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Chapter or Story
Truth and Consequences - by MMB
Chapter 16: Painful Echoes
"What time is your doctor's appointment in Dover?" Miss Parker asked Sydney over her cup of coffee.
Grey eyebrows raised. She'd been very quiet that morning, aside from thanking him for the first good night's sleep she'd had in days. "Two this afternoon. Why?"
"I'll send a sweeper over later this morning with the laptop for Broots, then," she put her empty cup down and reached for the remainder of her toast. "I have meetings most of the day - so I'm not sure exactly when I'd be able to drive it over to him myself..."
"Parker," Sydney reached out and captured her empty hand in his. "I wanted to talk to you about something along that line anyway. I'm thinking that there's nothing here that can't be shelved for a day or so while you can fly out to be with Davy for a bit. You should go to California..."
Storm-grey eyes met his in a fond gaze tinged with mild frustration. "I wish it were that easy, Syd. But the fact is that I'm at a delicate spot in the financial negotiations with the supervisors who are going to be the first stockholders for the Centre. If you and I and Jarod and Kevin intend to have a Centre still issuing us regular paychecks in the future, these negotiations HAVE to be done properly - and finished soon. And, believe it or not, I have a Senator from the Appropriations Committee and a General from the Pentagon coming to discuss some of the more questionable government projects that I've temporarily put on hiatus."
"Well, how about spending a little time this morning clearing your calendar for tomorrow and the next day then?" He tightened his hold on her. "Look, I'm not advocating playing hooky long-term until both Davy and Deb are released from the hospital - I'm just pointing out that you NEED to go be with them for your emotional and mental wellbeing. You need to satisfy yourself that they really ARE safe..."
"I figured I'd call Davy about mid-morning - about the time that he'd be waking up over there. Just hearing his voice..." She got a wistful look on her face.
"Isn't going to do for long," he finished for her dryly then cocked his eyebrows back at her in a mirror expression of hers. "And don't give me that look, Parker - you know damned well that I'm telling you the truth. You've been ripping yourself up one side and down the other for focusing on Centre business while your son was missing to the point that you had to step into another's personality to pull it off, and in the end you weren't sleeping, remember? If you want to know the truth," he glared at her to make his point, "I'd rather do WITHOUT a paycheck from the Centre than see you put yourself through one more day of Hell like that. None of us are without resources to get ourselves other jobs, if push came to shove..."
"Sydney," she put her other hand, now empty of toast, on top of his and sandwiched it between the both of hers, "I know you're telling me the truth. I'll see what I can do to clear time tomorrow and maybe fly over tonight and back tomorrow night."
His silvered head nodded. "Good. That will make ME feel better too, you know..." That was provided she'd actually DO it, however...
She shook her head at him. "I swear, I'm surrounded by worry-warts all of a sudden - first Jarod and Ethan, now you..."
"Ethan?" The grey eyebrows climbed high on the forehead again.
"It's a side-effect of his hearing the voices so loudly," she explained lamely. "He doesn't have to talk to me to know if I'm OK... He was worrying in my ear over the phone yesterday - trying to insist that I talk to you..."
That surprised him even more. "I hope I get to know your half-brother better someday," Sydney commented quietly. "But at least you listened to him."
"Speaking of feeling better, I have something for you that should help make YOU feel better." Miss Parker rose and carried her dishes to the sink to rinse. "Feel up to doing some marathon reading and prioritizing while you're stuck in that machine doing therapy on your knee all day?"
"I'm going to need to find something on that line to do fairly quickly," he responded, "or I'm going to have a raging case of cabin fever LONG before I'll be in any shape to do anything about it." He smiled over at her. "Why - what did you have in mind?"
"I'm going to need someone I can trust implicitly to start going through the hardcopy data archives we're bringing up from SL-26. I've got some ancillary personnel doing some rough sorting by department as it lands at Raines' old residence - but somebody's going to have to go through all that crap eventually. There are secrets in there that need to come out - and no doubt there's a ton of junk that can just go in the trash." She turned and leaned against the counter, wiping her hands on a hand towel. "Interested?"
"Definitely!" He grinned widely at her. "Anything to get my mind off of this damned knee..."
"Good! I'll have the first box of data delivered with the laptop then," she smiled back at him, then bent over him and dropped a kiss on his cheek. "Oh - and do you want me to wake Kevin up before I leave?"
"No," Sydney shook his head. "Yesterday was very hard on him. And that's something else I want to run past you. If it were my decision to make, I'd recommend that he never be asked to do another SIM in his life. Grey totally botched his training as a Pretender, and I think abused him in the process."
"Damn!" Miss Parker frowned. "I thought his attitude came more from sheer naivete..."
"Some of it does, but I watched him get defensive when he thought that he'd failed to uncover any new information. His personality is simply too fragile overall to handle stepping into the mind of another. Whether he ever will be strong enough to do it properly is extremely doubtful, given that I have neither the years nor the incentive to put him through the intensive UN-learning process that would have to come before any retraining." Sydney sighed.
"If I'm not mistaken," she commented archly, "you actually sound disappointed."
He nodded - it was a valid observation. "I am, in a way. Working with a Pretender and guiding him or her through a proper SIM can be just as mentally challenging for the mentor as it is for the Pretender. This was the first time since Jarod left that I've had a chance to..." He caught himself and glanced at her guiltily. "In many ways, I miss working in that kind of rarified intellectual level, I admit. It can be quite addictive in its own right."
She wasn't surprised at the admission. There had to have been at least some personal agenda in his cooperating in the search for Jarod all those years ago. At least it was a legitimate one, and not one with a sadistic bent. "So yesterday wore him out too?"
"More than I think even he expected," Sydney informed her. "I also saw that Grey must have conditioned him to expect abuse or at least anger upon exit. Any success he ever saw as Shadow must have come about from his natural talent at deductive reasoning, not through any substantial mental stretching as a Pretender."
"That's despicable!"
"I know - and something else that I'm going to have to work on with him so that the same issues don't arise in other areas of his persona as time goes on." Sydney shook his head at the damage that had been done to the personable young man in the name of... "So let's let him sleep in - I'll have my hands full today trying to undo some of the damage from yesterday soon enough as it is, and I'll need him well-rested to get anywhere. Besides, Mr. Ikeda and I have some common ground - I'm finding talking to him fascinating."
"I'm sure you would," she commented cryptically, wondering what in the world Sydney could find as common ground with a professional assassin. "You take care, then - and tell Broots I said “hi” when you see him. I'll call him the moment I hear any news of Deb from Sam."
"Have a good day, Parker."
She smiled at him. "My son and Deb are safe - and the monsters who stole them have all been caught one way or the other. Today will be a LOT better day, I promise you!"
~~~~~~~~
Tyler pushed open the door to his office with a foot and then walked in to set the pair of coffees down on his desk. His hand finally free, he checked his watch - his morning meeting with Miss Parker wasn't scheduled to start for another ten minutes, which meant he had a little more time to browse through the information pertaining to the new incorporation process the Centre was undergoing. Miss Parker had dumped into his lap the responsibility for making sure all the necessary forms were filled out in full and in however many copies were needed by one agency or another properly filed on time - fulfilling her promise that his new position would be full of “challenges.” This certainly was a long ways from morgue assistant!
For the most part, the amount of paperwork and sheer study that had been needed for him to learn the preliminaries of incorporation had meant that he'd had little time or energy for worrying about Deb. Like Miss Parker, however, he had breathed a deep sigh of relief the previous day when informed that both Deb and Davy had been found and were receiving medical care. That had meant that his at-home studies the previous night had been more in depth and concentrated than they had been for a couple of days.
For days he'd been acquainting himself with the corporate situation left behind by the old administration. So many of the particulars of corporate law had been put on a back burner when Mr. Raines had taken the helm of the Centre at Mr. Parker's death. Only the bare minimum had been filed with the proper agencies for tax purposes. It had taken the better part of a week of study and conferring with their retained tax lawyers to plug all the gaps left without repair for so long. Many of the people he either worked with or had heard mentioned often of late needed to be moved into positions of corporate authority - Miss Parker being Chairman, the CEO's position had been designated as Jarod's. Broots had been named IT executive, and Sydney, Sam and himself were then tapped to fill out a board of directors. New articles of incorporation following Jarod's careful framework of inter-related responsibility at all levels had been drawn up and filed with the state - articles that made board and stockholders together responsible for setting policy directions and goals from now on.
All that was needed now was for Miss Parker to make an executive decision as to what the stated value of the stocks to be issued to each of the satellite supervisors and department heads would be. They had already decided that the kind of stock to be issued would be preferred only, with additional voting rights distinctly specified in order that the supervisors have the authority they needed to help direct Centre policy from now on. Last but not least, she had to decide on a seal - whether it would be an actual imprinting set of dies, or simply a printed image - so that the actual printing of the stocks could commence.
The sound of Mei Chiang's voice greeting her boss from beyond his door brought him out of his reverie. He retrieved from his briefcase the folders of documents that needed review then grabbed the container with the two coffees and headed out the door.
"Any news?" he asked immediately after pushing through her door.
"Sam called last night to tell me Davy was awake," she announced with a smile much more the Miss Parker he knew. "I'm expecting a call from him sometime this morning with a full update."
"Nothing about Deb?"
Miss Parker gave her personal assistant an assessing gaze. She knew of his interest in Broots' pretty daughter, and hadn't had the heart to tell him of what the girl had gone through as yet. "Nothing yet," she told him with a shake of her head.
Tyler looked down at the folder in his hand and seated himself with a tight and unhappy look on his face.
She took pity on him. "So what did you bring me today?" she asked in a deliberately lighter tone.
His dark eyes searched her grey ones and found them sympathetic. He nodded, understanding the unspoken encouragement, and opened his folder and hauled out the first set of document regarding the value of the stocks to be issued.
~~~~~~~~
Gillespie moved through the halls of the hospital purposefully. This was not going to be a morning he enjoyed - he rarely enjoyed seeing people who he knew had somehow managed to slip under the radar of law enforcement go free. But the sad matter of fact was that despite many man-hours spent digging into the activities of Otamo Ngawe since his entrance to the country, no evidence had surfaced of any actual wrong-doing. And since the doctors were ready to release him into the care of his personal physicians back in Nigeria, there was no reason to hold him in custody any longer.
The FBI agent knocked on the wood of the open doorway and moved into the private room without waiting for permission. Ngawe looked up from a set of papers he'd been given by his nephew with impatience. "Yes? Do we have an appointment with you this morning?"
"No," Gillespie admitted. "I'm just here to let you know that you're free to go - but that our State Department would prefer that your route from the hospital take you straight to an airport from which you will head directly home."
Ngawe's face broke into a satisfied grin for the first time in a long time. "You are saying that you have found us completely innocent of anything after all this time? After interfering with our business..."
"I'm saying," Gillespie snapped, "that we haven't been able to UNCOVER any illegal activities - not that my suspicion has diminished any. I'm sure that if I had the manpower and the time, I'd be able to dig up something - but with budget cuts and everything lately, it just seems more appropriate to escort you and your entourage from the country."
The elderly African looked up at his nephew. "Call New York, arrange for our jet to fly to Dover. We're on our way home!"
"Yes, sir!" Siskele agreed excitedly and picked up the telephone receiver.
"Then we shall not be seeing you again?" Ngawe inquired hopefully.
"I sincerely hope not, at least not after you take off for Africa." Gillespie sounded no more desirous of a repeat meeting than Ngawe did. "Have your people coordinate your release with my people - you'll get a full escort to the airport, courtesy of Uncle Sam."
"We cannot say that this good news comes one moment too soon," Ngawe chortled. "We would wish you well, but you have been a particular obstacle in our path for days now."
"Screw you too," Gillespie turned on his heel and stalked from the room.
It just wasn't right - considering some of the information that was pouring out of the documents seized in Los Angeles, this man - or at least the organization he headed - was probably as dirty as they could come. Certainly somewhere within those documents was the rope to hang this conceited son of a bitch. Somebody must have pulled strings to get the old man sprung - someone with clout within the State Department and/or Immigration & Naturalization.
At this rate, the entire Blue Cove debacle - from the Centre bombing that had killed over forty people to the two separate but probably related murders - was going to end up a huge unsolved case. Unsolved cases tended to unravel reputations and careers, and NOTHING pissed him off worse than seeing one of THOSE develop on his watch.
~~~~~~~~
Jarod took a deep sigh as he moved slowly from sleep to wakefulness. It had been a long night, with a little girl waking up in the very dead of night screaming in terror from what he imagined was a nightmare caused by all the chaos in her life over the last few days. He'd held her for a long time in his arms while she'd shuddered and clung very tightly, then rocked her gently in his arms and rubbed her back as she lay against him until she finally fell deeply asleep again. He'd slipped her very carefully back into her bed and tucked her in again, depositing a very soft kiss on her forehead.
She was far too young to have such nightmares, as far as he was concerned. He'd sat on the edge of her bed for a long time after that, watching her sleep restlessly in case the nightmare returned. His heart went out to the tyke - he'd survived years of paralyzing, tormenting nightmares of his less than humane treatment at the Centre at the hands of Mr. Raines, Mr. Lyle and, occasionally, even Sydney. It had taken years to finally exorcise most of the demons that had driven those nightmares so that he enjoyed mostly restful nights' sleep. Now, it seemed, he'd have to find some way to help his little girl find that freedom as well. It wasn't fair - she was SO young. Finally satisfied that her sleep would be unbroken for a decent length of time, he'd shuffled back to his own bed and quickly fallen back to sleep.
He moved his long legs to stretch them and ran into an obstacle on the bed - something was holding the covers down tightly so that he couldn't move as freely as he wanted. Slowly one chocolate eye finally slipped open, then the other. Sitting cross-legged on top of his covers near the foot of the bed was Ginger, watching him with quiet patience. He rolled slightly to face her more fully then propped his head up on a forearm. "I've never had a wood sprite greet me when I wake up before - do fairies always come in and wait for a person to wake up by themselves?"
There was a muted but very obvious twinkle in her dark eyes at that, even though her face didn't give any evidence that she'd heard him. He opened his arms to her, and she unfolded herself and crawled up the bed to let him pull her close, settling with a sigh into the hollow beneath his arm with her head pillowed on his shoulder. "Came looking for me, did you Sprite?" he asked her gently, only to have her snuggle in closer as a response.
Jarod closed his eyes and let the feeling of contentment and completion wash over him like a warm wave. He'd felt this the first time he'd held his son in his arms, KNOWING Davy as his son. It was the love of a parent, unconditional and uncontrollable - the kind of love that he'd desperately wanted as a child and now apparently had in abundance to share with Davy and now Ginger, so that they would never feel that lack. With Ginger, however, there was an overwhelming need to protect that added to the gentler emotions.
Jarod had seen the pictures of the scars when he'd initially reviewed her case over a year ago. But last night, as she'd gotten ready for her bath, he'd finally come face to face with the small, round marks scattered liberally across her back where her parents had tortured her with their cigarettes under the influence of their drugs. He knew there were mental scars from the abuse of a pedophile foster father as well - and now the abuse of an unstable foster mother heaped on top of that. The nightmare the previous night showed that his work at helping her realize that she was finally safe from all her demons was just beginning.
There was no way in the world that he was going to just hand over the care of this little treasure to someone else. He would HAVE to talk to Missy about Ginger - and soon. It seemed only a fair proposition to him now that they each brought a child to the family that they would form together. And now that Davy was found, as soon as he knew that Missy was ready to hear him, he'd be putting his case to her again - hopefully in person. He didn't want to be put in a position where he'd have to choose between the woman he loved and a child he loved like a daughter already.
"We need to get up," he told her finally, planting a kiss on her forehead. "I have to shower, you need to get dressed, and we need to eat so that I can take you in to work with me this morning. Think you can get dressed before I can get my shower taken?"
She lifted her head and stretched up to look into his face with now thoroughly amused dark eyes, then nodded.
"OK then - off with you," he shooed her and rolled to a sitting position. He smiled as he heard the sound of small feet padding off toward her room again, and then rose to begin his morning ablutions.
~~~~~~~~
Sam roused, then groaned. Spending a night in a chair, no matter how comfortable it might be otherwise, never failed to leave him with a stiff neck and the feeling he would be wise to go find a masseuse. Slowly his eyes blinked open to see the nurse had come in once more to check on Davy's IV and monitors. The boy was still asleep, and from the looks of it, his face was now just an uncomfortable-looking pink rather than the angry red it had been the day before.
"How is he?" Sam asked quietly, not wanting to awaken Davy.
The nurse glanced over her shoulder at him and gave him a quick gesture that told him she'd be with him in a moment before adjusting the IV control and walking back to his chair. "He's stable and definitely improving. I'm no doctor, but provided he continues to improve steadily today, I'll be very surprised if he isn't released tomorrow."
The ex-sweepers face broke into a wide and pleased smile. "That's great!"
"Don't quote me to anybody," the nurse cautioned. "His doctor should be by to examine him sometime in the next hour or so - you can get a better idea of how things are going for him then." She eyed him critically. "You look like you could use a shower and a shave."
"I want to be here when he wakes up again," Sam told her firmly. "I told him I wouldn't leave."
"Tell you what," the nurse said after thinking for a moment. "Give me some change, and I'll go get you one a cup of coffee from the machine."
He looked up at her gratefully. "That would be wonderful!" He stretched out a leg to dig in a pocket for all the loose change he owned and dumped it in her open palm. "Just black - and as strong as you can get it."
"One black coffee, coming up," she smiled and dumped the coinage in a pocket and walked from the room.
Sam looked down at his watch. It was seven-thirty in the morning. He'd have to hit a drug store for shaving cream and a razor and then find a gas station restroom to make himself more presentable - later. First Davy had to wake up, and then he had to check on Deb's condition, and then call home to deliver the update and get instructions.
A stirring from the bed brought his attention back into the room. Davy reached up with the hand not tethered to the IV line and rubbed at his eyes and looked around. The brief look of panic died quickly when he saw that Sam was still there, as promised, sitting forward in the chair at the foot of his bed. "Hi," he said and looked around for the cup of water that Sam and the nurse had been giving him his sips from to ease the dry hoarseness.
"Hi there," Sam responded and rose as he saw Davy look around, knowing what the boy wanted. "Water?"
"Yeah." Davy sipped at the straw, still finding the feeling of water in his mouth thoroughly enjoyable. "Thanks."
"How are you feeling this morning?" the big man asked, putting the cup down where Davy could reach it himself if he wanted.
"Better," the boy answered, relaxing back into his pillow. "My face and arms don't hurt quite so bad today."
"Davy..." Sam seated himself on the edge of the boy's bed. "Not right now, but after a while, I and another man are going to need you to tell us what happened to you after the men took you." He noted that Davy's face grew tight and unhappy. "I know you'd just as soon forget the whole thing, but it will be necessary for you to tell your part of the story as best you remember it."
"When do I get to go home, Sam?" the boy asked plaintively. "I want my mom and dad and Grandpa Sydney."
"That's up to your doctors, Davy," Sam told him gently. "I'm sure it will be soon, though."
Davy looked as if he were on the verge of tears, so Sam opened his arms to him and let him lean against the only familiar person around. Burly and muscular arms closed protectively around the boy. "It's OK. You're safe now," Sam reassured him. "You'll be on your way home before you know it. Just hang tough. You know your mom and dad both love you." Davy snuggled against the big man who had been like an uncle to him for as long as he could remember.
"Are you ready for something for breakfast today?" the nurse returned to the room bearing Sam's coffee cup and a tray for Davy.
"I get to eat today?" the boy asked, straightening away from his protective guard.
"You get apple juice, some jello," the nurse responded, placing the tray on the wheeled table and waiting for Sam to take his coffee from her so she could swing the table into position. "There's an extra apple juice, in case you want it later."
"Jello? For breakfast?" Davy's nose wrinkled.
"You want to get off that thing, don't you?" The nurse pointed to the IV imbedded in the back of his hand.
"Thanks." Sam raised his coffee cup in salute to the nurse, who smiled back at him and then helped Davy sit up straighter in his bed so that he could get at his food more easily.
Davy waited patiently until the nurse had left again before turning anxious eyes on Sam. "Sam? Do I HAVE to tell the other man too?"
Sam nodded with a sympathetic look on his face. "I'm afraid so. He'll be with the FBI. They've caught two of the men who took you and Deb - and part of putting them in prison for what they did to you is for you to tell exactly what went on. You'll have to point them out too..."
"You mean I'm going to have to look at their faces again - in a line-up like on TV?"
"Something like that," Sam nodded. "But that's a ways in the future. Right now you need to just get yourself ready to tell your story - everything you remember, as precisely as you can remember it."
"OK..." Davy put a piece of the red jello in his mouth and smiled to himself as the flavor seemed so much more sweet and delicious than ever before. He wouldn't think about the bad time - not yet.
~~~~~~~~
Sydney watched Kevin's face carefully as the young man adjusted the straps that held his injured leg to the CPM therapy machine and then touched a button on the remote to begin the tedious up and down movement that the doctor assured him would hasten the healing process. "You're very quiet today," the psychiatrist commented as Kevin straightened.
"There's not a lot to be said," Kevin offered in a dreary tone. "I'm still tired..."
"Sit down, Kevin," Sydney directed with a finger pointing at the coffee table which had become a sometime chair. "You and I need to have a talk."
"Did I do something wrong?" the young Pretender asked immediately, his insides cringing as he followed Sydney's instructions.
"No, but that's part of what we need to talk about," Sydney answered in what he hoped was an encouraging tone of voice. "Why do you think that you did something wrong?"
"Because..." Kevin's eyes fleetingly reflected a sense of panic. "That's what Vernon would say just before..."
"Just before what?" Sydney asked in a deliberately calm voice despite the fact that his insides had twisted at the first sign of negative conditioning.
"Before he..." Kevin couldn't continue the thought. But his new mentor deserved an explanation. "I was never good enough for Vernon - he was never satisfied with the results of my SIMs. He used to lecture me about how Jarod used to be able to do all sorts of virtual miracles, and yet I..." He heaved a big sigh. Of all the people to know the difference between a great Pretender and himself, Sydney would be the one...
"Why was he dissatisfied with the results of your SIMs? From what I could gather, you were earning quite a healthy profit for the Centre. You must have been doing SOMETHING right?"
"But not fast enough," Kevin shook his head, "or not in-depth enough for Vernon. As far as he was concerned, I was a second-rate Pretender aspirant who really didn't deserve all the time and expense the Centre had spent on me. He never missed a single opportunity to remind me of how second-rate and inadequate my work was. And each and every one of those lectures always began with 'you and I need to have a talk...'"
Sydney closed his eyes and shook his head. "I keep being amazed at the depths of stupidity your former mentor demonstrated," he said out loud - Kevin deserved to hear a little truth about himself for a change. "I was the one who designed many of the techniques that Vernon used with you to train you - and from your responses and reactions when I use those same techniques, I can see that the man who trained you did a very poor job of it. You have a very strong talent as a Pretender - and had it not been for that talent stepping in when the training you were given came up lacking, your success rate wouldn't have been so high."
He looked across at the young Pretender, not attempting to hide his concern. "But I'm also seeing that the abuse you were subjected to at the hands of this man has damaged your ability to SIM effectively. You have to work so hard to get past your reluctance to put yourself in a situation that will earn you nothing but degradation that you have very little left with which to work the SIM itself." He could see that Kevin was taking what he was saying as a personal criticism. "I'm saying that what's wrong is NOT your fault, Kevin."
"But that means I'm useless." Kevin's blue eyes were tragic. "SIMming is the only thing I know how to do, Sydney! What am I going to do with myself if..."
Sydney reached out and took hold of his young protégé's hand tightly. "Now you listen to me. You are NOT useless. You have a powerful mind that can take you anywhere you want to go - SIMming is only one of the skills that can take advantage of your natural talent. And for you, SIMming is not a healthy activity for you to take part in anymore, at least, not for a very long time." He patted the young man's hand. "Maybe someday, when you have a much better idea about who Kevin is, you will be strong enough to go back to SIMming - but I can think of any number of ways in which you could be just as productive, and I'd like you to consider investigating them."
"You don't want to mentor me anymore?" Kevin was aghast - his failure at SIMming the previous day must have been much more disappointing than he'd first feared.
"I didn't say that - you're assuming the worst and getting yourself all upset over nothing." Sydney shook his head. "I want nothing more than the opportunity to mentor you back into a more healthy sense of self along with an increased level of socialization. And I can try to help you deal with the abuse Vernon heaped on you so you can move past it eventually as well."
"But you don't want to mentor me as a Pretender? Is that it?"
"Kevin..." Sydney sighed. "For me to do that, we'd have to start a very rigorous regimen of mental exercises designed to help you UN-learn everything that Vernon botched so badly - and then you'd have to start right back at the very beginning again to learn to use your skills properly." He gave the young man a sad smile. "And while I'd love to see how far I could bring you back into your full potential as a Pretender, I have to face the fact that I'm pushing retirement age. What I'd have to do would take years of hard work - years that I'm not sure I have left in me."
"What if I asked you to try?" Kevin's eyes were desperate. "Sydney, I don't have anywhere else to go - I don't have a family other than you... You know how to fix me. Please?"
Sympathetic chestnut stared deeply into pleading blue. Finally Sydney sighed. "I'll make you a deal. Miss Parker wants me to go through the hard-copy archive data, starting today - and that's going to be a HUGE job that's going to take a long time. I think I could use an assistant with your intellectual capabilities to help me go through the material faster."
Kevin opened his mouth to complain, but Sydney lifted a finger to silence him. "Somewhere in those files could be information about your real parents and where to find them again. If that information isn't there - or even if it is - when that big job is finished, and provided that you still want me to do this, we'll start. Maybe even we can have Jarod's help in the process when he comes back. How's that?"
The mouth had shut as the terms of the deal had been spelled out. "Agreed. But I'm not going to want to change my mind," Kevin told him firmly. "Being a Pretender is the only thing I've ever wanted - the only thing I've ever known to want. I don't want to think that Vernon stole THAT from me too."
"He won't have if I have anything to say about it," Sydney promised him. "Now, no more long faces. We're going to be making a trip into Dover, and before that, we're going to have a whole shipment of archives dumped in our laps. I suggest we start thinking of ways to streamline the process of sorting through old information before it takes over the house entirely."
~~~~~~~~
"Miss Parker, Sam is on line two for you," Mei Chiang announced.
She sighed in relief - she'd just finished an extra-long strategy meeting with Tyler, briefing him on the finer points of what she was hoping to accomplish so that he'd be up to handling things in her absence. Sam was exactly the person she was hoping to hear from right about now - before the appointment that was postponed from the day before. She picked up the receiver and punched the button. "Sam!"
"Good morning, Miss Parker. I have someone here who would like to talk to you." From the smile in Sam's voice, she knew exactly whom he was talking about.
"Alright," she said as her excitement began to show.
"Mom?" Davy's voice sounded hoarse - almost as bad as it had when he'd had strep throat a year earlier.
"Hi there, little man," she leaned back in her chair and smiled at her memory of her son's face looking at her. "How are you doing?"
"They gave me food to eat today - and the doctor says that maybe I can go home tomorrow?" Even though he was hoarse, she could hear the longing in his voice.
"That's good news, baby. I've been so worried about you."
"I love you, Mommy," the little boy said, his voice beginning to break. "I was so afraid that I wouldn't see you again..."
"Hush." She closed her eyes, feeling her son's anguish over three thousand miles of telephone wire. "I'm clearing my day so that I can come out and be with you tomorrow. What do you think about that?"
"What about Daddy?"
Of course he would have wanted to see Jarod too. "I'm thinking we'll fly up to where he is now on our way home - maybe spend the night with him and then fly home the next morning."
"I wanna go home." Sam stepped close and ran a comforting hand lightly through the tousled dark hair. "I know Sam's here, but..."
"I'm coming, baby, I promise." Tears she had been holding back since she'd heard that he was safe now found themselves dropping from lash to cheek. "Just be good for Sam and the doctors and nurses for a little while longer." She closed her eyes again to put his face foremost in her mind. "I love you, Davy."
"I love you too, Mommy." His own distress was getting hard to talk around.
"Let me talk to Sam, baby. I'll talk to you again before we hang up."
"OK..."
She heard the sound of a telephone receiver being passed from one hand to another. "Yes, ma'am?"
"Any news of Debbie?" she asked, using her other hand to wipe the tears from her cheeks.
"I saw her just a while ago and spoke with her doctor. She's responding to treatment, and was awake a little earlier. The doctor thinks that if she continues to respond, he'll be able to move her out of ICU by this evening - but she'll probably be in the hospital longer than Davy because of the infection." Sam's voice sounded almost defeated. "She looks very ill, Miss Parker. They still have her hooked up to an awful lot of machines."
"Geez," she answered, all too familiar with the kind of scene that her Security Chief was describing. "But you say she's getting better?"
"Yeah." Sam's tone hadn't lightened. "Oh, and the doctor said that they'd be calling in a counselor for her, considering some of the stuff she went through..." She could tell that he wasn't wanting to talk too candidly in front of Davy.
"Good. Until she can get home where Sydney can help her, that's the best thing for her." She rubbed her eyelids. "Has Davy told you..."
"Not yet," Sam answered before she could finish the question. "But we discussed that he would have to tell us everything when the agent responsible for watching him gets back."
"The agent LEFT?" Miss Parker's voice sounded both aghast and upset. "I thought they were going to provide round-the-clock security..."
"I sent him home, Miss Parker," Sam interrupted her gently. "I stayed with Davy last night."
No wonder Sam sounded so ragged - a person sleeping in a chair in a hospital didn't get much rest at all. "That's why you sound so tired," she commented sharply, finding it not so easy to back away from the sudden upset.
"I just didn't want..." Sam began, not exactly sure how to explain his driving need to have taken charge of Davy's security himself the night before.
"I understand, Sam," she said softly, knowing that her muscular Security Chief had always had a very soft spot in his heart for her son. "But I want you to get some rest today so that you're bright and ready to go tomorrow when I get there. We'll be making arrangements for Mr. Duncan's disposal with Mr. Mayeda before picking Davy up - if he's released - and I want you on your toes."
"Yes, ma'am." The mention of Mayeda made Sam's insides once more twist in sickening satisfaction. That meant that he'd be there to watch when Miss Parker faced the man immediately responsible for stealing her son and Deb - and for injuring Sydney. That was something to which he truly could look forward.
"OK, let me talk to Davy a little bit more, and then you go get yourself a motel room and rest yourself out. I'll call you this evening on your cell phone when I have my travel arrangements finalized." She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her desk.
"Yes, ma'am. I'll talk to you later."
The phone was once more passed between hands. "Hi, Mommy."
"OK. Remember I love you very much, and I'll see you tomorrow, baby. You do exactly what the doctors want you to - and when the time comes, you be sure to tell Sam and the FBI man everything you remember..."
"Mommy, some of what I remember was... not nice..." Davy whimpered. "The man was doing some things to Deb..."
"I know, baby, I know..." She flinched at the knowledge that her son had witnessed at least some of whatever had happened to Deb. "But you need to tell them everything. I promise you that it will be alright for you to tell them everything."
"OK..." He didn't sound completely convinced, but was willing to be led by his mother's advice. "I love you, Mommy."
"I love you too, little man. I'll see you tomorrow."
"G'bye, Mommy."
"Goodbye, sweetheart."
She hung up the telephone and put her face in her hands for the awful memories her innocent son must be carrying around in his head. Then, after wiping a fresh onslaught of tears from her cheeks, she punched the intercom. "Mei Chiang, bring me a copy of tomorrow's schedule and the next day too. We're going to be doing some serious postponing."
~~~~~~~~
"Good morning, Doctor Jarod," Cindy beamed over the top of the reception counter. Her eyes then widened and she smiled even more. "And just who is that you have with you today?"
"Can you say “good morning” to Cindy?" Jarod asked the little girl who had suddenly snuggled into the back of his leg, her teddy bear clutched tightly to her as if a shield. He looked up at his employee with a bit of chagrin. "I was hoping that maybe between the two of us, we could keep her occupied while I work with patients..."
The black girl rose out of her seat and came around the end of the counter and crouched in front of Ginger, the beads in her hair swinging and clicking merrily. "I think we can work something out," she smiled at the girl gently. "I have some billings to put together today - maybe Ginger can learn to fold the statements and stuff envelopes for me."
Jarod crouched down next to Cindy. "Do you think that would be OK - that when I see some of the other kids, you could help Cindy here? You'd be helping me, you know..."
The serious, dark eyes flitted over Cindy's friendly face and bright smile, then returned to Jarod's face. Ginger nodded ever so slightly. Jarod breathed a sigh of relief. "Cindy, I don't know..."
"Forget it, Doctor Jarod. I'm just glad she's with you now." Cindy reached out and wrapped a gentle hand around the small chin. "You've got someone pretty special taking care of you now, don't you, girl?" This time the small, dark head didn't hesitate to nod, and Cindy chuckled. "You and I are going to get along just fine, Ginger. C'mon - let's get you your own chair and place at my desk, and I bet we can even find a special place for your friend here to keep an eye on you..." Her finger caressed the top of the teddy bear in the child's arms.
"I'm going to be just in my office," Jarod told her, pointing. "You can come in and be with me when nobody else is here - but when Cindy tells us that someone is here to see me, it will be time for you to go work with her for a while." He rubbed her back gently, a movement that had proven very effective at calming and reassuring her. "Do you think that will work?"
Again the little head dipped in a nod.
"OK - why don't we see about doing what Cindy wants. I'll help." He stood and held out his hand, which was immediately filled with a tiny one. He led Ginger around the end of the counter, and the child's big, dark eyes widened at finally getting to see what went on behind the tall counter she'd only stood in front of before.
"There's another swivel chair in the storeroom that she can use, Doctor Jarod," Cindy suggested as she moved some of the office supplies that had found homes on the long desk to more orderly stacks or spaces and cleared room for a little girl to work. Jarod felt the hand in his drop away as Ginger became fascinated by what Cindy was doing, and he took that opportunity to head to the storeroom for the chair his receptionist claimed was back there and wheeled it forward. "Here, now, Sweet Pea - you climb up on this... Give me your bear so you don't fall..."
Ginger again gave Cindy an assessing look, then handed over her bear so that she could clamber up onto the swivel chair. The moment the child seemed settled, Cindy was handing the bear back, smiling as the expression in the little girl's eyes seemed to light up in gratitude for a brief moment. Jarod watched as Cindy patiently began explaining what they would be doing, and Ginger finally set her teddy bear on the desk well within reach when it became her turn to try. Satisfied that his little girl was safely cared for, he informed the two at the desk that he was heading for his office, sorted through the mail and pulled all the new applications to be his replacement and then headed down the hall.
As his hand was reaching for the doorknob of his office, he heard Ethan's voice saying, "Good morning, Cindy," and then, with some surprise, "and look who we have here! Seems you have a new helper, huh?"
Jarod smiled and proceeded into his office. Ethan soon pushed through the door. "I see you both made it to work on time," the younger brother said with a grin.
"It's just for the time being," Jarod began, only to see Ethan hold up a hand.
"I think it's a great idea. I KNOW Cindy used to grumble about the way Ginger was treated by that Thatcher woman. Cindy's just a frustrated mother hen herself, you know. And from the looks of things, Ginger's already taken a shine to her."
"I was kind of hoping that would happen," Jarod admitted. "It makes these first few days, until we're settled and have arranged for a sitter at home, so much easier..."
"You know, I did you another favor this morning," Ethan shifted from one foot to the other.
"Oh?"
"Yeah. I told Mom that you'd gotten custody of a little girl. I thought her jaw would hit the floor."
"I hadn't warned her," Jarod admitted ruefully.
"No fooling. Anyway, first thing I know, Mom's on the phone with Em, breaking the news across the lane." Ethan grinned. "Don't be surprised if you have the whole mob land on you tonight to check her out."
"Thanks for the heads-up," Jarod sighed. "It may be a slight strain on Ginger to have so much new family come at her at once - but then, most of them will be fawning over her, so..."
"A little boost to the self-esteem couldn't hurt her," Ethan reminded him with a smile. "I honestly think that having people - KIND people - paying attention to her and giving her positive strokes will go a long way toward undoing some of the damage. You never know, Mom may insist on Ginger coming with her over to Em's while you're at work."
"I can see her and Sammy getting along," Jarod thought about it for a moment and decided that wouldn't be a bad thing at all. "Incidentally, I've decided I'm going to talk to Missy about her tonight too," he then confided softly. "I don't want to have her surprised when either she walks into my house here, or I go home to Delaware, and I have my little wood sprite with me." His chocolate eyes darkened. "And I'm not going to give her up, Ethan."
"I didn't think you would," his younger brother told him sympathetically. "The moment I saw you two together last night, I knew that this was a forever arrangement." Ethan thought for a moment. "But be patient with Missy. She may balk at the idea at first - but remind her of... oh..." He sought a way to explain himself. "Sometimes I get a picture in my mind of you as a kid, with Missy and another kid..."
"That would have been Angelo," Jarod told him in a sad voice. "She didn't know it at the time, but he was her twin brother. Raines took him..." Ethan's face darkened at those three words, knowing from first-hand experience that they constituted a sentence of doom for any child. "...and destroyed him psychologically - leaving him this incredibly gifted empath, although he was virtually unable to communicate effectively anymore. He came close once, and I think he and Missy connected - she always had a soft spot in her heart for him after that, despite his handicap."
"Well," Ethan took a breath to clear his mind of the memory of Mr. Raines and his madness. "Remind her of this... Angelo - and how he might have been saved if someone had just cared enough. Maybe that will give her the push she needs."
"I'll think about it," Jarod said, filing the advice away for a more appropriate time to review and internalize.
Ethan could tell that Jarod wanted to drop the subject, so he pointed to the sealed envelopes on the desk. "Any new prospects in that lot?"
"I dunno - I just got in, so I haven't looked at them yet. You got a minute?"
The younger psychiatrist moved to the chair on the opposite side of the desk. "You open envelopes, I'll do the initial read-through."
~~~~~~~~
Deb lay quietly, just soaking up the sensation of cool sheets against her aching body. When she had been awake earlier, she thought she'd heard the rumble of Sam's voice in the distance talking to someone, and a layer of worry had dropped away despite her having trouble bringing her thinking processes under control enough to make sure that it WAS actually Sam she'd heard. Her mouth was so dry - what she wouldn't do for a single sip of water...
A gentle hand brushed across the hair at the top of her head. "Deb?" It took work to get her eyelids to follow instructions, but finally she got them to slide back just enough to see the kindly face of a middle-aged man in a white coat bending over her. Without warning, her mind flashed back to another face bending over her - the face dark and leering - and she flinched away from this new face to the extent that her sore and uncooperative body would allow. "Hush..." this new person said and the sound of his mellow baritone voice gently drew her mind back from the past into the present. "I'm Doctor Ramsey, and I've been overseeing your case. Do you know where you are?"
When she shook her head slightly, the man's expression grew sympathetic. "You're in Adelanto General Hospital, in the Intensive Care Unit. You've been here for a little over twenty-four hours now - suffering from the effects of exposure and dehydration, as well as a septic infection from either the bite mark on your breast or the cut on your foot." The face smiled encouragingly. "You've been a very sick young lady - but you're coming along quite nicely now. I'm here today to check on your injuries and see whether you're well enough to move to the medical floor."
He picked up her hand from where it lay on top of her blankets and looked at it closely, then turned it over so he could see the palm and the pads of her fingers. Slowly Deb pulled her hand out of his keeping, then let it fall back to the covers. Doctor Ramsey moved forward again to prop one sore eyelid open after another and, using his penlight, check the reaction of her pupil to the bright light. "What was her temp?" he asked briskly.
"One hundred point eight," came the nurse's response as she read from the chart on the tray table.
"OK, young lady, that's the easy part finished." Doctor Ramsey straightened and beckoned to the nurse, who had been standing patiently nearby. "Now, the nurse is going to remove the bandage on your breast so that I can assess how the infection there is coming. I figured that now that you were awake, you'd prefer that a nurse do this..." Deb's eyes filled with tears, and she nodded slightly.
The nurse gently moved the hospital gown aside and pulled the medical tape from her skin to uncover her right breast. Doctor Ramsey bent to look, then backed away again. "Let's clear away the salve so I can see the wound itself." Deb closed her eyes as the nurse gently ran a moistened cotton pad around and over the aching nipple, tears of humiliation and pain running down her face. The doctor bent over and assessed the damage and the amount of healing that had happened since last the wound had been seen. "Continue the antibiotic salve for now," he told the nurse, then carefully took Deb's hand to draw her eyes open again and to his face. "That looks much better than it did yesterday. Now let's check your foot."
The nurse moved the hospital gown back into place so that it protected the girl's modesty for the time being, then carefully pulled the covers back from the foot of the bed. Deb felt the slight pull of medical tape being dislodged from about her ankle, and then the very careful touch of the doctor manipulating her foot. "You know you were very lucky," he told her, "that this didn't sever any tendons. But the infection here is still of some concern." He turned to the nurse. "Maintain the level of IV antibiotics, bandage with antibiotic salve and continue to change this dressing three times a day. But before you bandage it again, I want a sample of the drainage cultured just in case we missed something."
As the nurse pulled the covers back over her foot, the doctor moved closer to Deb again. "I bet you're ready to drink a gallon of water too, aren't you?" Deb's eyes widened and she nodded. "Well, you can begin to have ice chips and occasional sips of water, but I'd like your system to just take a break from having to worry about using energy to digest anything as yet." He paused, then said in a softer tone. "I'm also giving a call to Claire Jackson to come and talk to you sometime today. She's our resident rape crisis counselor..." Deb's eyes widened with real fright. "She can talk to you about some of the reactions you may be having to what you went through, maybe help you begin to sort things out." Deb shook her head as vigorously as she could. She did NOT want to talk to anybody - not about THAT. The doctor gave her a sympathetic smile, but his words were firm. "You don't have to say anything. Just listen, OK?"
Deb closed her eyes and turned her head as far away from the doctor as she could. Doctor Ramsey sighed and patted her hand on the top of the covers again gently. "I'll be back to see you this evening, and we'll see whether you're ready to move to a regular bed - maybe in the same room with the young boy who came in with you?"
The girl in the bed didn't move, didn't relax from her withdrawn posture. Doctor Ramsey's eyes filled with concern as he moved to retrieve her chart from the tray table and begin making notes. Mental attitude was an important factor in recuperation - this young lady was showing signs that hers hadn't fully registered the fact that she was safe and getting better yet. Hopefully Claire would be able to work her magic that afternoon, so that the young lady he saw then would be more of an ally in her own recovery.
~~~~~~~~
Broots looked up as the door to his room pushed open, and then his eyes widened and his mouth stretched into a grin when Kevin carefully wheeled Sydney's wheelchair in, the psychiatrist's left leg extended out in front of him like a cannon. "Syd! What a surprise!" Then he thought for a moment. "What the Hell happened to YOU now?"
"One of the kidnappers did my knee in while we were fighting them off," Sydney explained. "I ended up having to have surgery on it..."
"Oh yeah - I remember Miss Parker saying she was here to pick you up from something," Broots nodded as his memory clicked into action. "Kevin," he greeted the young Pretender. "How are you doing?"
"I'm OK," Kevin said, feeling complimented just for being noticed. "Thanks."
"So," Broots turned back to his old friend. Sydney looked pale and drawn, obviously in pain. "What are you doing here today? Not more surgery?"
"No," Sydney shook his head. "Kevin, could you do the honors..." Kevin shrugged the strap from his shoulder and moved around the wheelchair to put the black canvas computer case on the tray table. "Miss Parker wanted us to deliver this laptop to you today without fail. She said you'd know how to get into the system - that Jarod made sure that your passwords were intact from before."
"Before?" Broots frowned.
"Before the explosion," Sydney explained patiently. "The old Centre mainframe was destroyed in the blast - everything we had to work with once we started to rebuild was found on your home system."
"Oh God!" Broots was aghast at the amount of information that had been lost. "Syd - that was most of everything you'd submitted over the last five years, not to mention all kinds of pharmaceutical research for the government..."
"We know, Broots, we know. All the department heads had to go back through our hard-copy files to sort, prioritize - and those projects that would continue to be carried on have had as much material pertaining to them submitted to clerical for re-entry. Miss Parker's cleaning house, getting rid of the more questionable projects in all departments and distancing the Centre from our more questionable clientele." Sydney tried to bring the tech up to date on the amount of reorganization that had been going on since he'd been aware of things.
"All my coding..." Broots couldn't stop thinking of the huge amount of work that he'd been doing directly on the mainframe that hadn't been backed up anywhere that had been lost. "All that work, lost..."
"You'll have your hands full with new stuff, I'm sure," Sydney reassured his friend. "With Miss Parker's decision to reorganize everything, we're going to be needing new security procedures put into place that will lock out those who used to be able to access our system with impunity. For example, we don't need the Triumvirate to be able to get into our new mainframe with just a few keystrokes."
"She's even dumping the Triumvirate?" Broots looked at his old friend in trepidation. "I mean - they GAVE her the job..."
"She's dumping all but the legitimate clients - and even then, sorting through the kind of projects we're doing for those that are left. The Yakuza has been completely paid off. The other projects are either in negotiations for refunds for not completing the work, or the project will be completed but no new ones accepted from the client." Sydney felt good making that announcement - both he and Broots had grumbled many times over the years about the quality of clientele the Centre tended to draw.
Broots reached for the tray table and drew it closer to begin unpacking the slim laptop. "Hey Kevin - unplug the phone and plug this one in instead," he directed, plugging the telephone cord into the modem and handing the young Pretender the other end. "I have work to do - guess there's no time like the present to get to it."
Sydney smiled as his geeky friend booted the laptop for the first time and rubbed his hands together at the evidence that he'd been given a top of the line system. Broots would have plenty to keep his mind from his injuries now too - and his worries about Deb. That was another piece of news he needed to deliver. "Broots!" he called, finally catching the tech's attention. "Miss Parker is planning on leaving for California tonight to be with Davy and Deb. Anything you want her to tell Deb, you might want to send her by email to the office before she comes home to pack. She's got the Centre jet ready to take off around nine tonight."
"Thanks," the hazel eyes spoke eloquently of his gratitude. "I'll send her a message to give to Deb when she gets there." Broots put out his hand, and Sydney wheeled himself closer to the bed so that he could clasp it. "You take care of yourself, now."
"You too - and keep in touch."
"I hope you get better real soon, Mr. Broots," Kevin added shyly as he took his place behind the wheelchair to pull Sydney back so that they could head back down to the car.
"You take good care of Sydney, Kevin," Broots smiled at the young man who, if he remembered correctly, had been smitten with Deb in the days before the lights had gone out for him. The boy looked like he hadn't rested very well at all for quite a while. "And take care of yourself too. You look like you could use a good night's sleep."
Kevin ducked his head at the unexpected thoughtfulness from Deb's father and twisted the wheelchair around with skill and headed toward the door and the car beyond - and Chet the Sweeper, who was waiting patiently for them just outside the hospital room.
Broots watched them leave, then turned back to the computer screen in front of him. With a look of glee, he laced his fingers together, then cracked them backwards, and then set himself the chore of getting into whatever system the Centre had going for it right now in order to get as much additional security up and functional as soon as he could.
~~~~~~~~
Davy watched with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as Sam came into his room accompanied by another man - this one tall and blonde. Sam had shaved sometime since last he'd seen him, but the ex-sweeper's face was still fatigue-ridden. Nervous, the boy reached for his water cup and took a long sip. "Do I have to tell everything now?" he asked in a small voice.
"In a little bit," Sam told him. "This is Agent Crandall, Davy - he's an FBI agent. He needs to show you some pictures, to see if you recognize any of the men in them."
Davy's eyes flitted up to the blue-green gaze of the FBI agent, then widened at the size of the book the man was pulling out of a briefcase that had landed on his tray table. "I have to look through all of those?"
"Don't let the size of the book intimidate you, Davy," Crandall told the boy. "Just flip through it and see if you recognize any of the people's pictures." Sam adjusted the bed so that Davy was sitting up a little straighter, and then Crandall put the book in the boy's lap. "Go ahead, let's see if you recognize anybody in there."
Davy opened the cover and looked down at a row of six faces on the page, none of them familiar at all. He flipped the page and looked down at another six, still all strangers. He flipped through several more pages, and then: "There!" He stabbed at the page, where a picture of Duncan stared up at him.
"Is that one of the men who brought you to California?" Sam asked, glancing at Crandall as if to tell the agent “I told you he could do it.” Davy's head nodded vigorously.
Crandall pulled the picture from the pocket that held it. "Keep on looking, Davy," he urged the boy. Davy flipped through more than half the book again before his finger again stabbed at the page. "There! That's the man that was doing strange things to Deb!"
Crandall pulled Cordoba's picture from its pocket and slipped it into an envelope along with Duncan's. "Keep looking, Davy. See if you recognize anybody else."
A few more flips of the page and Davy found himself looking down at a picture of Jones. "I remember him," he pointed down. "He was the one who put Deb in the trunk of the car with me after hitting her."
"You're doing good," Sam tousled the top of his head. "Keep going - let's see if you can't find anybody else."
The finger pointed one last time to a picture on the very last page. Crandall slipped the second pair of pictures into the envelope with the first pair. "You did very well, Davy. Now," he took back the big book and put it back in his briefcase, but this time brought out a small tape recorder. "I want you to tell us everything you remember - from the time your mom put you to bed until you woke up in the hospital."
Davy's face got tight and sad again, and he looked up at Sam imploringly. The big ex-sweeper sat down on the edge of the bed next to him and put an arm about the boy's shoulders. "It's OK, Davy. You can tell us what happened now - it's safe."
"They woke me up," he began, his voice small as he began to relive those first moments of terror. "I tried to yell for Mom, but one guy..." He looked up at the FBI agent. "Let me see those four pictures again, please?" Crandall glanced at Sam, who shrugged, and then pulled the envelope with the photos out and laid them each face up on the boy's lap. "This guy," Davy pointed to Duncan, "when I tried to yell, he just laughed at me and told me that he'd made it so she couldn't hear me. I thought he'd killed her until I heard him talk about taking the can of ether out to the car again..." A tear slipped to the cheek.
"They put me in the trunk after they put duct tape over my mouth and tied my hands and feet together with it. Then they closed the trunk down and drove for a while, then stopped. The next thing I knew the trunk was open and this man," he pointed at Jones, "was hitting Deb to get her to stop fighting, and then he threw her in on top of me. He was yelling for them to “get going already.” We drove for a long time after that - although they did stop once to put duct tape on Deb too in the middle of it." He took a shaky breath. "I could hear them talking - they were talking about Deb and laughing about what they wanted to do... I got scared that they were going to hurt her. But they closed the trunk again and started driving. It was dark in the trunk, and it hurt to go over bumps in the road. Then we stopped, and they carried me and Deb into this little plane kinda like the jet Mommy gets to ride in sometimes. These two," the finger pointed to Jones and Smith, "I think they got left behind when the plane took off."
"So only two men brought you to California?" Crandall asked, "these two?" The FBI agent pointed to Duncan and Cordoba.
Davy nodded. "They put us into some seats at the back of the plane, and then they flew for a long time. I think I fell asleep. I woke up when this guy," he pointed at Cordoba, "picked me up and carried me to another car and put me back in the trunk. The other guy put Deb in on top of me again, and then they started driving again. They made a few stops but didn't open the trunk those times. They finally stopped at this old ranch place out in the middle of nowhere, and carried us into this wrecked house. He," the finger pointed to Duncan, "carried me, and the other guy had Deb. He was starting to talk funny, nasty-like. I heard Deb yelp like maybe he hurt her while he was carrying her in."
He started to shake. "This other guy didn't carry Deb into the same room as me - so the other guy went looking. I hear them arguing, and then they both come back. The one guy that had Deb threw her down, and her head hit hard and knocked her out. I could see that he'd been trying to take her pajamas off - and she was bleeding..." Davy touched his chest where a young woman's right breast would be. Sam was glad that his face was behind the boy, because he was suddenly overwhelmed by an urge to murder. Even Crandall's face was serious. "He kept touching her - trying to put his hands inside her pants. He told me..." Davy could still hear the sound of that hideous voice echoing in his mind, "...that I should “look my fill,” and then he kept touching her... But then the other guy dragged him away. They argued - I think the one who'd been touching Deb wanted to do more. Then the other guy came over and hit me and I went to sleep."
Sam's arm tightened around Davy. "That was pretty scary, Davy. What happened next?"
Davy let himself relax into the big man's chest a little. "When I woke up, they were gone. Deb was still lying next to me, her clothes all pulled wrong. I moved around so that I could get a hold of the tape on her face and I pulled it off some. That's when she woke up - and she rolled so that she could pull the tape from my face too. I tried to get her to pick the duct tape away from my hands, but she couldn't get it. So she kicked one of the windows until the glass broke, and I used one of the bigger pieces to cut the tape."
"Is that how her foot got cut?" Sam asked quickly.
Davy nodded. "We used some of the old curtains to try to wrap up her foot so it wouldn't bleed so much. But it was getting hot, and neither of us had had any water or food since supper the day before. We started walking."
"You walked - in that hot sun?"
"Yeah." The boy sighed. "We tried to stay in the shade as much as we could, and walked as quickly as we could when we had to be in the sun. Then the sun went down and it got COLD. But we had followed the driveway as much as we could - and we came to this one fence, and I could see there were cows in the field. We went through the fence and we had just found this water trough, I think, when we both just kinda fell in." His fingers played absently with the nap of the blanket. "I don't remember anything else until I woke up here."
"How did you know which way to walk?" Crandall wanted to know.
"We... I... walked all the way around the yard at the ranch house. There was only one driveway that looked like it had been used. I could see the tire tracks from the car..." Davy explained quietly, almost shyly.
"That's pretty smart, kid."
Davy looked the man directly. "My Grandpa always taught me that my mind was my best defense, and to keep my eyes and ears open to everything."
Crandall looked at Sam, who had the funniest expression on his face while looking down at the boy. "Well, I'd say that your Grandpa should be pretty darned proud of you for keeping your head and using it, and not panicking."
"Is that all?" Davy asked.
The FBI agent reached out and clicked off the recorder. "You did good, Davy. But you should know that there's a very good chance that you'll have to tell your story again at least once more at court. Will you be able to do that?"
"Sam..." Davy whimpered. "I want to go HOME."
"You will," the ex-sweeper reassured him gently. "You will. We can fly back when the time comes for you to tell your story - but you'll have your mom and Grandpa Sydney with you then."
The boy leaned hard against his surrogate uncle. The idea that he'd have to relive his tale of horror more than this once was making him nearly choke with fear. "I'm really tired," he lied, turning his face into Sam so he didn't have to look the stranger in the face anymore.
Sam gestured at Crandall, who immediately packed his recorder in his briefcase and snapped it shut. "Then I'll let you rest. You take care of yourself, young man. You're a very lucky little boy to have walked out of that mess."
Sam hugged Davy close and then laid him back into his pillow. "I'm going to let this other agent keep an eye on you for a while. I need to get some shut-eye myself." He ruffled Davy's hair. "I'll be back before you know it, though."
"I'll be OK, Sam," Davy told the Security Chief and then closed his eyes. He was asleep before the two men had made it out of his room.
"Any idea when the girl will be up to talking?" Crandall asked of the tired Centre man as they walked slowly down the corridor toward the lobby.
Sam shook his head. "I wouldn't be holding my breath on that one for a while," he warned. "Deb's in a lot worse shape than Davy - I haven't even had a chance to talk to her when she was awake yet. She's still in ICU."
"Call me the moment you think we'll be able to take her statement," Crandall told him in a brisk tone. "The sooner we get that animal arraigned and tried, the sooner he can start doing his time. And maybe the sooner we can get a lead on those others."
Sam struggled not to grin at the thought of Duncan, bound and hooded and in the gentle clutches of Mayeda and his Yakuza goons. And Miss Parker was coming - and now he had some of Davy's story to tell her. Duncan was going to pay, and pay dearly. If not at Miss Parker's hands, then most definitely at HIS.
And THEN he'd be able to quit with a clear conscience. That thought wiped the grin from his face.
Chapter 16: Painful Echoes
"What time is your doctor's appointment in Dover?" Miss Parker asked Sydney over her cup of coffee.
Grey eyebrows raised. She'd been very quiet that morning, aside from thanking him for the first good night's sleep she'd had in days. "Two this afternoon. Why?"
"I'll send a sweeper over later this morning with the laptop for Broots, then," she put her empty cup down and reached for the remainder of her toast. "I have meetings most of the day - so I'm not sure exactly when I'd be able to drive it over to him myself..."
"Parker," Sydney reached out and captured her empty hand in his. "I wanted to talk to you about something along that line anyway. I'm thinking that there's nothing here that can't be shelved for a day or so while you can fly out to be with Davy for a bit. You should go to California..."
Storm-grey eyes met his in a fond gaze tinged with mild frustration. "I wish it were that easy, Syd. But the fact is that I'm at a delicate spot in the financial negotiations with the supervisors who are going to be the first stockholders for the Centre. If you and I and Jarod and Kevin intend to have a Centre still issuing us regular paychecks in the future, these negotiations HAVE to be done properly - and finished soon. And, believe it or not, I have a Senator from the Appropriations Committee and a General from the Pentagon coming to discuss some of the more questionable government projects that I've temporarily put on hiatus."
"Well, how about spending a little time this morning clearing your calendar for tomorrow and the next day then?" He tightened his hold on her. "Look, I'm not advocating playing hooky long-term until both Davy and Deb are released from the hospital - I'm just pointing out that you NEED to go be with them for your emotional and mental wellbeing. You need to satisfy yourself that they really ARE safe..."
"I figured I'd call Davy about mid-morning - about the time that he'd be waking up over there. Just hearing his voice..." She got a wistful look on her face.
"Isn't going to do for long," he finished for her dryly then cocked his eyebrows back at her in a mirror expression of hers. "And don't give me that look, Parker - you know damned well that I'm telling you the truth. You've been ripping yourself up one side and down the other for focusing on Centre business while your son was missing to the point that you had to step into another's personality to pull it off, and in the end you weren't sleeping, remember? If you want to know the truth," he glared at her to make his point, "I'd rather do WITHOUT a paycheck from the Centre than see you put yourself through one more day of Hell like that. None of us are without resources to get ourselves other jobs, if push came to shove..."
"Sydney," she put her other hand, now empty of toast, on top of his and sandwiched it between the both of hers, "I know you're telling me the truth. I'll see what I can do to clear time tomorrow and maybe fly over tonight and back tomorrow night."
His silvered head nodded. "Good. That will make ME feel better too, you know..." That was provided she'd actually DO it, however...
She shook her head at him. "I swear, I'm surrounded by worry-warts all of a sudden - first Jarod and Ethan, now you..."
"Ethan?" The grey eyebrows climbed high on the forehead again.
"It's a side-effect of his hearing the voices so loudly," she explained lamely. "He doesn't have to talk to me to know if I'm OK... He was worrying in my ear over the phone yesterday - trying to insist that I talk to you..."
That surprised him even more. "I hope I get to know your half-brother better someday," Sydney commented quietly. "But at least you listened to him."
"Speaking of feeling better, I have something for you that should help make YOU feel better." Miss Parker rose and carried her dishes to the sink to rinse. "Feel up to doing some marathon reading and prioritizing while you're stuck in that machine doing therapy on your knee all day?"
"I'm going to need to find something on that line to do fairly quickly," he responded, "or I'm going to have a raging case of cabin fever LONG before I'll be in any shape to do anything about it." He smiled over at her. "Why - what did you have in mind?"
"I'm going to need someone I can trust implicitly to start going through the hardcopy data archives we're bringing up from SL-26. I've got some ancillary personnel doing some rough sorting by department as it lands at Raines' old residence - but somebody's going to have to go through all that crap eventually. There are secrets in there that need to come out - and no doubt there's a ton of junk that can just go in the trash." She turned and leaned against the counter, wiping her hands on a hand towel. "Interested?"
"Definitely!" He grinned widely at her. "Anything to get my mind off of this damned knee..."
"Good! I'll have the first box of data delivered with the laptop then," she smiled back at him, then bent over him and dropped a kiss on his cheek. "Oh - and do you want me to wake Kevin up before I leave?"
"No," Sydney shook his head. "Yesterday was very hard on him. And that's something else I want to run past you. If it were my decision to make, I'd recommend that he never be asked to do another SIM in his life. Grey totally botched his training as a Pretender, and I think abused him in the process."
"Damn!" Miss Parker frowned. "I thought his attitude came more from sheer naivete..."
"Some of it does, but I watched him get defensive when he thought that he'd failed to uncover any new information. His personality is simply too fragile overall to handle stepping into the mind of another. Whether he ever will be strong enough to do it properly is extremely doubtful, given that I have neither the years nor the incentive to put him through the intensive UN-learning process that would have to come before any retraining." Sydney sighed.
"If I'm not mistaken," she commented archly, "you actually sound disappointed."
He nodded - it was a valid observation. "I am, in a way. Working with a Pretender and guiding him or her through a proper SIM can be just as mentally challenging for the mentor as it is for the Pretender. This was the first time since Jarod left that I've had a chance to..." He caught himself and glanced at her guiltily. "In many ways, I miss working in that kind of rarified intellectual level, I admit. It can be quite addictive in its own right."
She wasn't surprised at the admission. There had to have been at least some personal agenda in his cooperating in the search for Jarod all those years ago. At least it was a legitimate one, and not one with a sadistic bent. "So yesterday wore him out too?"
"More than I think even he expected," Sydney informed her. "I also saw that Grey must have conditioned him to expect abuse or at least anger upon exit. Any success he ever saw as Shadow must have come about from his natural talent at deductive reasoning, not through any substantial mental stretching as a Pretender."
"That's despicable!"
"I know - and something else that I'm going to have to work on with him so that the same issues don't arise in other areas of his persona as time goes on." Sydney shook his head at the damage that had been done to the personable young man in the name of... "So let's let him sleep in - I'll have my hands full today trying to undo some of the damage from yesterday soon enough as it is, and I'll need him well-rested to get anywhere. Besides, Mr. Ikeda and I have some common ground - I'm finding talking to him fascinating."
"I'm sure you would," she commented cryptically, wondering what in the world Sydney could find as common ground with a professional assassin. "You take care, then - and tell Broots I said “hi” when you see him. I'll call him the moment I hear any news of Deb from Sam."
"Have a good day, Parker."
She smiled at him. "My son and Deb are safe - and the monsters who stole them have all been caught one way or the other. Today will be a LOT better day, I promise you!"
~~~~~~~~
Tyler pushed open the door to his office with a foot and then walked in to set the pair of coffees down on his desk. His hand finally free, he checked his watch - his morning meeting with Miss Parker wasn't scheduled to start for another ten minutes, which meant he had a little more time to browse through the information pertaining to the new incorporation process the Centre was undergoing. Miss Parker had dumped into his lap the responsibility for making sure all the necessary forms were filled out in full and in however many copies were needed by one agency or another properly filed on time - fulfilling her promise that his new position would be full of “challenges.” This certainly was a long ways from morgue assistant!
For the most part, the amount of paperwork and sheer study that had been needed for him to learn the preliminaries of incorporation had meant that he'd had little time or energy for worrying about Deb. Like Miss Parker, however, he had breathed a deep sigh of relief the previous day when informed that both Deb and Davy had been found and were receiving medical care. That had meant that his at-home studies the previous night had been more in depth and concentrated than they had been for a couple of days.
For days he'd been acquainting himself with the corporate situation left behind by the old administration. So many of the particulars of corporate law had been put on a back burner when Mr. Raines had taken the helm of the Centre at Mr. Parker's death. Only the bare minimum had been filed with the proper agencies for tax purposes. It had taken the better part of a week of study and conferring with their retained tax lawyers to plug all the gaps left without repair for so long. Many of the people he either worked with or had heard mentioned often of late needed to be moved into positions of corporate authority - Miss Parker being Chairman, the CEO's position had been designated as Jarod's. Broots had been named IT executive, and Sydney, Sam and himself were then tapped to fill out a board of directors. New articles of incorporation following Jarod's careful framework of inter-related responsibility at all levels had been drawn up and filed with the state - articles that made board and stockholders together responsible for setting policy directions and goals from now on.
All that was needed now was for Miss Parker to make an executive decision as to what the stated value of the stocks to be issued to each of the satellite supervisors and department heads would be. They had already decided that the kind of stock to be issued would be preferred only, with additional voting rights distinctly specified in order that the supervisors have the authority they needed to help direct Centre policy from now on. Last but not least, she had to decide on a seal - whether it would be an actual imprinting set of dies, or simply a printed image - so that the actual printing of the stocks could commence.
The sound of Mei Chiang's voice greeting her boss from beyond his door brought him out of his reverie. He retrieved from his briefcase the folders of documents that needed review then grabbed the container with the two coffees and headed out the door.
"Any news?" he asked immediately after pushing through her door.
"Sam called last night to tell me Davy was awake," she announced with a smile much more the Miss Parker he knew. "I'm expecting a call from him sometime this morning with a full update."
"Nothing about Deb?"
Miss Parker gave her personal assistant an assessing gaze. She knew of his interest in Broots' pretty daughter, and hadn't had the heart to tell him of what the girl had gone through as yet. "Nothing yet," she told him with a shake of her head.
Tyler looked down at the folder in his hand and seated himself with a tight and unhappy look on his face.
She took pity on him. "So what did you bring me today?" she asked in a deliberately lighter tone.
His dark eyes searched her grey ones and found them sympathetic. He nodded, understanding the unspoken encouragement, and opened his folder and hauled out the first set of document regarding the value of the stocks to be issued.
~~~~~~~~
Gillespie moved through the halls of the hospital purposefully. This was not going to be a morning he enjoyed - he rarely enjoyed seeing people who he knew had somehow managed to slip under the radar of law enforcement go free. But the sad matter of fact was that despite many man-hours spent digging into the activities of Otamo Ngawe since his entrance to the country, no evidence had surfaced of any actual wrong-doing. And since the doctors were ready to release him into the care of his personal physicians back in Nigeria, there was no reason to hold him in custody any longer.
The FBI agent knocked on the wood of the open doorway and moved into the private room without waiting for permission. Ngawe looked up from a set of papers he'd been given by his nephew with impatience. "Yes? Do we have an appointment with you this morning?"
"No," Gillespie admitted. "I'm just here to let you know that you're free to go - but that our State Department would prefer that your route from the hospital take you straight to an airport from which you will head directly home."
Ngawe's face broke into a satisfied grin for the first time in a long time. "You are saying that you have found us completely innocent of anything after all this time? After interfering with our business..."
"I'm saying," Gillespie snapped, "that we haven't been able to UNCOVER any illegal activities - not that my suspicion has diminished any. I'm sure that if I had the manpower and the time, I'd be able to dig up something - but with budget cuts and everything lately, it just seems more appropriate to escort you and your entourage from the country."
The elderly African looked up at his nephew. "Call New York, arrange for our jet to fly to Dover. We're on our way home!"
"Yes, sir!" Siskele agreed excitedly and picked up the telephone receiver.
"Then we shall not be seeing you again?" Ngawe inquired hopefully.
"I sincerely hope not, at least not after you take off for Africa." Gillespie sounded no more desirous of a repeat meeting than Ngawe did. "Have your people coordinate your release with my people - you'll get a full escort to the airport, courtesy of Uncle Sam."
"We cannot say that this good news comes one moment too soon," Ngawe chortled. "We would wish you well, but you have been a particular obstacle in our path for days now."
"Screw you too," Gillespie turned on his heel and stalked from the room.
It just wasn't right - considering some of the information that was pouring out of the documents seized in Los Angeles, this man - or at least the organization he headed - was probably as dirty as they could come. Certainly somewhere within those documents was the rope to hang this conceited son of a bitch. Somebody must have pulled strings to get the old man sprung - someone with clout within the State Department and/or Immigration & Naturalization.
At this rate, the entire Blue Cove debacle - from the Centre bombing that had killed over forty people to the two separate but probably related murders - was going to end up a huge unsolved case. Unsolved cases tended to unravel reputations and careers, and NOTHING pissed him off worse than seeing one of THOSE develop on his watch.
~~~~~~~~
Jarod took a deep sigh as he moved slowly from sleep to wakefulness. It had been a long night, with a little girl waking up in the very dead of night screaming in terror from what he imagined was a nightmare caused by all the chaos in her life over the last few days. He'd held her for a long time in his arms while she'd shuddered and clung very tightly, then rocked her gently in his arms and rubbed her back as she lay against him until she finally fell deeply asleep again. He'd slipped her very carefully back into her bed and tucked her in again, depositing a very soft kiss on her forehead.
She was far too young to have such nightmares, as far as he was concerned. He'd sat on the edge of her bed for a long time after that, watching her sleep restlessly in case the nightmare returned. His heart went out to the tyke - he'd survived years of paralyzing, tormenting nightmares of his less than humane treatment at the Centre at the hands of Mr. Raines, Mr. Lyle and, occasionally, even Sydney. It had taken years to finally exorcise most of the demons that had driven those nightmares so that he enjoyed mostly restful nights' sleep. Now, it seemed, he'd have to find some way to help his little girl find that freedom as well. It wasn't fair - she was SO young. Finally satisfied that her sleep would be unbroken for a decent length of time, he'd shuffled back to his own bed and quickly fallen back to sleep.
He moved his long legs to stretch them and ran into an obstacle on the bed - something was holding the covers down tightly so that he couldn't move as freely as he wanted. Slowly one chocolate eye finally slipped open, then the other. Sitting cross-legged on top of his covers near the foot of the bed was Ginger, watching him with quiet patience. He rolled slightly to face her more fully then propped his head up on a forearm. "I've never had a wood sprite greet me when I wake up before - do fairies always come in and wait for a person to wake up by themselves?"
There was a muted but very obvious twinkle in her dark eyes at that, even though her face didn't give any evidence that she'd heard him. He opened his arms to her, and she unfolded herself and crawled up the bed to let him pull her close, settling with a sigh into the hollow beneath his arm with her head pillowed on his shoulder. "Came looking for me, did you Sprite?" he asked her gently, only to have her snuggle in closer as a response.
Jarod closed his eyes and let the feeling of contentment and completion wash over him like a warm wave. He'd felt this the first time he'd held his son in his arms, KNOWING Davy as his son. It was the love of a parent, unconditional and uncontrollable - the kind of love that he'd desperately wanted as a child and now apparently had in abundance to share with Davy and now Ginger, so that they would never feel that lack. With Ginger, however, there was an overwhelming need to protect that added to the gentler emotions.
Jarod had seen the pictures of the scars when he'd initially reviewed her case over a year ago. But last night, as she'd gotten ready for her bath, he'd finally come face to face with the small, round marks scattered liberally across her back where her parents had tortured her with their cigarettes under the influence of their drugs. He knew there were mental scars from the abuse of a pedophile foster father as well - and now the abuse of an unstable foster mother heaped on top of that. The nightmare the previous night showed that his work at helping her realize that she was finally safe from all her demons was just beginning.
There was no way in the world that he was going to just hand over the care of this little treasure to someone else. He would HAVE to talk to Missy about Ginger - and soon. It seemed only a fair proposition to him now that they each brought a child to the family that they would form together. And now that Davy was found, as soon as he knew that Missy was ready to hear him, he'd be putting his case to her again - hopefully in person. He didn't want to be put in a position where he'd have to choose between the woman he loved and a child he loved like a daughter already.
"We need to get up," he told her finally, planting a kiss on her forehead. "I have to shower, you need to get dressed, and we need to eat so that I can take you in to work with me this morning. Think you can get dressed before I can get my shower taken?"
She lifted her head and stretched up to look into his face with now thoroughly amused dark eyes, then nodded.
"OK then - off with you," he shooed her and rolled to a sitting position. He smiled as he heard the sound of small feet padding off toward her room again, and then rose to begin his morning ablutions.
~~~~~~~~
Sam roused, then groaned. Spending a night in a chair, no matter how comfortable it might be otherwise, never failed to leave him with a stiff neck and the feeling he would be wise to go find a masseuse. Slowly his eyes blinked open to see the nurse had come in once more to check on Davy's IV and monitors. The boy was still asleep, and from the looks of it, his face was now just an uncomfortable-looking pink rather than the angry red it had been the day before.
"How is he?" Sam asked quietly, not wanting to awaken Davy.
The nurse glanced over her shoulder at him and gave him a quick gesture that told him she'd be with him in a moment before adjusting the IV control and walking back to his chair. "He's stable and definitely improving. I'm no doctor, but provided he continues to improve steadily today, I'll be very surprised if he isn't released tomorrow."
The ex-sweepers face broke into a wide and pleased smile. "That's great!"
"Don't quote me to anybody," the nurse cautioned. "His doctor should be by to examine him sometime in the next hour or so - you can get a better idea of how things are going for him then." She eyed him critically. "You look like you could use a shower and a shave."
"I want to be here when he wakes up again," Sam told her firmly. "I told him I wouldn't leave."
"Tell you what," the nurse said after thinking for a moment. "Give me some change, and I'll go get you one a cup of coffee from the machine."
He looked up at her gratefully. "That would be wonderful!" He stretched out a leg to dig in a pocket for all the loose change he owned and dumped it in her open palm. "Just black - and as strong as you can get it."
"One black coffee, coming up," she smiled and dumped the coinage in a pocket and walked from the room.
Sam looked down at his watch. It was seven-thirty in the morning. He'd have to hit a drug store for shaving cream and a razor and then find a gas station restroom to make himself more presentable - later. First Davy had to wake up, and then he had to check on Deb's condition, and then call home to deliver the update and get instructions.
A stirring from the bed brought his attention back into the room. Davy reached up with the hand not tethered to the IV line and rubbed at his eyes and looked around. The brief look of panic died quickly when he saw that Sam was still there, as promised, sitting forward in the chair at the foot of his bed. "Hi," he said and looked around for the cup of water that Sam and the nurse had been giving him his sips from to ease the dry hoarseness.
"Hi there," Sam responded and rose as he saw Davy look around, knowing what the boy wanted. "Water?"
"Yeah." Davy sipped at the straw, still finding the feeling of water in his mouth thoroughly enjoyable. "Thanks."
"How are you feeling this morning?" the big man asked, putting the cup down where Davy could reach it himself if he wanted.
"Better," the boy answered, relaxing back into his pillow. "My face and arms don't hurt quite so bad today."
"Davy..." Sam seated himself on the edge of the boy's bed. "Not right now, but after a while, I and another man are going to need you to tell us what happened to you after the men took you." He noted that Davy's face grew tight and unhappy. "I know you'd just as soon forget the whole thing, but it will be necessary for you to tell your part of the story as best you remember it."
"When do I get to go home, Sam?" the boy asked plaintively. "I want my mom and dad and Grandpa Sydney."
"That's up to your doctors, Davy," Sam told him gently. "I'm sure it will be soon, though."
Davy looked as if he were on the verge of tears, so Sam opened his arms to him and let him lean against the only familiar person around. Burly and muscular arms closed protectively around the boy. "It's OK. You're safe now," Sam reassured him. "You'll be on your way home before you know it. Just hang tough. You know your mom and dad both love you." Davy snuggled against the big man who had been like an uncle to him for as long as he could remember.
"Are you ready for something for breakfast today?" the nurse returned to the room bearing Sam's coffee cup and a tray for Davy.
"I get to eat today?" the boy asked, straightening away from his protective guard.
"You get apple juice, some jello," the nurse responded, placing the tray on the wheeled table and waiting for Sam to take his coffee from her so she could swing the table into position. "There's an extra apple juice, in case you want it later."
"Jello? For breakfast?" Davy's nose wrinkled.
"You want to get off that thing, don't you?" The nurse pointed to the IV imbedded in the back of his hand.
"Thanks." Sam raised his coffee cup in salute to the nurse, who smiled back at him and then helped Davy sit up straighter in his bed so that he could get at his food more easily.
Davy waited patiently until the nurse had left again before turning anxious eyes on Sam. "Sam? Do I HAVE to tell the other man too?"
Sam nodded with a sympathetic look on his face. "I'm afraid so. He'll be with the FBI. They've caught two of the men who took you and Deb - and part of putting them in prison for what they did to you is for you to tell exactly what went on. You'll have to point them out too..."
"You mean I'm going to have to look at their faces again - in a line-up like on TV?"
"Something like that," Sam nodded. "But that's a ways in the future. Right now you need to just get yourself ready to tell your story - everything you remember, as precisely as you can remember it."
"OK..." Davy put a piece of the red jello in his mouth and smiled to himself as the flavor seemed so much more sweet and delicious than ever before. He wouldn't think about the bad time - not yet.
~~~~~~~~
Sydney watched Kevin's face carefully as the young man adjusted the straps that held his injured leg to the CPM therapy machine and then touched a button on the remote to begin the tedious up and down movement that the doctor assured him would hasten the healing process. "You're very quiet today," the psychiatrist commented as Kevin straightened.
"There's not a lot to be said," Kevin offered in a dreary tone. "I'm still tired..."
"Sit down, Kevin," Sydney directed with a finger pointing at the coffee table which had become a sometime chair. "You and I need to have a talk."
"Did I do something wrong?" the young Pretender asked immediately, his insides cringing as he followed Sydney's instructions.
"No, but that's part of what we need to talk about," Sydney answered in what he hoped was an encouraging tone of voice. "Why do you think that you did something wrong?"
"Because..." Kevin's eyes fleetingly reflected a sense of panic. "That's what Vernon would say just before..."
"Just before what?" Sydney asked in a deliberately calm voice despite the fact that his insides had twisted at the first sign of negative conditioning.
"Before he..." Kevin couldn't continue the thought. But his new mentor deserved an explanation. "I was never good enough for Vernon - he was never satisfied with the results of my SIMs. He used to lecture me about how Jarod used to be able to do all sorts of virtual miracles, and yet I..." He heaved a big sigh. Of all the people to know the difference between a great Pretender and himself, Sydney would be the one...
"Why was he dissatisfied with the results of your SIMs? From what I could gather, you were earning quite a healthy profit for the Centre. You must have been doing SOMETHING right?"
"But not fast enough," Kevin shook his head, "or not in-depth enough for Vernon. As far as he was concerned, I was a second-rate Pretender aspirant who really didn't deserve all the time and expense the Centre had spent on me. He never missed a single opportunity to remind me of how second-rate and inadequate my work was. And each and every one of those lectures always began with 'you and I need to have a talk...'"
Sydney closed his eyes and shook his head. "I keep being amazed at the depths of stupidity your former mentor demonstrated," he said out loud - Kevin deserved to hear a little truth about himself for a change. "I was the one who designed many of the techniques that Vernon used with you to train you - and from your responses and reactions when I use those same techniques, I can see that the man who trained you did a very poor job of it. You have a very strong talent as a Pretender - and had it not been for that talent stepping in when the training you were given came up lacking, your success rate wouldn't have been so high."
He looked across at the young Pretender, not attempting to hide his concern. "But I'm also seeing that the abuse you were subjected to at the hands of this man has damaged your ability to SIM effectively. You have to work so hard to get past your reluctance to put yourself in a situation that will earn you nothing but degradation that you have very little left with which to work the SIM itself." He could see that Kevin was taking what he was saying as a personal criticism. "I'm saying that what's wrong is NOT your fault, Kevin."
"But that means I'm useless." Kevin's blue eyes were tragic. "SIMming is the only thing I know how to do, Sydney! What am I going to do with myself if..."
Sydney reached out and took hold of his young protégé's hand tightly. "Now you listen to me. You are NOT useless. You have a powerful mind that can take you anywhere you want to go - SIMming is only one of the skills that can take advantage of your natural talent. And for you, SIMming is not a healthy activity for you to take part in anymore, at least, not for a very long time." He patted the young man's hand. "Maybe someday, when you have a much better idea about who Kevin is, you will be strong enough to go back to SIMming - but I can think of any number of ways in which you could be just as productive, and I'd like you to consider investigating them."
"You don't want to mentor me anymore?" Kevin was aghast - his failure at SIMming the previous day must have been much more disappointing than he'd first feared.
"I didn't say that - you're assuming the worst and getting yourself all upset over nothing." Sydney shook his head. "I want nothing more than the opportunity to mentor you back into a more healthy sense of self along with an increased level of socialization. And I can try to help you deal with the abuse Vernon heaped on you so you can move past it eventually as well."
"But you don't want to mentor me as a Pretender? Is that it?"
"Kevin..." Sydney sighed. "For me to do that, we'd have to start a very rigorous regimen of mental exercises designed to help you UN-learn everything that Vernon botched so badly - and then you'd have to start right back at the very beginning again to learn to use your skills properly." He gave the young man a sad smile. "And while I'd love to see how far I could bring you back into your full potential as a Pretender, I have to face the fact that I'm pushing retirement age. What I'd have to do would take years of hard work - years that I'm not sure I have left in me."
"What if I asked you to try?" Kevin's eyes were desperate. "Sydney, I don't have anywhere else to go - I don't have a family other than you... You know how to fix me. Please?"
Sympathetic chestnut stared deeply into pleading blue. Finally Sydney sighed. "I'll make you a deal. Miss Parker wants me to go through the hard-copy archive data, starting today - and that's going to be a HUGE job that's going to take a long time. I think I could use an assistant with your intellectual capabilities to help me go through the material faster."
Kevin opened his mouth to complain, but Sydney lifted a finger to silence him. "Somewhere in those files could be information about your real parents and where to find them again. If that information isn't there - or even if it is - when that big job is finished, and provided that you still want me to do this, we'll start. Maybe even we can have Jarod's help in the process when he comes back. How's that?"
The mouth had shut as the terms of the deal had been spelled out. "Agreed. But I'm not going to want to change my mind," Kevin told him firmly. "Being a Pretender is the only thing I've ever wanted - the only thing I've ever known to want. I don't want to think that Vernon stole THAT from me too."
"He won't have if I have anything to say about it," Sydney promised him. "Now, no more long faces. We're going to be making a trip into Dover, and before that, we're going to have a whole shipment of archives dumped in our laps. I suggest we start thinking of ways to streamline the process of sorting through old information before it takes over the house entirely."
~~~~~~~~
"Miss Parker, Sam is on line two for you," Mei Chiang announced.
She sighed in relief - she'd just finished an extra-long strategy meeting with Tyler, briefing him on the finer points of what she was hoping to accomplish so that he'd be up to handling things in her absence. Sam was exactly the person she was hoping to hear from right about now - before the appointment that was postponed from the day before. She picked up the receiver and punched the button. "Sam!"
"Good morning, Miss Parker. I have someone here who would like to talk to you." From the smile in Sam's voice, she knew exactly whom he was talking about.
"Alright," she said as her excitement began to show.
"Mom?" Davy's voice sounded hoarse - almost as bad as it had when he'd had strep throat a year earlier.
"Hi there, little man," she leaned back in her chair and smiled at her memory of her son's face looking at her. "How are you doing?"
"They gave me food to eat today - and the doctor says that maybe I can go home tomorrow?" Even though he was hoarse, she could hear the longing in his voice.
"That's good news, baby. I've been so worried about you."
"I love you, Mommy," the little boy said, his voice beginning to break. "I was so afraid that I wouldn't see you again..."
"Hush." She closed her eyes, feeling her son's anguish over three thousand miles of telephone wire. "I'm clearing my day so that I can come out and be with you tomorrow. What do you think about that?"
"What about Daddy?"
Of course he would have wanted to see Jarod too. "I'm thinking we'll fly up to where he is now on our way home - maybe spend the night with him and then fly home the next morning."
"I wanna go home." Sam stepped close and ran a comforting hand lightly through the tousled dark hair. "I know Sam's here, but..."
"I'm coming, baby, I promise." Tears she had been holding back since she'd heard that he was safe now found themselves dropping from lash to cheek. "Just be good for Sam and the doctors and nurses for a little while longer." She closed her eyes again to put his face foremost in her mind. "I love you, Davy."
"I love you too, Mommy." His own distress was getting hard to talk around.
"Let me talk to Sam, baby. I'll talk to you again before we hang up."
"OK..."
She heard the sound of a telephone receiver being passed from one hand to another. "Yes, ma'am?"
"Any news of Debbie?" she asked, using her other hand to wipe the tears from her cheeks.
"I saw her just a while ago and spoke with her doctor. She's responding to treatment, and was awake a little earlier. The doctor thinks that if she continues to respond, he'll be able to move her out of ICU by this evening - but she'll probably be in the hospital longer than Davy because of the infection." Sam's voice sounded almost defeated. "She looks very ill, Miss Parker. They still have her hooked up to an awful lot of machines."
"Geez," she answered, all too familiar with the kind of scene that her Security Chief was describing. "But you say she's getting better?"
"Yeah." Sam's tone hadn't lightened. "Oh, and the doctor said that they'd be calling in a counselor for her, considering some of the stuff she went through..." She could tell that he wasn't wanting to talk too candidly in front of Davy.
"Good. Until she can get home where Sydney can help her, that's the best thing for her." She rubbed her eyelids. "Has Davy told you..."
"Not yet," Sam answered before she could finish the question. "But we discussed that he would have to tell us everything when the agent responsible for watching him gets back."
"The agent LEFT?" Miss Parker's voice sounded both aghast and upset. "I thought they were going to provide round-the-clock security..."
"I sent him home, Miss Parker," Sam interrupted her gently. "I stayed with Davy last night."
No wonder Sam sounded so ragged - a person sleeping in a chair in a hospital didn't get much rest at all. "That's why you sound so tired," she commented sharply, finding it not so easy to back away from the sudden upset.
"I just didn't want..." Sam began, not exactly sure how to explain his driving need to have taken charge of Davy's security himself the night before.
"I understand, Sam," she said softly, knowing that her muscular Security Chief had always had a very soft spot in his heart for her son. "But I want you to get some rest today so that you're bright and ready to go tomorrow when I get there. We'll be making arrangements for Mr. Duncan's disposal with Mr. Mayeda before picking Davy up - if he's released - and I want you on your toes."
"Yes, ma'am." The mention of Mayeda made Sam's insides once more twist in sickening satisfaction. That meant that he'd be there to watch when Miss Parker faced the man immediately responsible for stealing her son and Deb - and for injuring Sydney. That was something to which he truly could look forward.
"OK, let me talk to Davy a little bit more, and then you go get yourself a motel room and rest yourself out. I'll call you this evening on your cell phone when I have my travel arrangements finalized." She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her desk.
"Yes, ma'am. I'll talk to you later."
The phone was once more passed between hands. "Hi, Mommy."
"OK. Remember I love you very much, and I'll see you tomorrow, baby. You do exactly what the doctors want you to - and when the time comes, you be sure to tell Sam and the FBI man everything you remember..."
"Mommy, some of what I remember was... not nice..." Davy whimpered. "The man was doing some things to Deb..."
"I know, baby, I know..." She flinched at the knowledge that her son had witnessed at least some of whatever had happened to Deb. "But you need to tell them everything. I promise you that it will be alright for you to tell them everything."
"OK..." He didn't sound completely convinced, but was willing to be led by his mother's advice. "I love you, Mommy."
"I love you too, little man. I'll see you tomorrow."
"G'bye, Mommy."
"Goodbye, sweetheart."
She hung up the telephone and put her face in her hands for the awful memories her innocent son must be carrying around in his head. Then, after wiping a fresh onslaught of tears from her cheeks, she punched the intercom. "Mei Chiang, bring me a copy of tomorrow's schedule and the next day too. We're going to be doing some serious postponing."
~~~~~~~~
"Good morning, Doctor Jarod," Cindy beamed over the top of the reception counter. Her eyes then widened and she smiled even more. "And just who is that you have with you today?"
"Can you say “good morning” to Cindy?" Jarod asked the little girl who had suddenly snuggled into the back of his leg, her teddy bear clutched tightly to her as if a shield. He looked up at his employee with a bit of chagrin. "I was hoping that maybe between the two of us, we could keep her occupied while I work with patients..."
The black girl rose out of her seat and came around the end of the counter and crouched in front of Ginger, the beads in her hair swinging and clicking merrily. "I think we can work something out," she smiled at the girl gently. "I have some billings to put together today - maybe Ginger can learn to fold the statements and stuff envelopes for me."
Jarod crouched down next to Cindy. "Do you think that would be OK - that when I see some of the other kids, you could help Cindy here? You'd be helping me, you know..."
The serious, dark eyes flitted over Cindy's friendly face and bright smile, then returned to Jarod's face. Ginger nodded ever so slightly. Jarod breathed a sigh of relief. "Cindy, I don't know..."
"Forget it, Doctor Jarod. I'm just glad she's with you now." Cindy reached out and wrapped a gentle hand around the small chin. "You've got someone pretty special taking care of you now, don't you, girl?" This time the small, dark head didn't hesitate to nod, and Cindy chuckled. "You and I are going to get along just fine, Ginger. C'mon - let's get you your own chair and place at my desk, and I bet we can even find a special place for your friend here to keep an eye on you..." Her finger caressed the top of the teddy bear in the child's arms.
"I'm going to be just in my office," Jarod told her, pointing. "You can come in and be with me when nobody else is here - but when Cindy tells us that someone is here to see me, it will be time for you to go work with her for a while." He rubbed her back gently, a movement that had proven very effective at calming and reassuring her. "Do you think that will work?"
Again the little head dipped in a nod.
"OK - why don't we see about doing what Cindy wants. I'll help." He stood and held out his hand, which was immediately filled with a tiny one. He led Ginger around the end of the counter, and the child's big, dark eyes widened at finally getting to see what went on behind the tall counter she'd only stood in front of before.
"There's another swivel chair in the storeroom that she can use, Doctor Jarod," Cindy suggested as she moved some of the office supplies that had found homes on the long desk to more orderly stacks or spaces and cleared room for a little girl to work. Jarod felt the hand in his drop away as Ginger became fascinated by what Cindy was doing, and he took that opportunity to head to the storeroom for the chair his receptionist claimed was back there and wheeled it forward. "Here, now, Sweet Pea - you climb up on this... Give me your bear so you don't fall..."
Ginger again gave Cindy an assessing look, then handed over her bear so that she could clamber up onto the swivel chair. The moment the child seemed settled, Cindy was handing the bear back, smiling as the expression in the little girl's eyes seemed to light up in gratitude for a brief moment. Jarod watched as Cindy patiently began explaining what they would be doing, and Ginger finally set her teddy bear on the desk well within reach when it became her turn to try. Satisfied that his little girl was safely cared for, he informed the two at the desk that he was heading for his office, sorted through the mail and pulled all the new applications to be his replacement and then headed down the hall.
As his hand was reaching for the doorknob of his office, he heard Ethan's voice saying, "Good morning, Cindy," and then, with some surprise, "and look who we have here! Seems you have a new helper, huh?"
Jarod smiled and proceeded into his office. Ethan soon pushed through the door. "I see you both made it to work on time," the younger brother said with a grin.
"It's just for the time being," Jarod began, only to see Ethan hold up a hand.
"I think it's a great idea. I KNOW Cindy used to grumble about the way Ginger was treated by that Thatcher woman. Cindy's just a frustrated mother hen herself, you know. And from the looks of things, Ginger's already taken a shine to her."
"I was kind of hoping that would happen," Jarod admitted. "It makes these first few days, until we're settled and have arranged for a sitter at home, so much easier..."
"You know, I did you another favor this morning," Ethan shifted from one foot to the other.
"Oh?"
"Yeah. I told Mom that you'd gotten custody of a little girl. I thought her jaw would hit the floor."
"I hadn't warned her," Jarod admitted ruefully.
"No fooling. Anyway, first thing I know, Mom's on the phone with Em, breaking the news across the lane." Ethan grinned. "Don't be surprised if you have the whole mob land on you tonight to check her out."
"Thanks for the heads-up," Jarod sighed. "It may be a slight strain on Ginger to have so much new family come at her at once - but then, most of them will be fawning over her, so..."
"A little boost to the self-esteem couldn't hurt her," Ethan reminded him with a smile. "I honestly think that having people - KIND people - paying attention to her and giving her positive strokes will go a long way toward undoing some of the damage. You never know, Mom may insist on Ginger coming with her over to Em's while you're at work."
"I can see her and Sammy getting along," Jarod thought about it for a moment and decided that wouldn't be a bad thing at all. "Incidentally, I've decided I'm going to talk to Missy about her tonight too," he then confided softly. "I don't want to have her surprised when either she walks into my house here, or I go home to Delaware, and I have my little wood sprite with me." His chocolate eyes darkened. "And I'm not going to give her up, Ethan."
"I didn't think you would," his younger brother told him sympathetically. "The moment I saw you two together last night, I knew that this was a forever arrangement." Ethan thought for a moment. "But be patient with Missy. She may balk at the idea at first - but remind her of... oh..." He sought a way to explain himself. "Sometimes I get a picture in my mind of you as a kid, with Missy and another kid..."
"That would have been Angelo," Jarod told him in a sad voice. "She didn't know it at the time, but he was her twin brother. Raines took him..." Ethan's face darkened at those three words, knowing from first-hand experience that they constituted a sentence of doom for any child. "...and destroyed him psychologically - leaving him this incredibly gifted empath, although he was virtually unable to communicate effectively anymore. He came close once, and I think he and Missy connected - she always had a soft spot in her heart for him after that, despite his handicap."
"Well," Ethan took a breath to clear his mind of the memory of Mr. Raines and his madness. "Remind her of this... Angelo - and how he might have been saved if someone had just cared enough. Maybe that will give her the push she needs."
"I'll think about it," Jarod said, filing the advice away for a more appropriate time to review and internalize.
Ethan could tell that Jarod wanted to drop the subject, so he pointed to the sealed envelopes on the desk. "Any new prospects in that lot?"
"I dunno - I just got in, so I haven't looked at them yet. You got a minute?"
The younger psychiatrist moved to the chair on the opposite side of the desk. "You open envelopes, I'll do the initial read-through."
~~~~~~~~
Deb lay quietly, just soaking up the sensation of cool sheets against her aching body. When she had been awake earlier, she thought she'd heard the rumble of Sam's voice in the distance talking to someone, and a layer of worry had dropped away despite her having trouble bringing her thinking processes under control enough to make sure that it WAS actually Sam she'd heard. Her mouth was so dry - what she wouldn't do for a single sip of water...
A gentle hand brushed across the hair at the top of her head. "Deb?" It took work to get her eyelids to follow instructions, but finally she got them to slide back just enough to see the kindly face of a middle-aged man in a white coat bending over her. Without warning, her mind flashed back to another face bending over her - the face dark and leering - and she flinched away from this new face to the extent that her sore and uncooperative body would allow. "Hush..." this new person said and the sound of his mellow baritone voice gently drew her mind back from the past into the present. "I'm Doctor Ramsey, and I've been overseeing your case. Do you know where you are?"
When she shook her head slightly, the man's expression grew sympathetic. "You're in Adelanto General Hospital, in the Intensive Care Unit. You've been here for a little over twenty-four hours now - suffering from the effects of exposure and dehydration, as well as a septic infection from either the bite mark on your breast or the cut on your foot." The face smiled encouragingly. "You've been a very sick young lady - but you're coming along quite nicely now. I'm here today to check on your injuries and see whether you're well enough to move to the medical floor."
He picked up her hand from where it lay on top of her blankets and looked at it closely, then turned it over so he could see the palm and the pads of her fingers. Slowly Deb pulled her hand out of his keeping, then let it fall back to the covers. Doctor Ramsey moved forward again to prop one sore eyelid open after another and, using his penlight, check the reaction of her pupil to the bright light. "What was her temp?" he asked briskly.
"One hundred point eight," came the nurse's response as she read from the chart on the tray table.
"OK, young lady, that's the easy part finished." Doctor Ramsey straightened and beckoned to the nurse, who had been standing patiently nearby. "Now, the nurse is going to remove the bandage on your breast so that I can assess how the infection there is coming. I figured that now that you were awake, you'd prefer that a nurse do this..." Deb's eyes filled with tears, and she nodded slightly.
The nurse gently moved the hospital gown aside and pulled the medical tape from her skin to uncover her right breast. Doctor Ramsey bent to look, then backed away again. "Let's clear away the salve so I can see the wound itself." Deb closed her eyes as the nurse gently ran a moistened cotton pad around and over the aching nipple, tears of humiliation and pain running down her face. The doctor bent over and assessed the damage and the amount of healing that had happened since last the wound had been seen. "Continue the antibiotic salve for now," he told the nurse, then carefully took Deb's hand to draw her eyes open again and to his face. "That looks much better than it did yesterday. Now let's check your foot."
The nurse moved the hospital gown back into place so that it protected the girl's modesty for the time being, then carefully pulled the covers back from the foot of the bed. Deb felt the slight pull of medical tape being dislodged from about her ankle, and then the very careful touch of the doctor manipulating her foot. "You know you were very lucky," he told her, "that this didn't sever any tendons. But the infection here is still of some concern." He turned to the nurse. "Maintain the level of IV antibiotics, bandage with antibiotic salve and continue to change this dressing three times a day. But before you bandage it again, I want a sample of the drainage cultured just in case we missed something."
As the nurse pulled the covers back over her foot, the doctor moved closer to Deb again. "I bet you're ready to drink a gallon of water too, aren't you?" Deb's eyes widened and she nodded. "Well, you can begin to have ice chips and occasional sips of water, but I'd like your system to just take a break from having to worry about using energy to digest anything as yet." He paused, then said in a softer tone. "I'm also giving a call to Claire Jackson to come and talk to you sometime today. She's our resident rape crisis counselor..." Deb's eyes widened with real fright. "She can talk to you about some of the reactions you may be having to what you went through, maybe help you begin to sort things out." Deb shook her head as vigorously as she could. She did NOT want to talk to anybody - not about THAT. The doctor gave her a sympathetic smile, but his words were firm. "You don't have to say anything. Just listen, OK?"
Deb closed her eyes and turned her head as far away from the doctor as she could. Doctor Ramsey sighed and patted her hand on the top of the covers again gently. "I'll be back to see you this evening, and we'll see whether you're ready to move to a regular bed - maybe in the same room with the young boy who came in with you?"
The girl in the bed didn't move, didn't relax from her withdrawn posture. Doctor Ramsey's eyes filled with concern as he moved to retrieve her chart from the tray table and begin making notes. Mental attitude was an important factor in recuperation - this young lady was showing signs that hers hadn't fully registered the fact that she was safe and getting better yet. Hopefully Claire would be able to work her magic that afternoon, so that the young lady he saw then would be more of an ally in her own recovery.
~~~~~~~~
Broots looked up as the door to his room pushed open, and then his eyes widened and his mouth stretched into a grin when Kevin carefully wheeled Sydney's wheelchair in, the psychiatrist's left leg extended out in front of him like a cannon. "Syd! What a surprise!" Then he thought for a moment. "What the Hell happened to YOU now?"
"One of the kidnappers did my knee in while we were fighting them off," Sydney explained. "I ended up having to have surgery on it..."
"Oh yeah - I remember Miss Parker saying she was here to pick you up from something," Broots nodded as his memory clicked into action. "Kevin," he greeted the young Pretender. "How are you doing?"
"I'm OK," Kevin said, feeling complimented just for being noticed. "Thanks."
"So," Broots turned back to his old friend. Sydney looked pale and drawn, obviously in pain. "What are you doing here today? Not more surgery?"
"No," Sydney shook his head. "Kevin, could you do the honors..." Kevin shrugged the strap from his shoulder and moved around the wheelchair to put the black canvas computer case on the tray table. "Miss Parker wanted us to deliver this laptop to you today without fail. She said you'd know how to get into the system - that Jarod made sure that your passwords were intact from before."
"Before?" Broots frowned.
"Before the explosion," Sydney explained patiently. "The old Centre mainframe was destroyed in the blast - everything we had to work with once we started to rebuild was found on your home system."
"Oh God!" Broots was aghast at the amount of information that had been lost. "Syd - that was most of everything you'd submitted over the last five years, not to mention all kinds of pharmaceutical research for the government..."
"We know, Broots, we know. All the department heads had to go back through our hard-copy files to sort, prioritize - and those projects that would continue to be carried on have had as much material pertaining to them submitted to clerical for re-entry. Miss Parker's cleaning house, getting rid of the more questionable projects in all departments and distancing the Centre from our more questionable clientele." Sydney tried to bring the tech up to date on the amount of reorganization that had been going on since he'd been aware of things.
"All my coding..." Broots couldn't stop thinking of the huge amount of work that he'd been doing directly on the mainframe that hadn't been backed up anywhere that had been lost. "All that work, lost..."
"You'll have your hands full with new stuff, I'm sure," Sydney reassured his friend. "With Miss Parker's decision to reorganize everything, we're going to be needing new security procedures put into place that will lock out those who used to be able to access our system with impunity. For example, we don't need the Triumvirate to be able to get into our new mainframe with just a few keystrokes."
"She's even dumping the Triumvirate?" Broots looked at his old friend in trepidation. "I mean - they GAVE her the job..."
"She's dumping all but the legitimate clients - and even then, sorting through the kind of projects we're doing for those that are left. The Yakuza has been completely paid off. The other projects are either in negotiations for refunds for not completing the work, or the project will be completed but no new ones accepted from the client." Sydney felt good making that announcement - both he and Broots had grumbled many times over the years about the quality of clientele the Centre tended to draw.
Broots reached for the tray table and drew it closer to begin unpacking the slim laptop. "Hey Kevin - unplug the phone and plug this one in instead," he directed, plugging the telephone cord into the modem and handing the young Pretender the other end. "I have work to do - guess there's no time like the present to get to it."
Sydney smiled as his geeky friend booted the laptop for the first time and rubbed his hands together at the evidence that he'd been given a top of the line system. Broots would have plenty to keep his mind from his injuries now too - and his worries about Deb. That was another piece of news he needed to deliver. "Broots!" he called, finally catching the tech's attention. "Miss Parker is planning on leaving for California tonight to be with Davy and Deb. Anything you want her to tell Deb, you might want to send her by email to the office before she comes home to pack. She's got the Centre jet ready to take off around nine tonight."
"Thanks," the hazel eyes spoke eloquently of his gratitude. "I'll send her a message to give to Deb when she gets there." Broots put out his hand, and Sydney wheeled himself closer to the bed so that he could clasp it. "You take care of yourself, now."
"You too - and keep in touch."
"I hope you get better real soon, Mr. Broots," Kevin added shyly as he took his place behind the wheelchair to pull Sydney back so that they could head back down to the car.
"You take good care of Sydney, Kevin," Broots smiled at the young man who, if he remembered correctly, had been smitten with Deb in the days before the lights had gone out for him. The boy looked like he hadn't rested very well at all for quite a while. "And take care of yourself too. You look like you could use a good night's sleep."
Kevin ducked his head at the unexpected thoughtfulness from Deb's father and twisted the wheelchair around with skill and headed toward the door and the car beyond - and Chet the Sweeper, who was waiting patiently for them just outside the hospital room.
Broots watched them leave, then turned back to the computer screen in front of him. With a look of glee, he laced his fingers together, then cracked them backwards, and then set himself the chore of getting into whatever system the Centre had going for it right now in order to get as much additional security up and functional as soon as he could.
~~~~~~~~
Davy watched with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as Sam came into his room accompanied by another man - this one tall and blonde. Sam had shaved sometime since last he'd seen him, but the ex-sweeper's face was still fatigue-ridden. Nervous, the boy reached for his water cup and took a long sip. "Do I have to tell everything now?" he asked in a small voice.
"In a little bit," Sam told him. "This is Agent Crandall, Davy - he's an FBI agent. He needs to show you some pictures, to see if you recognize any of the men in them."
Davy's eyes flitted up to the blue-green gaze of the FBI agent, then widened at the size of the book the man was pulling out of a briefcase that had landed on his tray table. "I have to look through all of those?"
"Don't let the size of the book intimidate you, Davy," Crandall told the boy. "Just flip through it and see if you recognize any of the people's pictures." Sam adjusted the bed so that Davy was sitting up a little straighter, and then Crandall put the book in the boy's lap. "Go ahead, let's see if you recognize anybody in there."
Davy opened the cover and looked down at a row of six faces on the page, none of them familiar at all. He flipped the page and looked down at another six, still all strangers. He flipped through several more pages, and then: "There!" He stabbed at the page, where a picture of Duncan stared up at him.
"Is that one of the men who brought you to California?" Sam asked, glancing at Crandall as if to tell the agent “I told you he could do it.” Davy's head nodded vigorously.
Crandall pulled the picture from the pocket that held it. "Keep on looking, Davy," he urged the boy. Davy flipped through more than half the book again before his finger again stabbed at the page. "There! That's the man that was doing strange things to Deb!"
Crandall pulled Cordoba's picture from its pocket and slipped it into an envelope along with Duncan's. "Keep looking, Davy. See if you recognize anybody else."
A few more flips of the page and Davy found himself looking down at a picture of Jones. "I remember him," he pointed down. "He was the one who put Deb in the trunk of the car with me after hitting her."
"You're doing good," Sam tousled the top of his head. "Keep going - let's see if you can't find anybody else."
The finger pointed one last time to a picture on the very last page. Crandall slipped the second pair of pictures into the envelope with the first pair. "You did very well, Davy. Now," he took back the big book and put it back in his briefcase, but this time brought out a small tape recorder. "I want you to tell us everything you remember - from the time your mom put you to bed until you woke up in the hospital."
Davy's face got tight and sad again, and he looked up at Sam imploringly. The big ex-sweeper sat down on the edge of the bed next to him and put an arm about the boy's shoulders. "It's OK, Davy. You can tell us what happened now - it's safe."
"They woke me up," he began, his voice small as he began to relive those first moments of terror. "I tried to yell for Mom, but one guy..." He looked up at the FBI agent. "Let me see those four pictures again, please?" Crandall glanced at Sam, who shrugged, and then pulled the envelope with the photos out and laid them each face up on the boy's lap. "This guy," Davy pointed to Duncan, "when I tried to yell, he just laughed at me and told me that he'd made it so she couldn't hear me. I thought he'd killed her until I heard him talk about taking the can of ether out to the car again..." A tear slipped to the cheek.
"They put me in the trunk after they put duct tape over my mouth and tied my hands and feet together with it. Then they closed the trunk down and drove for a while, then stopped. The next thing I knew the trunk was open and this man," he pointed at Jones, "was hitting Deb to get her to stop fighting, and then he threw her in on top of me. He was yelling for them to “get going already.” We drove for a long time after that - although they did stop once to put duct tape on Deb too in the middle of it." He took a shaky breath. "I could hear them talking - they were talking about Deb and laughing about what they wanted to do... I got scared that they were going to hurt her. But they closed the trunk again and started driving. It was dark in the trunk, and it hurt to go over bumps in the road. Then we stopped, and they carried me and Deb into this little plane kinda like the jet Mommy gets to ride in sometimes. These two," the finger pointed to Jones and Smith, "I think they got left behind when the plane took off."
"So only two men brought you to California?" Crandall asked, "these two?" The FBI agent pointed to Duncan and Cordoba.
Davy nodded. "They put us into some seats at the back of the plane, and then they flew for a long time. I think I fell asleep. I woke up when this guy," he pointed at Cordoba, "picked me up and carried me to another car and put me back in the trunk. The other guy put Deb in on top of me again, and then they started driving again. They made a few stops but didn't open the trunk those times. They finally stopped at this old ranch place out in the middle of nowhere, and carried us into this wrecked house. He," the finger pointed to Duncan, "carried me, and the other guy had Deb. He was starting to talk funny, nasty-like. I heard Deb yelp like maybe he hurt her while he was carrying her in."
He started to shake. "This other guy didn't carry Deb into the same room as me - so the other guy went looking. I hear them arguing, and then they both come back. The one guy that had Deb threw her down, and her head hit hard and knocked her out. I could see that he'd been trying to take her pajamas off - and she was bleeding..." Davy touched his chest where a young woman's right breast would be. Sam was glad that his face was behind the boy, because he was suddenly overwhelmed by an urge to murder. Even Crandall's face was serious. "He kept touching her - trying to put his hands inside her pants. He told me..." Davy could still hear the sound of that hideous voice echoing in his mind, "...that I should “look my fill,” and then he kept touching her... But then the other guy dragged him away. They argued - I think the one who'd been touching Deb wanted to do more. Then the other guy came over and hit me and I went to sleep."
Sam's arm tightened around Davy. "That was pretty scary, Davy. What happened next?"
Davy let himself relax into the big man's chest a little. "When I woke up, they were gone. Deb was still lying next to me, her clothes all pulled wrong. I moved around so that I could get a hold of the tape on her face and I pulled it off some. That's when she woke up - and she rolled so that she could pull the tape from my face too. I tried to get her to pick the duct tape away from my hands, but she couldn't get it. So she kicked one of the windows until the glass broke, and I used one of the bigger pieces to cut the tape."
"Is that how her foot got cut?" Sam asked quickly.
Davy nodded. "We used some of the old curtains to try to wrap up her foot so it wouldn't bleed so much. But it was getting hot, and neither of us had had any water or food since supper the day before. We started walking."
"You walked - in that hot sun?"
"Yeah." The boy sighed. "We tried to stay in the shade as much as we could, and walked as quickly as we could when we had to be in the sun. Then the sun went down and it got COLD. But we had followed the driveway as much as we could - and we came to this one fence, and I could see there were cows in the field. We went through the fence and we had just found this water trough, I think, when we both just kinda fell in." His fingers played absently with the nap of the blanket. "I don't remember anything else until I woke up here."
"How did you know which way to walk?" Crandall wanted to know.
"We... I... walked all the way around the yard at the ranch house. There was only one driveway that looked like it had been used. I could see the tire tracks from the car..." Davy explained quietly, almost shyly.
"That's pretty smart, kid."
Davy looked the man directly. "My Grandpa always taught me that my mind was my best defense, and to keep my eyes and ears open to everything."
Crandall looked at Sam, who had the funniest expression on his face while looking down at the boy. "Well, I'd say that your Grandpa should be pretty darned proud of you for keeping your head and using it, and not panicking."
"Is that all?" Davy asked.
The FBI agent reached out and clicked off the recorder. "You did good, Davy. But you should know that there's a very good chance that you'll have to tell your story again at least once more at court. Will you be able to do that?"
"Sam..." Davy whimpered. "I want to go HOME."
"You will," the ex-sweeper reassured him gently. "You will. We can fly back when the time comes for you to tell your story - but you'll have your mom and Grandpa Sydney with you then."
The boy leaned hard against his surrogate uncle. The idea that he'd have to relive his tale of horror more than this once was making him nearly choke with fear. "I'm really tired," he lied, turning his face into Sam so he didn't have to look the stranger in the face anymore.
Sam gestured at Crandall, who immediately packed his recorder in his briefcase and snapped it shut. "Then I'll let you rest. You take care of yourself, young man. You're a very lucky little boy to have walked out of that mess."
Sam hugged Davy close and then laid him back into his pillow. "I'm going to let this other agent keep an eye on you for a while. I need to get some shut-eye myself." He ruffled Davy's hair. "I'll be back before you know it, though."
"I'll be OK, Sam," Davy told the Security Chief and then closed his eyes. He was asleep before the two men had made it out of his room.
"Any idea when the girl will be up to talking?" Crandall asked of the tired Centre man as they walked slowly down the corridor toward the lobby.
Sam shook his head. "I wouldn't be holding my breath on that one for a while," he warned. "Deb's in a lot worse shape than Davy - I haven't even had a chance to talk to her when she was awake yet. She's still in ICU."
"Call me the moment you think we'll be able to take her statement," Crandall told him in a brisk tone. "The sooner we get that animal arraigned and tried, the sooner he can start doing his time. And maybe the sooner we can get a lead on those others."
Sam struggled not to grin at the thought of Duncan, bound and hooded and in the gentle clutches of Mayeda and his Yakuza goons. And Miss Parker was coming - and now he had some of Davy's story to tell her. Duncan was going to pay, and pay dearly. If not at Miss Parker's hands, then most definitely at HIS.
And THEN he'd be able to quit with a clear conscience. That thought wiped the grin from his face.
