Lyle leaned against the brick wall on one side of the narrow alleyway and wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth, wincing when the movement put pressure on what had to be several loose teeth. When he heard the sound of footsteps approaching him at a fast run, he slumped down behind several cardboard boxes and huddled there, praying that the security man who had given chase would pass by the alley when there was no visible clue that he was there.

If anything could have gone wrong with this assignment, it had. Darrel Hendrickson of the Boston Herald had proven to be a more wily and cagey bastard than anyone had thought – certainly he had taken a clue from the reputation of the organization he was poised to expose and had taken some precautions against retaliation. The reporter had hired two very big, very talented bodyguards to watch over his every move – so that just getting close to the investigative reporter had been excruciatingly difficult. The man had hired a reputable security firm – whose protective systems had taken real creativity to circumvent.

What had been the first surprise was that Hendrickson had opted to protect himself with a handgun – one that he’d obviously taken the time to learn how to use. Willy, too big and too arrogant to back down, had discovered the hard way that the man was fully willing and ready to use that gun – and Lyle really wasn’t sure whether Willy had been dead when he’d left the house that night, or merely mortally wounded. Considering the amount of blood that had been on the floor by the time he’d left, however, he doubted very much that he’d ever be seeing that dark face hovering over Raines’ in the Tower office again.

He himself had simply been lucky. While Willy had distracted the reporter, Lyle had managed to get off several shots with his silenced handgun – and he was fairly certain that one of them MUST have put an end to the pesky reporter’s dismal life, because the bastard had finally fallen. But he hadn’t counted on those bodyguards getting into the house quite as quickly as they had. As it was, the two of them had caught up to him very soon after the attack on their employer – and they had registered their displeasure very effectively with their fists. One eye was already swelling shut, his mouth was bleeding, and he suspected that there was at least one broken rib. Only an extra gun, secreted in an ankle holster, had given him the necessary power to get free – shooting one bodyguard in the knee and then running like hell.

Lyle normally prided himself on his running speed – he didn’t jog the dry sandy beach at the Centre on a daily basis and run in the occasional marathon for nothing. Several times over the course of his life, his feet had been his saviors. Now, as the footsteps slowed near the entrance of the alley and then trotted off into the distance, they had proven their worth again. Tired, breathing hard again now that he didn’t feel he had to hold his breath to keep from being discovered, Lyle sagged against the red brick and considered his options.

The airstrip where the Centre jet was parked and waiting for him was over five miles away. Willy was God only knew where, either alive or dead. And the sun had gone down quite a while ago, which meant that the streets were dark and now far more dangerous. He could call the Centre satellite office here in Boston and get them to send a car to pick him up and take him back to the air strip – THAT was what he could do. Lyle thrust a hand into his jacket and pulled out his cell phone – only to discover that he’d forgotten to charge the little device the night before, and the battery was dead.

“Fuck!” The expletive burst from his lips, but he retained enough control of himself to keep it merely a vehement whisper. This entire trip was a fuck-up from the word go, as far as he was concerned – he was out of practice being a corporate assassin. Hunting Chinese girls for dinner was something else altogether – mostly because he didn’t have to contend with a Centre sweeper hanging over his shoulder and screwing up his technique. What the hell had Raines been thinking? Didn’t he trust him?

Now he had to find a way back to the air strip without Centre involvement. He hadn’t brought any cash with him, so calling a cab was out – it looked as if he was going to have to walk. The airstrip was on the other side of town, too – in a poorly lit and uncomfortably dangerous part of the city. Lyle snorted with frustration. Damn it! Could the evening get any worse?

~~~~~~~~~*

“Sissy?”

Miss Parker looked up at the bright and inquisitive face at her side. “What, baby?” she asked, and then gave him an indulgent and expectant face. “I thought I told you it was time for you to get ready for bed.”

Jordan Parker put his hands on his big sister’s arm. “When can I come and stay with you all the time? I really don’t want to go back to the Centre tomorrow morning. I wanna go to school like the other kids…”

“Sweetie, we’ve talked about this before, haven’t we?” Miss Parker flinched inwardly. This was beginning to become a consistent topic of discussion on Sunday evenings – the fact that her little brother really didn’t like being cooped up in the underground suite of rooms at the Centre that had been his home since his birth. “I have to work – sometimes very long hours – and I might not be around to take care of you like I should…”

“But I can stay with Katie and Leon,” Jordan suggested with eager dark eyes. “Their mom said that it would be OK, in case of emergency.”

“Your Uncle Bill and I worked out this schedule a long time ago, Little Man,” she shook her head and put her arm around his shoulders. “During the week, you stay at the Centre and do your lessons, and you get the weekends with me.”

“But I don’t like Uncle Bill,” the lad continued to protest. “He smells funny and never talks TO me – he only talks to Nurse and Neil, and just about my lessons.”

“Well,” Miss Parker found it ironic that she was obliged to stand up in defense of a man she abhorred, “Uncle Bill just wants the best for you, baby…”

“He just wants me to do more math problems all the time,” Jordan retorted resentfully.

“What about some of the other things you’re studying,” Miss Parker tried to distract the intelligent child. Had she been this difficult when she was this young?

“Neil doesn’t like it when I spend more than twenty minutes on the piano,” the boy told her with innocent frankness. “He likes me to be working on practicing my writing or reading about new stuff in science.”

“Music is important too,” Miss Parker told him firmly. “I’ll talk to Neil and make sure that he understands that I want you to get your full practice time in every day.” She mentally noted that a talk with her little brother’s primary tutor be on the top of her to-do list for the next morning. “Besides, you like the piano, don’t you?”

The little boy’s face softened. “I wish I could play more than just one half hour a day, Sissy,” he answered in a voice that shimmered with pleading. “I know that I could do so much better…”

“I’ll talk to Neil about giving you some free time outside your room in the evening – or moving the piano into your room – how’s that?”

“How about a piano here?” Jordan began to smile.

Miss Parker looked around her living room. “I’m not sure about that,” she hedged. “I don’t know where I could put it…”

“In the studio,” he exclaimed happily. “I think Grandma would like to hear music in there.”

“Grandma?” She looked down into the glowing face with confusion. “Your Grandma?”

The dark little head nodded earnestly. “She talks to me sometimes in there, Sissy – tells me things about you, and about my daddy.” He glanced over his shoulder at the studio door, as if checking to make sure nobody was close by to hear him, then leaned closer. “She even told me once that YOU were my mommy.”

“Me?” Miss Parker gaped. “I’m your sister, Jordan – not your mother.”

The little boy just looked at her. “That’s not what Grandma said,” he insisted.

“You’d better go on upstairs and get into your jammies,” Miss Parker stated after recovering from the shiver she’d gotten at the look in the little boy’s eyes – a look that was so very familiar, although she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why. “I’ll be up to tuck you in when you’re ready.”

The little boy trotted obediently toward the staircase and began mounting the steps, leaving his sister watching him with a frown. It couldn’t be. She’d delivered the baby herself – and it had been Brigitte writhing on the floor and eventually bleeding to death as the boy had been born, not her. Still, there had been several times when she’d allowed herself to think traitorous thoughts about how an old man who, it had turned out, hadn’t actually been her father could possibly have fathered a child in the latter days of his life. Jordan’s dark eyes didn’t look anything like those of Charles Parker, nor like Brigitte – assassin turned stepmother. Whose child WAS he, Parker asked herself and then banished the question. It didn’t matter.

The courts had appointed her his guardian in tandem with William Raines – and she was doing the best she could to give him a better childhood than she’d had. There was only one way to find out for sure…

“This is Sydney…”

“Syd…”

“Miss Parker!” The delight in his voice was unmistakable – and almost as much of a caress as if he’d given her a hug. “To what do I owe the honor…”

“I need your help.”

There was only the slightest of pauses that betrayed his surprise before he was reassuring her, “Of course. What can I do?”

“I need to know Jordan’s heritage, Sydney,” she said in a tone that betrayed her own troubled conscience.

Again there was a pause, this one slightly longer. “What’s brought this up after all this time?” the old psychiatrist asked carefully. He knew better than most how sensitive she was when it came to questions about her family tree.

“Jordan was talking about things his ‘Grandma’ was telling him,” she answered, “including the fact that I am his mother.” This time, the pause was long enough that she finally asked, “Syd? Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” the melodic, accented voice replied softly. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know what to think,” she admitted frankly, “but I’d like to KNOW, if you know what I mean. If he’s right – if he’s hearing my mother, and it’s her telling him… If…” She blinked hard at the tear that threatened at merely entertaining the thought. “Sydney, if he’s my son…”

“Slow down, Parker,” the older man cautioned gently. “We’ll talk to Broots, and I’ll get in touch with a couple of friends of ours who can run the tests outside Centre scrutiny.”

“Sydney, if he’s my son, then who’s the father?”

There was another very long pause in which Miss Parker was certain that Sydney was considering the same possibility she was and finding it equally unbelievable and monstrous if true. “Looks like Broots and I will have to take another stroll through the genetic storage vault, doesn’t it?”

“I’m ready, Sissy,” she heard her little brother call from the top of the stairs, as was his habit when he was staying with her.

“I gotta go tuck him into bed,” she told her old friend apologetically.

“Do you want me to come over, so you can talk about some of what you’re feeling right now?” Sydney asked quickly, knowing his time with her was short otherwise.

“We’ll have a very long talk when and if we find out that Jordan’s ‘Grandma’ was right,” she promised him. “And if I get any more worked up about it, I’ll call again, I promise.”

“Very well,” Sydney sighed. Miss Parker didn’t dive into investigating her deeper feelings without a great deal of pressure and need – he was hardly surprised at her putting him off this time. “Go take care of Jordan – tell him I said to sleep well.”

“I will, Syd. Thanks.” The relief in her voice was palpable.

“We’ll figure this out, Parker,” he promised.

~~~~~~~~*

Lyle wished that there was some way to postpone or even cancel the meeting that morning in the Tower that would start the moment he walked through the etched glass doors that he’d face after this one, last, elevator ride. The news had made national headlines and network news coverage about the attack on Darrel Hendrickson that had left one unidentified man dead, Hendrickson himself hovering near death in a coma, and one of his bodyguards permanently maimed with a gunshot to the kneecap. The reports were that the Boston police had a partial description of the assassin that had eluded capture, but the details of that description were being withheld for the time being. Raines was not going to be pleased – but then, he wasn’t a happy camper himself at the moment either.

The only truly good thing to come of all this was that Willy was definitely dead. His identity would remain a mystery to others, inasmuch as working for the Centre at that high a level of authority meant that much, if not all, of the information regarding who Willy was and what he’d been up to for the last ten to fifteen years had been easily erasable by Centre-paid moles working on government databases. Willy would be forever unidentified – buried as a John Doe in Boston’s Potter’s Field, no doubt – and the only one who would miss him wasn’t all that long for this world either, if all went well.

“Oh, don’t YOU just look like you had a wonderful weekend!”

Lyle cringed inwardly and then turned to face his twin sister with a patently contrived smile. “You don’t want to know,” he warned in a deceptively calm and untroubled voice.

Miss Parker reached out and almost touched the puffiness of the one eye which looked as it was still the process of turning purple-black. “You need to put ice on that thing,” she counseled with unexpected sympathy. “It will take down the swelling – although there’s not going to be much that will help with the shiner.” She looked him up and down very quickly, in a move that made Lyle almost blush. “Split lip too. Must have been one helluva weekend! Anything else wrong with you?”

“Aside from the broken rib,” he quipped in a much brighter tone than he actually felt, “I’m just as right as rain.”

“What WERE you up to?” she queried curiously. “Or is it more a case of she fought back a little harder than you anticipated?”

Lyle closed his eyes and counted quickly to ten. After the weekend he’d had, the absolute LAST thing he wanted to face was his sister’s sarcasm. “You always believe the worst of me, Parker,” he commented in what he hoped sounded sincerely hurt. “What am I going to have to do to convince you that I’m not the monster you believe me to be?”

“Die,” Miss Parker stated flatly, and her storm-grey eyes reflected the hardness of her voice, “preferably sooner rather than later.”

He smiled sweetly at her as the elevator door slid open. “You first, my dear,” he replied with equal candor, stepping through and facing her as the elevator closed again. He took a deep breath and began to smile. The bitch had absolutely NO idea just how much that wasn’t a wish, but a prophecy.

A call to his associate early that morning before heading off to the Centre had let him know that all of the arrangements were back on track – especially in consideration of the fact that the Centre jet was still grounded in Boston, the victim of a broken hydraulics system. The arrangements for Miss Parker and her team had been that it would have been they who were on the jet flying cross-continentally when the hydraulics problem surfaced, causing the jet to crash and killing all aboard. With Lyle taking the jet prematurely, those arrangements had needed to be adjusted slightly. The overall coordination problem had also been simplified by Willy’s untimely demise – now there would only be the question of finding a convenient time and place to deal with William Raines. A car bomb for a single person was always so much easier to arrange than one to take out two with one blast.

All of these plans would begin to bear fruit AFTER this meeting, however.

Lyle brought his left, gloved hand up and gently massaged his chin and mouth, which also sported bruises and a split lip that hid the still painfully loose teeth that had yet to see a dentist. He only had to put up with all of this for a little while longer, he counseled himself so as not to let his temper get the better of him before he had any reason to. All he had to do was survive this meeting and see that the rest of the arrangements went into effect at the right time – and then his future was assured.

He straightened his back, ran his hand down his tie to make sure he looked as presentable as possible under the circumstances, and then pushed confidently through the glass doors.

~~~~~~~~*

Broots looked back and forth between Miss Parker and Sydney and let his distress and unhappiness show clearly. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

Sydney shook his head gently. “You know that’s the only way we’ll ever be able to be sure of these things,” he told his friend. “And if we do it now, it will be all over and done with – and I can get the material to my friend…”

“Broots, it’s important to me,” Miss Parker insisted quietly. “Wouldn’t you want to know…”

“I’m not disputing the reasons,” Broots shook his head quickly. “I’m just wondering if we’ll ever run out of circumstances where we have to go to these lengths to prove or disprove the depths to which…”

“Let’s get to it,” Sydney put out his hand and helped pull his balding friend from his comfortable computer chair. “With any luck, nobody would be fishing in the gene pool at this hour of the morning.”

Broots gave his old friend an astonished stare and then a shake of the head. “You’ve been hanging around Miss Parker too much lately, Syd,” was his diagnosis. “You’re even starting to sound like her.”

Miss Parker chuckled as the two men walked quickly away. “Better he start sounding like me than I start sounding like him,” she told herself and then picked up the phone at Broots’ desk and dialed an extension. “Neil? This is Miss Parker. Do you have a few extra minutes this morning? I’d like to have a word with you…”

“If you want to talk now, Miss Parker, Master Parker is busy with his morning math problems…” came the calm voice of the man that had been chosen as Jordan’s mentor and tutor.

“I’ll be right there,” she announced. “Meet me in the corridor – Jordan doesn’t need to be privy to our talk.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the tutor answered.

Miss Parker walked quickly to the elevator and punched the button that would take her down to SL-12, where Jordan’s nursery and schoolroom was located just down the hallway from the Renewal Wing. Under normal circumstances, she cleared changes in her little brother’s schedule through Mr. Raines’ office – but this time, she was doing this for Jordan, not the two of them. And because she was merely enforcing a decision that had been mutually arrived at over two years ago, she didn’t feel the need to inform Raines of what she was doing.

Neil Harper was a tall, thin, sallow-faced young man with watery blue eyes that tended never to quite look at a person directly – and he was waiting patiently just outside the schoolroom door, as she had requested. “What can I do for you, Miss Parker?”

“Jordan was telling me how you keep pushing him to shorten the time he spends at the piano,” she stated, coming straight to the point. “Mr. Raines and I decided that music and cultural enrichment would be a major part of his childhood – and I’m here to tell you that I don’t want to hear of your attempting to shortchange him in that regard again.”

The young man at least had the courtesy to look chagrined. “Master Parker could be so much further in his math and other topics, if only…”

“Master Parker’s curriculum is yours to command EXCEPT when ordered otherwise,” Miss Parker said in a lower, more dangerous voice. “He ENJOYS the music, and his teacher tells me that he’s a very talented little boy. I want him to get the full benefit of the practice time he has scheduled during his day – but I also want him to have the opportunity to do more during his free hours, if he chooses. Therefore, I’m making arrangements for the piano to be moved into his nursery…”

“Mr. Raines will not be happy about this development!” Neil burst out in frustration. “It isn’t good to give him too much access…”

“I’ll clear this with Mr. Raines,” Miss Parker snarled. “But I want any free time piano playing to be fun – and he is to continue his scheduled practice period as before. Do I make myself clear?”

Storm-grey met watery blue in a battle of wills, with the blue eventually conceding defeat. “Yes, ma’am,” Neil ground out.

“I’ll be checking with Jordan this next weekend, to make sure that my orders are being obeyed,” she commented in a cautionary tone. “If I find out that you’ve punished him for having spoken to me – or threatened him to not disclose your continuing to try to pull him away from his music – your continuing at this post will be reviewed. Do not cross me, Mr. Harper.” She withdrew her pointing finger from the tip of his nose and turned to walk away.

Miss Parker could hear the schoolroom door opening and closing behind her, and she breathed a quick prayer that this Harper character cared for her little brother even half as much as Sydney had cared for Jarod all those years. It was going to be a very long week before she could rescue the little boy from the bowels of the Centre again. She’d have to make sure to stay late and take the time to talk to the lad and make sure all was still OK with him sometime during the week.

She smiled at the thought of what Sydney’s reaction to her sudden concern for the boy would be – already had been – on the phone. One of these days, she suddenly knew with absolute certainty, he would nail her down and begin to ask her about her sudden tendency to softness and sentimentality. She knew he didn’t disapprove – but would want to know WHY, after all these years, she’d apparently turned a corner character-wise.

If she were honest with herself, she wasn’t exactly sure of that one herself. Until the night her father – or the man she’d always believed her father – had stepped out of an airliner on a stormy night over the Atlantic, she’d left the care and welfare of her baby brother for the most part to the Centre keepers Mr. Parker had appointed to the task. Even for months afterwards, she’d only paid token visits to the toddler. It was only now, as the hunt for Jarod seemed to be winding to an unsuccessful close – which meant her dreams of freedom from Centre servitude were evaporating like last night’s fog – that the child was beginning to take center stage in her off-hours mind.

By the time she was walking into the Sim Lab again, Sydney was bent over his desk, writing on a label that he then stuck to the top of a very small cardboard box. “I’m going to take an extended break,” he announced quietly, seeing Miss Parker’s eyes focusing on the box that was now in his hands, “and get this into FedEx right away.” His chestnut eyes caught and held hers. “We need your answers quickly.”

Miss Parker nodded without saying a word. And with that, Sydney grabbed up his beret and strode purposefully from the Sim Lab – moving at a pace that Parker hadn’t seen since the last time they all had genuinely made chase on Jarod. Broots paused at the Sim Lab door to watch Sydney’s departure. “He sure got that thing ready to go in a hurry.”

“He knows I don’t exactly want to sit on this,” she remarked and then gave Broots a second glance. “What’s the matter, Scooby? You don’t look so hot.”

Broots sighed and almost visibly sagged. “I’m not feeling too hot, if you want to know the truth. Deb was complaining of a stomach ache this morning, and a headache too – and truth be told, I’m starting to feel the same way.”

Miss Parker backed away from him. “Get out of here,” she directed the technician with a pointed finger. “I don’t need to catch the flu from you! I just hope Sydney’s constitution is more hearty than yours was!”

“Thanks, Miss P.,” Broots sighed again, this time in relief. “I’ll go turn off things on my terminal and then head out of here – I’ll call you tomorrow morning, if I’m still feeling crummy.”

“Tell Deb I said to get better quick,” she replied, waving her hand at him. “And don’t come back in until you feel better!”

~~~~~~~~~*

“And remember, I don’t want to be disturbed for ANY reason!”

Sung-Li gave a quick bow and backed toward the office door. “Yes, Mr. Lyle,” she said in her softest, most subservient voice before spinning on her heel and leaving the lion’s den.

Her boss was in a particularly foul mood, probably not helped in any way by the bruises and wounds that made him look like a loser in a prize fight. He’d left her only a half hour earlier in a quieter, more apprehensive mood, only to return looking as if he were ready to explode. She’d long since learned to ignore his occasional venting about the questionable wisdom of the Chairman himself – but this was something deeper, far more malevolent. She thanked the gods and the fates that it wasn’t she who had inspired such ire.

Even now, she could hear him talking to someone on the phone – and his voice sounded like the voice of the devil himself. Looking at her own phone, she saw that there was no light lit – so he had to be using his cell phone. Sung-Li picked up the latest draft of a contract that Lyle was shepherding through the process and made a mental note of where her boss had scribbled alterations to the previous text. There were three such contracts waiting to be retyped – and normally, she would simply bundle the documents together and ship them off to the clerical pool. Today, however, she chose to keep them and do them herself.

It would make for a good way for her to look busy while her boss calmed down again and became ready and presentable for dealing with clients. She moved the first page of the contract into the document holder and then glanced down at his appointment calendar. There was just enough time to call the next two and reschedule their appointments to give Mr. Lyle the time he needed to cool off.

As she dialed the contact number, Sung-Li wondered how long it would take for Mr. Lyle to notice all the little things that she did for him to make his life and his workday easier? It was so rare to find an American boss who, on his better days, gave his instructions to her in her native tongue – speaking Mandarin like a native. He was so alone – going home every night to an empty apartment…

She shook her head and cleared it of the fantasy thoughts that would most likely never happen as the efficient voice of the secretary of the first client came on the line. “Mr. Lyle has had an unexpected emergency,” Sung-Li lied glibly, “and needs to reschedule his appointment…”

~~~~~~~~~*

Miss Parker frowned as the telephone ringing burst through her concentration. Without even needing to watch what she was doing, she reached out and snagged her receiver and brought it to her ear while keeping track of her place in the latest security report. “What?” she growled.

“Miss Parker,” came Broots’ tired voice over the line. “We’ve had a possible hit on Jarod’s location.”

“Broots,” she looked up, concerned. “Didn’t I tell you to get out of…” Then what he’d told her registered. “What did you say?”

“I said we’ve had a possible hit on Jarod,” the technician repeated in an increasingly scratchy-sounding voice. “A sanitarium in San Francisco has uploaded a photograph of a John Doe committed last night for paranoid delusions and wild rantings. I’ve forwarded the picture to your email, if you’d like to take a peek…”

“Why aren’t you home with Debbie?” she asked as she pulled out her keyboard drawer, activated her terminal and began accessing her email program.

“This came in just as I was getting ready to leave – and I thought I’d check it out before…” He left the sentence unfinished – for good reason. If he’d left without following up on the lead, and it turned out that it WAS Jarod in that asylum, it would have meant his job – or worse.

“OK, OK, but I want you gone as soon as…” Her voice faltered as she studied the photograph. Even as blurry as it was, the visage before her was vaguely familiar despite being incredibly gaunt and emaciated-looking. “Good God, if that’s Jarod, he looks AWFUL!”

“That’s what I thought,” Broots coughed miserably into the phone on the other end.

Miss Parker’s voice firmed. “That’s it, Scooby. You get your ass home and into bed – I’ll take this one from here. And when you feel better, see what you can dig up from home on this John Doe – does he have a record anywhere, you know the drill…”

“I will, Miss Parker. See you…”

She reached across her desk and just hit the disconnect button briefly before dialing the number of a Centre extension that she’d known by heart from childhood. “This is Miss Parker, just letting you know that my technician has come up with a solid lead on Jarod in San Francisco and we’re taking the Centre jet…”

“That is impossible,” Raines wheezed unhappily. “The Centre jet is grounded in Boston with extensive hydraulic repairs underway.”

“Well,” Miss Parker rocked back on her heels and stared out her window, “what would you suggest we do?”

“There’s no other alternative – book yourself and your team seats on the next available commercial flight out of New York, and catch the commuter out of Dover to get to New York quickly. Leave your flight numbers and itinerary with my secretary before you leave.”

“Yes, sir.” Miss Parker sighed and moved to the door of her office to peek her head out at her secretary. “Get me three first-class seats on the next available flight from New York to San Francisco, and three first-class seats on the next available commuter from Dover to New York” she directed the young woman, “and then bring me the particulars.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She disconnected the call and then dialed yet another number.

“This is Sydney…”

“Put on your traveling beanie, Freud – we have a possible sighting of Jarod and we need to get there NOW!” she announced, already rising from her seat.

“Jarod!” Sydney sounded completely nonplussed. “After all this time?”

“If this is the real thing, your lab rat hasn’t done too well lately,” she remarked, hitting the print button to send the forwarded photograph to her printer. “I’ll show you what I mean when I meet you downstairs. You get Sam…”

“I haven’t seen Sam all day,” Sydney responded quickly. “I think I heard that he had to run errands for the Centre today.”

“Shit!” Miss Parker hissed. “OK, you get your stuff together, I’ll call Sam’s cell and get him to meet us at the Dover airport.”

“This isn’t something Lyle or Raines has cooked up, is it?” the old psychiatrist couldn’t help asking the question. “I mean, after all this time, to get a solid lead… and NOT have Lyle climbing all over it…”

“I suppose we’ll find out when we get to California,” Miss Parker shrugged. “Get a move on!”

Again she disconnected and turned around and dialed another number from memory. But this time, it took a little longer for the other end of the line to pick up. “Yes?”

“Sam, it’s me.

“Yes, Miss Parker.”

“Get your ass to the Dover airport and meet me there. We’ve had a hit on Jarod’s whereabouts.”

There was a short pause. “You’re kidding!” Sam exclaimed with uncharacteristic candor.

“Not hardly,” Miss Parker grumbled. “Whatever you’re doing at the moment, this is more important…”

“I’m on my way as we speak,” Sam told her, and the sounds in the background confirmed that he was walking very briskly – probably back toward the Centre sedan that he’d been driving already that day. “I’ll see you at the airport.”

~~~~~~~~~*

Sam cursed as the car ahead of him on the road seemed determined to go ONLY the speed limit. Of all the times for him to get stuck behind law-abiding citizens, he thought to himself with a touch of irony. Here he was, poised to take off cross-country to try to snare a man who, according to all indications, the Centre had been holding illegally and highly unethically for over thirty years – and he was cursed with a forward escort of a little old lady determined not to break the 55 mile per hour speed limit!

What was worse was that the on-coming traffic was heavy enough that it was nigh on impossible to get enough time to slip around the little old biddy. Sam was fairly sure that Miss Parker would much rather he get there just a touch late than not at all. So he let fly with a few choice words that generally only were heard around the sweeper locker room that disparaged his obstacles genetic heritage, general level of education and the manner in which she’d acquired her driver’s license and kept himself poised very close to the middle line. The instant there was the slightest let-up in traffic going south…

Finally! Sam hit the gas on the Centre sedan, which immediately leapt forward to speed around the slightly battered old minivan. What he hadn’t counted on was the delivery van pulling out into the empty spot at about the same time that he was neck and neck with the minivan, giving Sam nowhere to go but off the road entirely.

The Centre sedan, a Crown Victoria, was a well-constructed vehicle that could weather many circumstances that would ruin any other car. It didn’t do well, however, falling down an embankment virtually on the driver’s side. When it finally was ready to come to a full halt, it groaned mightily once and then rolled over on its roof against the drainage culvert, effectively pinning anyone within the car in a shallow flow of icy cold water.

~~~~~~~~~*

Miss Parker frowned and paced back and forth near the main entrance to the Dover airport terminal until Sydney walked out to the curb and caught her by the arm. “Miss Parker! Our plane departs in exactly ten minutes! We HAVE to get back through security and get on board!”

“We need Sam on this one, Syd, I feel it,” Miss Parker jerked her arm out of Sydney’s grasp and paced back and forth one more time. “All right, I’m coming,” she growled at him and let him again catch her elbow and drag her into the terminal. At the same time as she was walking, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed Sam’s number – and then frowned when the service announced that either the phone she was trying to reach was out of range or out of service. “That’s odd!”

“You’re just in time!” the attendant at the commuter flight desk told the hurried pair with a touch of frustration. “The pilot is ready to taxi to the end of the runway – they were going to leave without you if you hadn’t gotten here…”

Miss Parker and Sydney didn’t wait to hear the rest of the harangue, but rushed through the security check and out the doors and down the stairs to the tarmac and the little twin-engined puddle jumper that would get them to New York in time for their United flight.

“Good to see you folks,” the stewardess smiled a patently contrived smile at them. “Please take your seats right away. We’re ready to depart.”

Miss Parker nabbed the window seat, as always, and sat down into her seat grumbling. “I’m going to skin him alive when I get back,” she promised her companion. “There’s no excuse.”

“You never know, Miss Parker,” Sydney tried to reason with her. “There is a lot of road between wherever it was that Sam was when you called and the airport…”

“Not an hour’s worth,” she retorted. This whole dash to the west coast had a wrong feeling about it. Somehow she found it difficult to imagine a Jarod so lost in his mental disease that he’d need hospitalization – and even more difficult to imagine anything keeping Sam from making a half-hour drive in over an hour.

“Maybe he’ll call while we’re in the air – and we’ll make arrangements for him to catch up with us in California,” the psychiatrist tried a reassuring tone and a gentle pat on the hand to ease his companion’s tension. Miss Parker didn’t like flying much in the first place – and these tiny set-backs weren’t helping.

~~~~~~~~~*

William Raines was tired.

Not just because it had been a long workday – he’d worked long hours for the better part of his life, so that ten to fifteen hours at a stretch was nothing new or out of the ordinary. It helped that he loved his job – it had taken him long enough to finally win the authority he now wielded, and so he enjoyed seeing people jump when he spoke and the covert looks of dissatisfaction or resentment even as they blandly agreed to do whatever it was that he’d ordered.

No, a goodly percentage of the cause of his fatigue was his physical condition. Living life tethered to an oxygen tank was limiting even in the best of times – not being able to do much more than sit at his desk and delegate others to do things that he used to love doing himself could be downright frustrating. He missed being in the laboratory with the psychological tests ongoing – he missed the direct contact with the test subjects that had always helped him feel more powerful and in control of life in general. Isolated in his Tower office, there was little that gave him the same direct experience of power.

And now, the one person he’d relied upon consistently to help him experience that direct feeling of power was gone. Willy was dead – his constant companion for nearly ten years would never walk into the office again, never would take charge of that little oxygen cart with its annoying squeak that rattled others with such effectiveness as to make fixing it counterproductive, never again would crack a smile in that deadpan face at a joke or thought that only the two of them appreciated. Raines’ fatigue came at the thought of the world changing, and not for the better.

He walked slowly, so as not to overstress his debilitated respiratory system, toward the black Centre sedan that he’d long since requisitioned as his own. Tonight, he’d have to drive himself back to the fine mansion he’d purchased on the far side of Blue Cove – tonight, he’d have to prepare his own small supper and eat it alone. It would take days – weeks, perhaps – to find a suitable replacement for Willy; and it would take months thereafter before the man was completely trained in all the duties and obligations that would be his from now on, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

It was almost sunset, and twilight had always been his favorite time of day. The shadows were long and inviting and comforting, and the night was only a few degrees of visibility away. The transition from light to darkness – both as a psychological ambiance and a metaphor for the position of supreme authority – had fascinated him his whole life. So much of what he’d done over the years had been a practice of walking that thin line between light and darkness – always with a slight preference for the latter over the former.

Raines could see the lights of the houses on the very outskirts of Blue Cove when a small light on the console of his sedan caught his attention. Strange that the oil light would be on, he thought to himself – Willy had always made sure that this car was in the absolute best operating condition. Then again, as a slight ticking sound became discernable above the purr of the engine, Willy was gone. This was but another sign of the many ways in which his friend and bodyguard would be missed.

The explosion rocked the sleepy hamlet at the precise moment of sunset, and pieces of metal rained down upon the landscape for hundreds of yards in all directions of the pothole that had once been a Centre sedan.

~~~~~~~~~*

Miss Parker focused out the round little window in the fuselage of the airliner, not for the first time in the last six hours. Ever since the night her fath… Mr. Parker… had taken his stroll into the stormy night sky over the Atlantic from the cargo bay of a struggling Triumvirate airliner on its way to Nairobi from Scotland, air travel had been very low on her list of enjoyable pastimes. The ease with which the large plane had still crashed, despite the best efforts of a certifiable genius to keep them from dying, had never left her. Jarod had escaped the wreckage and presumably gone about his life as if nothing had ever happened – while she had become a white-knuckled flyer, wishing nothing more but for the ordeal to be over the moment the wheels lifted from the ground.

There was a gentle pat on her right hand, and her face softened slightly. Leave it to Sydney to sense her mood and try in a non-verbal way to soothe. “I’m sorry, Syd – I’m not such good company this time around,” she said quietly, not turning from her porthole.

“I’m not expecting you to be,” came the lightly accented response. “I can imagine that having been on one plane that crashed makes it difficult to ride in any other.”

Finally she turned to look at him, the expression in her eyes confused and tormented. “It doesn’t help that I know that it was Raines and Lyle themselves who had sabotaged the plane, you know?” she asked rhetorically, at long last breeching her silence on an event that had been profound for over three years now, “or that it was Daddy who threw away all the other parachutes.”

Sydney had to work to keep his face a study of neutrality and objectivity at finally hearing details of the crash that had supposedly killed Adama, one of the three powerful businessmen at the head of a global consortium known only as the Triumvirate whose existence seemed so closely tied to the Centre, and his team of bodyguards. “What is it then?” he asked gently, filing all the information away for review later.

“It’s watching the ground coming up at me too fast,” she replied, turning back to her window, “and knowing that there’s not a damned thing I can do in my own defense. It’s the feeling of helplessness…”

“Is that why you’re suddenly so concerned with your little brother?” Sydney wondered aloud. “Do you sense his helplessness against the powers that be in the Centre, and use him to help yourself feel just a little more in control?”

Miss Parker was silent for a moment, and Sydney was just starting to wonder if he’d trod too soon and too heavily into the topic when she nodded vaguely. “It could be,” she told him very softly and calmly. “And it could be that I just don’t want him to end up like Jarod – or me.” She turned to look at him again. “I want him to have a normal childhood, Syd.”

Despite the soft ache of regret that came whenever Jarod’s background was mentioned –exacerbated by the possibility that the wretch in the photograph she’d shown him actually WAS Jarod – Sydney could understand and sympathize. “I don’t blame you,” he told her gently. “I just wanted you to know that I’ll be glad to help, if you ever think you need it.”

“Thanks, Syd,” she patted his hand for a change, and then clutched at the top of his hand when the plane gave an unexpected lurch. She turned quickly to her window and then gasped, “Something’s wrong! We’re too close to the trees!”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the voice of the pilot came over the intercom, terse and brusque, “we’ve just lost two of our engines. We’re going to try to make an emergency landing in Salt Lake City, but things are going to get bumpy from here. Please listen to your flight attendants and follow all their instructions…”

“Sydney…” Miss Parker exclaimed, and then let out a little shriek as the plane again lurched badly. The interior filled with an odd whine. “Oh, God, not again,” she whimpered.

“Lean forward!” Sydney counseled them even as the stewardess in their section began giving them the same instructions – only to be knocked off her feet at the next hard lurch.

“Sydney!” Miss Parker screamed and groped for his hand blindly.

He managed to catch it and carry it to his knee when the plane lurched again – and this time, the sound of protesting and crumpling metal filled the compartment.

The last thing Sydney heard was a loud crash and the beginnings of screaming.

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