The Chemist

Daniel’s neck started to flush. She was sure he was going to mention the fact that if Kevin hadn’t broken in to a locked room in the middle of the night, he wouldn’t have seen anything. Before Daniel could object, Alex said, “Agreed. Appropriate businesslike behavior.”

Kevin glanced back and forth between them, measuring again. After a second, he turned and hit the call button.

Daniel gave her a Really? look. Alex shrugged.

“None of that!” Kevin commanded, though he still had his back to them.

“What?” Daniel complained.

“I can feel you two silently communicating. Stop it.”

It was a quiet drive in the average-looking black sedan. She didn’t know if it was Val’s car or something Kevin had acquired. It didn’t seem like Val’s style, but maybe she liked to be incognito sometimes. Alex appreciated the heavily tinted windows. She felt less exposed as she sat with her ball cap pulled low over her face and stared out at the still mostly sleeping city. They were early enough to beat the morning rush.

Kevin drove through a seedier section of town – more the kind of neighborhood she would have expected his hiding place to exist in. He pulled in at a storage facility that seemed to be mostly enormous cargo containers. There was no guard posted, just a keypad and a heavy metal gate with razor-wire coils on top. Kevin drove them to a spot near the back of the fenced lot and parked behind a dingy orange container.

The lot appeared to be empty, but Alex kept her face down and her walk unfeminine as they moved to the wide double doors that made up the front wall of the container. Kevin plugged a complicated sequence of numbers into the heavy-duty rectangular lock, then pulled it out of the way. He opened one door just a few feet and waved them inside.

It was black when Kevin pulled the door shut behind himself. Then there was a low click, and rope lights lining the ceiling and the floor glowed to life.

“Exactly how many Batcaves do you have?” Alex demanded.

“Just a few, here and there, where I might need them,” Kevin said. “This one’s mobile, so that helps.”

The inside of Kevin’s cargo container was tightly packed but compulsively organized. Like the barn in Texas, there was a place for everything.

Racks of clothing – costumes, really – were wedged against the wall by the double doors. She was sure that was on purpose – if someone got a glimpse inside while the doors were open, all he would see was clothes. A casual observer wouldn’t think anything of it. A more careful observer might think it was odd that uniforms for every branch of the military were hanging together, along with mechanic’s coveralls and several utility companies’ official garb, not to mention the raggedy components of a homeless man’s outfit hanging a few feet down from a row of dark suits that ranged from off-the-rack to high-end designer. A person could blend into a lot of situations with these clothes.

The props were in bins over the clothes racks – briefcases and clipboards, toolboxes and suitcases. The shoes were in clear plastic boxes underneath.

Beyond the costumes, deep floor-to-ceiling metal cabinets were installed. Kevin guided her through each; she took note of the things she might need. As in the barn, there was a space for guns, for ammo, for armor, for explosives, for knives. There were other things that hadn’t been in Texas, or if they were, they’d been better hidden than the rest. He had a cabinet full of various tech items – tiny cameras and bugs, tracking devices, night-vision goggles, binoculars and scopes, electromagnetic-pulse generators of various sizes, a few laptop computers, and dozens of gadgets she didn’t recognize. He identified the code breakers, the frequency readers, the frequency jammers, the system hackers, the mini-drones… She lost track after a while. It was unlikely that she would want to use anything she wasn’t familiar with.

The next cabinet was chemical compounds.

“Yes,” she hissed, digging past the front row to see what was behind. “This I can use.”

“Thought you’d appreciate that.”

“Do you mind?” she asked, holding up a sealed cylinder of a catalytic she knew she was almost out of.

“Take whatever you want. I don’t think I’ve ever used any of that stuff.”

She crouched down to the lower shelf and loaded several more jars and packages into her backpack. Ah, this one she needed. “Then why do you have it?”

Kevin shrugged. “I had access. Never look a gift horse —”

“Ha!” She stared up at him triumphantly.

“What?”

“You told me that was a stupid saying.”

Kevin raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Sometimes it’s really hard not to kick you.”

“I know precisely how you feel.”

Daniel moved to stand between her and Kevin. She shook her head at him. It was just banter. With the brief lecture on appropriate behavior out of the way, Kevin had shifted back to his normal self – something in between a serial killer and the world’s most obnoxious big brother. Alex was getting used to it; she didn’t mind him as much anymore.

Grumbling about silent communication, Kevin stalked back to the ammo cabinet and started filling a large black bag with reserves.

“First aid?” she asked.

“In the knife locker, top shelf.”

There were several zippered black bags over the knives, some of them about the size of a backpack, others smaller, like shaving kits. She couldn’t reach any of them, so Daniel pulled them down and she combed through them on the floor.