The Chemist

CHAPTER 5

The rest went almost too smoothly… did that mean something? Her paranoia level was already so high, it was hard to say if this new worry elevated it or not.

He got into the cab at the Rosslyn station without protest. She knew how he felt – she and Barnaby had tried out most of the nonlethal preparations to have some concrete experience with what they could do. This one was like dreaming a pleasant dream, where problems and worries were for someone else to figure out, and all one needed was a hand to hold and a nudge in the right direction. In their notes they’d nicknamed it Follow the Leader, though it had a more impressive name on the official reports.

It was a relaxing trip, and if it weren’t for the fact that she desperately needed her inhibitions, even back then, she might have indulged again.

She got him talking about the volleyball team he coached – he’d asked if he’d be back at school in time for practice – and he spent the entire cab ride telling her about the girls until she felt she knew all their names and their strengths on the court by heart. The cabbie paid no attention, humming along to some song too low for her to make out.

Daniel seemed mostly oblivious to the travel, but at a particularly long red light, he looked up and frowned.

“Your office is far away.”

“Yes, it is,” she agreed. “It’s a hell of a commute.”

“Where do you live?”

“Bethesda.”

“That’s a nice place. Columbia Heights is not so nice. My part of it, at least.”

The cab started moving again. She was pleased; the plan was going very well. Even if they’d clocked her getting on and off the last train, they’d be hard-pressed to keep track of one cab in a sea of identical cabs twisting together through rush hour. Preparation felt like a magic spell sometimes. Like you could force events into the shape you wanted just by planning them thoroughly enough.

Daniel wasn’t as talkative now. This was the second phase of the drug’s action, and he would be getting more tired. She needed him to stay awake just a little bit longer.

“Why did you give me your number?” she asked when his lids started to droop.

He smiled dreamily. “I’ve never done that before.”

“Me either.”

“I’ll probably be embarrassed about it later.”

“Not if I call you, though, right?”

“Maybe. I don’t know, it was out of character.”

“So why did you do it?”

His soft eyes never left hers. “I like your face.”

“You mentioned that.”

“I really wanted to see it again. That made me brave.”

She frowned, guilt pulsing.

“Does that sound weird?” He seemed worried.

“No, it sounds very sweet. Not many men would tell a woman something like that.”

He blinked owlishly. “I wouldn’t usually. Too… cowardly.”

“You seem pretty brave to me.”

“I feel different. I think it’s you. I felt different as soon as I saw you smile.”

As soon as I roofied you, she amended in her head.

“Well, that’s quite a compliment,” she said. “And here we go, can you get up?”

“Sure. This is the airport.”

“Yes, that’s where my car is.”

His brow furrowed, then cleared. “Did you just get back from a trip?”

“I just got into town, yes.”

“I go on trips sometimes. I like to go to Mexico.”

She glanced up sharply. He was staring ahead, watching where he was walking. There was no sign of distress on his face. If she pushed him toward a secret, anything that was a pressure point, his docility would turn to suspicion. He might latch on to another stranger as his leader and try to escape. He might get agitated and call attention to her.

“What do you like about Mexico?” she asked carefully.

“The weather is hot and dry. I enjoy that. I’ve never lived in a really hot place, but I think I would like it. I get burned, though. I’ve never been able to tan. You look like you’ve spent some time in the sun.”

“No, just born this way.” She got her coloring from her absentee father. Genetic testing had informed her that he was a mix of many things, predominantly Korean, Hispanic, and Welsh. She’d always wondered what he’d looked like. The combination with her mother’s Scottish background had created in her an oddly ordinary face – she could have been from almost anywhere.

“That must be nice. I have to use sunblock, a lot of sunblock. Or I peel. It’s disgusting. I shouldn’t tell you that.”

She laughed. “I promise to forget it. What else do you like?”

“Working with my hands. I help build houses. Not in a skilled way; I just hammer where they tell me to. But the people are so kind and generous. I love that part.”

It was all very convincing, and she felt a thrill of fear. How could he stick to the story so well, so effortlessly, with the chemicals moving through his system right now? Unless he’d built up a resistance somehow. Unless her department had created an antidote, unless they’d prepped him and he was playing her. The goose bumps stood up on the back of her neck. It didn’t have to be the department that had prepared him. It could be his interactions with de la Fuentes. Who knew what kind of results strange drugs interacting with her own would have? She touched her tongue to the false cap on her back tooth. The department would have just killed her if that were the goal. De la Fuentes would probably want to punish her for attempting to interrupt his plans. But how would he know in advance? How could Daniel have made her as an opposing agent so quickly? She didn’t even actually work for anyone anymore.

Stick to the plan, she told herself. Get him in the car and you’re in the clear. Sort of.

“I like the houses there, too,” he was saying. “You never close the windows, just let the air blow through. Some don’t even have glass. It’s a lot nicer than Columbia Heights, I can tell you. Maybe not nicer than Bethesda. I bet doctors live in nice houses.”

“Not me. Boring vanilla apartment. I don’t spend much time there, so it doesn’t matter.”

He nodded sagely. “You’re out saving lives.”

“Well, not really. I’m not an ER doctor or anything.”

“You’re saving my life.” Wide gray-green eyes, total trust. She knew that if this behavior was genuine, it was the drug talking. But it still made her uneasy.

She could only keep playing her role.

“I’m just checking up on you. You’re not dying.” That much was true. The boys back at the department might have ended up killing this man. At least she could spare him that. Though… after she prevented the catastrophe, Daniel Beach would never see the outside of a prison cell again. Which made her feel…

A million dead. Innocent tiny babies. Sweet elderly grandmas. The First Horseman of the Apocalypse on a white steed.

“Oh, a bus too,” he said mildly.

“This one takes us to my car. Then you won’t have to walk anymore.”

“I don’t mind. I like walking with you.” He smiled down at her and his feet tangled on his way up the steps. She steadied him before he could fall, then maneuvered him into the closest seat on the mostly empty bus.

“Do you like foreign films?” he asked, apropos of nothing.

“Um, some of them, I guess.”

“There’s a good theater at the university. Maybe if the dinner goes well, we could try some subtitles the next time.”

“I’ll make a deal with you,” she said. “If you still like me after one evening together, I will definitely see a movie I can’t understand with you.”

He smiled, his lids drooping. “I’ll still like you.”

This was totally ridiculous. There should have been some way to direct this conversation away from flirting. Why was she the one feeling like the monster here? Okay, she was a monster, but she’d come to terms with that, mostly, and she knew she was the kind of monster that needed to exist for the sake of the common good. In some ways, she was like a normal physician – she had to cause pain to save lives. Like cutting off a gangrenous limb to save the rest of the body, just disassociated. Pain here, savior elsewhere. And elsewhere was much more deserving of the save.

Rationalizing, as she always had, so that she could live with herself. She never outright lied to herself, though. She knew she didn’t exist in some moral gray area; she existed entirely in the black. But the only thing worse than Alex doing her job well was someone else doing it badly. Or no one doing it at all.

But even if she fully embraced the label monster, she was never the kind of monster who killed innocent people. She wasn’t even going to kill this very guilty one… who was still looking up at her from under his long curls with big hazel puppy-dog eyes.

Dead babies, she chanted to herself. Dead babies, dead babies, dead babies.

She’d never wanted to be a spy or work undercover, but now she saw that she was also emotionally unsuited for the job. Apparently she had too much gratuitous sympathy floating around inside her body, which was more than ironic. This is why you never talked to your subject before you talked to him.

“Okay, Daniel, off we go. Can you stand up?”

“Mm-hmm. Oh, here, let me take your bag.”

He lifted a hand weakly toward her briefcase.

“I got it.” Though in truth her fingers were pins and needles around the handle. “You need to focus on your balance right now.”

“I’m really tired.”

“I know, look, my car is right there. The silver one.”

“There are a lot of silver ones.”

Exactly the point. “It’s right here. Okay, let’s put you in the back so you can lie down. Why don’t you take off your coat, I don’t want you to get too warm. And the shoes, there we go.” Less for her to manage later. “Bend your knees up so your legs will fit. Perfect.”

He had his head pillowed on the backpack now, which surely wasn’t that comfortable, but he was past caring.

“You’re so nice, Alex,” he murmured, his eyes closed now. “You’re the nicest woman I ever met.”

“I think you’re nice, too, Daniel,” she admitted.

“Thanks,” he half articulated, and then he was asleep.

Quickly, she pulled the beige throw out of the trunk. It was the same color as the seats. She covered him with it. She pulled a syringe from her bag and inserted it into a vein in his ankle, hunching her body so it blocked any outside view of what she was doing. Follow the Leader would wear off in an hour or so, and she needed him to sleep longer than that.

Not an agent, she decided. An agent might have played along with her kidnap drug, but he would never have let himself get knocked out like this. Just a mass murderer for hire, then.

The temporary lab she had created was in rural West Virginia. She’d rented a nice little farmhouse with a milking barn that had been a very long time without cows. The exterior of the barn was a white composite siding that matched the house; inside, the walls and ceiling were lined in aluminum. The floors were sealed concrete with conveniently spaced drains. There was a little bunk room in the back; it had been advertised as extra space for visiting guests, delightfully rustic. She was sure there were many naive travelers who would find the rusticity charming, but all she cared about was that the electricity and water were hooked up and running. The farmhouse and barn were situated in the middle of a 240-acre apple orchard, which was in turn surrounded by more acres of farmland. The closest neighbor was over a mile away. The owners of this orchard were making money during the off-season by renting out the space to city dwellers who wanted to pretend they were roughing it.

It was very expensive. She frowned every time she thought about the price, but it couldn’t be helped. She needed a secluded facility with a usable space.

She’d been working nights to get everything ready. During the day she had followed Daniel from a good distance, then caught up on what sleep she could in the car during school hours. She was completely exhausted at the moment, but she still had a lot to do before her workday was over.

First stop, a minor freeway exit more than an hour out of the city. A narrow dirt road that looked as if no one had used it in a decade took her deeper into the trees. It must have led somewhere, but she didn’t drive far enough to see where. She stopped under a thick patch of shade, cut the engine, and went to work.

If Daniel was employed by the department or, more likely, one of the organizations that worked closely with it – the CIA, a few military sections, some other black ops floaters that, like the department, didn’t have official names – he would have an electronic tracker on him. Just like she’d once had. Absently, she rubbed her finger across the small raised scar on the nape of her neck, covered by her short hair. They liked to tag the head. If only one part of a body could be recovered, the head was best for identification purposes.

She opened the back passenger-side door and knelt on the damp ground beside Daniel’s head. She started with the place both she and Barnaby had been tagged, brushing her fingers lightly along his skin, then again, pressing harder. Nothing. She’d seen a few foreign subjects whose trackers had been freshly removed from behind their ears, so she checked there next. Then she ran her fingers through his hair, probing the scalp for any bumps or hard spots that shouldn’t be there. His curls were very soft and smelled nice, citrusy. Not that she cared about his hair, but at least she didn’t have to put her hands into some greasy, malodorous nest. She appreciated that.

Now for the heavy lifting. If it was de la Fuentes keeping tabs on this man, the tracker would probably be external. She threw the shoes into the woods beside the road first – they seemed the most likely culprit of his clothes; lots of men would wear the same pair every day. Then she stripped off his shirt, grateful for the button-down, though it was still hard to get it out from under the weight of his body. She didn’t bother trying to get the undershirt over his head; she pulled a blade from her pocket, untaped it, and cut the fabric into three easily removable pieces. She scanned his chest – no suspicious scars or lumps. The skin on his torso was fairer than his arms; he had a faint farmer’s tan, no doubt from building houses in Mexico with a T-shirt on. Or from acquiring superviruses in Egypt – also very sunny.

He had what she thought of as sports muscles rather than gym muscles. No hard-cut edges, just a nice smooth alignment that showed he was active without being obsessive.

Rolling him onto his stomach was hard, and he fell into the foot space, draped over the hump between seats. He had two light scars on his left shoulder blade, parallel and even in length. She explored them carefully, prodding the skin all around, but she couldn’t feel anything besides the normal fibrous, hypertrophic tissue that should be there.

It didn’t take her long to realize she should have removed his jeans before rolling him over. She had to climb on top of his awkwardly positioned form and reach both arms around his torso to get the button fly open. So very thankful that he was not wearing skinny jeans, she then climbed out the other passenger-side door and yanked the pants off over his feet. She was unsurprised to see that he wore boxers rather than briefs. It fit his clothing profile. She stripped the boxers off, then the socks, and then she grabbed up the rest of the clothes, walked them a few feet off the road, and stuffed them behind a fallen log. She made another trip for the backpack. The laptop would be a very good hiding place for any electronic device someone wanted him to carry around unknowingly.

This wasn’t the first time she’d had to strip a target down herself. In the laboratory environment, she’d had people who prepped a subject for her – Barnaby called them the underlings – but she hadn’t always been in the lab, and during her first field trip to Herat, Afghanistan, she’d learned to be deeply grateful to the underlings. Stripping down a man who hadn’t bathed in months was not pleasant – especially when she didn’t have a shower available for herself afterward. At least Daniel was clean. She was the only one working up a sweat today.

She found the screwdriver in the trunk and quickly changed the DC license plate for one she’d pulled off a similar car in a West Virginia scrap yard.

Just to be thorough, she did a cursory examination of the backs of his legs, the bottom of his feet, and his hands. She’d never seen a tracker on the extremities, probably because extremities sometimes got cut off to make a point. She didn’t see any scars. She also didn’t see any calluses that suggested he trained with guns or used them frequently. He had soft teacher hands, with just a few hard spots that spoke of blisters from inexperienced labor.

She tried to roll him back up onto the seat but quickly realized it was a vain effort. It wasn’t a comfortable sleeping position, but he wouldn’t wake up regardless. He would be sore later. Though it was completely ridiculous to even think of that.

As she repositioned the blanket and tucked it around his body as best she could, she was constructing a story about him from the documents she’d read and the evidence in front of her.

She believed Daniel Beach was mostly the man she saw now, the pleasant all-around good guy. The attraction for the avaricious ex was understandable. He was probably easy to fall in love with. After some time had passed, enough time for the ex to take love for granted, she would have been able to shift her focus to the things she didn’t have – the nice apartment, the big ring, the cars. She probably missed this side of Daniel now, the grass always being greener and whatnot.

But there was also darkness in Daniel, buried deep, perhaps born from the pain and unfairness of losing his parents, aggravated by his wife’s betrayal, and then ignited by the loss of his final family member. That darkness would not surface easily. He would compartmentalize it, keep it away from this gentle life, pack it into the dark spaces where it fit. No wonder he could speak of Mexico so blithely. He would have two Mexicos: the happy one the teacher loved, and the dangerous one the monster thrived in. They probably weren’t anything close to the same place in his head.

Not a true psychotic, she hoped. Just a fractured man who didn’t want to give up the person he thought of as himself but who needed the release the darkness gave him.

She felt comfortable with this assessment, and it changed her plan a little. There was a great deal of performance to what she did. For some subjects, the very clinical and emotionless persona worked best – white coat, surgical mask, and shiny stainless steel; for others, it was the threat of the crazed sadist (though Barnaby was always more successful with that play; he had the face and hair for it – unruly spikes of white, I’ve-just-been-electrocuted hair). Every situation was slightly different – some feared the darkness, some the light. She’d been planning to go clinical – it was the most comfortable role in her wheelhouse – but she decided now that Daniel would need to be surrounded by darkness to let that side come to the surface. And Dark Daniel was the one she needed to talk to.

She did a little evasive driving on the way in. If someone had been tracking Daniel’s clothes or possessions, she didn’t want that person coming along any farther on this trip.

She considered the possibilities again for the millionth time. Column one, this was a very elaborate trap. Column two, this was for real and a million lives were on the line. Not to mention her own.

During her long drive, the balance finally shifted to rest solidly on one side. This wasn’t a government agent in her car, she was sure of that. And if he was an innocent citizen, picked at random to draw her out, then they’d already missed their best opportunities to bag her. There hadn’t been one attack, not one attempt to follow her… that she’d seen.

She thought of the mountains of incriminating information on Daniel Beach, and she couldn’t help herself. She was a believer. So she’d better get to work saving lives.

She pulled into the farmhouse drive around eleven, dead tired and starving but 95 percent sure that there was no trail that could lead either the department or de la Fuentes to her doorstep. She looked the house over quickly, checking to see if anyone had broken in (and died, as he or she would have upon opening the door), and then, after disarming her safeguards, she drove the car into the barn. As soon as she’d pulled the barn door shut and reset the “alarm,” she went to work getting Daniel prepped.

All the other tasks were done. She’d bought timers from a Home Depot in Philly and plugged lamps into them in several rooms of the farmhouse; like a traveler leaving for a few weeks, she made certain that the place looked occupied. A radio was plugged into one of the timers, so there would be noise, too. The house was good bait. Most people would clear that before progressing to the dark barn.

The barn would stay dark. She’d constructed a kind of tent in the middle of the barn space that would hide light and muffle sound, while also keeping Daniel completely ignorant of his surroundings. The rectangular structure was about seven feet high, ten feet wide, and fifteen feet long. It was constructed of PVC pipe, black tarps, and bungee cords, and lined inside with two layers of egg foam duct-taped into place. Rough, yes, but more functional than a cave, and she’d handled that in the past.

In the center of the tent was an oversize metal slab with black accordion legs that could be adjusted for height. It had been on display in the barn – for authenticity, no doubt – and was some kind of veterinarian’s operating table. It was bigger than she needed – this vet had been dealing with cows, not kittens – but still quite a find. It was one of the items that had pushed her over the edge into renting this extortionate tourist trap. There was another metal-topped table that she’d set up as a desk with her computer, the monitors, and a tray of things that would hopefully only be props. The IV pole was next to the head of the table, a bag of saline already hanging. A wheeled metal cart from the kitchen was positioned beside the pole; a mass of tiny but ominous-looking syringes were lined up in easy view on a stainless-steel tray. There was a gas mask and a pressure cuff on the wire rack below the syringes.

And of course, the restraints she’d bought on eBay, prison-medical-facility grade, which she’d chained into place through holes she’d laboriously drilled into the stainless-steel slab. No one was escaping from those restraints without outside help. And that helper might need a blowtorch.

She’d left herself two exits, just openings in the tarp like the partings in a curtain. Outside the tent she had a cot, her sleeping bag, a hot plate, a small refrigerator, and all the other things she would need. There was a little three-piece bathroom attached to the bunkhouse, but it was too far away for her to sleep in, and there was no tub anyway, just a shower. She’d have to forgo her usual arrangements this weekend.

She used movers’ straps to haul Daniel’s inert form out of the car and onto a refrigerator dolly, bumping his head a few times in the process. Probably not hard enough to cause a concussion. Then she wheeled him to the table, set it to its lowest height, and rolled him onto it. He was still deeply under. She positioned him on his back, arms and legs extended about forty-five degrees from his body, then raised the table. One by one, she locked the restraints into place. He would not be moving out of this pose for a while. The IV was next; luckily he was fairly well hydrated, or maybe he just had really great veins. She got the line placed easily and started the drip. She added a parenteral nutrition bag next to the saline. This was all the sustenance he would get for the next three days, if it took that long. He’d be hungry, but his mind would be sharp when she wanted it to be. She put the pulse oximeter on his toe – he’d be able to pull it off a finger – and the dry electrodes on his back, one under each lung, to monitor his respiration. A quick swipe of the electric thermometer across his forehead told her that his current temperature was normal.

She wasn’t as practiced with the bladder catheter, but it was a fairly simple procedure and he wasn’t in any state to protest if she did something wrong. There would be enough cleaning up without urine to deal with, too.

Thinking of that, she placed the absorbent, plastic-lined squares – made for house-training puppies – on the floor all around the operating table. There would definitely be vomit if they needed to go past phase one. Whether there would be blood depended on how he responded to her normal methods. At least she had working plumbing here.

It was turning chilly in the barn, so she covered him with the blanket. She needed him to stay under for a while longer, and cold against his bare skin wouldn’t help with that. After a moment of hesitation, she got one of the pillows off a bunk-room bed, brought it back, and placed it under his head. It’s just because I don’t want him to wake up, she assured herself. Not because he looked uncomfortable.

She inserted a small syringe into the IV port and gave him another dose of the sleeping agent. He should be good for at least four hours.

Daniel’s unconscious face was unsettling. Too… peaceful somehow. She couldn’t remember ever having seen an alignment of features that was so intrinsically innocent. It was hard to imagine that kind of peace and innocence even existing in the same world that she did. For a moment she worried again that she was dealing with a mental flaw beyond any of her previous experience. Then again, if de la Fuentes had been looking for someone who others would instinctively trust, this was exactly the kind of face he would have wanted. It might explain why the drug lord had chosen the schoolteacher in the first place.

She slipped the gas mask over his mouth and nose and screwed a canister onto it. If her safety precautions killed Daniel, she couldn’t get the information she needed.

She did a final patrol around the perimeter. Through the windows, she could see that all the correct lights were on in the farmhouse. In the dead stillness of the night, she thought she could hear the faint strains of Top 40 pop.

Once she was sure that every point of ingress was secured, she ate a protein bar, brushed her teeth in the little bathroom, set her alarm for three, touched her gun under the cot, hugged her canister to her chest, and then sank into the folds of her sleeping bag. Her body was already asleep, and her brain wasn’t far behind. She just had time to slip on her own gas mask before she was totally unconscious.