Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  With that, Clement ignored the storm of questions the reporters hurled at him and walked up the steps, disappearing into the building behind a wall of stone-faced special agents and Capitol Police.

  “I think that was more than enough,” Jack said when the playback stopped, feeling like he was going to throw up.

  “So now we have two of the most wanted people in America, and every one of us is going to have FBI agents breathing down our necks,” Thornton growled. “You’ve compromised our entire mission with this foolishness!”

  “This isn’t the place for this discussion,” Naomi said, her tone carrying a great deal more authority than Jack expected.

  Without another word, she took Jack by the arm and headed toward one of the doors in the wall that held the large displays. Thornton, Tan, and a woman Jack hadn’t been introduced to yet trailed behind.

  Naomi pushed open the door and stormed into a conference room with a large oval table in the center surrounded by a dozen chairs. The wall adjoining the command center outside had two big flat panel displays that were hooked up to a video teleconferencing system, while the sloping outside walls held only the shock-mounted lights.

  Thornton slammed the door closed after the other woman had entered. Tan waited outside.

  “Naomi,” Thornton began, “this is a disaster! It was bad enough with just them after us. But that was out of the public eye. Now we’ll have every cop and agent in the country gunning for you and him...” He looked disgustedly at Jack and shook his head, momentarily speechless.

  “We knew this day would come, Gregg,” she retorted. “And I told you six months ago that we were running out of time.” She looked at Jack. “If it hadn’t been this, it would have been something else. The turning point is that they know now that we have real evidence of their plans. Before, they were content to harass us when there was opportunity to do so, but they didn’t think we could do what we’ve done. Now they know we’re a real threat, and they have to stop us.” She looked at Jack, softening her tone. “He’s an innocent in this affair, and he doesn’t deserve to be blamed by you or anyone else. Sheldon sacrificed himself for us, and I wasn’t about to let someone else die on our behalf without even knowing why.”

  “I hate to break it to you lovebirds,” the woman who had come in with Thornton said, her voice laced with sarcasm, “but we’ve got another problem.” She looked at Jack, giving him an appreciative once-over from head to toe with her brown eyes, then stepped forward and thrust out her hand. “I’m Dr. Renee Vintner,” she said with a thick New York accent. “Nice to meet you, although it would’ve been a lot better if you’d have brought some beer along. Gregg never orders enough.”

  Thornton rolled his eyes, but Jack couldn’t help but grin as he shook her hand, amazed at how strong her grip was. She was a short, rotund woman in her early fifties with carelessly cut curly black hair that had barely begun to show any gray. She gave him a tight but heartfelt smile.

  “Hi,” Jack said, happy for a diversion from the frigid tension in the room between Naomi and Thornton. “Nice to meet you, too.”

  “So, what’s the problem, Renee?” Naomi said.

  “I found the files that Sheldon hid in the photo frame’s memory,” she explained. “That was easy enough. We coordinated the encryption and the pass phrase before he went to Nebraska, just in case we got to it first. I didn’t have any problem with that, and got the files we were expecting.” She frowned. “There’s also a file in there that he encrypted a second time, and I don’t have a goddamn clue what the pass phrase might be.”

  “Can’t you just break it?” Thornton asked irritably.

  “With enough monkeys, typewriters, and time – sure,” Renee snapped. “But Sheldon wasn’t a monkey. He lived and breathed this stuff. Whatever pass phrase he used is going to take forever for a password cracking program to resolve, even using every network resource I have. It would save a lot of time, maybe years, if someone happened to know what the pass phrase was.” She looked pointedly at Jack.

  Shaking his head slowly, Jack told her, “Sheldon never mentioned anything like that to me. He never said anything to me about any of this! Even the photo frame: I had no idea it was important. If it hadn’t been a gift from him that he made a big deal over, I probably would’ve thrown the silly thing out. Why did he do that, anyway? Shouldn’t he have just sent the data directly to you guys?”

  Vintner shook her head. “He would have if the operation had gone as planned,” she told him. “But I think that once he was inside, he must have found something that made him think he’d been compromised. He was smart and had a backup in that little gadget he gave you, but was also an idiot for not telling us about it.” She shrugged. “Jack, was there anything else that he made a big deal over?” she asked him. “It would have been a name, or number. Maybe a phrase of some kind. It would’ve been fairly long, something he wrote down or emailed to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack told her, trying to think of anything Sheldon might have told him that could be a clue. “I don’t remember him writing anything down for me, and nothing that he said or emailed to me stands out.” He shrugged. “I’ll try to remember, but if you don’t mind my saying so, I’m a bit overwhelmed at the moment.” Looking from Renee to Naomi, he asked, “What’s so important about all these files?”

  “The files we were expecting, that Renee was able to extract,” Naomi explained, “were the genetic blueprints to the corn and the other crops in the new, and final, product line that New Horizons is planning to market. Those blueprints are both evidence that we can use to help expose their plans to the public, and that, with a lot of luck, we can use to try and develop a countermeasure. As for what this other file might be, I can’t even guess.”

  “It wasn’t part of the plan that we prepared Sheldon to carry out,” Thornton said. Much of his anger had drained away, as if he had grown tired of carrying a heavy burden. Now he just looked tired. And frightened. “We planned and carefully rehearsed for every eventuality that any of us could think of to help prepare him to get into the lab at LRU, get what we needed, and then get out as quickly as possible. Obviously, something went very badly wrong.” Turning to Renee, he said, “Do what you can.” With a quick glance at Jack, he said, “Maybe we’ll have some good luck for a change.”

  “Come on, Jack,” Naomi said in a disgusted voice, stalking out of the room. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Jack turned to follow after her, ignoring Thornton, but giving Renee an apologetic shrug. His mouth dropped open with surprise when she cocked her head in Naomi’s direction and gave him a mischievous wink.

  “Be sure you show him everything, Naomi,” Thornton said tersely.

  Outside the briefing room, Tan began to follow after them, but Naomi turned to him and said stiffly, “Thank you, Tan, but that won’t be necessary. We’re fine.”

  Tan only nodded and stayed rooted where he was as Naomi and Jack headed for the spiral staircase and made their way down to the lower level.

  Naomi headed for the small dining hall, stopping in front of one of the three large coffee makers.

  “Would you like some?” she said in a tightly controlled voice as she poured a cup. Jack saw that her hands were shaking.

  “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “If you’re hungry, go ahead and grab something to eat,” she told him, nodding her head toward a table that held several covered warming trays, plus bread, bagels, and lots of fruit. All of it looked fresh and homemade. He was still trying to come to grips with the situation he had been thrust into, and food was the last thing on his mind. But his stomach grumbled from not having had more than a couple beers before the battle at his house and all the time that had passed since then, and he knew that his body needed some fuel.

  “Do you want anything in yours?” she asked as he grabbed a plate and piled on some scrambled eggs, turkey bacon, and a bagel.

  “No, thanks,” he said. “Just black.”

 
She nodded and brought it over to where he’d taken a seat at one of the tables, then sat down across from him.

  “I’m sorry about that,” she told him. “Gregg’s a good man, and he’s been crucial to what we’ve been able to accomplish. But sometimes we don’t exactly see eye to eye on things.”

  “Yeah, I sort of got that impression,” Jack said wryly. “What did he mean about showing me ‘everything’?”

  “He meant that I should show you the same things that we showed to Sheldon and the others who work here,” she said cryptically, “to show you the things that convinced them that the war is real, and that we’re not just a bunch of UFO nuts or eco-terrorists.”

  “Listen,” Jack said, “I get the stuff about New Horizons, I think. But I’m still not seeing the angle with the little green men.”

  “There aren’t any little green men,” she said darkly. “I can promise you that.” She shook her head. “The web site thing was my fault. After I was...enlightened, one of my crusades was to try and bring the war to the public’s attention. That was something else that Gregg tried to talk me out of, but I wouldn’t listen. He was right about it, though: the way I presented it just made us look foolish, and attracted every UFO and alien abduction nut around the world.”

  “If that’s the case,” he asked, “why did you leave the site up? Why not just get rid of it?”

  “Once something gets out on the net, Jack,” she said, “it’s almost impossible to take it back or get rid of it. As it turned out, it actually did work in our favor in an unexpected way: it made us look like a bunch of crackpots, and I like to think it helped divert some of the scrutiny away from our operations, at least for a while.” She shrugged. “We also got a few great recruits out of it, including Renee. She’s got a doctorate from MIT in computer science, but has been a UFO buff since she was a little girl.” She took another sip of her coffee. “The only thing truly constructive that we managed to do in cyberspace was to eliminate as many visual clues to the senior EDS staff as we could. That was mostly Renee’s doing, although Sheldon helped a lot after he came on board.”

  “And that’s why every photo that should be you or any of the others was replaced with one of Gary Woolsey?” Jack gave her a grin, thinking of the photo of the obese African American man he had seen in every database where Naomi’s picture should have been. “Certainly you could’ve found someone more photogenic.”

  But Naomi didn’t smile. If anything, she suddenly looked on the verge of tears. “It was Renee’s idea,” she told him softly, looking down into her empty coffee mug. “She and Gary were good friends. It was a sort of tribute to him.”

  “What happened?” Jack asked. “I know he confessed to burning down the Outland Genetics lab and killing a bunch of people, then died right after he was sent to prison.”

  “He didn’t just die, Jack,” Naomi said fiercely. “He was murdered. We don’t know exactly what happened, because after Gary was arrested, we couldn’t contact him.” She looked him square in the eye. “I’ll go over the things you need to know about EDS with you later, Jack, but one of the cardinal rules is that if you’re compromised, you’re on your own. We won’t help you, and you can’t contact us. We can’t risk the operation for anyone.”

  “You saved me.”

  She shook her head. “That was different. We had to intervene to see if you’d found anything at the lab, which you did, along with the data Sheldon had hidden in the photo frame, which we didn’t even know about. We went to your house that night only for that. Gregg wanted me to either kill you or leave you to your fate to cover our trail, but I refused.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “we think that Gary found something at the last minute while he was setting up the network at Outland Genetics, that a...New Horizons special VIP, let’s call him, would be there, one of the very few that we knew about. Gary must not have even had time to contact us before he took matters into his own hands.”

  “And wound up burning five people to death,” Jack said grimly. He had dealt with horrible people and crimes in the line of duty, and his wife had been killed by one, but he still believed in justice, even if it was imperfectly dealt out. Killing five people without a trial was, to Jack, nothing less than murder.

  “What Gary did was an extraordinary act of courage, especially for him,” she said. “He was a gentle man who’d never committed a violent act in his life, and I think the thought of what he’d done made him crack on the witness stand during the trial. Those who died in that fire were enemies of humanity, Jack. You don’t believe or understand that now, but you will. And soon.” She looked away again, gathering her thoughts. “He recognized a unique opportunity and struck a tremendous blow against our enemies, Jack. Then, after he was sent to prison, they killed him.”

  “The coroner’s report said he died of a heart attack,” Jack said. “Let’s be honest here: he didn’t seem to be in the greatest shape, and what he must have gone through in the trial and being sent to prison would have put an incredible strain on him.”

  She shook her head sadly. “No, Jack. We have records from the prison’s computer network showing that Gary had a visitor the day he died, someone from the FBI. You might recognize the name: Lynnette Sansone.”

  “What?” Jack said.

  Naomi nodded. “That’s right. And an hour after Sansone’s visit, Gary was dead.”

  “So, you’re saying that Sansone killed him?” Jack asked, incredulously.

  “Yes,” Naomi replied. “She could have done so quite easily.”

  “What, she just slipped him something that made him have a heart attack, without anybody seeing it and the coroner not picking up on it?” He couldn’t restrain his skepticism.

  Naomi nodded, her face momentarily clouded by the haunted expression Jack had seen on her earlier, during their talk in her room. “Absolutely.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “Because we brought her here from your house, Jack,” Naomi told him. “And when I take you to see her, I’ll prove it to you.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I want to see her right now–” Jack began hotly, standing up from the table.

  “No,” Naomi said quietly. She held up her hand before Jack could say anything else, and told him, “You’ll see her soon enough. I promise. But there are some other things we need to do first.”

  “Like what?” Jack asked, trying to quell his anger. “Dammit, Naomi, I’m tired of...” He clenched his hands into fists, at a loss to describe his feelings.

  “You’re tired of feeling helpless,” she told him, getting up and coming around to stand beside him, “tired of Fate getting to call all the shots.” Jack nodded. It was as good an explanation as anything. She gripped his arm gently, saying, “I know. And that’s going to change, I promise you. But there are some practicalities we have to take care of. It looks like you’re with us now, whether you want to be or not. You need to know a few things before you can function here. Come on.” She nodded toward the tunnel mouth that led away from the command center dome. “Let’s take a walk.”

  As Jack followed her into the beige-painted tunnel, which was made out of ribbed steel and was a dozen feet across, he asked her, “What the heck is this place?” The floor material changed from the utilitarian but attractive tile of the command center dome to non-skid steel flooring that had absolutely no give to it, and that Jack suspected was at least a quarter inch thick. Arrays of pipes and conduits for what he assumed must be power and water covered the tunnel’s ceiling and traveled what looked to be around fifty feet to a junction that lay ahead.

  “Remember my telling you about humanity’s preoccupation with the Cold War?” she asked him as she walked along. He nodded. “Well, this is one of the relics from those bygone days.” Gesturing around them, she explained, “This used to be a base for Titan I Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. There were eighteen bases like this built in the early nineteen-sixties. Each one could launch three Titan I missiles with
multi-megaton warheads at the Soviet Union. This one was under the 851st Strategic Missile Squadron, headquartered at Beale Air Force Base here in California. We’re right in the foothills of the Sutter Buttes, believe it or not.”

  “Jesus,” Jack said softly as they approached a junction in the tunnel. “This is huge.”

  Naomi laughed. “Jack, you haven’t seen anything yet,” she told him. “But you’re right, it is huge. The irony is that these bases were only used for a few years. This one was commissioned in 1961, and shut down in 1965.”

  “Our taxpayer dollars at work,” Jack said wryly as they stepped out of the tunnel into the junction. It was another huge cylinder, sixteen feet across. There were more pipes and conduits, plus larger ducts, covering the ceiling.

  “This is the main junction,” she told him. “It’s the center of the complex.” Pointing at a diagram that hung on the curving wall, she explained the facility’s layout. “The complex is made up of six major sections, all joined by the main tunnel.” She gestured toward two openings where the tunnel, twelve feet wide, ran through the junction. “At the south end is the old antenna complex, with two silos that used to house the missile control antennas. Now we use them for…other things that you’ll learn about soon.”

  Jack saw her glance at the mouth of the tunnel that led south to the antenna complex, and he felt a chill at her expression. It was only there for a moment before she turned away, but for that instant a look of barely contained rage was in her eyes.

  “How far is that?” Jack asked, looking at the diagram. “I don’t have any sense of scale from this.”

  “That part of the tunnel is almost six hundred feet long,” she told him.