Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (64 page)

As he read, Monica Ridley’s eyes
closed, and Richards liked to think that she was imagining the
places and images conjured by Frost’s words, that they were taking
her far away from this reality to a better place.

He didn’t know how long he’d been
reading to her when her pulse rate monitor stuttered, then went to
a flat line as her heart finally gave out.

Wiping away a tear that threatened
to fall from his eyes, Richards closed the book. He wanted to stay
here for a while, to try and sort through his own feelings, but
that wasn’t his way.

Leaning over the bed, he kissed
Ridley on the forehead and placed the book in her hands. Then he
quietly left the room.

Duty called.

***

Major Elaine Harris stood in front
of the mirror in her quarters at Minot Air Force Base. Wearing her
Class A dress uniform, she gave herself a critical appraisal,
making sure everything was perfect.

Her life had been
a surreal nightmare since the day she had dropped the bomb over
California. When the blast wave shook the plane, she had circled
around Sutter Buttes and, in violation of her own rules, peeled
back the blast curtain to look outside. Her heart had nearly
stopped at the sight of the black and orange mushroom cloud that
rose from where the bomb,
her
bomb, had detonated.

She had spent the next few hours,
for as long as the plane’s load of fuel would give her, orbiting
the buttes, staring at the mushroom cloud while her crew tried to
help clear air traffic from the area over the radio. She finally
descended into a state of near-catatonia, and her copilot had been
forced to fly the plane back to Minot by himself.

The court of inquiry that inevitably
followed had cleared her and her crew of any wrongdoing, and
presented her with the surprising scenario that terrorists had
somehow been responsible, and that she and her crew simply happened
to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But she knew better. She had looked
at the radiological data, the fallout dispersal patterns and, most
tellingly, at imagery of the site after the blast. Had a bomb gone
off at or below ground, there would have been a crater. A big one.
But there wasn’t. It had clearly been an air burst, and there was
no way the terrorists could have somehow flung a nuclear weapon
high enough into the air.

The subsequent investigation into
security breaches that had allowed nuclear weapons to be loaded
aboard aircraft without proper authorization only confirmed her
suspicions. It was a practice that, to everyone’s shock and dismay,
had been going on for years.

No. The bomb had been dropped from
her plane. It didn’t matter how it had gotten aboard. She had been
the pilot in command. It had been her responsibility. And thousands
of innocent people had died.

She had been exonerated, although
she’d been taken off flight status until the flight surgeons were
confident that she was psychologically prepared to fly
again.

She already knew when that would be:
never. She had dreams every night, and they were filled with
nightmares of the one thousand three hundred and seventy-five souls
who had died from the bomb. Her bomb. The court had cleared her,
but her conscience hadn’t, and never would.

Looking in the mirror now, she saw
what she wanted to see, what had once been: a distinguished young
officer who had a bright future in the Air Force, and in
life.

Before the image could fade from her
mind, she put her service Baretta 9mm pistol under her chin and
pulled the trigger.

***

Renee turned from
her laptop to watch the news. She was a fledgling FBI agent now, of
a sort. Richards had asked her to fill in as a consultant to follow
up on what EDS had been doing unilaterally, but that was now a
government responsibility. Pending the official stand-up of the new
agency that Jack and Naomi would lead, once their personalities had
been sanitized, the FBI had the bulk of the responsibility for
tying up as many loose ends as possible. As for Richards, she liked
him, even though he was an ass, and had a sneaking suspicion that
he might feel the same way toward her.
It
could make for an interesting combination
,
she thought idly.

Suddenly, she spilled the coffee
she’d been holding into her lap as the news commentator relayed
some breaking news.

“The Justice Department announced
today that the CEO, Mr. Aaron Steinbecke, and the board of
directors of New Horizons Corporation have been arrested by the FBI
and the company’s assets and records seized in a series of massive
raids across the country this morning.” The video switched from the
commentator’s talking head to a series of clips showing FBI agents
and local police SWAT teams battering down doors and entering labs
and company offices, and of Steinbecke being hauled away in cuffs.
“The Justice Department announcement that was released only thirty
minutes ago charges that Steinbecke and the others were responsible
for developing genetically modified agricultural seeds that were
intended as weapons of mass destruction, and that they were working
in concert with the terrorist group known as the Earth Defense
Society, which was responsible for the nuclear explosion in central
California last week that claimed over a thousand
lives.”

“Fuck you,” Renee said under her
breath. She had to stick with the story that she had been at the
beach that day, and had never heard of EDS, New Horizons, or any of
the others. It was a supreme injustice, but something she and the
others couldn’t argue about.

“In what is believed to be a related
action,” the commentator went on, the video now shifting to a view
of President Curtis in the Oval Office with his cabinet, “President
Curtis has ordered a full investigation of all members of the
government who formerly worked for New Horizons. As of this
morning, the head of the Food and Drug Administration and several
other senior civilians and military officers handed in their
resignations. In addition, the President has penned an executive
order for the Food and Drug Administration, mandating that all
products containing genetically modified organisms be banned until
or unless the product has been fully evaluated for health concerns
by an independent review group...”

“Looks like the President’s got a
new broom and isn’t afraid to use it,” she heard a familiar voice
say from behind her.

She turned to look at Richards, who
sauntered up to her workstation. She was about to make a wise-ass
remark until she saw the chat message that had popped up on her
screen while she’d been watching the news broadcast on the larger
monitor hanging from the ceiling. It was Marion Henderson, the team
leader at one of the disposal sites they’d diverted the New
Horizons trucks to. The good news had been that, with Curtis seeing
the light, the “terrorists” of the EDS no longer had to take care
of disposing of all the seeds they had redirected: they were now
working with teams of military and civilian specialists to safely
and completely destroy them.

But there was a problem.

“Oh, shit,” Renee whispered as she
looked at what Marion had sent her.

One bag is missing
from 378
.

“What is it?” Richards said, leaning
over her shoulder.

“We accounted for all the trucks
that left the plant,” Renee told him as she called up Marion over
the Internet. “Every single one of them. And each one had a
shipping invoice listing the number of bags of seed that had been
loaded. Every truck’s inventory has been accounted for. This one,
truck 378, is the last to be counted, and we’re missing a damn
bag.”

The number only rang once before
Marion answered it. “Renee?”

“It’s me,” Renee
confirmed.

“We’ve counted four times,” Marion
told her, “and every time we’ve come up one bag short of what’s on
the manifest.”

“This is Deputy Director Richards,”
Richards interjected, ignoring Renee’s frown. “Did the driver make
any stops?”

“No, sir,” Marion answered. “He says
he didn’t, and the tracking information on the truck that we pulled
from the central monitoring center confirms that. The truck didn’t
stop for anything longer than a traffic light before it arrived
here.”

“And the trailer
was sealed?” Richards asked tensely, exchanging a worried look with
Renee.
One bag
,
they were both thinking. How many seeds were in a bag? Thousands?
Tens of thousands? And every one of them could produce a plant that
could in turn produce...
them
.

“Yes, sir,” came the answer. “With a
heavy duty padlock. The drivers weren’t given the keys, because the
trailers were to stay sealed until they arrived at their
distribution points. It was still intact when the truck got here.
We had to get a torch to cut it off so we could open the trailer.
It must be an error on the manifest. Or the bag was never loaded
and is...somewhere else. We may never know.”

“Hell,” Richards growled.

A sliver of ice
ran down Renee’s spine.
Hell
indeed
.

***

Six months later, Bryce Moore sat in
a rocking chair on the back porch of his home just outside of San
Antonio, Texas. The sun was just going down, and the sky was every
fiery shade of red and orange. Behind him, two cats, a big Siberian
male with a tuxedo coat and a white Turkish Angora with a long scar
down her flank, watched him from the big window of the living room.
The Siberian lived with him, while the Angora was a frequent
visitor.

“Here,” the woman sitting in a
rocker right next to his said, taking his wine glass and refilling
it. Her name was Angelina Matheson. They were coworkers, joint
heads of a government think-tank that had been established here to
study the long-term effects of soil erosion on agricultural
productivity. Or so their friends and neighbors outside of work
were led to believe. It was a topic that was important, but that
most people wouldn’t want to pursue for more than thirty seconds in
the course of casual conversation before switching to the far more
interesting details of the news or the mundane events of everyday
life. It was a good cover for their real work, which was to quietly
keep humanity safe, to protect the world from monsters. Parents
told their children that monsters were only the stuff of
nightmares, that they weren’t real; Bryce and Angelina knew
better.

“God, that’s beautiful,” Angelina
sighed at nature’s display before taking a sip of wine.

Turning to look at her, Bryce
suddenly knew what his next painting would be. Fixing that image of
her in his mind for later, he smiled and reached out to take her
hand. “Not nearly as beautiful as you,” he said. They had become
more than friends over the months since they had begun their new
lives, and he thought there was a good chance that someday she
might become Mrs. Angelina Moore. Someday.

She smiled and squeezed his hand,
her blue and brown eyes gleaming in the sunlight before she turned
back to the blazing horizon.

They sat in companionable silence,
waiting for the glow of sunset to give way to the stars of
night.

AFTERWORD

My inspiration for this story was
drawn from the research my wife, Jan, and I did on that most
mundane of every day topics: food. In the process of conquering
some health issues a couple years ago, we became much more
conscious of what we ate and, more importantly, what we fed to our
kids.

Genetically modified (or engineered)
organisms, GMOs, of course came up in the course of our
self-education on what was going into our bodies. I’m not going to
stand here and jump up and down (well, or try and throw words from
the page at your eyeballs), shouting “GMOs are evil!”

But you do have to wonder. GMO
products, particularly in the United States, are a big-ticket item,
with companies making profits in the billions of dollars and big
chunks of market share. Take soy, for example. Today, it’s very
difficult in the United States to get soy products that aren’t
GMO-based. Corn, wheat, and other basic sustenance foods used for
both human and animal consumption are also very high on the GMO
production scale.

I also learned a new term during my
digging around: substantial equivalence. What that means is that
GMO-based food should be considered the same as – and as safe as –
its non-GMO cousins if it has the same basic characteristics. For
example, if a GMO strain of corn looks and tastes like “natural”
corn, it’s substantially equivalent, even if its DNA has genes that
were tailored from bacteria (don’t laugh: bacteria, including some
rather nasty varieties, are a frequent source of genetic material
for the GMO food we eat).

The tight connections between
federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and some
of the large agribusinesses that produce GMO crops came as a bit of
a shock. There has been a great deal of discussion on the web about
the “revolving door” for officials moving between government
positions and these companies that, were I a cynic, I might
consider a potential conflict of interest.