Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  “No,” he said, shaking his head and dropping the phone into his lab coat pocket. “I’m not an electrician. But I do know how to fix things.”

  Jerri didn’t have a chance to respond before he lunged across the three feet separating them, jabbing his right hand, flattened like a knife, into her throat. She gasped for air through her crushed larynx and sagged toward the floor. Kilburn grabbed her by the hair and dragged her into the closet. After a quick look outside, relieved that no one else was in the hallway, he closed the door.

  “You have no idea how much I’ve loathed working with you people,” he told her. “But you’ve made my job a little easier by coming here.”

  Removing the bomb from its hiding place, he grabbed one of her hands and forced her fingers onto the metal casing of the detonator. Jerri struggled, but it was no use: her body was burning up what oxygen her blood stream had left, her chest heaving in vain to draw breath. And he was strong, much stronger than he looked. “It’s a long shot, but with a little luck the investigators might be able to take partial prints from the debris. If not, there’s always mitochondrial DNA analysis from any tiny bits that will be left of you here, where you planted the bomb.” He grinned at her. “Too bad it went off before you made your getaway. Sloppy, Dr. Tanaka. Very sloppy. I also took the liberty of tucking some information about the Earth Defense Society into your files.” Her eyes widened. “Yes, you recognize them from what Dawson told you, I see. I overheard him telling you. The network data center should survive the blast when the bomb goes off, and I’m sure the investigators will find the incriminating documents. If not on their own, I’ll help them along, as I plan to survive this.

  “And don’t worry about your friend Dawson,” he told her as he pulled out the cell phone. “We’ll take care of him, too.” He sent a text message to a twin of the phone he held, another that was unregistered and untraceable. The message said Jack Dawson knows something. Then he set the phone on the floor and smashed it with his heel.

  Unable to speak, unable to breathe, Jerri could only shake her head. No.

  He smiled. “The ironic thing is that I’ll be able to truthfully tell the investigators that I saw you come in here right before the bomb went off.” She stared at the detonator as he put it back in place, then she struggled to reach it. “No, I don’t think you’ll be doing any last-minute heroics,” he told her. “Goodbye, doctor.” Then he reached down, took her head in both hands and twisted it savagely, snapping her neck.

  With a last look at Jerri, whose lifeless eyes stared up at the ceiling, Kilburn stood up and left the electrical closet. He closed the door behind him, acting as if he had authorization to be there. He wasn’t worried about anyone seeing him now, as everyone in the nearby labs would be dead in a few minutes.

  As it turned out, no one happened to be in the hallway to appreciate his acting performance or witness his exit from the electrical closet. He returned to his cubicle in the CODIS unit at the end of the hall, where he sat quietly for the next few minutes until the bomb exploded.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jack had just made it through the door when the phone rang, but it wasn’t the house phone, which is what he was expecting: it was his cell phone. He glanced at the caller ID, sure that it would be Clement, but saw with some surprise that it was Richards, out in Nebraska.

  “Dammit,” Jack muttered, hitting the answer button. “Dawson here,” he said. “Make it fast, Richards. I’m expecting a call from Clement…”

  “Didn’t you hear?” Richards interrupted him.

  Jack stopped in his tracks at the tone of the other man’s voice. “Hear what?” he asked.

  “A bomb went off in the lab at Quantico,” Richards told him, “a little less than an hour ago. We’re wrapping things up here and heading back to Virginia right now, along with half the field agents from the rest of the goddamn country.”

  Stunned, Jack simply stood there, staring at his reflection in the sliding glass door to the patio. He felt completely numb, as if every nerve ending in his body had suddenly died.

  “Dawson, are you there?”

  “Yeah,” Jack whispered. “Jesus. It must have gone off right after I left.” He shook his head, trying to focus his mind. “Do you know how bad the damage was?”

  “Really bad,” Richards said. “The entire wing, the floor where the DNA labs were, is just gone, like a giant took a fucking bite out of the building. The CODIS unit was mangled, but a couple people survived.” He paused. “Nobody from either of the DNA analysis labs made it, Dawson. I’m sorry.”

  “Jerri...” Jack fumbled with a chair at the kitchen table, practically falling into it. First Sheldon, now Jerri, he thought, horrified. What the fuck is going on?

  “Listen,” Richards went on. “When Clement called me to recall our teams, he told me to pass on to you to stay the hell put and not get involved. He said he was supposed to call you, but he’s taking the lead as SAC on this himself, and he’s got more urgent things to take care of right now than babysitting your ass. You got that?”

  “Yeah,” Jack told him, biting back the anguish that suddenly threatened to overwhelm him. “Yeah, I got it.”

  “And Jack,” Richards said, which got Jack’s attention because Richards never called other agents by their first names, “you’re probably going to get grilled over this. You know that, right?”

  “Why?” Jack asked angrily. “Am I a suspect?”

  “If you were in my shoes, what would you think?” Richards said evenly. “It’s the timing, Jack, and the fact that you weren’t supposed to be there. Everybody’s going to be extra paranoid right now, and anything that stands out is going to draw attention like bees to honey.”

  “And flies to shit,” Jack muttered. “Yeah, I’d do the same.”

  Richards paused before saying, “I’ve gotta go, Dawson. Stay put and don’t do anything stupid for a change.”

  “Thanks, Richards,” Jack said before hanging up and setting the phone down on the table.

  He looked down as Alexander brushed up against his leg and made a mournful meow, begging for attention. Jack reached down and picked him up. Alexander curled up in his lap, and Jack absently stroked him as he thought about what Richards had said. Jerri and the others were dead. The only survivors from that part of the floor were from the CODIS unit.

  A surge of anger welled up from his core as he imagined Kilburn, battered but alive, staggering out of the smoldering wreckage while Jerri’s broken body lay somewhere in the debris.

  His mind automatically began churning over possibilities about what happened at the lab. But it was useless, like an engine running in neutral and going nowhere because he knew absolutely nothing. He decided that he was going to follow Richards’ advice and not get involved in this one. He wasn’t even going to log into FIDS. He was afraid of what he might find there.

  Jack didn’t know how much time had passed before a chiming ringtone sounded. At first, he thought it was his laptop, but it was closed, in standby. When he finally looked at his phone, he saw that it was an Internet chat program that Sheldon had insisted on loading onto it. It was the same program they had used to stay in touch with one another on the computer, but Jack had never used it on the phone: he hated trying to type on the tiny touch keyboard.

  Frowning, he pulled the phone closer, and felt his stomach turn to ice at what he saw:

  feeb_master is requesting a chat. Accept? Y/N

  feeb_master was Sheldon’s user ID on the chat service. “Feeb” was a slang term for an FBI agent, and like everything else with Sheldon, his user name was humorously irreverent but not excessively obnoxious. “Master,” of course, referred to his not-so-humble belief that he was the top dog in the Cyber Division in terms of computer smarts, if not in-house political savvy.

  What chilled Jack to the bone was that he knew Sheldon would never, ever have compromised any of his on-line information: he changed his passwords constantly, and they weren’t anything that someone was going t
o guess or even break with a password cracker unless they had a powerful computer and a lot of time on their hands. Beyond the braggadocio, Sheldon was – had been – a pro at what he did. So whoever was trying to call Jack now had either been given the information willingly before Sheldon was killed, which seemed damned unlikely, or had forced it out of him with torture or drugs.

  An image of Naomi Perrault again sprang to mind, her blue and brown eyes looking out at him over a pretty smile as she stood, figuratively or literally, over Sheldon’s mutilated body.

  The phone chimed again, and Jack’s hands were shaking as he reached for it. He wanted to hit the N key and terminate the connection, but he had to know. He had to.

  He hit the Y key, accepting the chat request, and a second later the application’s interface popped up on the phone’s screen. Then whoever was on the far end, using Sheldon’s pirated account, began to type:

  feeb_master: they r cmng 4 u, jack. soon.

  feeb_master: we r sndng help but may not arrv in time.

  Jack bit back a curse as he typed a response, which was the question he wanted answered more than anything, because he felt sure it was the key to the entire puzzle of Sheldon’s death, and now Jerri’s.

  jack_dawson7: who are you?

  feeb_master: u have a cat.

  “What?” Jack exclaimed at the nonsensical response. He glanced from the phone to Alexander, who still sat in his lap, purring, his intense green eyes fixed on the phone in Jack’s hand as if he could read the words there.

  Before Jack could type anything else, he saw this:

  feeb_master: they hate cats. watch alexander. trust his instincts. trust ur own. have ur shotgun rdy. glock wont work.

  Had he been typing at his computer keyboard, he would have been hammering at the keys. On the phone, he was nearly crying in frustration as he struggled with the tiny touchpad, finally repeating his question, “shouting” it to whoever was on the other end:

  jack_dawson7: WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU???

  There was a pause, and then he got his answer:

  feeb_master: naomi perrault. b careful jack.

  Then the connection was broken. Jack tried to reconnect using the address book in the chat application, but the icon showing Sheldon’s on-line status was grayed out. Dead. Just like Sheldon.

  “Goddammit,” Jack cried, slamming his fist down on the table, wanting to throw the phone against the wall and smash it to bits. Startled, Alexander leaped out of Jack’s lap, and he turned to stare accusingly at Jack before lying down on the floor like a living Sphinx, watching his human closely.

  Jack didn’t know what to do. With Sheldon and Jerri gone, there was no one he could turn to now. Even Richards, as surprisingly helpful as he had been, couldn’t help him, because Jack was going to be near the top of the list of potential suspects, and Richards very well might be the one who’d be knocking on Jack’s door. Or knocking it down.

  Have your shotgun ready, Perrault – if that’s truly who it had been – had said in the pidgin English often used in on-line conversations. The Glock won’t work. Had she just assumed that he had a shotgun, or was it something else she and her EDS friends had squeezed out of Sheldon? What she had said about the Glock was chilling: Sheldon’s certainly hadn’t done him any good. And what was that ridiculous nonsense about watching Alexander and trusting his instincts?

  “If that was her,” he said to himself, looking at Alexander, “then she’s even crazier than I thought.” On the other hand, she also said she was sending “help.” Maybe having his shotgun ready to greet them might not be such a bad idea.

  Determined to do something and not just sit on his ass, Jack took off his still-wet jacket and draped it over one of the kitchen chairs. Then he got up, went into his bedroom and opened the closet. He grabbed his shotgun from the gun rack and quickly checked to make sure it was loaded. A rarity in America, it was a Russian-made semi-automatic Saiga-12. Jack had always hated pump-action shotguns, and had special ordered his Saiga-12 after returning from Afghanistan. It held a seven-round box magazine, loaded with flechette rounds. It was an autoloader, and didn’t need to be pumped: you just kept pulling the trigger until the magazine was empty. He had gotten it as an insurance policy if he ever needed something heavier than his handguns, but had never really expected to use it.

  He grabbed an extra magazine, and then went back to the kitchen. Putting the gun in an easy-to-reach spot under the counter that looked out into the living room and the front doorway, he clipped the extra magazine to a holder on the weapon’s folding stock.

  Just as he was sitting back down at the table, about to break his promise to himself that he wasn’t going to check any reports that were being passed along through FIDS, there was a heavy knock on his door.

  “Shit,” he breathed, startled. “Why doesn’t anybody ever use the damn doorbell?”

  In typical fashion, Alexander trotted to the door, always eager to greet any guests. Jack first took a careful look at the porch through the living room window, his hand on his holstered Glock. There were three people on his doorstep, getting soaked in the rain. All of them wore dark jackets with “FBI” stenciled on them. Despite his worries about whatever hot water he might be in, he was relieved. At least they were his people. He relaxed, taking his hand off the Glock.

  Moving to the door, he took a quick look through the peephole, shooed Alexander out of the way, and opened the door.

  “Special Agent Dawson,” a stern-looking woman in her early thirties said formally, “I’m Special Agent Lynnette Sansone, with Special Agents Boardman and Castro from Internal Affairs. May we come in?”

  “Sure,” Dawson said, before ushering them into the small foyer, “let’s get you out of this stinking rain.”

  The three agents came in, but they declined Dawson’s offer to take their drenched jackets. Once in the foyer, they simply stood there, Boardman and Castro looking around the living room with keen professional interest, while Sansone’s dark blue eyes never left Jack. The two male agents could have moonlighted as professional wrestlers, and Jack wondered if Internal Affairs only recruited the biggest and most intimidating special agents they could find. Sansone would have been attractive, if it weren’t for her reptilian focus on Jack and her ice-cold formality.

  Jack gestured toward the living room furniture and said, “Care to sit down?” He figured that if the sofa and chairs had survived Alexander, they probably wouldn’t be bothered by a little water from his colleagues’ wet jackets.

  After an uncomfortable moment when the three agents glanced at one another in indecision, Sansone finally said, “Certainly. Thank you.” Once they settled onto the sofa and chairs she went on, “Dawson, you know about the explosion at the lab at Quantico tonight, correct?”

  “Yes,” Jack told her grimly. “Special Agent Richards, the SAC out in Nebraska investigating Special Agent Crane’s death, called and told me just a short while ago. And yes,” he went on, wanting to just get it off his chest and out in the open, “I was down there without authorization. Dr. Jerri Tanaka and I are...” He paused, taking a deep breath before going on, “...were good friends, and I wanted to help her in the lab. I wanted to do anything I could to help with Sheldon Crane’s case.”

  “I appreciate your openness,” Sansone said, as Boardman flipped open a notepad and started taking notes, “which will make our job a lot easier and hopefully will minimize the potential unpleasantness for you.” She looked at him intensely, and Jack felt distinctly uncomfortable, as if he were being visually dissected. “While the forensics work has barely begun, we know roughly where the bomb detonated. We think it was in an electrical closet adjoining the two DNA lab areas.”

  “Yeah,” Jack told her, “I know the one you mean. It was clearly marked, maybe a dozen feet from the door to Dr. Tanaka’s lab.”

  Sansone nodded. “We also have an eyewitness who saw Dr. Tanaka go into that closet roughly five minutes before the blast,” she told him, her eyes still fixed on
him. “Do you have any idea why she would have gone in there?”

  “No,” Jack shook his head as he tried to come to grips with what Sansone was telling him. “No, I can’t think of any reason why she would go in there. Are you saying that–”

  “Did you know that she also had several large sums of money transferred into offshore accounts by three members of the Earth Defense Society?”

  “What?” Jack asked, feeling like Sansone had first kicked him in the groin, followed by an uppercut to his jaw. “That’s not possible,” he told them, shaking his head. “It’s just not possible.”

  “There’s no question about it,” Sansone told him. “A data recovery team pulled all of her records and documents. It was a hidden, encrypted file that stood out from the others because it was obviously not intended to be found. The information it contained is very...explicit.”

  He simply sat there, staring at the three agents for a moment, overcome with shock. He didn’t want to believe it, couldn’t believe it. There’s no fucking way, he told himself. “No,” he told Sansone firmly, working hard to keep the anger out of his voice. “I had no idea. But why would she keep something like that at work, where anything is subject to search at any time?”

  “How often do you think that really happens, Dawson?” Castro asked him testily. “It was probably a lot safer there than in her home, where someone could just snag her computer.”

  “Dawson,” Boardman interjected, “let’s go back to what you were saying about Special Agent Crane’s death and your helping Dr. Tanaka at the lab. Right now, we have good reason to believe that his death and what happened at the lab, regardless of who committed the crime, are closely linked, and the only common thread we have so far is you. We need to know your account of what happened.”