The Chemist Part 7

She picked up the syringe on the far end of the tray, pushed the plunger till a drop of liquid dewed at the top, then flicked it away theatrically like a nurse in a movie.

"Please?" he whispered. "Please, I don't know what this is about. I can't help you. I swear I would if I could."

"You will," she promised, and she stabbed the needle into his left triceps brachii.

The reaction was nearly instantaneous. His left arm spasmed and jerked against the restraint. While he stared in horror at his convulsing muscles, she quietly picked up another syringe and crossed to his right side. He saw her approach.

"Alex, please!" he yelled.

She ignored him and his attempt to somehow evade her, as if he were strong enough to rip free of his cuffs, and injected this dose of lactic acid into his right quad. His knee wrenched flat, the muscles pulling his foot off the table. He gasped, and then groaned.

She moved deliberately, not in any hurry, but not slowly, either. Another syringe. His left arm was already too incapacitated for him to try to resist her. This time she injected the acid into his left biceps brachii. Immediately, the opposing triceps muscle group began tearing against the biceps, battling for contraction dominance.

The air burst out of his mouth like he'd just been punched in the gut, but she knew the pain was much, much worse than any blow.

One more injection, this time into his right biceps femoris. The same ripping struggle that was happening in his arm started in his leg. And the screaming started with it.

She went to stand by his head, watching dispa.s.sionately while the tendons in his neck strained into white ropes. When he opened his mouth to scream again, she shoved a gag in. If he bit off his tongue, he wouldn't be able to tell her anything.

She walked slowly to her desk chair while his m.u.f.fled shrieks were absorbed into the double layer of foam, sat down, and crossed her legs. She looked at the monitors-everything elevated but nothing in the danger zone. A healthy body could experience a lot more pain than most people would think before its important organs were really in any serious peril. She brushed the touch pad on her computer, keeping the screen brightly lit. Then she pulled her wrist.w.a.tch out of her pocket and laid it across her knee. This was mostly for theatrics; she could have watched the clock on her computer or the monitors just as easily.

She faced him while she waited, her face composed and the silver watch bright against her black clothing. Subjects tended to find this disconcerting-that she could watch her handiwork so dispa.s.sionately. So she stared at him, expression polite, an audience member at a mediocre play, while his body thrashed and distorted on the table and his screams choked past the gag. Sometimes his eyes were on her, pleading and agonized, and other times they whirled crazily around the room.

Ten minutes could be a very long time. His muscles started to spasm independently of each other, some locking into knots and others seeming to want to jerk themselves off the bone. Sweat ran off his face, darkening his hair. The skin over his cheekbones looked ready to split. The screams lowered in pitch, turned hoa.r.s.e, sounding more like an animal's than a man's.

Six more minutes.

And these weren't even the good drugs.

Anyone who was sick enough to want to could duplicate the pain she was inflicting now. The acid she was using wasn't a controlled substance; it was fairly easy to acquire online, even if one happened to be on the run from the dark underbelly of the U.S. government. Back in her interrogating prime, when she had her beautiful lab and her beautiful budget, her sequencer and her reactor, she'd been able to create some truly unique and ultra-specific preparations.

The Chemist really wasn't the proper code name for her at all. However, the Molecular Biologist was probably too big a mouthful. Barnaby had been the chemistry expert, and the things he'd taught her had kept her alive after she'd lost her lab; she had become her code name in the end. But in the beginning, it had been her theoretical research with monoclonal antibodies that had brought her to the department's attention. It was a shame she couldn't risk taking Daniel to the lab. This operation would have produced results much more quickly.

And she'd been so close to actually removing pain from the equation. That had been her Holy Grail, though no one else seemed eager for it. She was sure that if she'd been working in the lab for the past three years instead of running for her life, by now she would have created the key that would unlock whatever one needed from the human mind. No torture, no horror. Just quick answers, given pleasantly, and then an equally pleasant trip to either a cell or the execution wall.

They should have let her work.

Still four minutes to go.

She and Barnaby had discussed different strategies for dealing with these periods of the interrogation. Barnaby had told himself stories. He would remember the fairy tales from his childhood and think of modern versions or alternative endings or what would happen if the characters switched places. He'd said some of the ideas he came up with were pretty good, and when he had time he was going to write them down. She, however, felt like she was wasting time if she wasn't doing something practical. She would plan things. In the beginning, she planned new versions of the monoclonal antibody that would control brain response and block neural receptors. Later, she planned her life on the run, thinking of everything that could possibly go wrong, every worst-case scenario, and what she could do to keep herself from falling into each trap. Then how to escape the trap halfway in. Then after it was sprung. She tried to envision every possibility.

Barnaby said she needed to take a mental break now and then. Have some fun, or what was the point of living?

Just living, she had decided. Just living was all she asked. And so she put in the mental effort needed to make that possible.

Today she thought about the next step. Tonight, tomorrow night, or, heaven help him, the night after that, Daniel was going to tell her everything. Everyone broke. It was just a simple fact that a human being could resist pain for only so long. Some people could deal better with one kind or another, but that meant she would just switch to another type of pain. At some point, if he didn't talk, she would roll Daniel onto his stomach-so he wouldn't choke on his own vomit-and administer what she called the green needle, though the serum was actually clear, just like all the others. If that didn't work, she'd try one of the hallucinogens. There was always a new way to feel pain. The body had so many different ways to experience stimuli.

Once she had what she needed, she would stop his pain, put him under, and then e-mail Carston from this IP address and tell him everything she'd learned. Then she would drive away and keep going for a very long time. Maybe Carston and company wouldn't come after her. Maybe they would. And she might never know, because she would most likely keep hiding until she died-hopefully of natural causes.

Before nine minutes were over, the dose started to wear off. It was different for everyone, and Daniel was on the larger side. His screams turned to groans as his body slowly melted into a pile of exhausted flesh on the table, and then he was quiet. She removed the gag and he gasped for air. He stared at her with awed horror for one long moment, and then he started to cry.

"I'll give you a few minutes," she said. "Collect your thoughts."

She left through the exit he couldn't see, then sat quietly on the cot and listened to him choke back his sobs.

Crying was normal, and usually it boded well. But it was obvious that this crying was Daniel the Teacher. There was still no sign of Dark Daniel, not one knowing glance or defensive tic. What would reach him? If this was truly dissociative ident.i.ty disorder, could she force an appearance of the personality she wanted? She needed an actual shrink on her team today. If she'd gone docilely into the lab as they'd wanted, they probably would have been able to find her one almost the moment she asked. Well, there was nothing she could do about it now.

She quietly ate a soft breakfast bar while she waited for his breathing to even out, and then she ate a second. She washed it down with a box of apple juice out of the minifridge.

When she reentered the tent, Daniel was gazing despairingly at the egg-foam ceiling. She walked quietly to the computer and touched a key.

"I'm sorry you had to go through that, Daniel."

He hadn't heard her enter. He cringed as far away from the sound of her voice as he could.

"Let's not do it again, okay?" she said. She settled back into her chair. "I want to go home, too." Kind of a lie, but also mostly true, if impossible. "And, though you might not believe me, I'm not actually a s.a.d.i.s.t. I don't enjoy watching you suffer. I just don't have another choice. I'm not going to let all those people die."

His voice was raw. "I don't... know what... you're talking about."

"You'd be surprised how many people say that-and keep saying it for round after round of what you just went through, and worse! And then on the tenth round for one, on the seventeenth for another, suddenly the truth comes pouring out. And I get to tell the good guys where to find the warhead or the chemical bomb or the disease agent. And people stay alive, Daniel."

"I haven't killed anyone," he rasped.

"But you're planning to, and I'm going to change your mind."

"I would never do that."

She sighed. "This is going to take a long time, isn't it?"

"I can't tell you anything I don't know. You've got the wrong person."

"I've heard that one a lot, too," she said lightly, but it touched a nerve. If she couldn't get the other Daniel to appear, then wasn't she truly torturing the wrong person?

She made a snap decision to go off script again, though she was out of her depth when it came to mental illness.

"Daniel, do you ever have blackouts?"

A long pause. "What?"

"Have you, for example, woken up somewhere and not known how you got there? Has anyone ever told you that you did or said something that you can't remember doing or saying?"

"Um. No. Well, today. I mean, that's what you're saying, right? That I'm planning to do something awful, but I don't know what it is?"

"Have you ever been diagnosed with dissociative ident.i.ty disorder?"

"No! Alex, I'm not the crazy person in this room."

That didn't help at all.

"Tell me about Egypt."

He turned his head toward her. His expression made the words he was thinking as clear as if he'd spoken them out loud: Are you kidding me, lady?

She just waited.

He sighed a pained little gasp. "Well, Egypt has one of the longest histories of any modern civilization. There is evidence that Egyptians were living along the Nile as early as the tenth millennium BC. By about 6000 BC-"

"That's hilarious, Daniel. Can we be serious now?"

"I don't know what you want! Are you testing to see if I'm really a history teacher? I can't even tell!"

She could hear the strength coming back into his voice. The nice thing about her drugs was that they wore off quickly. She could have a focused conversation between rounds. And she'd found that the subjects had a greater fear of pain when they weren't feeling any. The high-ups and deep-downs seemed to speed things along.

She touched a key on her computer.

"Tell me about your trip to Egypt."

"I have never been to Egypt."

"You didn't go there with Habitat for Humanity two years ago?"

"No. I've been in Mexico for the past three summers."

"You do know people keep track of these things, right? That your pa.s.sport number is logged into a computer and there's a record of where you've gone?"

"Which is why you should know I was in Mexico!"

"Where you met Enrique de la Fuentes."

"Who?"

She blinked her eyes slowly, her face very bored.

"Hold on," he said, staring up like an explanation might be posted on the ceiling. "I know that name. It was on the news a while ago... with those DEA officers that went missing. He's a drug dealer, right?"

She held up the picture of de la Fuentes again.

"That's him?"

She nodded.

"Why do you think I know him?"

She answered slowly. "Because I also have pictures of you together. And because he's given you ten million dollars in the past three years."

His mouth dropped open and the word came out as a gasp. "Wha... ut?"

"Ten million dollars, in your name, scattered around the Cayman Islands and Swiss banks."

He stared at her for another second, and then anger suddenly twisted his face, and his voice turned harsh. "If I've got ten million dollars, then why do I live in a roach-infested walk-up studio in Columbia Heights? Why are we using the same patched volleyball uniforms that the school's had since 1973? Why do I ride the Metro while my ex-wife's new husband drives around town in a Mercedes? And why am I getting rickets from eating a steady diet of ramen?"

She let him vent. The desire to talk was a small step in the right direction. Unfortunately, this angry Daniel was still the schoolteacher version, just not a very happy schoolteacher.

"Wait a minute-what do you mean you have pictures of me with the drug guy?"

She walked to her desk and pulled the appropriate photo.

"In El Minya, Egypt, with de la Fuentes," she announced as she held the photo in front of his face.

Finally, a reaction.

His head jerked back; his eyes narrowed, then opened wide. She could almost watch his thoughts move as they ran through his brain and settled in his face. He was a.n.a.lyzing what he was looking at and making a plan.

Still no sign of the other Daniel, but at least he seemed to recognize that other part of himself.

"Do you want to tell me about Egypt now, Daniel?"

Tight lips. "I've never been there. That's not me."

"I don't believe you." She sighed. "Which is really too bad, because we've got to move this party along."

The fear came back, fast and hard.

"Alex, please, I swear that isn't me. Please don't."

"This is my job, Daniel. I have to find out how to save those people."

All the reticence disappeared. "I don't want to hurt anyone. I want you to save them, too."

It was harder not to believe his sincerity now.

"That picture meant something to you."

He shook his head once, expression closing up. "It wasn't me."

She had to admit, she was more than a little fascinated. This was really something new. How she wished she had Barnaby to consult! Oh well, she was on the clock. She didn't have time for wishing. She stacked the syringes one by one onto her left palm. Eight this time.

He stared at her with terror and... sadness. He started to say something, but no sound came out. She paused with the first needle ready in her right hand.

"Daniel, if you want to say something, do it quick."

Dejected. "It won't help."

She waited another second, and he looked straight at her.

"It's just your face," he said. "It's the same as before... exactly the same."

She flinched, then pivoted and moved up the table to stand beside his head. He tried to strain away from her, but that just better exposed his sternocleidomastoid. Usually she'd save this particular muscle for later in the interrogation; it was one of the very most painful things she could do to a subject under her current limitations. But she wanted to leave quickly, so she stabbed the needle into the side of his neck and pushed the plunger down. Without really looking at him, she replaced the gag as soon as his mouth opened. Then, dropping the other syringes, she escaped the room.