Stephenie Meyer - The Chemist

He locked down his expression as the facts began falling into place.

Quickly, she hopped out of her car and reached for the passenger door of his. She didn’t look back to watch Val slide over into the driver’s seat, but she heard the door close behind her. Alex waited with her fingers on the BMW’s passenger-door handle until she heard the locks click open. She climbed in next to him. The whole wordless exchange had taken less than two seconds. The cars behind them might be curious, but they would probably forget the transfer by the next light.

“Turn left,” she told Carston as Val went right and headed east. The Jag disappeared around the corner.

Carston was quick to recover. He put on his blinker and pulled across the left lane, nearly hitting the van headed through the light. Alex took his phone out of the cup holder, powered it down, and shoved it in her pocket.

“What do you want?” he asked. His voice sounded calm, but she could hear the strain in his lack of inflection.

“I need your help.”

He took a moment to digest that.

“Turn right at the next corner.”

He complied carefully. “Who is your partner?”

“Someone for hire. Not your concern.”

“I really believed you were dead this time.”

Alex didn’t respond.

“What have you done to Livvy?”

“Nothing permanent. Yet.”

“She’s only three.” His voice quavered uncharacteristically.

She turned to give him an incredulous look, which was wasted, as he never glanced away from the road in front of them. “Really? You expect me to care about civilians at this point?”

“She’s done nothing to you.”

“What did three innocent people in Texas do to you, Carston? Never mind,” she said when he opened his mouth to answer. “That was obviously rhetorical.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Kevin Beach.”

There was another long pause as he rearranged things in his mind.

“You’re going to turn left at the next block,” she instructed.

“ How did you…” He shook his head. “I don’t have him. The CIA does.”

“I know who has him. And I know Deavers is following your direction in his interrogation,” she bluffed. “Your specialist is the one leading the case. I’m sure you know where they’re working on him.”

He stared stone-faced through the windshield.

“I don’t understand what is happening,” he muttered.

“Let’s talk about what you do understand, then,” Alex said in a bleak voice. “Of course you remember a little concoction Barnaby and I created for you called Deadline.”

His pasty skin started to mottle, blotches of puce blooming on his cheeks and neck. She held her phone out and his eyes flickered to it automatically. The photo was back to its original size now, and the IV hooked into his granddaughter’s arm was conspicuously in the foreground. There was a saline bag, the nutrition bag, and a smaller, dark green bag attached underneath it.

He stared at the photo for one long second, then his eyes were back on the road.

“How long?” he asked through his teeth.

“I was generous. Twelve hours. One hour has passed. This operation shouldn’t take more than four, at most. Then Livvy is delivered safely back to her mother, no worse for wear.”

“And I’m dead?”

“I’ll be honest, the odds aren’t good that either of us makes it through unscathed. A lot is riding on your acting abilities, Carston. Lucky for you, we both know how convincing you can be.”

“What happens if, through no fault of mine, you die?”

“Bad luck for Livvy. And her mother, for that matter. Things have been set in motion. If you care about your family, you’ll do your very, very best to get me out alive.”

“You could be bluffing. You were never this cold-blooded.”

“Policies change. People change. Shall I share a secret?”

She gave him a moment to respond, but he just stared straight ahead with his jaw locked.

“Kevin Beach wasn’t in Texas when Deavers sent the kill squad. I was.” She let those two words hang in the air for a moment before she went on. Carston wasn’t the only one with acting abilities. “I’m not the person you used to know, Carston. You’d be surprised at the things I’m capable of now. Take the next right.”

“I don’t know what you hope to accomplish here.”

“Let’s get down to it,” Alex said. “Where is Kevin?”

Carston didn’t hesitate. “He’s in a facility west of the city. It used to be a CIA interrogation suite, but they haven’t used it in years. Officially, it’s abandoned.”

“The address?”

He listed it from memory without a pause.

“What kind of security?”

He glanced over, his eyes studying her for a second before he responded. “I don’t have that information. But knowing Deavers, it’s more than is necessary. He’ll go overboard. He’s terrified of Kevin Beach. That’s why he came up with the whole charade with the brother. No risk, that’s what he called it.” Carston chuckled once. It was a bitter sound, in no way amused.

“Does he know my face?”

Carston’s eyes jerked to her in surprise. “You’re going in?”

“Will he recognize me?” she demanded. “How much of my file did he see? Did you show him the footage from the Metro?”

Carston pursed his lips. “We agreed from the beginning to keep our… situations separate. It was need-to-know. Years ago, he would have had access to your old recruitment file, your write-ups from a few interrogations. He might still have those, but nothing more current. The only picture in that old file was from your mother’s funeral. You were very young, your hair was longer and darker…” He paused, seeming lost in thought. “Deavers isn’t a detail guy. I doubt he’d be able to link you to the picture. You don’t look that much like nineteen-year-old Juliana Fortis anymore.”

She hoped he was right. “It’s more than my life on the line,” she reminded him.

“I’m aware. And… that much is a bet I’d take. But I don’t know what you think you’re going to do when you get inside.”

“ We, Carston , we. And, probably, we go down in a hail of bullets.”

“And Livvy pays? That’s not acceptable,” he growled.

“Then give me more to work with.”

He took a deep breath, and she glanced over at him. He looked exhausted.

“How about this,” she suggested. She was going on intuition. She’d listened to Carston’s aggravation with that one particular him in the phone calls, and she thought she could guess who it was. After all, it was Deavers’s plan that had failed so spectacularly, over and over. “Would it be accurate to characterize you as unhappy with Deavers’s management of this joint operation?”

He grunted.

“Have you and Deavers disagreed on how to proceed?”

“You could say that.”

“Does he think that you trust him to handle the interrogation of Kevin Beach?”

“No, at this point, I would say he does not believe that I trust him to zip up his own fly correctly.”

“Tell me about your interrogation specialist.”

Carston made a sour face. “Not mine. He’s Deavers’s lackey, and he’s an imbecile. I told Deavers that someone like Beach was going to die before he talked to an ordinary interrogator. You can rest easy, if that’s your concern. They won’t break him. Beach hasn’t said anything about you, except that he killed you. I don’t think they even followed up on that. To be fair, I believed it, too.”

She was surprised. “So you never replaced me?”

Carston shook his head. “I’ve tried. I wasn’t lying about that in the beginning – you remember? ‘True talent is a limited commodity.’” He quoted himself and sighed. “Deavers has had a stranglehold on the department for a long time now, ever since I ‘lost a dangerous asset.’ The CIA has blocked my recruitment process and shut down all but the lab. The things we’re producing now could be created by any halfway decent pharmacist.” He shook his head. “They act as if they aren’t the reason why you’re dangerous in the first place.”