The Chemist

And they had weakened her – reduced her assets and damaged her physically. A partial success for them.

“And it doesn’t bother them that my brother is also stuck in the jar,” he said furiously. “Only he’s an ant, not a scorpion. They just throw him into the mix, don’t even care that he’s completely defenseless.”

“Hey,” Daniel protested.

“No offense, Danny, but you’re about as dangerous as hand-knitted socks.”

Daniel opened his mouth to respond, but a loud whine from the bunk room interrupted. The whine was quickly followed by angry snarls and a few sharp barks, then a strident clawing at the wooden door.

She was glad she’d gone the extra mile in securing the wolf.

“He’s upset,” Kevin accused.

“The dog is fine. There’s a toilet back there, it won’t even get dehydrated.”

Kevin just raised his eyebrows, not as concerned about the animal as she would have expected. The clawing and snarling didn’t let up.

“You really brought a dog?” Daniel asked.

“More of a partner.” He looked at her. “Well, what now? Their plan failed.”

“Narrowly.”

He grinned. “We could go another round.”

“As much as I would dearly love to inject a few things into your system, I’d rather not give them the satisfaction.”

“Fair enough.”

The dog was scratching and growling in an unbroken stream through all of this. It was getting on her nerves.

“I do have a plan.”

Kevin rolled his eyes. “I bet you always have a plan, don’t you, shorty?”

She regarded him with flat eyes. “I can’t rely on muscle, so I rely on brains. It appears you have the opposite problem.”

He laughed derisively.

“Um, Kev,” Daniel interjected. “I’d like to point out that you are chained up on the floor.”

“Shut up, Danny.”

“Please, boys, if I could get one more second of your time?” She waited till they looked at her. “Here’s the plan: I write an e-mail to my ex-boss. I tell him I got the truth, the real truth, and both of you are out of the picture. I really don’t appreciate the manipulation. If he tries to contact me in any way again, I’m making a personal visit to his kitchen pantry.”

“You claim the win?” Kevin asked in a disbelieving voice. “Please!”

“Chained on the floor,” Daniel murmured under his breath.

“It’s a gift,” she snapped back. “You get to be dead again. No one is looking for either of you.”

Kevin’s cynical expression dissolved. For a second, the twin thing was a lot more evident.

The sound of the dog was like a howling wood chipper in the next room. She hadn’t really planned to stick around for her security deposit, but it clearly was not an option now.

“Why would you do that for us?” Kevin asked.

“I’m doing it for Daniel. I owe him. I should have been smarter. I shouldn’t have taken the bait.”

It was all so completely obvious now: How easily she’d slipped through their surveillance – because there hadn’t been any. How simple it had been to snatch Daniel – because no one was trying to stop her. The heavy-handed way they’d given her a deadline with plenty of time for her to act. It was embarrassing.

“Then what happens to you?” Daniel asked quietly. She almost had to read his lips over the noise of the dog.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

She had learned a few things from this exercise in gullibility, maybe things they didn’t want her to know.

There weren’t going to be any helicopters or elimination teams. Carston – the one name she could be absolutely certain of at this point – and whoever else wanted her dead had sent only the occasional lone assassin because that was all they had. Her enemies had been driven to this wild collaboration, and she knew it wasn’t because the department didn’t have the resources. It could only be because she wasn’t common knowledge. And Carston – and whoever his confederates were – couldn’t afford to have her become so.

She’d assumed, when she’d seen the obituary for Juliana Fortis and read about the cremation, that everyone involved was in on the scam. But what if it was just a few key people? What if Carston had promised his superiors that the job would be done and then was afraid to admit he’d missed on the first swat?

Or – revolutionary idea – what if most people at the department thought it was a lab accident? That she and Barnaby had mixed the wrong test tubes and punched out together? What if Carston’s superiors hadn’t wanted her dead? What if only those few key individuals had wanted that, and now they had to keep their attempts to finish the job under the radar? That would change everything.

It played. It fit with the facts.

It made her feel stronger.

The ones who had arranged her death had been afraid of what she knew, but they had never been afraid of her. Maybe it was time for that to change.

There was a sudden earsplitting noise – an explosive fragmenting of wood. And then the enraged snarling got a lot closer.

CHAPTER 10

I

t took her one second to realize what had happened, and by that time the rabid wolf was bounding into the tent.

There was still a little bit of extra adrenaline in her system, apparently. She was on top of the desk before the animal was all the way inside, and her nervous system, not satisfied with that distance, launched her toward the PVC framework overhead before she had time to realize what she was doing. She caught hold with both hands, flipped her legs up and crossed her ankles around the pipe, then wrapped her elbows tightly around as well. She turned her head to the side to see that the creature was right below her, big paws on the desk as it strained to get its teeth into her. One paw mashed down on the keyboard, which was too bad. A little gassing would help a lot right now, and she already had both masks.