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Chapter or Story 
Chapter or Story
Part 2
Shannon
Shannon heard a noise and tensed, cursing silently as pain flashed up her left arm. Turning her head in the direction of the door, she saw the handle gradually begin to go down and slid her hand under her pillow, where her gun lay. The cautiousness of the motion gave her the idea that it wasn’t Cici coming to check on her, so she was wary. The sun was starting to rise and she knew she would get a clear shot at the intruder in the limited light that shone around the thick curtains hanging over her window.
“Who is it?” she asked sharply, her voice covering the sound of her releasing the safety.
“Me, Josh,” a voice muttered, and she breathed a sigh of relief, securing the gun and replacing it under the pillow as he opened the door.
“You shouldn’t do that,” she scolded gently. “You know I have weapons in here. One day I might shoot you.”
The boy sniffed and rubbed a hand over his nose as he nodded. Shannon held out her uninjured arm and he crossed the room, sinking down onto the floor beside the bed and taking her hand in both of his.
“Are you okay?” he asked in a muffled voice, and she released his hold to smooth his hair.
“Have you been worrying about me, Josh?” she asked gently, seeing him nod reluctantly. “It’s just a flesh wound, baby,” she promised. “I’ll be all right.”
His brown eyes suddenly filled as he looked up. “I only wanted to help,” he sobbed. “I didn’t want to put you in danger, but I thought maybe I could do something.”
Shannon pulled him up gently onto the bed, wriggling over so that he had room to sit and easing down his head so that she could kiss it. His arms wrapped around her neck and his head rested against her chest as she hugged him, his body still shaking with sobs and his white face gleaming in the dimly lit room.
“It’s okay, Josh,” she soothed, feeling his tears soak the front of her t-shirt. “Really, it is. You just wanted to play a part in this one. I realize that. I’m sorry I got mad before, but I was worried about you, and about all of us.”
Joshua snuggled closer to her, sniffing back his tears and nodding.
“I know it’s hard,” she continued. “You’re a lot more mature than other kids your age and I cut you more slack than your friends, so it’s confusing to know what you can do and what’s beyond you. I’m sorry for that, sending out those confusing signals. But it’ll get easier, baby, I promise. As you get older, it all makes more sense.”
“What would’ve happened if you hadn’t come back?” he asked piteously, hiccoughing. “I know about the gun an’ all, an’ how dangerous the Centre is. What would have happened to me?”
She sighed deeply, realizing suddenly how much she had to do for this boy, thinking that the past nine months hadn’t even touched on it. “We never managed to talk about that, did we?” She kissed his hair. “Sit up, sweetie, and we’ll talk about it now.”
He struggled into a sitting position, picking up the pillows from the floor and tucking one of them in behind his back while Shannon piled the others behind her, eventually settling back against them, the sling holding her arm in position. The boy took her other hand, holding it firmly in his lap.
“Things are a little different now that Jarod's here,” she began gently. “Before, it would have been up to you, whether you wanted to go and live with Nat, or maybe Cici, or even the Boss. It would have been a decision you could have made over time, like you did with me.”
Joshua scrubbed his eyes with the tissue she had pushed into his hand. “How come you got me?”
“Because I had more time than the others to spend with you, and because the assignments I got weren’t as dangerous as theirs. There was always less chance that things would go wrong, and we all felt that it was important for your life to become as stable as it could be.”
“So how come it’s different now?” he demanded. “What does Jarod have to do with it?”
She released her hand from his hold and smoothed his ruffled hair. “Remember we talked about the cloning technology and where you came from?”
He nodded reluctantly, and she could still remember the difficulty that conversation had been for them.
“Because of that, your connection with Jarod is stronger than with me. He has more right to say what he wants you to do than I do. Of course, he probably won’t be in a position to make those sorts of decisions right away. It’ll take time before he’s ready to do that. But once he is, I’ll have to step aside and let him do it.”
“He might take me away,” the boy wailed dismally, dissolving into tears again.
“Yes, he might,” Shannon agreed softly. “And if he does, we’ll talk to him and work out if that’s the right thing to do. And you never know, you might like being with him better. Remember all those problems we had when you first came?”
“Uh huh.” He wiped his nose on the tissues. “But you know me now, and you get how I think.”
“And for all we know, Jarod might get how you think too. After all, you’ve had similar experiences. I was at the Centre, sure, but the sims I did were different from yours, as was the environment in which I was trained.”
His face still bore a worried expression and she pulled the eleven-year-old boy into her arms for another kiss. “Josh, I want you to stay, if that’s what you want,” she murmured in his ear. “And it’s not something we need to think about yet. Jarod will still be here for a while. It’s going to take time for him to get used to the outside world. And you never know, he might decide to stay.”
“I hope so,” Joshua stated fervently, wrapping his arms around her waist.
“I do, too, baby.” She brushed his hair back from his forehead, kissing it again. “Now, will you go back to bed for a bit? It’s still pretty early.”
“’Kay.” He sniffed, wiping his nose with the sleeve of his pajama top and scrambling off the bed. “Are you getting up yet?”
“No, not yet,” she told him. “I’m still a little drained after last night. I want to see if I can get some more sleep.”
“Uh huh.” He turned to the door, but then looked back shyly. “I love you, Shannon.”
“I love you, too, Joshua,” she responded gently. “You’re a very special kid, and I’m so glad you’re here with me.”
He shot her a watery smile and then bolted for his room. She could hear the door slamming and heaved a sigh as she pulled out most of the pillows from behind her head and settled back on the remainder to try to sleep again.
Jarod
Jarod heard muffled chattering from somewhere nearby and tensed as he opened his eyes to find himself in a totally unknown environment. His eyes wandered around the room in which he was lying, seeing that he was still dressed in his familiar black attire, as he pulled himself into a sitting position. A blond-haired woman seated on a chair in the corner immediately rose to her feet and approached the bed.
“Good morning, Jarod,” she greeted him gently. “My name’s Cecilia. How are you feeling?”
He opened and closed his mouth several times without sound and she smiled.
“It’s all right,” she assured him. “I know how you feel. We’ve all found ourselves in your situation. There’s a glass of water on the table beside your bed, if you want something to drink, and I’ll get you something to eat.”
She walked with light steps to the door as Jarod looked more closely around the room, struggling to understand what this situation was. He had a hazy recollection of Sydney leaving and an Italian woman giving him an injection of something, wondering now if this was a dream as a result of the contents of that syringe. A bruise was visible on the back of his hand and he wonderingly touched it, feeling a slight pain from it.
When the woman opened the door again, the muffled voices he had heard before became briefly louder and he tried to look past her, out into the hallway, but she closed the door again.
“Where am I?” he demanded. “Is this the Centre?”
“No,” she told him, placing the tray down on a table and picking up several pillows from the floor, tucking them in behind his back. “You’re about three hours’ drive away from the Centre. Two of our people got you out of there last night.”
He shot her a sharp glance as she placed a tray on his knees. “What do you mean, ‘our people’?”
“Eat your breakfast first,” she suggested, “and then all will be revealed.”
“I’m not hungry,” he retorted, pushing it away, despite feeling curious at the appearance of the objects in the bowl with which he had been presented.
“Well, I have to check on someone, so you can either eat it or go hungry,” she told him, grinning. “Your choice, Jarod.”
Before he could ask how she knew his name, she picked up a case from the table and left the room. The door remained open and, after a moment, he heard a groan and, at the same time, a giggle.
“You’re a terrible patient,” Cecilia announced, and another female voice laughed again.
“You said I had to go to bed,” the other woman replied. “You never said I had to stay there.”
“Sit!” Cecilia snapped. “Or that hole in your arm’s going to start bleeding again.”
“Put something waterproof over it, so I can shower and get this fake color off,” the second voice stated. “I want to see myself when I look in the mirror, not some stranger.”
Jarod heard a soft growling and suddenly realized it was coming from his own stomach. Without thinking, he drew the tray back towards him and began to eat the contents of the bowl, stopping after the first mouthful, stunned by the sugary taste. Eagerly, he ate another, delighted by the sweetness, even as a soft hiss from nearby suggested that a shower was being turned on.
A muffled “ow” reached him through the wall, and then a laugh. “Well, if you’re stupid enough to use your arm when I told you not to, what do you expect?”
“You’re a bully, Cici,” the other female voice wailed. “Go away and let me hurt myself in peace.”
“Pieces, you mean,” Cecilia responded. “Keep using that arm and it’ll fall off.”
A shriek pierced the walls, and a moment later Cecilia reappeared in the doorway of his room, her hair wet, and giggling. Her eyes traveled immediately to the empty bowl, but she refrained from commenting, simply returning the tray to the table.
“What was that about?” Jarod asked curiously.
“Just a bit of nonsense,” she told him airily, suddenly smiling warmly at him. “You’ll find that some people outside the Centre are like that. Others are very serious.”
“How do you know so much about the Centre?” he asked suspiciously.
“I was there.” She pulled up a chair beside the bed and sat down. “Maybe you don’t remember me, Jarod, but I worked in the infirmary. I treated you a couple of times, after sims went wrong, but you were pretty young then, so you might have forgotten.”
Jarod looked at the woman closely and saw small lines around her eyes that betrayed her age, but any gray hairs she might have were almost invisible in the blondness of her hair.
“Why did you leave?” he demanded.
“I didn’t. I was rescued from there. The Boss realized that I’d found out about one of their major projects and they were planning to have me killed, so he got me out of there before they could do it.”
Jarod's brow furrowed. “But they wouldn’t do that. The Centre helps people, it doesn’t hurt them.”
She smiled. “That’s what I thought, too. But I’ve had a chance to learn otherwise. You’ll have that same chance.
“Who are ‘our people’?” he asked again.
“Apart from the Boss, we’ve all been at the Centre, most of us exploited because of the skills we – they – possess. I’m just an ordinary doctor, but other people are as gifted in their own special ways as you are. Several of those people got you out of there last night.”
His eyes widened in realization. “So that Italian woman, Signora Lanzano, she worked for you?”
“With us,” the doctor corrected. “Yes, she does. You’ll see her soon. But she isn’t Italian and she’s a lot younger than she might have seemed to you.”
He raised an eyebrow skeptically, before deciding to change the subject. “What about the others? Or is it just the two of you?”
“No, there’s quite a lot of us, but, to keep the majority of people safe, we only know a few of the other people each, except for the Boss, who’s the one in charge of everything. Different groups do different things. Some keep track of the Centre’s deals and who buys the sims, also looking at the results of them. Others work for some of the organizations the Centre does business with, like NuGenesis or Donoterase. You’ll see these names quite a lot in the things we’ve got for you to read. And then there’s our group, who does a lot of the rescuing of subjects, like yourself. Finally, there’s a group on the inside, who help us during the rescues. For those we get out, depending on their skills, if they want to, they can elect to work with one of the groups. If they don’t, we give them new identities and they can go and start new lives somewhere else.”
Jarod nodded slowly, finding it difficult to cope with the all the new information with which he was being presented.
“Oh, he’s awake,” another male voice announced from the doorway. “Good morning, Jarod. How are you after last night’s excitement?”
Cecilia half-turned before looking back at the man in the bed. “Jarod, this is Nathan, commonly known as Nat. He’s our technology expert.”
A man in his mid-thirties leant against the doorframe, his eyes twinkling as he brushed his hair out of his eyes.
“It’s pretty overwhelming, isn’t it?” he laughed. “It was like that when they got me out, too. I went to bed after a hard day of trying to improve the Centre’s security and woke up in a strange room, surrounded by strange people who sounded like they were telling me fairytales.”
“Strange, were we?” Cecilia asked indignantly. “You’re the strange one, Nat! At least, your sense of humor sure is!”
“Hey, I’ve never disputed that.” Nat slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans with a grin.
Cecilia rolled her eyes. “I’m going to check on Prodge. You can keep telling your fairy tales to our newcomer.”
When she was gone, Nat strolled over to sit on the chair she had occupied. “It’s not too long since I was in your position,” he told the older man. “And I was terrified when I woke up to find myself in a room with a whole lot of strangers.”
“I never saw you there,” Jarod suggested warily. “How do I know this is real?”
Nat grinned. “You don’t, or not for sure. But I saw you, or at least your work. I used it to keep the security system up to scratch. After I was rescued, the Centre replaced me with a woman called Sandy, but she didn’t realize that I still had ways and means of getting into the mainframe. We used the information I dug up to work out the best time to get you out of there.”
“I just don’t understand why you do it,” Jarod protested. “The work I did helped people. Why would you want to stop that?”
Nat sighed deeply, the humor fading from his eyes. “You might have thought so. Even Sydney might have believed it. But the men who were really in charge never planned that.” He stood up and walked over to a bookshelf in the corner, taking down a large book and placing it in Jarod's hands. “Here, take a look at this. This is what they really did with your supposedly benevolent sims.”
Jarod accepted the book and opened it to the first page. The top of the page bore the words SIM #118 and the Pretender recalled the details of the Pacific Fleet Simulation, his eyes wandering down the page to see a picture of the remnants of a boat, which had blown up and killed dozens of people. A feeling like a hand slamming into his stomach temporarily bereft him of breath, and he looked up in mute protest at the man sitting nearby.
“I know, Jarod,” Nat stated softly. “I created computer programs, which were later used to expose the financial details of companies that the Centre wanted to take over, and which could be twisted to make it seem like the company was embezzling or acting fraudulently. They twisted my work in every possible way, until the Boss came and got me out. So I understand how you feel. We all do. We’ve all had to face this.”
Wordlessly, Jarod began turning the pages of the book, seeing pictures and reading articles that showed how his work had been manipulated.
“Why… why would they lie?” he murmured brokenly.
“Because you have morals, scruples,” Nat told him. “And because, if you knew what the true purposes of most of your sims was, you wouldn’t have done them.” He smiled sympathetically. “It might be hard for you to believe, but we’re the good guys, Jarod. The victims, just like you. I spent all but the last ten months in that place, my work being used for whatever purposes they thought up, and without anything to show for it now.” He sighed again. “None of us have been people for a lot of years. There’s not even any record that we were ever born. As soon as the Centre found the people they wanted, they cleared the records of their birth certificates, so if any of our families ever went to the police, they wouldn’t bother to look for us because they wouldn’t believe we were even born.”
“It’s a powerful organization, all right,” Cecilia remarked from the doorway, “headed by a powerful, horrible group of people, who’ll do anything for money.”
“How’s Prodge?” Nat asked.
“Trying to rebel,” the doctor laughed. “I can’t convince her to stay in bed. You wanna try it?”
“Gladly.” He walked to the door, raising his voice. “Prodigy, if you’re not between those sheets when I arrive in your room, you’re in trouble.”
“I’m terrified,” the female voice Jarod had heard earlier yelled back, and then there was a thud.
“That would be the window closing,” Cecilia suggested with a grin, as Nat vanished.
“Why ‘Prodigy?’” Jarod asked curiously, his feeling of devastation temporarily retreating. “That’s not her name, surely.”
“No, it’s not,” Cecilia confessed. “Her name’s Shannon, but we had another Shannon on the team when she decided to help us, so we used her project name to tell the difference between them – Prodigy, or Prodge, for short.”
“They called me that, too, sometimes,” the Pretender confessed.
“I know,” she responded. “The team knows as much as it can about all the people we rescue, in case we need to share that information in an effort to make them trust us. That’s how I knew your name, too,” she added, grinning.
“What’s her skill?” he queried curiously. “I mean, you’re a doctor and Nathan’s a tech expert. She must have some use.”
“She’s a Pretender, like yourself,” the woman told him. “You’ll see her in a bit. Usually I’d put my money on Prodge winning a race against Nat, particularly with that much of a head start, but she has a handicap right now.”
Jarod watched the woman get a number of bags out of the closet and his eyes widened when he saw his project name on one of them. She tore it open and began to spread the clothing over the bed.
“What’s this?”
“New attire.” She nodded at his clothing. “We get people out of the Centre’s gear as quickly as we can. It’s a good way of giving them a new perspective, and it also makes them less conspicuous.”
He nodded, recognizing the sense of this, before looking up at her. “So what do I do now?”
She smiled. “That’s going to be one of the hardest habits for you to break: making decisions for yourself rather than waiting for others to tell you what to do. But I’ll make the suggestion now that you have a shower and get into these clothes. The Boss will be here in a few hours and he’ll want to talk to you.”
Jarod threw back the covers and stood up, feeling that the floor of the room was soft under his feet. He wiggled his bare toes luxuriously on the surface.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Cecilia suggested with a grin. “I don’t think there’s a square of carpet anywhere in the whole Centre.”
Jarod got out of the shower and picked up the towel, drying himself off. Donning his underpants, he picked up the shirt he had been given and ran a hand over it, feeling that the material was softer than his usual black. He pulled it on, seeing that it was the perfect size, and did up all the buttons to his neck. It was quite tight around his throat, so he undid the first button, resettling the collar in imitation of the way Nat had worn his shirt. The pants were another revelation, being heavier than what he was used to, but he struggled into them.
He turned to the basin and looked at the shiny wall surface. Some part of his mind had told him that this was a mirror, but that hadn’t meant a lot until he realized that the person he could see in it was himself. Then he remembered using a mirror in a sim, although he was watched carefully, possibly to ensure that he didn’t look at himself in it.
Running his fingers through his hair, he turned to look at the door, wondering if he dared to leave the room without permission.
“Jarod, are you dressed?” a voice called from the hallway, and he opened the door to find Cecilia waiting on the other side. “Oh, good,” she stated when she saw him. “I thought I ought to check that you didn’t drown.”
The Pretender risked an awkward smile at what he assumed was a joke, raising an eyebrow as a squeal broke through the house.
“What…?” he began, and the woman grinned.
“I told Nat to keep Prodge in the living room until you appeared. I think he’s using excessive force to do so.”
“Let me go, you bully!” the same voice Jarod had heard earlier that morning yelped. “I’m injured!”
“I notice that didn’t stop you running three blocks,” Nat’s voice teased. “So why should I be nice to you now?”
“Because, if you don’t, I’ll tell the Boss I want a new partner,” the voice proclaimed as Jarod and Cecilia approached the living room door. “No!” she suddenly shrieked. “Don’t tickle me! That’s not fair!”
“Behave yourself, Prodge,” Cecilia said sternly as they entered. “Our guest is here.”
Jarod found himself in a large room containing a sofa and chairs, objects similar to those that had been in his room at the Centre. Nat sat on the sofa, his arms around a dark-haired woman, who was trying to wriggle out of his hold, as she giggled uncontrollably. Her hair was tousled and her left arm was in a sling. With her right, she was trying to force away the man’s hand as the fingers moved on her stomach.
“I’m trying to behave,” the woman gasped breathlessly, before shrieking with laughter again. “But Nat won’t let me!”
“All right, we’re here now, Nat,” Cecilia stated firmly, as Jarod sat down in response to the wave she directed at an armchair. “You can let her go.”
The young man looked disappointed. “But it’s so much fun!”
“For you.” The brunette managed to struggle out of his arms and pouted as she staggered over to the other side of the room. “Just wait ‘till you get an injury. Your life will be officially hell.”
“As you put it so nicely this morning,” he smiled complacently, “I’m terrified.”
“That’s enough,” Cecilia intervened. “Jarod, this is Shannon, better known as Prodge. Shannon, I know you’ve already met.”
“We sure have.” The young woman’s bright blue eyes twinkled. “He speaks very good Italian.”
Jarod's eyes widened in disbelief as he examined her features, trying to compare them to his somewhat vague memory of those of the older woman who had been in the sim lab at the Centre, but with only limited success. Had he not been aware of who she was, he would have found it impossible to identify her.”
“Amazing,” he breathed, and she smiled.
“Thank you,” Shannon responded. “I like to think I’m pretty good in the disguise department.”
Seeing that the older man was speechless, Cecilia turned to Nat. “Did you get the DSAs from Steve?”
“Right here.” The man picked up a case and placed it on the table in front of him. “He said it was just sitting in Sydney's office.”
Jarod's head whipped around from his amazed scrutiny of Shannon’s face at that name. “How do you…?”
Nat grinned. “You’d be surprised how much I know about that place.”
Cecilia turned to Jarod, changing the subject, as Shannon curled up in another armchair. “We’re one of the basic rescue teams. We have a few people inside the Centre, like the sweeper Dan and a couple of others, but the rest come and go, depending on what’s required. We also rotate people a lot, so the Centre never has a chance to get to know any facial features.”
Jarod cast another disbelieving glance at Shannon. “I can’t see it being a problem,” he murmured, and was rewarded with a dimpled grin.
“We won’t ask you to make any decisions about your future yet,” Cecilia went on. “But we’ve got a few more rescues in the near future, so you can sit in on the planning meetings and get a feel for what we do.”
“But in the meantime, there’s a more urgent problem that will need your input,” Shannon stated in serious tones. “It’s tough to throw this at you, your first morning out, but unfortunately we can’t, in all fairness to everyone involved, avoid it.”
Nat slid a DSA into the machine and rolled the trackball to the start before looking up at the other man, his expression sympathetic. “Jarod, do you remember a sim from about 12 years ago? It was number 220.”
The Pretender thought for a moment, before nodding, recalling the difficulty he had had with that simulation. “That was the cloning one, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” Nat turned the machine around. “And, as with all the others, they took your work and used it for their own purposes.”
Jarod looked down at the screen, seeing a young boy performing a sim, a boy who looked exactly as he had appeared on the DSAs he had viewed of himself when he was young. Nat had seemed to understand what he was thinking, because the man shook his head.
“That’s not you, Jarod, or not literally. His name’s Joshua. He shares every gene in your body, but he’s only eleven. He was being trained at Donoterase until we got him out, nine months ago.”
Jarod barely heard the words, feeling as if his heart was being squeezed in a clamp as he looked down into the eyes of the boy on the screen. Suddenly he raised his head again, as a thought occurred to him.
“Why did you have to tell me about this now? What’s the urgency?”
Shannon sighed. “Joshua lives here, with me. He’s at school now, but he’ll be back this afternoon and we wanted you to have at least a few hours to get used to the idea that he exists. He knows who you are. One of the first things he asked about when we got him here was his parents, so we had to tell him.”
Jarod felt his eyes fill as he thought of his own long-dead parents and wondered how it might have felt to have them find him now that he was out of the Centre. However, he blinked back the tears, forcing his eyes away from the face of his clone.
“What else is there for me to know?”
“A lot.” Cecilia smiled. “More than you can possibly learn in one day, so don’t expect to know it all by tonight. Apart from the bad stuff that the Centre caused in all our lives, we’ll make sure you know about the good things that are out in the world, too.”
Jarod had just finished watching Shannon and Nat make lunch, fascinated by all the new things they had to show him, when the door opened. He saw that the other two people also immediately tensed, as he did, but both smiled when they saw the newcomer.
“Just in time for lunch,” Nat teased. “How surprising.”
The older man, who Jarod estimated was probably about Sydney's age, grinned, his brown eyes dancing. “You watch yourself, Nat, or I’ll send you back to where you came from.”
Something about the man, either his voice or his face, caused a strange feeling in Jarod: one that was almost recognition. He couldn’t remember ever having met this person before, and yet the idea that he knew him wouldn’t go away. Before he could think further about it, however, Cecilia looked up from the table, where she had been writing something.
“Jarod, this is the Boss. Boss, this is Prodigy, or Proteus, depending on what projects he’s done, more humanly called Jarod.”
The man turned with a smile, but there was an expression in his eyes that Jarod found difficult to understand, and continued to turn the memory of it over in his head during the discussion that followed. The stranger offered his right hand and, remembering the etiquette lessons Sydney had given him years earlier, when he had been told that he would be seeing his parents for the first time in years, Jarod returned the handshake. The Boss then turned to Shannon.
“How’s the arm?”
Shannon cast a sly glance at Nat. “Well, it might have been better if certain people hadn’t chased me along the street this morning.”
“Tattletale,” Nat shot back, before looking at the older man. “How’s the next project coming along?”
“Actually, that’s what I’m here to talk about now.” He looked at the plates, on which Shannon was placing the sandwiches she had just finished making. “Is that done?”
“Yup.” She handed the plates to Nat, who carried them over to the table. Cecilia pushed aside the papers and cleared a space for Jarod to sit beside her. The Boss took the seat at the head of the table, taking a folder from under his left arm and spreading the pages out over the flat surface in front of him.
“Okay, we’ve got a 60-hour window with this one, before they hand out the relevant sim. If we can stop this person from doing it, we’ve got a better chance of halting the entire project.”
“There’s nobody else they might hand it on to?” Nat asked, between bites of a sandwich.
“Not now that Jarod's out,” the Boss replied. “Their closest is about two years away from being at the same level.”
“What’s the plan?” Shannon asked.
“We’re going to order a fake transfer to Donoterase and hijack it,” the Boss responded. “We can’t afford to send any of you into the Centre for a while, so the open road is our best bet. It also gives us the best chance of not getting anyone on either side killed.”
“Who’s doing it?” The older woman asked. “And where are they going?”
“We’re using the house in New York for this one,” the Boss told her. “And we’re using the event to pull Dan out. He’s had long enough inside the Centre, and he’ll be number one suspect now that Jarod's missing.”
“He won’t be happy about that,” Nat grinned.
“He doesn’t have a choice,” the older man stated sternly. “There are three new people going in to replace him, over the next month. Besides, he’ll be more valuable out here.”
While the man stopped to eat, Cecilia turned to Jarod. “We have about ten of our own people as sweepers or cleaners at any time. They aren’t past subjects; instead, they go in as non-Centre-related people we’ve grown to know and trust over time.”
Jarod nodded, running his eyes over the sheets closest to him. “Do I know this person?”
“I doubt it.” She handed over a page, to which a photo was clipped. “You tell us.”
The Pretender’s eyes roamed over the young female’s face, and he shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” the Boss stated. “You and all the others were kept deliberately isolated, so that you never had a chance to discuss your work.” He handed an envelope to each of the three people. “They’re your directions. Cici, you’ll be in New York, waiting for the arrival; Nat, you’re on tech, as usual, and we’ve already got the site set up. You’ll be close, but not too close. Prodge, I was going to give you an active part in this one, but your injury nixed that idea. You’ll be helping the others to prepare.”
The young woman looked glum, but accepted the task without complaint. She pulled over a sheet on which the details of the hijacking were explained, and Jarod read it upside down, interested to find out how knowledgeable and experienced these people really were. In his mind, he simulated the situation as far as he could understand it from what he had read, and looked up sharply as he spotted a potential flaw.
“There could be a problem,” he began, suddenly realizing that a female voice had said the same words at the same time, and looked across the table to find Shannon smiling slightly as she lifted her eyes to meet his.
The Boss rubbed his ears. “In stereo,” he remarked with a grin. “Okay, you two, what is or are the problems?”
Shannon turned the page and pushed it towards him. “Go ahead,” she suggested. “They know what I’m capable of.”
He nodded, pushing the paper towards the older man and pointing out the possible problems in the set-up, watching out of the corner of his eye as Shannon nodded slightly at each. The Boss took a pen and scribbled down each point, looking up when the male Pretender was done.
“Anything to add, Prodge?”
“No, that was it,” she admitted. “Want me to work on improvements?”
“Please.” He handed the sheet over and then looked from Cecilia to Nat. “People, can you kindly make yourselves scarce? I want to talk with Jarod.”
The older woman sniffed indignantly. “Well, I guess we know when we’re not wanted.”
“Yeah!” Nat rolled his eyes. “After so many years of loyal service…”
The Boss wrapped his arm around Nat’s neck and affectionately scrubbed his hair. “Scram,” he ordered. “And I promise to make it up to you later.”
