The Chemist Part 17

It had only one bed, but Alex had been asleep for twelve hours straight, so she was happy to be the lookout. Kevin went out for a half hour and came back with cellophane-wrapped sandwiches, sodas, and a large bag of dog food. Alex scarfed her sandwich down, and then chased it with a handful of Motrin. Einstein ate just as enthusiastically as she had, straight from the bag, but Daniel and Kevin were more relaxed about the food. Apparently, she'd missed a couple of stops at the drive-through, too.

A quick a.s.sessment of herself in the scratched bathroom mirror was not encouraging. Her nose was swollen to twice its normal size, red and bulbous. On the plus side, odds were it would heal up differently than it began, thus changing her appearance a little. Maybe not as aesthetically pleasing a result as she would get from plastic surgery, but probably less painful on the whole, or at least faster. Her black eyes were an impressive contradiction to their name, boasting a rainbow of colors from jaundice yellow to bilious green to sickly purple. Her split lip puffed out from either side of the scabby fissure like flesh balloons, and she hadn't even known you could develop bruises inside your mouth. There was one stroke of luck: she still had all her teeth. Getting a bridge would have been tricky.

It was going to be a while before she could do anything. She really hoped Kevin's safe house lived up to the name. It worried her to be headed into the unknown. She hadn't prepared anything, and that was 100 percent unnerving.

She showered and brushed her teeth-a more painful ordeal than usual-and slipped into her black leggings and a clean white tee. She'd reached the limits of her wardrobe. Hopefully the safe house had a was.h.i.+ng machine.

Daniel was asleep when she came back out, stretched out on his stomach with one hand under the pillow and one arm falling over the edge of the bed, long fingers brus.h.i.+ng the faded carpet. His sleeping face was really something else-like before, when he was unconscious, his innocence and serenity didn't seem to belong in the same world that she did.

Kevin wasn't in the room and neither was the dog. Though she a.s.sumed the dog had needs, she couldn't bring her alert level down from orange-red until they'd returned.

Kevin didn't acknowledge her, but the dog sniffed her once as it pa.s.sed. Kevin lay down flat on his back, his arms at his sides, and immediately closed his eyes. He didn't move again for six hours. The dog jumped onto the end of the bed and curled up with its tail over Daniel's legs and its head pillowed on Kevin's feet.

Alex sat in the only chair-the carpet was just too questionable for her to lie on the floor-and bent over her laptop, surfing the news. She wasn't sure when Daniel's disappearance would be noticed or if it would be broadcast when it was. Probably not. Grown men wandered off all the time. For example, her father. That sort of thing was too common to make waves unless there was some sensational detail-like dismembered body parts in his apartment.

There was also no story yet about the crash of a single-prop plane in West Virginia-no fatalities or injured found, still trying to locate the owner-but she doubted the news would merit more than just a note in a local online paper. When it did surface, there would be nothing in the report that would catch anyone's attention in DC.

She exhausted her search for information that might endanger them. It seemed that, for now, they were in the clear on that front, at least. What was Carston thinking right at this moment? What was he planning? She wasn't due to deliver Daniel until Monday before school, and it was still only Sat.u.r.day-well, almost Sunday. The department knew she wasn't going to crack Daniel-he had nothing to spill. They had to know she would eventually learn of the identical twin's existence. They must have been pretty sure of Kevin's status in the land of the living. They had expected him to be drawn out into the open early in the game, and they'd been right about that. The only thing they hadn't foreseen was that the torturer and the a.s.sa.s.sin might have a conversation.

It would never have shaken out this way without Daniel's interference. He'd been a ploy for them, just a p.a.w.n moved into peril to lure the more critical players into the center of the board. They never would have guessed that he'd be a catalyst for change.

She planned to hold true to her side of the bargain-she would take the role of victor (though that was really the losing role) and let Daniel and Kevin be dead. Dead again, in Kevin's case. But oh, how she wished that she could be the one to die. Wouldn't it be easy for the department to believe that someone like Kevin Beach-who'd toppled a cartel-had succeeded where they had failed? Wouldn't it make sense for them to stop looking then? What would it be like to disappear, but this time with no one searching for her?

She sighed. Fantasies only made it harder; there was no point indulging in them. The men were both pretty well under, she was sure, so she dug into her bag and pulled out the pressurized canister she'd selected earlier. She had only the two gas masks, so nothing deadly tonight, just the airborne sleeping agent she'd had hooked up to her computer yesterday. It was enough. It would let her control the outcome if someone discovered them.

After she'd strung the leads-only a double line; she wouldn't have to arm or disarm from outside the room tonight-she settled back into her chair. She glanced at the twins. Both were deep, peaceful sleepers. She wondered if that was a healthy habit for a spy. Maybe Kevin actually trusted her-enough to sound the alarm at the very least, and maybe even to deal with a problem without killing them all. She and the brothers were strange bedfellows indeed.

How odd it was, watching over them. It felt wrong, and she'd expected that. But it also felt good, satisfying some need she'd never known was there, and that she hadn't expected.

She spent some time thinking about her a.n.a.lysis of the situation, searching for flaws in her theory, but the more she looked at it, the more it made sense. Even the woeful lack of evolution in her would-be-a.s.sa.s.sins-by the third try, someone should have been aware of her system and changed the approach-made sense in this light. There had never been any operation, just expendable individuals sent after her with little or no briefing. She thought through every conjecture two or three times and felt more confident than ever that she finally understood the ones hunting her.

And then she was bored.

What she wanted to do was log on to the website of Columbia University's pathology program and read the latest doctoral dissertations, but it wasn't safe to do that while the department was actively trying to locate her, which she was certain they were. The department couldn't trace every connection anyone made to her old interests, but this one might be too obvious. With a sigh, she put in earbuds, opened up YouTube, and started watching a tutorial about fieldstripping a rifle. It probably wasn't anything she'd ever need to know, but it couldn't hurt.

Kevin woke up at five thirty on the dot. He just sat up, as alert as if someone had flipped a switch to turn him on. He patted the dog once and headed toward the door. It took him only a second to notice the gas mask she was wearing and jerk to a stop. The dog, right on his heels, paused too and pointed its nose in her direction, looking for whatever had upset its master.

"Give me a sec," Alex said.

She got awkwardly to her feet, still aching and sore-whether more or less than at the beginning of the night, she couldn't tell-and walked stiffly to the door to undo her security precautions.

"I didn't say you could do that," Kevin said.

She didn't look at him. "I didn't ask for your permission."

He grunted.

It took her only a few seconds to clear his path. She removed her mask and used it to gesture to the door.

"Knock yourself out."

"Knock you out," she thought she heard him mutter as he pa.s.sed her, but it was too low for her to be sure. The dog followed him, tail swis.h.i.+ng so fast it blurred. She imagined the guy at the front desk probably wasn't paying any attention at this hour, but she still thought Kevin was pressing their luck a little. A screaming match with the management wasn't going to help them stay incognito.

She rummaged through the food Kevin had bought last night. The remaining sandwiches weren't as appetizing as they had been eight hours ago, but there was a box of cherry Pop-Tarts she'd missed before. She was working her way through the second pastry in the sleeve when Kevin and the dog came back.

"You want to catch a few hours?" he asked her.

"If you don't mind driving, I can sleep in the car again. Better to get where we're going."

He nodded once, then went to the bed and lightly kicked his brother.

Daniel moaned and rolled onto his back, covering his head with a pillow.

"Is that necessary?" she asked.

"Like you said, better to get going. Danny's always had a problem with the snooze b.u.t.ton."

Kevin yanked the pillow off Daniel's head.

"Let's go, kid."

Daniel blinked owlishly for a few seconds, and then she watched his face change as the memories. .h.i.t, as he realized where he was and why. It hurt to see the peace of his dreams crumble into the devastation of his new waking reality. His eyes darted around the room until he found her. She tried to make her expression rea.s.suring, but the damage done to her face would probably trump any arrangement of her features. She searched for something to say, something that would make the world a little less dark and scary for him.

"Pop-Tart?" she offered.

He blinked again. "Um, okay."

CHAPTER 12.

Alex did not approve of the safe house.

They'd reached it late in the afternoon. She'd kept her nap to just four hours during the drive. She didn't want to be on a nocturnal schedule forever. So she'd been awake as they turned off the highway onto a two-lane surface road, then to an even smaller road, until finally they were on a one-lane dirt path -calling it a road was too complimentary.

Sure it was hard to find, but once you did... well, there was only one way out. She never would have chosen to live backed into a corner like this.

"Relax, killer," Kevin told her when she complained. "No one is looking for us out here."

"We should have switched plates."

"Took care of it while you were snoring."

"You weren't actually snoring," Daniel said quietly. He was driving now, while Kevin directed. "But it is true that we stopped at a junkyard and stole a few license plates."

"So we're trapped out here on a dead-end lane while Mr. Smith goes to Was.h.i.+ngton," she muttered.

"It's secure," Kevin snapped in a tone that was clearly intended to close the discussion. "So don't go stringing your death traps through my house."

She didn't answer. She would do what she wanted when he was gone.

At least his setup was far away from neighbors; they drove for at least fifteen minutes down the dirt path without seeing any evidence of other human beings. That would keep the collateral damage low if for some reason she felt the need to burn everything to the ground.

They arrived at a tall gate flanked by a heavy-duty chain-link fence with a crowning line of spiraled razor wire. The fence ran so far off into the distance to both the right and the left that she couldn't see where it turned or ended. Beside the gate, there was a very serious-looking NO TRESPa.s.sING sign with an additional notice below that read ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK; OWNERS ARE NOT LIABLE FOR INJURIES OR HARM THAT MAY RESULT FROM TRESPa.s.sING.

"Subtle," she said.

"It gets the job done," Kevin responded. He pulled a key fob from his pocket and clicked a b.u.t.ton. The gate swung open, and Daniel drove through.

She should have expected that his safe house would be so obvious.

After a few more miles, the house came into view like a mirage, its dull gray second story hovering on a light haze over the dry yellow gra.s.s. Here and there, a few dark, scrubby trees studded the gra.s.sland with some texture. Over it all, the washed-out blue sky stretched to infinity.

She'd never been totally comfortable with the Great Plains. She'd been a city girl for too long. This felt so exposed, so... unanch.o.r.ed. Like a strong wind could just erase everything in sight. Which probably did happen around these parts, biannually. She really hoped it wasn't tornado season.

The rest of the house was revealed as they topped a low rise in the mostly flat road. It was large but dilapidated, two stories high with a rickety porch wrapped around half the ground floor. The coa.r.s.e, dead gra.s.s ended about twenty yards from the house, replaced by sand-colored gravel that covered the dirt up to the cracked lattice that attempted to camouflage the foundation. The only breaks in the monotone vegetation were the house, the stunted trees, the reddish scar of the dirt lane, and then several indistinct shapes that were in motion, roving along the edges of the road. She'd seen a lot of cows on the way in, but these animals looked too small to be cows. They did seem to be furry, ranging in color from black to brown to white to a combination of all three.

The shapes started to converge on the car, moving a lot faster than cows.

Einstein's tail began wagging so ferociously that it sounded like a small helicopter in the backseat.

"What is this place, Kev?"

"My retirement plan."

The animals reached the car-half a dozen dogs of various sizes. Fantastic, Alex thought. One could have been Einstein's twin. Another was gargantuan, looking like it was more closely related to equines than canines. She recognized a Doberman, two Rottweilers, and a traditionally colored German shepherd.

On the approach, the dogs had been totally silent and aggressive in their posture, but as soon as they saw Einstein, all the tails started wagging and they shared in a raucous chorus of barks.

"I train dogs for placement as guard dogs-commercial and private owners.h.i.+p. I also sell a few to families who just want a really well-behaved animal."

"How do you keep this under the radar?" she wanted to know.

"You can drive, Danny, they'll get out of the way," Kevin instructed.

Daniel had come to a stop when the dogs surrounded the car. Now he eased carefully forward and, as promised, the dogs moved to flank them and follow them in. Kevin then addressed Alex. "Nothing is in my name. No one ever sees my face. I have a partner for that."

As he spoke, she saw a figure walk out onto the porch-a large man wearing a cowboy hat. She couldn't make out any other details from this distance.

"Everybody knows the dog ranch is out here. n.o.body bothers with us. It has no connection to my past life," Kevin was saying, but she wasn't paying much attention. Her eyes were riveted on the man waiting at the top of the porch stairs.

Kevin noticed her preoccupation. "What, Arnie? He's good people. I trust him with my life."

She frowned at that expression. Daniel was looking at her, too. He started to slow.

"Is there a problem, Alex?" he asked in a low voice.

She heard Kevin's teeth grind behind her. It was obvious how much he hated the way Daniel turned to her for guidance.

"It's just..." She frowned, then gestured to Daniel and his brother. "This is already a lot for me. The two of you. I don't know how to trust even you, let alone another person. Who only this one vouches for." She pointed at Kevin and he scowled.

"Well, that's just tough, shorty," Kevin answered. "Because this is your best option, and the guy I vouch for is part of the deal. If you want to execute this plan of yours, you'll have to suck it up."

"It will be okay," Daniel rea.s.sured her. He put his right hand lightly over her left.

Stupid how something like that could make you feel better. It wasn't like Daniel comprehended even the most basic elements of the danger they were in. But still, her heartbeat decelerated a tiny bit, and her right hand-unconsciously clenched around the door handle-relaxed.

Daniel drove slowly; the dogs kept up with them pretty easily until they stopped on the gravel. She was able to get a better look at the man waiting for them.

Arnie was a tall, heavyset man, part Latino, maybe part Native American. He could have been forty-five, but he could have been ten years older, too. His face was lined, but it looked like the kind of leathering that was due to wind and sun rather than age. His hair, which hung several inches below the hat, was salt-and-pepper gray. He stared at them without any emotion as they stopped, though there was no way he could have expected a third pa.s.senger, even if Kevin had told him about Daniel.

Einstein exploded out of the car as soon as Kevin cracked the door open and immediately set to sniffing and being sniffed. Daniel and Kevin climbed out almost as quickly, eager to stretch their long legs. Alex was more hesitant. There were a lot of dogs, and the brown-spotted horse-dog looked to be taller on all fours than she was standing. They seemed to be occupied with one another at the moment, but who knew how they would react to her?

"Don't be such a coward, Oleander," Kevin called.

Most of the dogs had converged on him now, nearly forcing him to the ground with the combined weight of their greeting.

Daniel came around the car and opened the door for her, then offered his hand. She sighed, irritated, and got out on her own. Her shoes crunched on the gravel, but the dogs didn't seem to notice her.

"Arnie," Kevin called over the sound of the happy dogs. "This is my brother, Danny. He'll be staying here. And, um, a temporary... guest, I suppose. Don't know what else to call her. But guest seems kind of over-positive, if you know what I mean."

"Your hospitality takes my breath away," Alex murmured.

Daniel laughed, then climbed the stairs in two quick steps. He offered his hand to the stone-faced man, who didn't look as tall standing next to Daniel, and they shook.

"Nice to meet you, Arnie. My brother's told me nothing at all about you, so I look forward to getting to know you better."

"Ditto, Danny," Arnie said. His voice was a rumbly baritone that sounded as if it wasn't used often enough to keep it running smoothly.

"And that's Alex. Don't listen to my brother; she's staying as long as she wants."

Arnie looked at her, focusing now. She waited for a reaction to the mess of her face, but he just regarded her coolly.

"A pleasure," she said.

He nodded.

"You can move your stuff inside," Kevin told them. He tried to walk toward the stairs, but the dogs were weaving around his legs at high speed. "Hey, boneheads! Attention!"

Like a small platoon of soldiers, the dogs immediately backed off a few paces, formed an actual line, and froze with their ears up.

"That's better. At ease."