Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (49 page)

“No,” Jack told her,
“but...”

“We’re thinking about this all
wrong,” Renee suddenly said, a sly look on her face.

“What do you mean?” Naomi asked
her.

“We’re focused on
trying to destroy the seed before it gets shipped, right?” she told
the others, and everyone nodded. That much was obvious. “But we
can’t.” Jack opened his mouth to argue, but Renee held up her hand
to him. “We
can’t
, Jack. We can’t burn it or even blow it up safely, and we
can’t wave a magic wand and miraculously come up with a nuke to
vaporize it, even if it didn’t kill a bunch of people. Besides, the
seeds are going to start shipping
tomorrow
, remember? Does anybody
have a clue how to get a nuke delivered by overnight express?” She
shook her head. “No. None of that’s going to happen, at least not
between today and tomorrow.”

“So what are you proposing that we
do, Renee?” Jack asked, sharing a questioning glance with
Naomi.

Renee smiled. “We steal the seed
right out from under their noses.”

***

“We’ve got something.” A special
agent hurried over to where Richards sat at his desk, trying to
look busy while actually doing nothing but worrying. The young
woman handed him a printout, and his stomach fell away as he saw
what was typed there.

“Our Legat in
Moscow got this from the FSB,” the woman said, barely able to
restrain the excitement in her voice. Richards automatically
translated the alphabet soup in his head: the Legat was the
Bureau’s Legal Attaché office in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, which
had gotten the information from the Russian
Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti
,
the modern-day successor to the infamous KGB. “It’s a report by one
of the Russian soldiers involved in the incident on Spitsbergen.
Apparently, there was a civilian aircraft there–”

“I can read,
Special Agent Dobbs,” Richards snapped as he again scanned the
damning information.
It’s a lead, all
right
, he thought numbly. The Russians had
eyeballed the tail number on the Falcon jet that Dawson and the
others had taken to Spitsbergen, and had obviously tracked down its
country of origin, which would have been easy enough. And with
that, not only did the FBI, which was led by a collaborator, have
the next best thing to a glowing neon arrow pointing to where the
EDS was located, but they’d also find out that Richards himself had
been conspiring with them. He’d managed to keep secret his little
stunt of getting Dawson clearance to fly back into the States, but
he’d known it would catch up with him sooner or later. He just
hadn’t expected it to be quite this soon. Once his agents began to
dig into the information on the plane, it wouldn’t take them long
to discover the link back to him. He knew most of them considered
him an asshole, but he had trained them well. “Take this up to
Assistant Director Clement right now,” he told Dobbs, shoving the
paper back at her.

“Me?” she gulped.

Richards fixed her
with an astonished glare. “Did I stutter? Yes, you! Personally.”
Dobbs, who had graduated from the Academy only two months before,
just stood there. “
Now
, Dobbs!”

She nodded and hurried from the
room, clutching the printout in her hands.

Richards waited until she’d gone
before he stood up from his desk. He felt his eyes tearing up as he
took one last look around the place that he’d dedicated his life
to, knowing he could never come back.

Blinking his eyes clear and cursing
himself for a sentimental fool, he slipped on his coat and
left.

***

“We’ll have them soon,” Monica
Ridley told the President over the secure phone. “We have a trace
on a plane that was in Spitsbergen where the Norwegians and
Russians nearly came to blows.”

“Those idiots,” Curtis told her. “We
gave both of them information that EDS was targeting Spitsbergen,
and they made a complete fiasco out of it when we could have had
the bastards in our hands.”

“At least one good thing came of
it,” she reassured him. “We’ve already pinned down the plane’s
flight activity, and where it went after it returned from
Spitsbergen.” She paused. “It first landed at Baltimore Washington
International.”

Curtis sat forward in his chair in
the Oval Office, nearly spilling his coffee. “What? How the devil
did they get clearance to reenter our airspace?”

“One of my most senior and trusted
agents,” she said, trying to mask her frustration, “decided to go
rogue on us. I found out that he made arrangements for the Air
Force to pass the plane through, without clearing it with anyone
higher up in the Bureau or Homeland Security.”

“Are
any
of your agents
reliable, Monica?” Curtis said acidly.

“Yes, Mr. President,” she replied,
carefully forcing out the words, “but this man was one of my best.
He was conducting the investigation at Lincoln, and would’ve been
my first pick to send in after the EDS when we find
them.”

“If we find them, you
mean.”

“No, Mr. President,” she said,
allowing a measure of pride and certainty back into her voice.
“When. Because we know where that plane went to after it left BWI,
and after analyzing its flight plans for the last six months, we
know where its primary airport is.”

“Where?” Curtis asked, a flare of
excitement washing away some of the aggravation.

“Oroville Municipal Airport in
California,” she told him. “We have agents on the way there as we
speak, and it’s only a matter of time – a short time, I believe –
before we find our EDS friends.”

“Good,” Curtis said, nodding to
himself. “That’s good. Just don’t screw it up, Monica.”

“I won’t,” she reassured him, then
hung up.

***

Monica Ridley pulled up to an
expensive condo in downtown Alexandria that wasn’t too far from
Jack Dawson’s house, and parked her black BMW Z4 in its designated
space in the basement garage. It was nearly ten o’clock at night,
and aside from the security attendant at the entrance, the garage
was deserted. She walked across the concrete to the elevator, the
clicking of her heels echoing from the white-painted walls. The
fact that she was a woman walking alone in a deserted garage may
have caused some to cast a worried glance around them. But Ridley
was unconcerned. Like her field agents, she was well-armed, and had
survived her own trials by fire earlier in her meteoric career. She
wasn’t afraid, only weary.

Taking the elevator up to the eighth
floor, she turned down the hallway and went to the door for her
condo. Using her magnetic key on the lock, she opened the door and
stepped into the dark entry hall, flipped on the lights, then
entered her pass code into the security system, which turned from a
blinking red to a peaceful green.

After dropping her purse on a stand
in the entryway, she was about to turn on the light in the living
room when a voice from the darkness behind her, somewhere in the
kitchen, made her freeze.

“Why did you betray us?” was all the
voice, a man’s voice, said. It was a voice she had heard before
several times, from a man whom, before today, she had trusted and
respected.

“I could ask you the same question,
Richards,” she replied, turning on the light. She didn’t bother
asking him how he’d gotten in. Any security system could be
defeated with the right knowledge, and Richards had spent part of
his career working as a physical security specialist. Her household
alarm system would hardly have been a challenge for him. She held
her hands away from her sides, making sure he could see they were
empty, as she turned around to face him. “How much did your EDS
friends pay you to turn traitor? How much did they pay Sheldon
Crane? Or Jack Dawson?”

“You can’t buy men like Crane or
Dawson,” Richards snapped as he moved further into the light, “or
me, for that matter.” He held a snub-nose revolver, a .44 magnum,
aimed right at her heart. “They just showed me the truth. They
showed me one of the things that you’re collaborating with, the
things that want to kill us all, and that have been behind the
attacks and the death of the President.” He shook his head slowly.
“You’ve betrayed your entire species.”

“
What?
”
Ridley said, genuinely surprised. “You’ve seen them? The
Others?”

“One of them,” Richards replied,
nodding. “They captured it when some of the things tried to destroy
the seed vault at Spitsbergen. They put it into some sort of stasis
so they could transport it to wherever they’re going to lock it
up.”

“Lock it up?” she asked, dismayed.
“The fools! Don’t they realize what the Others are trying to
do?”

“They’re trying to exterminate us,
for the love of God!” Richards shouted.

“No, Richards,”
she said fervently, shaking her head and taking a step toward him.
“That’s not true at all! They’re trying to
heal
us, all of us. I’m living proof
of their intentions. I was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease
right after I graduated from the Academy, and they cured me,
Richards. They cured me! That’s what this is all about: they want
to give all of humanity the same gift.”

“Then why all the mystery?” Richards
snapped. “And what about the President and the terrorist attacks?
Why did they do that?”

“The Others didn’t do it! Perrault
and EDS did,” Ridley snapped right back. “I would’ve thought you
had figured that part out already.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think
EDS had anything to do with the President’s death,” he told her,
“at least not directly. They couldn’t have: Perrault, Dawson, and a
team from EDS were a few thousand miles away over the Arctic when
the president was killed.”

“What do you have as proof?” she
spat. “Their word of honor?”

“No,” Richards told her. “I have as
witnesses a pair of F-16 pilots who picked up the EDS plane off the
coast near Maine and escorted it to Baltimore where I talked to
Dawson and saw the...thing. And I just don’t buy the idea that a
bunch of crackpots that nobody’s ever heard of suddenly put
together a terrorist organization that could strike multiple
targets around the globe simultaneously and then manage to kill the
President of the United States.” He moved from around the kitchen
counter to come stand closer to her, still holding the gun toward
her chest. “Explain how they could possibly have pulled any of that
off and I’ll hand you my weapon and turn myself in right here and
now.”

Ridley knew that
Richards actually meant his last words, that they weren’t mere
sarcasm. She was shocked to see that the look on his face in that
moment was almost pleading.
He wants to
believe EDS was to blame
, she thought. But
he’s right, the analytic side of her mind whispered.
How could they have possibly done all that The
Others have accused them of?

The answer, she realized with
paralyzing clarity, was simple: they couldn’t have. The only
alternative conclusion, unfortunately, was one that she couldn’t
bear to contemplate. Instead, she focused on the clock in the
kitchen behind Richards. If she could just keep him talking for a
few more minutes...

“So,” she said, her mind shearing
away from the chasm that Richards had opened for her, “are you
planning to kill me? If you are, then just get it over with.
Otherwise, get out so I can make myself some dinner. I’m
starving.”

“Is the new President in on this,
too?” he asked, ignoring her. “That’s what Dawson told
me.”

“Well, if he said it, it must be
true,” she said acidly, but she knew her body language must have
given her away as she saw Richards’ expression harden, his mouth
turning down in a deep frown. “Richards,” she said, softening her
voice, “please, listen to me. They’re not bad or evil, no matter
what Dawson or Perrault might have told you. They’re trying to help
us. They’re–”

There was a knock
at the door. Richards turned his head, his attention drawn by the
sound, and Ridley threw herself to the floor and screamed,
“
Gun! In the kitchen!
”

A second later the door crashed
inward, the frame splintered as Ray Clement’s powerful body
hammered into it. He rolled to the floor in the hallway and came
up, gun in hand, aiming to the right and into the
kitchen.

Even though he was caught by
surprise, Richards had always been regarded as a cool-headed
bastard, and with good reason. Without hesitation he fired through
the wall separating him from the entry hallway, guessing where his
opponent might be. He was rewarded with a cursing roar from
Clement, who came around the corner like a bull elephant, his 9mm
spouting fire in Richards’ direction.

Richards dodged back behind the
counter separating the kitchen from the living room where Ridley
was, Clement’s 9mm slugs chipping into the sleek granite counter
and ricocheting into the dark cherry cabinets behind him. Richards
fired again, hitting Clement in the chest and knocking him backward
over the sofa.