The Chemist

"Depends on your approach. Will the target be in an enclosed space?"

  "How would I know? I'll be improvising."

  She huffed out a breath. "Fine. Take both. Daniel, can you grab the perfume bottle in the outside pocket of my backpack? It's in a Ziploc bag."

  "Found it," Daniel said after a minute. "Here." He passed it up to Kevin. Kevin turned it over in his hands.

  "Looks empty."

  "Mm-hm," Alex agreed. "Pressurized gas. Now," she said, stretching her left arm across her body and holding her hand toward him. "Take the silver one."

  He pulled the ring off her third finger, and then his eyebrows mashed down in surprise when the tiny clear tube and attached rubber squeeze pouch came out one after the other, like a couple of handkerchiefs from the sleeve of a mediocre magician. His expression turned skeptical.

  "What's this supposed to do?"

  "See the little hatch on the inside? Swing it open. Be careful."

  Kevin examined the tiny hollow barb, then looked at the little round rubber bag. It was quiet enough to hear the faint sound of liquid sloshing inside.

  "Hold the pouch in your palm," she directed, pantomiming as she explained. "Put your hand down hard on your target." She gestured to Daniel, who obligingly held out his arm. She grabbed his wrist--not violently, just forcefully. "The subject will feel the prick and try to pull away automatically. Hold on. If you're doing it right, the liquid in the pouch will be expelled through the barb." She released Daniel when she finished.

  "And then what happens?" Kevin asked.

  "Your target takes a nap--for an hour, maybe two, depending on his or her size."

  "This thing is tiny," he complained, holding the ring between his thumb and forefinger and staring through the hole.

  "Sorry. I'll try to have bigger hands for you next time. Put it on your pinkie."

  "Who wears a pinkie ring?"

  She smiled. "I think it will suit perfectly."

  Daniel chuckled.

  Kevin shoved the ring onto his littlest finger, but it made it only over his first knuckle. The pouch barely reached his palm. He'd need more tubing if he ever wanted to hide it in his sleeve. He frowned at the apparatus for a moment, then suddenly grinned. "Neat."

  Daniel leaned forward and gestured to the rings Alex still wore. "What do those other two do?"

  She lifted her right hand, wiggling her ring finger with the gold band. "Kills you easy." She held up the middle finger of her left hand with the rose-gold band. "Kills you hard."

  "Oh, hey!" Kevin said in sudden realization. "Is that what that girlie slap back in West Virginia was about?"

  "Yes."

  "Damn. You're one dangerous little spider, Ollie."

  She nodded in agreement. "If I were taller or you were shorter, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

  "Well, I guess that was your lucky day."

  She rolled her eyes.

  "Which one did you try to hit me with?"

  She held up the middle finger on her left hand again.

  "Harsh," Kevin commented. "Why don't those rings have all the extra stuff?" He waved his hand so that the tube and pouch swung beneath his hand.

  "Be careful," she warned. "That could detach."

  Kevin caught the little bag and cradled it in his palm. "Right."

  "My other rings are coated with venom. A little goes a long way. Just one drop of cone snail venom is enough to kill twenty men your size."

  "Let me guess, you keep cone snails and black widow spiders as pets back home?"

  "No time for pets, and really, black widow venom is on the very weak end of the damage scale. No, I used to have access to a lot of things. I studied cone snail venom briefly because of the way it targets particular classes of receptors. I was never one to waste an opportunity. I kept what I could and I'm careful with my supplies now."

  Kevin looked down at the ring he wore again, considering. It kept him quiet, which Alex appreciated.

  She chose Howard University Hospital, because it was a level-one trauma center and she knew her way around the facility--unless a lot had changed in the past ten years.

  She did a slow loop around the buildings, scanning for camera placement and police presence. It was not even seven a.m., but there were plenty of people coming and going.

  "How about that one?" Kevin asked, pointing.

  "No, that will mostly be linens and paper goods," she muttered.

  "Take a break before you do another lap; we don't want to be noticed."

  "I know how this works," she lied.

  She drove a few streets west and stopped at a small green space. A handful of joggers were doing their rounds, but it was otherwise fairly empty. They waited in silence for ten minutes, then she pulled out and drove a wider circle, staying two blocks out from the roads around the hospital. Eventually she spotted something promising--a white truck labeled HALBERT & SOWERBY SUPPLIERS. She was familiar with the company and was pretty sure they would have usable goods on board.

  She tailed the truck into a loading area behind the main building of the hospital. Kevin was ready, fingers already wrapped around the door handle.

  "Just drop me behind them, then wait a block up," he told her.

  Nodding, she slowed to a brief pause just behind the truck, too close for Kevin to be seen in the mirrors. Once he was out, she reversed a couple of feet and then drove away at the exact posted speed. She glanced into the truck from under her hat as she passed; there was only a driver, no passengers. Still, there were plenty of people in scrubs and maintenance uniforms on the sidewalk. She hoped Kevin could be unobtrusive about this.

  She braked at the stop sign on the corner, wondering how she was supposed to wait here when there was no parking. Before she could decide, she saw the white truck coming up behind her, one car back. She drove ahead slowly, goading the car between them to pass, then letting Kevin pass, too. She could see the driver--a very young-looking black man--leaning against the passenger-side window with his eyes closed.

  "Well, there aren't any cops following him... yet," she muttered as she began following.

  "Will it hurt the guy?" Daniel asked. "What Kevin stuck him with?"

  "Not really. He'll have an awful hangover when he wakes up, but nothing permanent."

  Kevin drove for about twenty minutes, first putting some distance between them and the hospital, then seeking the right place for the transfer of goods. He decided on a quiet industrial park, pulling to the back where there were several empty loading spaces near closed, roll-down access doors. He backed into one and she parked next to him, on the lee side, where she would be invisible to anyone entering the lot.

  She yanked on a pair of latex gloves, handed another to Daniel, and shoved a pair into her pocket.

  Kevin already had the back door of the truck open. She handed him the extra gloves, then boosted herself up onto the floor of the cargo hold. Everything inside was secured in opaque white plastic bins, stacked high and anchored to the walls with red nylon cords.

  "Help me get these open," she instructed. Kevin started pulling the bins down and removing the lids. Daniel climbed in and followed his lead. Alex went behind them, sorting through her options.

  Her main worry was being shot. It seemed the most likely fallout from an offensive action. Of course, she couldn't rule out being knifed or beaten with a blunt object. Still, she was very happy when she found a bin with blowout kits; each had tourniquets, gauze impregnated with QuikClot, and a variety of chest seals. She started a pile, adding different kinds of closure strips and gauze packs, dressings and compression bandages, chemical heating and cooling packs, resuscitation kits, a few bag-valve masks, alcohol and iodine wipes, splints and collars, burn dressings, IV catheters and tubing, saline bags, and handfuls of sealed syringes.

  "You planning to start your own field hospital?" Kevin asked.

  "You never know what you might need," she countered, then added in her mind, You might be the one who needs this stuff, idiot.

>   "Here," Daniel offered, turning one of the half-depleted bins upside down and dumping what was left into another. He took the now-empty bin and started organizing her pile inside.

  "Thanks. I think I've got everything I want."

  Kevin secured the bins to the wall, then wiped down the door. She followed him again until he found a place to leave the truck and driver, behind a small strip mall. He quickly cleaned his fingerprints from the cab, and they were on their way.

  When they got back to the apartment, Raoul the housekeeper had been and gone, and Val was lying across a low sofa watching a big-screen TV that Alex could have sworn was not there yesterday. It was playing a black-and-white movie.

  Today Val wore a pale blue jumpsuit with short shorts and a plunging neckline. Einstein lay on the sofa beside her with his muzzle on her arm. She was petting him rhythmically, and he didn't get up to greet them as they came through the door. He only pounded his tail against the sofa when he saw Kevin.

  "So, how did all the spying go?" she asked lazily.

  "Just boring groundwork," Kevin said.

  "Ugh, then don't tell me about it. And don't leave any of that new stuff in here, either. I don't want the clutter."

  "Yes, ma'am," Kevin agreed docilely, and he headed back to Alex and Daniel's room to add to the storage pile.

  "I'll get you hooked up on my computer, Ollie," he said as he stacked. "You can watch the playback from the cameras I've got on Carston. And you can listen--there's a bug in the car and a directional mike on the office. The car has a tracker, too, so you can follow his movements for the past several days."

  Alex exhaled, already exhausted by the mound of intel to assess. "Thanks."

  "I'm starved," Daniel said. "Anyone else for breakfast?"

  "Yes, please," Alex said at the same time that Kevin answered, "Hell, yeah."

  Daniel smiled and turned for the door.

  Alex watched him walk away, then realized that Kevin was watching her watch Daniel.

  "What?"

  Kevin pursed his lips, as if he were looking for the right way to express himself. He automatically glanced at the bed--still rumpled; Raoul had not been allowed in here--and shuddered.

  Alex turned her back on him and went to retrieve her own computer. She'd want to move the important files onto it.

  "Ollie..."

  She didn't look up from what she was doing. "What?"

  "Can I..."

  She held her computer to her chest and turned to face him, waiting for him to finish. Unconsciously, she squared her shoulders.

  He hesitated again, then asked, "Can I ask you some questions without getting any specific or graphic answers?"

  "Like what?"

  "This thing with Danny... I don't want him to get hurt."

  "That's not a question."

  He glared, then took a deep breath, forcing himself to relax. "When we finish up here, where do you go?"

  It was her turn to hesitate. "It... well, it kind of feels like a jinx to assume that I'm going to survive. I honestly haven't thought about what's next."

  "C'mon, this isn't that hard," he said disparagingly.

  "It's not what I do. You handle it your way, I'll handle it mine."

  "You want me to take care of Carston, too?"

  "No," she growled, though if his tone hadn't been so condescending, she would have been tempted. "I'll take care of my own problems."

  He paused, then asked, "So... what? Do you think you're just going to tag along with us after?"

  "That wouldn't be my first choice, no. Going with the theory that I'm still alive then, of course."

  "You're a real pessimist."

  "It's part of the way I plan. Expect the worst."

  "Whatever. Back to my point--if you go your own way, what about Danny? Is it just Good-bye, thanks for the laughs?"

  She looked away, toward the door. "I don't know. That depends on what he wants. I can't speak for him."

  Kevin was silent long enough that she finally had to look back. His face was uncharacteristically vulnerable. Like always, when his features were allowed to relax, he looked a lot more like Daniel.

  "You think he'd choose to follow you?" Kevin asked very quietly. "I mean, he just met you. He barely knows you. But... I guess he probably feels like he barely knows me, too, at this point."

  "I don't know what he'll want," she said. "I would never ask him to make that choice."

  Kevin focused on the air a few inches above her head. "I really wanted the chance to make things up to him. To set him up in a life he could live with. I was hoping, after a while, we could be brothers again."

  She had an odd urge to walk across the space between them and put her hand on his shoulder. Probably just because he was still looking like Daniel.

  "I won't get in the way of that," she promised. She meant it. Whatever was best for Daniel, that was the main thing.

  Kevin stared at her for a minute, his face hardening and turning back to normal. He blew out a huge sigh. "Well, damn it, Ollie, I wish I'd just left that Tacoma thing alone. Millions of lives saved--really, what does that add up to in the face of my brother sleeping with Lucrezia Borgia?"

  Alex froze. "What did you say?"

  He grinned. "Surprised that I know the appropriate historical analogy? I did pretty well in school, actually. I've got just as many brain cells as my brother."

  "No, about Tacoma. What do you mean?"

  His grin shifted to confusion. "You know all about that--they gave you the file. You interrogated Danny--"

  She leaned toward him, unconsciously clutching her computer more tightly against her ribs. "This is about the job you did with de la Fuentes? Does the T in TCX-1 stand for Tacoma?"

  "I've never heard of TCX-1. The de la Fuentes job was about the Tacoma virus."

  "The Tacoma Plague?"

  "I never heard it called that. What's going on, Ollie?"

  Alex yanked open her computer as she climbed onto the foot of the bed. She pulled up the most recent file she'd worked on--her coded case notes. She scrolled through the list of numbers and initials, feeling the bed shift as Kevin put one knee on it, leaning to read over her shoulder.

  It felt like a long time since she'd written these notes. So much had happened, and the thoughts she'd attached to these brief lines were faded.

  There it was--terrorist event number three, TP, the Tacoma Plague. The letters danced in front of her eyes, only some of them resolving into words in her memory. J, I-P, that was the town in India, on the Pakistani border. She couldn't remember what the name of the terrorist cell was, only that they originated out of Fateh Jang. She looked at the initials for the connected names: DH --that was the scientist, Haugen; OM was Mirwani, the terrorist, and then P... The other American she couldn't remember. She pressed her fist to her forehead, trying to force her recall.

  "Ollie?" Kevin said again.

  "I worked this case--years ago, when the formula was first stolen from the U.S. Long before de la Fuentes got hold of it."

  "Stolen from the U.S.? De la Fuentes got it out of Egypt."

  "No, it was developed in a lab just outside Tacoma. It was supposed to be theoretical, just research. Haugen... Dominic Haugen, that was the scientist." The story came back to her as she concentrated. "He was on our side, but with the theft, the situation became too sensitive for him to continue where he was. The NSA buried him in a lab somewhere under their control. We had the terrorist cell's second in command. He gave up the location of the lab in Jammu that was successfully creating the virus from the stolen blueprints. Black ops razed the lab. They thought they had the biological-weapon aspect locked up, but there were members of the cell who slipped through. As far as I know, the department was still working with the CIA on hunting them down a couple of years later... when Barnaby was killed."

  She looked up at him, the wheels in her head spinning so fast that she felt physically dizzy.

  "When the CIA called you in, when they burned you--you said there we
re issues you were trying to track down. What were they?"

  He blinked fast, reminding her of Daniel again. "The packaging on the vaccinations--the outside was in Arabic, but the inside packaging, the original labels--everything was in English. And the name, too: Tacoma. It didn't make sense. If de la Fuentes had wanted them translated, he would have had it changed from Arabic to Spanish. I wanted to trace the virus back. I was sure it hadn't originated in Egypt. I figured there had to be an American or a Brit working with the developers somewhere. I wanted to find the guy. You're saying this thing started in Washington State?"

  "It's got to be the same thing. The timing's right. We get some info about this virus, suddenly they start watching me and Barnaby. Two years later--around the time de la Fuentes got his hands on it, right?--they murder Barnaby. That has to be the catalyst. That's why they killed him and tried to kill me. Because the virus was out there again, and if the public found out, we knew something that could connect it back..."

  Barnaby had never told her what had triggered his paranoia, why he'd decided they needed to be ready to flee. She looked at the letters on her screen. DH, Dominic Haugen. It was unlikely that the bad guys would leave Haugen alive if they'd felt the need to erase her and Barnaby. Had Haugen been the first to die? Probably in some totally normal, expected way. Car accident. Heart attack. There were so many methods to make it look innocent. Had Barnaby seen some notice of Haugen's death? Had that been the tip-off?

  She wanted to do a quick search online, but if she was right about this, then Haugen's name was sure to be flagged. Anyone inquiring into his death--no matter how anonymous the method--would be noticed.

  Who was the P? She couldn't even be positive she had that letter right. It had been a fleeting mention. Something short, she thought, something snappy...

  "Ollie, the packaging... it looked... professional? Is that the right word? It wasn't something put together in a makeshift lab somewhere in the Middle East."

  They stared at each other for a moment.

  "I always thought it was a stretch," she murmured. "That someone could actually fabricate the virus from nothing more than Haugen's theoretical design. It seemed the equivalent of winning the terrorist lottery."

  "You think they stole more than notes?"

  "Haugen must have done it--actually created the thing. If there was a supply that large, if the vaccine was packaged up so neatly... they must have been producing it. So working on weaponized viruses wasn't just Haugen's weekend hobby. It was a military project. There were hints of that... something about a lieutenant general's involvement. No one wanted to follow up on the American side of things. They kept us focused on the cell. Usually they let us ask the questions that naturally followed... but I remember, this was different. Carston fed me the questions he wanted."