Stephenie Meyer - The Chemist

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 identity 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 sadist. 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 identity 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 passport 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.