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Chapter or Story 
Chapter or Story
The Pretender: The Administration
by Dash Nolan
The Lame Duck Congress
by Dash Nolan
The Lame Duck Congress
In one practiced motion, Miss Parker slipped the pack of cigarettes from her skirt pocket, thumbed it open, snatched a nail coffin out of the container, and jammed the cigs back into her pocket. She lit up, closing her eyes to focus on the smoke as it caressed her mouth, throat, and lungs. Holding her breath just long enough to hear her heart slow just enough, she released her tensed muscles and the smoke rushed from her lips and nostrils. Yes, she had at least one ulcer. Yes, she was asking for lung cancer by forty-five. But these little sticks of release were the only things keeping her from marching through the Centre's halls, Sig Sauer-in-hand, and settling business.
The fantasy was not an unfamiliar one: hunting down Mr. Raines and not pulling the barrel away from his temple until she knew everything there was to know about the web of lies surrounding her father, her mother, the Pretender Project, and anything else that came to mind. It would be so easy. Unless a sweeper was specifically-assigned to one of the executives, every fool in the building with a suit and gun was supposed to follow her when told and fire where she pointed. She would be twenty feet from Raines' office before the smartest of the sweepers even began to question where they were headed. It would be so easy.
Miss Parker took another slow, deep breath through the burning leaves. As her heart slowed once more, she was reminded of why it would be that easy. No one could pull that sort of maneuver, not even the daughter of the Blue Cove Instillation Director, and make it out of the building alive. Sure, she would have her answers, but she wouldn't be able to appreciate them for terribly long.
"Such is the theme of this place," She said to her empty office. "So close, and yet so far away. Family, answers, targets..." The putrid smoke filled her chest, rushed right back out. "Jarod."
He was always one step ahead of her. Where she was, he had been there moments before, sometimes when she wasn't chasing him. Even when she took time out of her Centre duties, if such a thing was possible, to search for the truth about her own past, Jarod's footprints were fresh. Everything she knew about her mother, everything that she hadn't gathered from foggy childhood memories and her father's ramblings, had been practically presented to her with a silver bow courtesy of Jarod. Before, she had questioned it. Her mind wasn't willing to accept that Jarod was doing this for her, or anyone else's sake. At the time, the only explanation her mind could level with was that he was tossing these bits of history to keep her off his tail. It had certainly done that, but Parker was finally allowing herself to believe that maybe it wasn't just a means to his end.
As Sydney was constantly reminding her, she thought, they had only proceeded as far as they had because Jarod wanted them to. Jarod wanted Miss Parker to know that her mother hadn't killed herself. He wanted her to know that her mother had been saving countless children from bleak futures in the Centre's halls.
But there was still a barrier within Parker's mind that wouldn't allow her to see Jarod as a separate, individual person. To her, at least partially, he was still the walking, talking results of years of conditioning and simulations. He was a Centre asset. It would be a long-time still before she could accept him as more than a snatched valuable.
There was a knocking from her office door. It didn't register.
Miss Parker hadn't always had this level of freedom. At one point she herself had been a goon with a gun, moving from assignment-to-assignment, killing or detaining the unfortunate bastards that caught the Tower's attention. More often-than-not, they were ex-employees who had run off the second they had any scrap of threatening information. Perhaps they hadn't been able to handle the choices that crossed their desks, or maybe the offers from rival organizations for Centre documents was too high to ignore.
Another series of knocks.
But they had all been simple-minded fools. Easy to track, easy to predict, and easy to bring down. It hadn't been her decision to do what she did to those targets. Her hands were clean of those actions, Parker silently claimed. But she was in charge of a unit now, a unit assigned to one of the most important Centre assets to see the inside of a "Sim" room.
And that asset was relaxing within the secure halls of the White House, likely smiling at his pursuers' helplessness to get at him.
Whoever was on the other side of Miss Parker's office door knocked once more, louder than before, and she was finally roused from her nicotine reminiscing.
"What?"
"Miss Parker?" came a nervous male voice through the frosted glass.
The perpetually-annoyed Centre operative buried the cigarette into a steel ashtray and sighed.
"Come in, Broots."
Broots cautiously entered the office, nervously smiling as he met Miss Parker's gaze.
"I've been searching through congressional office staff listings," he began, his words hurried from excitement. "From Congressional aides to something called minority "whips", all the records have been public and so, of course, not anything Jarod would be interested in."
Miss Parker sighed loudly, stopping Broots in his tracks, and leaned back in her chair. "I already knew all of this. Do you honestly think Jarod would be stupid enough to make himself a face that hundreds of Congressmen and political drones would see everyday? He's put himself somewhere in the White House, somewhere protected."
Broots stared at her for a minute, his mind trying to fast forward to the part in his speech that Miss Parker had just skipped-to.
"Right, so I have an active search running through active White House staff, but with the way they have their staff divided into entirely different branches and listings, it could be-"
"There are fourteen-hundred people working at the White House, and they all think they're helping to run the supposed "free world." Do you really think they update their staff lists regularly?"
Broots started to respond, but the words never came. Instead he simply looked down, admiring the intricate marble work in the office floor. Miss Parker went on with a new cigarette between her fingers.
"Jarod gave us his position early, which means he knew we wouldn't be able to reach him until he wanted us to. We are exactly where he wants us to be." She took a long hit from the coffin nail before continuing. "What a surprise, right?"
And then it hit her. Looking to the mauve office walls to Broots' right, something in her mind clicked. All this talk of her, all this talk of "we."
"We're the ones after him," Parker mumbled, smoke escaping from her lips.
"Miss Parker?"
"Jarod is playing this game against us. You, me, Sydney, the Centre, we're the ones after him. All he thinks he has to do is beat us, and he's home-free, right?"
"I, uh- I guess, yeah."
"We've been dancing to his tune. There has to be another side we can hit him from."
Miss Parker's eyes finally abandoned blankly-staring at her office wall and oriented toward the man in her office.
"Broots, you have access to Centre transfers, right?"
"Outbound, you mean? Sure. Unless it comes from any office at your father's level or higher, I can pull it up."
"And you check those?"
"Of course. I have to look over the major data transfers from the Centre-out every week. Pretty much, every time this place gets money for data like text or a Sim video, I have to review it."
A smile crept across Miss Parker's glossed red lips.
"And is our best customer still the D.O.D.?"
Broots' brow arched in confusion, but he answered without argument. "As of this last week, the Department of Defense topped our list of singular data transfers with six. There's a seventh scheduled to go through, but I got a message from the second-level department that it may-"
"That's perfect, Broots. Do you have contacts in the Department? Names, numbers?"
The young computer analyst looked to the side, thinking, before responding. "Not me specifically, but each data transfer is sent to a specific server within the D.O.D.. I could trace the requests from those deals and probably get you some names and e-mail addresses of people who have been working with the Centre."
"Inside the Pentagon and the White House?"
"Yeah, sure."
There was a moment of silence, and that same little click that had hit Miss Parker moments before had now crossed the air and was sounding off inside Broots' head. He slowly turned towards his boss, smiling. It was a more optimistic, less predatory smile than that of Miss Parker, but for a brief moment, they smiled together.
Then Parker realized she was sharing a moment of humanity with another member of it, and quickly returned to a mildly-aggravated glare.
"Get me those names and numbers, Broots."
