The Chemist Part 20

"Danny, c'mere. We've got one more thing we need to do."

Curious-and procrastinating; the catalog of nightmares past was beginning to give her a headache-she walked quietly down the stairs to see what was happening. She knew Kevin well enough to be sure he wasn't calling Daniel over for a heartfelt good-bye, complete with hugs and snuggles.

The front room was empty-Arnie had cleared out-but she could hear voices through the screen door. She went out to the porch, where Lola was waiting for her. She absently scratched the dog's head while she took in the scene, lit by the porch lamps and the headlights of the sedan.

Einstein, Khan, and the Rottweiler were all lined up at attention in front of Kevin. He looked to be addressing them while Daniel watched.

Kevin started with his star pupil. "Come, Einstein."

The dog stepped forward. Kevin turned his body to point at Daniel. "That's your honey, Einstein. Honey."

Einstein ran to Daniel, tail wagging, and commenced sniffing up and down his legs. From Daniel's expression, he was just as confused as Alex was.

"Okay," Kevin said to the other dogs. "Khan, Gunther, watch."

He turned back to Einstein and Daniel, dropping into a wrestler's crouch and approaching slowly.

"I'm gonna get your honey," he taunted the dog in a growly voice.

Einstein wheeled around and put himself between Daniel and Kevin's advance. The hackles rose at least six inches off the top of his shoulders, and a menacing snarl slid from between his suddenly exposed fangs. The demon dog she'd first met was back.

Kevin feinted to the right, and Einstein blocked him. He dove left toward Daniel and the dog launched himself at his master, taking him down with a solid-sounding thud. In the same second, Einstein had his jaws wrapped around Kevin's neck. It would have been a frightening picture if it weren't for the smile on Kevin's face.

"Good boy! Smart boy!"

"Kill! Kill!" Alex whispered under her breath.

Einstein released and jumped back, tail wagging again. He pranced a few steps back and forward, ready to play another game.

"Okay, Khan, your turn."

Once again, Kevin identified Daniel as the Great Dane's honey and then made as if to attack. Einstein stayed with Khan; supervising, Alex imagined. The big dog simply shoved one ma.s.sive paw against Kevin's chest as he attacked and toppled him backward. Khan used the same paw to pin him to the ground while Einstein moved in for the jugular.

"Kill!" she said again, louder.

Kevin heard this time and shot her a look that clearly said: If I weren't in the middle of teaching these dogs something very important, I would have them tear you to shreds.

Khan sat out the next round, while Einstein supervised again. The barrel-chested Rottweiler took Kevin down even harder than Einstein had. She heard the breath crush out of his chest; that had to hurt. She smiled.

"Do you mind if I ask what all that was about?" Daniel asked as Kevin heaved himself to his feet and started brushing the dirt off his dark jeans and black T-shirt.

"It's a command behavior I created for personal-protection dogs. These three dogs will guard you with their lives from here on out. They'll also probably be under your feet a lot."

"Why honey?"

"It's just a word. But, to be honest, I was mostly picturing it being used for women and children..."

"Thanks," Daniel retorted.

"Oh, relax. You know I don't mean it that way. Think of a better command and we'll use it with the next generation."

There was an awkward pause. Kevin looked at the car, then back to his brother.

"Look, you're safe here. But stay close to the dogs anyway. And the poison lady. She's tough. Just don't eat anything she tries to feed you."

"I'm sure we'll be fine."

"If anything happens, give Einstein this command." He held out a little piece of paper, about the size of a business card. Daniel took it and stuck it in his pocket without looking at it. Alex thought it was odd that Kevin wouldn't say it out loud. Or maybe he just wrote it down because he didn't trust Daniel's memory.

Kevin looked now as if a hug was actually on his mind, despite what she'd imagined before, but then Daniel's posture stiffened slightly, and Kevin turned away. He kept talking as he walked to the sedan.

"We'll talk more when I get back. Keep the phone on you. I'll call when things are set."

"Be careful."

"Wilco."

Kevin got in the car and revved the engine. He put his right hand on the back of the pa.s.senger headrest and watched out the rear window as he maneuvered the car to face the road. He didn't look at his brother again. Then the red taillights were fading into the distance.

A weight seemed to lift off Alex's chest with his leaving.

Daniel watched the car for a minute, the loyal three all sitting close to his feet. Then he turned and walked thoughtfully up the porch steps. The dogs moved with him. Kevin hadn't been kidding about them staying underfoot. Daniel was lucky Khan kept to the rear or he wouldn't have been able to see where he was going.

He stopped next to Alex and turned to face the same way she did, both of them staring out into the featureless black night. The dogs arranged themselves around their feet. Lola got muscled out by the Rottweiler and whined once in protest. Daniel gripped the porch railing in both hands, holding tight like he was expecting a shift in gravity.

"Is it bad that I'm relieved he's gone?" Daniel asked. "He's just... a lot, you know? I can't process everything with him always talking."

His right hand relaxed its hold, then moved to rest on the small of her back in an almost automatic manner, like he hadn't consciously decided to place it there.

The way he was always touching her reminded Alex of the experiments she and Barnaby had done years back with sensory deprivation tanks. It was an effective means of getting someone to talk without leaving any marks, but on the whole, it took too much time to be the best option.

Anyone who went into the tank, though, no matter his level of resistance, had the same reaction when he was let out: he craved physical contact like a drug fix. She thought of one memorable experience with an army corporal-a volunteer they worked with in the initial testing phase-and the very long and somewhat inappropriate hug she'd received upon his exit. They'd had to have security peel him off her.

Daniel must feel a lot like that soldier. For days he'd been completely out of touch with anything he considered to be normal life. He would need the rea.s.surance that another warm, breathing human being was there next to him.

Of course, this diagnosis also applied to herself; she'd been out of touch with normal life for much longer than Daniel had. While that meant she was used to the lack, it also meant that she'd been starved of human contact for a very long time. Maybe this was why she felt so improbably comforted whenever he touched her.

"I don't think it's a bad thing," she answered him. "It's natural that you'd need s.p.a.ce to deal with all of this."

He laughed once, a darker sound than his earlier fit of hysteria. "Except that I don't need s.p.a.ce from anyone but him." He sighed. "Kev has always been like that, even when we were kids. Has to be in charge, has to have the spotlight."

"Funny traits for a spy."

"I guess he's figured out a way to suppress those instincts when he's working-and then it all comes surging out when he's not."

"I wouldn't know anything about it. Only child."

"Lucky, lucky you." He sighed again.

"He's probably not so bad." Why was she defending Kevin? she wondered. Just trying to cheer Daniel up, maybe. "If you weren't stuck in this very extreme situation, he'd be easier to deal with."

"That's fair. I should try to be fair. I guess I'm just... angry. So angry. I know he didn't mean to do it, but his life choices have suddenly destroyed all of mine. That's so... Kevin."

"It takes a while to accept what has happened to you," Alex said slowly. "You'll probably stay angry, but it gets easier. Most of the time, I forget how angry I am. It's different for me, though. It was people I didn't know very well who did this to me. It wasn't my family."

"But your enemies actually tried to kill you. That's worse; don't even try to compare what happened to you to what's happening to me. Kevin never meant to hurt me. It's just hard, you know? I feel like I've died, but I have to keep on living anyway. I don't know how."

She patted his left hand on the rail, remembering how that had made her feel better in the car. The skin over his knuckles was stretched tight.

"You'll learn, like I did. It turns into a routine. The life you had before gets... dimmer. And you get philosophical. I mean, disasters happen to people all the time. What's the difference between this and having your nation overrun by guerrilla warfare, right? Or your town destroyed by a tsunami? Everything changes, and nothing is as safe as it was. Only that safety was always just an illusion anyway... Sorry, that might just be the world's c.r.a.ppiest pep talk."

He laughed. "Not the very c.r.a.ppiest. I do feel infinitesimally better."

"Well, then I guess my job here is done."

"How did you get started with all this?" The question rolled out lightly, as if it were a simple thing.

She hesitated. "What do you mean?"

"Why did you choose this... profession? Before they tried to kill you, I mean. Were you in the military? Did you volunteer?"

Again, the questions were spoken lightly, like he was inquiring how she had become a financial planner or an interior decorator. The very lack of emotion was its own tell. He kept his face forward, staring out into the darkness.

She didn't evade this time. She would want to know this, too, if fate had saddled her with one of her peers as a companion. It was something she'd asked Barnaby in the early days of their a.s.sociation. His answer wasn't much different from hers.

"I never actually chose it," she explained slowly. "And no, I wasn't military. I was in medical school when they approached me. I'd first been interested in pathology, but then I shifted focus. I was deep into a particular vein of research-you could call it a kind of chemical mind control, I guess. There weren't many people doing precisely what I was doing, and there were a lot of roadblocks in my way-funding, tools, test subjects... well, most of it came down to funding. The professors I was working under didn't even fully understand my research, so I didn't have a lot of help.

"These mysterious government officials showed up and offered me an opportunity. They picked up the tab for my ma.s.sive student loans. I got to finish my schooling while focusing my research toward my new handlers' goals. When I graduated, I went to work in their lab, where every technology I could dream of was at my disposal and money was never an object.

"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 n.o.ble, 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, pa.s.sing 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.