Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (6 page)

Jack turned away from the words on
the screen in disgust. Either someone had played an incredibly bad
joke with the paper that had been stuffed down Sheldon’s throat, or
the Earth Defense Society, the EDS, had at least one homicidal
lunatic with the balls or stupidity to murder an FBI special
agent.

What made him angry was that he
wanted Sheldon to have suffered and died for something important.
The thought that some lunatic who believed in garbage like Area 51
might have killed him for nothing more than some bizarre delusion
turned Jack’s stomach.

Gritting his teeth, he forced
himself to read the rest of what the site had to say, mostly
elaborating on the ridiculous “aliens are here to eat us” theme.
Over the next three hours, he read every page on the site, taking
notes as he went. He didn’t write down anything having to do with
the alien invasion trash, only the tidbits he thought might be
important to obtain a warrant to go after this “society.” He knew
that Richards would have a dozen people doing the same thing right
now, but that didn’t matter: this was something Jack had to do, and
it was always possible he’d find a tidbit that they might have
missed.

The big prize was Naomi D. Perrault,
Ph.D., M.D., who seemed to be the leading contributor to the site.
There weren’t any pictures of her, but there was plenty of
impressive-sounding biographic information, presumably to help
legitimize her ridiculous claims. What really caught his eye was
that she was a former senior researcher at New Horizons, who
claimed to have jumped ship after she discovered that little green
men were guiding the development of genetically engineered crops at
New Horizons for their own nefarious purposes.

Yeah,
right
, he thought coldly.
Men from Mars are the last thing you should be
worrying about now, lady
.

Since there weren’t any photos of
her on the EDS site, he went digging around on the New Horizons
site, hoping there would still be something left from when she’d
been working for the company. He found a small bio that said
nothing that was different from the EDS site, and a slew of papers
she had written that were so technical he had no idea what they
said. But there were no photos.

Moving on to FIDS and several state
and federal databases, he found something truly disturbing: every
document that matched her name had a photo of an obese African
American male. Whoever she was, someone had gone to extraordinary
lengths to mask her electronic past.

His cell phone rang.

“Dawson,” he said.

“I hope you’ve been spending your
crying time wisely, Dawson,” he heard Richards say.

“What the hell is that supposed to
mean?” Jack said, shocked that Richards had bothered to call
him.

“The EDS site,” Richards answered.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t been pawing through every ridiculous
word of it.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Sorry. I’m not
trying to muck around in your turf, but I couldn’t help looking.
Now, I’m almost sorry I did.”

“Don’t be. The whole EDS thing
smells like one big murdering rat,” Richards said, barely
restrained anger evident in his voice. “And since you did me a good
turn, I figured I’d return the favor, although if you ever breathe
a word of any of this to Clement, I’ll kick your ass.”

“Thanks, Richards,” Jack said,
meaning it. “I appreciate it.”

“Forget the mushy sentiments,”
Richards told him brusquely, returning to the matter at hand. “I’ve
had an entire team turning that web site upside down and inside
out, and tracing down every individual and other site that’s
associated with it. The individuals they list on the contributor
page appear to be real people, but all of their critical records
have either been tampered with or deleted. Social security,
military documents, driver’s licenses, bank records, credit cards.
Everything. The guys from the Cyber Division that I’ve talked to
about this weren’t happy at all: whoever did this was good. Really
good. And I’m getting really tired of seeing the same fat black guy
that they used to replace every goddamn photo of these people.”
Jack grunted his agreement, wondering why they’d chosen that
particular photo. “He actually turned out to be a lead,” Richards
went on. “We ran an image match and found him. The only problem is
that he died three months ago of a heart attack, right after he was
tossed into Joliet prison. Go figure.”

“What was he in for?”

“Arson,” Richards told him. “Our
late friend Gary S. Woolsey got caught torching a lab called
Outland Genetics in Chicago nine months ago. He managed to burn the
facility to the ground, killing the CEO and four
employees.”

“Jesus,” Jack said, stunned. “And
let me guess: Outland Genetics was somehow involved in genetically
engineered crops.”

“Bingo,” Richards said. “And get
this. According to the trial records, his attorney was loony enough
to put Woolsey on the stand, and under cross examination by the
prosecution he broke down. He confessed to the whole damn thing,
apologizing for killing the employees, who were, as he put it, ‘at
least fellow humans.’ He claimed the CEO was a goddamn alien. After
that, his counsel tried to plead an insanity defense.”

“The jury didn’t swallow that trash,
I take it.”

“No,” Richards said. “Neither did
the judge. It was a quick trial, and Woolsey got five consecutive
life sentences, with no parole. Not that he got to enjoy much of
Joliet’s hospitality before he kicked off.” He paused. “The weird
thing was that he had no priors, not even a parking ticket. He just
came out of the blue and murdered five people.”

“What was his
background?”

“Would you believe that he used to
work for New Horizons?” Richards told him.

“No shit?” Jack said, furiously
scribbling notes. “Was he a geneticist?”

“No,” Richards said. “We got his bio
from the legal people at New Horizons, who are happily bending over
backwards for us on this. It turns out that Woolsey was an IT guy,
a network engineer type. He was the head honcho of their wide area
network infrastructure linking up the company’s labs across the
country. And – get this – he was also the guy who led the IT
installation at Lincoln Research University.”

Jack sat there,
watching as the pencil in his right hand, as if it were moving of
its own accord, made a dotted line on his notepad from Woolsey’s
name to Sheldon’s, then made a big question mark in the middle.
“Can we get a list of the facilities that he may have worked
on?”
What are the odds that they’re the
same facilities that had been hacked, and that Sheldon had been
investigating?
he asked
himself.

“I don’t know,” Richards said, “but
we’ll ask.”

“So what happened to him?” Jack
asked.

“They fired his ass a year ago,”
Richards replied. “Get this: when he wasn’t installing networks for
the company, he was robbing them blind. If he needed five routers,
he’d bill the company for ten and sell the rest on the
side.”

“That seems a little obvious for
somebody who was smart enough to be a network engineer,” Jack told
him.

“Even bright people do stupid
things,” Richards replied. “In any case, he got caught in a routine
internal audit and was terminated for cause.”

“A year ago,” Jack mused. “Right
about the same time that our good friend Dr. Perrault left the
company.”

“It wasn’t ‘right about the same
time,’” Richards told him. “It was the very same week. New Horizons
said that Perrault walked out after being accused of trying to
steal proprietary technology by her boss.”

“And who was that?” Jack
asked.

“Dr. Rachel Kempf,” Richards told
him. “She’s–”

“–
the scary-looking dean at
LRU,” Jack finished for him. “So, Perrault joined the staff at LRU
when it opened its doors?”

“Right. She was one of their star
attractions.” Jack heard him rustling some paper notes in the
background. “Let’s see: she got her doctorate from Harvard’s
Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at the ridiculously
young age of eighteen, won just about every prize you can win in
the field of genetics, then went on to get her M.D. before being
picked up by New Horizons as a senior researcher. She spent the
next nine years playing a key role in developing the company’s
genetically engineered commercial crops, and was hand-picked by
Kempf over a ton of other well-known researchers for a first-string
position on the new LRU faculty lineup.

“Then a year ago, just when Woolsey
pulls his little arson stunt, good Dr. Perrault is caught stealing
company secrets and they kick her out on the curb,” Richards
finished.

Jack frowned. “I don’t get it,” Jack
told him. “She was one of the stars of the show, and then she
suddenly decides to risk it all by trying to steal from the
company? Something’s not adding up here. How much was she
making?”

“According to New Horizons, at the
tender age of twenty-eight, just before she walked out, Dr.
Perrault was pulling down an annual salary of one and a half
million, plus bonuses and options. So figure a gross income of
nearly three mil a year.” He chuckled, but there was no humor in
the sound. “Sort of makes you wish that you’d been born a genius,
doesn’t it?”

“But if she was making that much,
what was the motive for stealing something?” Jack asked.

Richards sighed in resignation, as
if Jack were a complete idiot. “Greed, Dawson. You could give the
moon to some people and they’d still try to steal the stars if they
could reach them.”

“Did New Horizons know what happened
to her after she left?”

“They told me that she just
disappeared,” Richards said. “Poof. They hired an army of private
investigators to find her, but she was just gone. Ironically, one
of Perrault’s neighbors called the cops because she hadn’t seen
Perrault for days, and the good doctor always told her when she was
going on vacation.”

“Did the PIs find anything?” Jack
asked.

“Not a goddamn thing to follow up
on,” Richards told him bluntly. “All that was missing for certain
was Perrault’s laptop, which she took with her everywhere, and her
cat. The only other oddity that popped up was that there wasn’t a
single photograph of her in the house. None of the neighbors saw
her after the day she left the LRU campus. Her car was still in the
garage, and there weren’t any obvious signs that she’d packed in a
hurry to flee. She also didn’t have a security service, so there
weren’t any records of when she might have entered the house that
day. And after she left, there was no trail from her credit cards,
ATMs, phone, or her known computer accounts. No hits on her
passport or airline ticketing. Nothing. She just dropped off the
grid. And she has no known surviving family: she was an only child
and her parents died in a car wreck when she was in college. We’re
still trying to find any friends or extended family, but so far the
only thing we’ve got is the EDS web site.”

“She had tons of money,” Jack mused,
“so it wouldn’t have been impossible for her to disappear, and
there are ways she could maintain a presence on the web – assuming
what’s on the EDS site is really from her – and not be easily
traced. But if she did a disappearing act, she must have prepared
it in advance: that’s not the sort of thing you could manage at the
drop of a hat. It also seems a little extreme for the trouble she
was in with the company. It’s not like she’d committed murder,
after all. At least, not then,” he added darkly.

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Richards
told him. “One of the New Horizons reps told me that the technology
involved in the theft she was accused of was potentially worth
billions. They weren’t just going to let her walk away with it.
Hang on,” he said suddenly. In the background, he barked some
orders at someone as if he or she were a complete idiot. Then he
came back on.

“Stupid idiot people,” Richards
growled. “We’re still trying to track down Kempf. She’s on vacation
in Italy, and we’ve got the Legal Attaché in Rome yammering at the
Italians to scour the countryside for her. Apparently she refuses
to take a cell phone when she travels, and the only other way to
contact her is to leave a message with her travel agent, who gets a
call from her once every few days to check if she’s gotten any
messages. Idiot. And speaking of traveling, are you up for a
drive?”

Glancing at his watch, Jack
grimaced. It was just after midnight. He’d been awake since five
a.m. and felt completely exhausted. “Sure,” he lied.

“Good. Because if you manage not to
kill yourself in a car wreck on the way to Quantico, maybe you can
sweet-talk your lab analyst friend down there into letting you look
at what we’re sending back. There’s certainly plenty of blood for
her to sample before the rest of the forensics and ballistics
people can touch anything. The plane should be arriving at
Washington National in two hours. Even if you take a nice little
nap and a shower, you shouldn’t have any trouble beating the team
couriering the evidence down to the lab.”

Jack’s “lab analyst friend” was
Jerri Tanaka, Ph.D., who worked in the FBI’s DNA Analysis Unit that
specialized in characterizing nuclear DNA from blood or other body
fluids. The unit was part of the state of the art FBI Laboratory
facility located at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Quantico,
Virginia, about a forty minute drive from Jack’s home.