Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (50 page)

As Richards moved back around the
counter, trying to make it to the hallway, Ridley fired several
shots at him from behind the corner of the sofa, and he was stung
with fiery pain as a slug nicked his shoulder. He aimed his weapon
at her, had her face right in his sight picture even as she was
shooting at him, but at the last second changed his aim slightly.
Even in this life or death moment, he couldn’t bring himself to
kill his director. He fired, the .44 magnum bullet blasting into
the parquet wood floor right in front of her, sending shards of
wood into her face. Screaming in pain, Ridley pulled back behind
the sofa.

Two shots
left
, Richards told himself automatically
as he sprinted for the hallway.

Just as he turned
into the hallway he heard a blood-freezing screech behind him.
Turning, unable to help himself, he stared, transfixed with horror,
as one of the creatures, a harvester, rose up from behind the
sofa.
Clement
,
his mind gibbered. He was one of them.

A long tendril, tipped by a stinger,
uncoiled from the creature’s thorax and arrowed toward Richards. It
would have hit him right in the chest, except the two remaining
bullets that Richards fired were far faster. Both slammed into the
harvester’s center of mass, driving it backwards, insectile limbs
flailing, into the living room, where it crashed into Ridley’s
glass coffee table.

Richards didn’t wait to see if he’d
killed it. Clutching his bleeding shoulder, he turned and
ran.

***

“Hold still!”

Ridley heard Clement’s voice from
above her. She was blinded by the blood that had flooded into her
eyes from the hail of splinters Richards’ shot had sent into her
face. Most of them had sliced into her forehead and scalp, but she
was terrified that some had hit her eyes. She felt something
daubing at her face, then Clement’s voice again.

“Your eyes are okay,” he reassured
her, carefully wiping the last of the blood from her eyelids with a
hand towel he’d grabbed from the kitchen. “You can open
them.”

She did as he told her, blinking
away the last of the blood. “Jesus,” she hissed as he helped her up
onto the sofa, pain searing her scalp from the dozen splinters
lodged there. Blood still streamed freely down her face, but she
ignored it. Looking at Clement, she said, “I heard...something
horrible. What was it?”

He shook his head. “Probably just me
screaming, bellowing like a mad cow,” he told her, forcing a smile.
The smile faded. “Or more likely it was you screaming. That and the
sound of the shots in a confined space would certainly mess with
your hearing.” He looked at her more closely. “You were damn lucky,
Director. If he’d had slightly better aim, we wouldn’t be having
this conversation.”

Ridley was about to tell him that
Richards hadn’t missed: she’d seen him shift his aim, the big bore
of the revolver moving ever so slightly just before her world had
exploded in a cordite glare as Richards pulled the
trigger.

But before she could say anything
more, there was a stampede of shouts and footsteps out in the
hall.

“I’m just glad we’d scheduled this
meeting,” she said hurriedly. She had decided on her own that she
was going to bring Clement in on The Secret, and had set up a
meeting with him here, where she could show him her medical records
as proof. He was her lead man now in the hunt for the EDS, and she
felt he needed to know, to understand, everything that was going on
in order to aid his search efforts.

Unfortunately, that would now have
to wait. The shock was wearing off, and the pain from the wood
shards was nearly unbearable. She considered herself to be tough,
but her body was shivering in agony. “I just wish I’d had time to
tell you what I wanted to,” she whispered. “You really need to
know–”

“We’ll have that conversation soon,”
he reassured her, gently holding her hand as a pair of cops
carefully moved into the condo, weapons ready and shouting for
Clement to identify himself, “but first we’ve got to get you to the
hospital.” Holding up his badge, he turned to the cops and shouted,
“Federal agents! I need paramedics in here right now!” Turning back
to Ridley, he said quietly, “In the meantime, I’m going to find
that bastard Richards and run him down.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE

“What the hell was he thinking?”
Naomi demanded angrily after Jack told her what Richards had
done.

Jack had just spoken to him over a
secure voice link through the Internet that they had set up for use
in case of an emergency. Jack had known the day would soon come
when they would have to use it, but hadn’t expected it to be quite
so soon. He had been totally surprised that Richards had done
something so spontaneous, but in retrospect he should have known:
the senior agent had been shaken to the core, far more so than
Jack, by the revelation that the FBI Director had been an agent of
the harvesters. Richards could never have simply walked away from
such an insult to the institution that had been his life for almost
twenty years.

After hearing Richards’ brief but
pointed description of the encounter with Ridley and Clement, Jack
had offered to send the Falcon to fetch him, but Richards had
tersely informed him that he had made his own travel
arrangements.

“Take that plane and get rid of it,”
he had advised Jack. “They made the connection between you and the
jet, and there are going to be agents swarming into California to
track you down. I’ll get to you on my own. Assuming you’re still
alive.”

Then he had hung up.

Returning his attention to Naomi,
Jack said, “I had no idea he’d do something like confronting the
director. And finding out that Clement was a harvester...” He shook
his head. “He wasn’t on either list!”

“He must have been replaced
recently,” Renee said. It was just the three of them at the
conference table in the command center. “Remember, the list we have
was just a local copy from Kempf’s laptop. It was a snapshot. There
must be a master copy somewhere on a server that all of them can
get to that has current information.”

“It doesn’t really matter now,” Jack
told them. “We’re out of time.”

Trying to shed her anger, which was
more a manifestation of fear of what the coming hours might bring,
Naomi asked, “Are you ready, Renee?”

“We’ve got everything lined up,” she
answered.

“I just hope this works,” Jack told
her.

“Me, too,” Renee said in a voice
that suddenly sounded small and vulnerable. Jack knew that she felt
confident in her plan, but the world was literally on Renee’s
shoulders now: if this failed, there was no backup option, no “plan
B.” The Earth as they knew it would very likely die.

“Then let’s get to it,” Naomi said,
getting up from the table. She let Renee go through the door to the
command center first, then lingered for just a moment.
“Jack...”

His arms were suddenly around her,
drawing her to him, and her lips met his. It was only a moment, but
it was something they both needed.

“For luck,” she whispered as they
reluctantly separated and followed Renee.

The command center was fully manned,
but was quiet, tense. This was Renee’s show, and she took her place
in the central command console like the conductor of an orchestra.
All eyes looked to her, then to the main screens as she began to
initialize her plan.

“Since we can’t destroy all the seed
at the source,” she muttered, as if she were talking herself
through it all again while she typed commands into the computers
linked to her console, “the next most logical step is to intercept
it during shipment. Or,” she said with the hint of a grin as she
hammered a few last commands into the keyboard, “take control of it
right from the plant itself.”

Half of the main screen at the front
of the room echoed what she was seeing on her computer console:
windows spawned on the screen showing logins for a dozen shipping
companies.

“I couldn’t hack into the New
Horizons computers at the plant,” she said. “Their security was too
good. But the trucking companies they’ve contracted with were
another matter.”

With a final tap on the keyboard,
the logins in the open windows began to flicker, filled and
refilled with letters and numbers as Renee’s hacks began to work
their magic. One after another, her software gained access to the
systems of the companies that New Horizons had contracted to ship
the seed.

“Then,” Renee muttered as she typed
more commands, “we reroute the trucks to go where we want. New
Horizons is having a huge media event over this, so they’re sending
out the first batch of seed in a wave of eighteen
wheelers.”

Vehicle tracking and delivery
schedules appeared on the main screen, and Jack had a hard time
following everything Renee was doing: windows were popping into
existence, data scrolling rapidly, then suddenly disappearing as
she took control of the companies’ routing schedules.

Blinking his eyes clear of the mass
of information on the right half of the screen, he focused his
attention on the left half, which he could actually understand. It
showed a map of red pinpoints clustered around the New Horizons
plant in Nebraska: a huge fleet of trucks coming in empty, and
leaving with a full load of genetically modified seed.

“Now,” she went on, her fingers
still on the keyboard, “the trucks should receive new dispatch
instructions after they leave the plant, rerouting them to new
destinations.” Another map window popped up, zoomed out to show the
entire country. “We’re getting teams together at each of these
sites,” she highlighted five locations, scattered over as many
states, “to isolate the seed so we can properly neutralize
it.”

“How are they going to do that?”
Jack asked as he watched data flow across the screen. “And isn’t
someone going to get suspicious about the changes in the
destinations?”

“She’s diverting the grain to other
deep underground facilities we have,” Naomi explained as she
watched the swarm of glowing icons moving across the map. “Three of
them are abandoned mines. The other two are other Cold War bunkers,
smaller than this one, but still big enough to safely house the New
Horizons seed until we can properly dispose of it. If nothing else,
we’ll be able to keep it out of the environment.”

“As for someone noticing the
change,” Renee added with an uncomfortable shrug, “that’s always
possible. But most of these guys,” she nodded toward the map,
indicating the truckers, “don’t get paid to ask a lot of questions.
They get paid to haul cargo. All they’ll see is a destination
change in their shipping orders on the trucks’ computer displays.”
She looked up, catching Jack’s eye. “We know from the contract
specifications I nabbed that all the trucks had to have computer
connectivity with a New Horizons central dispatch system. That way
the trucks could be tracked with GPS, and New Horizons could send
them routing updates or destination changes. Since New Horizons
deals with crops and not trucks, they contracted out for the
central dispatch service, which I was able to hack into.” Looking
back at the screen, she murmured. “Now we wait and see if it
works.”

Five minutes went by, then ten. More
and more red icons, more trucks, dispersed from the New Horizons
plant, bearing their lethal cargo.

“Come on,” Renee whispered, glaring
at the map on the main screen.

A wave of the red icons suddenly
turned yellow.

“That’s it!” Renee called to the men
and women manning the other consoles. “The first set of updates has
been sent out. Make sure every one of those damn trucks diverts
from its original route.”

On her own workstation, she zoomed
in closer to the map, following the icons for three trucks she’d
chosen at random that had turned from red to yellow. The computer
had plotted their most likely path to their original destinations
in red, and the projected path to the new destination in
yellow.

“Turn, you bastard,” Renee murmured
as the first truck neared the projected turn.

Jack and Naomi watched over Renee’s
shoulder, their attention riveted on her computer screens. The
yellow icon of the first truck slowed, then turned onto the new
route. The other two, trailing about a quarter mile behind one
another, followed.

“Yes!” Renee shouted jubilantly.
“It’s working!”

Leaning down, Jack gave her a quick
kiss on the cheek. “You’re bloody amazing,” he
whispered.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” Renee told
him, “but you can give me a big smooch after we’ve accounted for
every one of these bastards. We’re still a long way from being out
of the woods.”

“And then, of course,” Naomi said,
“we have to deal with the little problem of the facility
itself.”

Jack frowned. That was the one part
of the plan that he hadn’t liked at all, but Naomi had made it
clear that Jack was staying put. Staying here. “Hathcock’s a good
man. He and his team will take care of it.”

Hathcock and eight other men had
boarded the Falcon on a quick turnaround from the nearby airport
and had headed back to Nebraska as fast as a grumbling Ferris could
fly them after they’d gotten back from Baltimore.