Chapter Sixteen – A Flawless Escape?
At night, when just about everyone else was gone, sleeping, or hanging about doors pretending to guard them, a janitor tucked a wheelchair into a corner of the room. Then he gave Jarod a sandwich and a bit of cake, as well as a soda. The genius accepted them eagerly; the bland food The Centre gave him made him wonder if anyone who actually ate the food regularly had lost their taste buds long ago. With a bit of sandwich he had eagerly bitten off in his mouth, he asked, "What's the deal with the wheels?"
"A friend of yours asked me to drop it off here."
"Can you tell me who?" Jarod asked the janitor, who was scruffy-haired and amiable. The tag on his shirt read 'Ron.'
"Nope," he said, shaking his head as he continued sweeping. "Asked me not to tell you. Guess the person thought Lyle might be able to get something out of you."
The captive sighed. "Oh."
"By the way," Ron began. "I hear you nearly killed the one-thumbed psycho today. True?"
"They had to drug me to get me to stop," Jarod said with a small grin of his face.
"Atta boy!" the janitor exclaimed. "He deserved it. I don't think anyone here likes him anyhow." He finished dusting. "Sorry, friend, but I gotta go. This place has a lot of dirty rooms."
"Indeed," the other murmured. As he left, Jarod called, "Bye, Ron!"
Then, once again, he was left in the dark.
The next morning, Miss Parker entered Broots' office. "Your part of step two begins today at lunch."
Broots swallowed the lump in his throat. Although this was not something he wanted to do, she did not look like she would tolerate being questioned. "A-alright," he stuttered and she left.
Later, Sydney intercepted the person who usually gave Jarod his meal and offered to take it down for him. Eager to get out of duty, the man accepted.
Broots snuck into the Tech Room. He shouldn't have wasted the effort, however – it was empty, as was much of the Centre; only a skeleton crew remained. Besides, he worked there much of the time. He chose a computer other than his and signed on.
Sydney walked through a corridor, taking a packet out of his pocket as he did so. When he was sure no one was watching, he slipped the white powder into the sandwich on the tray and continued on his way.
Raines took note of the furtive action from his position just inside an office door in the same hallway.
"Hello, Jarod!" the doctor greeted as he approached the cage.
"Hi, Sydney," the captive said as he took the tray. "Where's Nick?"
The doctor took this to mean the man he had taken the tray from. "Oh. I offered to take the tray down so I could have a reason to see you."
"Oh," Jarod said as the Sweeper allowed Sydney in and locked the door again. He watched the doctor study the cell and could tell that he was ever so slightly uncomfortable on this side of the bars. "Not very homey, is it?" Sydney asked.
The young man sat down with the tray he had accepted from the elder on a bench adjacent to a side of the cage. He took a bite of the sandwich, which tasted vaguely of pistachio. "I don't expect to be here long."
Sydney nodded. "That's the spirit," he said.
A few minutes after Jarod finished his lunch, he started brushing his hands across his lips every so often in a compulsive manner. "Is there something wrong?" Sydney asked.
As if suddenly aware of what he was doing, the Pretender stopped. "No," he lied as he dug his hands into his lap.
"Has Lyle been to visit you?" the doctor asked.
"Not since yesterday," Jarod said with a slight smile.
"What did you do to him?"
"What have you heard?" the young man returned.
"Someone tells me you pounced and throttled him. Is it true?"
With an even larger grin, Jarod said, "What do you think?"
Sydney lapsed into a silence. After a while, Jarod asked, "Have you decided yet?"
He shook his head. "I can't figure out why you would do such a thing. I assume that you decided to postpone carrying out your vendetta against Lyle. And The Centre isn't the best place to do stuff like this."
An agonized expression flickered across Jarod's face. Then he shifted awkwardly, as if there was a pain in his abdomen. "Sydney," he observed. "I think I'm allergic to something I ate."
As if the reaction was triggered by awareness, Jarod started having difficulty breathing. To Sydney's dismay, the conditioned worsened more rapidly than he'd anticipated. Before the doctor could say anything further, his protégé went into anaphylactic shock and collapsed, his beating ragged and his pulse weak. "What are you doing just standing there?!" Sydney yelled at the Sweeper who was standing speechless outside. "Get that wheelchair over here! He needs medical attention and we can't very well carry him!"
The Sweeper dashed for the chair he couldn't remember ever being there and fumbled for the key to the cage door. He opened it just as alarms began ringing out.
In the Tech Room, Broots spoke into a headset he'd stolen from the lone security guard watching the surveillance cameras. He nervously watched the guard, who he'd knocked out with an injection, as his voice was distorted through a synthesizer. "Security breaches on Sub-Levels Twenty-One, Twenty-Three, and Twenty-Four. Motion sensors indicate the intruders are moving rapidly." He paused. "I repeat, security breaches on Sub-Levels Twenty-One ..."
Miss Parker ran out of her office and was assembling there teams of six Sweepers each when Lyle dashed out of his. "What are you doing?" he asked in an irritated tone.
"Going after the security breath, my dear brother," she said, equally vexed. "What does it look like?"
"Well, if you've got one team and I've got the other," Lyle called to her, "who's got the third?"
"They can think for themselves!" Miss Parker yelled over her shoulder as she ran for an elevator.
While Sydney maneuvered Jarod into the wheelchair, the Sweeper hovered at the door, apparently torn between staying as Lyle instructed and going as the alarms urged. "Go!" the doctor exclaimed. "Until Jarod is better, there's no point guarding him!"
The Sweeper ran, leaving Sydney alone.
As soon as the other was gone, the doctor gave Jarod an antihistamine, as well as a stimulant, via injection. They were powerful together, and as he ran down the corridor for an elevator that wasn't going down, the invalid's immune system began letting up. As Sydney punched the buttons to the elevator, his breathing cleared up and the pulse grew stronger. He was not over the anaphylactic shock, however.
The lobby was virtually devoid of activity as Sydney rushed him out of The Centre. Jarod winched while the old man pushed him down a ramp and made a particularly bad turn. He noticed this and joyfully exclaimed, "You're awake!"
Jarod winced once more as he changed position in the wheelchair. In a strained voice, he said, "And never been better!" He slowly got up and started running. Abandoning the wheelchair, Sydney followed his lead.
From a window above, Miss Parker watched the two escape, having made her brief appearance on SL-23. She called Broots on her cell phone, telling him, "Kill the noise," before hanging up. The arrival of silence coincided with Sydney and Jarod's speeding off in a car.
From a window to her left, Raines witnessed the same thing.
At the Tech Room, Broots doctored everything he had touched. He wiped off any possible fingerprints he may have left on the headset and replaced them on the security guard's head. Broots altered the records on the computer he'd been working on, making it look like a break-in from TekNolo-G, providing server ID and everything. Lastly, he checked each of the surveillance tapes and got rid of any trace of Sydney after 11:30 this morning, which was before he had ran into Nick, and himself in the Tech Room.
The computer technician was most careful in his cover-up. If he made one slip, no one would be able to catch him when he fell.
In the passenger seat of the Ford they had taken, Jarod was still feeling ill, and the way his eyelids drooped, coupled with the slight downward turn to his mouth, made him look very unhappy. Suddenly, he asked, "Where are you taking me now?"
Keeping his eyes on the road, the doctor answered, "Away from The Centre."
In a bad humor, the protégé criticized his teacher. "Now that's a hypocritical thing to do. On the one hand, you're trying to capture me. With the other, you're setting me free."
"Miss Parker and Broots are in this, too," Sydney said.
Slightly surprised and a little skeptical, Jarod glanced at Sydney. "What?" he asked. "Miss Parker? Why?"
"You know the two men who took part in your capture two and a half weeks ago, Stuard and Meeker?" Sydney began. Jarod nodded. "After the plane crashed, Miss Parker found that they were working for Mr. Lyle, and that Mr. Lyle had stolen a large sum from The Centre, doctoring his traces so that it looked like Mr. Raines did it. With proof that Miss Parker had 'worked' with two people outside of The Centre to capture – and, further more, hadn't immediately turned you in after they did – "
"Lyle would have had easy access to the top of the ladder. Instead, it looks like he both caught me and let me slip through his fingers," Jarod finished.
The doctor nodded his head. "Yes, so the fight for control of The Centre continues."
"It's as if Miss Parker knew she couldn't act against her father, so she took it out on Lyle instead," the young man remarked.
Sydney glanced at Jarod, who was looking outside with the window rolled all the way down and enjoying the wind and sun on his face. He seemed to have recovered fully by now and there seemed to be no trace at having been a pawn while Lyle and Miss Parker played chess. But Jarod could hide his feelings well.
At Miss Parker's house, Jarod collected his things, stuffing the Taj Mahal into the same bag that contained his cell phone, PEZ dispensers, red notebook, and wallet.
"What about the puzzle?" Sydney asked.
The young man removed a piece near the center and put it into his pocket. "She can have it."
They arrived at an Amtrak train station, and Sydney gave Jarod a ticket as a clock chimed one. "Get going," he said. "Or you'll be late for the train."
Jarod put his Halliburton case on the ground so that he could shake the doctor's hand. "Thanks, Sydney," he said softly.
Sydney nodded.
A man rolled some luggage in the doctor's direction and, realizing that he would be cutting it extremely fine, asked him, "Hey, can you move it over there?"
"Oh, sorry," Sydney apologized as he got out of the way. He watched the man pass and turned to Jarod, but he was gone.
Instead of looking around himself, Sydney scanned the windows of the train. He was able to glimpse Jarod's profile before he truly disappeared.