The Chemist

by Stephenie Meyer

  The Serpent and de la Fuentes were attempting to orchestrate the most debilitating attack that had ever been perpetrated on American soil. And if it was true that de la Fuentes already had the weaponized virus and the vaccine, they had an excellent chance of success.

  Carston hadn't been kidding. What she'd originally thought had been an act to play to her sympathies now appeared to be an amazing demonstration of self-control. Of all the potential disasters that had crossed her desk--back when she'd had a desk--this was one of the very worst, and she'd seen some bad things. There had even been one other biological weapon with the potential to do this kind of damage, but that one had never made it out of the lab. This was a feasible plan already in progress. And it wasn't hundreds of thousands of people dying they were talking about here--it would be closer to a million, maybe more, before the CDC could get control of the situation. Carston had known she would discover that fact. He'd deliberately downplayed the disaster so that it would sound more realistic. Sometimes the truth was worse than fiction.

  The stakes were higher than she'd expected. This knowledge made it harder for her to justify her own little low-stakes game. Was the tight focus on saving her own life even defensible in the face of this kind of horror? She'd held a hard line in her conversation with Carston, but if there was any chance this story was more than a trap, did she have any choice but to try to stop it?

  If Daniel Beach disappeared, de la Fuentes would know someone was onto him. Odds were, he would act sooner than he'd planned, ahead of schedule. Daniel had to talk, and he had to talk quickly. And then he had to go back to regular life, be seen, and keep the megalomaniac drug lord calm until the good guys could take him out.

  In the beginning, it was standard operating procedure for Alex's subjects to be released into the wild for a short time. This was a major part of her specialty; Alex was the best at retrieving information without damaging the subject. (Before Alex, Barnaby had been the best and only man for the job.) The CIA, the NSA, and most similar government sections had their own teams for interrogating subjects who were slated for disposal after the information was acquired. Over time, as she proved more successful than even the best of the other teams, Alex had gotten a lot busier. Though the other sections would rather have stayed insular, kept the information with their own people, the results spoke for themselves.

  She sighed and refocused on the now. Eleven pictures of Daniel Beach lay in a row across the pillows at the head of the bed. It was hard to reconcile the two sides of the coin. In the early pictures he looked like a Boy Scout, his softly waving hair somehow projecting innocence and pure intentions. But though it was obviously the same face in the spies' photos, everything was different. The hair was always hidden under hoods or ball caps (one of her own frequent disguises); the posture was more aggressive; the expressions were cold and professional. She'd worked on professionals. It took time. Possibly more than one weekend. She looked at the two matching but contradictory faces again and wondered briefly if Daniel had an actual psychiatric disorder or if it was a progression she was looking at, and the innocent no longer existed at all.

  Not that it mattered--yet.

  The headache felt like it was searing a hole through the inside of her eyeball. She knew it wasn't the hours of reading that had caused it. No, the decision looming in front of her was the source of the pain.

  She gathered up all the files and stuffed them into a suitcase. The decimation of the population of the American Southwest would have to take a backseat for a few hours.

  She was in a different car than she'd started out with that morning. Before checking into the motel, she'd returned the rental in Baltimore, then taken a cab to York, Pennsylvania. The cabbie dropped her a few minutes' walk from the house where a man surnamed Stubbins was selling his three-year-old Tercel, as advertised on Craigslist. She'd paid cash and used the name Cory Howard, then driven to Philly in her new ride. It was a trail that could be followed, but it would be very hard to do.

  She drove several miles away from her motel, then chose a little dive that seemed to be doing brisk business. That was desirable for two reasons. One, she would be less memorable in a crowd. Two, the food was probably edible.

  The dining area was packed, so she ate at the small bar. The wall behind the bar was mirrored; she could watch the door and front windows without turning around. It was a good perch. She had a greasy burger, onion rings, and a chocolate malt. All were delicious. While she ate, she turned off her brain. She'd gotten pretty good at that over the last nine years; she could compartmentalize almost anything. And while she focused on the food and watched the people around her, the headache subsided to a dull throb. Over the course of the meal, the Motrin finally won and the pain dissolved completely. She ordered a piece of pie for dessert--pecan--though she was completely stuffed and could only pick at it. She was stalling. Once the meal was over, she'd have to make a decision.

  The headache was waiting for her in the car, as she'd known it would be, though it was not as sharp as before. She drove randomly down the quiet residential streets, where anyone following her would be obvious. The little suburb was dark and empty. After a few minutes she wandered closer toward the city.

  There were still two columns of possibilities in her head.

  The first column, that Carston had been lying in order to lure her to her death, was beginning to seem more and more unlikely. Still, she had to stay alert. This whole story could be fiction. All the evidence and coordinating departments and separate analysts with their differing writing styles and the photographs from around the world--it could be a very detailed, elaborate setup. Not a foolproof one, either, since they had no way of knowing she wouldn't just walk away from it.

  But why would Carston have all this info prepared if he'd hoped to get her to a prearranged meeting? They could have killed her easily there without all this window dressing. A ream of blank paper was all you would need if you expected your mark's brains to be on the pavement before she could open the briefcase. How quickly could this kind of thing be thrown together? She'd given him no time to manufacture it on the spot with her early arrival. Who was Daniel Beach in this scenario? One of their own? Or an unsuspecting civilian Photoshopped into the exotic scenes? They had to know she would be able to verify some of this information.

  They'd offered her a plan of action in the final file. In five days' time, with or without her, they would pick him up during his regular Saturday-morning run. No one would miss him until school began again Monday. If anyone did happen to look for him, it might appear that he'd taken a little holiday. If she agreed to help, she would have two days to get the information they needed, then she would be free to go. They hoped she would consent to keep in some form of contact. An emergency e-mail address, a social network site, the classifieds even.

  If she didn't agree to the job, they would do their best without her. But trying to leave the informant physically unmarked would be slow... too slow. Failure was hard to contemplate.

  She almost salivated at the thought of all the goodies waiting for her back at the lab. Things she could never get her hands on out here in the real world. Her DNA sequencer and polymerase chain reactor. The already fabricated antibodies she could stuff her pockets with if the invitation was on the up-and-up. Of course, if Carston was for real, she wouldn't need to steal those things anymore.

  She tried to imagine sleeping in a bed again. Not carrying a pharmacy's worth of toxins on her body at all times. Using the same name every day. Making contact with other human beings in a way that left nobody dead.

  Don't count on it, she told herself. Don't let it go to your head and impair your judgment. Don't let hope make you stupid.

  As pleasant as some of her imaginings were, she hit a wall when she tried to visualize the steps she would need to take to make them happen. It was impossible to see herself walking back through the shiny steel doors into the place where Barnaby had died screaming. Her mind totally refused to construct the ima
ge.

  The lives of a million people were a heavy weight, but still an abstract idea in many ways. She didn't feel like anything could push her hard enough to get her through those doors.

  She would have to go around them, so to speak.

  Only five days.

  She had so much work to do.

  CHAPTER 4

  This operation was murdering her nest egg.

  That thought kept circling in the back of her brain. If she lived through the next week, and nothing changed in regard to her working relationship with the department, she was going to have serious financial issues. It wasn't cheap changing lives on a triannual basis.

  Just acquiring disposable funds in the first place had been a major procedure. She'd had money--the salary had certainly been a factor in her choice to do the job in the beginning, and earlier than that, she'd inherited a decent insurance payout when her mother had died. But when you work for powerful paranoids who probably note it in your file when you switch toothpaste brands, you can't just withdraw all your money and put it in a shoe box under the bed. If they weren't planning to do anything to you before, you might have just given them a motive. If they were, you just made them decide to accelerate their plans. You could try withdrawing all your money on the way out of town, but that limited your ability to pay for any advance preparations.

  Like so much of it had been, it was Barnaby's scheme. He'd kept her in the dark about the details to protect the friend or friends who helped him set it up.

  In the cafeteria located a few floors up from the lab, she and Barnaby had let themselves be heard talking about a promising investment situation. Well, Barnaby had called it promising and worked to convince her of it. There was nothing remarkable about the conversation; various versions of it were probably taking place by watercoolers in several normal offices at the same moment. She played being convinced, and Barnaby loudly promised to set it up. She wired money to an investment firm--or a company that sounded very like an investment firm. A few days later, that money was deposited--minus a 5 percent "commission" to compensate those friends for their time and risk--in a bank in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the name of Fredericka Noble. She received notification of this new account in an unmarked envelope placed in a copy of Extranodal Lymphomas at the county library. An Oklahoma driver's license for Fredericka Noble, with her own picture on it, was also in the envelope.

  She didn't know where Barnaby's drop was. She didn't know what his new name was going to be. She'd wanted them to leave together--the vast aloneness of running was already part of her nightmares then--but he had thought that unwise. They'd both be safer separated.

  More investments, more little envelopes. A few more accounts were created for Freddie, but there were also accounts and IDs for Ellis Grant in California and Shea Marlow in Oregon. All three identities were strong creations that would hold up under scrutiny. Freddie had been blown the first time the department found her, but this only made her more careful. Ellis and Shea were still safe. They were her prized possessions and she used them carefully and sparingly so as not to contaminate them by any association with Dr. Juliana Fortis.

  She'd also started buying jewelry--the good stuff, and the smaller the better. Canary diamonds that looked to her eyes like nothing more than yellow sapphires but that cost ten times as much as their clear counterparts. Thick gold chains; heavy solid-gold pendants. Several loose gems she pretended to be planning to set. She knew all along that she would never get back half of what she paid, but jewelry could be carried easily and later converted to cash under the radar.

  From a pay phone, Freddie Noble rented a small cabin just outside Tulsa, using a new credit card that would be paid from the Tulsa bank account. The cabin came with a sweet older landlord who sounded happy to bring in the boxes she mailed there--boxes full of the many things she would need when she walked away from her life as Juliana Fortis, everything from towels and pillows to her unset jewels to reflux condensers and boiling flasks--and collected his rent without commenting on her absence. She left a veiled hint here and there that she was planning to leave a bad relationship; it was enough for the landlord. She ordered supplies from library computers, giving an e-mail address she never accessed on her laptop at home.

  She did everything she could to be ready, and then she waited for Barnaby to give the signal. In the end, he did let her know that it was time to run, but not the way they'd planned it.

  That money, so carefully hoarded for so long, was now flowing through her fingers like she was some entitled trust-fund brat. One big spree in hopes of gaining her unlikely freedom, she promised herself. She had a few tricks for making real money, but they were dangerous, involving risks she could ill afford but would have no choice but to take.

  People needed medical professionals who would break the rules. Some just wanted a doctor who knew how to oversee the administration of a treatment that was not approved by the FDA, something they'd picked up in Russia or Brazil. And some people needed bullets removed but didn't want it done in a hospital, where the police would be notified.

  She'd maintained a floating presence on the web. A few clients had contacted her at her last e-mail address, which was now defunct. She'd have to get back on the boards that knew her and try to get in touch with some contacts without leaving any new trails. It would be hard; if the department had found the e-mails, they probably knew about the rest. At least her clients understood. Much of the work she did for them ranged from quasi-legal to totally criminal, and they would not be surprised by occasional disappearances and new names.

  Of course, working on the dark side of the law added other dangers to her already overloaded plate. Like the midlevel Mafia boss who found her services very convenient and thought she should set herself up permanently in Illinois. She'd tried to explain her carefully composed cover story to Joey Giancardi without compromising herself--after all, if there was money to be made by the sale of information, the Mob wasn't exactly known for its loyalty to outsiders--but he was insistent, to put it mildly. He assured her that with his protection, she would never be vulnerable. In the end, she'd had to destroy that identity, a fairly well-developed life as Charlie Peterson, and run. Possibly there were members of the Family looking for her, too, now. It wasn't something she lost sleep over. When it came to manpower and resources, the Mob couldn't touch the American government.

  And maybe the Mob didn't have time to waste on her anyway. There were lots of doctors in the world, all of them human and most of them corruptible. Now, if he'd known her real specialty, Joey G would have put up more of a fight to keep her.

  At least Joey G had been good for changing her jewels into cash. And the crash course in trauma medicine couldn't hurt. Another perk of working in the underground: no one got too upset about your low batting average. Death was expected, and malpractice insurance wasn't necessary.

  Whenever she thought of Joey G, she also remembered Carlo Aggi. Not a friend, not really, but something close. He'd been her contact, the most constant presence in her life then. Though he was stereotypically thuggish in appearance, he'd always been sweet to her--treated her like a kid sister. So it had hurt more than the others when she hadn't been able to do anything for Carlo. A bullet had lodged in his left ventricle. It was too late for Carlo long before they'd brought his body to her, but Joey G had still been hopeful; Charlie had done good work for him in the past. He was philosophical when Charlie had pronounced Carlo dead on arrival. Carlo was the best. Well, you win some, you lose some. And then a shrug.

  She didn't like to think about Carlo.

  She would have preferred a few more weeks to think about other things--to fine-tune her scheme, consider her vulnerabilities, get the physical preparations perfect--but Carston's plan gave her a deadline. She'd had to divide her limited time between surveillance and organizing a workspace, so neither had been perfectly done.

  It was likely that they'd be watching her in case she tried to make a move without them. After her early visit t
o Carston, they would be anticipating it. But what choice did she have? Report for work as expected?

  She'd seen enough to bet that Daniel would follow the same pattern today as he had the past three. Something about his almost identical outfits--similar jeans, button-down shirt, casual sport coat, all featuring only minor differences in hues--made her suspect that he was a creature of habit in his public life. After school, he would stay past the final bell to talk to students and work on his lesson plan for the next day. Then, with several folders and his laptop in a backpack over his left shoulder, he would head out, waving to the secretary as he passed. He would walk six blocks and get on the subway at Congress Heights around six, just as the commuting mayhem was at its worst. He had a straight shot up the Green Line to Columbia Heights, where his tiny studio apartment was located. Once there, he would eat a frozen dinner and grade papers. He went to bed around ten, never turning the TV on as far as she'd seen. It was harder to follow what happened in the morning--he had rattan shades that were basically translucent when lit from inside, but opaque in the morning sun. He hit the street at five for a morning run, returned an hour later, then left again after another thirty minutes, headed for the subway station three blocks away, longish curly hair still wet from his shower.

  Two mornings ago, she'd followed his exercise route as best she could from a safe distance. He held a strong, fast pace--obviously an experienced runner. As she watched, she found herself wishing that she had more time to run. She didn't love running the way others seemed to--she always felt so exposed on the side of a road, no car to escape in--but it was important. She was never going to be stronger than the person they sent after her. With her short legs, she wouldn't be faster, either, and there was no martial art she could learn that would give her an advantage over a professional killer. But endurance--that could save her life. If her tricks could get her past the crisis moment, she had to be able to keep going longer than the killer could keep chasing. What a way to die--winded, muscles quitting, crippled by her own lack of preparation. She didn't want to go out that way. So she ran as often as she could and did the exercises she could manage inside her small homes. She promised herself that when this operation was over, she would find a good place to jog--one with plenty of escape routes and hidey-holes.