D Carpenter - Infertile Grounds

He never hid his dislike of Wendel. If it were up to him, they would have lost this guy a long time ago, but Sarah liked him. She said that they needed grunts as well as geniuses.

“Will you guys get back to work?” Seth said. “Anybody heard from Mark? He should have been here hours ago.”

Seth placed the transmitter on the hood of the pickup. Incompetent fuckups aside, things were moving nicely, way ahead of schedule. He jogged back to the lab with Curtis and Wendel following close behind. The sun would be rising in another couple hours to what was supposed to be a beautiful day – their last in Maine. He noticed Bert studying them from his position on the floor. He would be scheming a way to get out of this predicament but with Jerry’s rifle pointed at his head, wasn’t going anywhere.

Seth walked into the lab. The room looked like a hurricane had passed through. “I don’t believe it,” Seth said as he walked around. “We’re ready to get out of here,” he glanced at his watch. “Ten hours early.”

“Great job,” he said as he went down his checklist, confirming that everything that was supposed to go had been packed into the truck.

“You’re never going to get away with it,” Bert said from the floor.

Seth ignored the comment for a minute until he finally looked over the top of his papers and said, “You’ll never know.”

Bert’s eyes narrowed and he involuntarily moved toward Seth.

“Don’t even think about it,” Jerry said as he pulled back the hammer on the rifle. All of them stared at Bert.

The lights went out. Darkness from outside poured into the room like water through a dam breach.

The voice kept repeating. ‘Agent Pelletier, are you there, Agent Pelletier?’ Chris rolled over and fell off the couch onto the dirty carpet. Lying on the floor in a semi-stupor, he realized that the voice came from the communicator on the conference room table.

He stood up groggily and looked for Pell.

“Agent Pelletier,” the voice said again.

“He stepped out for a minute,” Chris said. His voice cracked as he spoke.

“Who’s this?”

“I’m helping Pell, let me go get him for you.”

He walked out into the dark office space stopping in the middle of the lobby, overcome by fear. Maybe he wasn’t alone? Where was Pell? He crept down to Pell’s office – empty. He started a room-to-room search, calling Pell’s name softly. The hairs on his arms stood straight up. Finally, he came to the bathroom. A slit of light seeped out from under the door.

He tapped on the door. “Pell?”

No answer. He rapped harder and called his name louder. Still nothing. Slowly he pushed on the door. It started to open but then stopped. He stuck his head inside the opening and saw Pell on the floor amidst several empty bottles.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

He stepped back and rammed his body into the door, shoving Pell into the corner. He kneeled over and turned Pell’s face so that he looked directly at him.

“Pell,” Chris said. No response. He slapped his face a few times and repeated his name. Nothing. The double vodkas and whatever he had slammed down out of these other bottles had knocked him out cold. He turned on the cold water, cupped both hands under the frigid stream, letting the water overflow them and then splashed it onto Pell’s face.

This woke him up instantly. He wiped furiously at his face, as if Chris had spilled acid on him.

“What the hell are you doing, Chris?”

“That’s what I was going to say to you,” Chris replied angrily, looking down at the empty bottles. He kicked one across the tiles and it slammed into the wall.

Pell looked up at him and then down at the spinning empty bottle that was coming to rest next him. Chris said, “Are you an alcoholic?”

“Who the fuck do you…” Pell’s mouth froze on the next word. He looked longingly at Chris for a moment – his eyes pleading and watery. Then hung his head between his knees and ran his fingers through his already disheveled hair.

“Are, you, an, alcoholic,” Chris said again.

Pell let out a low, slow sigh and said, “I am.”

“Great. Fucking great,” Chris said. “We’ve got people out there trying to kill me and wanting to alter the natural order of the world, and I’m relying on a drunk, resentful, oh-poor-me-I’ve-had-a-tough-time-of-it-and-been-treated-unfairly FBI agent who can’t take it. Go ahead, Pell. Crawl back into your beloved bottle. That will solve everything like it always does, right? People like you make me sick.”

He stormed out of the tiny bathroom and back to the conference room with Pell in hot pursuit.

As he was about to enter the room, Pell caught up and spun him around. His expression was intense, fiery – the weak, pleading expression remained back on the bathroom floor. This wasn’t the look of a drunken man.

“You don’t understand, Chris,” he said. “When I poured those bottles into the toilet last night, I admitted to myself for the first time that it was all my fault. I’m responsible for where I am today. Booze had a lot to do with it, but ultimately it was me – all me. I took my last drink at the Lo Maine last night with you.”

Chris huffed. He had a lot of personal experience with alcoholics, and knew how good at lying they become, but the look on Pell’s face was different – it was look of a man with determination and hope.

“You’re not just jerking me around? This is too important. You need to be one-hundred percent.”

Tears ran down Pell’s cheeks as he professed his new-found sobriety.

After a minute of silence, Chris patted him on the back. “You can do it, Pell. It’s all in the mind.”

“I’m sure as hell going to try. It’s been too long.”

At that moment, the voice on the speakerphone said, “Hello.”

“Oh, yeah,” Chris said. “They’re on the line.”

Pell pushed by him and into the conference room.

“This is agent Pelletier,” he said. “What have you got?”

“Agent, Pelletier. This is third-shift supervisor seven. We have been trying to contact you for the last ten minutes. Where have you been? When you leave a secure line open you need to be available at all times. Particularly as I understand you have a member of the public with no security clearance there with you.”

“Sorry about that,” Pell replied.

“We’ve finished the query you requested, and I’m sorry to say that, after looking at what we came up with, I don’t think you’re going to get much out of it.”

“That’s okay. I’ll decide if it’s any good.”

“I’m sending it over now” the faceless voice replied. “Are you ready?”

“Thanks for the help,” Pell said as he pressed a button on his portable communicator.

“That’s why we’re here,” the man said. After about thirty seconds, a piece of paper started to emerge from the front of the suitcase.

“Cool,” Chris said, admiring the technology – nothing but the best for the government. I wonder what this set the taxpayer back?

After a few minutes it was done. The communicator beeped, and Pell shut it down. He leaned back in his chair, unrolling the paper as if it were a scroll. Chris walked around the table and looked over his shoulder.

At the top was a photographic quality picture. It was of a plain-looking young girl; obviously this picture was taken some time ago. Underneath were the words Sarah Burns and a brief biography. Garden-variety information. She was a real genius, full-boat to Harvard, the whole works, but other than the genius part, she could have been anybody except for the fact that she completely disappeared back in the late eighties. After finishing college at the top of her class she vanished – no tax returns, no FICA contributions, no parking tickets, nothing at all to indicate she was even alive.