The Chemist

by Stephenie Meyer

  "It was obvious what they had me creating. They didn't lie to me. I was aware of the work I was contributing to, but it sounded noble, the way they described it. I was helping my country..."

  He waited, still staring ahead.

  "I didn't think I would be the one who would actually use my creations on a subject. I thought I would just be supplying the tools they needed..." She shook her head back and forth slowly. "It didn't work like that, though. The antibodies I'd created were too specialized--the doctor who administered them had to understand how they worked. So that left exactly one person."

  The hand on the small of her back didn't move--it was too still, frozen in place.

  "The only person ever inside the interrogation room with me, besides the subject, was Barnaby. At first, he handled the questioning. He frightened me in the beginning, but he turned out to be such a gentle person... We were mostly in the lab, creating and developing. Actual interrogations made up only about five percent of my job." She took a deep breath. "But often, when there was a crisis at hand, they needed to be running multiple interrogations simultaneously; speed was always critical. I had to be able to work alone. I didn't want to do it, but I understood why it needed to be that way.

  "It wasn't as difficult as I'd thought it would be. The hard part was realizing how good I was at it. That scared me. It's never really stopped scaring me." Barnaby was the only one she'd confessed this to. He'd told her not to worry; she was just one of those people who were good at anything they tried. An overachiever.

  Alex cleared the sudden lump out of her throat. "But I got results. I saved a lot of lives. And I never killed anyone--not while I was working for the government." Now she stared out into the darkness, too. She didn't want to see his reaction. "I've always wondered if that was enough to make me less than a monster."

  She was fairly certain, though, that the answer was no.

  "Hmmm..." It was just a low, lingering sound in the back of his throat.

  She kept staring at the dark nothing in front of her. She'd never tried to explain this choice--the line of dominoes that had made her what she was--to another human being. She didn't think she'd done a very good job.

  And then he quietly chuckled.

  Now she turned to stare up at him in disbelief.

  His lips were puckered in an unwilling half smile. "I was braced for something really disturbing, but that all sounded a lot more reasonable than I expected."

  Her brows pulled together. He found her story reasonable?

  His stomach growled. He laughed again, and the tension of the moment seemed to vanish with the sound.

  "Did Kevin not feed you?" she asked. "This is a help-yourself kind of place, I guess."

  "I could use some food," he agreed.

  She led him to the freezer, trying to hide her surprise that he seemed to be treating her no differently than before. It had felt dangerous, speaking all of that out loud. But then, she supposed he already knew the worst of it, having learned it in the cruelest way possible. Her explanation was really nothing after that.

  Hungry Daniel might have been, but he wasn't too thrilled by the available supplies. He unenthusiastically chose a pizza, as she had, grumbling about Kevin's deficiencies in the kitchen, which seemed to be long-standing, from what she heard. The conversation rolled easily, like she was just an ordinary person to him.

  "I don't know where he gets all that manic energy," Daniel said. "Eating nothing but this."

  "Arnie can't be much of a cook, either. Where'd he go, anyway?"

  "He hit the sack before Kev left. Early riser, I infer. I think his room is back that way." Daniel gestured in the opposite direction from the stairs.

  "Does he seem a little strange to you?"

  "What, with the mute thing? I figure that's just the glue in his relationship with Kevin. You have to be able to stomach listening to someone else talk nonstop if you're going to be friends with Kev. No room for your own words."

  She snorted.

  "There was ice cream under the pizza. You want some?" he asked.

  She did, so the search began for silverware and bowls. Daniel did locate an ice cream scooper and soupspoons, but they had to put the ice cream into coffee mugs. As she watched him ladle the ice cream out of the carton, something occurred to her.

  "Are you left-handed?"

  "Er, yes."

  "Oh. I thought Kevin was right-handed, but if you're identical twins, doesn't that mean--"

  "Usually," Daniel said, passing her the first mug. The ice cream was plain vanilla, not her first choice, but she was happy to have any kind of sugar right now. "We're a special case, actually. We're called mirror-image twins. About twenty percent of identical twins--the ones where the egg splits late, they think--develop as opposites. So our faces aren't exactly the same unless you look at one as a reflection. It doesn't mean much, for Kevin especially." He savored his first bite of ice cream, then smiled. "I, on the other hand, will run into a problem if I ever need an organ transplant. All of my insides are reversed, so it's very complicated to replace certain things unless they find an organ from another reversed twin who also just happens to be a genetic match. In other words, I better hope I never need a new liver." He took another bite.

  "It would make a lot more sense to me if it was Kevin who had everything backward."

  They laughed together, but it was much gentler than it had been earlier in the day. Apparently they'd gotten the hysteria out of their systems.

  "What does the paper say--the one with the command for the dog?"

  Daniel pulled the card from his jeans pocket, glanced at it, and then handed it to her.

  It read, in all caps, ESCAPE PROTOCOL.

  "Do you think something bad happens if we say it out loud?" she wondered.

  "I suppose it's possible. I'll believe anything after seeing his secret lair."

  "Kevin really needs to hire someone to come up with better names for his commands. He's not very good at that part."

  "I guess that could be my job now." Daniel sighed. "I do like dogs. It might be fun."

  "It's still kind of teaching, right?"

  "If Kev lets me do any." Daniel scowled. "I wonder if he sees me just mucking out stalls? I wouldn't put it past him." And then he sighed again. "At least the students all appear to be pretty bright. Do you think I could teach them to play volleyball?"

  "Well... actually, yeah. They don't seem to have many limitations."

  "I guess it won't be so bad. Right?"

  "Right," she said confidently. And then mentally called herself a liar.

  CHAPTER 14

  When Alex woke up, the first issue was the soreness. Unconsciousness had given her a break from the pain, and that period of relief, though welcome, made the awakening to reality worse.

  The room was pitch-black. She assumed there was a window somewhere behind the boxes, but it must be covered with a blackout shade. Kevin wouldn't want too many lighted windows at night. Better to keep the house looking only partially inhabited. As far as any locals knew, Arnie was the sole occupant.

  She rolled out of the cot, groaning when her left shoulder and hip hit the wooden edge, and then felt her way to the light switch. She'd cleared a wide path from the cot to the door so that she wouldn't add to her injuries fumbling around in the dark. Once the light was on, she disarmed the leads and then removed her gas mask. Given that there were people here that she didn't want to kill, she'd used a pressurized canister of knockout gas.

  The hall was empty, the bathroom door open. There was one damp towel hanging on the rack, so Daniel must already be awake. That was no surprise. She'd been up pretty late with her memory list, despairing, even as she continued typing, at the probability of recalling in a week's time what any of her cryptic notes stood for. As she worked through it, she noted plenty of secrets worth killing over, but none specific to her or Barnaby. There would have been other victims if any of those particular secrets were the root problem. From what she'd been abl
e to track in the news, her death and Barnaby's had not been followed by any other names she recognized. Nothing public, anyway.

  While she shampooed her hair, she thought about how she could narrow down the time frame. She usually did her best creative thinking in the shower.

  Barnaby had always been paranoid, but he hadn't started acting on that paranoia until two years before his death. She remembered that initial conversation, the first time she'd realized she was in actual danger. It had been late fall--around Thanksgiving. If that was not a random change, if there had been some sort of catalyst, maybe Barnaby had been reacting to the case that was the issue. She couldn't be sure of the timing, but she was fairly positive about the interrogations that had taken place after that change--in her memory, they were all riddled through with the new stress and distraction. So those could be ruled out. And she knew all the cases from her first year easily, when everything had been horrifically new and awkward; those could be set aside as well. It still left her three years of work to sort through and two of the nuclear scares, but she was happy to have even the slightest measure of containment.

  She appreciated the fluffy towels the bathroom was stocked with. Kevin apparently enjoyed his creature comforts. Or maybe it was Arnie who liked things plush. Whoever it was had also stocked the bathroom with all the toiletries a hotel would provide, only in full-size bottles. There had been shampoo and conditioner in the shower. Toothpaste, lotion, and mouthwash were all set out on the counter. Nice touch.

  She took a swipe at the mirror with the towel and quickly confirmed that she was still unfit to be seen. The black eyes were mostly a sickly green color now, with some of the darker purple in the inside corners. Her lip was starting to deflate, but that only made the superglue more obvious. The bruises on her cheeks were just barely beginning to yellow around the edges.

  She sighed. It would be at least a week before her face could go out in public, even in makeup.

  After dressing in her least dirty clothes, Alex gathered the rest, balled them up inside a T-shirt as an improvised laundry bag, and set off in search of the facilities. It was empty and quiet downstairs. She could hear barking in the distance. Daniel and Arnie must be out dealing with the animals.

  She found the spacious laundry room tucked away behind the kitchen. She noted the back door--always good to be familiar with the exits--and the large plastic attachment to the bottom half of it. It took her a minute to realize it was a doggie door--a huge doggie door, big enough to let Khan in. She hadn't seen any dogs in the house so far, but it must not always be off-limits. She started her load, then went to find breakfast.

  The cupboards weren't much more helpful than the refrigerator had been. Half were full of cans of dog food, and the other half mostly empty. There was some coffee left in the pot on the counter, thank goodness. She also found a stash of Pop-Tarts, which she pilfered. Apparently Kevin and Arnie cared less about food than they did about towels. She found a mug from a Boy Scout camp circa 1983, chipped and faded. The time frame didn't fit either of the men who lived here--must be a secondhand acquisition. It worked just fine, regardless. When she was done, she loaded the mug in the stainless-steel dishwasher and then went to see what was on the day's agenda.

  Lola and Khan were on the front porch, along with the Rottweiler whose name she couldn't remember. They all got up like they'd been waiting for her and followed as she headed out to the barn. She patted Lola a few times as they walked; it seemed like the polite thing to do.

  North of the modern outbuilding was a big run full of animals, Arnie in the center of them all, calling out commands to the frolicking dogs. It didn't look like many of them were listening to him, but a few played teacher's pet. She couldn't see Daniel anywhere. She wandered into the outbuilding, went down the length of it to where the supply room was. Kevin and Arnie stocked the place much better for the dogs than for themselves. Daniel wasn't there, either.

  She meandered out to the edge of the practice yard, not sure what else to do. It was odd; she was used to being alone all the time. But now Daniel wasn't around to check on, and suddenly she was at loose ends.

  Arnie, of course, paid zero attention to her as she came up to the fence and hooked her fingers through the links. She watched him work with a young German shepherd--still all oversize paws and floppy ears--long past the point when her own patience would have run out. Lola's two pups came over to press their bodies against the fence and beg for licks from their mother. She obliged a few times, then yelped at them, a funny sound that made Alex think of her own mother reminding her to study after dinner. Sure enough, the two half-grown puppies ambled back toward the man with the treats.

  Maybe Daniel had returned to the practice range. Kevin had said there was a truck around here, but she'd seen no sign of it. She wished Daniel had waited for her. She wanted to play with the SIG some more. And, honestly, she could use some exercise with her PPK, too. Her life had never depended on her aim in the past, but it very well might in the future. She didn't want to waste the unexpected opportunity to improve her skills.

  She watched Arnie with the young dogs for another half hour. Finally, she interrupted, more out of boredom than any driving need to know.

  "Hey," she called over the dog sounds. "Um, Arnie?"

  He looked up, his face betraying no interest.

  "Did Daniel take the truck over to the range? What time did he leave?"

  He nodded, then shrugged. She tried to guess at a translation, but quickly gave up. She would have to keep the questions simpler.

  "He took the truck?" she verified.

  Arnie was focused on the dogs again, but she did get an answer. "Guess so. Wasn't there the last time I went to the barn."

  "How far is it to the range?" she asked. It had seemed too long a distance to walk, but she might as well ask.

  " 'Bout five miles, as the crow flies."

  Not as far as she'd thought. Daniel was a runner--couldn't he have left the truck? Well, she could use a run herself, but he'd probably be on his way back before she could get there.

  "And you don't know what time he left?"

  "Didn't see him. It was before nine, though."

  It had been more than an hour. Doubtless he'd return soon. She'd wait her turn.

  It was good that Daniel was taking an interest in the practice. Maybe some of what she and Kevin had been trying to tell him had sunk in a little. She didn't actually want him to have to live in fear, but it was the best option. Fear would keep him alive.

  She waved her thanks to Arnie, then headed back to the house to finish the laundry, furry entourage in tow.

  An hour later, she was in clean clothes for the first time in several days, and it felt fantastic. She put the outfit she'd been wearing in the washing machine, happy at the thought of having her whole wardrobe smelling nice again. She put in another thirty minutes on her memory project; at least she remembered her notations twelve hours later. She was trying to do things chronologically as best she could, though her numbering system was based on severity. It might have made things more confusing than they should be, but she didn't want to reorganize it all now.

  This morning she worked terrorist events number fifteen and three--an attempted subway bombing and a stolen biological weapon--trying to think of any names that had come up in context. The terrorist and Russian profiteers on number fifteen had been dealt with, so it was probably nothing to do with them. She noted it down anyway. NY was too obvious an abbreviation, so she used MB for Manhattan-Bronx; the 1 train had been the target. TT for the faction behind it, KV for Kalasha Valleys, VR for the Russian who sold them the materials. A few outsiders who had aided and abetted: RP, FD, BB.

  Number three had a few loose ends, as she remembered, but those had been turned over to the CIA. She looked at her letters: J, I-P for Jammu, India, on the border of Pakistan. TP; the Tacoma Plague, they'd called it. It had been developed by a known terrorist cell from the notes of an American scientist, lifted from a lab near Sea
ttle. The splinter cell, FA, was involved in events T10 and T13 as well. The department had still been helping the CIA procure information about the remnants of the cell back when she'd been "fired." She wondered if the CIA had ever shut it down completely. Kevin had been busy enough in Mexico that he probably couldn't give her the answer. She noted down initials for a few connected names. DH was the American scientist the formula was stolen from, and OM was a member of the terrorist cell whom she'd interrogated. She thought there was another American involved somehow--not a participant in the event. Or had that name been related to number four? She only remembered the name was short, clipped-sounding... did it start with a P?

  She'd never been allowed to keep any notes, of course, so there was nothing to refer back to. It was frustrating. Enough so that she gave up and decided to look for lunch. The Pop-Tart hadn't exactly been filling.

  As she walked into the great room, she could hear the low rumble of an engine pulling up outside, then the grinding sound of heavy tires on the gravel. Finally.

  Habit had her checking out the door to make sure it was Daniel. Just as she peeked out, the engine noise cut off. A dusty white older-model Toyota truck with an equally aged and dusty camper shell was parked where they'd left the sedan last night, and Daniel was getting out of the driver's seat. Einstein jumped out the car door after him.

  Even as she was admiring the vehicle's ordinary exterior--perfect for blending in--a slow creeping sensation started to inch up her back, raising bumps on her skin as it moved. She froze, wide eyes darting around like a startled rabbit trying to suss out the direction danger was coming from. What had her subconscious noticed that she had not?

  She zeroed in on the paper bag cradled in Daniel's left arm. As she watched, he pulled the front seat forward and grabbed another bag. Einstein danced happily around his legs. Khan and the Rottweiler ran down the porch steps to join in.

  She felt the blood drain out of her face, leaving a dizzy sensation behind.