Rudenko hefted his KS-K shotgun. “Those svolochi definitely do not like the Dragon’s Breath.”
Jack nodded, impressed at what Rudenko had told him about the special shotgun shells. “Those rounds are something I already texted Naomi about. She’ll pass the word to others. I have a feeling we’re going to need a lot of those by the time all is said and done. But that brings us to the next question, the big one: what do we do now?”
The two Russians exchanged an unhappy look. “There is not much more we can do,” Mikhailov said. “No one will listen to me, any more or less than they already have through the reports I have given, because I am considered incompetent, a madman, or both. No one will listen to Rudenko, because he is only a NCO and has an impressive list of past offenses, and he is guilty by association.”
“So we do nothing?” Jack felt his hands begin to clench with frustration.
“I’m open to suggestions, my friend. You are faring better with this matter in America?”
Jack had no trouble discerning the sarcasm that crept into Mikhailov’s voice. “No. Goddammit, no we’re not. None of the things are loose there yet, as far as we know, but nobody’s taking it seriously, either.” He rubbed his eyes, then looked back at Mikhailov. “I’m sorry. I just feel like we’re riding on an out of control train that’s about to run off a cliff.”
Outside the room, they heard the sound of boots coming down the hall, the guards snapping to attention.
Someone was coming.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“If you keep doing that to yourself, you’re going to wind up as bald as I am.”
Renee shot Carl a venomous look. “Hey, I’d still be better looking, Mr. G-Man.” She rubbed her eyes before turning back to the computer monitors.
“And smarter, too.” Carl pulled up a chair and sat down next to her. “But if you were smarter than me, you wouldn’t be working yourself to death. Even I know when to take a break. Sometimes.”
“I can’t, Carl. I’m this close.” She held up a hand, the index finger and thumb spread just a hair. “This goddamn close!”
Violating his self-imposed workplace standards of decorum, Carl gently put a hand on her shoulder and said in a quiet voice, “You’ll figure it out. But as exhausted as you are right now, you could miss something as obvious as a dump truck in a swimming pool.”
“That’s what scares me. But we don’t have time to screw around. Every minute counts.”
“Yeah, I know.” Carl gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze, then let go so she could try to focus on the image-matching algorithm. After several false starts in tying all the necessary programs together, it was running the way she wanted. The first few tries had resulted in so many false matches that the results were useless. Much of it was because the images she was using from the passport database were of terrible quality to begin with, and she’d muttered a long stream of curses at the makers of passport cameras and those who used them. After a lot of testing and tweaking, she’d gotten it to find a high percentage of correct matches while generating few false matches.
While the resulting process worked better than she’d initially expected, it wasn’t perfect. Some potential matches were bound to be lost, although she’d still set the match threshold fairly low. But the biggest problem was that it was taking forever to run. She didn’t have the computing resources available here that she’d had when she’d been with the Earth Defense Society.
On top of the mountain of frustration the image matching system had caused, the news she and Carl had received from Naomi and Jack had been chilling, to say the least. Naomi’s revelation about the possibility that the harvesters might be able to reproduce on their own, no longer having to rely solely on the transgenic weapon of the New Horizons corn, was particularly frightening.
Worse, there were more reports cropping up in the news about events that fit Renee’s search criteria for possible harvester-related incidents. The majority continued to be focused in Brazil, China, and India, but new reports had come in that morning from France and Italy, the leading corn producers in Europe.
“Whoever this asshole is, he’s certainly gotten around. Check this out.” She pulled up a French web site and hit the translate button. “This was posted just a few hours ago. It’s sort of an alternate news site, and the post is about a mass disappearance in a little town south of Bordeaux, France.”
Looking over her shoulder, Carl read a few bits of the text. “Over two hundred people disappeared…suspected alien abduction…police not available for comment…”
“It hasn’t been picked up by any of the real news services. That’s the way things have been with most of these reports, with the newsies just writing all this off as hoaxes or mass hysteria. Let’s check this out.” There was an image below the text summary that linked to a video. Renee clicked on it, and it began to play.
Carl watched as whoever was holding the camera moved slowly down a very quaint-looking cobblestone street. The sky was darkening, and the street lights were already flickering on. Had the scene been a still image, he could have pictured it on a postcard, a sleepy little French town where the only serious pursuit was drinking wine or coffee at a little sidewalk café.
But there was something wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it as he watched the video, but he could hear it in the voice of the woman who was narrating her exploration. He couldn’t understand her words, but he could tell she was nervous. And scared. “Do you understand any of what she’s saying?”
“Only a little. We’ll have to get a French linguist to listen to it. But I think the gist of it so far is that she came here to visit someone, maybe an uncle. She was supposed to meet this person at the train station, but they never showed up. And whoever it is isn’t answering the phone. So this gal’s taking a hike from the train station to their apartment or whatever, and…oh, Jesus.”
The woman narrating the video gasped and the image shook as she turned a corner and found a body on the ground. Sprawled amid overturned tables and chairs of a café like Carl had just pictured in his mind, the body belonged to a middle-aged man. Or so he thought, as the woman managed to steady the shot, focusing on the body. In the background, it was clear that the little café had been demolished, as if it had been the scene of a fight involving two rival biker gangs.
“Pause that!”
Renee clicked the pause button as Carl leaned closer to the screen. “Are you seeing the same thing I am?”
“If by that you mean that half of his torso is missing, yes.” She put her fingers to her lips. “God, I feel like I’m going to puke.”
“That’s not a typical trauma wound, like from an explosion or even like the body was struck by something that sheared part of it away.”
“It looks like he melted. Dissolved.”
Renee’s voice sounded very small in Carl’s ears, and he put his hand back on her shoulder. While Carl hadn’t seen it himself, the Norwegian officer, Terje Halvorsen, whom Jack and Naomi had met up with on Spitsbergen during the battle for the seed vault there, had reported seeing one of his men, dead, with a limb in similar condition. No one had an explanation then.
“Play it.” Carl didn’t need to point out to Renee something else he’d noticed about the body: while he wasn’t any expert on uniforms, he would have bet a month’s pay the dead man was wearing the uniform of a gendarme, a cop.
With an unsteady hand, Renee clicked the mouse button to continue the video.
The image stayed focused on the body for a moment more, and the woman somehow managed to get her voice under control. She was crying, but she wasn’t hysterical. Even without knowing exactly what she was saying, Carl could tell she was determined to get to her destination. He felt as if he was watching one of those cheesy horror movies where the characters were holding a video camera. Only this was real.
“She hasn’t seen anyone else so far,” Renee whispered after the woman spoke a bit more. “Then she says, ‘The town is dead.’”
; The camera panned around, showing what looked like a small central square with an old stone church at one end. Aside from the woman with the camera, there was no one else.
The woman headed for the church, and Carl and Renee watched her hand move forward to push against the door, which was standing ajar. Breathing so fast now that she was nearly panting, the woman stepped inside. The video quickly adjusted to the dim lighting, but Carl suddenly wished it hadn’t. Along with several pools of liquid, there were at least a dozen bodies. Some were draped across the pews, while others lay on the floor. Most of them were intact, while others had been partially consumed.
Unable to help herself, the woman bent over and vomited on the floor. The camera panned crazily across part of the floor, then the woman’s stomach as the audio relayed the retching sounds. Then it shifted to show what was to her left.
Carl and Renee both gasped in recognition as they saw the dark, insectile form that grew with astonishing speed in the image as it rushed toward the woman.
Sensing something approaching, the woman looked up. Reflexively bringing up her hands to defend herself, the camera caught a final glimpse of the blurred image of a gleaming chitinous exoskeleton. There was a piercing scream from the woman, and the camera recorded its fall to the floor.
The video ended.
“Jesus Christ.”
Carl looked at her. “You hadn’t watched that yet?”
She shook her head. “No. I just read the translated text and cross-referenced it against the other French and international news services before you came by.” She pulled up another web page and did a quick search, then scanned the result summaries. “Looks like the video’s going viral on the web, but everybody thinks it’s a gag horror film made by college students or something. I’ll have to check with the other agencies to see if the French police have actually moved on this.”
“Wait a minute. How did the video get to the web in the first place if she was killed?”
“There are apps and web services where you can stream live video, even from your phone. She was broadcasting live to this French alternate news site. Whoever was tuned in then saw the whole thing as it happened.”
“And they think it’s a joke?”
“That’s the gist of the comments, according to the on-line translator. Thank God for that. My French sucks.”
Carl sat there for a moment, staring at the black rectangle on the web page that was the end of the French woman’s video, the recording of the last moment of her life.
“Don’t stick your neck out too far on this, hon,” Renee cautioned.
“I’m not. I know I’ve got to rein it in or the Director’s going to have my guts. But I think I’ve got something legit on this one. I’ve had a team working with the French National Police on a kidnapping case, a French father and American mother, and the mother’s accused the father of abducting their daughter to France, but nobody could find him.” He pointed at the screen. “What’s the name of this town again?”
Renee opened her mouth to tell him, but he grabbed a pad of sticky notes and handed it to her. “You know I can’t pronounce anything that’s not written on the sports page.”
Rolling her eyes, Renee wrote down the name of the town, then handed him the note.
“The French are about to get a little tip on the whereabouts of our suspected kidnapper. Then we’ll see what happens after that.”
Popping his head above the cubicle walls, Carl took a quick look around the office before leaning down and giving Renee a quick kiss on the lips. “Keep up the good work, babe.”
“Casanova,” she sighed as she listened to the sounds of his footsteps quickly recede down the walkway, heading toward his office.
The warmth in her heart that she felt for Carl gave way to icy fear as she looked back at the screen and the video recorded by the unknown French woman.
Taking in a deep breath, she returned her attention to the image matching program on one of the other monitors, hoping against hope that it would finish soon.
* * *
“Just the person I wanted to talk to.”
Naomi turned at the sound of Howard Morgan’s voice. Just a moment before, the entire hallway behind her had been empty. The man was uncanny. She smiled. “Doing your magical appearing-out-of-thin-air act again, Howard?”
Morgan didn’t return the smile. “A little birdie told me that you’d shifted your research focus to the Beta-Three payload, rather than the delivery system.”
“Yes, I did temporarily. I helped the team get past the obstacles that had been holding up their progress on the delivery system, and Harmony has them hammering hard on the next stage of development.”
“So you’re telling me that your leadership on the project isn’t needed any longer?”
She stopped and turned to face him, crossing her arms. “No, I’m telling you that your tech lead is doing a great job, and that when they’ve finished this part of engineering the delivery shells they’re going to hit more obstacles, which I’ll help them through. In the meantime, most of what they have to do is work that they’re well-trained and well-equipped to perform, and I wanted to take a closer look at what to you represents an even greater windfall of genetic technology, but that to me represents a threat to our entire world.” Morgan opened his mouth to speak, but she didn’t let him. “And if this ‘little birdie’ happens to be my dear friend Dr. Kelso, he can go straight to hell. It’s fine by me if he wants to poke his head in the door whenever he wants, but his refusal to even acknowledge my existence unless I get right in his face is unprofessional, to say the least.”
By now, Naomi had worked up quite a head of steam. She was tired and worried to death, and the last thing she felt inclined to tolerate was someone tattling on her, especially if that someone had not a clue what she was doing or why.
Morgan didn’t flinch. “Fair enough. I’ll speak to Kelso and get him straightened out. But I also wanted to remind you who the boss is around here, Naomi. That would be me. I don’t necessarily have an issue with you wanting to go off the reservation on your own for a while, but I do have an issue with not being informed about it.” He stepped closer, his expression and voice softening. “Listen, you are, without doubt, the crown jewel of this company among the people in my employ. But even the crown jewel is bound by a few rules.” He smiled. “Not many, perhaps, but a few. I try not to be a tyrant, but I like to know what my people are doing. From now on, it would make me a lot happier if you’d tell me about any changes, rather than Kelso or anyone else whispering in my ear.”
He gestured for her to keep walking in the direction she had been before he appeared. “And another thing,” he went on. “I want you to go home and get some sleep. I’ve also checked the vault and building access logs, and you’ve locked yourself up in this place for most of the last three days. I consider myself a workaholic, but you’re too much. This isn’t a residence.”
She waved away his concern. “I nap on a cot in my office and take showers in the gym. I have several changes of clothes and can send them out to be cleaned.” She shrugged. “I used to do the same thing sometimes when I was with New Horizons. While Jack’s away, especially with everything that’s going on, I need to be here.”
“Naomi…”
She stopped and turned to face him again, this time reaching out and taking his arm. “I need to be here, Howard. I don’t think you understand. One thing you don’t know, because I didn’t tell Kelso, and I don’t think Harmony did, either, is that we think we identified a gene sequence in the harvester DNA contained in the Beta-Three corn samples that may allow them to reproduce asexually. That’s a game-changer, because the original harvesters couldn’t reproduce. We don’t know why, and probably never will. But the generation introduced with Beta-Three can. And my friends in the FBI think the possible incidents involving harvester infestations are growing both in number and severity.” She looked at him with frightened eyes. “The genie is out of the bottle, Howard, and he’s f
ar more dangerous than any of us imagined. That’s why my work on the harvester DNA from the Beta-Three samples is critical. If we don’t understand them, we’ll never have a chance of stopping them.”
She started walking again. She’d been heading down the hall toward her office. She’d forgotten to feed the cats their dinner, and was dreading the mess that Alexander had probably made. When he was full, he just slept all day. When he wasn’t, he could be a holy terror. Thankfully, she didn’t have to worry about cleaning out their litter box: someone on the janitorial staff took care of it, but she’d never caught the person in the act so she could thank him or her.
“It’s that bad?”
“It looks like it, yes. We know they’re loose in India and Russia for certain, and I just got word from my FBI contacts that there’s also been an outbreak in France, and probably Italy, as well.”
“But why nothing here so far?”
“I don’t know. Maybe whoever was peddling these seeds only sold to one buyer here, although that seems extremely unlikely, considering the number of companies that would kill for this technology.” She looked at him. “I’m still waiting for you to fulfill your end of our bargain, Howard. I need the name of the seller.”
“Remember, I only said that I’d consider it.” Before Naomi could explode, he went on, “And I have. His name was Norman Kline.”
“Was?”
Morgan nodded. “Kline was actually a middleman. He said the source was a New Horizons employee, but that was all he would give us. I had Karina Petrovsky, my head of security, keep tabs on him after our little exchange last year in hopes of discovering the source so we might be able to deal with him directly. New Horizons was defunct, of course, but he might have more samples or other information that we might have used. Unfortunately, Kline was killed in his home in Seattle during a robbery the day you started work here, and the name of the source went with him.”
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 16