Title:  Requiem

Author: Eva Parker

Rating: PG

Disclaimer:  They’re not mine.  You know who they belong to.  Here’s hoping I did it right, anyway.


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  She rested her hand on the door handle.  It was cool against her palm, and the light within the building glowed warm, something to nestle up to.  A man in a smock worked busily inside, making a cup of java that, at the moment, looked like a little slice of heaven.
  With its own, personal guardian angel and more freaking baggage than an airport luggage claim. Why had she come? she asked herself for the hundredth time.  Anyone with sense would’ve turned tail and run.  Actually, anyone with sense would never have risked her hard-won directorship for a quarry she’d stopped hunting many years ago.
   And, she was certain, anyone with half a brain would not be feeling the tempest of emotions that threatened to drown her now.  Her breath caught in her throat.  She leaned against the chill glass door and let the autumn wind whip her brown hair, now streaked with gray, across her face.  She closed her eyes and breathed, trying to return her attention to the outside world rather than her inner self.  And failing miserably, as usual.  She felt like she was thirty-six again.  Hell’s bells, she felt like she was nine.
   She recalled the chain of events that had brought her to this meeting.  Or, rather, the event. 
   The letter.
  She sat in her office, on a brand new, luxurious black leather chair which did nothing for the damned arthritis—you’d think a doctor would have come up with a cure for that by now—but conveyed the kind of power which glowed around the rest of the corporation.  The office had changed a lot in the last fourteen years; the desk was glass and polished steel, in the style of the times, and the console was nothing but a small and wireless module that looked like a dish turned over.  It was a few years ahead of the times; soon every CEO and director in the world would have one.
   There were a few personal touches:  a family photograph sat on the far edge of the desk, where a younger Mr. Parker held a smiling blonde woman around the waist—his second wife—his other hand on the shoulder of his fair-haired and powerful son, his dark-eyed and serious young daughter drawn away, her arms crossed over her chest, the beautiful, ominous Centre façade rising above them.  But she, the daughter, was smiling.  It had been a good day.  A rare moment of love between the Parkers, a rarer moment of intimacy.
   So many years ago.  So many in that photograph dead or dying.  The thought didn’t upset her.  It had been a long time, a half-dozen years, longer, since she’d last looked at that photograph and cried, and even then, those tears had been of catharsis and release.  She’d grown plenty of scars in the right places.
  The second photo on the desk was an even older one.  A beautiful woman clutched her child to her chest, her smile one of pure joy, her sparkling eyes all for her infant daughter.  She looked so much like the serious and clipped daughter in the first picture that it was hard to believe that they were different people—and, she guessed, not so difficult, now that her daughter had made it to fifth decade.  Catherine Parker hadn’t lived that long.  There were smudges on the glass where she’d touched her mother’s face.  A corner was wrinkled and the colors warped, where she’d spilled gun oil on the last day of her search for Jarod, but the picture was salvageable.
   Salvageable.  As she had been, surprisingly, after that day.
   The third and last picture sat on a small table where she kept the gin.  She’d found it convenient to have hard liquor available in this job, and though she’d only dipped into the crystal decanter a few times, they had been times when she really needed it.  Besides, if worse came to worst, she decided, she could always use it to sterilize a gunshot wound.  She rarely looked at the third photograph at all.  It was black-and-white.  It was a photograph of a thirteen-year-old boy in blue Centre scrubs, and it was almost as old as the picture of her mother.
   Oh, and there were the school pictures of Nathan in her top desk drawer.  Her nephew.  The only good thing Lyle had ever created before she shot him with her own gun.  Even then, he hadn’t known about Nate, not until he died.  Parker thought little Nathan had been damned lucky never to meet his father.  She’d known for years, courtesy of the brown-eyed little lab monkey that was the boy in her photo.  One of her first acts in her newfound position was to ship Nate and his mother to Cincinnati, where they would never get involved and her contacts could watch over them discreetly.  Nate would not grow up with this life.
  Though, she guessed, this life wasn’t that sorry of an excuse for one.
   And, of course, there was the polished and rather old-fashioned nametag on her desk.  She’d forgone Director, for the position underneath her name.  All that had been necessary was Tsarina, a small joke that still gave her a thrill.  She also kept a reserve weapon in her bottom desk drawer, with the oil, and the extra clips, and the first aid kit.  A 9mm nickel-plated monstrosity.  She much preferred the Smith and Wesson holstered at the small of her back, but in a crisis, Parker believed, a gun is a gun.
  She thought about none of that now.  Her office was home, and she took it entirely for granted.  What occupied her full attention was the unopened letter in her hand.  Hardly anyone sent letters anymore, which was a shame—the dying postal service had become one of the most secure ways to communicate, because no one paid attention to it anymore. Even the sweeper who’d slipped it across her desk, a round-faced kid called William…or was it Warren?…had stared at it in befuddlement.

She’d known who it was from the moment her eyes alighted on the neat capital letters on the envelope.  Formal, formal, she’d chirruped in her head.  Miss Parker, Director, The Centre, Post Office Box #1672, Blue Cove, Delaware, the envelope read.
   It had been almost fourteen years…
  Fourteen years since the day that had changed her life.  The day she finally had him in her clutches, back to his place in the Centre—and fourteen years since she’d let him go.  Fourteen years since he’d contacted anyone at the Centre, even Sydney.  So long, since anyone had seen him at all.
   Fourteen years during which she’d built a whole life for herself, one that didn’t factor in an experiment running away from the corporation from Hell.
   And then, he sends her a letter.  He knows her title.
   Pretender, experiment, lab rat, fugitive.  Jarod.  Call him what you will, the little bastard always caught up with you eventually.  But even as she thought the words, she couldn’t say them in her head without a touch of playfulness.  That, at least, hadn’t faded.  She’d chased him with a ferocity that stemmed from her life as a Parker and her early, early career as a cleaner.  She’d released him from her life, not to mention the prison of the chase—for both of them—when she was thirty-six. 
She had forgotten him easily enough, in the flurry of work and politics and maneuvering, seeing him only in those rare moments when everything was done and the night was clear, and the windows were open, breathing warm, Blue Cove summer air into her office, and she closed her eyes, and was at peace.  Then, she didn’t feel wounds, didn’t feel the ache or the deep, fluctuating, passionate emotions that had threatened to drown her when she was a young woman.  She just felt content.
She could remember Jarod then.  The sound of his laughter.  The feeling of his small, light hand on her arm, when they were both children.
  How his brown eyes glistened with despair when she’d looked down the barrel of her gun at him for the last time.
  Hell, maybe she’d loved him.  Once.  Maybe she’d even loved him then, when she sighted slow and prepared to shoot him, if it came to that.  Now… she was familiar enough with his mind to call her, in some twisted and bizarre way, a friend.  No, they had never had a moment of companionship after they’d both grown.  Jarod played mind games and she hunted him down, and neither effort had more than a touch of fun in it. They were comrades-at-arms, two strangers who were too tired from the battle to hate each other, to familiar with each other’s psyches to make words much of an issue.
  And that had been more than a dozen years ago.  She wasn’t that woman anymore.  Lyle, Raines, her mother, the ghosts of her past, dead memories, only one of which she remembered with fondness, and none of whom she had nightmares about anymore.  Angelo—sent to a nice, cozy, hometown Centre satellite, if there was such a thing, in Oregon, where the worst sin committed was loosing the paperwork on the way in.  Sydney, noble doctor, trusted friend, living out his last years in his cabin, with Melissa.  She visited them for a week every summer.  Broots’s daughter had gone to medical school, and was now working at one of the world’s top ten research hospitals, right in Dover.  Parker had insisted on paying for it, though Broots certainly made enough money as head of the tech department.
  Her father.  That still hurt; she felt it now in her chest and stomach.  He was dying of Alzheimer’s.   She’d refused the world-class facilities at the Centre for him.  Though Parker had made many changes—beginning with returning all the children, and setting up a renowned adoption center, and ending with cutting the ties with the Triumvirate, a project she was still working on—there was still treachery here.  He was at Debbie’s hospital, guarded twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week by a security team assigned to the purpose.  She’d cried for hours, every week, at his bedside; now there was only waiting, and the thick-headed feeling of grief anticipation.
  Jarod, a ghost himself, just who happened to be living.  Another face she no longer saw in her dreams.
  She didn’t even feel guilty to think it:  her father’s death, a relief as his mind slipped away, was the last threshold.  And then all her memories would be dead.  Her life would be her own.  She would grieve, and then she would be happy.  She would remember fondly, and that was contentment.  To think that once she’d believed, with all her heart and soul, that the only path to happiness was a life without the Centre.  Now, she couldn’t imagine leaving.  She’d finally turned this place into something that was just as much her mother’s as her father’s.  She loved what she’d created, and she was married to this job just as surely as she would have been if it was a living person.
  No more trickery.  No more secrets and lies.  She was vindicated, and freedom was sweet.
  She should just throw the goddamn letter in the trash can and get on with it.
  Parker placed it on her desk.  She stared at the lettering.  She picked it up again, twirled it in her fingers.
  Looked at the trash can.
  Glanced at the stainless steel letter opener that flashed in her pen cup.  A gift for her ten-year anniversary, inscribed with the Centre logo and her name.  A terrible gift, especially in a business world forged on the instantaneous electronic transmission, but then, she’d gotten a matching pen and a mug, too.
  Screw this, she thought.
  She grabbed the letter opener, wrapped her fingers around it, inserted it into the paper, and pulled it gently open.  The sound seemed to echo through her office.  She dropped the opener on her blotter with a clink.  Then, she reached in, pinched the paper with her fingertips, and drew it from its envelope.
  There was the security issue, she thought, but she guessed, too, that she just plain old liked paper letters.  They were a lot more real.  A lot more convincingly human.  Maybe Jarod had remembered that; there were certainly a dozen ways he could have left her a message on Centrenet, the corporation’s internal network, though it was already sprayed with enough electronic graffiti that it would take Broots years—well, at least six months—to clean it all out.
  She was delaying.  Because there was only one reason Jarod would contact her.  And if she read it, she guessed she would have to go.  One more night that she couldn’t visit with her dying father.
Parker lifted the edges of Jarod’s letter.  It was handwritten, too, on a piece of copy paper with a faint corporation watermark.  Part of her wanted to call analysis and have the watermark traced, put the Jarod-team, the no-longer-existent Jarod sweeper team, on alert.  Old habits die hard.
  She closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath in order to gain control of all the emotions that had risen up in her.  Nostalgia, her old wistful companion in still moments.  Yeah, a bit of annoyance, too; the cold bitchiness, she thought with a smile, that had wrought her this job had been dulled, not killed, with her newfound peace.  Must be a natural part of my personality, after all.   
  Maybe even a little anticipation.

After a moment, when she was sure her mind was boss again, she glanced down at his handwriting.  Not different at all, was her first reaction.  And, of course, the words invited her to a meeting.  A small coffee shop she knew in New York City.  Five in the morning…she rolled her eyes.  Don’t tell me he anticipated that I’d be up half the night trying to decide whether to read it.
  In those rare moments in her life when she’d thought about meeting Jarod again, though back then, she’d been sure she never would, she had sworn she had changed completely.  It bothered her, that he could still predict her moods.  For Chrissake, he hadn’t seen her in fourteen years.      She felt like laughing, though it wasn’t that funny.
  She wasn’t going, she decided.  Too much anguish.  To many buried things to dig up.  But the words were empty; she’d made the decision before she opened the letter.  She flipped on her headset, spoke the code that would bring her in touch with the pilot on duty, and tried not to notice that her hands trembled, ever so slightly.  Her mind was on a one-track phrase.  Fourteen years…Fourteen years…Fourteen years.  She felt like a little kid again.
  Now don’t get yourself into anything stupid, Angel.  That’s what Daddy would have said, if he was lucid.  Don’t go running off with your emotions.  You’re a Parker.  Remember what that means.
  She knew she wouldn’t, with the same surety that meant she was going.  But she felt a little dark something sink inside her at the thought.  Maybe regret.  Some things just don’t turn out the way you thought, she told herself.  She wouldn’t feel this way for long.  She never did.  The Parker girl might have gotten caught up in the moment, hot-headed and foolish as she had been, but the Director certainly did not.
  Already drowning, she spoke the code into her headset which would waken the helicopter pilot.

And so she was here, she thought, blinking her eyes as if rising from a dream.  Standing out in the cold, while it threatens to rain, while my past uses his photographic memory to recall that I like my cappuccino with a shot of French vanilla, whipped cream, and chocolate sprinkles. Or had she drunk it black, like the hard-core bitchcake commando she’d fancied herself to be in those early years?  She thought Jarod would probably figure it out, anyway.
  How long are you going to stand out here, Miss Parker, Madame Director?  Afraid of the lab rat, are you?  Afraid of how you might feel? For a long time, she’d used that word scornfully.  Feelings sucked, was her general opinion.
  But the answer was yes.  She was fourteen years beyond lying to herself and calling it courage.  She wiped a stray tear from her cheek, wondering why she was crying at all, ran her fingers through her hair—it was not so difficult to restrain as it had once been—and pulled open the door.    Buck up, bucko.  Remember who you are.
  A blast of heat breathed into her face before the door closed, cutting her off from the strange-tasting air of New York. 
  She searched the empty seats for him, and this time, she spotted him first, eyes hooded, staring at the golden oak floorboards, hand wrapped around a tall latte mug.  Whipped cream, she noticed.  Colored sprinkles.  She stared at his hand a long time before realizing what she was looking for.  Something more than the wear of fourteen years.  What had his life brought him?
  Who was Jarod now?  Not the man she had let go, the man who wore the face of an innocent and abused child.  And someone familiar, all the same.
  And then he was staring at her, his deep brown eyes bright.  An impish smile spread across his face.
  He winked.  “Hello, Miss Parker,” he murmured, a playful lilt in his voice.  “Listen—how do you drink your coffee these days?”
  She felt something stick in her throat for a moment, but she smiled back, though her eyes welled up with tears.  It was a long moment before she spoke  “Jarod,” she choked, trying to put that snappish tone in the name.  “You brought me all the way to New York City to ask me how I wanted my coffee?”
  With the hand that had been resting in his lap, he beckoned her toward the table for two.  She sat down, forgetting the pain in her knees and ass, and leaned close.
  “We can talk about that later,” he informed her.  “You don’t look bad, you know.”
  Neither do you. “Thanks a lot,” she sighed sarcastically.
  His hand came up and rested on hers.  It was warm.  There was no electricity, but she had never put much stock in that kind of BS, anyway.  “Miss Parker…”  He was grinning, eyes full of mischief.
  “What is it, Jarod?”
  “I wanted to ask you…well, I wanted you to go with me to…”
  She turned her head and pursed her lips, an expression that felt so familiar, as she listened to Jarod explain his idea, and something unknotted in her soul.  Outside, raindrops fell fat and heavy onto the street and hissed into drainage vents, a cold and bittersweet accompaniment.

Title:  Requiem II: Ghosts and Strangers

Author:  Eva Parker


Disclaimer: Concepts, characters, scenery, and psychotic corporations from the television show The Pretender are protected trademarks of MTM Television, Pretender Productions, and NBC.  I lay no claim to them; I’m just taking them out for a little spin.  All escaped characters will be returned immediately to the Centre.  All other characters, scenery, etc. belong to me.  Please note that fanfiction is covered under the “Free Use” clause of the copyright law.

Rating:  PG-13


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Wait by Sarah McLachlan

Under a blackened sky
Far beyond the glaring streetlights
Sleeping on empty dreams
The vultures lie in wait
You lay down beside me then
You were with me every waking hour
So close I could feel your breath

Chorus:
When all we wanted was the dream
To have and to hold that precious little thing
Like every generation yields
A newborn hope unjaded by the years

Pressed up against the glass
I found myself wanting sympathy
But to be consumed again
Oh, I know would be the death of me
And there is a love that’s inherently given
A kind of blindness offered to deceive
And in that light of forbidden joy
Oh, I know I won’t receive it

Chorus

You know if I leave you now
It doesn’t mean I love you any less
It’s just the state I’m in
I can’t be good to anyone else like this

Chorus

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   Her gun clattered to the ground, a noise as sure to alert the team as a shot would have been.  The adrenaline pumping through her body made her feel like she was dancing on electrical wire—and reminded her that she’d probably die for this.  This was a stupid risk.  Worst of all, it would make the last half-decade of her life meaningless.
   Jarod was so close she could feel him, a line of warmth down the front of her body.  He stared at her with tired, brown eyes, drowning in sadness, calling up all sorts of strange emotions—guilt—which she didn’t understand and didn’t want to listen to.  Mostly, she decided, she was pissed, because anger was an easy emotion to call up.  Parker had plenty of reserves.
   The furrow between her quarry’s brow showed his confusion at her action.  Good.  Satisfying to know that she could still surprise wonder boy now and then.  She stared at him for a long moment, drinking in his taut form, committing the road map of his soul to memory, because this was the last time she was ever going to see him.  “Get out of here, Jarod.”
   He looked like he might say something.  Thank you, maybe.  And then he was gone, down the hall.
   Something like satisfaction tugged at her shoulders.  Her mother had taken a lot of stupid risks.  Maybe this was good enough to make up for some of the Centre’s sins.  She bent down, picked up her weapon, and tucked it back into its holster.
   Hernandez, the new sweeper, clattered into the small anteroom.  He glanced left and right, searching for the man she’d freed.  He was out of breath.  “I got here as fast as I could…where’d he go?”
   “Flew the coop.”  She said it with no anger and no regret.
   Comprehension dawned on Hernandez’s face.  He was no Einstein—no Jarod—but he was smart enough, for the hired muscle that made up the bulk of a sweeper team.  He formed his face into a suspicious Que?
   “We’re getting out of here,” she ordered.  She tossed him her phone.  “Call the rest of the Jarod team.”  She’d only dispatched a few to this particular area. 
   “What should I tell them?”
   “That they’re going to have to find something else to do.”
   The sweeper’s eyes widened.  He was cute, she’d first noticed when they hired him.  Like a puppy.  Or a kid.  Except most kids didn’t have two confirmed kills.  “But Mr. Parker said—”
   “It’s not my father’s decision.”  She turned around and walked out of the building, toward the black Lincoln, Blue Cove, and home.
   As she walked, her satisfaction evaporated.  She was alone now, as much as ever, and there was a hollow feeling in her soul.  Well, at least one of us won’t have to live with this. This would have ended, she told herself, at one point or another.  She just hoped she’d made the right decision.

A man’s voice reached Miss Parker, his breath warm-cool-warm-cool against her cheek.  “No,” he murmured, a tremble in his voice like a child’s.  “Please…I can’t…”  He’d fallen asleep on the plane, and Parker couldn’t blame him.  It was a long flight from Montreal to the small airport in Moose Jaw;  even Parker, who had never been completely at ease thousands of feet in the air, had nearly drifted off.
   He’d always slept fitfully.  She was just sorry that the last fourteen years of his life hadn’t brought him the release it had brought her.
   Her mind taken from her reminiscing, she looked down at her sleeping comrade.  Funny, how the people from your past always caught up with you at the strangest times.  Had she been braver, she would have covered the trembling hand that lay on his armrest with her own.  But she didn’t know how to act, now.  Jarod was a stranger to her.
   Which brought her back to why the hell she’d agreed to go to Moose Jaw—actually, some secret destination in Hellhole, Canada, north of here.  She could only be here a couple of days at least.  Parker tried to figure out, again, how he’d convinced her to come along.  She had a Centre headquarters to run.
   Actually…she had to unsnap her seatbelt and lift her ass into the air to pull her phone from her suit pants.  In the heat of the moment, she’d almost forgotten to appoint somebody to look after things while she was gone.  An oversight that made her wonder if she belonged in the hospital with Daddy—which was a cruel and terrible joke.  Watching Jarod, a habit she hadn’t been able to break, was a full-time job.  She flipped open the plastic mouthpiece and checked the battery life.  Fifteen minutes, and this cheapo plastic phone was out of a charge.  She’d have to buy a new one in  Moose Jaw.
   If they carried the disposable cells in Moose Jaw.  Canada still had the lowest population count in the world, and Canadians generally went in for what worked, not what was hot.  Most of the people those wilderness cabins probably still thought of CB radios as a viable communications device.
Sometimes she missed her old phone, which she hadn’t had to toss for years.  But she knew the little secret of these disposables:  they may be only ten bucks each, but they brought in five percent more than their longer-life counterparts of the nineties and the early millennium.  The Centre held the patent.
She spoke the name into the receiver.
  Ring.  Ring.  Ring.  She waited.  It usually took him a while to answer his phone.  He was busy.    “You’ve reached the Centre Tec—”
  “Miss Parker!”  It was seven-fifteen Blue Cove time, and her sweet little hacker was already at work.  His voice was bright.  Broots was one of the few of the old guard who’d chosen to stay on, even when she’d given him the option of fully paid retirement, as she’d given Sydney.  He had been a fiercely loyal friend when they were chasing Jarod together, and it warmed her to hear his voice.  Made her feel like she wasn’t in a parallel universe.  “Will said you left like the sky was about to fall down on us.  How are you!”
  “Still breathing.”  They’d greeted each other like that for years.  Sometimes it seemed like a joke.    Others, a relief.  “And the sky isn’t falling.  At the moment.”
  “Where are you?”
  “Give it up, Broots.”
  “Okay, okay.  Air Canada.  Flight 3459, Montreal to Moose Jaw.”
  Impressive, she was about to interrupt.  She’d bought the ticket under a moniker, but it was one they both knew.  But he beat her to the punch.
  “But there’s nothing in Moose Jaw that would interest the Centre.  There’s another Air Canada flight to Chicago in an hour, and the flight you’re on gets a tank full of gas and goes back east toward Calgary.  If you were going to either of those places, though, you’d tell me, so you know what I think?”  He paused for a minute, and she heard the clicks that meant he was typing into his machine; he had her on speaker phone.  “I think you’re taking the only for-hire plane service in Moose Jaw.  Small.  Private.  And very secret.  Miss Parker—”
  “What?”  She tried to sound annoyed at the intrusion, and couldn’t.
  “Twenty bucks says you’ll pay in cash.  Another twenty says a certain someone is footing your bills.”
   Nosy little…she’d taught him too well.  In the early days, he wouldn’t have dared to check up on her.  Or if he had, he wouldn’t have said anything.  But as head of technology, she’d made it his business to keep an eye on everything.  He didn’t know it, but in her safe she had paper instructions that would ensure that he was made Director if anything happened to her.  She didn’t trust anyone else living more than she trusted Broots except Sydney, and Syd would turn down a directorship.  “You’re good, Broots.  You get a Scooby Snack when I get home.”
  “Thank you, MP, ma’am.”  He was in a jovial mood, now wasn’t he?  “Why did you call me, anyway?  Jarod can take care of everything there, can’t he?  I mean, I’m not bad, Miss Parker, but Jarod can kick my butt in the hacking business any day.”
  She sighed.  Disappointing.  “You got all that information from Jarod?”
  “Of course not.  He just emailed me to say you’d be out for a couple of days, maybe a week…oh.  He didn’t tell you.  Well, I’ve got everything under control here.  I’m letting Keating take your office for now, unless you want me to do it.”  He said the last part quietly, because he would hate her job.  Heaven for Broots was to peck away at his computer all day, and management be damned.  He would do it, if she asked him to, but he’d hold a grudge for days at least.
   “Just check up on Keating.  Make sure he doesn’t get too comfy in that director’s chair.”  Keating was twenty-five, a manager from Centre Corporate, where Parker had had her own unorthodox business education.  He was also too arrogant to realize how naïve and foolish he was, and was a die-hard, power-hungry, slash-and-burn Centre executive.  In the rare conversations she’d had with him, he reminded her of Lyle, albeit not as crazy and more reliable.
   Broots’ relief was palpable.  “Thanks, Miss Parker.  I will.”
  “And occupy that mind of yours with something more interesting than my itinerary.”
  “Any examples?”
  “Find out what they’re doing with our consoles in Australia.  Exactly what they’re doing.  I don’t want what nearly happened with the phones to even get started over there.”

“Okay.  What am I supposed to do with the rest of my day?”
  “Find something, Broots.  Or call Debbie.  Or take the rest of the day off.  I don’t care.”  She hoped he could imagine her rolling her eyes, even though she wasn’t there.  And then she turned off the phone.
   There was still an hour before they reached Moose Jaw.  Months ago, she had thrown a book haphazardly into the travel bag she kept on the chopper reserved for her.  Unfortunately, she thought it was The Saddest Little Valentine, a romance book Jarod had written for her—about her, actually—as a little joke.  She’d have to find her reserve pair of reading glasses, somewhere in the bottom of the bag, to read it, though.  Besides, by the middle of the book, she always got pissed that the beautiful “Tiffany” Parker had more great sex in a day than she’d had in the last twenty years.
  And she wouldn’t give Jarod the satisfaction of learning how dog-eared the pages were.
  She shifted in her chair until she was as comfortable as she was going to get.
  So? she thought at herself, it wasn’t a bad book.  Who cares if Jarod kicks Danielle Steele’s ass? And then, the low hiss of air gliding across the wings lulled her eyelids over her tired gray eyes.
  The plane’s wheels screeched as the 747 bounced onto the runway, jolting her from a cozy nap.  Jarod was watching her as she wiped gunk from her eyes and stretched as well as she could in her seat, her shoulders aching. 
  He was smiling, but he balanced two cups of coffee in his hands.  She could smell a mixture of hazelnut and French vanilla; flying commercially had become more expensive, but a lot more pleasant when they began building cappuccino machines into the airplanes.  As far as she was concerned, the stranger who had once been the bane of her existence was, at the moment, a Godsend.  She reached up sleepily, and Jarod plopped the French vanilla cup into her hand.  It was just warm enough, and good.
She stared at him over the Styrofoam cup.  She was not going to let him lull her into a false sense of intimacy.  “How long have you been watching me sleep?”
  “About twenty minutes.”
  “I want to remind you that I haven’t agreed to that little—”
  The voice of the pilot interrupted her.  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Moose Jaw.  The temperature here is seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit and skies are clear.   I would like to thank the crew of Air Canada Flight 3459 for a successful flight.  For those of you staying with us to Calgary, the crew will be serving refreshments after all other passengers are released.  We ask you to remain seated until the aircraft has come to a complete stop.  Thank you for flying Air Canada.”  The pilot repeated her message in French, and then a member of the flight crew came over the intercom to announce the destinations and gates of the other flights.
  A moment later, they were at the gate.  She unsnapped her seatbelt—and realized with a start that she hadn’t snapped it back on before she slept.  “Jarod—”
  He’d gotten out of his seat on the aisle.  He had a black leather backpack slung over his shoulder.  “The baggage claim is one floor down.  Go out the staff door, take a left.  It’s the only freestanding building.  The sign is hand-lettered.  Dream Flights.” He smirked at her.  “Ask for Ron.  Or Kevin.  They’ll know where to take you.”
  He turned, and she jumped up and grabbed him on the arm.  There was no tenderness to the gesture.     “Where, exactly, do you think you’re going?”
  His expression was bland.  “Away, Director.  Assuming that you’re giving me a choice.”
  “Jarod, you’re not leaving me alone here.  Not if this is some wild goose chase.”
  “I’m sure you can find something to do at my house, Miss Parker, while I take care of a little business.  And I can promise you, you’ll see me again.  I can’t stay away for long.”  His tone was light and a bit too sarcastic for her taste—though she probably couldn’t point fingers.
  He was gone.
  Again.  She didn’t know where he was going or how long he was going to be there.  Frankly, she didn’t care that much.  This was starting to smell like one of his old games.
  And it was pissing her off.
  She grabbed the woven black bag from underneath the seat and wriggled between a girl with nose rings and an old woman with a cane.  Far in front of her, she spotted  gray-at-the-temples, fifty year old Jarod, conversing with a smiling young flight attendant before vanishing out the door.  Good riddance, she thought, and wondered when she’d see him again.
  As she walked down the isle, she tossed the used cell and the half-empty cup into a wastebasket.  She would buy another phone at the little depot, one of the only airport stores in Moose Jaw.  At least she could look forward to her flight.

  Parker had ridden the Centre’s corporate jet many times in fifty years of life.  It was plush and had six rows of seats.  It had a mini-bar, an incredible surround sound system, a small but pleasant bathroom, good food, skilled security, and she could bring her gun.  It beat the hell out of flying commercial.
Somehow, she had expected a private plane to be equally as pleasant, or at least as good as a commercial flight.
  She almost passed out when she saw the three Cessnas in Dream Flights’ small hangar.  Any one of the airplanes could have fit in her office.  Well, diagonally, anyway.  Of course, she had seen private planes before.  She’d just never thought she’d have to get in one.
  Parker was not afraid of heights, not any more than a rational person would be.  Nor was she afraid of being in an airplane crash; that was unlikely, and besides, there were worse ways to die. However, she was, ever so slightly, claustrophobic.
  Ron, who was American but had a rangy Midwestern accent, had let her pick.  Not that there was a difference.  “So you’re Miss Parker,” he’d said when he saw her, and looked her up and down, though not with the sense of appraisal that men his age had once given her.  He stared like he was trying to see if she had guts.  Like she was a man.  Like he didn’t believe his next phrase.  “Jarod says you’re nuts about these things.”
  “Oh, absolutely crazy about them,” she’d replied.
  The damn plane bounced with every change in the wind.  She was just glad she didn’t get airsick.  She clutched the armrest in the copilot’s seat until her knuckles turned white.  Next to her feet was an oxygen tank, just in case.
  One.
  The headset was a little too big.  “How long have you known Jarod?”
  Longer than you have. “We’re old friends.  But I knew him for years,” she answered honestly.
  “What, did you go to school together or something?  Date?”
  “Something like that.  You?”
  “Going on five years now.  He comes down to the hangar once a week for a soda if he’s not flying.  Flies a lot, though.  Sometimes, he pilots the planes himself.  You know, he’s crazy as hell.  Has the freakiest stories.”
  “I can imagine.”

“Smart, though.”  Ron lit a cigarette.  Miss Parker had quit smoking years ago, but now she was dying for a smoke herself.  Good for nerves.  “Nice piece of ass like you musta been…he had to be smart.” 
  “Thanks, Ron.”  These were the kind of people the Centre should be assassinating, if she still permitted assassinations.  Ron wasn’t exactly the best conversationalist.  Or the world’s smartest pilot.  She took a deep breath of the smoke that was clogging this sardine can imitation of an aircraft.  “I don’t think you should be doing that.”
  “What?”
  “There’s oxygen in here.  You know…there could be an explosion...”
  He stared at the burning end of his cigarette.  “Oh.”  He took another drag and glanced out the window.  “I think we’re almost there.”
  “You think?”
  “Damn odometer’s been dead for a month.  But this looks like the place.  Yeah, there’s his roof.” 
Parker glanced out.  All she could see was the tops of trees, a long way down.  Maybe it was one of those places you had to be looking for.
   “Listen—unbuckle your seatbelt,” Ron continued.
  She stared at him.
  “Trust me.”
  She didn’t, but she slid her fingers underneath the release and snapped it open.  Like a car seatbelt, it withdrew into the wall.
  “Now reach behind you and pull those straps over your shoulders.  Buckle it across the front.”  She snapped the plastic buckle together and instinctively pulled down the straps at her sides until they were taut. 
  “What’s this all about?” she said, though she was close to figuring out the answer.  She simply didn’t like it.
  “It’s your parachute.”
  She stared at him, then peeked out the window at the ground.  “You’re kidding.”
  “It’s the only way to get down there.  Unless you take a dogsled.  Or, I guess, a Jeep, but Jarod doesn’t have a Jeep and neither do I.”
  “Well, how the hell does he get to your airport, then!”
  “I think he walks.  It probably takes him three days.  That guy’s more fit than I am.”  She stared at his beer gut.  A lot of people were more fit than Ron Stalwart.  “You probably shouldn’t have a problem with this—I busted my kneecap doing this jump once, but Jarod got it on the first try and he said you were better at parachuting than he is.  Count ten and then let fly.  Tell Jarod I said hi.”
  “Oh, don’t worry, I will.”  She smiled tightly, hoping he understood the threat associated with that promise.
  He winked.  “Have fun, honey.”
  “Bye, bye, Ron.  It’s been an absolute dream.”
  Now she was dying to jump out of the airplane.  At least she wouldn’t have to live with the indignity of him slapping her on the butt as she wrestled open the Cessna’s door and squatted, almost pulled out by the wind, to jump.  She had the feeling that if she was twenty years younger, or even ten, he would have.
  I’m going to kill him, she thought.  Then she took a deep breath and stared at the trees, which looked like moss this far away from her.  One, she counted.  And then she jumped.
   Ron hit the jerry-rigged—Jarod-rigged—button that closed the door.  He stared as his plane drifted away, until her chute snapped open and jolted her back up into the air.  He had to admit, that was kind of fun.  He lit another smoke, banked his plane, and headed back toward his job.  Jarod.  He snorted good-naturedly.  Crazy as hell, the old bastard.  But better with women.

   The note in the kitchen read, Make yourself at home—J. 
   The drop had been hell, but she had to admit, she’d survived, and the log cabin was beautiful, homey.  The floors were all polished, golden wood.  The table, which was in the kitchen/dining room, was small, but Jarod lived alone here.  Everything was neat and glowing as if this were a model home in Architectural Digest. 
   His worn, black leather jacket hung on a peg next to the door.
   Lifting the wrought iron latch had triggered the coffee maker, and as soon as she had a steaming cup—she was a raging caffeine addict—she explored his home, first like a person, and then like a cleaner.
   The living room was cozy, with a thick red throw rug on the floor, a tired, but soft-looking. brown sofa and matching loveseat, a fireplace, a few tables, and enough books to keep someone busy for years.  A large oil painting of a group of white wolves, hunched from falling snow in an evergreen forest, decorated the wall over the couch.
  No TV, but the controls for a MD player were embedded discreetly in the wall, so modern that she’d had trouble figuring out what it was.  The yellow Post-it taped there read, Play me!
   He’d always had a thing for notes.
   Her fingertips brushed PLAY.  It was George Winston’s Plains album, with no funky projections, or altered sounds.  It was one of her favorite MD’s at home.  She remembered what she’d said when the first three-dee music video DVD’s came out.  I want to hear the music.  I don’t want the whole damn band in my house.
   George Winston had always made her want to cry.  Or laugh.  She loved piano music.
   His room was around the corner, past a bathroom and at the end of a small hallway.  Wrought-iron double bed.  A tall and comfortable-looking chair pushed up in the corner, next to the window, which looked out over close trees and a path.  She could see a lake flashing in the distance.  More books.  She scanned some of the titles.  Ender’s Game.  Chasm.  Prisoners of War and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: A Psychological Analysis, by Dr. J. Rueller.  An Overview of Neurosurgery.  Practical Applications of the Quantum Sciences.  Photography in Surveillance.  Criminal and Abnormal Psychology. Some of the titles, she couldn’t even pronounce.  All of them looked read, from science-fiction novels to classics to elevated political analysis.
   One level of his bookshelf was reserved for photographs.
   There was one of Jarod with his elderly parents and younger sister.  They all looked happy.  No one hiding, dour, cutting themselves off like in her photographs of her family.  A second one of his sister, each of her hands on the shoulder of one child.  Jarod had a niece and a nephew.
  One with the other guy she’d seen at Dream Flights, who must’ve been Kevin.  They were grinning, looking for all the world like best buddies out for a good time.
  In the last one, he was standing with Kara and Nathan, Kara’s son and Parker’s nephew.

“Miss Parker.  If you’re playing this tape, it means you’ve found your room.  I hope you like it.  I made a few additions that should make your stay more… homey.  If I’m not there now—if I am, you can just turn off the tape—then I’ll be there shortly.  I just had to pick up some groceries and a few other supplies.  Typing oh-four-seven into your wall console will play Plains in here; typing one will get you to a main menu, for security, entertainment, temperature adjustments, and communications features.  You can have the patent, if you want it.  If you’ve been exploring, like I know you have, then I probably have a few explanations to make.  But don’t worry, Miss Parker.  I would never harm your family or get them involved with the Centre.  Or involved with me.”
   The tape hissed for a moment, then clicked and rewound.
   The guest room was smaller than Jarod’s bedroom, but just as comfortable.  And there were little touches, but they didn’t set her more at ease.  Actually, they made her uncomfortable, not because it was difficult to scan and print a photograph, but because one had to have the original to do so.
   The magazines, lined up on the oak bookshelf, were eerie, too.  All the ones Centre projects had appeared in since she’d taken the directorship, including exclusive periodicals reserved for the kind of extremely private think-tanks like the Centre.  One of them, Connections, showed her and Broots standing together in front of a busy Tech Room on the front cover, with the headline A DECADE OF CHANGE: PARKER’S TENTH YEAR.  Look at us, she thought, smiling.  Victors in the corporate wars.  She remembered that year.   A good one.
   There were brand-new copies of old classics, all the familiar ones she had at home, and a few interesting-looking new ones, too.  A line of Michael Crichton’s, and a few by Dean Koontz.  Even a couple by that new author, Jamie Chains.  She hated science fiction, because she felt like she was living a science-fiction movie half the time, but she loved thrillers, when she had time to read anything at all.
   In the closet were clothes in her size, mostly jeans and sweaters, but a few nice business suits, too.  There was also an anorak and a pair of boots.  Jarod had chosen well.
   She opened the large window and let air breathe into the room.  She sat down on the double bed with the patchwork quilt which took up most of the bedroom, leaned back, and sighed.  She didn’t know how she would greet Jarod whenever he got here, with anger or with gratitude.  Probably with curiosity, mixed with a little annoyance. 
   Right now, Parker was exhausted, and lonely.  Jarod’s home was empty, dead, without anyone inside but her.  She took her new plastic phone from her pocket and spoke Broots’ name, glad she had invested in one of the small PhoneDiscs which held her phone number and saved names from phone to phone.  Ring—click. “You’ve reached the Centre Tech Room.  I’m not here right now, um, you can try to reach me on the computer.  Or you can leave a message.”
   “Broots, it’s me.  I guess you took the day off like I said.  It’s all right, though; this isn’t an emergency.  I just wanted to talk.  Well, say hello to Debbie for me, if you go to the hospital, and my father.  And call me when you get back to work.”  She hung up.
   There were a few other people she could call.  Her father, but he probably wouldn’t remember her voice.  Sydney would certainly be interested in what Jarod’s place looked like after all these years, and he would be glad to hear her voice.  But there was someone else she had the wickedest temptation to call—Kara Depp, the woman whom Lyle had screwed over, but hadn’t killed.  She’d be at work right now, and Nate, if he knew what was good for him, would be at school.  She said the name anyway.  “The Depps.”
   Nate’s childish voice—he was fourteen—was the one on the answering machine.  “You’ve reached the Depps at 894-3093.  We’re not available to come to the phone right now, but leave a message after the beep, and we’ll return your call as soon as possible.”  At first, Kara hadn’t wanted a thing to do with her, or any of Lyle’s family, and Parker couldn’t blame her.  But years had taught them to trust each other, and though Kara and Parker might not be the best of friends, Nate adored her.  She’d told him she was CEO of a big company, which was close enough to the truth.
   She’d also said, quite frankly, when he asked, that his father had been an asshole, which didn’t go over well with Kara, but did go much better than it would’ve with any other mom; Kara had known Lyle.  She didn’t speak.  Suddenly, she didn’t know what to say.  She just hung up, and pondered calling again just to hear her nephew’s innocent voice.  If Jarod had touched him—of course, he wouldn’t, but if he’d told Nate anything about his life, about his aunt, than Parker might well kill him.  She would definitely refuse the scheme he’d outlined to her vaguely in the coffee shop.  And she’d leave.  Even if she had to walk.
   After a while, she slept, the sound of piano music chasing her into darkness.

   A dog chuffed and slobbered on her face.  She blinked and tried to remember where she was.  Jarod’s house.  It was twilight.
   She groaned and rolled over.  A yellow Labrador jumped on her bed, wagging its tail, license tags clinking.  She pushed it away.  “Get out of here.  Shoo,” she mumbled sleepily.  The dog jumped from the bed and dashed out of the room.  Its claws clicked on the wooden floor.  Miss Parker preferred cats. 
   She rolled out of bed and examined herself in the full-length mirror.  Her nice red suit was wrinkled all to hell, and she needed a shower.  Her eyes were still half-lidded with sleep, there was a terrible taste in her mouth, and her hands hurt.  She needed a shower.  She was confused, angry, and a little scared.    It was a crappy way to spend an evening.
   She found a brush and fixed her hair, without bothering to flip it.  Parker thought for a moment, then removed her phone and put it on the bedside table.  It was flashing ONE INTERNET MESSAGE—CLYDE@CENTRENET.COM—SUBJ:  HOW’S BONNIE?
   Parker smiled wearily.  Broots.  Sometimes, he worried about her too much.  She would call him at home.  Later.  Now, she took off her suit and pulled on a pair of jeans, a maroon turtleneck, and a loose-woven black sweater.  She smiled at herself.  Loose the crow’s feet and the smile lines, ditch the gray—she’d look like a college student.  Ha!
  Maybe ten years ago.  She yawned and interlocked her fingers, stretching them high over her head.
  Jarod was clanking around in the kitchen.
Such a pretty little domestic scene.  The kind of thing she’d dreamed about for them when she was eleven, with a couple of little kids running around in the backyard.  But neither of them were destined for the picket fence kind of life.  No children, no marriage… from an evolutionary standpoint, they were complete failures.

There had been times when she longed to have her own children.  But she wasn’t sure she’d make a great mom.  Catherine Parker had been wonderful, but she hadn’t been with her daughter for very long—a perfect example of loving too much.  Parker was her father’s daughter, cool, not too good with kids.  She was no Sydney; she sucked at nurturing.  Even the potted plants in her house died after a couple of months of neglect.
   She put her hair into a pony tail and walked out to find Jarod.
   “Evening.”  He was humming that German folk song… kree kraw, toad’s foot, geese walk barefoot, while he sauteed fish, onions, green peppers, and mushrooms in a saucepan.  Her mouth watered.  She hadn’t eaten anything since the peanuts on the airplane, not really anything since the delicious apple muffin she’d had in New York.
   He’d taught the song to her when they were kids, and now she remembered the words every time she listened to the NPR theme song during the commute to work.  “I see you met Carson.”  The dog was lying behind Jarod in the kitchen, staring up at his master with adoring golden eyes.  His otter tail swished slowly against the wooden floor when his name was mentioned.  “He’s a good dog.  He’s really what I had to go pick up.  I left him with a friend.”
   She’d never figured him for a pet person, but Carson looked happy enough.  She noticed off-white plastic grocery bags on the table.  There was also a very large and heavy-looking bag which read RADIO SHACK.  She wondered how the dog had managed the parachute jump.
   However, there were more pressing issues.  “Jarod, how come there’s a picture of you with my sister and my nephew?”  Though Lyle had never married her, Parker had admitted Kara into the family, anyway.
  Kree kraw, toad’s foot, he hummed, dinner sizzling and emitting a delicious aroma, geese walk “Lay-ter,” he said, filling in the last two syllables.
   “Dammit, Jarod.”  She stomped her foot.  She hated to have to wait, for anything.  “You know, you haven’t changed at all.  It’s going to drive me up the wall staying here tonight.”
   “Oh, I don’t know, Miss Parker.  It’s not so bad.  You can lock the door.  And Carson is good company, if you need someone to talk to.”
   She was not going to tolerate this.  She had been up all night.  She had been dragged to a foreign country, on the whim of an escaped lab rat she’d known fourteen years ago.  She’d been locked in a flying tin can with a jerk-off pilot, and she’d been forced to jump from an airplane to a cabin in the middle of fucking nowhere, where genius boy had been inventing home control panels and writing psychology books and messing around with her family and spying on her.  She was sick and tired of the bullshit.  And she wanted to go home.  “Jarod, if you don’t tell me everything right now, including what the hell you were trying to pull with Kara and Nate, I’m walking out your front door and I’m never coming back, not even if it starts snowing.  Not even if I starve to death.  Screw your stupid plan, Jarod, screw Africa, and most of all, screw you.”
   The dog had gotten to its feet, its hackles raised.  Jarod had frozen, his wooden spoon stuck in their sizzling dinner.  His eyes were burning, and she couldn’t tell if it was from hurt feelings or plain old anger.  The moment hung there, Parker with her hands on her hips, Jarod staring back, a tense expression on his face.  And then it was gone.
   “Easy, Car,” he murmured gently.  He reached down to scratch the yellow dog behind his ears, but she guessed that the comfort was as much for him.
  He scooped the food onto two plates, portions slightly smaller than she was used to, but then, Jarod probably hadn’t cooked for two lately.  A loaf of bread was already on the kitchen table.  Frosted glasses of iced water had been set out for both of them.  “Miss Parker,” he said, after he’d set both plates on the table, kitty-corner from each other.  “I want us to have dinner, okay?  I want a quiet evening without thinking about any of the problems we’re going to have to deal with tomorrow.  I want to know how Sydney’s doing.  I want to ask you about your sister and nephew—I haven’t had a chance to see them in a while.  And I’m very curious about what you’ve been up to for the past fourteen years.  And then we can sit down in my living room, light a fire, make some hot tea—though you’ll probably want a shot of liquor in yours—and discuss what I’ve been up to, to your heart’s content.  Is that all right with you?”  He said it all in a calm tone usually reserved for the mentally unstable, or if you were unsure if the person nearby spoke English properly.  She was trembling with anger, or the release of it.
   Breathe.  “Fine.  Jarod— fine.”
  She drew back the high-backed wooded chair.  It squeaked across the wood floor.  She drew it close, and then she picked up a silver fork and took a bite of her dinner.  The fish was fresh, and the veggies released a warm sweetness as she bit into them.  Her meals were the pop-in-the-microwave kind.  She’d never been much for stove-jockeying.  But Jarod…of course, a Pretender could cook like Julia Child.  A Pretender could be Julia Child.  Still, involuntarily, she released a muffled, “Mmm,” as she chewed.  It didn’t even need salt or pepper.
  Jarod was watching her with a ghost of a smile.  When she swallowed, savoring every last taste, he asked her, “So, anything going on with business that he hasn’t told me?”
  She sipped her water.  Surprisingly, it was exactly appropriate.  Bitingly cold.  Refreshing.  “Who?”
He chuckled.  “Oh, come on.  Don’t tell me you didn’t know.”
  “Know what?” She wracked her brain for some indication of the “he” Jarod was talking about.
Jarod was trying very hard not to laugh.  “You mean…you mean…he didn’t tell you?  I mean, I asked him not to but I’d always thought… he likes you so much…”
  She was giggling, too, now, though she had a feeling she should be irritated.  It felt good.  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d laughed.  “Who are you talking about, Jarod?”
  “Well, Broots.”
  He waited for comprehension to dawn on her face.  His brown eyes were glowing, paler in the light which hung over the kitchen table.
  “Broots?”
  “Wow, he really didn’t say anything.  Parker, do you know that place just off the Centre’s driveway?  Across the street, a half-block down?”
  “Moe’s.”  She still didn’t have a clue what Jarod meant by Broots.  She had lunch at Moe’s once or twice a week.  They had great sandwiches.  The best French fries in Blue Cove, too.
  He took a bite of food and chewed it, messing up his words.  “We meet there on the second Tuesday of every month.  At seven p.m. We’ve been exchanging information for almost ten years…you’re serious…he didn’t tell you anything about it?”  Jarod swallowed and lifted his eyebrows at her.
  That little shit.  Now she’d have to kick his ass when she got back.  Clyde, shmyde; loyal Broots, best friend and techie extraordinaire, had turned traitor.  But she couldn’t think it with any malice.  It was actually kind of sweet, in a weird sort of way, that he expected Jarod to look after her.
  She'd still have to kick his ass.

Parker took another bite of her dinner and reached out for a warm piece of sourdough.  Underneath the table, Jarod’s dog laid its heavy muzzle on top of her foot.

  She waited until the light left his eyes.  They’d had vanilla ice cream with hot chocolate syrup after dinner, chuckling about their grown-up lives and dodging their worst memories.  It was hard not to dredge up all the things she’d forgotten, with such an integral piece of her past sitting next to her and acting like he’d always acted.  She was sure there were some pretty terrible experiences Jarod didn’t want relive, either.
  “Why do you live here, Jarod?” she asked after a while.  “It’s nice.  Cool vacation house.  But for goodness sake, it’s completely empty here.  There’s nothing to do.  You must be going nuts.”
  He lifted an eyebrow at the word cool, unsure of its usage, probably.  He hadn’t exactly grown up with a thorough knowledge of slang. 
  “I’m hiding.”  His eyes trailed to the large window which let starlight into his kitchen.  He’d tapped the control panel in the wall and dimmed the kitchen lights an hour ago.  He peered at it as if he thought someone might jump up behind it.
  Or shoot through it.
  For a hideaway, this place had pretty lousy security, Miss Parker thought suddenly.  She wished she’d been allowed to bring her Smith and Wesson, but the checking-weapons policy only applied to U.S flights. Canada had very strict anti-gun laws.  Not that that would matter to a criminal.
  “Jarod, I stopped hunting you when I let you out of that house.  I know my father pushed for the search to continue, but you don’t have to worry…”
  “You think the Centre was the only corporation interested?  Or the only organization involved?  You may have been able to stop running from your past, Miss Parker, but mine is still haunting me.  Every day.”  The look on his face now was definitely pain.  Pain and battle-weariness, feelings she’d worn like banners for most of her life.
   She could still read him, if not as well.
  There was only one organization she could think of.  Other groups would be interested, but not as daring, not as cruel.  Nobody had the big brass ones or the money to capture and imprison a fleeing genius like Jarod except her Centre, which had given up, and… “The Triumvirate,” she breathed.   They were still so terrifying, and still had so many eyes and tentacles in the corporation that to whisper them felt like a sin.  There hadn’t been any official contact with them for years.  Parker had likened the atrocities they committed to those of concentration camps.  The Triumvirate.  Bigger than international law.  Bigger than the Centre.  Bigger than Jarod.
  His expression was raw.  He stared at the floor.  “Mostly,” he murmured.  There were still traces of the precocious and abused boy in him.
  “We should go to the living room,” he said.
  After a moment, she nodded carefully.  She felt like she was standing at some kind of precipice, and the wrong move would send her plunging to her death.  Jarod could have asked nearly anything of her now, and she would’ve said yes, her guilt weighing her down.  “All right,” she agreed, gently.    She got to her feet and walked through the open door.  After a moment, without looking behind her, she felt Jarod get up and follow.  She sat down on the couch and watched as he moved across the room, slowly, as if carrying a great weight on his shoulders.
  Jarod sighed heavily, and sat on the loveseat, within touching distance.  He turned away from her and pressed his thumb against what was ostensibly a wrought iron keyhole in the drawer of an oak side table, the kind of drawer most people kept coasters with wry comments on them and old copies of Reader’s Digest in. It beeped, and when he lifted his hand, a small light glowed green from within.    It made her want to retract her earlier thought about security.  This place was wired pretty creatively, and Jarod had a lot of time on his hands here…no telling what he could have worked into this place.
  Like drawers that had thumb scanners.
  He pulled open the drawer, lifted a thin manila file folder from it, and closed it.  “We can save this until tomorrow.  Maybe you should get some sleep.”  He thought for a moment, resting his hand on top of the file.  “Because you are never going to sleep the same again after seeing what’s in here.”
  He should know what he could do with his sleep.  She couldn’t wait.  Not anymore.  His words had only strengthened her curiosity, and her determination to get to the bottom of this before she returned to her job and her life.  She almost snatched the file from him, but something in Jarod’s tense form and seriousness stopped her.  This man, this portion of his personality, was different from any part of Jarod she’d seen before.
  “At the Triumvirate facility in Africa, Miss Parker, there are approximately one hundred and fifty children.  Stolen from their parents.  Growing up miles from civilization, in dormitories.  Apparently, they all have above-average intelligence.  Gifted children.”  His words dripped with scorn.  He might as well have been talking about himself.  “They live in squalor.  They’ve been harmed.  But worst of all, these children…”  He froze, as if he couldn’t speak.  There were no words for that kind of evil.
One hundred and fifty children.  Prisoners.  They’ve been harmed. Parker felt sick with horror, dizzy with anger.  Violated.  She’d worked so hard, to end the presence of children at the Centre, Jarod’s legacy… and they were still committing atrocities.
  Jarod had comforted her in the coffee shop that morning—had it only been that morning?—now, she did what she never expected she’d do.  She rested a manicured hand on top of Jarod’s, feeling a flood of warmth that came from contact with another human being as much as Jarod’s slightly-higher-than-normal temperature.
  Jarod jumped like he’d been shot.  But he didn’t pull away, and it was enough of a prompt for him to go on.  “These children…they’ve been brainwashed, by someone we both knew a long time ago.  They’re sociopaths.  All of them.  I’ve seen these children, Miss Parker.  I took the photographs in this file.  And their eyes… Maybe, some of the younger ones can be deprogrammed, if we can get them out.  But the reason I invited you here was because you know the man in these pictures.  You, as well as anyone.”
  With his spare hand, he reached across his chest and held out the file, daring her to take it.  I had the guts to look at these, Miss Parker.  Do you?  They’d competed when they were eleven, with Syd’s medical textbooks of human brains and eyes and mottled livers, and somehow, this had the feel of the same kind of game, taken to a new, morbid level.
  When she lifted her hand from his to take it, he turned away.  He didn’t want to see what these pictures would do to her.  He clicked his tongue, calling Carson to him in a shaky voice. 
  He really loves the goddamn dog.
  She took a breath and opened the file.

The pictures were black and white glossies, and they were all close shots.  They looked like they’d been taken by a pro.
  Suddenly, her heart throbbed in her ears, and her hands began to tremble violently.  She felt a touch of vertigo.  No…
  He was older than she remembered.  Like her, he was going gray.  Like her, he bore the lines and scars associated with the wear and tear of fourteen years—actually, thirteen, since she’d last seen him.  His eyes seemed dimmer, but maybe that was just the photography.  In some of the photographs, he wore stylish, oval-shaped, wire-rimmed glasses.
  In some shots, he pointed, his face harsh as he directed a dead-eyed, stoic-faced child.  In others he stood laughing, suave, with a group of black men.  He dressed the same.  He looked, essentially, the same.
  It was the man who had been introduced to her as Mr. Lyle.  Her brother.  The father of her nephew, the man who’d screwed Kara and dumped her like she was nothing, had left her pregnant and alone with the ashes of a too-young marriage to someone who wasn’t Lyle.  Assassin.  Murderer.  The Triumvirate’s whipping boy. 
  The man Parker had shot to death on the Centre’s roof one year after she’d been made director.  She’d done a public service, and yet, she’d still borne that guilt every day for thirteen years.  She’d cried for the tainting of her soul and the grief of her father at his funeral.  She’d accepted that evil as part of herself, and gotten over it, and had also sworn that she would never kill anyone again.  She carried a gun because it was an excellent threat, but since that day with Lyle, she’d never even pulled off a shot except on the range, and then every one jolted her body with emotion.
  “Jarod, no,” she whispered, the words choking in her throat.  “I killed this man.  I shot his face off.”
  “Did you see him die?” Jarod didn’t turn to look at her.  “Miss Parker?”
  “I—It was the roof.  He fell from the roof.  But I saw the body.”
  “You saw a blond man of medium build…”
  “…with no face.  Holy hell, Jarod.”  She was trembling so violently that she was afraid she might pass out.  Lyle had been a serial killer.  He preyed on Oriental women.  He was supposed to be a ghost.  He was supposed to torture her for the rest of her life in dreams and never touch anyone else ever again.  And they had given him children.  It took her a long moment to understand all the implications.
  Her first thought was that she was going to have to get Nate out of Cincinnati.
  Her second…what was Lyle doing with those kids?
  Jarod answered her as if she’d spoken the words.  “He’s turning them into his own, private army.”  He stared.  His expression was painful to look at.  Their pleasant meal seemed worlds away.  His eyes were drowning in despair, and he stared at her like she could draw him out.  He didn’t just need her to go to Africa to get the kids and stop Lyle, she realized.  He needed someone to pull him out of the hole when he needed it.  Someone to lean on.  She wondered if his simulations had somehow taken a part in this.
  Jarod had taken these shots himself, she remembered.
  If I’d taken these pictures, I’d want to live out the rest of my life in a cozy, quiet place in BFE, Canada, too.  She didn’t want to go.  She didn’t know if she was up to going.  This kind of business, which she’d thought was done with when she cleaned out the Centre years and years ago, was the sort of thing quiet middle-aged women, even tough and healthy ones, didn’t do.
  But it all came down to who had the guts, and she had them.  She knew she did.  She would have to go back to the Centre and explain things to Broots, get him started on the hacking end, ensure that everything was in order if she didn’t return.  She would have to find some way to get her hands on a bigger gun.  She would have to put Sydney and his family, and Kara, and Nathan, and Debbie, and her father, out of Lyle’s reach, and do the same for Jarod’s family if he couldn’t do it himself.
  “Parker,” Jarod croaked,  “will you come with me?”
  She wiped the tears from her cheeks, though more flowed to replace them.  She tried to wink.  She’d be on risky emotional ground for the next few days.  When she spoke, however, her voice was strong.  “Lock and load, Jarod.  Let’s go to Africa.”
  He struggled to smile, his curiosity betraying his desperation.  “What the hell does that mean?”
  She very nearly laughed.
  When she glanced back at the images her brother’s face, though, her confidence waned.  It stung to think that this might be the last, best memory of her life.  She closed the folder almost reverently.  If this was going to be the last week or month of her life, then she was going to take the longest, most luxurious hot shower she possibly could.  And then she was going to take two Tylenol P.M.’s from her duffel, come back here, and look at these pictures until she could see them without wanting to vomit, or until she fell asleep.
  Whichever came first.

Title: Requiem III: Sacred Ground

Author: Eva Parker


Disclaimer:  Concepts, characters, scenery, and psychotic corporations from the television show The Pretender are protected trademarks of MTM Television, Pretender Productions, and NBC.  I lay no claim to them; I’m just taking them out for a little spin.  All escaped characters will be returned immediately to the Centre.  All other characters, scenery, etc. belong to me.  Please note that fanfiction is covered under the “Free Use” clause of the copyright law.


---

  It was the last morning of the last day at Jarod’s house in the wilderness, and Parker was glad.  She’d been on edge since she’d seen his file, barely able to sleep, pacing his small cabin.
She wanted to go.  Now.  She had waited a week while Jarod prepared—something, she guessed, that at one point she could never have managed.  But during that week she had tried to stuff down her anxiety, ignore it, endure it only as a tangential problem, and now it threatened to explode inside of her.   She was decent at managing matters of some delicacy.  She could never have risen to this position of she wasn’t.  But this was different.  This involved the Parker family.  Their continued existence, in all their twisted and bizarre glory.
   Her father was dying.  She had often, in some strange way, hoped for the closure of that telephone call or alarm of a heart monitor.  But at the same time, she couldn’t let him go.  It hurt her to think of him dying without understanding or dignity, two things a terrible disease they could not yet cure had stolen from both of them.  And it terrified her to think that Lyle’s face was quite possibly the very last thing their father might see before…
   There was a small chance that after his initial frustration, Lyle had forgotten Jarod even existed.  Jarod certainly hadn’t gone out of his way to make himself noticeable.  But Miss Parker had made herself a thorn in the Triumvirate’s side ever since she’d shot—and, she’d assumed, killed—her brother.  It was Miss Parker that had cut all the strings, Miss Parker who’d stopped taking orders, Miss Parker who’d told them they could take their representatives and cronies and put them where the sun don’t shine.
   And Lyle had wormed his way back into a job there.  If she knew him, then he was probably running the place by now.  Even if he wasn’t he was in charge of something that was, in Triumvirate parlance, big.
   A psychopath.  A killer.  A man with more than one reason to hate her and, after thirteen years of working for the Triumvirate, more than a dozen to be concerned about his position.  And all he would have to do to kill anyone she was close to was say the word, reach out with a metaphorical hand, and they would die.  For all her efforts, the Triumvirate still had plenty of sway in the Centre.  Enough to put Broots at the most immediate risk, and Sydney close behind.  Of course, he might prefer to reach out to his son and Nate’s mother, Kara.  Or his father.
  To him, she guessed, it would be so much more gratifying to destroy the people who knew most intimately his secrets.
   She sipped her hot black tea and looked out over Jarod’s lake.  The porch was one of those places she felt had been built specifically for her.  It was peaceful, and quiet.  And she could pretend that her hands weren’t trembling, that she wasn’t sickened with fear and doubt, and that she didn’t want to march back inside and tell Jarod to move his little lab rat ass, or she’d kill him.
   Pretending.  What a crock.  Parker had never been that good at masking her emotions.  No; that wasn’t true.  A long time ago, she’d realized she had the best poker face of everyone who worked for the Centre.  She had, after all, learned deceit from her father.  What she wasn’t good at, really, was not feeling her emotions.  Despite her every effort to remain as cool and distanced as…as Daddy, her feelings were as real and overpowering as her mother’s.
   Perhaps it would have been easier if Jarod didn’t try to do everything for her.  It had been presumptuous for him to choose clothing for her, even though she liked what he had chosen.  That, she told herself, made it worse.  She liked everything he had done for her:  her room, the homemade food, the entertainment—and the security.  He had given her a replica of her own weapon, good enough that it felt like part of her hand when she held it.  He had also made a few modifications, along the lines of what she’d been thinking herself.  Anything she wanted, he could get.  Anything she needed, he probably already had.
  For a woman who’d spent every day since her mother was killed taking care of herself, it was absolutely infuriating.  She didn’t have a thing to do, and it was driving her crazy.
   Maybe if she kept thinking about what was wrong with this delightful little journey into Pretenderland, Parker told herself, she wouldn’t have to worry about what Lyle was doing to those kids right now.  She wrapped her hand more tightly around the warm mug with the image of a Labrador on it—interesting, eh, Miss Parker?  I wonder why they make these things. It's kind of funny, don't you think? —brought it to her lips, and let its sweet liquid warmth run down her throat.  She closed her eyes.  The stuff almost, almost beat coffee.
  She swept an errant piece of hair behind her ear.  She was a little hungry, this morning, though she hardly ever ate breakfast.
   She could smile at that.  The world kept turning, whether you were miserable, depressed, grieving, angry, scared, or horrified.  Nature still worked generally the way it was supposed to.  Pump it in, pump it out.  That was life.
   She turned away from Jarod’s sparkling blue lake and the chill outdoors.  Autumn may only have been beginning in Blue Cove, but winter was almost here in Canada.  The screen door slammed behind her.  The calming heat inside Jarod’s house made her skin feel like it was burning.  Parker waited for the feeling to leave her, then picked a bright red apple from the green bowl on the kitchen table.  She preferred the tart taste of the green apples to the sweet Red Delicious.

That was an imperfection.
   There was a clatter from below her.  Jarod.  The room she’d originally had pegged for a pantry was actually a concealment for the small trap door which led to Jarod’s private cellar.
   He kept it locked.  He wasn’t nearly as trusting as he seemed to be.
   “The Granny Smiths are in the fridge,” he shouted, his voice muffled by the wooden floor. 
   Son of a bitch.
   “Stop nurturing, Jarod,” she called back.  She’d said the same thing to Sydney almost twenty years ago.  He hadn’t stopped, either.
   She took a bite of the red apple, just for spite, then threw it into the sink and turned on the disposal.    There was a sucking sound as the apple was chomped away, then a growl as the thing tackled the core.  She turned it off.
   Jarod peeked out from the pantry door.  “Well?”
   She shot him a scathing look, ignoring the excitement that leapt into her chest.  This was it.  They were going now.  “Well what, brain boy?”
   He smiled.  “Are you coming?”
   She fought to keep the dour look on her face.  Of course she was going.  She was already there, practically.  She dumped the tea into the sink and walked into the pantry. He took a graceful step out of the way, so she could walk down.
   “And they say women take longer,” she sniped, and then she trotted down.  She was going to get a look at Jarod’s secret room before they left.
   She stood in awe.  He had built an exact replica of a fully-furnished simlab.  She remembered, because she had been part of a few of his simulations as a child, and they had, of course, utilized the Centre’s simulation laboratory as the headquarters for the Jarod search.  She had selected this area for the new cancer research the Centre was doing, but this…this place was right out of the seventies.
   For a short moment, she forgot her emotions. “Christ, Jarod,” she breathed.  “How long have you been building this place?”  She’d gotten the impression that it was fairly new.
   The question was supposed to be a rhetorical one, but suddenly, he was right behind her, his breath warm on her face as he leaned over her shoulder and spoke in her ear.  “The underground structure was here already.  Part of some kind of population rescue program from the Cold War.  All I really had to do was get some equipment in here.  I built the cabin over it a few years ago, because I could no longer conceal the work I was doing.  And I needed a place to sleep.”
   “This is a bomb shelter?”
   “It was.  Once.  It’s the door on your right.”
   She took a breath of the damp air and walked toward the door Jarod indicated.  Let’s see, she thought, in the old Centre layout, this would lead to…Sydney’s office.  She opened the door.  If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine the bookcases, the small and simple desk, lit dimly by a lamp and covered with mementos of Sydney’s family and his past.  The comfortable sofa which had been one of the last things her mother had seen before…
   Was there something you wanted to talk about, Miss Parker?
   No, thanks.  The last thing my mother did before she killed herself was have a session with you, remember?
   Jarod’s flirtations with Memory Lane, however, left off at the simlab behind her.  He’d felt no need to recreate Sydney’s office, or the structure of the cellar simply hadn’t lent itself to that.  She made her way down the cement-lined hallway, aware of the functional track lighting and the slight, almost imperceptible decline of the floor.  They were traveling further and further underground.  She had no doubts that this place could survive a nuclear blast.
   She wondered if it might have to someday.
   If only to fill the eerie emptiness—and remind herself that she was not alone—she spoke.  “You know, if I were you, Jarod, I’d never want to do a simulation again.”
  “I don’t ever want to do one again.  For the Centre.”
  “But you do them?  In that place?”  Involuntarily, she shivered.  She had many vivid memories of the torturous experiments Jarod had survived in the original simlab.  He had told her about most of them, when they were still friends.  Some, in her training as a cleaner and in her powerful position as Mr. Parker’s daughter, she’d observed herself.
  There was no reply.
  She halted, turned, and looked at him.  The hall was narrow enough that he couldn’t pass around her.  His expression was harsh, almost angry.
  He had been kind, caring, even welcoming to her.  He had made her a place here, a place where she felt safe enough, even if the walls closed around her a bit.  He had not opened up to her in any way, shape, or form.  They were not friends.  They were strangers who had lived in the same house for a week.  Those were boundaries Jarod had set on their new relationship.
   Frankly, she had come to the café in New York, where this whole business had started, expecting, even desiring, something different than chase-and-tease.  She’d had no delusions about being whisked away for a brilliant-hero, ass-kicking-heroine wedding; any romantic feelings she had for Jarod were old and dusty, buried in the annals of her memory and focused on a bright-eyed and innocent eleven-year-old boy.  A child’s fantasies, channeled into a familiarity, an intimacy, which even Miss Parker’s chilly façade couldn’t fake into nothingness.
   She’d been prepared for friendship, even for an unlikely tearful reunion.  She’d been ready for hostility and bitterness, too; Miss Parker wasn’t much for compassion when it came to Jarod, but she could imagine that he had a few things to say to her.  She’d even braced herself for some sort of twisted, “I’ve always loved you,” testimony, which she would have walked away from, first because it was bullshit, and second, because trying to resurrect that mushy-stuff kid relationship would make them both miserable and angry at each other.
   She had not wanted this.  She had come to Jarod looking for a final bit of closure on the last part of her life that had been left hanging.  “Talk to me, Jarod.”
   “Miss Parker—”
   “Talk.”
   His eyes darted away, his expression hurt.  “You want to know, Miss Parker?  Really?  Remember when you used to cry at your mother’s grave?”
   Every year, on the anniversary of her death.  She still went, every year, though she hardly ever cried anymore.  She sighed.  “Yes.”  The word breathed from her mouth, gentle.
  “That’s what this place is to me.  Refuge.  Where I go to remember.  To fix all the things that went wrong.”  He didn’t look at her.  What did psycho-quacks call it?  Dodging?  Distancing?  Make it easy, and call it pain.
   Feel better, now, Parker?  You’ve hurt another person you care about. You can’t escape everything, Jarod.  You can’t just say some magic incantation and fix it.  Some wounds you can’t even heal by undoing the crime.  The words burned in her throat.

He was close, temptingly close.  She could comfort him, like the friends they were trying to be, and he wouldn’t push her away.  She could sense it.  But she made no move, and neither did he.  Jarod was the touchy-feely person, given to spontaneous embraces, reaching out to the people he trusted like touchstones, even as a little boy.
   Miss Parker had never learned to trust as freely.  The gestures of love between her and her father had all been practiced, planned, like they were reading out of a TV script for a show called This is What a Real Family Would Do Now.  In the Parker family, they were all pretenders, liars.
   By pressuring him, she had refused to let Jarod pretend himself out of this pseudo-relationship.  She would not pretend them into it.  Instead, she would remind him that she was the woman who had chased him for five years, who swore to kill him.  Who had shot and, she thought, killed her own brother and walked away.  She turned and continued walking.
   After a moment, she heard Jarod take a slow breath and follow her.
   The hollow ache in her chest clawed at her, less satisfying and more painful than the familiar pain in her knees.  Who’s pretending now?
   They passed by an open door which led into a small, neat office.  There were two filing cabinets pressed up against a wall, another bookcase filled mostly with how-to books, college and graduate school texts, and technical journals.  Quite a few of them were about identity disorders.
  The bottom shelf was stuffed with thin red notebooks, those infuriating gifts he left her at the end of every Pretend he did while they were chasing him.  She had hundreds of them herself, stored away in the old simlab.  There were also newspaper articles tacked to a bulletin board.  She lingered long enough to read a few of them.
   RETIRED MILITARY POLICEMAN SAVES MISSING BOY.  “GUARDIAN ANGEL” LAWER FREES INNOCENT MAN FROM DEATH ROW.  SURGEON REMOVES “IMPOSSIBLE” BRAIN TUMOR—THEN DISAPPEARS.  MYSTERY HACKER CRACKS STOCK FRAUD PLOT  And, more intriguingly, JAROD: THE SEARCH FOR THE VANISHING GOOD SAMARITAN.  There was a black-and-white silhouette of a man’s head and shoulders in the center of the article.  It had a big, white question mark printed over the face.  Jarod had scribbled a mustache and a halo on it.
  The subhead was NBC TO CREATE SHOW BASED ON MYSTERIOUS, REAL-LIFE HERO.
  That almost made her laugh.  They could call it The Pretender.  The only difficulty would be figuring out who the show was actually about.  Ha!  If the program was anything like their lives, it would be a flop.  No one wanted to watch a dozen wounded people hurt each other.  It was bad enough enduring it herself. 
  She hoped the actors would be better.
  Jarod reached around her and closed the door.  “Let’s keep going,” he said.  There was no trace of pain in his voice.
  And then they were at the end of the hall.  The door was surprisingly innocuous, for such a long trek.  It felt like they had walked a mile.  She opened it.  Within were floor-to-ceiling stocks of food, water, equipment.
  Someone could hide for years in a place like this.
There was also a vehicle, under a worn, tan tarp that looked like a refugee from Desert Storm.  Jarod removed it without ceremony.
  It was a vehicle, dwindled by the incredible size of the room, but still a massive specimen of auto mechanics.  She could not have been more surprised if she tried.  Her initial reaction was:  Bastard.  That airplane pilot told me Jarod didn’t have a Jeep.  Her second was: Oh, my God.
  “A Hummer?” she said, cocking an eyebrow.  The machine was covered in mud.  It looked like it had just been in Desert Storm.  Except most of the American vehicles had come back from that war as fresh as when they’d left for it.
  She’d loved Hummers as a teenager.  They were almost as cool as red convertible Corvettes.
  Jarod shrugged.  “At one point or another.”
  She wondered what Jarod could do to a poor innocent Hummer to make it any tougher.  Laser-sight headlights?  “Don’t tell me it spits oil and smoke out the back to halt your pursuers.”
  Jarod winked.  “Only tacks,” he said, but the joke lacked luster.
  He reached into the glove compartment and brought out a silver whistle.  He blew it, and it didn’t make a sound.
  A human-audible sound.
  Carson, Jarod’s dog, emerged from underneath one of the shelves and hopped into the backseat, making a spot for himself between a box of military-issue, freeze-dried meals and another labeled POWDERED MILK.  She also noticed that the Radio Shack bags he’d brought with him to the cabin were there. 
  “Jarod, we are not taking your dog to Africa.”
  “We’re not driving to Africa,” he pointed out.  “And I can’t leave him alone here.”
  What?  Would the dog run out of his thousand pounds of freeze-dried Purina? However, she couldn’t bring herself to speak those words, either.  Something about the way Jarod hopped in the driver’s seat and ruffled the yellow Lab’s short hair, his exaggerated movements and forced jokes, because he was trying very hard to show Miss Parker that her words and her unconcern hadn’t affected him at all.  Carson drew back his black lips and let his tongue hang out in what could only be a doggie smile.
  She got in the seat, beside Jarod, promising herself that she would be driving the next time they stopped.  She hated being a passenger.
  Jarod pressed his thumb to the ignition button, another thumbprint-scanner, she guessed, though that wasn’t too unusual with most new cars.  She noticed that the vehicle didn’t have any switch to turn the car over to auto-drive, which meant they’d have to stay off the major highways that led into the larger cities. 
  That was all right, though; the auto-drive systems had only been implemented in New York, San  Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angles, as a kind of experiment.  They wouldn’t be going through any of those cities, she guessed, and the excision of “features” like auto-drive, On-Star, and Global Positioning would only make the Hummer that much more difficult to track.
  “This is an awfully expensive car to be dragging through the mud.”
  They were going up at a high angle.  She wondered how they could have gotten this low.  Their walk hadn’t been that far, nor the decline that deep.
  “I wouldn’t have bought it if I wasn’t going to use it.  Don’t worry, Miss Parker, we’ll take it through a car wash before we leave Canada.”
  There was only a detached moment, in the garage’s dark exit, for her to wonder where Jarod got all the money to build the cabin, and buy the Hummer, not to mention pay for the equipment and supplies and upgrades of this bizarre underground hideaway.  Certainly, he was capable of playing the stock market, probably with more skill than anyone else alive.  Of course, there were groups that investigated those types of winnings, and not just the SEC.  The Centre, which ran a few projects for the SEC, took a quick look at all the big stock winners, for example.

The only thing she was reasonably sure of was that no money had disappeared from Centre accounts, so unless Jarod had somehow, covertly, put himself on the payroll…of course, with Broots taking care of computer security, that was almost impossible.
  Broots, who’d been feeding Jarod information for years.  She reminded herself to have an independent company come out and investigate computer security, not because she thought her compatriot was selling Centre secrets, but because Jarod was smart enough to pick up on unspoken clues Broots had accidentally left for him.
  Then they passed through an oblong opening so closely that Parker instinctively crouched in her seat.  The moss hanging from the opening brushed against the top of the car.  She glanced back and saw a cave, squat and easy-to-miss.  She wondered how many secret exits Jarod had from his hermit cabin.
  Was the paranoia residual, from his few short years as a fugitive, or were there still enough people gunning for a runaway Pretender to necessitate these kinds of precautions?  She half-expected gunshots to ring out over the forest, or a squad of security men in ghillie suits to jump from the forest floor and salute as Jarod drove by.
  The Hummer bumped and weaved through the forest, finding spaces between trees that were big enough for the car to slither between but so strangely-spaced that no one but Jarod could ever have linked them up in his mind in a long enough pattern to mark a road.  They went up a hill, and she could see the cabin in the distance.  She thought she saw smoke rising from the chimney, even though there was no one there to tend a fire and therefore, no reason for warmth.
  And then it was gone, for good, the house and the way to it forgotten as they took the long way through an unnamed forest to the small and well-kempt city of Moose Jaw.
  It had been a long time since she’d lived the nomadic life.  Her last long car trip had taken her to Cincinnati, to see the woman she called her sister and her fourteen-year-old nephew who had his father’s eyes and smile.  All the ones before that had led, in one roundabout way or another, to a piece of Jarod’s past.
  Jarod reached out and flipped on the radio, turning the band button to ST.
  “—elcome to QRK Radio, “The Quark,” the world’s best satellite radio forum for scientific discussion and those classic oldies from the seventies and eighties.  Shortly we’ll be hearing from Nobel Laureate Dr. Jennie Becket, but first, to warm you up for that cold fusion, here’s Hot Chocolate, with one of my favorite oldies, ‘You Sexy Thing.’”
  To each his own, thought Miss Parker.  Broots listened to QRK, too.  You could find anything these days if you were looking for sat-dat on the radio.  She rolled down the window and let the cold bite her face, glad for the warmth of her anorak, and upset that she hadn’t remembered to collect a few good books before taking a trip into the Jarod-Cave.
  I believe in miracles…
  Carson curled up, heaved a resigned sigh, and went to sleep.
  Bright maple trees whispered their discontent as the Hummer rumbled through the forest, and leaves drifted gently toward the ground.  After a while, Miss Parker let the thrum of the engine lull her eyes closed.  The first snowflakes of the season drifted from the sky and brushed her eyelashes before melting away.
  …where you from, you sexy thing, you sexy thing, you…

They were in Maryland, and Miss Parker had a map spread across the steering wheel, trying to figure out the best way to get through the District of Columbia to Delaware.  The digital clock on the dash read 0539, and they were fast approaching their thirty-third hour on the road.  They’d made great time out of Moose Jaw.
She’d slept longer than she expected, on the first day, waking only for a late lunch at a burger dive about midpoint in the journey, where they’d switched off.  For dinner, they’d had two Cokes from chilled, real glass bottles—which were the best kind—and Publix chicken salad sandwiches.  The rest of their meals had been on the road, sandwiches and chips fumbled from the two rustling brown supermarket bags which were stuffed in the backseat.
Carson had had the leftover chicken salad. 
Despite her intentions and her anxiety, she had relished their time on the road.  They’d rolled down the windows and let the wind fly through the car, pushing her hair away from her face.  They wore sunglasses, and made bad jokes, and listened to the oldies Jarod had never heard, and got to know each other a bit again.  There wasn’t as much positioning, as much cynicism.
So easy, with the yellow lines and the sunrise leading them, to forget the wounds of the past and the risks of the near future.  So difficult, to remember that he was the most infuriating human being alive and that hadn’t really changed.
  Jarod pawned the dog off on Broots, forgoing her phone and making a pay phone call at a gas station.  She had been surprised at the lengths Jarod would go for his pet, but, she guessed, alone in that cabin, far from his newfound family, Carson would start looking like a good pal.  Even Miss Parker shared a few words with the animal, pulling over to let him do his business and murmuring to him while Jarod napped.
  It was like talking to yourself, only less crazy, and it made the drive less lonely.  She wondered if she should look into getting a dog.  “What do you think, Car,” she said, rustling the map at him. “Should we take the interstate, or go through the city and see the monuments?”
   The dog snorted, then went back to sleep.
   “Yeah.  Me, too,” she sighed drowsily.  “Interstate it is.”
  Or perhaps a therapist would be a better choice after all.
  She folded the map and pulled from the side of the road, back out into the relatively nonexistent traffic.   Few people were stupid enough to be driving this late, and those that were, at least, this close to a big city, were drunk or high on something.  Miss Parker was half-asleep herself, and wondered if she should wake Jarod, or settle for fake French Vanilla coffee at a twenty-four hour gas station somewhere, or just muddle through for the next two hours to Blue Cove.
  To home—soon, she’d start seeing familiar landmarks—and bed.  Of course, they wouldn’t be going to the stone-and-wood house which was once the Parker family summer home.  They were going straight to the Centre, where Broots was waiting, where they could order supplies and ensure that there was another private plane waiting discreetly for them in Nairobi, which Jarod would pilot.

Then they’d get a few hours sleep in one of the sweeper barracks on SL-5, buy the supplies they wouldn’t pick up in Africa, and then catch a commercial flight from Dover to Atlanta, Atlanta to New York, and the twenty-three hour flight from New York to Nairobi, under the names Mr. and Mrs. Jamison, a retired couple out to live their thirty-year anniversary fantasy on an incredible African safari, which Jarod had ever-so-intelligently registered the Jamisons for.  They’d buy souvenirs, send postcards, eat at five-star restaurants and stay in the best and stay in most extravagant hotels, too, all of it immortalized on Jarod and Samantha Jamison’s Smart Chip Visa account.
   Miss Parker was just glad that the imaginary Jamisons were reasonably wealthy and not to cautious about throwing away that money.  It meant they would ride first class.  At the moment, she was too tired and too worried to regret that she wouldn’t actually be going on the African safari.
  At the same time, the private jet reserved for the transportation of the Director would bounce around the country a bit, and Miss Parker would conduct some very smart, and very obvious, business deals through her laptop, and maybe even have a few teleconferences, a technology trick carefully arranged by Broots.  In the meantime, Keating, who’d turned out to be a pretty good kid despite his ambitions, would ensure that business at the Centre went on as usual.  The real Jarod and Miss Parker would disappear, for six weeks at best—if Lyle had kept a mediocre hacker on her trail—or two weeks, if there was someone with the same skill level as Broots doing the electronic detective work.
  This, Miss Parker and Jarod had worked out on cell and pay phones during their journey, though she was not surprised to hear that all the pieces for this little shindig, which were from Broots’ and Jarod’s ends, had already fallen into place.  All that was necessary was for Jarod to say the word.
  It was a good plan, and it sounded like an infallible one.  However, Miss Parker knew how easily even the best of plans could be foiled; Jarod himself had proven that, time and time again.  And she was still stuck with the same painful problems: how to get Broots, Sydney, Daddy, Kara, and Nathan to safety.  Oh, and Broots’ daughter, Debbie, too.  Miss Parker had only spoken to the young doctor a few times, first when Debbie was a child—she’d had rescued Debbie from the more…malicious interests in the Centre once—and, infrequently, as an adult. 
   Debbie had made it onto Miss Parker’s short list of people she’d protect because her survival meant something big to Broots, and therefore, something big to Miss Parker.
  Their trip was fraught with danger, and Parker wasn’t undertaking all of that danger herself.  That was the price she paid for allowing herself to care, and make that care obvious to the world.  She’d often told herself that she had learned from her mistake with Jarod:  you try to stop needing a person enough, you stuff down those feelings and hide them and pretend they don’t exist, and eventually, they stop existing.   Eternal love was a sweet story, but unless encouraged, fueled with constant contact and communication, that fire burned out for almost everyone.
  She bit her lip.  She would hightail it to Blue Cove.  She had to find some way to protect her blood and surrogate families, and there were only a few short hours to do it in.  She focused her stinging gray eyes on the yellow line and switched back to her high-beams.

  Morning had dawned, and so had two McBreakfasts, with greasy hash browns and eggs which had evolved from a carton.  Technology certainly hadn’t changed the food service industry very much, except that now you could take the short line and have your meal dispensed in thirty seconds by a talking computer.
  Parker, in the end, had forgone the McBreakfast and made do with a McCoffee, which was plastered with warnings about how the beverage was very hot, and could cause severe scalds if poured on the delicate areas of one’s anatomy.  Though, Miss Parker thought, anyone who didn’t know that was too stupid to read or drink from a cup, anyway.
Jarod, who’d woken from his coma, ate hers.
They were in Blue Cove proper now, and Parker, who was in a giddy and uninhibited mood from lack of sleep and too much caffeine, recognized everything.  Her stomach clenched when she passed the road which would have led her home and turned onto the street which would take her to work.
“You’re quiet, Jarod,” she commented acerbically.  “Feeling nervous?  You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to.”  She cursed herself for not paying attention to what she was saying.  She was being cruel.
“I remember the first time I went down this road,” he murmured, clenching his hand into a fist.  “It was darker.  And I was going the other way.”
“Jarod,” she said, struggling to be comforting, “I gave you your truce fourteen years ago.  I’m giving it to you now, and you can have it when this is all over, if only,” she smiled, “because you’re too damn annoying to chase.  I promise you that a sweeper team isn’t going to swoop onto your souped-up Hummer as soon as we drive through the entrance.  I’m in charge, remember?”
“‘Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly’,” Jarod retorted.  “Maybe I should drive.”
  It has to be frightening, for him to come back after so many years, a more aware part of herself said.  However, even without sleep, those deeper feelings would never come to the surface.  Perhaps they weren’t dead, but they were buried, and it would take more than a shovel to dig them up.  “Take it easy, Jar,” she said instead.  “You wouldn’t remember the way, and it’s only fifteen minutes.”
  Of course, he would remember the way.  It would be etched, larger-than-life, into that clever photographic memory of his.  And, of course, he’d come back here as an adult, twice, once seeking refuge, and a second time, to make a deal with the old-time “family” he’d left behind.  She remembered that day vividly.  He was smiling coolly, teasingly, every sweeper’s gun in the place trained on his head, including, if she recalled correctly, her own. 
  He’d been glib and nonchalant, and though Miss Parker knew, even then, the reason the prisoner always made sarcastic jokes, in movies and in real life—because he was terrified—she had been impressed.  The deal was simple:  her father, who Jarod held hostage, for the young Jarod clone.
  Simpler, in fact, then the plan before them.  She had come away from that particular encounter with a bullet in her back from her own people, a bullet she had taken for her father, another spontaneous risk she’d assumed without thought for someone that she loved.  She’d always thought that was strange, not because she ever would have stood by and watched as her father was killed, but because she’d always though natural survival instincts would always overpower something as human as love.
  What does that mean, Sydney? Jarod had asked that question when they were doing a simulation regarding the positioning of Secret Service personnel in order to protect the President.  It was one of the first simulations she’d been allowed to watch.  Sydney had just told him that any one of those men would willingly get shot, get killed, in order to protect someone he probably hadn’t ever known before.  The questions in his mind were the same ones that lingered in hers, while she struggled to recover in the Centre medical ward.
  The simulation was over; Sydney could help, and he smiled paternally, at his prize project’s naivety.  “It means, Jarod, that rational instinct doesn’t always overpower emotions.  That’s what makes us all human.  Secret Service agents protect the President because they care about him and the greatness that he represents.”

Jarod had seen the parallels right away.  “Like parents for their children?”
  “Yes.  And, sometimes, children for their parents.”
  “Would you do that for me?” His young eyes were hungry for reassurance, for the confirmation that some adult, somewhere, cared about him.
  Sydney paused a long time before answering.  “God forbid I’d ever have to, Jarod, but yes.  Yes, I think I would.”
  Jarod smiled.  “You’ll never have to, Sydney, I promise.”   As if it were in his limited power to promise anything like that.  But for Jarod it didn’t matter.  All that mattered was that Sydney would, if it came right down to it.  He still would today.
  Thinking back, that day, when they made the deal, was one of the last days she had really allowed herself to care about Jarod, to think about him, until now.  To see him again, so suddenly, in the brave and daring position of coming back to the Centre under his own volition, had awakened a compassion in her that was disorienting in its intensity.  If she hadn’t been so concerned about her father, and herself—if she had been Catherine Parker—she would have gone to him that day, before the deal, and told him she would go where he said and do as he asked, until she died.  They could take little Jarod, little J2, and go find the white picket fence and the three car garage, and pretend they were all normal and that there was nothing but love between them.
  Of course it was foolish and suicidal; the young Miss Parker didn’t do feelings any other way.  The course of sensations she had endured that day left her less than able to make a rational decision and drunk on anger and passion.  She ignored those emotions and acted as bitchy as ever.  Maybe Sydney noticed that things were different, but if he had, he didn’t say anything.
  At any rate, it was all torn up and overwhelmed when she was shot, anyway.
  Even if she had been the same woman then that she was now, she would have made the same decisions.  Well, she wasn’t sure she’d get shot for her father again.  It hadn’t been so very long, since then, that his mind had begun to fade.  It would have been a cleaner death for him and a less emotional one for her.
  And she might have kissed Jarod goodbye before forgetting about him.
  She glided the Hummer gently into the parking space next to hers, glad to see the sleek, new red Saturn safe and sound.  She dropped the keys into Jarod’s open hand, then pulled open the door and shuffled into the building, past the security guard—a sweeper named Ashford, who grinned at her and glared at Jarod and the dog, who trailed her.  Ashford wasn’t old enough to remember the days when the Jarod hunt had been a Centre priority.  He would have been twelve, thirteen, when she dispatched with the Jarod matter once and for all, but perhaps Sam had told him about it; he seemed to recognize the Pretender.
  Sam.  Another person whose security she’d have to ensure.  Oh, he was nobody important to her and probably wasn’t a target, but her long-time sweeper and bodyguard deserved to be informed that someone was probably interested in killing his boss, and he might not want to be around when it happened.  She planned to transfer an amount of money into the sweeper working budget anyway, and she would ensure that Sam could have full use of that to find a nice hole to crawl into and a big rock to pull over his head.
  There.  One down, six to go.  Not counting Jarod and herself.
  She was exhausted, and she was bothered with everything.  She made her way across the marble floor, and pressed the T button, for Tower, then punched in her authorization code.  Jarod was fully awake, almost alarmed, drawn up with a pinched look to his face, petting his dog between its shoulder blades, which was something, she’d recently realized, that he did when he was nervous or upset.  She wondered if he was planning to make a run for it.
  Involuntarily, she wondered how far he would get if she called out the sweeper teams on him.      Probably about two feet, on a Tower floor.  Maybe further, if he decided to fight or went through the ventilation system.  Not so very long ago, she would have done it.  Regardless of how she felt about him, Jarod was, had been, a valuable asset.  I mean, right now he’s doing simulations anyway, right?
  Those were feelings she would have to ignore, too.  The old huntress instinct.  She hadn’t chased Jarod for so long that it had become a habit to think about his capture, had she?
  “Here’s my office,” she said brightly, nodding toward the door.  But they passed by it, as good as it would have been to see it again.  The next door down belonged to Broots.  His office was not as large or lush, but it was more homey; you’d think the dad from Leave it to Beaver worked there.
  She rapped lightly on the door with her knuckles.  Jarod hung back, the tense expression melting from his face, though his body was still stiff and alert.
  “Just a second,” came the voice from behind the door.  She smiled and leaned into the retinal scanner.  ‘Just a second’ for Broots was just an hour, or just twenty-four, depending on how deeply involved with cyberspace he actually was.
  There was a quiet click as the door unlocked, and then it slid silently open.  Broots was tapping furiously on his computer—he preferred the keyboard to the voice-command system he’d engineered for her.  He looked tired.
  “Don’t tell me you’ve been in here all night.”  She walked in and surveyed his office, staring out at the familiar view of Blue Cove Woods, and crossed her arms over her chest.  There was always tension here, not between herself and Broots—or even herself and Jarod.  It was the Centre.  It was an ambiance.  A vibe.
  It was comfortable and it felt like home.  She moved here with the same familiarity that Jarod had moved through his cabin.  After all, wasn’t each place a retreat, a haven, in one way or another?  Terrible things had happened here, but Miss Parker had also grown up here.  For her, it was safe.
  For Jarod, she supposed, it was hell all over again.
  “Hi, Miss Parker,” Broots sighed.
  “You didn’t answer my question.”
  “Well, actually, Miss Parker, it wasn’t a question.  More of a statement.”
  “Broots.”
  “It’s not like I could do the kinds of things you two ordered in a couple of hours.  This takes time, and care, if you don’t want people to find you.  Perhaps if Jarod could help me out…” 
Miss Parker turned to look at her longtime friend.  She’d called him idiot and worse before.  Often, he’d been a frustration.  Broots wasn’t the kind of guy that went in guns blazing.  It had made him another person to protect, a hindrance rather than a help when it came to the actual, physical chase.  And he’d never known Jarod, which made it difficult for him to have any powerful feelings to pressure him forward. 
  Parker had her anger, and those unresolved feelings which alternately confused and frustrated her.  Sydney had his “emotional umbilical,” his “unique relationship,” his father-son bond with the wayward Pretender, not to mention his fears that the real world was far too overwhelming for a man raised in captivity and isolation, even if it was resilient and adaptable Jarod he was talking about.

Broots had…well, Broots had Debbie.  And, of course, the career; the Centre paid well, even if the simple act of obtaining a job here then put your life, to one degree or another, at risk. 
  He was smart, and reasonable, and good, in both senses of the word, qualities she had come to value and admire in a treacherous place like the Centre.  He’d been a better friend, and closer to a brother, than Lyle had ever been.  Despite herself, she cared about him then, and gave him hell about it, and she still cared about him now.
  And she still gave him hell.
  He smiled wearily at her.  He looked sharp enough, for pulling an all-nighter.  Probably better than she did. 
  Parker glanced around, looking for Jarod.  He was examining Broots’ only potted plant with scientific concentration, a furrow between his eyebrows.  If they were children, she would have been able to guess what he was doing, what he was thinking, or would have been brave enough to ask him.  “You can do some things with your security,” he murmured.
  “What are you talking about?” This from Parker.  Broots had gone back to work and wasn’t paying attention—at least, not seeming to.  Parker knew that Broots’ ears were some of the best in the Centre.  It was always the invisible employee who heard the most. “As far as I’m concerned, we have better security than the NSA.”
  “The retinal scan isn’t really a recommended security feature.  It serves a theatrical function but other than that…anybody who can obtain a retinal picture, or, for that matter, get you, can get in here.”
  She glanced at Broots, looking for some kind of support.  He was in techno-oblivion.  “I don’t let people take pictures of my retinas,” she stated.
  “Unless they’re overwhelmingly…convincing,” Jarod replied ominously.  “Now, what you could do is set up a keypad code system where the code—twelve-digit numerical—changed, say, every four minutes.  You would hold onto a digital card which displayed the code.”
  Silly.  “Then all they’d have to do was steal the card.”
  “No.  I made a card, once, which was able to pick up minor chemical changes in the bloodstream through the skin.  If it wasn't you, or your heart wasn’t beating—or your adrenaline was too high—the card wouldn’t work.”  
  Why do you care, Jarod?  Want a challenge? What neat trick had he worked out to overcome the card system?
  “How would we work that into our system?”  Broots didn’t look up, and his voice was distant.
  “Well…you’d have to do an overhaul of course…”
  “A total overhaul would take years.”
  There was a light tone in Jarod’s words.  “It’ll give us something to do.”
  “Us?” Miss Parker said.  “Where, exactly, does us fit into the equation?”  Especially, she appended silently, in the context of years?  But neither of the men in her life was listening.  They were firing jargon at a hundred miles an hour.  It was dizzying.
  Whatever.  She had work to do anyway.  She turned and walked out the door, around the corner, into her own office.
  The air tasted familiar.  She took a breath and looked around.  It took a moment for the lights to sense her body heat and turn on.  Us.  Years.  She pursed her lips.  Jarod knew exactly what he was doing, the smart little bastard, but even now she couldn’t think the words without some fondness.  What was wrong with her, anyway?  This was her life.  Her refuge.  And Jarod was—dammit, part of that life, in his own, twisted little way.  She sat down on her black leather swivel chair and cradled the picture of her family.
  I hated you Jarod.  Understand me? I hated you and I still don’t like you very much, though sometimes you use that brilliant mind of yours to trick me into thinking I do…
  But…but part of her had always thought his face was missing in the only photograph of the Parkers that was of value to her which did not include her mother.  It would have clicked, if only because of the brutal irony.  She had loved Jarod once and cared about him still.
  God, she was exhausted.  She could use a drink, too.
  She lifted the headset from its small hangar on the desk and called up Sam’s voice mailbox, left him a cryptic message, transferred half a million into the sweeper expense account.  Though it would be obvious if money from that account was used, it would be quite difficult for even the most skilled computer hacker to determine exactly how it was used, especially if the sum was transferred into cash.
  Broots had made sure of that, and Sam would make sure to transfer it into cash dollars.  You didn’t cling on in the Centre for years and years unless you had at least half a brain. 
  She should go to the little reception parlor that connected to this office and try to get some sleep on the couch.  In just a little over twenty-four hours, they’d be walking right into enemy territory, and she had the sneaking suspicion that she wouldn’t sleep the same or as well as long as she thought that Lyle might be actively hunting her.
  Of course, he was probably already actively hunting her anyway.  She hadn’t exactly concealed her short leave from the Centre to go meet Jarod in New York.  She ran the Centre and was the most powerful person she knew—what reason was there to think she had to?  She hadn’t taken a day off of work since her father had been diagnosed; such an erratic and sudden trip would certainly be a huge red flag for anyone keeping tabs on Director Parker.
  And an even bigger one if they hadn’t been able to discover where she’d gone.  An innocuous business trip might have been ignored.  But dropping off the face of the planet certainly would not.
Stupid, stupid, stupid! And far stupider that the thought hadn’t even occurred to her until now.  She may very well have already gotten all of them killed.  Right now, they could be breaking her security system, or worse, Lyle would just send his armies through; windows shattering, the clatter of gunfire, the horrible noise as people were killed and all the things she’d built were destroyed, all unheard because of the beautiful soundproof structure they’d put in when this place was built.
  Then, they would stomp up the stairs, into the elevators, killing everyone in their way, bang, bang, bang.  The gentle click as a faked retinal scan unlocked her office door, or the sharp crack of an explosives, or the terrible sound of the door simply shattering.  They wouldn’t care about Broots.  He’d be dead before they ever touched her.  But they’d want to kill Jarod in front of her, drag him in kicking and begging and--Bang!  My fault, she’d realize.  And then they’d kill her.

Or they wouldn’t.  No, Lyle would keep her right here, with her influence and her incredible guilt, a silent gun to the head of anyone she cared about.  He would love that, love it, to use her like a puppet.  He’d be laughing and teasing the whole way through.
  “Let’s keep this in the family, shall we, Parker?”
  Click.
  She jumped, gasped, gulped for air.  What the hell had that been?  Okay, okay, Parker, just a dream.  Just a waking nightmare.  Your imagination running away from you.  Your exhaustion getting the better of you.  Just…take…it…easy.
  There.  Her pounding pulse faded, and slowly, she caught her breath.  Everyone’s still breathing, she whispered, so quietly that the sound didn’t even reach her ears.  I haven’t killed Jarod or Broots or anyone.
  Her eyes settled on the photograph of the blue-scrubbed boy, her only picture of Jarod, in it’s hidden little cove on the other side of the office.  His grin, strangely, calmed her heart, until her quiet office felt almost as real as her dream.  Is this what its like for you all the time, Jarod, Pretender?  Feeling other people’s feelings?  Does it ever get away from you like my self-control gets away from me? Oh, the questions I wanted to ask you when I was a little girl.
  She waited until she was sure her voice would be steady, and then she spoke another name into the microphone.  She needed to hear another human voice right now, and there was only one she wanted to hear.  “Kara Depp, please.”
  For security reasons, the Depps number had never been programmed into Miss Parker’s business phone numbers.  It had to be called up each time by the main Centre telephone operator, and it was wiped from the machine as quickly as it had been dialed.  She was not stupid with the Depps the way she was stupid with her own life.  The name could easily be found in the telephone books, of course, but their association with the Centre and the Parker family would never be noted, if she had influence anywhere.   And, of course, when Lyle knew Kara, her name was not Depp.
  There were two, three rings.  Then, “Hi, you’ve reached the Depps…”
  Parker cursed under her breath.
  “Oh God, is that you?”  Kara’s tone was desperate.  She sounded near tears.
  “Kara.  What’s wrong?”
  “Miss Parker…oh, God…Miss Parker, the police are here…Nate…he didn’t come home from school yesterday.  The police…for some reason they think I have something to do with this… I’m being investigated…oh, God….oh, God!”  She was crying now, low, terrified sobs.
  Parker felt dizzy, felt the blood drain from her face.  She wrapped her fingers around the chair's armrests until her knuckles turned white.  “Why didn’t you call me earlier?”  her voice sounded tense, more snappish than she meant. 
  “I didn’t…I didn’t know…”

She didn’t know if Lyle had finally wrested control of the Centre.  She didn’t know if Parker was part of the plan.
  “You have to help us, Miss Parker.  Please.  Do whatever it takes.  And if you’ve seen him, if you’ve talked to him…tell him to give my boy back or I’ll kill him myself.  I'll dig his eyes out with my fingernails.  And this time he’ll stay dead.”  Her tone rang hollow in Miss Parker's ears.
  She would blame Parker.   If not now, then later, when she calmed down.  How could she not?  Miss Parker was supposed to keep them safe, she was supposed to have kept Lyle from them once and for all, thirteen years ago.  Miss Parker had even spoken those words, promised over and over again that Lyle would remain a nightmare and nothing more.  Kara was a smart woman and damned vengeful; if she didn’t have Lyle’s body dumped on her doorstep, this would be the end of any friendship or chance of it they ever had.
  Though that was the least of her worries.  Her own fears aside, the thought of Lyle taking Nate, manipulating him, controlling him…
  “I’ll do everything I can,” Parker breathed.
  Kara hung up so softly that Parker didn’t even hear the click.
  This was how he got to her.  This was how he controlled her.  This was how he would start a game of chase bloodier and more dangerous then any she could possibly conceive.  Not by breaking down doors and dirtying his hands.  By stealing children, taking them from their mothers, daring them to come to Africa and take him back.  A game that was rigged destroy her and Jarod both. 
   And they’d probably still end up dead at the end.
   He could imagine Lyle, touching Nate, embracing him like a father.  They could have caught Jarod that way.  Such a lonely little boy, so desperate to understand; before long he would forget everything Parker had ever said, or dismiss her words as jealous lies.  Growing up, soon enough, just like the old man. 
  She ran through the door, shoved past Jarod and dashed into the luxurious corporate bathroom.  For the first time in many, many years, she was physically sick at the thought of her brother.  And it had nothing to do with her feelings about his murder.
  “Miss Parker!”  Broots shouted after her, only a few steps behind Jarod.  “Are you all right?”
  He followed her, oblivious of the silhouette of a woman in a dress on the bathroom door.
  Alone in the hallway, Jarod—who understood instinctively that Miss Parker needed solitude, time to regroup with the new facts she’d just learned—could only look on forlornly and guess what had happened.

Title:  Requiem IV: Fields of Gold

Author: Eva Parker

Rating: R

Disclaimer: 



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For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
-Matthew 16:26

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.    
-Aristotle
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   It was raining, a gentle wash which trailed down the windows of the small private airplane Jarod had picked up from his Nairobi contact.  Miss Parker pressed her shoulder into the gray cushion of the passenger seat, lying sideways in order to keep her gun from digging into her back.
   And the better to watch Jarod, as he piloted the airplane with unheard of skill.  He glided through bumps which would normally have been jarring, and the rain, far from being frightening, was merely peaceful.  It helped, perhaps, that physical and emotional exhaustion were beginning to overtake her.  She was overcome with too many emotions to c<!-->url up and enjoy the release of sleep—unlike Jarod, her feelings overtook the rational response.  Always had, always would, and they wouldn’t give up just because she was tired of them.
   She watched Jarod’s utterly confident moves through a warm haze, but even now, on the threshold of sleep, there was a cold leaden feeling in her chest.  She would not rest peacefully until Nate was safe.  Until she saw his smiling face and knew he was unharmed.  It was more than fear of his mother’s retribution.  It was just what had to happen.
   Fortunately, Jarod seemed to know instinctively not to fill up the silence between them with chatter.  He never so much as glanced at her; he probably assumed she was asleep, and she could stare freely.
   He was wearing a short-sleeved red shirt, with small black buttons up the front, and black jeans.  His worn black leather jacket was in the back, along with a few choice weapons.  He had suffered no terrible loss of physical strength as he aged, and his biceps still bunched pleasantly as he guided the airplane.  She wondered what about his simulations required him to stay conditioned, but then, she couldn’t throw stones, either.  She was not, perhaps, in her prime physically, but neither had she let it slip.  She could handle herself in a fight as well as anyone.
   They were both overdressed for a safari.
   It was in Nairobi that she had noticed that Jarod had changed as much as he remained the same.  This, Jarod’s business life, was something she had no experience with at all.  There was a quiet dignity in the way he walked, a closed, bastion-of-sanity expression which gave little away and, at the same time, drew people in.  He gave orders to the people handling their equipment as if he was used to it, accustomed to their obedience and comfortable with their obvious respect.
   She had stood at his side like a lieutenant, or, God forbid, a girlfriend, amazed.  What the hell had Jarod been up to?  Who the hell was he, now?  Of course, she hadn’t gone deeply into the details of her own life, either. 
   On the other hand, she hadn’t had a little birdie whispering into her ear about every aspect of Jarod’s doings since he’d disappeared.  Broots had been Jarod’s birdie.  Not so very long ago, she would have been pissed.  She would have kicked Broots’ ass six ways to Sunday.  Now, she didn’t really care.  Oh, Broots would hear a thing or two from her when—if—she came home, but really, she had driven all that anger toward Lyle, toward the rescue.  You couldn’t be worried about the angels at your back when you were off to slay the demon.
   Which was what it all came down to.  Jarod, Mr. Secret Information, was in charge of this escapade, but could she count on him when it came down to the grand finale?
   Parker had practical skills in infiltration, in moving quietly and undetected through a place and, when she was in full business mode, like now, killing every little fucker who stood in her way.  She had no doubts about her ability to pull the trigger when it counted.  It had been years since she had personally shot anyone—had the last person really been Lyle?—but even now, she did the re-qualification every three months just like the FBI.  She could still hit a dime from the hip at a dead run.
   As skilled as Jarod might be at the practical aspects of using a firearm, at calculating the direction and influence of the wind, the range, the kick of the weapon, there was no way to tell if he could really kill someone.  Wound, probably.  But kill?  That wasn’t the Jarod she knew.  But it was the kind of person they were both going to need for this.  Someone who could blow Lyle’s head off without a second thought.
   Or in spite of second thoughts.
   Parker sighed and tried to blink some of the sleep from her eyes.  Every time she closed them, she thought of Nate.  And she thought of Lyle.  What was Lyle doing to him?  Nate was fourteen, and though growing up without a father had put an adult strength into him years too early, for such a loss of innocence, he was still just a child.  Still influenced by the adults around him.

Lyle was a serial killer.  That he preyed on young Chinese women, and not kids was not much comfort, though really, victim preference never changed for killers like Lyle.  Creatures of habit, creatures of routine, all of us.  If he touched a single chestnut hair on Nate’s head, he was a dead man. 
   But Parker knew, perhaps better than anyone else alive except Jarod, exactly how compelling an actor Lyle was.  Even if all Lyle had managed to do was convince Nate of his benevolence before Parker and Jarod rescued him, he would cause pain.  Wellsprings of pain, wounds that time and experience might scar over, but would never quite heal.  Parker had hoped to protect what little remained of her family from the poison of all the early Centre secrets, the most painful of which had—she had believed—died with her baby brother.
   Now, it was all she could do to keep those secrets from killing them all.
   It was a terrible burden, a ripping away from her peaceful, previous life.  Now, even if she personally witnessed the body burned and the ashes scattered, she knew she would always look over her shoulder for him.  She would fear Lyle’s return until her own death.  There were many lives she would rather have lived than one so brutally thrust back into her past.
   She must have made a small sound, because Jarod took one hand off the stick and rested it on the fingertips of her right hand, on top of the armrest.  For a long moment, she did nothing but stare.  If there was anyone the Centre had hurt more than Jarod, she didn’t know.  She wondered, when she’d thought of him, whether that childhood had brought him any happiness all, if he had ever known real tenderness there.      He must have; he had to learn that gesture from somewhere.
   Buried feelings.  Once, when she was a girl younger than Nate was now, that touch would have taken her breath, set an electric shock through her.  She was no longer as capable of calling up passions.  Her emotions were powerful, overwhelming, sometimes, but rarely did one so strong and difficult as passion move her to anything but a defense, if she felt them at all.  Now, she could accept the gesture for what it was, the comfort of a friend.  A man she didn’t understand, a stranger she cared about, but a friend anyway.
   Jarod glanced at her, his dark eyes weighted with something that was neither as simple nor as comfortable as compassion.  She wondered what occupied his thoughts when he was still; she wondered more why that look of pain cut her so suddenly.  It was not her fault he had lost the first half of his life.  It was not her guilt to bear, so why did she feel responsible?
    Gently, ignoring the hurt in his face, she drew her hand away and set it in her lap.
   Who was she kidding?  She had no earthly idea what kind of relationship to expect from Jarod, nor what kind of emotions he was trying to draw from her.  She curled the hand he had just touched into a fist.  She hated confusion.  It was one of her least favorite emotions.
   Jarod’s expression had gone controlled and distant again, his eyes fixed on the horizon.  They would be landing soon, she guessed.  And the plane began to glide toward the ground as if she had cued it.
   Trust.  Trust would be enough for both of them.
---
   Midnight in the garden of evil.
   Miss Parker took light, quiet breaths as she crept through the ventilation ducts on her stomach.  It was five hours later here, so she was wide awake, at least, adrenaline keeping the pain of cuts, scrapes, and aches away.  She’d snagged an elbow on a piece of metal coming in, and it was slowly leaking blood, but it wasn’t a terrible pain; nothing band-aids and Benadryl couldn’t cure.
   Her arms and legs were already aching, though.  Ventilation-duct surveillance was not in her daily regimen of exercise.
   And that’s what this was.  Surveillance and surveillance only.  When they went in for real, they’d have to know their way around.  Broots had managed to hack a diagram of the emergency exits for the Triumvirate facility, and from that, Jarod had managed to create a working map of the children’s camp.  But it wasn’t exactly reliable; there could have been rooms in the design that were never built; there could have been additions or changes from the original design.
   And the map of the ducts themselves would be invaluable when they moved in.
   So even though Parker was armed—to the teeth—she was not to attempt rescues on her own.  Jarod had phrased the order just like that.  Any other time, she would have challenged him. What gave Jarod the right to command anyone?  If anything, Miss Parker should be in charge of this expedition.  She was the one with the practical skills.  That was the reason Jarod had asked her here in the first place.
   Well, the most obvious reason.
   However, she didn’t have the will to argue with anyone at the moment.  If she started in on Jarod, on Broots, who joined them by satellite, she wouldn’t stop.  She would yell at them both until she was out of breath and words.  They had delayed the mission a week for planning and all the while she’d grown more frustrated, felt more useless. 
  Planning time we needed.
   She had been able to contribute, a little.  But Jarod and Broots got into a genius vibe.  They were gone, lost in chemical compounds and plastique explosive, in complex equations and hours of computer hacking.  Both of them slept less than she did.
   She would not tear into them for doing what they did best.  It wasn’t like they left her behind on purpose.  Smarter to direct her frustration toward this, toward what Miss Parker could do and Jarod couldn’t.  Now her hands were untied.  Besides, Jarod was right. 
   This was not a job to do blind and alone.
   So she’d take his orders, and she’d use the surveillance equipment he’d built, and she’d do what had to be done and get her ass out of there.  Unless somebody brought out a screaming, tortured hostage.  Then all bets were off.
   There.  Dim light cast yellowish lines just in front of her.  It was another vent that faced out into a room.  She sidled up to it and pushed the end of one of the devices through the slats.  This was one of Jarod’s special numbers; it estimated the dimensions of a room by bouncing beyond-the-range-of-hearing sounds off the walls.  Echolocation.  Like a bat. 
  There was no way to know whether or not it worked.
  Concentrating on the machine kept her from the full impact of what was in the room.  Low bunk beds, each of them filled with small bodies that made noises, just like any preschool naptime.  There were too many children to count.  And this was the second dormitory.  She closed her eyes and turned away, waiting for the low beep which meant the machine was done.
  She had no idea what the children did during the day.  All the rooms she’d seen so far that weren’t dorms were largely empty and painted with bright colors.  One room was a playroom, with toys and electronic equipment that would make any kid jump for joy.  No simlabs.  No experimental laboratories.  No closets filled with—she shuddered at a sudden memory—formaldehyde bottles.

Nothing to indicate that any child here had been harmed.
   That, she guessed, made it worse.  For some reason, thinking about the small empty rooms with elephant wallpaper or circus posters made her feel physically ill, solidified and channeled her anger.  This was the Triumvirate.  This was Lyle.  It wasn’t exactly Disneyland.  So why the façade?  What in God’s name was going on?
   Low noises echoed in her ears.  Voices.  For a moment she tensed and drew the small black rod away from the vent—but it wasn’t the dormitory.  It was the next room, a few hundred feet away, barely visible from where she was crouched. 
   She tucked the small device back into her pack and pulled herself toward the noise, more careful than ever to keep silent. 
   Moving without noise was a cleaner skill, but when she did it, she always thought of elementary school.  The cafeteria was up a flight of stairs, where the older students’ classrooms were.  It was against the rules to go clomping up and down the stairs, disrespectful to disturb the sixth-graders’ studies.  Marshmallow feet, Miss Kerr would murmur, as they walked back to class.  Pretend you have marshmallows on the bottoms of your shoes.
   Marshmallow feet.
   She held her breath as she moved, until she felt dizzy.
   And she peeked through the vent.
   There was a boy standing just below her; a bit back, so she could see his face.  Not more than four or five.  A perfect little boy, with blond hair and bright blue eyes and skin that almost glowed.
   He was wearing blue shorts, a white T-shirt, and a big nametag that had PATRICK written on in big, easy-to-read letters.  Just as if his mommy had dressed him, kissed him on the cheek before sending him off to school.  Parker had dreamt about having children once.  She’d always wanted boys.
   The only thing that didn’t fit was the fierce expression on his face.  Children didn’t carry that in their eyes.  He had an expression like—like his personal demon was just around the corner, and he was going to fucking kill it when it appeared.  It was finely honed terror.
   It was a recognizable look.  It was an expression Kyle, Jarod’s brother, had held in his eyes even as an adult.  It was something she’d seen on Jarod’s face from time to time, as if he was a little boy again and the monsters were coming to get him.
   Patrick was holding something in his chubby little hand.
   All of a sudden, Parker was drenched in cold sweat.
   “What do you want, Patrick?”  It was the voice she’d heard just moments ago, now discernable.  A quiet voice, utterly without emotion, yet somehow compelling.
   Her brother’s voice.
   Lyle carried the mark of the Centre on his face, too.  He was lucky she couldn’t see his face, that she couldn’t get a shot off at this angle, that even if she could, she would never do it in front of this little boy.  Some things you never recover from.
   Seeing someone’s head blown off when you were four might be one of them.
   So might growing up with Lyle.
   The boy jumped at the sound of Lyle’s voice, stood at attention.  “I want to go to bed, sir.”  The voice was young, but not imprecise.  No stumbles around the r’s, no cutting off the t’s.
   “You want to go to bed.”
   “Yes, Mr. Lyle.”
   “Then do it, and you can go to sleep.”
   “No.”
   Do what? Miss Parker wanted to shout.  Do fucking what, you bastard? Terror was turning into panic.  She should go.  She should move.  She had to move, or she was going to do something they might all regret.  She didn’t want to see what the boy would be required to do.  She had a feeling she knew already.
   “Why not?”
   “I can’t, Mr. Lyle.”
   “I asked you a question.”
   “It’s bad, sir.”
   “It’s not bad.  As a matter of fact, it will be good for you.  This person deserves it.  Now.”
   A long pause.  “Fine.”
   The little boy lifted up his hands.  And now Miss Parker could see for sure what he clutched.
   A gun.  With a laser sight.
   Miss Parker closed her eyes.  She would not run.  Running was for innocent bystanders, and she was neither.  But she couldn’t watch, either.
   Though she listened with her heart and soul, and she felt and heard it with her heart and soul when one, two, six, a clip was emptied into what sounded like a paper target.  She wondered whose face was on it.
   It was a long moment before the ringing in her ears subsided.
   “—at wasn’t so bad, was it, Patrick?  You get cake tomorrow.  Now off to bed.”
   “Of course, sir.”  But as Parker blinked back the flash, she could see the boy tremble as he walked away.
   Son of a bitch.  Son of a bitch.  Parker mouthed the words, trying to calm herself down.  She’d seen kids shoot people before.  She’d seen the video of Kyle, emptying a weapon into a picture of Parker’s mother.  It wasn’t—it wasn’t—
   “Miss Parker?”
   She very nearly screamed at the sound of Jarod’s voice in her ear.  Just the headset.
   She pressed the talk button at her waist.  “Okay,” she choked, then cleared her throat.  “I’m okay,” she whispered.
   “You stopped moving.”  There was anxiety in his voice.
   “I know, I know, sorry, Jarod.  Just—”  She had no words.  She was clutching her own gun now.     She’d pulled it from her holster without thinking, just something to hold on to.  Something to make her feel safe.
   She pressed the cool flat of the barrel against her head and remembered to lift her finger from the radio button.
    Jarod had seen this.  She heard it in the sharp weight of his voice.  He’d been here for things just like this.  He’d seen it and it terrified him and he called her.  First time in fifteen years.  Now she knew why.       “We’ll get them out of there, Miss Parker.”
    Yeah, they would.
    Like the fucking special forces, they’d get them out.  And Lyle would never see it coming.  The question was whether or not things could be rebuilt after that.  
    “I’ll be fine,” she said weakly, and was surprised to discover that it was true.
    “I know,” Jarod said, and then she was alone again. 
   Good.  Parker needed to be quiet; she only wished she could talk with someone, with anyone, touch base with something familiar.  Plenty of time for a nervous breakdown after the rescue.  Plenty of time to bond with Jarod after they’d gotten their pint of blood and pound of flesh.
   Besides, the show wasn’t over.  She hadn’t seen Nate alive and healthy.  He was tough, she thought.  This wouldn’t work for him.  He wasn’t a four-year-old.  Lyle wasn’t making him into a complacent little assassin.  That was what she told herself as she kept moving.

And there was another sound, another young voice she had no trouble recognizing, humming a tune that was deeply connected to another child’s past.
   Kree kraw, toad’s food, geese walk barefoot.
   She smiled.  Jarod had taught Nate his song.  It was comforting to hear.  She remembered Jarod murmuring it while he slid a small screwdriver behind the security panel which protected the Centre’s ventilation system, biting his bottom lip, asking her for wire-cutters, a bolt, rigging the system so they could get up on the roof and look out over the ocean.
   And humming it while he cooked them dinner in his hiding place.
   This was something she had no problem seeing.
   Nate was working at an old laptop computer in a private room, his back to the duct.  How close was Lyle, Parker wondered.  And Nate was obviously wondering, too, because he peeked over his shoulder, flashing his face at Parker.
   He was fine.  No look of fear or even discomfort.  He looked like he was having fun.  And then she saw why.  He popped a floppy out of his computer and made his way to the duct, humming Jarod’s song and glancing furtively around.
   She had to back away quickly, because he reached up and lifted the air duct open.
   His hand was within touching distance as he taped the disc to the side of the air duct.  He would have felt her breath on his hand if she’d been breathing; if he’d reached in the other direction, he would have touched her.
   It took every ounce of her resolve not to call to him.
   And the duct clattered shut.  She pulled herself into the danger zone again, and reached out to peel the disc from its hiding place.
   She angled it toward the light, so she could read the label.
   BUSTING OUT OF ALCATRAZ.
   Parker grinned.
---
   It had been a long and lonely walk back to the camp.  A soul-searching walk.  Had she done it right?     Should she have gotten Nate out right then and there?  She would never forgive herself if he was hurt now.  Not when she’d had the opportunity, and she’d skipped it in favor of backup.
   Cleaners were supposed to work alone.
   She ducked under the wing of the partially-disassembled aircraft which had become their tent and their workspace.  It was hot and cramped inside, so much so that she and Jarod would trip over each other all the time if they could stand.  On the other hand, it was camouflaged and felt safe.
   Safe was good.
   Jarod was leaning against an axel, a hand resting against the computer in his lap, the other on the headset control.
   He was asleep.
   She smiled wearily.  She’d gotten in a full eight hours before the mission, and Jarod and Broots were still awake and working when she suited up and left.  Jarod had barely slept all week. 
   She dropped her backpack and pulled off her headset.  She was recovering already; it was under control.  Mitigated disaster.
   Parker crept over, bent underneath the smooth surface of the wing, and pulled off Jarod’s headset, too.  Then she crouched next to him, too exhausted to do anything else, too keyed up to sleep.
   There was only a moment of indecision before she took one of Jarod’s limp hands and curled it around her own.  Say what she would about emotional shock; it certainly made her more daring.  At least in some ways.
   Jarod stirred and blinked unseeing, sleepy eyes at her.  He lifted his eyebrows in a silent question.
   “I’m okay,” she said, without hesitation.
   And he slept again, as if nothing had happened.
   Miss Parker reached behind with her other hand and pulled out her gun, letting it rest in her lap, finger against the trigger guard.  She would keep watch tonight.  Let Jarod get a little sleep for once; she would pick up the pieces of her part of the mission.  She would expect to see things like that again and it would not disturb or dissuade her, she decided.
   In a few hours, it would all be over.
   Until then, the monsters under the bed would have to go through her.