the oval
office, glaring at the members of his National Security Council. In
what was an unusual circumstance in many respects, he had also
instructed the Director of the FBI, Monica Ridley, to attend. Among
the other men and women in the room, he was aware that she knew The
Secret. The terrible, wonderful Secret. “The people who did this,
these Earth Defense Society people. I want their heads on a
platter, and I want them
now!
” Turning to the Secretary of
Homeland Security, Jeffrey Komick, Curtis said icily, “What actions
have you taken, Jeffrey?”

Leaning forward on one of the sofas
that suddenly seemed incredibly uncomfortable, Komick took a deep
breath before answering. Curtis had never been a well-liked member
of the former President’s team. He was an extremely savvy
politician and was quite competent, but he had about him an aura of
cold arrogance and a fierce temper that had always been well-masked
in the presence of his former boss, but would become, Komick and
several other cabinet members feared, the norm for the country’s
new leader. Komick suspected it wouldn’t be long before he’d be in
search of another job, and the greater part of him was already
looking forward to it as a relief. However, like the others
gathered in the room, he put the needs of his country first, and he
would weather whatever Curtis brought to bear on him. For
now.