Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (23 page)

As the thing came to a heavily wooded area, it looked up at the sound of helicopters flying low over the city, heading east. It waited until they were gone, wondering at their destination, before it continued on its way.
 

It was guided now as much by instinct as conscious thought. It had no wounds to heal, but would need to feed again to replace the malleable flesh it had lost.
 

There was that, but something more, as well. It stopped as it was overtaken with a peculiar sensation, and felt a sudden swelling in the malleable flesh that surrounded its thorax.
 

Focusing its visual receptors, its eyes, on its thorax, it watched as a lump the size of a human fist rose from the soft tissue. The base of the lump began to constrict until the lump detached and fell away, landing on the ground with a soft splash.
 

Curious, the thing probed the lump with one of its smaller appendages, the serrated tip poking into the newly formed mass of flesh. Outwardly, it appeared to be nothing more than malleable tissue.

But appearances, as it knew quite well, could be deceiving. A wave of searing pain shot up the appendage touching the lump of tissue. The thing shrieked and tried to jerk its appendage away, but the tissue clung on tenaciously. The pain became greater with every second as the lump, driven by its own genetic imperatives, feasted upon the appendage, greedily consuming it.

In desperation, the thing extended the blade from the pod in its thorax with which it had injured one of the humans. With a decisive slash, it amputated the appendage just above the lump. A spurt of ichor fluid pulsed from the mutilated limb.

Snarling at its cannibalistic offspring, the thing backed away and watched, brooding, as its “child” finished consuming the rest of the amputated appendage. The lump, larger now, paused, as if it were sniffing the air, then began to ooze toward its parent.

The thing backed away. Already, the bleeding from its wound had stopped, although the severed limb still throbbed with pain.
 

Its offspring continued to move in its direction, but the thing didn’t wait for another close encounter. It turned and fled from the woods into the adjoining neighborhood. But it was not simply fleeing from its offspring. It had been overcome with a sense of ravenous hunger, and it needed to feed. And soon.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Carl Richards was pacing in his office in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, from the window to the door, then back again. It was a luxury he afforded himself only when he was alone. It was an expression of anxiety, an old habit he’d picked up as a child, locked in his room for hours on end after being beaten by his alcoholic father.
 

He had conveyed his faked tip to the French National Police about the kidnapper they’d been searching for. He’d spoken for some time to his counterpart in Paris, who’d promised to send a team into the town right away. Richards couldn’t, of course, tell him what they might really encounter, but didn’t want them to be completely unprepared if they encountered harvesters. So he did the only thing he could: he told the French that the information the FBI had on the suspect indicated he was heavily armed and should be considered extremely dangerous. He was plagued with a sense of guilt, sending the French into what could easily turn into a slaughter, but he didn’t see any alternative, other than to let the situation in the town fester.
 

Renee and her sidekick in the Directorate of Intelligence had found indicators of additional potential harvester infestations in France, and the situation was getting worse around the globe. While nothing had hit the mainstream news yet, the outbreaks appeared to be spreading to other parts of the countries that Renee had already pegged as hot zones. Oddly enough, the only major corn producing country where things were quiet was the United States, and Richards wasn’t sure if that was a good sign, or if it was just the calm before the storm.
 

His cell phone, which he’d been holding in his hand while he paced, rang. He stopped in mid-stride, halfway to the window, and answered it. “Richards. Go.”

“Sir, this is Special Agent Kayla Sweeney.”
 

Sweeney was the leader of the team Richards had sent to investigate the home of the late Norman Kline, whom Naomi had fingered as a middleman for the person selling samples from The Bag. Richards knew that information had come as a huge relief for Renee, who wouldn’t have to bang her head against the wall anymore on the image matching program. Richards had tried to pry out of Naomi who had been the source of the tip, but she had steadfastly refused, and he’d had to let it go. For now. The information had probably come from one of her Earth Defense Society cohorts, who were still working in a very loose coalition, he knew. But it didn’t matter. It had been enough for Richards to get Sweeney a warrant to search Kline’s condo and seize his banking and telephone records, along with any travel information they could dig up. It was highly unusual for an agent like Sweeney to be reporting directly to Richards, and not through a Special Agent in Charge, or SAC. But this particular investigation had to be both thorough and discreet, and Richards knew from having worked with her before that she was both. For this assignment, at least, she was to report the findings of her team directly to him.

“Make my day, Sweeney. What have you got?”

“To begin with, his real name isn’t Norman Kline. It’s Anatoli Klimov. He emigrated from Russia fifteen years ago and legally changed his name when he became a naturalized citizen. We ran a background on him, and it turns out he had some associations with Russian organized crime after he came here. Nothing big that we can find, and he doesn’t have any priors either here or in Russia. But there are definitely some shady characters in his social network.”

“I’m liking him as a bad guy so far. What else?”

Sweeney’s deep Southern drawl went on. “He ran a boutique import-export business that specialized in biotechnology, special supplies and consumables that are used in a lot of different kinds of laboratory work. He had customers in all the countries in the background information you gave me, and others, as well.”

“Was all of it legal?”

“From what we can tell so far, yes, sir, it looks legit. We haven’t gotten through everything yet, but aside from his social connections to the Russian mafia, we haven’t found any red flags. We ran him and his business through Commerce and State, and the results came back clean.”

Richards frowned. He hadn’t been under any delusions that there’d be a smoking gun marking Kline as the suspected purveyor of New Horizons seeds, but he hadn’t expected him to be squeaky clean, either.

“How about travel?”

“That’s the kicker, sir. Unless he’s got a fake passport or two hidden away, the only travel he’s done since coming to the States was a trip to Canada ten years ago and one to the Bahamas five years ago. Even here, as best we can tell, he didn’t do much traveling. He was a homebody who conducted almost all his business over the phone and the web from his home office. We already pawed through his computer and came up blank. We’re going over his bank records to see if anything stands out, or if there are any pointers to offshore accounts. Nothing stands out so far. If I had to label this guy based on what we’ve found so far, I’d have to say he was just a businessman who was making a decent living, or he really knew how to launder his money.”

Carl started pacing again. “There has to be something. The information we have on this guy was very specific. Was he up to anything unusual right before he died?”

Sweeney was silent for a moment, then told him, “The only thing that I’d qualify as unusual was a phone call he received the day he died. It was the last call he got before the break-in when he was killed.”

“Why does that stand out? Somebody had to have been the last to call the poor schmuck.”

“It’s because we think the caller was using a prepaid phone, with no associated user information, and that same phone called Kline a lot during the period you told us to focus on, from September through December of last year.”

Carl stopped pacing, his heart suddenly hammering in his chest. “And?”

“That’s just it, sir. This particular phone called Kline’s cell number seventy-eight times between 9 September and 15 December, but not again until the day he was killed. I took the liberty of looking back a bit further, and found a series of calls from that phone to Kline starting exactly one month before the bomb went off in California. I couldn’t find any other calls before that.”

“Good God. I’m going to get you a warrant for a wiretap on that phone.”

“There may not be a need to, sir.” Sweeney sighed. “We got a warrant to access the calling records for that number, too, looking for any associations beyond the calls to Kline, but there was nothing, no other contacts. It was never used for anything but contacting Kline. It’s probably in the landfill by now.”

Stifling a curse, Carl asked, “What about follow-on calls or activity by Kline? Those calls must have been for a reason. The timing is too coincidental. Did he call anyone or do anything unusual after he got the calls from the throwaway?”

“From September through December, no. He was always on his phone, contacting clients all over the world, but that was his daily routine. So if our throwaway mystery caller had instructions for him, let’s say to get in touch with potential buyers for whatever it was he had to sell, it would just blend in with his regular business calls.” She paused. “The only exception was last year, in the weeks leading up to the bomb in California. Interspersed with calls with Mr. Throwaway, Kline made calls to two other unusual numbers. One was to another throwaway that doesn’t have any associated user information. But the other number was in Los Angeles, which was unusual in itself, because Kline didn’t make any other calls there in the previous year.”

“Who was it?” Carl was gritting his teeth, willing her to somehow make a connection that would make sense.

“It was to a company called Morgan Pharmaceuticals. We don’t know who he spoke to, because it was the company’s public contact number and was probably routed internally to whomever he might have asked for. But it was a pretty short call, and not half an hour later he got the first call from the other number I mentioned, the second prepaid phone. There were a lot of calls between those two over the next week, then nothing until two days before the bomb blast in California, when there was one final call from Kline to the second prepaid.”

“Setting up a delivery,” Carl thought aloud, but his insides had suddenly gone cold.
Morgan Pharmaceuticals
. That was where Naomi was working, and she had tipped him to Kline as the provider. That meant that someone inside Morgan Pharmaceuticals had information linking Kline to The Bag, and Sweeney’s analysis was pointing at Morgan as a potential buyer. And that meant someone at Morgan must have samples from The Bag, or at least knew where they might be. He couldn’t believe Naomi was holding anything out on him, but she had been very cagey about where she’d gotten the information about Kline. She was trying to protect someone, but whom? And why? “Damn.”

“Sir?”

“Nothing. Listen, Sweeney, that’s some good work. Keep digging and let me know the instant you find anything else.”

“Yes, sir.”

Carl hit the end call button, then sat down in his chair to think.
Kline must have been the middleman
, he thought.
Mr. Throwaway was probably the guy with The Bag, and through Kline he must have made a sale to someone at Morgan Pharmaceuticals
. And the last call from Mr. Throwaway to Kline just before Kline was killed was a bit too coincidental for Carl’s liking. It was probably to make sure Kline was home. “You were set up, buddy.”
 

Something else was nagging at him, tickling his brain as he stared at the computer screen. All it showed right now was his email and calendar.
 

The calendar.
 

Leaning forward, he looked at the date when Kline was murdered. Like a bolt of lightning, he made the connection. It was the same day that Naomi started working for Morgan Pharmaceuticals.
 

“
Damn
.” He reached for the phone and buzzed his secretary. “Get me the Assistant Director in Charge of the Los Angeles Division on the line right away. And I want Renee Vintner and her sidekick from the Intelligence Directorate in front of my desk in ten minutes.”

* * *

“I wish your people would learn to write things that actually make sense.” President Daniel Miller glanced up at the Director of National Intelligence. While technically not a member of the cabinet, Miller insisted that the DNI be a regular attendee. In Miller’s hand was a copy of the PDB, the President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified document containing the latest and most urgent intelligence information that the DNI and his subordinates in the intelligence community thought the President should see. Miller propped his glasses on his nose, then read from the document:
 

Anomalous military activities have been observed over the last seventy-two hours in Russia, the People’s Republic of China, India, and Brazil. Regular military and special forces units have made unscheduled deployments, and there are some reports of serious casualties inflicted by unspecified entities. The Chinese, in particular, have reportedly suffered the decimation of at least two divisions, and both the Chengdu and Guangzhou regions have been put on general alert.

The causes behind these activities, and whether they are somehow linked across the above mentioned nations, is unknown.

He let the document fall to his desk. “Where’s the punch line? Are these countries going to war? Did they simultaneously decide to have civil wars? What? This sounds alarmist but doesn’t really tell me anything. And what’s this
unspecified entities
garbage?”

The DNI looked uncomfortable. “Mr. President, we aren’t sure what’s going on, yet. But the situation, particularly in China and Brazil, is quite serious. The Chinese have deployed five divisions into rural agrarian areas, and there’s no question that those units are engaged in combat operations.”