Time slowed down while she analyzed.
Daniel didn’t look surprised or relieved. The noise did not seem to signal rescue or attack to him. He just noticed it the way someone might notice a car alarm going off. Not relevant to himself, but distracting from the moment.
It felt like she was moving in slow motion as she jumped up and raced to the desk for the syringe she needed.
“You don’t have to do that, Alex,” Daniel said, resigned. “I’ll tell you.”
“Shh,” she whispered, leaning over his head while she injected the drug—into the IV port this time. “I’m just putting you to sleep for now.” She patted his cheek. “No pain, I promise.”
Understanding lit his eyes as he connected the sound to her behavior. “Are we in danger?” he whispered back.
We. Huh. Another interesting pronoun choice. She’d never had a subject anything like this before.
“I don’t know if you are,” she said as his eyes drooped closed. “But I sure as hell am.”
There was a heavy concussion, not immediately outside the barn but too close for her liking.
She put the gas mask securely on his face, then donned hers and screwed in the canister. This time was no drill. She glanced at her computer—she had about ten minutes left there. She wasn’t sure it was enough, so she tapped the space bar. Then she jabbed a button on the little black box, and the light on the side started blinking rapidly. Almost as a reflex, she covered Daniel with the blanket again.
She shut the lights off, so the room was lit only by the white gleam of her computer screen, and exited the tent. Inside the barn, everything was black. She searched, hands out in front of her, until she found the bag beside her cot and, with years of practice guiding her, blindly put on all of her easily accessible armor. She shoved the gun into the front of her belt. She took a syringe from her bag, jabbed it into her thigh, and depressed the plunger. Ready as she could make herself, she crept into the back corner of the tent and hid where she knew the darkest shadow would be if someone came in with a flashlight. She pulled out the gun, removed the safety, and gripped it with both hands. Then she put her ear to the seam of the tent and listened, waiting for someone to open the door or a window into the barn, and die.
While she waited through the slow seconds, her mind raced through more analysis.
This wasn’t a big operation coming for her. No way any extraction team or elimination team worth its salt would announce its arrival with a noisy plane. There were better ways, quieter ways. And if it was a big, SWAT-style team sent after her without any briefing, just busting their way in by sheer might, they would have come in a copter. The plane had sounded very small—a three-seater at most, but probably two-.
If a lone assassin was coming for her again, as had always been the case in the past, she didn’t know what this guy thought he was doing. Why would he give himself away? The noisy plane was the move of someone who was lacking resources and in a very big hurry, someone to whom time was much more important than stealth.
Who was it? Not de la Fuentes.
First of all, a small prop plane didn’t seem like a drug lord’s MO. She imagined that with de la Fuentes, there would be a fleet of black SUVs and a bunch of thugs with machine guns.
Second, she had a gut feeling about this one.
No, she wasn’t a lie detector. Good liars, professional liars, could fool anyone, human or machine. Her job had never been about guessing the truth from the subject’s shifty eyes or tangled contradictions. Her job was breaking down the subject until there was nothing left but compliant flesh and one story. She wasn’t the best because she could separate the truth from the lie; she was the best because she had a natural affinity for the capabilities of the human body and was a genius with a beaker. She knew exactly what a body could handle and exactly how to push it to that point.
So gut feelings were not her forte, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d really felt something like this.
She believed Daniel was telling the truth. That’s why this exercise with Daniel had bothered her so much—because he wasn’t lying. It wasn’t going to be de la Fuentes coming after him. No one was coming after Daniel, because he wasn’t anything more than what he said he was—an English teacher, a history teacher, a volleyball coach. Whoever was coming was coming for her.
Why now? Had the department been tracking her all day and only just discovered her? Were they trying to save Daniel’s life, having realized too late that he wasn’t the guy?
No way. They would have known that before they set her up. They had access to too much information to be fooled in this. The file wasn’t entirely make-believe, but it was manipulated. They had wanted her to get the wrong person.