Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (46 page)

“Mister President,” Komick began,
his rasping voice filling the now-silent room, “starting where the
President...” he paused a moment, his mouth hanging open as his
mind replayed the horrifying scene of the explosion that killed his
longtime friend and hundreds of others, “...where the President was
killed, we’ve locked down concentric rings around Madison,
Wisconsin, blocking all road and air traffic with the help of the
National Guard.”

The Secretary of Transportation
shifted uncomfortably, but kept her eyes firmly fixed on Curtis.
When Komick had said that road and air traffic had been locked
down, he meant it quite literally: there was an unprecedented
gridlock forming around the now-beleaguered city of Madison that
was spreading like a tsunami, particularly through the nation’s
airspace. On the ground, tens of thousands of people were marooned
in their cars, unable to move, and the news had already reported a
number of small-scale disturbances that would soon build into
riots.

Curtis merely glanced her way, then
dismissed her with his eyes. “What else?” he said to
Komick.

“We’re searching everywhere and
everyone in the area,” Komick went on, “and of course we have every
available member of the law enforcement community combing the area,
looking for witnesses and clues. The various agencies under
Homeland Security have received thousands of tips already and we’re
coordinating with the Intelligence Community,” he nodded his head
at the Director for National Intelligence, “but so far we’ve come
up empty.”

“How about the FBI?” Curtis asked,
turning to Monica Ridley.

Far more relaxed than Komick, Ridley
explained, “We’ve got three hundred agents in Madison, with more on
the way. They’ve been conducting a thorough forensic examination of
the scene, but our analytic capabilities have been seriously
hampered by the destruction of the FBI lab at Quantico.” As Curtis
opened his mouth to speak, she went on smoothly, “But that hasn’t
stopped us from putting some pieces of the puzzle together.”
Turning to her notes, she went on, “The bomb appears to be very
similar to the ones used by EDS in their earlier attacks on the
seed storage facilities: it was an improvised fuel-air explosive
that was detonated in the basement of the auditorium where the
President was speaking. It was the same chemical composition as the
others, and roughly the same size.”

“That’s impossible,” Komick
interjected. “How did anyone get something like that past the
Secret Service protective detail?”

“No one got past them, Mr.
Secretary,” Ridley said. “The perpetrators were in the detail, not
outsiders. We believe that at least two of the Secret Service
agents assigned to the President’s protective detail that day were
associated with EDS. I doubt it was a coincidence that both of them
were on duty in the basement when the bomb went off.”

“They were suicide bombers?” someone
else asked. “That’s ridiculous.”

“That’s not what I said,” Ridley
said, clearly irritated. “I said that we believe at least two had
ties to EDS: they both had received money some time ago from Gary
Woolsey, a known EDS terrorist who burned down a New Horizons lab,
killing the occupants, and who died in prison shortly after his
conviction.” She looked up. “We haven’t found the bodies or remains
of the agents in the rubble, and at this point we have every reason
to believe they escaped after initiating the bomb, releasing the
fuel-air mixture into the basement, but before it
detonated.”

“Jesus!” Curtis exploded. “You mean
those bastards infiltrated the Secret Service?” He turned to the
Secretary of the Treasury. “I want every agent assigned to my
protective detail re-checked and re-cleared. Today.” Turning to
Ridley, he ordered, “You handle it. I don’t want this particular
investigation accidentally handed over to any moles. Get someone
who knows what the hell they’re doing. We don’t need any more
screwups.”

“Mr. President!” The Secretary of
the Treasury, under whom the Secret Service operated, blurted.
“Sir, I must protest! The Secret Service is not infested with
traitors! The director here so much as said she doesn’t have any
direct evidence: this is all pure speculation. And–”

“Enough!” Curtis shouted. Leaning
forward, he fixed the man with a glare. “The President of the
United States, who was a close friend of mine for the last thirty
years, was assassinated this morning. I don’t plan on being the
next victim, or have my family fall prey to these...savages. If it
causes your department some discomfort to be investigated, too bad.
Let’s face it: the only logical answer is that it had to have been
an inside job. That school was swept and cleared multiple times,
just like every other place that’s visited by the President. Some
guy dressed up as a janitor didn’t just wheel a bomb in there.”
Softening his voice slightly, he said, “This week has already seen
enough tragedies. I don’t want any more. I expect you to give
Director Ridley your full cooperation.” Looking around the room, he
added, “And that goes for all of you. The gloves come off and the
brass knuckles go on. I want these EDS people found.”

“And then what?” Komick asked
quietly.

Curtis compressed his mouth into a
thin hard line before he spoke. “And then,” he said, “I want
justice done.”

***

After Curtis brought the meeting to
a close, he ushered everyone out but Ridley. Collapsing onto the
sofa beside her, he tiredly rubbed his hands over his
eyes.

“I ran a marathon once,” he said
quietly. “For two days I felt like I’d been steamrollered. I feel
now like I’ve just finished a dozen marathons.”

Ridley glanced around the Oval
Office, a look of concern on her face. She’d only found out the day
before that Curtis was in on The Secret, but hadn’t expected him to
speak openly about it.

Curtis chuckled, knowing what she
was thinking. “I’ve received assurances from our friends that we’re
secure here,” he told her. “But it always makes me wonder what was
really said during those eighteen and a half minutes missing from
Nixon’s Watergate tapes. I’ll bet they know.”

“It makes me wonder if we should be
speaking at all,” she told him bluntly. It was true that he was the
President now, and her boss, but they had a very unique
relationship because of their shared knowledge of The
Secret.

“We don’t really have a choice,” he
told her. “Things have gotten out of control, and we have to be
able to coordinate our efforts more closely. And the first part of
that is that we have got to stop these EDS bastards. The terrorist
attacks were bad enough, but what they did this morning...” He
shook his head sadly. Curtis had no illusions that he could be a
cold hearted son of a bitch, but the man who had died that morning
on the podium had indeed been a close friend. Curtis had hoped to
someday reveal The Secret to him, because the President had been a
man of vision, a man of dreams. And The Secret, once it could truly
be unveiled, would be a dream the likes of which humankind had
never known. “We need to find them, Monica. I don’t care how you do
it, but we’ve got to make sure they don’t interfere with the rest
of the plan.”

“Is New Horizons ready?” she
asked.

He nodded. “Yes. I hate to say it,
but the terrorist attacks and the recent virus outbreak have been
catalysts we can take advantage of. I’ve received confirmation from
Dr. Kempf that the final retrovirus variant is ready. She told me
what’s in it: a full-scope cure for almost every disease we have! I
can’t believe what they can do,” he said in unabashed awe. “It will
cure people of everything from cancer to the common cold! And so
easily!”

“Maybe it’s too easy,” Ridley said
quietly.

“No,” he said firmly. “Years of
research and billions of dollars have gone into this. This wasn’t
something that just popped out of thin air. It took our technology
a while to catch up to their genius, their almost instinctive
understanding of genetics, but now...”

“Now we can play
God,” Ridley filled in for him. “Or have
them
play God for us. Even our
brightest scientists don’t understand much of what they’re doing.
You realize that, don’t you?”

“What difference would it make?” he
asked. “Would my daughter be alive today if it wasn’t for them?
Would you?”

Ridley looked down at her clasped
hands. Shortly after she’d graduated from the FBI Academy at
Quantico, she was diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, that threatened to destroy
her life, her future. It was more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s
disease, and affected the nerve cells of the brain and spinal cord
that control voluntary muscle movement. The diagnosis was even more
shocking because it was most commonly found in people who were in
their forties or older; Ridley was in her early twenties. The
thought of what her future held was unbearable, and she had begun
contemplating suicide to avoid the hellish life that she saw
looming before her.

In a coincidental encounter, she met
Dr. Rachel Kempf, who told her that her company was conducting some
top secret government-sanctioned genetics research that might be
able to stop the progression of the disease, or even cure it
altogether. Ridley was certain that even an experimental treatment
that could possibly kill her was better than the inevitability of
the disease that would slowly destroy her.

Kempf invited her to a small lab in
San Diego, California, for treatment. Kempf’s company, a
pharmaceutical firm that Ridley had never heard of, would pay all
the expenses: Ridley was simply to play tourist and enjoy herself
while the experimental miracle cure worked its magic.

And it did. In only a few days, the
early onset symptoms of the disease that Ridley had been
experiencing – weakness in her hands and a slight but noticeable
slur in her speech – disappeared. Kempf showed her the MRI scans
from before and after the treatment, where the abnormalities she
had identified in Ridley’s brain and spinal cord before the
treatment were completely gone. Ridley was cured.
Permanently.

It was the most emotional moment of
Ridley’s life, and that’s when Kempf chose to reveal what she truly
was, taking the form of a humanoid being that was half again as
tall as Ridley, with smooth white skin and a bright red feathery
crest along her elongated spine. Looking down at Ridley with
tremendous almond-shaped eyes, she told Ridley The Secret, that
what they had done for her, they hoped to do for all humankind. But
a secret it must remain, for there were many who would oppose what
Kempf and the others like her sought to bestow upon
humanity.

Ridley had no choice but to believe,
for she was living proof. She became a convert, a zealot. And every
day of her life since then had been devoted to making that dream
come true for everyone.

Yet, she couldn’t avoid a gnawing
sense of doubt as time went on. As she steadily climbed the ladder
in the Bureau, Kempf and a few others of her kind exposed more and
more of their plans to her so she could better guide events around
them. Most of what she’d come to find out was benign, but there
were disturbing discrepancies, such as the unfortunate deaths of
several of Kempf’s chief researchers in a car accident a year ago,
followed by the disappearance of Dr. Naomi Perrault. Ridley still
believed the story that Perrault hadn’t been able to accept The
Secret, and had instead believed it to be an insidious plot to
destroy humanity. But having worked for over twenty years in the
FBI, Ridley couldn’t help but analyze the data she had seen, and
doubt had steadily encroached into her vision of a halcyon
future.

Looking up at Curtis, she knew that
his daughter’s story wasn’t far removed from her own. The girl had
been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer at the age of ten, when
Curtis had been a junior senator. Kempf had paid him a visit and
offered an experimental therapy that might cure his daughter. That
the girl had cancer wasn’t yet known to the public, and Kempf’s one
inviolable condition was that if the treatment was a success, it
was to remain a secret.

With no hope forthcoming from the
world of conventional medicine, Curtis readily agreed. Like Ridley,
his daughter was miraculously cured in a matter of days, and today
was enjoying a very healthy and successful time at Harvard
University. After Curtis was convinced that his daughter was indeed
healthy and cancer-free, Kempf had revealed herself and The Secret
to him. He, too, had become a ready and willing convert.

That chapter of the Curtis family’s
life had been carefully orchestrated to make sure that the public
never knew the true nature of his daughter’s medical condition. The
official story had been that she had been diagnosed with a serious
but fully treatable liver ailment.

Ridley had only found out that
Curtis knew The Secret the day before through Kempf, who had also
told Curtis of her story. Keepers of The Secret were rarely
introduced to one another, Kempf had explained, but she had felt
they both needed to know in order to more effectively run EDS to
ground. It had come as a shock to Curtis to learn that Ridley had
been in on The Secret for over twenty years, and it had made them
both wonder just how long The Others had been on Earth, working on
their miracle cure. But Kempf’s only answer to that question had
been, “A very long time.”