Infertile Grounds

by DB Carpenter

"What the –" Arthur started to curse, but caught himself. "Can I take the call somewhere private, please?"

  "Of course. You can use our office. Follow me," she said as she jerked her head out of the crack in the door and scooted back down the hall. Arthur collected his briefcase and coat and followed after her without a word.

  The phone was ringing as he stepped into the nurse's office and shut the door. Arthur picked it up. "Kent," he said curtly. He hated being tracked down when he was in the field. He carried a Bureau enhanced iPhone that was capable of secure communications. Why would someone have to get him on an unsecure line? Particularly some dink from State. It couldn't be good news.

  "Is this Arthur Kent, Director of Criminal Investigations for the FBI?" A deep, unfamiliar voice said.

  "Yes, who's this?" A premonition-knot formed instantly in his stomach.

  "My name's Jack Long. I'm with WOTN in Boston, and before you hang up the phone on me, I want to tell you something."

  "What's that?" Arthur said, having an ominous feeling he knew what he was about to hear.

  "I was told an incredible story this morning about a group of people who have developed a virus that's going to sterilize the world."

  "A virus? What are you talking about?" Arthur said. Shit!

  "You know what I'm talking about, Mr. Kent. That's why you're here in Boston, isn't it. The agent who's been working the case is in Mass General. I know all about it. I wanted to get your comments before we break the story."

  Arthur glared down the hall at Carl and his men. One of them, Pell, or one of those two doctors had talked to the wrong person, and now he was on the brink of his worst nightmare.

  "What was your name again?"

  "Jack Long."

  He took a long pause before saying, "I don't know what you're talking about, Jack. I'm here to interview an agent that went bad and shot a cop. That's it, plain and simple. Whoever told you that story about viruses, or whatever the hell it is, was obviously taking you for a ride. Hope you didn't pay them too much."

  "I don't think so, Arthur. Why would you come all the way to Boston for a bad agent? You've got people to deal with that sort of thing. You must be here for something more substantial. Something with bigger implications. I'll tell you what, though, I'm willing to make a deal."

  "A deal?" Everyone wanted to make deals today.

  "I can see how a situation like this requires complete secrecy. If the public found out about it," he paused for a moment. "Well, I can only imagine what would happen. You give me the exclusive on the investigation, and I'll wait until you say it's okay to run the story."

  Blood rushed to his face as his heartbeat doubled. If there was one thing he hated more than anything else, it was being pressured like this, especially by some media schmuck. "Who told you about this?"

  "A friend," the reporter replied.

  "Well, even if there were any truth to what you're saying, I certainly wouldn't discuss it over the phone like this. And, don't get me wrong, there is no story here, but I'd like to hear what you have to say in more detail. Could we meet to discuss it?"

  "Sure," Jack replied. "When and where?"

  "I'll send a car for you now. Are you at your office?"

  "Yes."

  "They'll be there directly."

  Before hanging up the phone, Arthur said, "One more thing, Jack."

  "What's that?"

  "Have you told anybody else about this story?"

  There was a hesitation. "No."

  "Good, don't or you lose any exclusive on anything."

  "Damn," Arthur muttered as he slammed the phone into its cradle. He furiously pounded out a message on his phone and then stepped out of the office.

  "May I use your office for a bit longer?" He asked the nurse who was sorting through patient records outside.

  "Of course," she replied.

  Arthur walked down the hall to Carl, Irving, and Steve. "I need to speak with you three in private. Come with me."

  They piled into the small office. Arthur let the tension, his ally, build for a minute before he said, "I just got off the phone with a reporter at WOTN. He knows what's going on here with this suspected virus. I want to know how this information has got out. Right now."

  His eyes blazed as they moved between the three men.

  Carl spoke first. "None on my team has spoken to anyone. It must have been Pell. He probably contacted the media just to get this out there, to distract everyone from the real issue about him shooting a cop."

  "I have the news reporter being picked up now and believe me, by the time I'm done with him I will know exactly where the trail leads. So if any of you has anything to say, you'd better say it now. It'll be your jobs if I find out I'm not being told the truth."

  "I'm telling you, Arthur. This sounds just like the sort of thing Pell would do," Carl said. "We're professionals. None of us have said a word, have we?" He turned to Irving and Steve for support.

  "Well?" Arthur asked as he stepped into Steve's and the Irving's personal space, glaring at each man fearsomely.

  "Well sir," Irving began tentatively. "Pell was babbling about the virus and the doctors –"

  "I know about that," Arthur said. "It was a stupid move by Carl to tell them anything but that's done. Right now, I want to make sure none of you is the leak. Look me in the eyes and answer that question."

  Each man professed their innocence satisfactorily and Arthur glared at Carl for a long moment. He made a slow hissing sound as he took a long intake of breath between clenched teeth and shook his head. "So that means your foolish decision to talk to those doctors is the reason we're in this mess."

  Carl opened his mouth to say something but Arthur shut him down. "I'll deal with you in due course," he said before opening the door of the office and heading outside.

  Dr. Epstein was right there, talking on a phone at the nurses' station. Arthur walked over and pressed down on the hook switch, disconnecting the Doctor's call.

  Dr. Epstein began, "What the –"

  "I want you and that intern in here. Now."

  "Page Lasu and have him meet us," Dr. Epstein said to a nurse as he stepped into the office.

  Arthur stood silently in the office, keying a message into his iPhone for an update from the agents that were on their way to get Jack Long as he waited impatiently for Lasu to arrive.

  After a few minutes, the door opened and Lasu walked in. The tension in the room was palpable, and the young doctor looked like he was going to crumple under the invisible pressure. This kid's never going to make it through his internship, Arthur thought as he glared at the most likely candidate for the Loose Lips award.

  "I'll get straight to the point," he said. "The fact that Agent Moscovitz here, for whatever reason, decided to share information with you about an active investigation is unfortunate, but we need to know exactly who you might have told about this."

  "I didn't tell anyone!" The intern screamed as he looked wildly at the men around him. "Nobody."

  "I didn't say you did," Arthur said. "And what about you, Doc? Did you talk to anyone about this?"

  Dr. Epstein shook his head back and forth.

  "You didn't even tell your wife about it?"

  The now visibly nervous man continued to shake his head.

  Arthur stepped forward, stood directly in front of the doctor and Lasu and said, "Do you realize how important this is? If this gets out in the media, we're going to have a crisis. Hysteria in the general public is not a good thing, gentlemen. I need to corral anyone who knows anything about this until we can either confirm or deny the whole thing. Do you understand? This isn't a game."

  He waited for one of them to talk.

  "I talked to my wife about it last night," the doctor said finally, his face turned down in disgrace. "I'm sure she didn't tell anyone else, though."

  Arthur took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. "Where's your wife now?"

  "At home, as far as I know."

  "You," Arthur s
aid as he pointed to Steve Strange. "Take the doctor and go find his wife. Bring her to the office. If you can find out if she talked, then get whoever she talked to and bring them in as well."

  "I'm an American citizen," the doctor said. His verbal polish gone, face flushed, eyes wide. "You can't do this."

  Arthur grabbed the doctor by the shirt and pulled him so that their faces were an inch apart. Dr. Epstein struggled, but it was pointless. Arthur was in tremendous shape for a man his age. He could easily bench press the apparently chatty doctor.

  "Listen to me, Doc. I'm only going to say this once. You're either going to work with me or against me and, you can trust me when I say, you don't want to be on my bad side in a situation like this. Do you understand?"

  The doctor nodded violently. Arthur let him go and watched as he and Agent Strange ran from the room.

  "Be fast about it," Arthur yelled at them as the door shut. "Now, what about you?" He said as he turned to Lasu.

  7:00 am PDT Humboldt County, California

  Sunlight filtered around the edges of a shade and provided the only light in the room. Chris sat up slowly, trying to piece together where he was and how he had gotten here. Last night came back to him slowly. Jesus Christ. Two car accidents, Miguel and his boys – he was lucky to be alive. Unbelievable. He could vaguely remember walking for miles, then hearing the music and stumbling up onto the porch. After that, it was all blank.

  Bloody gauze wrapped his forearm. He touched the bulge where the unset bone pressed against the medical dressing and flashed back to the disturbing sensation of touching the jagged bone last night. He could still feel the sharpness of the bone on his fingertips. Bending his elbow sent an intense pain up his arm that rippled across his chest and up his neck. He clenched his teeth, holding in the agonizing scream.

  He tried to stand but was too weak and dropped back down onto the bed. After a minute or two, he tried again, and this time got to his feet. He walked over to the door and turned the knob. Locked – from the other side.

  "What the..." he muttered as he walked over to the window and lifted the shade.

  A large tractor-trailer sat in the driveway below the window and several people stood next to it talking. Chris watched them for a few minutes until a man with bandages wrapped around his head noticed him and pointed. The others looked up. Chris instantly recognized one of them – Albert from Camilla Haywood's house.

  Son of a bitch! He lowered the shade and stepped back from the window. What were the odds that he had managed to stumble on Albert? Was this the McGuire place? Footsteps pounded up the stairs to his room. He stepped back as a latch snapped and the door swung open. The bandaged man stormed in, followed immediately by a woman. She slammed the door behind her.

  "Why don't you sit down, Chris?" The chiseled man said.

  Chris dropped onto the corner of the bed.

  Both of them stared at him as if he were some sort of strange curiosity – like he was the Yak-boy at the carnival Freak Show.

  The man moved as if in pain – his features frozen in a permanent sneer. The woman was oddly familiar. As he stared at her, it came to him – she had put on some years since her picture and had blossomed into a much more beautiful woman than she had been back then.

  "Sarah Burns," he said before even fully realizing it himself.

  She stared back coolly.

  "You do exist," Chris said, trying to get her to respond. He wanted to hear her voice.

  "I do," she replied finally.

  The man leapt into the conversation, "How the hell did you find us?"

  "Who are you?" Chris asked.

  The man's foot kicked out and slammed into his arm. The blast of pain nearly knocked him off the bed as he screamed. He clutched his arm but there was no dulling the searing pain.

  "You're not asking questions here, buddy. I am and if you get cute, I'm going to do the same thing again. Got it?"

  Chris didn't respond. The pain in his arm was unbearable and he flinched as the man pulled his foot back to kick him again.

  "Do you get it?" He said again as he stood on one foot with the other cocked.

  Chris nodded. "Yes," he squeaked through gritted teeth.

  "Now I'm going to ask again. How did you find us?"

  Chris looked first at the man and then at Sarah, expecting to see compassion on her face. Instead all he saw was nothing – an emotionless mask. Her widely set grey eyes above her high, defined cheekbones fixed on him unwaveringly – clinically, as if he were an experiment in a petri dish. Compassion was definitely not in her vocabulary.

  He quickly evaluated his options, but unfortunately he couldn't think of any that were truly viable, other than telling them what they wanted to hear.

  "I followed Albert," he said. "I was at Camilla Haywood's house in Malibu, and I talked to him. He told me he was moving stuff back to her other house. When I saw him heading north on the highway, I followed him."

  "How did you end up at Camilla's house?" Sarah asked.

  "Pell told me about her," Chris replied.

  "Who's Pell?" She asked.

  "He's with the FBI – Agent Paul Pelletier."

  Sarah pulled up a chair and sat down.

  "Is the FBI with you?" The man asked.

  Chris shook his head. He didn't want to tell them that he was alone, but he didn't want them to panic either. If they were to pack up and abandon this place, his body would probably be one of the few things that they left behind.

  "I did it on my own," Chris said. "Pell's back in Boston. He's got his own troubles with the FBI. When he couldn't come out here to chase down the only real lead we had, I came."

  The man and Camilla exchanged glances before the man said, "Albert told us you said you were with the FBI and that –"

  Chris shook his head, "No, I'm not. I just said that to try to get him to talk to me."

  "Are you sure," the man said, cocking his foot again.

  "Absolutely, I'm just a guy caught up in all this bullshit. That's it."

  "You've been a thorn in our side since that night up at the Wild Bear," the man said.

  Chris glared at him. So he was the one sent to the Wild Bear to kill him. Probably the same guy that blew the place up as well. Actually, he looked a lot like one of the men he had seen crossing the parking lot at the FBI office in Bangor – not good.

  "David Rose brought me into this whole mess," Chris said. "I was just fishing at my camp, taking a little R and R, and the next thing I know, I'm being chased by you people. You forced me to go to the Feds."

  Sarah sat down in a ladder back chair, crossed her long, denim-clad legs and folded her hands in her lap. "Everyone has been in the wrong place at the wrong time at one point in their lives, Chris. That day when David's plane went down was just your time."

  "Maybe so," Chris replied. "You tried to kill me. For someone who wants to save the world, you're pretty violent."

  "Don't tell us our business," the agitated man said as his foot lashed out again and connected with Chris' tender arm, causing him to scream out as he fell to the floor. The room spun. The overwhelming pain made it hard to breathe, to think. He teetered on the brink of consciousness.

  They let him writhe on the floor in agony for several minutes before the man pulled him back up onto the bed. He drew a pistol from behind his back, placed the steel barrel against Chris' temple, and cocked the hammer.

  "Okay. Enough small talk. I'm going to ask you direct questions and I expect direct answers. If you jerk me around, I'm going to kill you," the man said. "Does the FBI know we're here?"

  Chris couldn't focus. The gun and the pain in his arm weakened his ability to think of a way out, but it also seemed to strengthen his resolve. He couldn't tell them anything, yet. He had to be strong, to pull it together. His life depended on it. "I'm not answering any questions until you tell me your name."

  The man's angular face twisted into a scowl. His body tensed. His finger increased the pressure on the narrow, curled me
tal trigger. He wanted to kill Chris – it was obvious. For some reason it seemed personal.

  "His name's Seth. Now answer the question," Sarah said.

  Chris looked slowly from Sarah back to Seth.

  "Fuck you," he spat at Seth.

  Seth jerked the trigger on his pistol and the gun roared.

  10:16 am Boston, Massachusetts

  "Goddamn it," Arthur growled as he slammed down the phone. He turned to one of his men and said, "Go establish a secure link with DC. I need to talk to William Stevens and probably the president too."

  The man quickly left the conference room of the FBI office on State Street.

  "What happened?" Carl asked.

  "They won't let us in."

  "What do you mean?" Carl asked.

  "They locked the front doors and won't let us in without a warrant. They're a two-bit shit station that thinks they're in the big leagues now because of this Wendy Johnston." He flung his pencil across the room. Dr. Epstein's wife hadn't been able to keep her goddamned mouth shut and had talked to her ex-reporter sister who had shopped the story to WOTN. Now he had a third major crisis to deal with – this one courtesy of Carl's decision to trust those doctors.

  "We need to get them off the air," Arthur said. "Get some people on it, Carl. Once I get the okay, we're going to do it."

  "Are you serious?" Carl asked.

  Arthur glared at him, wanting to tell him about Pell's accusations against him – to throw everything on the table in plain view. This dancing around the truth stuff wore on his nerves. Two of his best men were trying to confirm what Pell had told him, and if it turned out to be true, he was going to personally make sure that Carl got his just deserts.

  "Do I look serious to you?"

  Carl turned to Irving and said, "You heard what he wants. Take whoever you need and go."

  The agent Arthur had sent to set up the comm link to DC popped his head into the room. "It's up," he said.

  "Thanks," Arthur replied as he marched toward the door.

  The Director of the FBI, William Stevens, was typing on his computer as Arthur sat down in front of the video conference system and cleared his throat.