Unforgiven (5 page)

I walked out of David’s office in a bit of a daze. Owen wasn’t waiting for me in the gym, so after taking a quick glance at the file in my arms, I wandered up to the work floor in search of him. Unassigned workrooms were spread out along both sides of the hallway, each of them equipped with big, glass windows facing inward, which made it easy to find someone or to locate an empty room. There were at least five offices on each side of the hall, and at the end there was a bizarre little room equipped with a cot, a sink, and a toilet. I couldn’t imagine that anyone would stay in there on purpose when our dorms were only a few flights of stairs away, so I could only assume it was for prisoners.

About three rooms down, I found Owen staring intently at the set of screens in front of him. I knocked lightly on the glass window. He smiled when he spotted me and immediately left his workspace to join me in the hall.

“What are you doing up here, beautiful?”

“I’m taking a break from training, apparently.” I pointed to the file under my arm. “I’m going to start working.”

“What?” He seemed incredulous, but I wasn’t quite sure why. Did he think I couldn’t handle a job? Or that I wasn’t ready? That I wasn’t good enough? Or that I’d be in danger? The questions cycled through my mind on rapid fire until he interrupted them.

Opening the door to his work area, he gestured for me to follow him inside. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

Suddenly, I saw the situation from his perspective. No wonder he was startled—the last he knew, I was still having trouble launching myself over Tracy’s wall. I hadn’t felt much inclined to talk lately, so he knew only the bare minimum about my training. I didn’t know what to say, or how to say it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell him much more than that. I had secrets to keep, promises to uphold. Shuddering at the thought of Tracy’s wall of memories, I shook my head and struggled to find a safe place to begin.

“Well, I um…” I hesitated. “To be honest, I’m not really sure how much I can tell you.”

He frowned, so I decided to throw him some crumbs. “I got past Tracy’s defenses. It’s why they gave me my first assignment.” Deliberately leaving out exactly how many of Tracy’s defenses, I set the folder on the table in front of me and took a seat across from Owen. I hoped he would pick it up, thumb through it, and show some curiosity about my first assignment.

Instead, he simply glanced down at the folder with a disapproving look on his face, making my defensive side flare to life.

“What? You don’t think I can do it?” Folding my arms over my chest and narrowing my eyes, I challenged him to cross me.

He looked up at me, startled by my reaction. “What? No! That’s not what I was thinking at all. I’m just worried it might be too soon.” He paused. “For work.”

“Well, don’t you worry. It’s just some spying gig on a real low-profile guy. As far as I can see, his only crime is being a scientist in a suspicious field. It’s essentially busywork.”

He leaned back in his chair, glancing warily at the file on the table. “Nothing the Unseen does can be classified as busywork, Mac.”

Although his sentiment tugged at my curiosity, I was still skeptical. I pulled the file closer and opened it to see the photo of the scientist paper-clipped to the top. I’d only thumbed through it quickly, but I’d seen enough to know he studied the toxic effects of chemicals on humans. He was mostly responsible for doing the due diligence for those warning labels you saw on stuff like bleach and brake fluid. Although some of his experiments were conducted on animals, which was a bit disagreeable to say the least, I wasn’t sure how else someone could discover the effects of inhaling too much ammonia mixed with bleach. Scientist I was not.

“Well, he seems pretty harmless to me,” I said, staring down at the scientist’s photo. Dr. Jeppe had brown hair, cut in an eighties-style bowl with silver-rimmed rectangular glasses covering his brown eyes. He’d worn a white lab coat for the photo, which looked like it had been taken for an ID badge, but that was all I could glean from the photo. Taken from the waist up, it was hard to tell how tall he was, but he seemed slender.

“Sooo…” He drew out the word. “Do you feel like you’re ready?”

I closed the file. “I’m not really sure what there is to be ready for, Owen. I don’t even have to leave for this ‘job.’” I put air quotes around the word with my fingers.

He lowered his voice. “I think you’re taking it too lightly, but that’s just me. All of this has hit you very hard. I just don’t want you to rush into anything. There are others who can do the work until you’re ready.”

I thought again of what had become of Maddie and Tracy’s twin and sighed. “Maybe. But the scientist will be a good distraction. Besides, no one else wants to take on my busywork.”

He ignored my last comment and glanced at the big, black computer screens behind him. I wasn’t sure if they’d fallen asleep while we were in the hall, or if he’d turned them off in anticipation of me coming into his space.

“Either way,” he said before I could debate it much longer. “You’d probably better get to work. Do you know what they’re looking for, or how much time you have?”

“No.”

He chuckled. “I love those kinds of assignments.” I didn’t miss the sarcasm in his voice. “Just do me a favor and try to take the scientist seriously. I can assure you he’s not busywork. And whatever intelligence you do uncover on him will be used later in an actual mission. Something you discover could save an Unseen’s life.”

From my cursory glance, my target just didn’t strike me as the type of chemist who was secretly gassing people with his creations in some creepy dugout in the woods. I felt certain that he wasn’t a threat. “Like what? What could I possibly dig up on this guy that would be that life changing?”

“I don’t know.” He sighed, clearly searching his mind for a good example. “Oh, I know. What if he has a nervous tic? He scratches his eyebrow when he’s nervous or something like that. You put that tiny detail in your report, and if the person assigned to him sees him doing it, he or she might know the guy’s onto them.”

“That’s a bit of a stretch. Anyway, how am I supposed to find out he has a nervous tic without meeting him? I’m not even being asked to go out into the field for this one.”

“That’s just an example. Everything you find out about the guy will be important. Sometimes, you never know how the details are going to add up until it’s too late. Hindsight is a terribly clear picture.”

His eyes pleaded with me, and the depth of his concern gave me pause. A tiny voice at the back of my mind said,
Maybe the scientist
is
dangerous.
But I dismissed it. As far as I could tell, sending someone after him would be a waste of our resources, so anything I put in my report wouldn’t ever be implemented in a real mission anyway.

“Hey,” Owen called out to me before I walked out of his workroom. “Good luck! And congrats on your first assignment.”

His tone seemed sincere enough, so I nodded. “Thanks.” It hadn’t occurred to me to be excited about my first assignment. It meant I was a contributing member of the Unseen. But I didn’t feel like it, since they obviously didn’t want to trust me with anything important. I wanted to be hunting the real bad guys—killers and terrorists, particularly those who were responsible for Maddie’s death—not chasing after some poor scientist who was probably just guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As I walked down the hallway, looking for an unoccupied space, I chewed on everything that had happened recently. I found an office a few doors down from Owen’s, and shut myself inside it before setting the file on the desk in front of the computer screens. Owen seemed adamant that the assignment wasn’t busywork, but of course he would say that. He cared for me, so the last thing he wanted was for me to feel bad.

I should’ve asked him what his first assignment was,
I thought. Maybe they gave unimportant assignments to all the newbies.

The room I settled into was identical to the one I’d just left. Two computer screens and a large, flat-screen television lined one wall, hallway-facing windows lined another, and the other two were covered in dry-erase boards. A long table sat in the center, with chairs on either side so you could spread out as needed. All in all, it wasn’t a bad workspace, if you had to be several floors underground.

Settling in front of the screens, I typed in the scientist’s name to a Google search, just to see what it would spit out at me. It popped out several scholarly papers on the science behind separating chemicals, as well as his credentials at the University of Michigan. Not much else.

As I flipped through his file again, reading the contents more intently, nothing in particular jumped out at me. I thought about going back to David’s office and asking him why they were looking into this guy, maybe get some sort of jumping-off point. But then I remembered this assignment probably wasn’t about the guy. It was about keeping me busy until Tracy figured out what to do with me.

A heavy sigh escaped my lips as I sat back in the desk chair and put my hands behind my head. It was going to be a long week.

By Friday, I hadn’t come up with anything more. Having little else to go on, I’d printed out his papers, and I was trying valiantly to read through them. But I was a musician, not a chemist. The language was all jargon, and I found myself having to look up every other word. It was at once frustrating and tedious.

Most of his papers talked about identifying and separating the specific toxic elements of things like ammonia, trichloro (chloromethyl) silane—which I had to look up. Apparently, its toxicity was pretty intense and it was used to bond silicon and chlorine, or something like that—and a few other compounds that I didn’t learn much about beyond the fact that they were highly toxic if inhaled, and some were extremely flammable.

Then something occurred to me. I pulled up Google again, typing in, “What would happen if you combined ammonia, trichloro (chloromethyl) silane, sulfur pentaflouride, and osmium tetroxide?”

Nothing popped up, except articles defining what the chemicals were and how they were all ridiculously deadly.

Leaning back in my chair, I considered the scientist’s seeming fascination with identifying and isolating the most toxic elements of each of these chemicals. Assuming this was a real job, and not just busywork, what could he do if he managed to successfully combine some of the worst elements from each of these deadly chemicals? Could he create a stable super chemical that would be so horrifyingly deadly, I wouldn’t even expose my worst enemies to it?

I paused for a moment, considering those who were responsible for killing Maddie.
Nothing could be bad enough for them.

A few minutes later, I had his Facebook page pulled up on one of the screens. His last post—a humblebrag about beating the latest Final Fantasy game—was over a month old. The rest of the posts followed a similar theme: a review of the latest Marvel movie or Game of Thrones episode, a few quick words about a comic book he’d read or a game he was playing. He didn’t post frequently, and he never talked about work. His most recent post about the game hadn’t gleaned any comments or likes, and he didn’t have many friends. But was unpopularity enough of a reason to accuse him of terrorism? Staring at his profile pic, I couldn’t repress the thought that he looked like a sitcom nerd. All he needed was tape on the bridge of his glasses and a pocket protector.

No,
I thought as I slammed his file shut. He was harmless.

As I added the papers I’d printed to the file, I hoped this would be the last I saw of Dr. Jeppe.

The following morning, I had a meeting with David to report my findings.

“So, what did you learn about Dr. Jeppe?”

Refraining from the urge to roll my eyes proved quite difficult. “That he’s fascinated with highly toxic chemicals.”

“And?”

“Not much else to be honest. He has several papers published about separating the particularly toxic elements out of certain chemicals like ammonia.” I picked that one because I wasn’t quite sure how to pronounce the others.

“Isolating only the toxins?” He seemed to think about that for a moment. “And how does that strike you?”

“To be honest, I don’t know. I’m not a chemist, David. I don’t even know what’s possible. I guess there’s a possibility he might be trying to learn how to combine the toxins into a super chemical or something, but I don’t even know if that’s possible for one thing.”

“Is there another thing?”

“Well, I don’t really think he’s that dangerous. Just because he’s chosen a somewhat dangerous career, why should that make him an automatic target? From the looks of his Facebook page, he’s too interested in playing video games in his spare time to be plotting a major terrorist attack.”

“Are you so confident you can judge someone’s character from Facebook?” Although his question seemed accusatory, his tone was genuine, like he really wanted to know how I’d come to my conclusions based on the information available to me.

“No. I suppose not. But he doesn’t exactly have many of the common characteristics of a criminal. Wouldn’t it be a better gamble to use our resources elsewhere? On more of a surefire danger?”

“The atypical ones can be the most deadly. Not because they’re more manipulative or sadistic, but because they’re unexpected.”