Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (26 page)

Jack, badly shaken, joined Rudenko and the others, who now stood in a circle around the amputated limb. They watched with grim fascination as the oozing mass quickly consumed the rest of it. In just a few moments, the flesh and bone had been dissolved, absorbed. Then the thing began to move toward Rudenko, who stood closest to it.

“I suggest you stand back.” Rudenko raised his shotgun. The other men backed away, as well. Staring at the oozing thing, he said, “I believe term in English is
fuck you
.”
 

He pulled the trigger, sending a fiery cascade of burning particles from the Dragon’s Breath round into the larval harvester. The thing exploded, burning so furiously that everyone had to take several paces back.

As the harvester burned itself out, Kuybishev was in Jack’s face. “You did not explain to me what that was.”
 

“It was what we think is a larval form of the harvester, colonel. A baby. They can get bigger than that one. Much bigger. And the only thing that we know will kill them is fire.”

“Perhaps smaller is worse,” Mikhailov commented. “Big we might be able to see at night or in the rain. Ones like this.”

“Will be like tiny land mines used in Afghanistan,” Rudenko finished for him. “Only much more deadly.”

“Come, we finish our sweep.” Kuybishev was reaching for the radio when one of the men with a thermal imager tensed. He had been scanning the area while the unfortunate soldier was being taken care of. At the moment, his weapon was pointed in the direction from which they’d come, back toward the drop zone.

“
Polkovnik? Polkovnik!
” The soldier handed Kuybishev the rifle and pointed.

The colonel looked through the sight. “
Bozhe moi
.” He thrust the rifle at Jack, then began bellowing orders to his men.

With a cold knot of dread congealing in his chest, Jack raised the weapon to his shoulder and looked through the scope. “Oh, God.”
 

There were at least a dozen loping, deadly-looking shapes coming straight for them. Sweeping the scope from side to side, he saw more. A lot more.
 

Mikhailov was right beside him, “Jack, what is it?”

“It’s a trap.” He tossed the rifle to its owner before grabbing Mikhailov’s web harness and pulling him after Kuybishev and the others. “Come on,
run!
”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Renee felt as if she was going to explode, not from anger or even frustration, but from acute pressure. She’d left the young man in the Intelligence Division to keep track of the ever-growing pile of potential harvester incidents while she hammered away on the passport image correlation. After learning that Kline had just been a middleman and had probably never left the country, Carl had made finding The Bad Guy her number one priority. The Los Angeles Division had a team of agents standing by with a warrant to search the headquarters of Morgan Pharmaceuticals and seize any documents or materials related to The Bag, although that’s not how it was phrased in the warrant. The only remaining piece that Carl wanted to have in place before the LA agents went in was a name. The name of whomever she’d been searching for before being sidetracked by Kline. Everything hinged on her now, and she couldn’t fail.

She’d already sifted through the questionable results and discarded them. While there were valid matches, the same faces but different passports, none of them met the profile she was looking for. Some she’d passed to her new friend in Intelligence for follow-up as possible terrorists, smugglers, or other ne’er-do-wells, but the one she was hoping to find hadn’t appeared yet. Carl had authorized the IT support section to give her whatever computer horsepower she wanted, and while that had helped, it was still taking time.

“Come on, come on!” She banged her fist against the desk, and coffee sloshed out of her cup.
 

At last, the scrolling list of computer processes stopped, replaced with this:

9 POSSIBLES FOUND

She quickly opened up the results file and sifted through them. Eight were clearly unrelated.

The ninth, however, was a good match. There were seven passports, with seven different photographs. The man, a middle-aged, heavy set caucasian, was clearly the same individual, despite the terrible quality of some of the photos. He had visited every country on her list, each one with a different passport. While he had seven different aliases, after cross-indexing them against various databases, one of them came up as a perfect fit for the profile she was looking for, and was probably his real passport.
 

Snatching up the phone, she rang Carl’s direct number.
 

“Richards.”

“I’ve got him, Carl. One of the matches came up as an employee of Morgan Pharmaceuticals.”

“Name?”

“Dr. Adrian Kelso.” She paused. “Shouldn’t we let Naomi know?”

“No. We’ve got to keep this entirely aboveboard, for her sake and ours. I just pray that she didn’t know anything about whatever deal was cut for The Bag or there’s going to be hell to pay.” He lowered his voice. “Thanks, babe.”

“You owe me, hon. Now go catch this asshole. I’m going to go home and get some sleep.”

* * *

Howard Morgan was enjoying the view from his penthouse office, sipping a cup of coffee and enjoying the morning sun when a chime sounded. From the tone, he knew that it was his head of security, Karina Petrovsky.
 

“Yes, Karina?” The system was voice activated, although if he wanted privacy, which he usually did if there was someone else in the office, he could use the phone handset on his desk.

“Sir, we have a problem. Look at the main entrance.”

Morgan moved to where he could look through the glass walls to the parking lot, far below. A group of armed men and women had taken over the guard post, and a swarm of black SUVs was pouring in. “Who are they?”

“FBI, sir. They’re sealing off the other entrances, as well.”

In an unusual fit of anger, Morgan threw the mug to the floor. He had gone to such great lengths to fly under the radar of the authorities. This couldn’t have happened at a worse time, just when they were making some real progress on the Beta-Three project.

That’s when the image of Naomi’s face flashed into his mind. It was too coincidental that the FBI was here so soon after he’d told her about Kline. “Damn. Karina, flush Vault One. And I want Naomi Perrault taken aside. Call me back when it’s done.”

“Yes, sir. Right away.”

A soft beep signaled him that she’d ended the call. Morgan fumed as he watched more FBI agents enter the building.
His
building. “It’s a setback,” he reassured himself, “nothing more.” He had invested too much in Beta-Three to have put all his eggs in one basket. The data was backed up, as were the samples.

He kicked one of the pieces of the shattered coffee mug across the floor.

Naomi
, he thought,
you’ll regret this
.

* * *

Naomi looked up as an alarm, a piercing wail, sounded in the vault, and a red light began to flash. Her first thought was that it was a fire drill, until she saw the stricken look on Harmony’s face.

“Come on!” Harmony nearly leaped out of her chair and grabbed Naomi by the arm. “We’ve got to get out of here, now!” Turning to the others in the room, who appeared just as baffled as Naomi, she shouted, “Out! Now!”

Naomi yanked her arm away. She was sure she was just on the verge of identifying more genes associated with the reproduction cycle of the second generation harvesters, and she wasn’t going to just walk away if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. “What’s going on?”

“They’re flushing the vault, Naomi. We’ve got to get out of here, right now!”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that in less than five minutes, everything in here is going to be destroyed. It’s an emergency protocol that only Mr. Morgan can initiate. We’ve got to go.”

“And what if I don’t?” Naomi stood there and crossed her arms in defiance.

“You’ll die, Naomi.” Harmony’s face was pale with fright. “Only a few of us were briefed on this. There aren’t any drills, and it’s for real.” The lock cycled open at the rear of the vault, and the others, shocked and surprised, headed toward it.
 

“But what about all this? We can’t just leave it!”

“Yes we can! Now come on, let’s go!” Harmony grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the door. After a quick head count, she hit the button to cycle the inner vault door closed. When it was closed and locked, she opened the outer door that led to the hallway. “Remember,” she told the others, “what you were working on was classified. Discuss it with
no one
.”

Naomi followed Harmony and the others down the hall toward the elevators just as Karina Petrovsky and two muscular men in suits stepped out.
 

“Naomi, a word, please?” The tone of the blond woman’s voice made it clear that it wasn’t a request. “Harmony, take the others upstairs. We’ll make sure this floor is clear.”

Naomi continued to follow Harmony, but one of the men with Karina stepped in front of her.
 

“Don’t do anything to make an unpleasant scene.” Karina was watching the elevator, waiting for the doors to close.

They don’t want Harmony and the others to see what happens
, Naomi thought. She wasn’t going to give them a chance to do whatever it was they planned. As the elevator doors began to close, Naomi stamped her foot down on the man’s instep, then bashed her right elbow into his jaw, sending him careening backward.

Before either Karina or her other strongman could catch her, Naomi dashed into the elevator just as the doors hissed shut.

* * *

On his way to work, Dr. Adrian Kelso had just turned the corner of the main street leading to Morgan Pharmaceuticals when he caught sight of a long string of black SUVs heading toward the building from the opposite direction. Instinctively, he slowed down, and watched as the vehicles pulled up in front of Morgan’s headquarters. A group of armed men and women emerged from the lead SUV and surrounded the guards at the entry gate. Even at this distance, Kelso could see the letters
FBI
emblazoned on their dark jackets. A moment later, the gate was raised and the other SUVs charged into the parking lot.
 

A prickling sensation broke out along Kelso’s spine, and he slammed his palm against the steering wheel in frustration. He didn’t need his Ph.D. from MIT to know that he’d be a fool to drive into the middle of the small army of agents now flooding into the building.
 

“One more week,” he ground out through clenched teeth as he passed by, moving with the flow of traffic that had slowed down to gawk at the spectacle. The plan he’d set into motion over a year ago might now be in jeopardy. He’d been so careful, and he was so close to his goal now. So close to not only leaving Howard Morgan behind, but crushing the sanctimonious bastard under his heel.
 

Kelso had been with Morgan since the beginning, and had been just as instrumental in building the Morgan Pharmaceuticals empire as its namesake. But Kelso had never been recognized as a partner, had never been granted his just due. He’d always been the sidekick, a glorified gofer. He’d been willing to put up with all that until Morgan had taken the research into genetic payload delivery systems that Kelso had spent years on and given it to Harmony. It had been Kelso’s baby, the show-stealer that he knew would have vaulted him to the top of the scientific community, and would earn him the recognition from Morgan that he deserved.
 

But no. That had been taken away from him. Morgan had insisted that Kelso had to focus on the big picture, to have a hand in all of the company’s many scientific endeavors, but he was little more than a member of Morgan’s personal staff who parroted what Morgan said to those below, and parroted what they said back to Morgan. He had no power, no authority. As Morgan’s senior scientist, Kelso had less impact on the company than Morgan’s secretary. The papers that were written carried the names of Harmony and the others who’d been given his project. The accolades that should have been his went to them.

Just when he thought he would be consigned to the ash heap of history, however, a most curious thing happened. He received a phone call from a man who’d worked for him years before as a laboratory technician, before the man left Morgan Pharmaceuticals for greener pastures. As the man told Kelso, those greener pastures had been New Horizons, and the man had found himself assigned to a new, very hush-hush facility northwest of Lincoln, Nebraska. Upon hearing that news, Kelso’s pulse had shot into the stratosphere, because he knew that New Horizons had been working on something much like his own delivery system idea. He didn’t know the specifics, for that had been held so tight by New Horizons that even Karina Petrovsky hadn’t been able to dig anything up. But Kelso had pieced together much of what they were doing based on the talent the company had hired. Part of his job for Morgan was helping Karina to assess their competition. She provided Kelso information, and he tried to read between the lines.
 

Kelso knew the man well enough to know that he was always looking for more ways to make money, legally or otherwise. He’d never been caught, so far as Kelso knew, but when he wasn’t in the lab, he was finding new ways to try to get rich quick. He was cunning enough to stay clear of real trouble, but otherwise wasn’t terribly bright.

His offer to Kelso was simple: he had access to the New Horizons blockbuster product, the
Revolutions
seed, and was giving Kelso first shot at it. At first, the man was demanding a million dollars for a bag of the seed. While Kelso would have gladly paid that if he’d had the money, he argued that the seed would eventually be available on the open market, and he could simply buy it at the local store or order it online. Getting his hands on it early wasn’t worth a million dollar premium, and no one would pay any significant sum of money for it. If the man could get his hands on the documentation for the genetic engineering that had been done, that would be something else entirely, but the man didn’t have the necessary access.