Table of Contents [Report This]
Chapter or Story 
Chapter or Story
Part 5
Jarod
Jarod barely heard the statement, having locked eyes with his sister, and seeing as she stared at him as if unable to believe her eyes. Then she gave a shriek, leapt off the sofa and threw herself at him. Jarod had only a second to prepare for the onslaught, but he wrapped his arms around her, as much to stop her falling as to embrace her.
“Oh, Jarod,” she sobbed, and he could feel tears tricking down the back of his shirt as her hands clutched at him. “It’s really you! At last!”
A moment of silence passed, apart from the sound of sobs in Jarod's ear, and the Pretender saw various people in the room exchange startled glances. Emily’s cry had drawn Charles’ attention from his own thoughts, and he now came over to where his children sat, with a gesture that made the others hurriedly leave the room.
He pulled up another chair nearby and sat in it, gently drawing Emily off her brother’s lap and onto his own, taking a tissue from a nearby box, which he pressed into her hand as she swallowed the last of her sobs, although she smiled happily through her tears.
“So you did get away,” she exclaimed, both his hands held firmly in her lap. “I found out that your project had disappeared from the records, but that could have meant you’d…” She was unable to speak her fears: that her brother had been killed. Instead she looked up at her father. “It was only after that happened that I heard him called ‘Jarod’ by one of the other sweepers, so I went searching and found photos and DSAs of him. That’s when I knew it was our Jarod, and when I found that out – that he was gone – I knew there was no point in me staying any longer.”
“What else did you find, Em?” Charles asked curiously.
“Kyle’s not in the Centre anymore,” his daughter replied. “His projects stopped in 1983. About the only person who might know where he now would be Raines, I guess. He was the one who was responsible for Kyle being out of the Centre.”
“Then we’ll have to start looking other places,” her father said firmly, his face full of determination. “We’ll find him, though. We have to.”
“Boss!” Nat suddenly burst into the room without knocking and thrust a piece of paper into the older man’s hands. “Here she is. I just got that off the security system. She’s down in the archives section.”
“Oh, jeez,” Charles murmured, accepting the sheet, and Jarod looked over his father’s shoulder, able to recognize the figure in the picture as Shannon, despite the fact that she looked years older, with short hair and light hazel eyes, as well as something in her mouth to alter the shape of her face.
“That’s her,” Emily said definitively. “That’s the woman who bailed me up.”
The Boss looked up at Nat. “Can we contact her somehow and arrange to get her out of there?”
“No,” another voice said, and Jarod looked up to see Tom in the doorway, holding a cell phone. “I just found this in the bag she left behind. There’s a note, too, Boss. She says not to worry about her. The worst that can happen is only what’s happened to her already.”
“So she isn’t coming back?” a young voice gasped from behind Tom, who moved aside so that the others could see Joshua, his eyes red, watching them anxiously. Tears rolled down the boy’s face as he waited for a response of some sort, and the longer people remained silent, the more his shoulders heaved.
Jarod felt something inside him melt, remembering how desolate he had felt at a similar age when he had been told that his parents had been killed. This, he could only imagine, would be the way his clone was feeling now, and he got up, gently released his hands from his sister’s grasp, and crossed the room to where the younger version of himself stood. Bending down, he placed his hands on Joshua’s shoulders, drawing the boy close and feeling the small arms wrap around him in a desperate hug.
“What are we going to do?” Cici asked, and Jarod, keeping an arm around Joshua’s shoulders, turned in time to see his father shake his head.
“I don’t know,” Charles said softly. “I don’t think we can do anything. Without being able to contact her, we can’t arrange for a time and place to get her out. And if we told any of our guys what was going on and they tried to protect her, someone would notice.”
Nat dropped onto the sofa, his expression haggard. “She can’t just be looking for Peter,” he said in low tones. “Why go into the archives? There’s only two places he could be – the cells and the cemetery – and the records for both are kept elsewhere.”
Charles looked up at Lucy. “What did she say to you? Did she say anything about where she was going?”
“Home, she told us,” the older woman said. “But I called there while Nat was tracking here, and there’s no answer.”
A heavy silence fell over the room, and Jarod saw tears brim in Joshua’s eyes, the boy’s arm tight around his waist. Suddenly Charles gave Emily a hug and set her on her feet, turning to Nat.
“Let’s keep an eye on what she’s up to. Maybe she’s got another aim in mind. If she’s not going to be there for long, we might be able to arrange for her to be picked up safely.” He turned to his daughter. “And you can tell me what you were researching at the Centre. We might be able to get a hold of that information you were planning to bring with you.”
Cici left the room with them, taking Lucy and Margaret, so that only Tom was left with Jarod and Joshua. Guiding the boy to the sofa, Jarod sat down and drew Joshua down beside him. The boy immediately buried his face in his progenitor’s shoulder, his chest again heaving with sobs. Jarod rocked him gently, unable to think of anything that might be comforting. Tom wandered over to the wall, staring blankly at blueprints of the Centre that were pinned to it, lightly running the index finger of his right hand over the diagrams.
The silence extended for several minutes, and gradually Jarod could feel Joshua’s sobs lessen, until only an occasional gasp for breath and uneven breath revealed his emotional distress. Even as Jarod looked down, the boy’s arms, which had been around Jarod's neck, began to slip down until they hung loosely towards the floor. His breath was warm against Jarod's throat, his head resting on the man’s shoulder, and Jarod felt him snuggle slightly closer. The man could see that Joshua’s eyes were now closed, his lips slightly parted, and in another minute it was clear that he was sound asleep.
Jarod looked up at the other man in the room. “Tom?”
Without turning, Tom spoke. “Hmm?”
“Who’s Peter?”
There was another long pause, during which Jarod began to believe that either Tom hadn’t heard him, or else wasn’t going to answer, but finally the young man turned around and came over to pull up an armchair beside the sofa.
“Did Shannon tell you anything about a person who she worked with when she was at the Centre?”
“She did say that someone once told her about ‘mother’ and ‘father’,” Jarod admitted, suddenly remembering that conversation.
Tom nodded. “That’s Peter. According to the records we found, he was taken from his parents when he was about eight. At least, that was his age when he arrived at the Centre. He was tested for about three weeks, and then brought in to work with Shannon. For some reason, Raines had the idea that their skills would compliment each other.” He sighed and stared at his hands for a moment, before continuing. “I’d been out about a month when we started planning to get Peter out, and then we found that he was working so closely with Shannon that, if we got him, she’d probably have to have done his sim, so we got them both out.”
“What was it?” Jarod asked curiously.
“I honestly don’t remember anymore,” Tom admitted. “I don’t think I ever knew that much about it, really. Just that it was bad, and had to be stopped.”
“So what happened to him? I heard what Dad said about him disappearing, when he was planning this latest.”
Jarod used the term to describe his father without thinking, cursing silently as soon as he finished speaking, but either Tom had already made the connection himself, or else he missed the term, because he answered the question without surprise.
“We were on a night raid, like last night, except that we arranged for the convoy to pass at ten p.m. instead of the early hours of the morning. It was all going well, until we were leaving and did our usual headcount. Peter was missing. Nobody saw him – well, you probably know for yourself now how hard it is to keep track of everyone during raids – but we don’t know whether he was recognized and dragged off, or left of his own accord.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Nobody knows.” Tom sighed. “Nat found footage of him, surrounded by sweepers, walking into the Centre, but then he just disappeared. The entire system went down with a power outage for a full minute, and by the time it started again, he was gone.”
“And so Shannon’s gone in to find him?” Jarod asked softly.
“I guess so.” Tom blinked rapidly, and Jarod guessed that he was fighting to keep his composure. “They were so close,” he explained after another minute. “Like Meg and me. When we first found that he was missing, Shannon wanted to go right back in to find him, but the Boss wouldn’t let her. She begged him to let her – she was almost hysterical – and finally Charles got Cici to give her something to calm her down, so that she wouldn’t escape out of a window or something to go back and try to find him herself, like she kept threatening to do.”
“Why didn’t she go looking for him instead of getting me out?”
“The Boss reminded her that it wasn’t right for us to forget everyone else who was suffering at the Centre’s hands just for one person. She finally agreed that she would play her part in getting you out.” Tom steadily met Jarod's gaze. “I think it helped her a little, too. She’d begun to be more like she was when we first got her out – shy and withdrawn – but after she went through that, Nat told me that she was better.”
“Maybe she was planning this at the time,” Jarod suggested.
“Maybe,” Tom agreed. “She knew about Freya, of course, and that we’d have to use an outside rescue, because we never go into the Centre twice in a row – and certainly not this close together – so maybe she was getting ready for it.” He stared blankly at the floor. “I only hope she planned how she was going to get out, too…”
Shannon
Shannon left the infirmary and headed for the bedroom she knew belonged to the woman whose identity she had stolen hours earlier. As she got into the elevator that would take her down to the residence level, she wondered whether anyone had yet noticed that she was missing.
When the doors slid open, she walked down the hallway and let herself into the room in which, she already knew, there were no cameras, so she could sit and plan her next move.
She had begun planning for this the morning after Jarod's rescue, when she had been doing one of her usual searches through the Centre’s mainframe for anything that could lead her to Peter. It was a typical part of every day; she worked through some part of the mainframe for two or three hours, in the hope of finding a project that could be him.
On this day, she had found herself grateful for the lessons Raines had so painstakingly beaten into her of checking every detail. While examining the project records of one candidate, she had opened the file belonging to a particular female sweeper whose name was new to her.
The photo, however, when it finally opened on the screen, was almost sickening familiar.
Shannon had, by chance, one day seen the photos that the Boss carried around in his wallet of his three children. She had once overheard him talking to Cici about them, and had herself asked him about them. Now she found herself gazing into the eyes of a person who looked almost exactly like his daughter, Emily. The name in the sweeper’s file read “Lauren Emerson”, but Shannon knew that details could be easily falsified, and that the Centre ran very few such basic searches to confirm identity.
Her heart was in her throat as she opened the sweeper’s file and began a methodological search. For months, ever since being rescued from the Centre, she had sought a way to repay the Boss for everything he had done for her, and now, with this discovery, she believed she had found it. She could get herself into the Centre and Emily out of it at the same time. But that depended on the young woman’s role. If she were working with the Centre, it would do the group more damage than good to introduce her to it, so background checks had to be done carefully.
However, Nat had once shown her the way he introduced their sweepers into the Centre records and made it appear that they had been working there for years. Each sweeper had a record of all the projects they had overseen, and each project and sim had a list of those sweepers that had overseen them. However, nobody in the Centre ever compared these two lists, and Nat only recorded the names of the projects under the sweepers’ records, without doing the opposite. Now, as Shannon found the list under ‘Lauren’s’ name, she began to compare those names with the project details. Only three matched, and these were all recent, being within the past two months. This gave her a date at which Emily had gone into the Centre, and suggested that she wasn’t working with any of the people there. If she had been, her details would have checked out. Shannon suspected that she had ulterior motives, possibly to do with her family.
Resting her chin in the palm of her right hand, Shannon considered her possible motives, continuing to stare blankly at the photo on her screen. Slowly, the features became more familiar, and something made her open the file of their latest target and scan both into her facial recognition program. Enough features matched for her to be sure that there was a genetic connection. Mentally, Shannon made the same comparison to her memory of the Boss’s face, and then she knew. Jarod and Emily were two of his children, and, judging by his age, Jarod was the elder son, the search for whom had driven Charles to begin getting people out of the Centre.
Even as she thought this, a plan suggested itself to her. She ran it through her usual processes, and although there were potential problems, she had no time to come up with something else that might have a greater likelihood of success. She had to act now.
In the bathroom, she selected a wig of the same length as her own hair and dyed it to match her dark locks. Then, with barely a murmur of compunction, she took out an electric razor from her case and shaved off her hair. As the strands fell around her feet, she mentally shrugged, trying not to remember what Peter used to say about her hair and how much he had loved it when it grew. It would grow back, she reasoned with herself, even as she removed the last of it and put the razor away. By then, the wig was dry, so she fastened it to her remaining hair and packed her colored contact lenses, and the mouth moulds that would change the shape of her face, into her bag, along with makeup that would dye her skin to match Emily’s, as it appeared in the photo she had found.
By the time she was ready, she could hear the others gathering by the door and hurried out to join them. Joshua, Jarod and the Boss were waiting for her, but nobody commented on the bag she carried, although no makeup would be necessary on this occasion.
“You two follow us,” Charles said, and Shannon guessed that he wanted to talk to Joshua about what would happen that evening, so she readily agreed.
Jarod's eyebrows lifted as she threw him the keys and he caught them. “I’m driving?”
“Cici told me not to,” she fibbed. The doctor had never been specific about what Shannon couldn’t do, but she had told her to rest the arm. Besides, Shannon didn’t want anyone to suspect what she had planned, and if she said now that she couldn’t drive, no one would imagine that she would follow the Boss’s van in her car.
So Jarod got into the driver’s seat, and Shannon verbally guided him through the stages to get the car onto the road, but within a few moments she found that he needed no more instruction, other than to identify the meaning of the various road signs.
The trip to the meeting place took surprisingly little time, with Jarod asking more questions about the world outside the Centre, and Shannon endeavoring to answer them. She was surprised by the depth of his requests. It had taken weeks, rather than days, before she began to ask about such indecipherable things as emotions. But he wanted to know about them, and the feelings that accompanied various events and activities. Before long, he had exhausted her limited knowledge, and she was forced to admit that fact, suggesting that he talk to the Boss or Cici instead.
Upon arrival at Lucy’s house, Shannon could feel the tension. As usual on rescue days, everyone remained as silent as possible, as if not wanting to jeopardize the operation by discussing it, or losing focus by talking of something else. Even Joshua seemed to feel it, and any questions he asked were murmured, with responses coming in the same low tone.
Gradually, ever so slowly, time crept on until the group prepared to leave. Shannon waited only ten minutes after they left before announcing that she was going home to get some rest. She was invited to stay there, but declined, expressing a desire for sleep in her own bed. Nobody made a move to stop her, so she got into her car and, instead of heading for her house, followed the path that the assignment van had taken.
When she was still two miles away from the ambush site, she pulled the car into a clearing and got out, taking her bag with her. In the darkness, she hurried along the road, staying behind trees and in ditches as much as possible, eventually approaching the area where everything was being set up. The place was only dimly lit, and she was able to scoot around it, giving the group a wide berth, and get to the place she had picked out on the map. There, she pulled off the long brown wig and stuffed it into a bag, from which she then removed the makeup, contact lenses and dentures she had brought.
Final preparations took about ten minutes, by which time she could hear the faint rumble of cars approaching. She held her breath, waiting for them to pull up, pressed against the tree. As they stopped, she braced herself and then slipped out from behind the tree, searching for her quarry.
Getting Emily to safety had been easy. Like all the other Centre sweepers, she had been caught off guard by the attack, and Shannon had managed to steal the gun from the regulation holster and pull her away. Emily had been frightened, although she hadn’t shown it, but Shannon knew how she would be feeling and kept the interview mercifully short. Although Emily hadn’t wanted to drink the sedative Shannon offered, the younger girl insisted, and only just managed to get Emily around a clump of bushes and away from the main road before she collapsed. It was then a simple matter of removing the cards and papers from her jacket and putting it into the pocket of the uniform that matched that of the real sweepers, before covering Emily with piles of leaves that had begun to fall from the surrounding trees.
Then she had dodged around the site of battle, which was starting to die down, and began to run in the direction of the Centre. She had heard someone call for help on the radio and knew that cars, and probably a helicopter, would be speeding in that direction, and would hopefully stop to pick her up. Her fear was that one of the Boss’s men would see her and come after her, but she managed to get some distance away without anyone seeming to notice her, and she slowed to a jog.
It was probably twenty minutes before she saw the first headlight on the horizon, and Shannon at once clapped her hand to the arm that had been shot two days before. She had removed the bandage Cici had applied and had moved her arm vigorously during her run to make it bleed, so that she could persuade the Centre people that she had been injured in the attack.
A moment later, a van came into view and she waved it down. It pulled up beside her and the door was flung open.
“What happened?” a voice barked from the interior.
“A whole gang of ‘em,” she gasped, still breathless from her frantic run, although she emphasized it for effect. “They stopped us and grabbed the girl. They beat some of our people and tied ‘em up. I only just got away!”
“Get in,” the same voice demanded, and she climbed into the vehicle, which barely gave her time to do so before it took off.
Inside, the van was dimly lit, and she could see the six other grim-faced sweepers, as well as one man who was dressed in a paler suit, and whom she guessed to be a doctor. He glanced at her arm and opened the case that lay on the seat beside him, telling her to take off her jacket and roll up her sleeve.
“Gunshot wound?” he asked as he began to dab the site with antiseptic.
“Yeah,” she panted. “They were all armed.”
As she sat back and let the doctor treat the injury, Shannon was aware of one sweeper watching her keenly. She turned away, recognizing him, having made him up for a rescue not long after she herself had been rescued. Her heart seemed to pound in her ears as she looked out of the window into the darkness, feeling doctor wrap a bandage around the top of her arm. Surely he wouldn’t say anything here and now. To do so would be the death of them both. And if she could just avoid him later…
The van pulled up at the scene of the ambush, the powerful headlights illuminating the three cars, and the sweepers leapt out. The doctor was the last one out and looked back at her.
“Stay here,” he ordered. “We’ll bring the others here, if they’re injured, and get you all back to the Centre so you can be checked over.”
She had been thankful to stay in the seat, watching as people were untied and escorted over to the van. It was also obvious that the Boss had got everyone away safely. She even saw people go over to the place she had hidden Emily, and when nothing was found, Shannon sighed deeply, relieved that Emily was probably now safe with her family.
Within an hour, they were back at the Centre, being treated for their injuries. Those sweepers who had fought against their attackers had been knocked out, but others had simply been tied and gagged. The darkness meant that nobody could describe any identifying features of the people who had ambushed them, and Shannon heard someone saying that they only hoped the cleaners would find something. Then a doctor ordered Shannon to her room to rest, and she realized she had got through the first stage of her plan without being caught.
Charles
Charles glanced around the living room of Lucy’s home. Nat sat in the corner, his computer open in front of him, tracking Shannon’s movements through the Centre, while Tom watched over his shoulder. Jarod sat on the sofa, Joshua next to him, the boy staring blankly into space while his progenitor spoke softly in his ear. After waking from his nap, Josh had been almost hysterical at the fact that Shannon was gone, but Jarod had managed to calm him. Charles could almost see a relationship developing between them, and he was thankful for the fact. If… if Shannon didn’t come back, Joshua would need someone to help him cope, and Jarod seemed to have taken on that role without prompting.
Cici and Meg were in one of the bedrooms, watching over Freya. The girl had been terrified when she regained consciousness, and, fearful of her injuring herself in a desperate bid to escape, Cici had sedated her again. There could be no hope of moving her to the intended safehouse until she was calmer and able to cope with strangers, and so the group had to remain where it was.
Emily sat in the armchair beside her father, clutching one of his hands in both of hers. He forced a warm smile at her, and saw her smile in response. She had been disconcerted by the panic over Shannon’s disappearance, and Charles had been unable to explain to her his reasons for his anxiety. He had silently cursed himself, in the harshest language he knew, when she had said to him, in a hurt voice, “Daddy, aren’t you glad to see me?”
He was, of course. The shadow of anxiety that had been weighing on him for years had lifted the instant he had laid eyes on her. But first he had been afraid she was working for the organization that had caused such damage to his family, and he had barely had time to get over that when it was realized that Shannon was gone.
Charles hadn’t known how much Shannon meant to him until the moment he knew she had gone back into the man-made hellhole in Delaware. The group had only been back at the house for ten minutes when Charles had received a call from one of the sweepers he had sent into the Centre, reporting that he believed he had seen Shannon, and that she was now avoiding him and all the other sweepers, whether friend or foe.
Now, as he sat silent, staring at the floor, Charles tried to understand why Shannon meant so much to him. There had been that moment, after she regained consciousness, when she had asked, in a tiny, helpless voice, whether he was her father. Briefly, his heart melting in wordless sympathy at her fear, he had considered lying and saying yes, he was. But his heart had smote him with memories of his real daughter, and he had had to admit the truth. Since that moment, however, she had clung to him as if there was a real biological relationship. Her face lit up the moment he appeared, and he had begun increasing his visits to her home without realizing that he was doing so, the delight of being with her driving him to it.
Was he in love with her?
The question seemed ridiculous on the surface. She was in her early twenties and he was sixty-five. But as it occurred to him, he had to wonder. He spent a moment considering it, and then dismissed it as ridiculous. He was still deeply in love with his wife, and what he felt for Shannon was different – similar, however, to what he felt for Emily.
That was it, then. He, having lost his family, had begun to treat her as if she was a member of it, and his emotions supported this idea. He believed it because he wanted to believe it, because he wanted to be a father again. That had been the Centre’s cruelest torment, to deprive him of his dream in life – to have a family. And Shannon had, in some way, begun to represent for him what he had lost.
He had always felt sorry for her, too. Everyone else they rescued had had some memories, no matter how faint, of life outside the Centre, and had managed to adapt relatively quickly to life in the world again. But she had been conceived and born in the Centre. Her nanny had been one of the cold, emotionless women that the Centre seemed to produce in countless numbers. He could still remember the way she had flinched away the first time he had moved the hug her, her fear of his motives obvious. It had taken time for her to trust anyone except Peter, but they had all worked hard to prove themselves to her, and slowly she became braver.
Peter’s disappearance, however, had driven her back into her shell somewhat, and it had only been when Charles decided to actively involve her in the rescues that she had recovered some of her former merriment. With Jarod, Charles noticed, she had been as warm and playful as she had been with Peter, and she had quickly adopted an almost motherly attitude to Joshua: a fact that had comforted Charles, who was inclined to look on Joshua as another son or even a grandson, having guessed his connection to Jarod from the few details they had found and his own memory of his son.
But now she was gone. He had the same feelings of abandonment as were clearly apparent in Joshua, who had early asked Jarod to tell him what he had done wrong that had made Shannon leave. Those questions made Charles question the same things of himself and wonder whether anything he could have done would have prevented her from going.
Shannon
Shannon opened the door of the archive room and walked in as if she had every right to be in that place. Confidence was expected of sweepers at the Centre, and a confident demeanor was often enough to prevent questions from other employees. Now, as the sweeper at the door barely cast a glance in her direction, she pulled out the short list of project numbers she had found on a sheet of paper in Emily’s pocket and began to hunt for the files in which the data would be stored. She had guessed that the details would have to do with Emily’s family, and if Shannon managed to get out of the Centre alive, she wanted to have that to give them.
She had also memorized a short list of projects that might be Peter. Shannon knew that inside each project folder was a photo, and so she hoped that it wouldn’t take her long to search through the half-dozen files and, hopefully, find what she wanted. Knowing that they would be quicker, she checked them first, glancing at each photo and rejecting it when the features proved to be unfamiliar. It was only when she turned away and began to collect the files Emily had listed that the truth hit her – she had failed to find him.
And yet, successfully fighting back tears, she went on with her methodical hunt.
Massive photocopiers stood against one wall, and when Shannon had found the files she sought, she carried them over to the tables on which the machines stood. Feeding the pages in took very little time, and, she knew, was normal procedure. Files were never taken out of the archives, unless they were to be destroyed, and Shannon found that one file on the list of numbers taken from Emily’s pocket was missing, suggesting that the data inside it had met with just such a fate. But the number was still listed on the massive index that showed the location of the files, and Shannon memorized the project name – Mirage – wondering what it had to do with the Boss and his family.
She should have been nervous and clumsy as she hurried through the process, but here was an unexpected benefit of Raines’ harsh training. Thanks to the frequent beatings and verbal abuse, she had learned to suppress her feelings and act emotionlessly. That skill was driving her now as she quickly copied and sorted the pages, returned the files to their folders, and inserted the information into new folders, each marked with the Centre logo, which lay on another table beside the door for that purpose.
Gathering the folders in her arms, she walked back along the hallway to the elevator and rode it down to the residence level, where she left them on the table in her room and locked the door behind her, aware that nobody could access the room without the key that hung at her waist.
Disappointment tugged at her, realizing that, Peter’s not having been among those files she had looked at, she now had no idea where to look in order to find him. Then a name flashed into her mind, at the mention of whom she was unable to suppress a shudder. For the voice that had spoken the name in her mind was instructing her to go to the one place in the Centre she most feared – Raines’ office.
Miss Parker
Miss Parker barely suppressed a smirk as she saw Willie, Raines’ personal sweeper, hurrying down the hallway ahead of her. The first piece of news Broots had told her that morning, upon her arrival at the Centre, had been that Raines was called in front of the T-Board regarding the disappearance of one of his projects during the night. Despite not showing it, she had been delighted by the information. It would hopefully keep Raines off her back for some time to come.
It was frustrating, though, that there seemed to be no sign of Jarod. Several apparent sightings had proved to be false, and her frustration was mounting. She had been certain that Jarod would immediately throw himself into the world and play his little games of pretence, and the fact that, so far, nothing supported this theory was frustrating. She hated to be wrong, particularly when other people had disagreed with her, as Sydney had.
Sydney had suggested that, as Jarod was obviously with other people, he wouldn’t immediately get involved in the outside world, but wait until he understood it better. When Miss Parker had dismissed this with a snort, he explained that, had Jarod left the Centre of his own volition, he would have agreed with her idea, but as all evidence led to another conclusion, he couldn’t believe that Jarod would immediately be placed in such a risky situation.
That discussion had only served to raise the tension that already existed between them, and Miss Parker was wishing that Sydney hadn’t been assigned to help them track Jarod, particularly as she believed he no longer genuinely desired the Pretender’s return.
“Angel!” a voice suddenly boomed, and she turned to see her father coming up behind her.
“Daddy,” she greeted him with a smile, reaching up to kiss his cheek.
“Well, and how’s it going?” he demanded, his gaze suddenly critical. “I’ve heard that you haven’t found much to go on yet.”
“It’s only been a few days, Daddy,” she reminded him coolly. “You have to give me time. This is a big country, and he could be anywhere. We do have some strong leads that we’re chasing up, though. We’ll get there.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll succeed eventually,” he said lightly, but there was a deeper meaning in his voice that she could just detect and wondered at. Then he leant in towards her, and she found herself backing away. “You will succeed, Angel,” he murmured, “because you have no choice.”
Turning on his heel, he strolled away, leaving his daughter staring after him.
Shannon
Shannon glanced around a corner and then pressed herself against the wall, not daring to breath, listening to the two Parkers talking. She had recognized Miss Parker from a photo Nat had shown her, being the person who was leading the hunt for Jarod. And Mr. Parker was a face and a name drilled into her memory. She hated him. Not as much as she hated Raines, because this man had never directly hurt her, but Mr. Parker had been responsible for the sale of her sims, which had resulted in the deaths of so many innocent people. Every time he put his signature to a form, it seemed, people died as a result.
It was difficult for her to suppress a sigh of relief when she saw them part, and when neither of them came in her direction. A moment later, the hallway was clear, and she took the first of many hesitant steps in the direction of Raines’ office. Despite the fact that she knew he was down in one of the lowest levels, being subjected to a T-Board by the Triumvirate, she was still terrified of him coming and finding her now. But a persistent voice in her head drove her onwards, into the darkened room.
The handle was cold under her fingers, and her pulse thrummed in her ears so fast that she was unable to detect the individual beats. She thought she would be sick as she turned the handle, the key on her belt having allowed her access to the locked room. As she closed and locked the door behind her, Shannon wondered idly where Emily had found an all-access pass. Then she drew a deep breath and looked around the room.
It was as sterile, impersonal and sparsely furnished as Shannon had always imagined it to be. A massive window took up almost an entire wall and looked out onto the bay, the calm water reflecting the gray sky above it. Another wall contained only the usual massive air vent cover, and an ornate clock, the ticking of which seemed to fill the room with sound. Shannon was startled to discover that it was already after three o’clock in the afternoon, and even as she looked around at the rest of the room, she had to wonder where the hours that had passed since her arrival at the Centre had gone.
The third wall, to the right of the person entering the office, was lined with filing cabinets, which were all three drawers high. Against the opposite wall stood a sofa, facing which were two lounge chairs, with a coffee table in the middle. Raines’ desk stood in lonely grandeur in the middle of the room. It held only a plain lamp, a penholder and two folders bearing the Centre’s logo. The cord of the lamp hung down to the marble floor and then seemed to vanish into it. When Shannon moved around the desk, however, she saw that it was plugged into a socket that had been built into the table leg.
Her point of interest now was the great row of filing cabinets, and Shannon was breathless with anxiety as she approached it.
Go on, a voice in her head seemed to urge, and she ran her eyes over the labels, seeing that the drawers were organized by date. This would make things easier, and she opened the drawer bearing the month in which Peter had disappeared, finding herself confronted with files that bore project names. So she would have to go through each in the hope of finding Peter’s photo. With a sigh that was almost a groan, and which the great room threw back as an echo that caused her to flinch, she began her hunt.
There were four drawers of files from the date of Peter’s disappearance, and she quickly found that Raines used the same process as that in the archives, so all that was required as a quick glance to determine the usefulness of the files. Thus was she quickly able to discount the first drawer of files, and then the second. She had a second of hope during her search of the third, but this quickly turned to bitter disappoint when she pulled out the file and took a second look at the photo. It wasn’t him, and nor was he to be found in the remainder of that drawer or the one below it. So it was with a sense of frustration and defeat that she shoved the fourth drawer closed.
It squeaked on its runners, and gave a loud thud as it slid back into place. Shannon, who had already begun to walk towards the door, was terrified by the noises, which were exacerbated in that massive, empty room, and sounded to her like an enormous crash of thunder. She cringed against the great solid door, waiting for it to be flung open and for her to be hurled across the room. Then many pairs of hands would drag her to her feet and, with the familiar shackles on her wrists and ankles, she would be dragged down to one of the cells. She had been shackled every day for the short journey between her room and the lab in which she had done her work. She had no idea why Raines had taken this precaution, only that it had been one of the most hated parts of her life.
But the silence returned, apart from the pounding of her heart in her ears. Her senses, which fear had temporarily driven away, began to return, and the silence of the office bore down on her as it had when she first entered. She found herself staring blankly at the smooth wooden door, her nose only inches from it, and wondered how she had managed to cross the massive space in such a short time. She could again smell the dry, musty scent that, to her, always signified that the man who continued to haunt her dreams was either nearby or had only recently left. And her fingers were clutched tightly around each other, with the sharp nails leaving marks on the skin, although they failed to draw blood.
Then a hand lightly touched her arm…
