D Carpenter - Infertile Grounds

“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.

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?”

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.