The Chemist

CHAPTER 7

She was rusty, that was all. It had been three years. That’s why she was feeling things. That’s why this subject was affecting her. It was nothing except her having been out of the game so long. She could still get her groove back.

She entered the room once during this session to keep the computer alive but didn’t stay to watch. She came back only after the dose was waning, about fifteen minutes later.

He lay there gasping again, but this time he didn’t cry, though she knew the pain had been much worse than before. Blood from his chafed skin now stained all the restraints and dripped onto the table. She might need to paralyze him for the next round so his injuries didn’t get any worse. That was a frightening feeling, too; it might help.

He started to shiver. She actually turned toward the exit one millisecond before she realized that she was heading out to get him a blanket. What was wrong with her?

Focus.

“Do you have anything to say?” she asked gently when his breathing was more even.

His answer came out in exhausted, breathy gasps. “It’s not me. Swear. I’m not – planning – anything. Don’t know the drug guy. Wish I could help. Really, really, really – wish I could help. Really.”

“Hmm. You’re showing some resistance to this method, so maybe we’ll try something new.”

“Re… sistance?” he croaked in disbelief. “You think… I’m resist… ing?”

“Honestly, I’m a little worried about messing up your head with hallucinogens – seems like there’s already enough trouble up there.” She tapped her fingers against his sweaty scalp as she spoke. “Maybe we have no choice but to try old-school…” She continued to absently tap his head as she glanced at the tray of tools on her desk. “Are you squeamish?”

“Why. Is this – happening to me.” Totally rhetorical, he wasn’t looking for an answer to his broken whisper. She gave him one anyway.

“Because this is exactly what happens when you plan to release a lethal influenza virus in four American states, potentially killing a million citizens. The government takes exception to that kind of behavior. And they send me to make you talk.”

His eyes focused on her, horror suddenly overtaken by shock.

“What. The. Actual. Hell!”

“Yes, it’s horrific and appalling and evil, I know.”

“Alex, really, this is nuts! I think you have a problem.”

She got in his face. “My problem is that you aren’t telling me where the virus is. Do you have it already? Is it with de la Fuentes still? When’s the drop? Where is it?”

“This is insane. You’re insane!”

“I’d probably enjoy life a lot more if that were true. But I’m beginning to think they sent the wrong doctor. We need the doctor for crazies here. I don’t know how to get the other Daniel to show up!”

“Other Daniel?”

“The one I can see in these pictures!”

She whirled and grabbed a handful from the desk, jabbing the computer once angrily in passing.

“Look,” she said, shoving them toward his face, peeling off one after the other and dropping them to the floor. “It’s your body” – she smacked one photo against his shoulder before letting it fall – “your face, see? But not the right expression. There’s someone else looking out of your eyes, Daniel, and I’m not sure if you’re aware of him or not.”

But there it was again, the recognition. He was aware of something.

“Look, for right now, I’d settle for you just telling me what you see in this picture.” She held up the top photo, Other Daniel skulking in the back door of a Mexican bar.

He looked at her, torn.

“I can’t… explain it… it doesn’t make any sense.”

“You see something I don’t. What is it?”

“He…” Daniel tried to shake his head, but it barely moved, his muscles were so fatigued. “He looks like…”

“Like you.”

“No,” he whispered. “I mean, yes, of course he looks like me, but I can see the differences.”

The way he said it. Of course he looks like me. The transparent honesty again, but something still withheld…

“Daniel, do you know who this is?” A real question this time, not snark, not rhetoric. She wasn’t playing psychiatrist – badly – now. She felt for the first time since the interrogation started that she was actually onto something.

“It can’t be,” he breathed, closing his eyes less out of exhaustion and more to block out the picture, she thought. “It’s impossible.”

She leaned forward. “Tell me,” she murmured.

He opened his eyes and stared at her searchingly. “You’re sure? He’s going to kill people?”

So natural, his use of the third person.

“Hundreds of thousands of people, Daniel,” she promised, earnest as he was. She used the third person, too: “He’s got access to a deadly virus and he’s going to spread it for a psychopathic drug lord. He already has hotel reservations – in your name. He’s doing this in three weeks.”

A whisper. “I don’t believe it.”

“I don’t want to either. This virus… it’s a bad one, Daniel. It’s going to kill a lot more people than a bomb. There’ll be no way to control how it spreads.”

“But how could he do this? Why?”

At this point, she was nearly 65 percent convinced that they were not talking about one of Daniel’s multiple personalities.

“It’s too late for that. All that matters now is stopping him. Who is he, Daniel? Help me save those innocent people.”

A different kind of agony twisted his features. She’d seen this before. With another subject, she would know that his desire to be loyal was warring with his desire to avoid more torture. With Daniel, she rather thought the war was between loyalty and wanting to do the right thing.

In the perfect stillness of the night, as she waited for his answer, through the weak sound barrier of the foam, she clearly heard a small prop plane overhead. Very close overhead.

Daniel looked up.

Time slowed down while she analyzed.

Daniel didn’t look surprised or relieved. The noise did not seem to signal rescue or attack to him. He just noticed it the way someone might notice a car alarm going off. Not relevant to himself, but distracting from the moment.

It felt like she was moving in slow motion as she jumped up and raced to the desk for the syringe she needed.

“You don’t have to do that, Alex,” Daniel said, resigned. “I’ll tell you.”

“Shh,” she whispered, leaning over his head while she injected the drug – into the IV port this time. “I’m just putting you to sleep for now.” She patted his cheek. “No pain, I promise.”

Understanding lit his eyes as he connected the sound to her behavior. “Are we in danger?” he whispered back.

We. Huh. Another interesting pronoun choice. She’d never had a subject anything like this before.

“I don’t know if you are,” she said as his eyes drooped closed. “But I sure as hell am.”

There was a heavy concussion, not immediately outside the barn but too close for her liking.

She put the gas mask securely on his face, then donned hers and screwed in the canister. This time was no drill. She glanced at her computer – she had about ten minutes left there. She wasn’t sure it was enough, so she tapped the space bar. Then she jabbed a button on the little black box, and the light on the side started blinking rapidly. Almost as a reflex, she covered Daniel with the blanket again.

She shut the lights off, so the room was lit only by the white gleam of her computer screen, and exited the tent. Inside the barn, everything was black. She searched, hands out in front of her, until she found the bag beside her cot and, with years of practice guiding her, blindly put on all of her easily accessible armor. She shoved the gun into the front of her belt. She took a syringe from her bag, jabbed it into her thigh, and depressed the plunger. Ready as she could make herself, she crept into the back corner of the tent and hid where she knew the darkest shadow would be if someone came in with a flashlight. She pulled out the gun, removed the safety, and gripped it with both hands. Then she put her ear to the seam of the tent and listened, waiting for someone to open the door or a window into the barn, and die.

While she waited through the slow seconds, her mind raced through more analysis.

This wasn’t a big operation coming for her. No way any extraction team or elimination team worth its salt would announce its arrival with a noisy plane. There were better ways, quieter ways. And if it was a big, SWAT-style team sent after her without any briefing, just busting their way in by sheer might, they would have come in a copter. The plane had sounded very small – a three-seater at most, but probably two-.

If a lone assassin was coming for her again, as had always been the case in the past, she didn’t know what this guy thought he was doing. Why would he give himself away? The noisy plane was the move of someone who was lacking resources and in a very big hurry, someone to whom time was much more important than stealth.

Who was it? Not de la Fuentes.

First of all, a small prop plane didn’t seem like a drug lord’s MO. She imagined that with de la Fuentes, there would be a fleet of black SUVs and a bunch of thugs with machine guns.

Second, she had a gut feeling about this one.

No, she wasn’t a lie detector. Good liars, professional liars, could fool anyone, human or machine. Her job had never been about guessing the truth from the subject’s shifty eyes or tangled contradictions. Her job was breaking down the subject until there was nothing left but compliant flesh and one story. She wasn’t the best because she could separate the truth from the lie; she was the best because she had a natural affinity for the capabilities of the human body and was a genius with a beaker. She knew exactly what a body could handle and exactly how to push it to that point.

So gut feelings were not her forte, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d really felt something like this.

She believed Daniel was telling the truth. That’s why this exercise with Daniel had bothered her so much – because he wasn’t lying. It wasn’t going to be de la Fuentes coming after him. No one was coming after Daniel, because he wasn’t anything more than what he said he was – an English teacher, a history teacher, a volleyball coach. Whoever was coming was coming for her.

Why now? Had the department been tracking her all day and only just discovered her? Were they trying to save Daniel’s life, having realized too late that he wasn’t the guy?

No way. They would have known that before they set her up. They had access to too much information to be fooled in this. The file wasn’t entirely make-believe, but it was manipulated. They had wanted her to get the wrong person.

For a moment she felt a wave of nausea. She’d tortured an innocent man. She put that away quickly. Time for regret later, if she didn’t die now.

The columns reversed again. Elaborate trap, not real crisis. Though she did believe the situation with de la Fuentes was genuine, she no longer believed it was quite so urgent as she’d been told. Time was the easiest small change to make to a file; the tight deadline was a distortion. Low stakes again – just her own life to save. And Daniel’s, too, if she could.

She tried to shake the thought – it felt almost like an omen – that her stakes had somehow doubled. She didn’t need the extra burden.

Maybe someone else – that brilliant and unsuspecting kid who had taken her place at the department – was working on the real terrorist now. Maybe they didn’t think she still had the ability to get what they wanted. But why bring her in at all, then? Maybe the terrorist was dead, and they wanted a fall guy. Maybe they’d discovered this doppelgänger weeks ago and held him in reserve. Get the Chemist to make somebody confess to something, and tie a bow on a bad situation?

That wouldn’t explain the visitor, though.

It had to be near five in the morning. Maybe it was just a farmer who liked to start the day early and knew the area so well that he didn’t mind flying without radar through a bunch of tall trees in the pitch-black night and then enjoyed a good crash landing for the adrenaline kick…

She could hear Daniel’s breath rasp through the gas mask’s filter. She wondered if she had done the right thing putting him under. He was just so… exposed. Helpless. The department had already exhibited exactly how much concern they had for Daniel Beach’s well-being. And she’d left him trussed and defenseless in the middle of the room, a fish in a barrel, a sitting duck. She owed him better than that. But her first reaction had been to neutralize him. It wouldn’t have been safe to free him, she knew. Of course he would have attacked her, tried to exact revenge. If it came to brute strength, he’d have the advantage. And she didn’t want to have to poison him or shoot him. At least this way, his death wouldn’t be on her hands.

She still felt guilty, his vulnerable presence in the darkness worrying at the edges of her mind like sandpaper against cotton, pulling threads of concentration away from her.

Too late for second thoughts.

She heard the faint sound of movement outside. The barn was surrounded by bushes with stiff, rustling leaves. Someone was in them now, looking into the windows. What if he just let loose with an Uzi through the side of the barn? He obviously wasn’t worried about noise.

Should she lower the table, get Daniel down in case the tent was sprayed with bullets? She had oiled the accordion base well, but she wasn’t positive it wouldn’t squeak.

She scuttled over to the table and cranked it lower as fast as she could. It did make some low, bass groans, but she didn’t think they would carry outside the barn, especially through the foam barrier. She scooted back to her corner and listened again.

More rustling. He was at another window, on the other side of the barn. Her booby trap’s wires were inconspicuous, but not invisible. Hopefully he was only looking for a target inside. Had he gone to the house first? Why hadn’t he gone in?

Sounds outside another window.

Just open it, she thought to herself. Just crawl inside.

A sound she didn’t understand – a hissing, followed by a heavy clank from above. Then a thump, thump, thump so loud that the barn seemed to shake. Her first thought was small explosives, and she hunkered down into a protective position automatically, but in the next second she realized it wasn’t that loud, it was just the contrast with the silence before. There was no sound of anything breaking – no glass shattering or metal tearing. Was the reverberation enough to break the connections around the windows or door? She didn’t think so.

Then she realized the thumps against the wall were moving up, just as they stopped. Above her.

Major hitch – he was coming through the roof.

She was on her feet in a second, one eye to the seam in the tent. It was still too dark to see anything. Above her, the sound of a welding torch. Her intruder had one, too.

All her preparation was falling apart. She glanced back once at Daniel. His gas mask was on. He would be fine. Then she darted out into the larger space of the barn, bent low with her hands stretched out in front of her to find the objects in her way, and moved as quickly as she could toward the faint moonlight filtering through the closest window. There were milking stalls to maneuver around, but she thought she remembered the clearest route. She broke into the open space between the tent and the stalls, half running, and one hand found the milking apparatus. She dodged that and reached out for the window -

Something tremendously hard and heavy threw her to the ground face-first, knocking the wind out of her and pinning her to the floor. The gun flew away into the darkness. Her head thudded resoundingly against the concrete. Bright pops of light skittered across her eyes.

Someone grabbed her wrists and pulled her arms behind her, then wrenched them higher until she guessed her shoulders were close to dislocating. A grunt escaped her lungs as the new position forced the air out. Her thumbs quickly twisted the rings on her left and right hands, exposing the barbs.

“What’s this?” a man’s voice said directly above her – generic American accent. He changed his grip so he was holding both her wrists in one hand. With the other, he yanked off her gas mask. “So maybe not a suicide bomber after all,” he mused. “Let me guess, those hot wires aren’t connected to charges, are they?”

She squirmed under him, twisting her wrists, trying to get her rings in contact with his skin.

“Stop that,” he ordered. He clocked the back of her head with something hard – probably the gas mask – and her face smacked the floor. She felt her lip split, and tasted blood.

She braced for it. In such close quarters, it would probably be a blade across her carotid artery. Or a wire around her throat. She hoped for the blade. She wouldn’t feel the slice as pain – not with the specially designed dextroamphetamine she had racing through her veins right now – but she’d probably feel the strangulation.

“Get up.”

The weight lifted off her back and she was drawn up by her wrists. She got her feet under her as quickly as possible to take the pressure off her shoulder joints. She needed to keep her arms usable.

He stood behind her, but she could tell by where his breathing came from that he was tall. He pulled her wrists until she was on her tiptoes, struggling to maintain contact with the floor.

“Okay, shorty, now you’re going to do something for me.”

She didn’t have the training to beat him in a fight, and she didn’t have the strength to wrest herself free. She could only try to make use of the options she’d prepared.

She let her weight sag precariously against her stressed shoulders for one second as she kicked the toe of her left shoe down with enough pressure to pop the stiletto blade out of the heel (the front-facing blade was in her right shoe). Then she slashed awkwardly back toward where his legs had to be. He jumped out of the way, loosening his grip enough for her to rip free and spin around, her left hand flying out for an open-handed slap. He was too tall; she missed his face, and her barb scraped against something hard on his chest – body armor. She danced backward, away from the blow she could hear coming but could not see, her hands extended, trying to make contact with unprotected skin.

Something cut her legs out from under her. She hit the ground and rolled away, but he was on top of her at once. He grabbed her hair and bounced her face against the concrete again. Her nose popped and blood flooded her lips and chin.

He bent down to speak directly in her ear. “Playtime is over, honey.”

She tried to head-butt him. The back of her head connected with something, but not a face – uneven spires, metallic…

Night-vision goggles. No wonder he’d been able to control the fight so well.

He slapped the back of her head.

If only she’d put her earrings on.

“Seriously, stop it. Look, I’m going to get off you. I can see you, and you can’t see me. I’ve got a gun, and I will shoot you in the kneecap if you try one more stupid trick, okay?”

While he was talking, he reached back with one hand and ripped her shoes off, one after the other. He didn’t check her pockets, so she still had the scalpel blades and the needles in her belt. He jumped off her. She heard him move away and click the safety off his gun.

“What do you… want me to do?” she asked in her best frightened-little-girl voice. The split lip helped. She imagined her face was a sight. It was going to hurt like hell when the drugs wore off.

“Disarm your booby traps and open the door.”

“I’ll need” – sniff, sniff – “the light on.”

“No problem. I’m switching my night-vision goggles for your gas mask anyway.”

She dropped her head, hoping to hide her expression. Once he had the mask on, 90 percent of her defenses were rendered obsolete.

She limped – too theatrical? – to the panel by the door and turned the light on. She couldn’t think of any other option right now. He hadn’t killed her immediately; that meant he wasn’t under direct orders from the department. He must have an agenda here. She had to figure out what it was he wanted and then keep it from him long enough to gain the advantage.

The bad news was that if he needed the door open, it was probably not just to have an easy escape route. It meant he had backup, which didn’t help her odds. Or Daniel’s, a voice in her head added. Like she needed more pressure. But Daniel was here because of her. She felt responsible for him. She owed him.

When she turned, blinking against the brilliance of the overhead lights, the man was twenty feet from where she stood. He had to be six foot three or four, and the skin on his neck and jaw was definitely white, but that was all she could be sure about. His body was covered with a black one-piece suit – almost like a wet suit, but rough, with jutting plates of Kevlar. Torso, arms, and legs all armored. He looked pretty muscular, but some of that could be the Kevlar. He wore heavy all-terrain boots, also black, and a black watch cap on his head. His face was hidden by her gas mask. Over one shoulder was slung an assault rifle – a McMillan.50-caliber sniper. She’d done her homework; it wasn’t hard to become an expert on just about anything when you spent all your free time studying. Knowing gun makes and models could tell her a lot about an assailant, or any suspicious man on the street who might be planning to become an assailant. This assailant had more than one gun; a high-standard HDS was holstered on his hip, and a SIG Sauer P220 was in his right hand, pointed at her knee. Right-handed, she noted. She had no doubt he could hit her kneecap from this distance. Given that particular rifle, she figured, he could probably hit her wherever he wanted from however far away he wanted to.

He reminded her of Batman, but without the cape. Also, she thought she remembered something about Batman not ever using guns. Though if he did, assuming taste and skill, he would probably choose these.

If she couldn’t get this assassin out of the gas mask, it wouldn’t matter how many super-soldier friends were waiting for him outside. He would have no trouble killing her once he had what he wanted.

“Disarm your leads.”

She feigned a brief dizzy spell as she limped over to the barn door, trying to get as much time for thinking as possible. Who would want her alive? Was he a kind of bounty hunter? Did he think he could sell her back to the department? If they’d put out a contract on her, she was sure that all they would have asked for was her head. So a blackmailer-slash-bounty hunter? I have what you want, but I’ll release it alive, back into the wild, unless you double the reward. Smart. The department would definitely pay.

That was the best guess she could come up with by the time she was to the back edge of the door.

The system wasn’t complicated. There were three sets of leads for each area of ingress. The first was outside in the bushes to the left of the barn door, hidden under a thin layer of dirt. Then there was the trigger line that ran across the seam where the door opened, connected loosely enough to pull apart with the slightest breach. The third was the safety, tucked under the wood paneling beside the door; its exposed wires were separated by an inch of space. The current was only stable if at least two of the connections were linked. She wondered if she should make the process look more convoluted than it actually was, but then decided there was no point. All he’d have to do was examine the setup for a few seconds to understand it.

She wrapped the ends of the third lead tightly together and then stood back.

“It’s… off.” She made her voice crack in the middle of the words. Hopefully he would buy that he’d knocked the fight out of her.

“If you would do the honors?” he suggested.

She gimped her way to the other side of the door and then pulled it back, her eyes already on the spot in the darkness where she assumed the dark heads of his companions would be. There was nothing but the farmhouse in the distance. And then her eyes dropped, and she froze.

“What is that?” she whispered.

It wasn’t actually a question for him, it was just shock breaking through her façade.

“That,” he answered in a tone that could only be described as obnoxiously smug, “is one hundred and twenty pounds of muscles, claws, and teeth.”

He must have made some kind of signal – she didn’t see it, her eyes were locked on his “backup” – because the animal darted forward to his side. It looked like a German shepherd, a very big one, but it didn’t have the coloring she associated with Alsatians. This one was pure black. Could it be a wolf?

“Einstein,” he said to the animal. It looked up, alert. He pointed to her, and his next word was obviously a command. “Control!”

The dog – wolf? – rushed her with its hackles rising. She backed up until the barn door was against her spine, her hands in the air. The dog braced itself, snout just inches from her stomach, its muzzle pulled back to expose long, sharp white fangs. A low, rumbling growl began deep in its throat.

Intimidate would have been a better name for the command.

She thought about trying to get one of her barbs into the dog’s skin but doubted they were long enough to make it past its thick fur. And it wasn’t like the thing was going to sit there and let her pet it.

The Batman wannabe relaxed a bit, or she thought he did. It was hard to be positive about what his muscles were doing under the armor.

“All right, now that we’ve broken the ice, let’s talk.”

She waited.

“Where is Daniel Beach?”

She could feel the shock on her face even as she tried to suppress it. All her theories whirled around again and turned upside down.

“Answer me!”

She didn’t know what to say. Did the department want Daniel dead first? Make sure the loose ends were all tied up neatly? She thought of Daniel, exposed and unconscious in the center of the tent – not exactly a strong hiding place – and felt sick.

Batman stalked angrily toward her. The dog reacted, moving to the side to allow the man through even as its snarl grew in volume. The man shoved the barrel of his SIG Sauer under her jaw roughly, knocking her head against the barn door.

“If he’s dead,” the man hissed, “you’re going to wish you were, too. I’ll make you beg me to kill you.”

She almost snorted. This thug would probably hit her a few times – maybe, if he had any creativity, he would cut her up a bit – and then he’d shoot her. He had no idea how to generate and maintain real pain.

But his threats did tell her something – he apparently wanted Daniel alive. So they had that one thing in common.

Resistance was counterproductive at this point anyway. She needed him to think she was out of the game. She needed him to relax his guard. And she needed to get back to her computer.

“Daniel is in the tent.” She pointed with her chin, keeping her hands raised. “He’s fine.”

Batman seemed to consider this for a moment.

“Okay, ladies first. Einstein,” he barked. “Herd.” He pointed to the tent.

The dog barked in response, and moved around to her side. It poked her thigh with its nose, then nipped her.

“Ow!” she complained, jumping away. The dog got behind her and poked her again.

“Just walk, slow and steady, to your tent thing, and he won’t hurt you.”

She really didn’t like the dog behind her, but she kept her pace to the injured hobble she’d been faking. She glanced back at the animal to see what it was doing.

“Don’t worry,” Batman said, amused. “People don’t taste very good. He doesn’t want to eat you. He’ll only do that if I tell him to.”

She ignored the taunt and moved slowly to the curtained access point.

“Hold that open so I can see in,” he instructed.

The tarp was stiff with the layers of egg foam. She rolled it back as far as she could. It was mostly black inside. Her computer screen glowed white in the darkness, the monitors dull green. Because she knew the shapes, she could make out Daniel under the blanket, just a foot off the ground, his chest rising and falling evenly.

There was a long moment of silence.

“Do you want… me to turn on… the lights?” she asked.

“Hold it there.”

She felt him come up behind her and then the cold circle of the gun barrel pressing into the nape of her neck, just at her hairline.

“What’s this?” he murmured.

She held perfectly still while his gloved fingers touched the skin next to the gun. At first she was confused, but then she realized he had noticed the scar there.

“Huh,” he grunted, and his hand dropped. “Okay, where is the switch?”

“On the desk.”

“Where is the desk?”

“About ten feet in, on the right side. Where you can see the computer screen.”

Would he take off the gas mask and put on the goggles again?

The pressure of the gun disappeared. She felt him move back from her, though the dog’s nose was still pressed against her butt.

A slithering noise hissed across the floor. She looked down and watched the thick black cord for the closest work light whip past her foot. She heard the bang when it fell over but no crunch of glass.

He dragged the light past her, then flipped the switch. For a fraction of a second she allowed herself to hope that he’d broken the light, but then it flickered to life.

“Control,” he commanded the dog. The snarling started again, and she held herself very still.

Aiming the light in front of him, he stepped into the tent. She watched the wide beam sweep the walls, then settle on the form in the middle.

He moved into the room, sliding into a sinuous gait that was totally silent. Obviously a man of many skills. He walked around the body on the floor, checking the corners and probably looking for weapons before he focused on Daniel. He crouched, removed the blanket, examined the bloody restraints and the IV, followed the sensors to the monitors, and then watched those for a moment. He put the light down, angling it at the ceiling to get the widest spread of illumination. Finally, he reached down, carefully removed the gas mask from Daniel’s face, and set it on the floor.

“Danny,” she heard him whisper.