Chapter 6. I'll never tell.

  "Mr Parker is in a meeting..." A young blond receptionist chorused in dismay as Miss Parker made another whirlwind appearance and rapid disappearance through her boss's doors.

 ‘At least Mr Parker was yet to reprimand me for his daughter's last unannounced appearance,' she thought to herself as she resumed her position behind the desk, trying to convince herself not to listen to the heated debate that begun brewing shortly after Miss Parker's entrance and to look as busy as humanly possible in the meantime.

<~>

  Miss Parker almost burst into the chairman's office and was a little taken back by the meeting that was evidently in place without her knowledge. All five men present set their eyes firmly upon Miss Parker's steely gaze, but it was Raines, standing next to Mr Parker, who broke their silence, "You were not invited Miss Parker..."

  Mr Parker cut him short, "Angel, Lyle told me you agreed to head the search for Jarod's clone..."

  Miss Parker limited her gaze to that of her brother's, "News travels fast."

  "That it does." Came Lyle's unnerved response from where he sat in front the Chairman.

  Mr Cox seated to Lyle's left, calmly folded his hands across his lap, watching the twin's exchange with interest, "Is there something we can help you with Miss Parker?"

  "I'm sure I can think of something." Her reply was spoken flatly, her cocky expression rather vibrant and telling.

  Lyle returned his sister's conceited smile with one of his own, "We were just finishing up."  He gathered a series of files from Mr Parker and awaited his three colleagues to stand and make their way to the door. The third man to follow Lyle, being someone to whom, Miss Parker had been spared an introduction.

  "Thank you Gentlemen." Mr Parker dismissed the party with an air of royalty, before warmly gesturing to Miss Parker to sit.

  She declined, "I need an answer."

  "Most people have the courtesy to ask a question before they demand an answer, Angel. You know better than that."

  "My decency is not in question..."

  Mr Parker straightened his silk tie, his daughter successfully commanding his full attention. He replied with a heavy sigh, "...I'm listening..."

  Parker walked forward and dropped a plastic evidence bag on his desk, before folding her arms defensively across her stomach, "What do you know about this?"

  Mr Parker glanced at the photograph, a fleeting look of pure hatred crossing his eyes before he returned his daughter's gaze, "Where did you get this?"

  "In the mail. What do you know about it?"

  "That whoever dares cross my daughter had better hope to be dead before I get through with them..."

  Miss Parker picked up the plastic with caution and replaced it to its previous secure position in her coat pocket, her eyes never leaving her father's.

  "...Consider this matter resolved, Angel. There's no point distracting you from the hunt for the boy over such trivial matters..."

  She turned to leave without further response but was beckoned back, "If you let these things get to you, you know what will happen. You're a Parker. Parker's don't let other's stand in their way..."

  Miss Parker sighed to herself, how could he consider such a thing to be insignificant? Then again, considering what she'd recently discovered about her family's legacy, she seriously doubted that she was a Parker, not that the alternative was even remotely tolerable.

 Mr Parker continued, "...You know what they say about water under the bridge..."

<~>

  Broot's dragged his feet slowly along the linoleum floors of the SL-5 corridors, having resigned himself to retuning to the tech room to look for something that could distract him long enough for either Sydney or Miss Parker to come looking for him. Assuming they were still alive, that was.

  Sitting in the familiar swivel chair that he seemed to spend the majority of his nights figuratively attached to, Broots logged into his computer terminal under the pretence of reading some of the emails that were currently clogging his inbox. Having just settled into a good system of ranking the replies he would have to answer by the day's end, Broots positively jumped out of his skin at the sound of the ringing office phone. Glancing around to see if anyone had noticed his little episode, he quickly realised that he was the only one around and fumbled to answer the incoming call.

  "...T..Ttech support... "

  "Broots? Is that you?"

  Broots struggled to place the young but familiar sounding female voice on the other end of the line, "Y-yess."

  "Oh thank God! I was worried that maybe I'd get someone... Never mind... How are you? I need your help. Big time..."

   "...Ok..." Broots rubbed his forehead in thought.

  "It's me Cameron. Did I forget to mention that? Maybe I forget to mention that. It's just that I think I might have made a mistake, a big mistake, only I can't make anymore mistakes because Mr Cox has already yelled at me today and I didn't even know who Mr Cox was, but he told me that if I made another mistake that my career here was as good as stuffed. And what does that even mean, anyway? I'm so confused..."

  Broots smiled. He'd had quite the crush on the new intern down in reception and had found himself on many an occasion, making unnecessary trips to the lobby just to see her smile. Very recently they'd begun exchanging ‘hi's' and ‘bye's' in the foyer, so for her to call him out of the blue like this was quite an honour, "W...Wwhat happened?"

  "Well, this guy just came in and he said that he had an appointment today, so I checked his visitor's pass and then looked it up on the computer but couldn't find anything. Then he told me that he'd spoken to me on the phone twice before when his appointment got changed but I still couldn't find him in the system..." her voice dropped even lower than before, "I think I might have deleted his appointment. B-by accident!"

  "What kind of appointment was it?" Broots asked expertly balancing the phone with his shoulder and chin, as he brought up the appointment making software.

  "It was a job interview."

  "Which department?"

  "Psychology."

  "Who was the appointment with?" Broots stopped typing so as not to disrupt her response.

  "It's supposed to be with your friend, Sydney."

  "..."

  "Broots? Broots are you there? Did I delete it? What should I do?"

  "I... I'm on my way to meet Sydney now... Why don't I stop by the lobby and take..."

  "...Cameron... Cameron Charles..."

  "Why don't I take Mr Charles too? Then no-one will have to know about the mix up." Broots smiled to himself at his ‘night in shining armour' response. Perhaps all these years working for Miss Parker had finally paid off...

  "Would you? Would you do that for me?"

  "I'm on my way." Broots replaced the phone and straightened up his scruffy jacket using the refection from his computer monitor, before making his way to the elevators.

<~>

  Miss Parker left the chairman's office and stalked off to find the remaining members of her team, unsure of what to make of her father's response, though it was certainly not the first time he'd left her feeling alienated.

  Arriving at Sydney's office, she opened the door unannounced, and was surprised to see that it was empty. Shaking her head and muttering to herself as she left for the elevators once more, Miss Parker figured the shrink must have been getting Broots to try and crack the security feed on Jarod from the terminals in the Tech support offices on SL-5.

  It wasn't until she'd received a room full of SL-5 gawky stares, none of which she recognized as belonging to her team, that Miss Parker resigned herself to checking her own office.

  As she opened her office doors, Miss Parker was slightly taken back by the sight of Mr Parker sitting behind her desk, "Any news on the clone?"

  "Not since you told me about water under the bridge ten minutes ago..." She folded her arms across her deep plum coloured satin blouse, tossing her black designer coat across her leather lounge. She wasn't used to seeing him so frequently.

  Mr Parker smiled, "Well I can't have my angel getting hurt."

  Miss Parker nodded, "I guess not."

  "Vested interest you see."

  "I do." She remained beside the door, feeling oddly out of place in her own office.

  "Asking questions only makes waves, you see..."

  "And waves make water deeper..." Came a sarcastic reply that was evidently missed by the man still proposing to be her father.

  "If you let the water get deep enough..."

  "It will drown me." She approached her desk, retrieving a small metal thimble, "I was listening."

  He smiled again, "That's my girl." He stood to leave, glancing at the thimble in her hand, "...I can have a tailor sent..."

  She smiled to herself, placing the thimble back on her desk. He didn't remember. "It's Jarod's," She lied, "Sydney seems to think it has a connection to his clone..."

  "And what do you think?"

  "That it's a thimble."

  As abruptly as their awkward conversation had begun, Miss Parker's phone began to ring. Screening the caller's identity before she answered, she ensured that her eyes never left her father's.

  Mr Parker nodded to himself as she spoke confidently to the caller, satisfied that she was no longer on a tirade for answers to questions that she shouldn't know and was successfully back on the task of finding Jarod's clone.

<~>

  Telling himself repeatedly that he could muster the courage to speak to Cameron in person, Broots approached the reception desk and sighed with partial relief, partial disappointment, that Cameron was already occupied on the phone, leaving one of the more experienced receptionists to take his enquiry.

  "What can I do for you today Mr Broots?"

  Broots smiled nervously at Cameron, who returned the frazzled gesture, before glancing up at the older woman, "I've been asked to collect a Mr Charles for an interview with the department of psychology."

  The receptionist raised an eyebrow, "But you're from tech support..."

  Broots hid his shaking hands behind his back, noticeably unaccustomed to lying and certainly not to lying twice in the one day, "Sydney asked if I could escort Mr Charles through on my way to meet Miss Parker."

  Not having entirely bought the mumbling technician's story, though not wanting to be personally responsible for delaying the chairman's daughter, she pointed vaguely at a blond man dressed neatly in a beige business suit across the lobby, "Mr Charles is over there..."

  Broots smiled nervously, "Thanks for your help."

  As he neared the black leather chair that Mr Charles was sitting on, he began to sweat and hastened his approach.

  Once he was well inside voice range, Broots was met with a polite, "Are you from the psychology department?"

  "Are you crazy?" Broots hissed, taking Mr Charles's elbow as he stood and directing him towards an out-of-sight janitor's closet, aware that he was being watched rather closely from reception, "Do you have any idea...?" Pulling Mr Charles in behind him, Broots barricaded them both inside the tiny space and pulled out his phone, "Please, please, please pick-up!" he muttered as Sydney's phone simultaneously begun to ring, "Why me?"

<~>

  Sydney glanced at his ringing phone before rejecting the incoming call and returning it to his pocket, resuming his verbal boxing match with Lyle, "...All you have proven is that Jarod's mind is rather fragile... You haven't even come close to gaining his trust... He'll kill himself before he gives you anything of use..."

  Lyle smiled at the frozen image of Jarod in the infirmary on his monitor, "Jarod has unrestricted access to medical attention around the clock. If he tries to harm himself, which even for him would be damn near impossible, we've got people who can fix him up in seconds..."

  Sydney sighed with pent-up rage, "Are you familiar with the term ‘suicide by cop,' because Jarod is, and so far he's doing a fine job of seeing to it that you are the one responsible for his death!"

Lyle chuckled, "Even if I do kill him, he's got a whole team on stand-by to bring him back to life. There's absolutely no reason why you should be permitted to see him..."

<~>

  Broots kicked the stonewall hard and flinched with pain at his now sharply throbbing big toe, as he dialled the second person he'd call to save his life. Praying that she would answer, with a slightly increasing desperation since Sydney had failed him.

  "What?" Miss Parker sounded odd and it took Broots a second to react.

  "...Miss Parker...?"

  "You called me. Now what do you want?"

  "We've got a... a situation..."

  "Deal with it. I'm busy."

  "...It's not that kind of situation..."

  "Well what kind of situation is it?"

  Broots lowered his voice to barely a whisper, "...The kind I can't tell you on the phone..."

  "...You have...? Well why didn't you just say so!"

  Broots furrowed his eyebrows, "Miss Parker...? I just did... It's..."

  "...Well I guess I'd better come and see this hadn't I...?" she interrupted.

  "Ok... Ok but we're locked in the janitor's closet in the lobby... I don't know how you'll... Without..."

  "Where did you find it?"

  "What...? Miss Parker are you ok...? You're not making sense..."

  "I have a quick appointment to make and then I'll be in your office."

  Broots watched the pale blue screen of his phone fade to black after she abruptly cut him off, "We're doomed," He muttered between hyperventilations, leaning against the door in the now pitch black closet, "I should have been an architect... Architects don't risk their lives every time they answer a phone call... What are they going to put on my tombstone?  Likes to play chess and tetras...? I haven't even left a legacy...!"

<~>

 Miss Parker stood outside Jarod's infirmary for the third time that day and watched with a crooked smile as he counted artifacts in the concrete ceiling, the two sweepers accompanying him, oblivious to his occupation. Taking a deep breath, she scanned her hand and entered the room, "What did you get up to?"

  "16,785."

  The sweepers looked to her for an explanation but she ignored them, perching herself on the spare bed next to Jarod instead. He motioned to prop himself up, but quickly found the restraints too short.

  "Bet you're sore now... Any chance you've re-considered?" Miss Parker crossed her legs neatly, overlooking the sweeper's stares.

  Jarod resumed staring at the ceiling.

  "I've seen the tapes Jarod. I know what they're prepared to do to get an answer out of you... But I also know it's an answer you don't have..."

  Jarod turned his head to face her, staring deep into her eyes. They weren't the same eyes he'd been confronted with on either of her earlier visits. Something had again changed. Dramatically.

  "...You don't know where he is, do you Jarod...?"

  Jarod smiled faintly, "Not a clue."

  Parker returned his smile, "But you do know how to contact him..."

  The smile on Jarod's face faded, "Not anymore..."

  "And what's that supposed to mean?" Parker folded her arms across her chest, her smile fading synchronously.

  "We had a deal. I broke it. He's gone."

  "Nice try. I want more of an answer than that Egg Head."

  "It's the truth Miss Parker. If he didn't hear from me by Wednesday..." he paused, "...Which I'm guessing that on account of your expression was a while ago, he'd drop off the radar completely... I couldn't tell you where he is if I wanted to..."

  "Well how were you supposed to contact him Monkey Boy?"

  "Computers may not be your forte Miss Parker, but there is an amazing online world out there..."

  Miss Parker got up and leant right in Jarod's face, incidentally obscuring it from the cameras, "Do you remember when we were kids and you asked me what my name was...? I want an email account Jarod." She leant back so as not to draw any extra attention from the sweepers or worse still, the monsters that would be watching the monitors, "Make it snappy. I'm pressed for time."

  Jarod watched her eyes carefully, "I remember."

  "Well...?"

  Jarod grinned, remembering the extent of that earlier conversation fondly. He could almost feel her soft smooth hands cupping his ear and her sweet smelling hair bushing against his cheek as he revisited those three words... No other words were in existence that could describe her better...

 I'll never tell.

<~>