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.