Infertile Grounds

by DB Carpenter

  "Turn that down," Jerry said from the backseat. "Goddamn hippie music."

  "Hey, man, the Dead –"

  "Just turn it off, Curtis," Seth spat. "Did Sarah call?"

  Curtis punched the power knob silencing the music. "Not that I know of."

  Seth looked at his watch as they started to drive. She'd be calling any minute.

  "Did you get Wendel started on packing up the rig?" Seth asked, referring to the eighteen wheeler which would be loaded with everything they weren't going to destroy before they left camp.

  Curtis nodded and said, "So we're finally out of here?"

  "Yeah," Seth replied. "If you guys follow the plan to the letter we should be on the road by noon. We've got a lot to do."

  They bounced down the rutty road. The lights of the lodge were visible through the brush and woods up ahead. As they came to a stop, Seth saw that Wendel was hard at work with the forklift, loading up the trailer. While he climbed out of the cab, he heard the faint sound of the phone ringing. He made a rush up the stairs and into the lodge. Just as he was about to pick up the receiver, it stopped ringing.

  "Damn," he muttered as he turned and went back outside to make sure that everybody knew exactly what to do.

  He turned on the rest of the outdoor floodlights before walking across the driveway to the lab. From the outside, it looked like a garage or barn, but inside was several million dollars' worth of extremely high-tech equipment – centrifuges, ultra-cold freezers, a couple of in-memory analytical servers for doing modeling, and even an electron microscope. Wendel buzzed by on the forklift. Seth was happy to see his "to do" list taped to one of the bars that supported the overhead cage on the lift, with lines going through each completed item. He loved lists and nothing irked him more than making a list that people didn't use. He nodded at Wendel who grinned in return.

  Inside the lab, he was surprised to see that noticeable progress had already been made. His plan was simple – take everything that would appear out of place to somebody picking through the ashes. All of the high-tech stuff had to go. Anything that would be incinerated by the fire could stay, but he didn't want anyone to look at the wreckage and know that this was not a simple hunting camp. Especially now.

  Shit, he had to deal with Bert too. Primarily a scientist when they had started this so long ago, his responsibilities had grown over the years and somehow he had become the strong arm of Sarah's organization. It came naturally to him. He had been a tough kid – more a product of the streets than his family, but he had a gift and a keen self-taught interest in science. The scholarship to Harvard came from an endowment left to his hometown, the shit-hole city of Lawrence, Massachusetts by one of the daughters of its once glorious textile business. He had accepted it, reluctantly, and it turned out his Harvard professors recognized he had a genius-level intellect with an eidetic memory. Though they had pushed him to achieve and had high expectations, he would never have made it through if it weren't for Sarah – when she found him he was floundering, distracted, railing against the system and trying to find a reason for expulsion. She gave him purpose – a reason for persevering and he eventually graduated with his MSC Summa Cum Laude, at the top of his field, with honor and prestige. Now here he was – about to commit murder and unleash a virus that would change the face of the earth. He shook his head and chuckled – fucked up stuff.

  He dialed Bert's number. He wasn't looking forward to this. Over the years he had grown to like Bert. But, as always, business was business and unpleasant as it might be, he had to do it. He hadn't wanted to kill Stu and his wife either.

  "Hello," Bert said picking up the phone.

  "Bert, it's Seth."

  Bert's voice dropped, "I was just about to call you. I managed to track that guy from the diner down. I've got some details on him as well as more details on Foster."

  "We need to talk face to face," Seth said. "When do you think you can come out to the lodge?"

  "I'm kind of in the middle of something."

  Seth could hear a woman's voice in the background.

  "How long, Bert? You know how important this is. It takes precedent over everything."

  "I don't know. Maybe two hours or so."

  Seth paused and said, "I want you here in one hour, Bert." He slammed the phone down and started to plan Bert's final visit.

  10:40 pm FBI Field Office, Bangor, Maine

  Pell opened up a cabinet at the end of the room and pulled out a battered suitcase. He placed it on the table and opened it up. It was a ruggedized, military style portable communications system with lots of well-used buttons, a touch-tone dialpad and a handset, and a keyboard and monitor.

  "This is our portable communicator. We can make secure calls from any phone line or network connection with it," Pell explained, plugging a network cable into a jack in the wall.

  "Who are we calling?" Chris asked.

  "First, I'm going to call the datacenter and get them started with the sketchy information that we have. I could do it from here," he pointed to the notebook. "But I've always found that by the time I ask the computer the right questions, they could already have gotten me the answers."

  Chris thought back on all of the information that they had about him in their databases, and he was a nobody. They had to have something about David Rose's people.

  "And then what?" Chris asked, looking at the clock that read a quarter to eleven. His body trembled with nervous energy but he was starting to sag. The past two days were catching up with him.

  "I'll open an incident report and push it up to Carl. Then we wait for the IC to get back to us."

  "Shouldn't we get the cops or someone to come here? Since the place is all shot up and all?"

  "Gee, I didn't think of that. Thanks, Chris," Pell said as he placed his hand on a small biometric pad next to the handset and a retinal scanner popped out of the unit. After a moment, the communicator came to life. He punched numbers on the dial pad, pressed several other buttons, turned on the speakerphone and replaced the handset.

  A female voice came out of the speaker that sounded oddly distorted. This was probably because of the encryption and compression that the communicator was doing to make this a secure call.

  "IC, operator 275. What can I do for you, Agent Pelletier?"

  "I need a data search on some pretty abstract stuff."

  "I'm sure we can help," Operator 275 replied. "Why don't you tell me what you know, and I'll see what I can do."

  Pell started to regurgitate the details that had been given to him earlier. He frequently referred to his pad of paper giving them the geographic location, and the names of David Rose and Sarah Burns, the word 'engamy', and a quick overview of what they thought might be happening.

  When he got done, the operator asked, "That's it?"

  He asked Chris if he could think of anything else. Chris shook his head.

  "That's all we've got."

  The rapid clicking of an experienced typist was the only sound from the speaker for a couple of minutes.

  Finally, Operator 275 came back on the line and said, "This is going to take some time, gentlemen. Can I recommend that we leave this channel open, and as soon as I have some information, I'll pick you up again."

  "That'll be fine," Pell replied sleepily. The alcohol was having its effect on him too.

  "One last question Agent Pelletier," Operator 275 said.

  "What's that?"

  "Who's in the room with you?"

  11:01 pm Unorganized Township T8 R4, Aroostook County, Maine

  Seth walked back over to the barn to help move things along. He went into his office and started backing up all of their data to a heavily encrypted SSD. The drive silently sucked gigabyte after gigabyte off their network. He fired up his notebook and began moving the critical files to it, the ones that he would need before they had a chance to set up shop again on the West Coast. This took the better part of an hour. Bert would be showing up soon.

  "I'm really a fair guy,"
he muttered as he unlocked a small, hidden safe and removed another SSD that held all of the formula and implementation information for Gen96. It was encrypted by a program that he had coded. Needing the highest level of security, he had spent several weeks developing this password and encryption program. Decent commercial packages were available, but none offered all of the features that they wanted. His program used the position of the Earth in relationship to the moon and sun at a given day and time. NASA had an active laser system that kept track of this information and was accessible through the internet. From this number, he created a formula that changed itself radically with each passing day. Every encryption could be broken but this one would be very difficult. Sarah had the other disk with her in California. Without both of them, the information they contained was useless.

  This done, he placed a powerful electromagnet on the hard disk in the server and energized it. He let it sit there for a few minutes destroying the data before turning on the computer. It came up immediately with a catastrophic message telling him that the drive and media type was unrecognized.

  "Beautiful," he said. Their data was traveling with him. He quickly cleaned the other machines' disk drives and then returned to his office. Opening the top drawer of his desk, he slowly removed a forty-five-caliber beast of a pistol, and stuck it in his pants, behind his back.

  Walking out into the main room he yelled to Wendel, "It's looking good."

  Wendel just smiled and continued what he was doing. The room was emptying out nicely – a lot of debris remained but that wouldn't matter. It was all flammable – especially at a couple of thousand degrees.

  Curtis was working with Jerry in the center of the room. They were leaning over a fifty-five-gallon steel barrel.

  Curtis looked up as Seth approached.

  "How's it going?" Seth asked.

  "Great," Curtis replied. Jerry grunted something, his head inside the drum.

  "Good," Seth said. "Bert Nadeau's going to be here soon. You guys just keep on doing what you're doing. Okay?"

  Jerry pulled out his head and pounded the lid onto the drum, his lazy eye drifted to Seth as he said, "This stuff makes me nervous."

  Seth nodded. The drum held an accelerant mixture that was essentially identical to solid rocket fuel. In a matter of seconds, it would go from room temperature to just over two-thousand degrees before erupting in a volcano of flames and heat incinerating anything in this building – even bones would be reduced to ashes.

  "Just make sure you stay away from the detonator," Seth said. "Keep working."

  He walked out of the lab and looked up at the brilliantly cloudless sky that was dominated by the Milky Way's myriad of twinkling stars – the kind of profound beauty that made any thinking being feel insignificant. As he stood appreciating that fact, the phone in the lodge started ringing and the beauty of the moment vanished.

  He ran inside and snatched up the receiver, "Hello?"

  "Seth?" Sarah said. "I'm glad I finally got you."

  "You made it out there all right?" Seth asked.

  "Everything was fine."

  "So you met the…," Seth paused as he searched for the right word, "Benefactors?"

  "Look, Seth, I don't have time to chit-chat. How'd you make out today?"

  He paused for a bit too long before saying, "Not too good, Sarah."

  He told her about his trip to Bangor and the chase of Chris Foster and the FBI agent.

  "What were you thinking?" She exclaimed.

  "It seemed –"

  "So you're shutting down the base, right?"

  "It's being done as we speak – just like we planned. Bert Nadeau's on his way down. Once I get done with him, things will be looking a lot better."

  "When will you be out of there?" She asked.

  "At the latest it'll be noon tomorrow."

  "Camilla is not happy about this. I just hope she doesn't feel compelled to tell the others. This is not anything they would want to hear. Hell, I just got done telling them the great news about the results and how we're ready to go into release phase. And here we are, having to bring our exit forward."

  "Screw Camilla. She's not the one doing all of the work. I know how close we are, and I know how big a problem this is. All I can tell you is that I'm on top of it. Things won't get worse."

  "Seth, this is Camilla Haywood." Her normally perky voice was suddenly excruciatingly business-like.

  He cleared his throat and said, "Hi, Camilla. I didn't know you were on the phone."

  "Obviously," she replied. "Sarah told me what happened with David."

  "None of us saw it coming."

  "That doesn't matter. What matters is that we've invested a lot of money and we expect results. Understand? I don't care what you do or how you do it, but you better fix it. I'm not going to think about what we'll have to do if things go sour at this point. You can be certain it's nothing you'll like."

  "I think that it's a little premature to be talking about failure," Sarah interjected. "There's still a long way to go from where we are now to complete failure. Our schedule for getting out of Maine has just been bumped up by a few weeks. When are you going to be able to give us an update?"

  He glanced at his watch and said, "Six hours."

  Sarah and Camilla both said, "Good."

  "You'll call us?" Sarah asked.

  "Of course."

  Sarah hung up and looked at Camilla.

  "He's very competent."

  Camilla didn't look convinced.

  "Are you going to tell them … him … about this?" Sarah asked, pointing toward the great room.

  Camilla sat down on the bed. "You truly believe that they're going to be able to straighten this out?"

  "Have I ever lied to you, Camilla? We planned contingencies. This is just a change in the schedule. We're prepared."

  Camilla smiled and said, "Okay, he's got six hours, but after that, I'm going to have to let him in on this. I don't have a choice. Can you imagine if somehow the FBI was able to tie me and Phillip to this? It would be such a scandal."

  True. If Sarah could get out of the country, she would be able to disappear. Over the years she had squirreled away a little more than a million dollars in a Cayman Islands account. A little pilfering from the generous grants was no big deal. She deserved it.

  She sat down on the bed next to Camilla and put her arm around her shoulder. "It'll all work out. I promise." Involuntarily, she leaned forward and kissed Camilla's cheek.

  "So what's up with Mike?" Sarah asked.

  Camilla pushed a loose strand of hair behind Sarah's ear and said, "We connect really well – kind of a rarity for me. Each time we've gotten serious, we've each pulled back. I don't know where it's going but he's a good guy and he chipped in some cash."

  Sarah nodded. "Does he know about us? I mean, about how we used to be."

  "Used to be?"

  "You know what I'm saying."

  Camilla laughed. "I know what you're saying and he does."

  "You trust him?"

  "Absolutely."

  11:15 pm FBI Field Office, Bangor, Maine

  "He's a civilian who's providing me with the information. His name isn't important," Pell said.

  "Agent Pelletier, there is a reason this communication channel is secure and encrypted, as you well know. You should not have non-identified third parties in the room with you there. I'm going to need to take a name and full details," Operator 275 ordered.

  Pell rolled his eyes at Chris. "Okay, his name is Chris Foster and he was the one who first brought this to my attention." He explained, then he gave the operator the details she needed.

  "I will need to detail this on my report," she said. "This could look bad for you for not revealing you had a third party in the room. Keep the connection up and I'll be back."

  The speaker fell silent as they were placed on hold.

  "Whatever," Pell sighed under his breath. "This could take a while, why don't you try and grab some sleep on the co
uch."

  The combination of the alcohol and not sleeping for two days finally caught up with him and Chris was asleep as soon as he lay down.

  Pell leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the table. He loosened his tie and put his hands behind his head, which filled with thoughts of personal and professional redemption as he drifted into a fitful sleep.

  He dreamed he was at a Bruins game with Allen Jenkins' son. They were sitting in the corner directly behind the glass, and it was a great game against the hated Canadiens. Ricky Jenkins turned and asked, "When's my dad gonna get here, Mr. Pelletier?"

  Pell didn't know what to say. He had killed the boy's father, but for some reason Ricky didn't know it. "I don't know, Ricky. I'm sure he'll be here soon."

  "I hope so," Ricky replied. "This is a really great game. Dad never takes me to the Bruins anymore."

  The crowd roared as the B's scored a goal. Pell turned to watch the celebrating players when, to his horror, he saw Allen Jenkins standing directly in front of him on the other side of the glass. Blood spurted and trickled down his forehead from the bullet hole Pell had put there.

  Pell glanced at Ricky who looked through his father, as if he didn't even see him.

  He turned back to Allen and tried to say something but the words weren't coming out.

  "You're lying to my boy, Pell. I'll never get to take him to another game because of you!" Allen screamed. Pell barely heard him over the roar of the crowd.

  "But, Allen. You were there. There was nothing I could do."

  "Bullshit."

  "I regret it every day."

  Allen pressed his face against the clear barrier. His pasty features compressed and turned grotesque as he slid his head back and forth, leaving trails of blood streaked along the glass.

  "You wimped out. I want you to tell Ricky what you did."

  Pell shook his head spastically. "I can't. It wasn't my fault."

  "You've got to tell him the truth!" Allen screamed as he pulled his head back and slammed it into the glass, shattering it. More blood poured out of the fresh cuts on Allen's face as he leaned in and hissed, "Tell him now."