The Chemist

CHAPTER 6

By three thirty in the morning, she was up, dressed, and fed, still exhausted but ready to start. Daniel slept on, oblivious and peaceful. He would feel well rested when he woke up, but disoriented. He would have no idea what time or even what day it was. Discomfort was an important tool in her line of work.

She took his pillow and blanket away, acknowledging the regret this made her feel. But this was important; regardless of training, every subject felt great discomfort being naked and helpless in front of the enemy. Regret would be the last feeling she would allow herself for a few days. She closed off the rest. It had been more than three years, but she could feel things shutting down inside of her. Her body remembered how to do this. She knew she had the strength she would need.

Her hair was still wet from the quick color job, and the makeup felt thick on her face, though she wore very little, really. She didn’t know how to do anything complicated, so she’d just smeared on dark shadow, thick mascara, and oxblood-red lipstick. She hadn’t planned to adjust her hair color this soon, but black hair and the camouflage on her face were part of the new strategy. The white lab jacket and pale blue scrubs she’d brought lay crisply folded in her bag. Instead, she was in the tight black shirt again with black jeans. It was a good thing the farmhouse had a washer and dryer. The shirt was going to need a wash soon. Well, it needed one yesterday, actually.

It was strange how a little colored powder and grease could change an observer’s perception of you. She checked herself in the bathroom mirror and was pleased by how hard her face looked, how cold. She ran a comb through her hair, slicking it straight back, then walked through the barn to her interrogation room.

She’d set up floodlights that hung from the PVC structure overhead, but she left them off now, just turning on two portable work lights that stood waist-high. The black duct tape and gray egg foam looked the same color in the shadows. The air temperature had dropped as the night progressed. There were goose bumps on the subject’s arms and stomach. She ran the thermometer across his forehead again. Still within the normal range.

Finally, she turned on her computer and set up the protocols. It would go to screen saver after twenty minutes of inactivity. On the other side of her computer was a small black box with a keypad on top and a tiny red light on the side, but she ignored that now and went to work.

There was a feeling that struggled to break through to the surface as she injected the IV port with the chemical that would bring the subject around, but she suppressed it easily. Daniel Beach had two sides, and so did she. She was her other self now, the one the department called the Chemist, and the Chemist was a machine. Pitiless and relentless. Her monster was free now.

Hopefully his would come out to play.

The new drug trickled into his veins, and his breathing became less even. One long-fingered hand fisted and pulled against the restraint. Although he was still mostly unconscious, a frown touched his features as he tried to roll onto his side. His knees twisted, tugging against the fetters on his ankles, and suddenly his eyes flew open.

She stood quietly at the head of the table and watched him panic; his breathing spiked, his heart rate increased, his body thrashed against his bonds. He stared wildly into the darkness, trying to understand where he was, to find something familiar. He stopped suddenly, tense and listening.

“Hello?” he whispered.

She stood still, waiting for the right moment.

For ten minutes, he alternated between wildly yanking against the restraints and trying to listen around the harsh noise of his breathing.

“Help!” he finally called out loudly. “Is anyone there?”

“Hello, Daniel,” she answered in a quiet voice.

His head jerked back, stretching his throat, as he looked for where the voice was coming from. It wasn’t the instinct of a professional soldier, she noted, to expose the throat that way.

“Who’s there? Who is that?”

“It doesn’t really matter who I am, Daniel.”

“Where am I?”

“Also not relevant.”

“What do you want?” he half shouted.

“There you go – you got it. That’s the question that matters.”

She walked around the table so he could focus on her, though she was still lit from behind and her face would be mostly shadows.

“I don’t have anything,” he protested. “No money, no drugs. I can’t help you.”

“I don’t want things, Daniel. I want – no, I need information. And the only way you’re getting out of here is if you give it to me.”

“I don’t know anything – nothing important! Please -”

“Stop it,” she snapped loudly, and he sucked in a shocked breath.

“Are you listening to me now, Daniel? This part is really crucial.”

He nodded, blinking fast.

“I have to have this information. There is no other option. And if I have to, Daniel, I will hurt you until you tell me what I need to know. I will hurt you badly. I don’t necessarily want to do this, but it doesn’t bother me to do it, either. I’m telling you this so that you can decide now, before I begin. Tell me what I want to know, and I will free you. It’s that simple. I promise I will not harm you. It will save me time and yourself a lot of suffering. I know you don’t want to tell me, but please realize that you are going to tell me anyway. It may take a while, but eventually you won’t be able to stop yourself. Everyone breaks. So make the easy choice now. You’ll be sorry if you don’t. Do you understand?”

She had given this same speech to many, many subjects in her career, and it was usually quite effective. About 40 percent of the time, this was when the subject would start confessing. Not often finish confessing, of course, and there was always some exploratory work to do, but there was a decent chance the first admission of guilt and some partial information might be surrendered now. The statistic varied depending on who she was giving the speech to; roughly half the time with most military men, the first divulgence would happen before any pain was administered. Only 5 to 10 percent of the actual spies would say anything without some physical distress. Same numbers for religious zealots. For the low-level toadies, the speech worked 100 percent of the time. The man in charge had never once confessed a single detail without pain.

She really hoped Daniel was just a glorified toady.

He stared back at her while she spoke, his face frozen in fear. But then, as she was concluding, confusion narrowed his eyes and pulled his brows together. It wasn’t an expression she’d expected.

“Do you understand me, Daniel?”

His voice bewildered: “Alex? Alex, is that you?”

This was exactly why one didn’t make contact with a mark beforehand. Now she was off script.

“Of course that’s not my real name, Daniel. You know that.”

“What?”

“My name isn’t Alex.”

“But… you’re a doctor. You helped me.”

“I am not that kind of doctor, Daniel. And I didn’t help you. I drugged you and I kidnapped you.”

His face was sober. “You were kind to me.”

She had to control a sigh.

“I did what I had to do to get you here. Now, I need you to focus, Daniel. I need you to answer my question. Are you going to tell me what I want to know?”

She saw doubt in his expression again. Disbelief that she would actually hurt him, that this was really happening.

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know. But like I said, I don’t know anything important. I don’t have any bank account numbers or, I don’t know, treasure maps or anything. Certainly not anything worth all this.”

He tried to gesture with his trussed hand. Looking at himself as he did, he seemed to realize for the first time that he was naked. His skin flushed – face, neck, and a line down the center of his chest – and he pulled automatically against the restraints as if trying to cover himself. His breathing and heart rate started spiking again.

Nudity; whether black ops agents or just low-level terrorist gofers, they all hated it.

“I don’t want a treasure map. I’m not doing this for personal gain, Daniel. I’m doing this to protect innocent lives. Let’s talk about that.”

“I don’t understand. How can I help with that? Why wouldn’t I want to?”

She didn’t like the way this was going. The ones who clung to the claim of ignorance and innocence often took longer to break than the ones who owned their guilt but were determined not to sell out their government, or their jihad, or their comrades.

She walked to the desk and picked up the first picture. It was one of the very clear surveillance shots of de la Fuentes, a close-up.

“Let’s start with this man,” she said, holding the photo at his eye level and using one of the work lights as a spot.

Perfectly blank, absolutely no reaction. A bad sign.

“Who is that?”

She allowed her sigh to be audible this time.

“You’re making the wrong choice, Daniel. Please think about what you’re doing.”

“But I don’t know who that is!”

She fixed him with a resigned stare.

“I’m being completely honest, Alex. I don’t know that man.”

She sighed again. “Then I suppose we’ll get started.”

The disbelief was there again. She’d never dealt with that in an interrogation before. All the others who’d been on her table had known what they were there for. She’d faced terror and pleading and, occasionally, stoic defiance, but never this strange, trusting, almost-challenge: You won’t hurt me.

“Um, is this some kind of fetish fantasy thing?” he asked in a low voice, somehow finding a way to sound embarrassed despite the bizarreness of his circumstances. “I don’t really know the rules for that stuff…”

She turned away to hide an inappropriate smile. Get a grip, she ordered herself. Trying to keep the movement smooth, as if she’d meant to walk away at that exact moment, she went to her desk. She clicked one key on her computer, keeping it awake. Then she picked up the prop tray. It was heavy, and some of the props clanked against each other as she moved it. She brought the tray to his side, rested the edge of it beside the syringes, and angled the light so the metallic implements shone brightly.

“I’m sorry you find this confusing,” she said in an even voice. “I am in deadly earnest, I assure you. I want you to look at my tools.”

He did, and his eyes grew very wide. She watched for some hint of the other side to break through, the Dark Daniel, but there was nothing. His eyes were somehow still gentle even in abject fear. Innocent. Lines spoken by Hitchcock’s Norman Bates flashed through her head. I think I must have one of those faces you can’t help believing.

She shuddered, but he didn’t notice, his eyes fixed on her props.

“I don’t have to use these very often,” she told him, touching the pliers lightly, then stroking her finger along the extra-large scalpel. “They call me in when they would like to have the subject left more or less… intact.” She brushed the bolt cutters on the hard syllable of the last word. “But I don’t really need these tools anyway.” She flicked her fingernail against the canister of the welding torch, producing a high-pitched pinging sound. “Can you guess why?”

He didn’t respond, frozen in horror. He was starting to see now. Yes, this was real.

Only Dark Daniel must already have known that. So why wasn’t he surfacing? Did he think she could be fooled? Or that his charm on the train had melted her weak, womanly heart?

“I’ll tell you why,” she said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper. She leaned in conspiratorially and held her face in a sweet, regretful half smile that didn’t touch her eyes. “Because what I do hurts… so… much… worse.”

His eyes looked like they were going to bug out of his head. This, at least, was a familiar reaction.

She took the tray away, letting his focus move naturally to the long line of syringes left behind, glinting in the light.

“The first time will last only ten minutes,” she told him, still facing away as she set the tools back on the desk. She spun around. “But it will feel like a lot longer. This will just be a taste – you could look at it as a warning shot. When it’s done, we’ll try talking again.”

She picked up the syringe on the far end of the tray, pushed the plunger till a drop of liquid dewed at the top, then flicked it away theatrically like a nurse in a movie.

“Please?” he whispered. “Please, I don’t know what this is about. I can’t help you. I swear I would if I could.”

“You will,” she promised, and she stabbed the needle into his left triceps brachii.

The reaction was nearly instantaneous. His left arm spasmed and jerked against the restraint. While he stared in horror at his convulsing muscles, she quietly picked up another syringe and crossed to his right side. He saw her approach.

“Alex, please!” he yelled.

She ignored him and his attempt to somehow evade her, as if he were strong enough to rip free of his cuffs, and injected this dose of lactic acid into his right quad. His knee wrenched flat, the muscles pulling his foot off the table. He gasped, and then groaned.

She moved deliberately, not in any hurry, but not slowly, either. Another syringe. His left arm was already too incapacitated for him to try to resist her. This time she injected the acid into his left biceps brachii. Immediately, the opposing triceps muscle group began tearing against the biceps, battling for contraction dominance.

The air burst out of his mouth like he’d just been punched in the gut, but she knew the pain was much, much worse than any blow.

One more injection, this time into his right biceps femoris. The same ripping struggle that was happening in his arm started in his leg. And the screaming started with it.

She went to stand by his head, watching dispassionately while the tendons in his neck strained into white ropes. When he opened his mouth to scream again, she shoved a gag in. If he bit off his tongue, he wouldn’t be able to tell her anything.

She walked slowly to her desk chair while his muffled shrieks were absorbed into the double layer of foam, sat down, and crossed her legs. She looked at the monitors – everything elevated but nothing in the danger zone. A healthy body could experience a lot more pain than most people would think before its important organs were really in any serious peril. She brushed the touch pad on her computer, keeping the screen brightly lit. Then she pulled her wristwatch out of her pocket and laid it across her knee. This was mostly for theatrics; she could have watched the clock on her computer or the monitors just as easily.

She faced him while she waited, her face composed and the silver watch bright against her black clothing. Subjects tended to find this disconcerting – that she could watch her handiwork so dispassionately. So she stared at him, expression polite, an audience member at a mediocre play, while his body thrashed and distorted on the table and his screams choked past the gag. Sometimes his eyes were on her, pleading and agonized, and other times they whirled crazily around the room.

Ten minutes could be a very long time. His muscles started to spasm independently of each other, some locking into knots and others seeming to want to jerk themselves off the bone. Sweat ran off his face, darkening his hair. The skin over his cheekbones looked ready to split. The screams lowered in pitch, turned hoarse, sounding more like an animal’s than a man’s.

Six more minutes.

And these weren’t even the good drugs.

Anyone who was sick enough to want to could duplicate the pain she was inflicting now. The acid she was using wasn’t a controlled substance; it was fairly easy to acquire online, even if one happened to be on the run from the dark underbelly of the U.S. government. Back in her interrogating prime, when she had her beautiful lab and her beautiful budget, her sequencer and her reactor, she’d been able to create some truly unique and ultra-specific preparations.

The Chemist really wasn’t the proper code name for her at all. However, the Molecular Biologist was probably too big a mouthful. Barnaby had been the chemistry expert, and the things he’d taught her had kept her alive after she’d lost her lab; she had become her code name in the end. But in the beginning, it had been her theoretical research with monoclonal antibodies that had brought her to the department’s attention. It was a shame she couldn’t risk taking Daniel to the lab. This operation would have produced results much more quickly.

And she’d been so close to actually removing pain from the equation. That had been her Holy Grail, though no one else seemed eager for it. She was sure that if she’d been working in the lab for the past three years instead of running for her life, by now she would have created the key that would unlock whatever one needed from the human mind. No torture, no horror. Just quick answers, given pleasantly, and then an equally pleasant trip to either a cell or the execution wall.

They should have let her work.

Still four minutes to go.

She and Barnaby had discussed different strategies for dealing with these periods of the interrogation. Barnaby had told himself stories. He would remember the fairy tales from his childhood and think of modern versions or alternative endings or what would happen if the characters switched places. He’d said some of the ideas he came up with were pretty good, and when he had time he was going to write them down. She, however, felt like she was wasting time if she wasn’t doing something practical. She would plan things. In the beginning, she planned new versions of the monoclonal antibody that would control brain response and block neural receptors. Later, she planned her life on the run, thinking of everything that could possibly go wrong, every worst-case scenario, and what she could do to keep herself from falling into each trap. Then how to escape the trap halfway in. Then after it was sprung. She tried to envision every possibility.

Barnaby said she needed to take a mental break now and then. Have some fun, or what was the point of living?

Just living, she had decided. Just living was all she asked. And so she put in the mental effort needed to make that possible.

Today she thought about the next step. Tonight, tomorrow night, or, heaven help him, the night after that, Daniel was going to tell her everything. Everyone broke. It was just a simple fact that a human being could resist pain for only so long. Some people could deal better with one kind or another, but that meant she would just switch to another type of pain. At some point, if he didn’t talk, she would roll Daniel onto his stomach – so he wouldn’t choke on his own vomit – and administer what she called the green needle, though the serum was actually clear, just like all the others. If that didn’t work, she’d try one of the hallucinogens. There was always a new way to feel pain. The body had so many different ways to experience stimuli.

Once she had what she needed, she would stop his pain, put him under, and then e-mail Carston from this IP address and tell him everything she’d learned. Then she would drive away and keep going for a very long time. Maybe Carston and company wouldn’t come after her. Maybe they would. And she might never know, because she would most likely keep hiding until she died – hopefully of natural causes.

Before nine minutes were over, the dose started to wear off. It was different for everyone, and Daniel was on the larger side. His screams turned to groans as his body slowly melted into a pile of exhausted flesh on the table, and then he was quiet. She removed the gag and he gasped for air. He stared at her with awed horror for one long moment, and then he started to cry.

“I’ll give you a few minutes,” she said. “Collect your thoughts.”

She left through the exit he couldn’t see, then sat quietly on the cot and listened to him choke back his sobs.

Crying was normal, and usually it boded well. But it was obvious that this crying was Daniel the Teacher. There was still no sign of Dark Daniel, not one knowing glance or defensive tic. What would reach him? If this was truly dissociative identity disorder, could she force an appearance of the personality she wanted? She needed an actual shrink on her team today. If she’d gone docilely into the lab as they’d wanted, they probably would have been able to find her one almost the moment she asked. Well, there was nothing she could do about it now.

She quietly ate a soft breakfast bar while she waited for his breathing to even out, and then she ate a second. She washed it down with a box of apple juice out of the minifridge.

When she reentered the tent, Daniel was gazing despairingly at the egg-foam ceiling. She walked quietly to the computer and touched a key.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that, Daniel.”

He hadn’t heard her enter. He cringed as far away from the sound of her voice as he could.

“Let’s not do it again, okay?” she said. She settled back into her chair. “I want to go home, too.” Kind of a lie, but also mostly true, if impossible. “And, though you might not believe me, I’m not actually a sadist. I don’t enjoy watching you suffer. I just don’t have another choice. I’m not going to let all those people die.”

His voice was raw. “I don’t… know what… you’re talking about.”

“You’d be surprised how many people say that – and keep saying it for round after round of what you just went through, and worse! And then on the tenth round for one, on the seventeenth for another, suddenly the truth comes pouring out. And I get to tell the good guys where to find the warhead or the chemical bomb or the disease agent. And people stay alive, Daniel.”

“I haven’t killed anyone,” he rasped.

“But you’re planning to, and I’m going to change your mind.”

“I would never do that.”

She sighed. “This is going to take a long time, isn’t it?”

“I can’t tell you anything I don’t know. You’ve got the wrong person.”

“I’ve heard that one a lot, too,” she said lightly, but it touched a nerve. If she couldn’t get the other Daniel to appear, then wasn’t she truly torturing the wrong person?

She made a snap decision to go off script again, though she was out of her depth when it came to mental illness.

“Daniel, do you ever have blackouts?”

A long pause. “What?”

“Have you, for example, woken up somewhere and not known how you got there? Has anyone ever told you that you did or said something that you can’t remember doing or saying?”

“Um. No. Well, today. I mean, that’s what you’re saying, right? That I’m planning to do something awful, but I don’t know what it is?”

“Have you ever been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder?”

“No! Alex, I’m not the crazy person in this room.”

That didn’t help at all.

“Tell me about Egypt.”

He turned his head toward her. His expression made the words he was thinking as clear as if he’d spoken them out loud: Are you kidding me, lady?

She just waited.

He sighed a pained little gasp. “Well, Egypt has one of the longest histories of any modern civilization. There is evidence that Egyptians were living along the Nile as early as the tenth millennium BC. By about 6000 BC -”

“That’s hilarious, Daniel. Can we be serious now?”

“I don’t know what you want! Are you testing to see if I’m really a history teacher? I can’t even tell!”

She could hear the strength coming back into his voice. The nice thing about her drugs was that they wore off quickly. She could have a focused conversation between rounds. And she’d found that the subjects had a greater fear of pain when they weren’t feeling any. The high-ups and deep-downs seemed to speed things along.

She touched a key on her computer.

“Tell me about your trip to Egypt.”

“I have never been to Egypt.”

“You didn’t go there with Habitat for Humanity two years ago?”

“No. I’ve been in Mexico for the past three summers.”

“You do know people keep track of these things, right? That your passport number is logged into a computer and there’s a record of where you’ve gone?”

“Which is why you should know I was in Mexico!”

“Where you met Enrique de la Fuentes.”

“Who?”

She blinked her eyes slowly, her face very bored.

“Hold on,” he said, staring up like an explanation might be posted on the ceiling. “I know that name. It was on the news a while ago… with those DEA officers that went missing. He’s a drug dealer, right?”

She held up the picture of de la Fuentes again.

“That’s him?”

She nodded.

“Why do you think I know him?”

She answered slowly. “Because I also have pictures of you together. And because he’s given you ten million dollars in the past three years.”

His mouth dropped open and the word came out as a gasp. “Wha… ut?”

“Ten million dollars, in your name, scattered around the Cayman Islands and Swiss banks.”

He stared at her for another second, and then anger suddenly twisted his face, and his voice turned harsh. “If I’ve got ten million dollars, then why do I live in a roach-infested walk-up studio in Columbia Heights? Why are we using the same patched volleyball uniforms that the school’s had since 1973? Why do I ride the Metro while my ex-wife’s new husband drives around town in a Mercedes? And why am I getting rickets from eating a steady diet of ramen?”

She let him vent. The desire to talk was a small step in the right direction. Unfortunately, this angry Daniel was still the schoolteacher version, just not a very happy schoolteacher.

“Wait a minute – what do you mean you have pictures of me with the drug guy?”

She walked to her desk and pulled the appropriate photo.

“In El Minya, Egypt, with de la Fuentes,” she announced as she held the photo in front of his face.

Finally, a reaction.

His head jerked back; his eyes narrowed, then opened wide. She could almost watch his thoughts move as they ran through his brain and settled in his face. He was analyzing what he was looking at and making a plan.

Still no sign of the other Daniel, but at least he seemed to recognize that other part of himself.

“Do you want to tell me about Egypt now, Daniel?”

Tight lips. “I’ve never been there. That’s not me.”

“I don’t believe you.” She sighed. “Which is really too bad, because we’ve got to move this party along.”

The fear came back, fast and hard.

“Alex, please, I swear that isn’t me. Please don’t.”

“This is my job, Daniel. I have to find out how to save those people.”

All the reticence disappeared. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. I want you to save them, too.”

It was harder not to believe his sincerity now.

“That picture meant something to you.”

He shook his head once, expression closing up. “It wasn’t me.”

She had to admit, she was more than a little fascinated. This was really something new. How she wished she had Barnaby to consult! Oh well, she was on the clock. She didn’t have time for wishing. She stacked the syringes one by one onto her left palm. Eight this time.

He stared at her with terror and… sadness. He started to say something, but no sound came out. She paused with the first needle ready in her right hand.

“Daniel, if you want to say something, do it quick.”

Dejected. “It won’t help.”

She waited another second, and he looked straight at her.

“It’s just your face,” he said. “It’s the same as before… exactly the same.”

She flinched, then pivoted and moved up the table to stand beside his head. He tried to strain away from her, but that just better exposed his sternocleidomastoid. Usually she’d save this particular muscle for later in the interrogation; it was one of the very most painful things she could do to a subject under her current limitations. But she wanted to leave quickly, so she stabbed the needle into the side of his neck and pushed the plunger down. Without really looking at him, she replaced the gag as soon as his mouth opened. Then, dropping the other syringes, she escaped the room.