Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (27 page)

In the end, Kelso had agreed to pay five thousand dollars for the bag, making it clear that even that was an outrageous sum for something that was soon going to be available worldwide at government-subsidized prices.

Reluctantly, the man had agreed. A day before the
Revolutions
seed was to be sent out into the world, Kelso met the man late in the evening in the parking lot of a bar on the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska. He handed the man an envelope with fifty one hundred dollar bills, and the man dumped a brightly labeled hundred pound bag of corn seed into the back of Kelso’s BMW. Then they went their separate ways.

Kelso took the bag with him to work the next day, but left it in the car, intending to have someone haul it in for him later. He turned on the television in his office so he could watch the announcement by President Curtis of the roll-out of the
Revolutions
seed. Like the rest of the world, he was stunned as the news broadcast showed the New Horizons plant being blown to bits. Feigning illness, he left work for home, and remained glued to the television and the internet for the rest of the day and most of that night. He learned that everyone at the New Horizons plant where his contact worked, including the man from whom he’d bought the seed, had been killed, and that the trucks carrying the seed had been hijacked.

Then President Curtis dropped a nuke over California.

Over the next few days, he managed to dig out a vital fact buried amidst the torrent of reporting on the Sutter Buttes disaster: the Earth Defense Society had destroyed the
Revolutions
seed carried in the trucks. Every kernel of it.
 

Two days after that, he learned that all the documentation on how the seed had been created, the blueprints, had been destroyed. The mastermind behind the
Revolutions
seed, Dr. Rachel Kempf, and the others on the original research team were dead.
 

The five thousand dollar bag of seed sitting in the trunk of his car had suddenly become unique, a priceless commodity.

The downside, of course, was that President Curtis had declared the
Revolutions
seed to be a weapon of mass destruction, a biological doomsday device, and that anyone having anything to do with it was likely to wind up labeled as a terrorist.

Kelso panicked. He got into his car and headed out of town, hoping to find a place where he could destroy the seed without drawing attention to himself. But as the miles unwound behind him as he raced westward out of LA, he began to calm down. One of his mentors at MIT had once told him, “In chaos, there is opportunity.” Chaos was now abundant. So then, should be opportunity.

He was well aware how much Morgan Pharmaceuticals had already spent on research paralleling what New Horizons had done, and also had a good idea how much more Howard Morgan was willing to spend: he would have put his entire fortune on the line to unlock the secrets of the bag of seed in Kelso’s trunk. The applications of what New Horizons had done were limitless, and so was the potential profit.
 

That’s when the wheels in Kelso’s mind began to turn faster. Profit. He had never been, by nature, a greedy man. Despite never having treated him with the respect that Kelso thought he deserved, Morgan had certainly rewarded him financially. But profit, the kind of profit the seeds in the trunk could bring from anyone interested in developing this technology, could also bring leverage. Power. Independence. What he could get for the seeds wouldn’t make him as rich as Morgan, but it would provide enough for Kelso to step out of Morgan’s shadow. He could determine his own destiny, and Morgan could find someone else to play the role of Tonto.

He stopped for lunch at a roadside diner, his eyes never wandering far from his car, and thought about what he could do. He had many contacts in corporations here and overseas who would be extremely interested in what he had to offer, but he couldn’t expose his identity or he’d wind up on the FBI’s most wanted list.
 

That’s when he remembered Norman Kline, who had been a supplier for the lab Kelso had worked at years ago, before joining Morgan, and who had also been a supplier for Morgan Pharmaceuticals until Karina had discovered his unsavory Russian mafia connections and terminated his contract. The irony had not been lost on Kelso: Howard Morgan could be just as ruthless as anyone else, but he pretended to hold the moral high ground and never did anything outwardly unscrupulous. Any businesses that his company had dealings with had better have clean sheets or they were dropped. The same went for his employees, except when he ordered them to do otherwise.

Kelso was no spy or underworld kingpin, and it took a bit of research and thought to put his plan together. He contacted Kline using a disposable phone to set up a meeting, and Kline was the only one he called with it.
 

From there, Kline set things in motion. Kelso paid him twenty thousand dollars up front for his services, with the promise of more once Kelso began making sales.

That’s where things got stuck. President Curtis pushed legislation through Congress that would have put Kelso behind bars for life if he were caught peddling the seeds. Kelso wanted the rewards, but the risk was simply too high.
 

He forced himself to be patient. It was an election year, and Curtis was scraping the gutter in the polls. Howard Morgan had also unwittingly been helping Kelso by pouring money into lobbying Congress to repeal the President’s anti-biotechnology legislation.
 

Kelso had already planned to offer the seed to various American biotechnology companies, and was working on those arrangements with Kline when he had a flash of brilliant inspiration: why not sell the seed to Morgan himself?

He actually laughed out loud when the thought came to him. But why not? Morgan was just another potential buyer, and he would never turn away from this sort of opportunity, regardless of how illegal it might be. And with Kline as the front man, Morgan would have no idea that Kelso was behind it.
 

The irony was irresistible.

He had Kline contact Karina and arrange a meeting, and after that everything fell into place like a line of dominos, with Kelso pocketing twenty-five million dollars in an offshore account. He could have asked for more, but didn’t want to be too greedy. And he vowed that he wouldn’t spend a penny of the money until he was out from under Morgan’s boot.
 

But the deal was perfect: Karina got the glory, Morgan got his Beta-Three samples, Kelso got the money, and everyone was happy.

For the next several months, Kline set up meetings with various other potential buyers in the United States, closing seven deals worth more than a hundred million dollars to Kelso. Kline was also rapidly becoming rich, and like Kelso, he was socking the money away until the time was right. He didn’t want any of his almost-former friends in the Russian mafia to get wind of what he was doing, especially the deals in Russia and the other former Soviet republics, or they’d want in on the deal. Or just slit his throat.

By September, long before the polls would open in November, things were looking up for Kelso to begin the overseas part of the plan. It was clear that there was no way, short of a miracle, that Curtis would be elected. It was just as clear that the opposition favored a complete reversal of Curtis’s stance on biotechnology.

Kelso again contacted Kline and had him set up meetings with contacts Kelso provided. They were people he knew by reputation, people who would be keenly interested in his “product,” but who didn’t know him personally, so he could keep his true identity hidden. In turn, Kline provided him with several fake passports and other supporting documents to help Kelso fly under the radar, figuratively speaking, of the authorities.
 

Over the next three months, he traveled to six countries, emboldened by the election of Daniel Miller to the Presidency and his proclamations that everything Curtis had done would be just as quickly undone. Kelso had taken some trips while on leave from work, but he didn’t have enough time off to cover all of his time away, nor was he quite ready to part with Morgan. So he took a chance, risking Karina digging into his activities, and did some travel on company time and company money, but using fake documentation while away. It was dangerous, but he had to admit to himself that he began to enjoy the thrill.

Things were going perfectly until the fateful day when Naomi Perrault rose from the dead and Howard Morgan decided to hire her. Kelso knew she had been on the original research team for the
Revolutions
seed, working with Kempf. When Karina revealed that Perrault had been working for some recently cancelled government think-tank, it didn’t take Kelso’s IQ of 176 to figure out what Perrault must have been focused on. She and her boyfriend Jack Dawson, also resurrected from administrative purgatory, knew too much and had too many connections. Once she got directly involved with the Beta-Three project, how long would it be before she started asking inconvenient questions?

By hiring Perrault, Morgan had put in place a bigger threat to Kelso’s plans than Karina Petrovsky had ever been.
 

Kelso decided to stop the presses. He called Kline and told him that the deal was done, finished. But Kline didn’t see it that way. Kelso was his cash cow, and he wasn’t going to let him stop. Kline threatened to expose Kelso, both to Morgan and the authorities, if he didn’t move forward on the remaining deals that Kline had lined up.

After letting him bluster for a while, Kelso agreed to back down. Once he ended the call, Kelso found the contact information for some of Kline’s Russian mafia connections, whom Kline had periodically mentioned. Kline had said that he hated them, because they still had their hooks in him, even after all these years, and he did everything he could to get around them.

Through a set of anonymizer services on the web, Kelso tipped off a few of Kline’s old friends that Kline had been doing black market business in Russia without cutting them in, citing several of the deals Kline had mentioned. Kelso didn’t, of course, mention the deals in which he himself had been involved.

While Kelso was struck with a deep sense of guilt when he read the press article about Kline’s death during a break-in at his home, he was also tremendously relieved. The Russians would have left nothing behind, no information about Kline’s deals, because they didn’t want anything traced back to them.

That little loose end had been neatly tied off.

Only two things had been left before Kelso planned to leave Morgan. There was one last trip to Brazil to meet with another buyer. It had already been arranged by Kline before he was killed, and Kelso had planned to fly out next week to Brasilia. It would have been his last official act as an employee of Morgan Pharmaceuticals. His last unofficial act would have been to smuggle out the thumb drives that contained all the information on the Beta-Three project.
 

Now, however, as he drove past the besieged Morgan Building, he realized that the drives, the data, were gone. It was infuriating, because the information would be worth even more than the New Horizons seed had been, especially with all the progress the Beta-Three team had made since Naomi had arrived. But there was nothing to be done about it. While he couldn’t be positive they were after him, it didn’t matter. He couldn’t go back to the company. There was no way he was going to risk being taken by the FBI.

While he was shocked by this sudden turn of events, he was not unprepared. He drove to LAX and pulled the car into a spot in one of the long term parking lots. Reaching under his seat, he pulled out a small leather bag that he had velcroed in place there, out of sight. He had known there might come a time such as this, when he wouldn’t be able to return to his home or the safe house where he kept his hoard of organic gold. He took out a fake passport, driver’s license, credit cards, and ten thousand dollars in cash, then put his real documents into the bag and zipped it shut.
 

After locking the car, he slipped the bag under his suit coat to keep it out of sight. Once he reached the nearest shuttle stop, which was deserted, he walked past the trash can and surreptitiously dumped the bag.
 

Then he caught the next shuttle for the international terminal.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The night had dissolved into a maelstrom of screams and chaos as Jack and the others ran, following Kuybishev, who was still bellowing orders at his men. Gunfire had erupted all around them, the muzzle flashes illuminating the terrified faces of the soldiers.

Jack had no idea where they were going. He now had his arm wrapped around Mikhailov’s waist, helping him along, while his free hand clutched the KS-K shotgun. Rudenko ran behind them, periodically turning around to watch their backs, his heavy footsteps splashing in the cold, muddy ground.

A man in front of them went down, clutching at his leg and screaming. Jack couldn’t see him well in the dark, but knew what must have happened: he’d stepped on a larval harvester. As they ran, he saw five more men near them go down. Jack slowed down, instinctively wanting to help them.

“No!” Rudenko shoved him forward. “Too late for them!”

Jack didn’t turn around at the boom of Rudenko’s shotgun and the blinding flare of the Dragon’s Breath. The screams of the men who were suddenly transformed into blazing pyres rang in Jack’s ears, but he kept running.

Kuybishev stopped and made a series of hand signals while he spoke rapidly into his radio. The company commanders shouted orders to their men who were converging out of the darkness.

“Here, Jack,” Mikhailov gasped. “We make our stand here. Defensive perimeter.”

Looking around them, Jack could see that they were in an open field near the center of the town. While there was little light to aim by, it made for a good killing ground against opponents who had to close to short range. The only alternative would have been to hole up in some houses, but then the harvesters could have overwhelmed them piecemeal.