The Chemist

CHAPTER 11

Once upon a time, when she was a young girl named Juliana, Alex used to fantasize about family road trips.

She and her mother had always flown on the few vacations they took – if duty visits to ancient grandparents in Little Rock actually qualified as vacations. Her mother, Judy, didn’t like to drive long distances; it made her nervous. Judy had often said that far more people were killed in car accidents than in plane crashes, though she was a white-knuckle flyer, too. Juliana had grown up unfazed by the dangers associated with travel, or germs, or rodents, or tight spaces, or any of the many other things that upset Judy. By default, she had to be the levelheaded one.

Like most only children, Juliana thought siblings would be the cure to the loneliness of her long afternoons doing homework at the kitchen table while she waited for Judy to get home from the dentist’s office she managed. Juliana looked forward to college and dormitories and roommates as a dream of companionship. Except, when she got there, she found that her life of relative solitude and adult responsibility had rendered her unsuited to cohabitation with normal eighteen-year-olds. So the sibling fantasy took a beating, and by her junior year she had her own small studio apartment.

The fantasy about a big, warm family road trip, however, had survived. Until today.

To be fair, she would probably have been in a better mood if her entire body hadn’t felt like one huge, throbbing bruise. Also, she had instigated the first argument, though quite unintentionally.

When she drove across the county line, she’d rolled the window down and tossed out the small tracker she’d removed from Daniel’s leg. She hadn’t wanted to carry it with her for long, just in case, but she also didn’t want to leave it right in the middle of her last base of operations. She thought she’d removed most of the evidence, but one could never be sure. Whenever she could muddy the trail, she took the time to do so.

In the rearview mirror, she saw Kevin sit forward.

He’d been able to retrieve a backpack he’d thrown from the plane when he jumped; now he and Daniel looked fairly normal in jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts – one black, one gray – and Kevin had two new handguns.

“What was that?” Kevin asked.

“Daniel’s tracker.”

“What?” Kevin and Daniel said together.

They spoke over each other.

“I did have a tracker?” Daniel asked.

“What did you do that for?” Kevin demanded.

The dog looked up at Kevin’s tone but then seemed to decide everything was fine and stuck his face out the window again.

She turned to Daniel first, looking up at him from under the ball cap that was supposed to be keeping her mangled face in shadow. “How did you think your brother found you?”

“He tracked me? But… where was it?”

“Sore spot on your inner right thigh. Keep the incision clean, try not to let it get infected.”

“Do you know what a pain it was to get that in place?” Kevin grumbled.

“If you can track it, so can someone else. I didn’t want to take chances with our position.”

Daniel turned around in the passenger seat to stare at his brother. “How did you… How could I not know about this?”

“Do you remember, about two years after the tramp left you, a hot leggy blonde at that bar you go to when you’re depressed, what’s it called…”

“Lou’s. How do you even know about that? I never told you… wait, did you have me followed?”

“I was worried about you after the tramp -”

“Her name is Lainey.”

“Whatever. I never liked her for you.”

“When did you ever like a girl for me? As far as I can recall, you only ever liked girls who wanted you. You took it as an insult if someone preferred me.”

“The point is, you weren’t yourself. But having you followed was unrelated to the -”

“Who followed me?”

“It was just for a few months.”

“Who?”

“Some buddies of mine – not in the Agency. A few cops I had a relationship with, a PI for a little while.”

“What were they looking for?”

“Just making sure you were okay, that you weren’t going to jump off a bridge or anything.”

“I can’t believe you. Of all the – wait a minute. The blonde? You mean that girl, what was her name, Kate? The one who bought me a drink and… she was a spy?”

She saw Kevin grinning in the rearview mirror.

“No, she was actually a hooker. Kate isn’t her real name.”

“Apparently no one on the entire planet besides me uses his or her real name. I am living in a world of lies. I don’t even know Alex’s given name.”

“Juliana,” she said at the same time Kevin did. They cast irritated looks at each other.

“He knew?” Daniel asked her, offended.

“It came up while you were unconscious. It’s the name I was given at birth, but it’s really not me anymore. It doesn’t mean much to me. I’m Alex for now.”

Daniel frowned, not entirely mollified.

“Anyway,” Kevin went on in the tone of someone who was telling a joke he really enjoyed, “the blonde was supposed to get you back to your place, but you told her that your divorce wasn’t finalized yet and it didn’t feel right.” Kevin laughed raucously. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard. But it was so you. I don’t even know why I was surprised.”

“Hilarious. But I don’t see how that little exchange got a tracking device into my leg.”

“It didn’t. I just really like that story. Anyway, that’s what was such a pain. The hooker was easy to set up. And if you’d taken her home, having the tracker placed would have been enjoyable for you, at least. Getting you into your GP’s office was a lot more work. But eventually I got a temp in the front office to call you in for checkup. When you got there, you saw one of the new partners. A guy you’d never seen before.”

Daniel’s mouth popped open in disbelief. “He told me I had a tumor!”

“A benign tumor. Which he took out right there in the office with a local anesthetic and immediately assured you was nothing. He didn’t even charge you. Don’t make it into a bigger thing than it was.”

“Are you serious? How could you -” Daniel was shouting at full volume now. “How do you justify these things to yourself? All these years you’ve been manipulating me! Treating me like some laboratory animal who exists for your own amusement!”

“Hardly, Danny. I’ve been putting myself out trying to keep you safe. The Agency wanted me to play dead from the very start, but I couldn’t do that to you, not after Mom and Dad. So I made a lot of promises and spent all my free weekends flying to Milwaukee to be a criminal.”

Daniel’s voice was calmer when he answered. “I drove. And was all that really necessary?”

“Ask the poison girl. These kinds of jobs aren’t for family people.”

Daniel looked at her. “Is that true?”

“Yes. They like to recruit orphans – preferably only children. Like your brother told you before, relationships give the bad guys leverage.”

His tone mellowed further. “Are you an orphan?”

“I’m not sure. Never met my father. He could still be alive somewhere.”

“But your mother…”

“Uterine cancer. I was nineteen.”

“I’m sorry.”

She nodded.

There was a brief, very pleasurable moment of silence. Alex held her breath and prayed for it to last.

“When I did finally let you think I was dead…” Kevin began.

Alex turned the radio on and started searching through stations. Kevin did not get the hint. Daniel just stared through the windshield.

“… I was just starting with Enrique de la Fuentes. I could tell in the first few days that it was going to get out of hand. I knew what he’d done to the families of his enemies. It was time to set you free.”

“Free yourself from the visitation charade, you mean,” Daniel muttered.

Alex found a classical station and turned it up so she could hear it over Kevin’s voice.

“That’s when I put the tracker in. I needed to know you were okay. No one was watching you anymore, just me.”

Daniel grunted in disbelief.

The music’s volume was making Alex’s head hurt more. She turned it down again.

“It ended… badly with the Agency. The plan was to wait until things died down and I was forgotten, then get the face fixed. Eventually, I was coming back for you, kid. You wouldn’t have recognized me at first, but I wasn’t going to leave you thinking you were alone your whole life.”

Daniel stared straight ahead. She wondered if he believed what his brother was saying. He was staggering under the weight of so many different kinds of betrayal.

“What happened with the Agency?” Alex asked. She really didn’t want to get involved with this conversation, but it didn’t look like Daniel was going to pursue it. Before joining this unlikely alliance, it hadn’t mattered much to her one way or the other how Kevin had left the CIA. Now this information was important. It affected her, too.

“When the job with the virus was done, and de la Fuentes was out of the picture, the Agency wanted to pull me back in, but there were still some loose ends that bugged me. I wanted to nail it all down. It wouldn’t have taken too much longer and I was in a very unique position of power with the cartel. It was also a good opportunity to influence what happened there – who took over, what their agenda might be – while also getting solid information on the new structure. I couldn’t believe the Agency was calling me in. I refused to leave. I thought I had explained myself clearly, but… I guess they didn’t believe me. They must have thought I’d gone rogue, that I’d flipped and was choosing the cartel. It still makes no sense to me.” He shook his head. “I thought they knew me better.”

“What did they do?” Daniel asked.

“They burned me. Ratted me out as an agent, told people I’d killed de la Fuentes. And those people came for revenge.”

“And got that revenge, as far as the CIA knew,” she guessed.

“Exactly.”

“Did you kill him?” Daniel asked. “De la Fuentes?”

“Part of the job.”

“Have you killed a lot of people?”

“Do you really want to know?”

Daniel waited silently, not looking back.

“Okay. Fine. I’ve killed around, oh, forty-five people, maybe more. I can’t be sure about the number – you don’t always have time to check for a pulse. Do you understand why I had to keep you separated from my life?”

Daniel looked at Alex now. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

“Three times.”

“Three… oh! The people your company sent after you?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t act like that makes her better than me,” Kevin interjected, angry.

“I wasn’t -” Daniel started to say.

It was Kevin’s turn to shout. “Ask her how many people she tortured before you. Ask her how long for each of them. How many hours – how many days? I just shoot people. Clean and fast. I would never do what she does. To anyone, especially not an innocent civilian like -”

“Shut up,” Daniel snapped. “Just stop talking. Don’t make this about her. Whatever pain she caused me, remember, you caused me more. It hurt more, and it lasted for much, much longer. You say you had a good reason. So did she. She didn’t know she’d been lied to, that she’d been manipulated. I know how that feels.”

“As if she’s just some blameless bystander here.”

“I said shut up!” Daniel bellowed the last two words at a deafening decibel.

Alex cringed. The dog whined, pulling its face inside and staring at its master.

“Easy,” Kevin said, maybe to the dog.

Daniel noticed her reaction.

“Are you okay?”

“Actually, on top of a lot of other uncomfortable injuries, I’ve got a splitting headache.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“You look like you’re going to crash – figuratively and literally. Want me to drive? You could try to get a nap.”

She thought about that for a minute. She’d always had to do things on her own, but that was okay, because then she knew they were done right. She didn’t have someone to take turns driving with, but that was also okay, because then she didn’t have to trust someone. Trust was a killer.

Still, she knew her limits. There was something so luxurious about the idea of being able to sleep and travel at the same time.

And she did trust Daniel not to hurt her, not to betray her. Knowing it could be a huge mistake, she still trusted him.

“Thank you,” she said. “That would be really nice. I’ll pull over at the next exit.”

The words sounded odd to her as they came out of her mouth. Like something someone would say on television, lines from one actor to another. But she supposed this was how normal human interactions generally sounded. She just didn’t have a lot of those in her life.

The silence was lovely for the two miles it took to get to the next exit. The peace made her even sleepier. Her eyelids were already doing the involuntary slow blink as she pulled off onto the dirt shoulder.

No one spoke while they made the exchange. Kevin’s head lolled back on his seat, eyes closed. Daniel touched her shoulder lightly as he passed her.

Tired as she was, she didn’t fall asleep immediately. At first she thought it was the weirdness of having the car moving beneath her; her body assumed from long habit that she would be the one at the wheel and knew sleep was not allowed. She peeked at Daniel a few times from under her hat, just as reassurance. He knew how to drive a car. It was okay to relax. Sure, the seat was uncomfortable, but not much worse than her usual nighttime setup. She’d taught herself to get rest where she could. But her head felt… too unrestrained. As soon as she realized this, she knew it was the gas mask she was missing. It had become part of her sleep ritual.

Understanding the problem helped. She pulled her baseball cap farther down over her sore face and told herself to relax. She’d strung no wires today. No poison gas threatened. Everything was okay, she promised herself.

It was dark when she woke up. She felt stiff, incredibly sore, and hungry. She also really had to pee. She wished she could have stayed asleep longer and thus avoided all of these unpleasant feelings, but the brothers were arguing again. She’d been out for a long time, she knew, so she couldn’t blame them for forgetting her, but she wished they hadn’t been arguing about her when she awakened.

“… but she isn’t pretty,” Kevin was saying as she began to surface.

“You don’t even know what she looks like,” Daniel replied angrily. “You mauled her face before you had a chance to introduce yourself.”

“It ain’t just about the face, kid. She’s built like a skinny ten-year-old boy.”

“You are the reason why women think all men are dogs. Also, the term is sylphid.”

“You read too many books.”

“You don’t read enough.”

“I call it how it is.”

“You have limited perception.”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Alex interrupted. There was no graceful way into this conversation, but she didn’t want to pretend to be asleep. “No offense taken.”

She pulled the hat off her face and wiped away the drool that had leaked from her damaged lip.

“Sorry,” Daniel muttered.

“Don’t worry about it. I needed to wake up.”

“No, I mean him.”

“Your brother’s low opinion of my charms is its own special kind of compliment.”

Daniel laughed. “Good point.”

Kevin snorted.

Alex stretched, and then groaned. “Let me guess. When you pictured the Mad Scientist’s female partner, the mysterious Oleander, you saw a blonde, right?” She glanced at his face – suddenly rigid. “Yes, definitely a blonde. Large breasts, long tan legs, full lips, and huge blue doe eyes? Did I get it all? Or was there a French accent, too?”

Kevin didn’t respond. She glanced back at him; he stared out the window as if he weren’t listening to her.

“Got it in one.” She laughed.

“He was always a fan of the obvious,” Daniel said.

“I never saw one of those on the job,” Alex told Daniel. “I’m not saying such a creature wouldn’t have the brains necessary, but really, why spend decades buried in unglamorous research when there are so many other options?”

“I’ve seen girls like that on the job,” Kevin muttered.

“Sure, agents,” Alex allowed. “That’s a sexy job. Exciting. But trust me, lab coats really aren’t that figure-flattering, despite the slutty Halloween-costume version.”

Kevin went back to looking out the window.

“How are you feeling?” Daniel asked.

“Ouch.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

She shrugged. “We should find a place to pause. I’m not going to be able to eat in a restaurant without someone calling the cops on you two. We’ll have to get a motel somewhere, and then somebody’s going to have to go out for groceries.”

“Room service not an option?” Daniel wondered.

“Those types of hotels notice when you pay cash,” Kevin explained before she could. “Sorry, bro. We’ll have to rough it for a night.”

“Have you been driving all day?” she asked.

“No, Kev and I switched out a couple of times.”

“I can’t believe I slept through all of that.”

“I think you needed it.”

“Yeah, I guess I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for too long.”

“So little time,” Kevin muttered, “so many people to torture.”

“True story,” she agreed lightly, just to annoy him.

Daniel laughed.

Daniel seemed so kind and gentle – more so than anyone she’d ever known – but he was definitely weird. Possibly unstable.

They found a small place on the outskirts of Little Rock. Alex thought she ought to recognize the city just a bit, but nothing reminded her of her childhood visits to the grandparents. Maybe the city had grown too much in the years since she’d been here. Maybe she was just in the wrong part. Somewhere nearby, her mother and her grandparents were buried. She wondered if that should make her feel something. But the place didn’t really matter. She was no closer to them for being closer to the remains of their genetic material.

Kevin insisted on making the arrangements at the front desk. It was probably for the best that Kevin took the lead now; Alex was out of commission, thanks to her face, and even if she had looked fine, he was still the expert. She knew only what she’d learned through theoretical research and a couple of years of trial and error. Kevin had been taught so much more, and he’d proved it all in the field. Daniel wasn’t even an option. Oh, his face was fine, but his instincts were all wrong.

Case in point, the way he argued when he saw that Kevin had gotten them only one room. It hadn’t occurred to him that a hotel clerk would be more likely to remember a man who came in alone yet paid cash for two rooms. And when Kevin parked three doors down from their actual room, Daniel didn’t understand why. Misdirection, they explained, but it was foreign to everything Daniel had ever known, every habit he’d formed. He thought like a normal person who’d never had anything to hide. There was a lot he was going to have to learn.

He even asked if they should get permission before they brought the dog into the room.

It had only one bed, but Alex had been asleep for twelve hours straight, so she was happy to be the lookout. Kevin went out for a half hour and came back with cellophane-wrapped sandwiches, sodas, and a large bag of dog food. Alex scarfed her sandwich down, and then chased it with a handful of Motrin. Einstein ate just as enthusiastically as she had, straight from the bag, but Daniel and Kevin were more relaxed about the food. Apparently, she’d missed a couple of stops at the drive-through, too.

A quick assessment of herself in the scratched bathroom mirror was not encouraging. Her nose was swollen to twice its normal size, red and bulbous. On the plus side, odds were it would heal up differently than it began, thus changing her appearance a little. Maybe not as aesthetically pleasing a result as she would get from plastic surgery, but probably less painful on the whole, or at least faster. Her black eyes were an impressive contradiction to their name, boasting a rainbow of colors from jaundice yellow to bilious green to sickly purple. Her split lip puffed out from either side of the scabby fissure like flesh balloons, and she hadn’t even known you could develop bruises inside your mouth. There was one stroke of luck: she still had all her teeth. Getting a bridge would have been tricky.

It was going to be a while before she could do anything. She really hoped Kevin’s safe house lived up to the name. It worried her to be headed into the unknown. She hadn’t prepared anything, and that was 100 percent unnerving.

She showered and brushed her teeth – a more painful ordeal than usual – and slipped into her black leggings and a clean white tee. She’d reached the limits of her wardrobe. Hopefully the safe house had a washing machine.

Daniel was asleep when she came back out, stretched out on his stomach with one hand under the pillow and one arm falling over the edge of the bed, long fingers brushing the faded carpet. His sleeping face was really something else – like before, when he was unconscious, his innocence and serenity didn’t seem to belong in the same world that she did.

Kevin wasn’t in the room and neither was the dog. Though she assumed the dog had needs, she couldn’t bring her alert level down from orange-red until they’d returned.

Kevin didn’t acknowledge her, but the dog sniffed her once as it passed. Kevin lay down flat on his back, his arms at his sides, and immediately closed his eyes. He didn’t move again for six hours. The dog jumped onto the end of the bed and curled up with its tail over Daniel’s legs and its head pillowed on Kevin’s feet.

Alex sat in the only chair – the carpet was just too questionable for her to lie on the floor – and bent over her laptop, surfing the news. She wasn’t sure when Daniel’s disappearance would be noticed or if it would be broadcast when it was. Probably not. Grown men wandered off all the time. For example, her father. That sort of thing was too common to make waves unless there was some sensational detail – like dismembered body parts in his apartment.

There was also no story yet about the crash of a single-prop plane in West Virginia – no fatalities or injured found, still trying to locate the owner – but she doubted the news would merit more than just a note in a local online paper. When it did surface, there would be nothing in the report that would catch anyone’s attention in DC.

She exhausted her search for information that might endanger them. It seemed that, for now, they were in the clear on that front, at least. What was Carston thinking right at this moment? What was he planning? She wasn’t due to deliver Daniel until Monday before school, and it was still only Saturday – well, almost Sunday. The department knew she wasn’t going to crack Daniel – he had nothing to spill. They had to know she would eventually learn of the identical twin’s existence. They must have been pretty sure of Kevin’s status in the land of the living. They had expected him to be drawn out into the open early in the game, and they’d been right about that. The only thing they hadn’t foreseen was that the torturer and the assassin might have a conversation.

It would never have shaken out this way without Daniel’s interference. He’d been a ploy for them, just a pawn moved into peril to lure the more critical players into the center of the board. They never would have guessed that he’d be a catalyst for change.

She planned to hold true to her side of the bargain – she would take the role of victor (though that was really the losing role) and let Daniel and Kevin be dead. Dead again, in Kevin’s case. But oh, how she wished that she could be the one to die. Wouldn’t it be easy for the department to believe that someone like Kevin Beach – who’d toppled a cartel – had succeeded where they had failed? Wouldn’t it make sense for them to stop looking then? What would it be like to disappear, but this time with no one searching for her?

She sighed. Fantasies only made it harder; there was no point indulging in them. The men were both pretty well under, she was sure, so she dug into her bag and pulled out the pressurized canister she’d selected earlier. She had only the two gas masks, so nothing deadly tonight, just the airborne sleeping agent she’d had hooked up to her computer yesterday. It was enough. It would let her control the outcome if someone discovered them.

After she’d strung the leads – only a double line; she wouldn’t have to arm or disarm from outside the room tonight – she settled back into her chair. She glanced at the twins. Both were deep, peaceful sleepers. She wondered if that was a healthy habit for a spy. Maybe Kevin actually trusted her – enough to sound the alarm at the very least, and maybe even to deal with a problem without killing them all. She and the brothers were strange bedfellows indeed.

How odd it was, watching over them. It felt wrong, and she’d expected that. But it also felt good, satisfying some need she’d never known was there, and that she hadn’t expected.

She spent some time thinking about her analysis of the situation, searching for flaws in her theory, but the more she looked at it, the more it made sense. Even the woeful lack of evolution in her would-be-assassins – by the third try, someone should have been aware of her system and changed the approach – made sense in this light. There had never been any operation, just expendable individuals sent after her with little or no briefing. She thought through every conjecture two or three times and felt more confident than ever that she finally understood the ones hunting her.

And then she was bored.

What she wanted to do was log on to the website of Columbia University’s pathology program and read the latest doctoral dissertations, but it wasn’t safe to do that while the department was actively trying to locate her, which she was certain they were. The department couldn’t trace every connection anyone made to her old interests, but this one might be too obvious. With a sigh, she put in earbuds, opened up YouTube, and started watching a tutorial about fieldstripping a rifle. It probably wasn’t anything she’d ever need to know, but it couldn’t hurt.

Kevin woke up at five thirty on the dot. He just sat up, as alert as if someone had flipped a switch to turn him on. He patted the dog once and headed toward the door. It took him only a second to notice the gas mask she was wearing and jerk to a stop. The dog, right on his heels, paused too and pointed its nose in her direction, looking for whatever had upset its master.

“Give me a sec,” Alex said.

She got awkwardly to her feet, still aching and sore – whether more or less than at the beginning of the night, she couldn’t tell – and walked stiffly to the door to undo her security precautions.

“I didn’t say you could do that,” Kevin said.

She didn’t look at him. “I didn’t ask for your permission.”

He grunted.

It took her only a few seconds to clear his path. She removed her mask and used it to gesture to the door.

“Knock yourself out.”

“Knock you out,” she thought she heard him mutter as he passed her, but it was too low for her to be sure. The dog followed him, tail swishing so fast it blurred. She imagined the guy at the front desk probably wasn’t paying any attention at this hour, but she still thought Kevin was pressing their luck a little. A screaming match with the management wasn’t going to help them stay incognito.

She rummaged through the food Kevin had bought last night. The remaining sandwiches weren’t as appetizing as they had been eight hours ago, but there was a box of cherry Pop-Tarts she’d missed before. She was working her way through the second pastry in the sleeve when Kevin and the dog came back.

“You want to catch a few hours?” he asked her.

“If you don’t mind driving, I can sleep in the car again. Better to get where we’re going.”

He nodded once, then went to the bed and lightly kicked his brother.

Daniel moaned and rolled onto his back, covering his head with a pillow.

“Is that necessary?” she asked.

“Like you said, better to get going. Danny’s always had a problem with the snooze button.”

Kevin yanked the pillow off Daniel’s head.

“Let’s go, kid.”

Daniel blinked owlishly for a few seconds, and then she watched his face change as the memories hit, as he realized where he was and why. It hurt to see the peace of his dreams crumble into the devastation of his new waking reality. His eyes darted around the room until he found her. She tried to make her expression reassuring, but the damage done to her face would probably trump any arrangement of her features. She searched for something to say, something that would make the world a little less dark and scary for him.

“Pop-Tart?” she offered.

He blinked again. “Um, okay.”