Stephenie Meyer - The Chemist

Alex turned and hurried back to the guest room. She had to pack, too.

And think. She hadn’t planned for this. She should have.

Daniel followed her down the hallway. “Tell me what I need to do,” he said as they walked through the door.

“Can you get everything back into the duffel bags? I… I need to think for a few minutes. We can’t afford any mistakes today. Just let me concentrate, okay?”

“Of course.”

Alex lay down on the bed, then crossed both arms over her face. Daniel worked quietly in the corner; the noise wasn’t distracting. She tried to think through all the moves they had available to them, everything Kevin didn’t know.

There wasn’t much. She couldn’t even go back for Lola – Kevin had picked the boarding facility.

She took another centering breath and put that thought away. There was no time for sadness now.

It would be small motels for a while. Cash only. Luckily she had plenty of Kevin’s drug money. They’d be able to keep their heads down.

Of course, Carston would expect that. Her face and Daniel’s would end up on a police flyer e-mailed to all the potential stops for a thousand miles. Since they’d already rolled the Daniel story, maybe they’d cast her as his captive. It would be hard to sell the other version, given Alex’s and Daniel’s relative sizes.

They could camp out of whatever car they found, as they’d done before. The scrutiny would be intense. Once Carston’s people located Kevin’s vehicle, they’d trace every used car sold, every want ad, every stolen car for a hundred miles in any direction. Any description that fit the scenario would go onto a list, and if a cop reported that vehicle, Carston’s people wouldn’t be far behind.

Maybe it was time to go back to Chicago. Maybe Joey Giancardi wouldn’t kill her immediately. Maybe he’d be willing to trade some kind of indentured servitude for two sets of facial reconstruction. Or maybe he’d get one whiff of her desperation and know there was good money to be made in selling her back to the people who wanted her.

She had identities that Kevin knew nothing about, but Daniel didn’t. The documents she’d grabbed from Kevin’s mobile Batcave wouldn’t be safe.

Unless Daniel acted fast enough.

She uncovered her face and sat up.

“Do you think you’ve grasped the basic principles of hide-and-seek?”

Daniel turned with two clear bags of ammo in his hands. “Maybe the very most basic of the basics.”

Alex nodded. “You’re smart, though. You speak Spanish pretty well, right?”

“I can get by. You want to go to Mexico?”

“I wish I could. Mexico probably isn’t totally safe for your face since you’ve been there so many times, but there are a lot of good hiding places in South America. It’s cheap, too, so you won’t run out of money for a while. You won’t blend in, but there are lots of expats…”

Daniel hesitated for a second, then carefully placed the ammo in one of the duffels. He came to stand next to her.

“Alex, you’re using a lot of second-person pronouns there. Are you… talking about us splitting up right now?”

“You’ll be safer outside the country, Daniel. If you laid low in a quiet little place somewhere in Uruguay, they might never find -”

“Then why can’t we go together? Is it because they’ll be looking for a couple… if… if Kevin talks?”

She hunched her shoulders; it was half a shrug, half a defensive motion. “It’s because I don’t have a passport.”

“You don’t think they’ll be waiting for Daniel Beach to try to board a plane?”

“You won’t be Daniel Beach. I’ve got a couple of Kevin’s ID sets. It will be a long while till they get around to asking him about false identities, if they ever do. You’ll have plenty of time to catch a flight to Chile tonight.”

His expression was suddenly hard, almost angry. He looked like Kevin, and she was surprised at how sad that made her.

“So I just save myself, then? Leave you behind?”

Another almost-shrug. “Like you said, they’ll be looking for a couple. I’ll slip through the holes in the net.”

“They’ll be looking for you, Alex. I won’t -”

“Okay, okay,” she interrupted. “Let me think some more. I’ll come up with something.”

Daniel locked eyes with her for a long second. Slowly, his expression softened until he looked like himself again. Finally, his shoulders slumped and his eyes closed.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry this didn’t work. I’m sorry that Kevin…”

“I keep hoping he’ll walk through the door,” Daniel admitted, opening his eyes and staring down. “But I can feel it in my gut – that’s not going to happen.”

“I know. I wish I were wrong.”

His eyes flashed up to hers. “If our positions were reversed, he’d do something. He’d find a way. But there’s nothing I can do. I’m not Kevin.”

“Kevin would be in the same position we are. He wouldn’t know where they were keeping you. If he did, he’d still be impossibly outgunned. There wouldn’t be anything he could do.”

Daniel shook his head and sank down onto the bed. “Somehow, none of that would have stopped him.”

Alex sighed. Daniel was probably right. Kevin would have some secret informant, or another camera angle, or a way to hack into Deavers’s system. He wouldn’t give up and run. But Alex wasn’t Kevin, either. She couldn’t even poison Carston while he was still oblivious. He wasn’t anymore, she was sure of that.

“Let me think,” she repeated. “I’ll try to figure a way out.”

Daniel nodded. “But together, Alex. We leave together. We stay together.”

“Even if that puts both of us at risk?”

“Even then.”

Alex threw herself back onto the bed, hiding her face again with her arms.

If there had been some perfect escape for them, she would have tried it earlier. The whole reason she was here in the first place was that the escape option had failed. Now the attack option had failed. It didn’t leave her feeling very optimistic.

It was funny how you didn’t realize how much you had to lose until it was gone. Yes, she knew she was in deep with Daniel; she’d embraced that disadvantage. But who would have thought she would miss Kevin? How had he become her friend? Not even a friend, because you chose your friends. More like family – the brother you tried to avoid at family gatherings. She’d never had anything like that, but this must be what it felt like, the pain of losing something you’d never wanted but had come to count on anyway. Kevin’s arrogant self-assurance had made her feel almost safe in a way she hadn’t for years. His team was the winning team. His invulnerability was the safety net.

Or used to be.

And the dog. She couldn’t even think about the dog or she’d be incapacitated. She wouldn’t be able to make her brain work toward any kind of solution.

Again, the image of Kevin on her table flashed across the black insides of her eyelids. If only she could know that he was already dead, that would be something. If she could believe he wasn’t in agony right now. Surely he was smart enough to have had a way out. Or was he so certain of himself that failure was never part of the plan?

She thought she knew enough about Deavers from his moves up to this point to be sure he wouldn’t waste an opportunity if there were any way to find an edge in it.

She honestly wished the situation were reversed. If she’d been the one caught, she would have been able to take a quick, painless exit, leaving Deavers and Carston no information about the others. Whatever Kevin had done wrong, however he had failed, he was still the one best qualified to keep Daniel alive. And Val, too, for that matter. Val would have the easiest escape in the short term, but neither Carston nor Deavers seemed like the type to give up on a witness.