The Agent in the Blind Spot ~ Chapter Two
Chapter Two
Booth stepped into the converted warehouse as if he didn't have a care in the world. He strolled around the debris, left in neat piles by whatever clean-up crew had been hired by the original owner and catalogued the entrances and exits of the bottom floor as he moved to the steel staircase that ran along one inner wall of the building.
He could hear soft footsteps on the upper floor, solidifying his suspicions. His contact had an informant in the person of a homeless woman who had seen someone matching Pelant's description coming and going from the warehouse for over a week, and had offered up her information in exchange for fifty dollars and a hot coffee.
If this panned out the way Booth hoped, he was going to buy the woman a house.
Keeping his step light, Booth ascended the stairs, gun still strapped in his shoulder holster. If the device he'd been given by the FBI IT department worked the way it should, Pelant would never see him coming and his plan hinged on appearing as unimposing as possible. He just hoped it didn't backfire on him.
"I'm not getting a signal from the transmitter, Bren." Angela tapped her control screen as she desperately tried to bring up the audio and video feed from the tiny surveillance device Brennan had made sure was sitting on Booth's lapel that morning. "Something is wrong and I don't like it."
"Do you think Pelant discovered the device?" Brennan asked, twisting her hands in front of her as she stood next to her best friend in front of the Angelatron's large screen.
Angela shook her head. "No, I implanted a failsafe that I invented. It turns the device cold when he checks for it, so it can't be detected by a scanner. Then I jammed the signal in this room so he doesn't know we're watching, and hopefully he thinks we're just working on trying to track him as usual. Basically, I jammed the signal from this room so he knows we're looking for him, but doesn't suspect I've found a backdoor to send and receive signal from Booth's bug. Then, I made sure my system is on a secure server that only I know about, but…"
"Nothing is completely secure with Christopher Pelant."
Angela's tight nod confirmed what Brennan already knew to be true. Something was very wrong.
Booth listened closely as Pelant, still out of his sight line, moved from one area of the room to another, muttering to himself. Booth knew the reason his adversary was irritated, and he indulged himself for a few more moments, enjoying the frustration he could hear from across the room.
"Dammit!" Pelant cursed, tapping a set of commands into his laptop as his beady eyes darted from one external screen to another. His internet signal was being interrupted and he began to suspect that he might have to get out of the building as soon as possible.
"Something wrong, Christopher?"
The twisted genius froze, the low voice of Special Agent Seeley Booth crashing over him like a bucket of ice cold water. Swallowing through the tightness in his throat, he composed himself and turned slowly; giving off an air of calm he was nowhere near close to feeling.
Pelant smiled and held his arms out in mock welcome. "Agent Booth! So nice of you to join me."
Crossing his arms across his chest, Booth nodded. "Pelant. We need to talk. But first…" He reached cautiously for his jacket pocket, one hand extended in a gesture meant to placate his foe. When he pulled the small black box with the blinking red light from its hiding place, Pelant nodded in acknowledgment.
"I wondered who was jamming my system."
With a click, Booth shut off the device. "No need to keep this on. It's just you and me here, Christopher."
"There he is!" Angela cried as Pelant's mangled face appeared on her screen.
Brennan gasped as she heard Booth speaking to the maniac in front of them. "Oh God…"
Pelant moved a step closer to Booth, emboldened by the fact that the agent's weapon stayed securely in his holster. "You really expect me to believe that you don't have a full SWAT team outside this building, Agent Booth? That Doctor Brennan and her team aren't standing by, anxiously waiting for you to bring me in?"
Booth shrugged, his casual air more unnerving to his opponent than if the former sniper had been holding a gun directly to his head. "Believe what you want to believe. I don't need a SWAT team and I don't need the Jeffersonian team backing me up. This is just between you and me."
"So you're going to take me in all on your own? Knowing that I can just push a few buttons and be free in hours?"
"You seriously think you're going to jail?" Booth's short laugh caused a shot of fear to skitter up Pelant's spine. "I thought you were a genius, Pelant. What makes you think you're ending this day in anything but a body bag?"
Knowing why Booth was hunting Pelant and actually hearing it verbalized were two completely different things, Angela thought to herself as they watched Pelant's face acknowledge Booth's words. Not that she disagreed with the course of action, because if anyone deserved to leave this planet as soon as possible it was Christopher Pelant. But the reality of the situation was making the artist feel skittish, and she looked to her right to see how it was affecting her friend.
Brennan tipped her head slightly away from Angela, hoping she couldn't see the tear that slid down her right cheek. She was battling her inner need to immediately go to Booth and help him dispose of the man who had been terrorizing them for the better part of two years, because deep down she knew that this was what had to happen. But she also knew that no matter what he said afterward, Booth was going to struggle with this and that was the last thing that Brennan wanted for him.
Pushing her own worries down tightly, Brennan forced a small smile and nodded at Angela before turning her attention back to the drama unfolding on the screen in front of her.
Rolling his eyes, Pelant tried to force a laugh. "You won't kill me in cold blood, Agent Booth. You're too good a man for that."
Booth nodded. "You would think so. I mean, I used to be." He dropped his crossed arms and began to pull his jacket off his shoulders. "But you'd be surprised what you can rationalize when you've been faced with losing your family for three months, seeing a flayed body on your friends' bed and bloody flowers in their child's crib, having that same friend lose everything their family has worked for in the blink of an eye, having another friend's life almost taken in the middle of the street…" Booth stopped abruptly while somewhere across town; his partner was holding her breath, waiting for his next words.
"Having to lie to the woman you love and make her believe that you don't want to marry her, when that's the only thing you've ever wanted to do since the day you laid eyes on her."
"He thought he was trying to protect you, Bren."
"I should have had more faith in him from the beginning."
"I still don't understand why…"
"Shhh, Angela."
"Still lamenting the demise of your engagement, Booth? I don't know why, she's still sticking around." Pelant watched as Booth finished removing his jacket and placed it carefully on a chair between them, a few feet away to the side.
"I hurt her when I promised her I would never do that again."
Brennan's mouth twitched as Booth's frame came into view of the camera. She watched closely as her partner moved back to stand in front of Pelant, the two men continuing their standoff on either side of the frame. "It's a good thing he laid his jacket like that otherwise we would have lost video and the audio would have been compromised."
Something in Brennan's tone made Angela stare at her for a moment. "Yeah. We got lucky Booth is so fastidious about his clothes."
"Yes, Booth is...fastidious."
"Oh, she'll get over it." Pelant waved a hand in front of his face, smarmy smile in place. "I mean, it's not like Doctor Brennan hasn't had her share of heartbreak, right? She's a pretty tough nut."
A bit of Booth's weakness for any and all things Brennan leaked through as he responded. "That she is."
After a few minutes of an increasingly uncomfortable (for Pelant, anyway) staring contest, the self-proclaimed "hacktivist" lost his patience.
"So if you're going to kill me, Agent Booth, why haven't you done it? I'm here, I'm unarmed…why not just shoot me between the eyes and be done with it?"
The agent shook his head and smiled. It wasn't a genuine smile; it never reached his eyes, which glittered in determination.
"Because I need you alive for this next part."