Season of the Harvest Read online

  What had torn him apart was what happened back in the States. While he lay unconscious in the SSG Heath N. Craig Joint Theater Hospital in Bagram, his wife Emily was kidnapped while leaving a shopping mall not far from their home outside Fort Drum, New York. Emily had her own home business, and they had no children, so no one immediately noticed that she’d gone missing. Four days passed before a persistent Red Cross worker who had been trying to get in touch with Emily about Jack’s injuries contacted the provost marshal at Fort Drum. Two military policemen went to the house, and when they found it empty, they contacted the local police.

  The police located her car that same day: the mall’s security center had ordered it towed away after it had sat in the parking lot overnight, reporting it to the police as abandoned. The next day, the fifth since she had disappeared, police investigators found footage on one of the mall security cameras that vividly showed what had happened to her. A man stepped around the back of a nondescript van as she had walked by, laden with shopping bags. With a casual glance around to see if there were any witnesses, he turned as she passed and jabbed her in the back with a stun gun. Scooping her up in one smooth motion, he dumped her into the van through the already open side door, and then collected up the bags that had fallen to the ground. He didn’t rush, didn’t hurry as he threw the bags into the van. Then he climbed into the back and slammed the door closed. After a few minutes the van backed out of the space and drove away.

  It had all happened in broad daylight.

  Because it was clearly a kidnapping and so much time had passed since the crime had been committed, the local authorities contacted the FBI.

  That was when Jack learned of his wife’s disappearance. Immobilized in the hospital bed, still in a great deal of pain, he was paid a visit by his grim-faced commander and a civilian woman who introduced herself as an FBI special agent. His commander told him what had happened, and over the next three hours the FBI agent gathered every detail that Jack could remember about his wife’s activities, associations, family and friends. Everything about her life that he could think of that might help track down her kidnapper. It had been the three most agonizing hours of his life. The special agent had assured him that everything was being done to find his wife and bring her back safely. Jack prayed that they would find her alive, but in his heart he knew she was gone.

  His intuition proved brutally prophetic. Her body was found a week later, buried under bags of trash in a dumpster behind a strip mall in Cleveland, Ohio. She had been repeatedly raped and beaten before she’d finally been strangled to death. The FBI and law enforcement authorities in Ohio did everything they could to find her killer, but he had covered his tracks well and was never found.

  When Jack was well enough to travel, the Army arranged for him to be flown home, where one of his first duties had been to formally identify Emily’s battered, broken body. He had seen his share of horrors in Afghanistan, and some might think it would have made the trauma of viewing her body somewhat easier. It hadn’t. Thankfully, the family lawyer, an old friend of his parents, who themselves had died in a car wreck a year before Jack had gone to Afghanistan, had made all the necessary arrangements for her burial. Jack simply had to endure the agony of laying her to rest.

  After the funeral, Jack had found himself at a loss. His time in the Army was nearly up, and he was tempted to simply lapse into an emotional coma to shut off the pain and the nightmares of Emily’s tortured face.

  But a cold flame of rage burned in his core at what had happened to her, and the bastard who had done it. He found himself sitting in the kitchen one morning, holding the business card of the female special agent who had interviewed him in Bagram. As if his body was acting of its own accord, he found himself picking up the phone and dialing the woman’s number. The conversation that followed was the first step on the path that eventually led him to become a special agent in the FBI.

  She had tried to dissuade him, warning him that he wasn’t going to find answers, or vengeance, to Emily’s death. In truth, while the thought of finding her killer was more than appealing, he realized from the beginning that avenging Emily wasn’t what was pulling him toward the Bureau: it was the thought that he might be able to help prevent what had happened to her from happening to others.

  When he got to the FBI Academy, one of his fellow agents was Sheldon Crane. Sheldon had an irrepressible sense of humor, and immediately glued himself to Jack. At first, Jack had resented the unwanted attention, but Sheldon had gradually worn through Jack’s emotional armor, eventually becoming the Yin to Jack’s Yang. Sheldon was a self-proclaimed computer genius, recruited to work in the Bureau’s Cyber Division, while Jack’s skills in intelligence analysis and experience in combat made him a good candidate for the Criminal Investigative Division.

  Jack had done well in CID, but remained an outsider, something of a mystery to his fellow agents. Most of his supervisors knew his background and were content to let it be, but when Clement took over and began his interviews, Jack had heard that he could be very pointed in his questions. Jack didn’t want to be interrogated again about his experience in Afghanistan or Emily’s murder. He didn’t want anyone’s sympathy. He just wanted to move on.

  Clement had completely surprised him. He didn’t talk or want to know about anything related to Jack’s past or his work. Instead, he asked questions about Jack as a person outside of the Bureau, what he liked to do in his free time, his personal likes and dislikes. At first, Jack had been extremely uncomfortable, but after a while he found himself opening up. Clement talked to him for a full hour and a half. When they were through, Jack actually found himself laughing at one of Clement’s notoriously bad jokes.

  After that, while Jack couldn’t quite call Clement a friend, he had certainly become a confidant and someone he felt he could really talk to when the need arose.

  Now was certainly one of those times.

  Clement walked across the office toward Jack, but stopped when his eyes fell on the folder Jack clutched in one hand. “Dammit, don’t you know any better than to grab files off my desk, Special Agent Dawson?”

  “Yes, sir,” Dawson told him. “I took it from your secretary’s desk.”

  “Lord,” Clement muttered as he moved up to Dawson. Putting a hand on the younger man’s shoulder, he said again, “I’m sorry, Jack. I’d hoped to have a chance to talk to you before you saw anything in that file.” With a gentle squeeze of his massive hand, he let go, then sat down behind his desk. “Sit.”

  Reluctantly, still clutching the folder containing the professional analysis of Sheldon Crane’s last moments alive, Jack did as he was told, dropping into one of the chairs arrayed around a small conference table before turning to face his boss.

  “Why aren’t you letting me go out with the teams to Lincoln?” he asked before Clement could say anything else.

  “Do you really have to ask that?” his boss said pointedly. “Look at yourself, Jack. You’re an emotional wreck. I’m not going to endanger an investigation by having someone who isn’t operating at full capacity on the case.” He raised a hand as Jack began to protest. “Don’t start arguing,” he said. “Look, Jack, I’ve lost close friends, too. I know how much it can tear you up inside. But you’re not going to do Sheldon any favors now by screwing things up in the field because you’re emotionally involved. I promise you, we will not rest until we’ve found his killer.”

  “My God, Ray,” Jack said hoarsely, looking again at the folder in his hand, “they didn’t just kill him. They fucking tore him apart!”

  He forced himself to open the folder again. The top photo was a shot that showed Sheldon’s entire body at the scene. It looked like someone had performed an autopsy on him. A deep cut had been made in his torso from throat to groin. The ribs had been cracked open to expose the heart and lungs, and the organs from his abdomen had been pulled out and dissected, the grisly contents dumped onto the floor. Then something had been used to carve open his skull just above
the line of his eyebrows, and the brain had been removed and set aside. Another shot that he dared not look at again showed what was done inside the skull: his killer had torn his nasal cavities open.

  Another photo showed Sheldon’s clothing. He had been stripped from head to toe, and his clothes had been systematically torn apart, with every seam ripped open. In the background, on the floor next to the wall, was his gun.

  Jack had seen death enough times and in enough awful ways that it no longer made him want to gag. But he had never, even in the hateful fighting in Afghanistan, seen such measured brutality as this.

  The last photo he had looked at had been a close-up of Sheldon’s face and his terrified expression. “He was still alive when they started...cutting him up.”

  “I know,” Clement said, his own voice breaking. “I know he was.”

  “What was he doing out there?” Jack asked, sliding the photos back into the folder with numb fingers. “This couldn’t have just been some random attack. What the hell was he working on that could have driven someone to do this to him?”

  Pursing his lips, Clement looked down at his desk, his face a study in consideration. “This is classified, Jack,” he said finally, looking up and fixing Jack with a hard stare, “as in Top Secret. The kind of information you have to read after you sign your life away and go into a little room with thick walls and special locks on the door. Even the SAC in Lincoln doesn’t know the real reason Sheldon was there, and the only reason I’m telling you is because you held high-level clearances in the Army and you can appreciate how sensitive this is and keep your mouth shut about it.”

  Jack nodded. He had been an intelligence officer in the Army, and knew exactly what Clement was talking about. He also appreciated the fact that Clement could lose his job for what he was about to say. That was the level of trust that had built up between them.

  Satisfied that Jack had gotten the message, Clement told him, “Sheldon was investigating a series of cyber attacks against several research laboratories doing work on genetically modified organisms, mainly food crops like corn. The FDA was also hacked: someone took a keen interest in what the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition was doing along the same lines. And before you say, ‘So what’s the big super-secret deal,’ there was also a series of attacks against computers, both at home and work, used by specific individuals across the government, including senior officials in the Department of Defense and the military services. Sheldon was convinced the perpetrators were from a group known as the Earth Defense Society, and that they’re somewhere here in the U.S. He’s been out in the field for the last three weeks, tracking down leads.” He frowned. “Apparently he found something in Lincoln.”

  “What the hell are they after?” Jack asked, perplexed. It seemed an odd potpourri of targets for hackers to be going after. He could understand someone going after one group of targets or another, but what common thread could run through such a mixed bag, from labs working on how to improve crops to the military?

  “That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn’t it?” Clement said. “So, now you know what Sheldon was doing. Just keep your mouth shut about it and pretend this conversation never happened.”

  Standing up and coming around his desk, Clement continued as Jack rose from his chair, “I want you to take some leave. Get out of here for a few days until you’ve pulled yourself together. Then come back in and we can talk. And I promise you, I’ll keep you informed of what we find.”

  “Yes, sir,” was all Jack said as he shook Clement’s hand. He turned and walked out of the office, closing the door quietly behind him.

  As Jack left, Clement saw that he still had the copy of Sheldon’s case file in his hand. With a satisfied nod, he returned to his desk and checked his phone, which was blinking urgently. It hadn’t been ringing because he had ordered his secretary to hold all of his calls. Quickly scanning the recent caller list on the phone’s display, he saw that the director had called him. Twice.

  He grimaced, then pulled out the two smart phones that he carried. He used one of them for everyday personal communication. That one the Bureau knew about. He had turned it off before talking to Dawson to avoid any interruptions, and now he turned it back on.

  The other smart phone, the one he flipped open now, was used for an entirely different purpose, and something of which his bosses at the Bureau would not approve. Calling up the web application, he quickly logged into an anonymizer service and sent a brief, innocuous-sounding email to a particular address. Then he activated an application that would wipe the phone’s memory and reset it to the factory default, effectively erasing any evidence of how he had used it.

  Putting it back in his pocket, he picked up his desk phone and called the director.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jack didn’t remember the drive to his small two-bedroom home in Alexandria. He sat at the kitchen table, drinking a beer in a vain attempt to help numb the gnawing agony inside him. He looked around the kitchen, then out into what he could see of the living room through a cutout in the wall that sported a breakfast bar. One of Sheldon’s many girlfriends had insisted on helping Jack decorate the house, and she had actually come up with ideas that appealed to him. The furniture was masculine, mainly dark leather and sturdy dark wood, with some of his own paintings on the walls. Sheldon had made a big deal out of Jack’s painting, and had insisted on taking several that he liked to be framed for his girlfriend to hang up in strategic locations throughout the house.

  Painting was Jack’s main passion outside of work. He didn’t consider himself any good at it, but everyone who visited the house had embarrassed him by gushing over the work. He outwardly dismissed the compliments as people just being polite, but a part of him, deep down, enjoyed the praise. Most of the paintings were still lifes, ranging from an apple sitting on a table, lit by the glow of a setting sun through the window, to his memory’s view of some of the rugged hills of Afghanistan. They couldn’t be called cheery or dark, nor did they follow a particular theme. But each one seemed to evoke an emotional response in those who saw them. Jack painted because he found it inwardly satisfying, and it had been good therapy after Emily’s death. That others might enjoy looking at his work had never really occurred to him.

  Tonight, his easel sat in the corner of the living room with a bare canvas. That was how he felt inside as he listened to the rain drum against the roof in the darkness. Bare. Empty.

  He took another swig of beer and set the bottle down on the table before flipping open the folder containing the initial field report on Sheldon’s murder.

  Next to the folder was the digital photo frame that Sheldon had bought for him a month ago, and Jack sadly watched the images fade in and out as they had day and night since Sheldon had given it to him. It was an outrageous gadget that Jack never would have bought for himself, but it was the perfect gift from a gadget nut like Sheldon. The frame not only had a tiny storage card that could hold thousands of photos, but even had Wi-Fi wireless networking, and Sheldon had insisted on hooking it up to Jack’s home network so Sheldon could remotely upload his latest ridiculous photos for Jack to enjoy. He was a true character, the perfect complement to Jack’s role of straight man, and Jack desperately missed him.

  Unable to look at the photos anymore, he turned off the frame and carefully set it down on a shelf next to the table. There would be a time for grieving and remembrance, but not now. Not yet.

  He opened up his laptop and logged into the FBI Intelligence Information Reports Dissemination System (FIDS) to check on any updates on the case. It didn’t take him long to determine that the special agents in Lincoln hadn’t found anything that leaped out at him as being terribly significant. The forensics team was still hard at work gathering physical evidence, and the small army of special agents was interviewing anyone and everyone who could have had access to the Lincoln Research University building, a special genetics research facility, where Sheldon had been found. So far, no leads had
turned up. No one who’d been interviewed remembered ever having seen Sheldon Crane.

  Fine, he thought, frustrated, let’s see what we can figure out on our own. Jack didn’t consider himself brilliant, but he had a knack for looking at a pile of seemingly unrelated or contradictory information about a case and coming up with a story of what happened. It was all about making associations between the different elements and seeing the underlying patterns. In a way, it was akin to painting, and the “pictures” that he came up with were usually spot on.

  Unfortunately, he had very little to work with so far, but that was real life: you never had all the answers you wanted, especially right off the bat. So he started with what he had.

  He normally used paper for his initial brainstorming, idly doodling on the page as his mind processed information, later typing things up on the computer. Pulling a sheet of paper from a small stack, he took a pencil and began to write.

  Murder scene: Lincoln Research University genetic research labs; maintenance tunnel. Lincoln Research University. He’d never heard of it. A quick search on the web told him that “LRU” had opened its doors only two years before. He had assumed that it was an extension of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but it wasn’t. Digging deeper, he found that LRU was a graduate institution that had been largely funded by a grant from New Horizons, a huge agribusiness whose main focus was on producing insect- and herbicide-resistant commercial crops like corn.

  LRU’s web site touted its genetics research labs as the most advanced in the world, and a key asset in developing the next generation of genetically modified, or GM, products in the New Horizons line. If nothing else, the school had certainly attracted a breathtaking array of talent, based on the lofty-sounding bios for the faculty and the incredibly steep entry requirements for student applicants. While it was billed as a learning institution, it was clear that anyone short of a genius would have a tough time getting their foot in the door, which seemed to have driven potential applicants into a frenzy of competition. If the web site could be believed, LRU accepted only one percent of the applicants who met the admission requirements. Having earned a summa cum laude in your bachelor’s program meant nothing at LRU.