Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) Page 6

  Looking up at Morgan, she told him, “I need some time to think about it.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  She felt a flare of anger, but Morgan spoke before she could react.

  “Naomi, this is the best place for you right now. I’m well informed, and I know that the government has let you go. That’s fine, because you don’t belong there.” He waved his hand, a dismissive gesture. “Sure, you could find a job somewhere else, and you’d do well. But you won’t find any other place, no company or institution, that has resources and technology on a par with ours, and the very personal and direct interest of the CEO backing your efforts. Were you to take any other path, you would not only be shortchanging yourself, but would inflict a tragic loss on humanity. We might eventually be able to recreate what you did at New Horizons, but it’ll take us years. I have some very smart people working for me, and that’s what they’re telling me. But you could get us there in months.”

  Morgan stood up and walked to his desk. Opening one of the slim drawers, he removed a piece of paper. He sat on the couch next to Naomi and handed the paper to her. “Here.”

  She recognized what it was: a check, written out to her. She gasped when she saw the amount.

  “That’s right,” Morgan told her. “Five million dollars. Consider that your base pay for the first year you’re with us, plus the usual laundry list of benefits and stock options that’ll easily double the value of that check.”

  “Howard,” she said, “I still don’t know…”

  “Listen to me, doctor. I can’t hold you down and torture you into taking the job.” He smiled. “I’ve tried brazen flattery and have now enticed you with gold. If those won’t work, maybe trust will do the trick. So here’s the deal. Don’t give me your answer now. But I want you to take that check to the bank as soon as you leave here and deposit it. If you decide to come work for me, show up for work tomorrow at your convenience. If you decide that you’re not interested, I want you to keep the money, no questions asked, on the chance that you may change your mind later.”

  “That’s very generous, but I couldn’t do that, Howard.” She didn’t want to make the commitment without talking to Jack first, but she knew in her heart that she was going to take the job. She would be a fool not to, for any number of reasons.

  Morgan crossed his arms, a knowing grin on his face. “I’ll be free at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon to walk you through the orientation.”

  * * *

  “Jack, he offered me the job, and I want to take it.” Back in her hotel room after having gone for a three mile run and taking a hot bath, Naomi had made a video call to Jack over the web. He had stayed in San Antonio to manage the shutdown of SEAL, which mostly meant doing what he could to alleviate the shock of the people who worked there, all of whom were being systematically kicked out on the street. The two week severance was a sop that would have brought cries of protest and outrage in any other federal agency. But SEAL was different. There were no civil service protections for its employees; they served, and could be dismissed, at the pleasure of the government. Jack did what he could to ease their pain, but they were all well and truly screwed.

  It was nearly midnight in Texas, and Jack looked exhausted. But he visibly brightened at her words. “It’s nice to hear some good news for a change. We could use a lucky break after this cluster.” He ran a hand through his hair, a nervous habit. “When does he want you to start?”

  Naomi saw movement in the corner of Jack’s video pickup, and Alexander’s big head appeared, his nose suddenly filling the view from the webcam. With a single meow, he jumped off the desk. She could hear him tearing off down the hallway, no doubt chasing after Koshka, her cat.

  “He wants me to start tomorrow.” She was a little nervous about how Jack might react. He respected her freedom and her individuality, but they were also a couple very much in love, even if not married. Yet. She hated to leave him holding the bag in San Antonio, but she had to admit to her own streak of selfishness. She couldn’t wait to get started on the work Morgan had promised her.

  “Tomorrow?” He sat back and pursed his lips. After a moment’s consideration, he said, “Hell, why not? I’ll have the mess at SEAL wrapped up by the end of the week. With that done, there’s no reason to stay here, and I sure don’t have anything cooking on the job front. We’ll have to sort out what we want to do with finding a place out there and selling the place here, but I can handle this end while…”

  “Jack,” she interrupted him, “just finish up at work, grab the cats, get your tight little ass in that SUV, and head out here. Forget about the house and all the other stuff for now. We can deal with that later.” She touched his face in the monitor with her fingers. “I want you here with me. Right now.”

  “There’s nowhere in the world I’d rather be, baby. Believe me. But we don’t have a lot of money in the bank to pay a mortgage on a house here and rent a place there until we find a house to buy. And a place out there is going to be a fortune compared to what we paid here.”

  Naomi grinned. “Honey, cash right now is not a problem. Howard Morgan wrote me a check for five million dollars, and I deposited it in our account this afternoon.”

  Jack’s jaw dropped. “Holy shit.”

  Naomi nodded. “That’s what I thought!”

  “Okay.” Jack blinked and shook his head. “Five mil? Seriously?”

  “Yep. And his people are going to take care of finding us a place to live here and selling the house there. It’s all set. So get your buns out here as soon as you can.”

  Naomi watched as a huge weight seemed to fall from Jack’s shoulders. Then a sly grin crept onto his face. “You know,” he told her slowly, “I could probably get used to being a kept man. Being a gigolo to a genius millionaire sure as hell beats working as a government manager or FBI agent.”

  “I’ll still make you earn your keep, you know.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  Naomi’s expression suddenly became more thoughtful. Troubled. “Jack, there’s one thing that I need you to look into. I got a call from Vijay Chidambaram this morning.”

  “The bee and worm guy? What did he say?”

  “That’s the problem. He didn’t say anything. When I answered the call, I heard, I don’t know, like a big boom and maybe a scream on his end. It was really distorted and I’m not really sure. What bothers me is that I’ve tried to call him back several times, and I’ve only gotten an out of service recording. I haven’t been able to track down his family on the web, and I want you to check on him for me, if you could. I want to make sure he’s all right.”

  While SEAL was being shut down, Jack still had all his security clearances and access to nearly every system in the intelligence community. He likely wouldn’t have to dig very deep to find Vijay, but he still had the resources to dig as far as he needed, at least for the next few days.

  “You’ve got it. Anything else for your pleasure, ma’am?”

  “You’ll find out when you get here,” she purred. “That, I can promise.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Lights.” Mikhailov’s quiet order echoed through the eerie darkness that filled the lobby of the lab building. Aside from the glass door, there were no windows, and the lights were off. He stood behind the men of the first squad, who had spread out across the lobby, covering the reception desk and the three closed doors behind it.

  One of the men reached for the bank of light switches near the entry door and switched them on.

  Nothing.

  “Tactical lights.”

  His men turned on the small but intense flashlights attached to their weapons.

  “Bozhe moi,” someone whispered.

  In the harsh beams, Mikhailov could see that this part of the building had been reduced to a shambles. The reception area was also likely the lab’s administration office, for he saw desks, file cabinets, and computers. Or what was left of them.

  The place looked like a tornado had w
hipped through it. Or a battle had been fought.

  Moving forward slowly until he could see behind the counter that ran from one side of the room to the other, Mikhailov could see that the big metal filing cabinets had been upended, and one of them had been crushed in the middle and was covered with dried blood and flecks of gore. Papers were spread everywhere, crumpled and torn, many of them stained with spatters of crimson. The white tile of the floor was splashed with stains of dark brown. Blood.

  Of the computers, one looked as if it were half melted. Of the others, all that was left was metal and silicon. Everything that had been made of plastic or rubber was gone. Mikhailov saw a pile of electronic components that he suddenly realized had once been a telephone, now without its plastic skeleton.

  Rudenko pointed to the door on the right, and Mikhailov nodded. While one soldier yanked the door open, two more moved through and cleared the room beyond. The pair of desks inside were upended, their blood-splashed white laminate tops facing the doorway. The tops had also been slashed and scored, and the end of one had been lopped off. There were also a half dozen holes in each desk in various places, about as big around as his little finger. At first he thought they were bullet holes, but they didn’t have the paint splintering around the edge that he would have expected to see. These looked more like sharp spikes had been driven into them. A dark viscous substance, still glistening, oozed from them.

  One of his men leaned forward, extending a finger to touch the liquid.

  “Touch nothing,” Mikhailov ordered. He had not only seen harvesters himself, he had also read the reports Naomi and Jack had sent him by encrypted email, and he knew they had stingers that could produce this sort of damage. “It is deadly poison.”

  The man recoiled and took two steps back. The others looked nervously at the desks, then at Mikhailov.

  Mikhailov knew then that if they found anything alive in this place, it would not be human. He turned to Rudenko.

  “Da, kapitan?”

  “I have reconsidered my earlier orders. I believe that anyone we may find in here will be like our Spetsnaz friends on Spitsbergen.” During the ill-fated mission to Spitsbergen the year before to secure the Svalbard “Doomsday” seed vault from terrorists, four Spetsnaz — special forces — soldiers had been attached to Mikhailov’s company. They had all been harvesters, and had managed to kill most of Mikhailov’s men. “The men are to consider anyone they encounter to be hostile, even if they appear to be a civilian.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “And warn them not to touch anything like that liquid. They must take great care.”

  “Sir.” Rudenko moved out of the office and repeated Mikhailov’s orders to the men outside, his voice calm and just loud enough to carry so that all could hear. Each soldier nodded his understanding.

  Mikhailov looked again at the remains of the computers. “Pull the hard drives and whatever remains of any thumb drives or disks.” Even if the plastic had vanished, the data on the drives would still be intact, and might be able to tell the story of what had happened here.

  Under Rudenko’s watchful eye, a pair of men quickly gutted the remains of the computers and handed the hard drives to Mikhailov. Another man produced a handful of USB drives, which now looked like the innards of electronic beetles bereft of their plastic exoskeletons. Mikhailov placed them in his cargo pockets.

  Catching Rudenko’s eye, Mikhailov gave him the hand signal to proceed.

  There were two other doors in the reception area. One was a bathroom. Empty, except for more bloodstains on the floor and mirror.

  The final door opened onto the main hallway that ran the length of the building. Like the office and reception area, it was pitch black except for the soldiers’ flashlights.

  As they slowly moved down the hall, they passed another set of bathrooms — empty — and several storage and utility closets, also empty. There were more signs of struggle, but only a few traces of blood could be seen. The same was true of the cafeteria. The tables and chairs had been knocked over, and there were more spatters of blood, but not many.

  Then they found the labs. There were two, in large rooms on either side of the central hallway that occupied the bulk of the building’s first floor.

  “You lead third and fourth squads to check the left side,” Mikhailov said to Rudenko. “I will take the first and second into the right.”

  “Sir.”

  “Slow and quiet,” Mikhailov ordered the men behind him as he led them into the right-side lab. His whispered voice sounded like a shout in the unnerving silence that surrounded them. Even the buzz of the helicopter was barely discernible through the building’s thick walls. “Spread out and check everywhere.”

  The men moved a pace at a time as if they were walking on explosive eggshells, holding the stocks of their weapons tucked tight into their shoulders, fingers on the triggers as they swept the labs with the beams of their flashlights.

  Much like the administrative area, the labs were a scene of utter devastation. What Mikhailov guessed must have been millions of rubles of delicate equipment had been toppled over, thrown, or smashed. Freezers the size of small cars had been knocked to the floor, their thick stainless steel dented, punctured, and even torn. One bore gouges all the way through the metal. The gouges looked like claw marks.

  The men who saw that glanced nervously at one another, but they maintained their silence.

  Mikhailov was suddenly aware of the vast darkness above them. “Check the ceiling.”

  Instantly, half a dozen lights pointed upward. Most of the tiles in the drop-down ceiling had been knocked out. Beyond that, there was nothing but the concrete forming the floor of the second level, along with pipes, and conduits.

  “Kapitan.”

  Mikhailov moved forward to where a pair of soldiers were crouched near one of the big freezers.

  “Sir, look at this.”

  Kneeling down, Mikhailov shone his light over a pool of viscous, foul-smelling amber liquid at least two meters across. As disgusting as it was, it clearly was not the same as the poison residue they had seen on the desks in the administrative office. There was a stain across the floor suggesting the pool of liquid here had originally been considerably larger, but had evaporated. Bits and pieces of things glinted under the glare of the lights. Some looked like electronic components. Others he couldn’t identify.

  “What is that?” He pointed to a pair of shiny nuggets near the edge of the reeking mass. One of the soldiers drew his combat knife and dragged the things out of the ooze so they could get a better look.

  It took Mikhailov a moment of staring at them to realize what they were: gold crowns that had once been on someone’s teeth. Glancing at the two men, Mikhailov suspected that neither recognized what they were looking at. It was too macabre a thought.

  The soldier was about to wipe the blade of his knife on his pants to clean it off before returning it to its scabbard.

  “No,” Mikhailov told him. “Don’t contaminate your clothing. Leave the knife here.” The man reluctantly set the knife down on the floor. Mikhailov drew his own and handed it to him. “Here. Take mine.” It was a mental placebo, Mikhailov knew, for whatever ghastly abomination had caused the destruction here would certainly not be killed by a simple knife.

  “Spasibo, kapitan.” The soldier gratefully slid his captain’s knife into the scabbard before standing up and backing away. The other soldier joined him, clearly relieved to distance himself from the foul-smelling pool.

  Getting to his feet, Mikhailov eyed the refrigerators. There were three of them. Two lay on their sides, the doors open and the contents, hundreds of vials and dishes, spread across the floor. The third had fallen front side down, with the door still shut. “Turn it over. Check inside.”

  Four men, grunting with effort, managed to heave the heavy unit on its side with a loud boom that echoed through the building.

  Mikhailov’s radio suddenly came to life. Rudenko. “Kapitan? We heard so
mething.”

  “It was just us. We had to move something heavy. How goes your search?”

  “We have cleared most of the lab area here. No contacts. Everything in here has been torn apart, as if by a pack of enraged bears. And it is much the same as with the cars: anything made of plastic or rubber is gone. Only metal and things like stone or ceramic remain. But there is hardly any blood. No bodies, no parts of bodies, either.”

  “It is much the same here, although there are things made of plastic that yet remain. Proceed with your search. We will link up with you near the rear doors.”

  “Understood, sir. Rudenko, out.”

  Three soldiers now held their weapons pointed at the freezer door, which had remained firmly closed.

  “Open it.”

  A fourth man clambered onto the side of the freezer that now faced the ceiling and reached down to grasp the heavy duty handle.

  Mikhailov aimed his own shotgun at the freezer door. “Now!”

  The soldier on the freezer yanked on the handle, then leaped back out of the way to get clear of the line of fire.

  As if in slow motion, fixed in the beams of half a dozen flashlights, the door fell open, banging heavily onto the floor.

  Something leaped out, screeching.

  Mikhailov and the others opened fire.