CHAPTER Two
Dec 29-30 2001
Blue Cove did not appear on any map. It was just a group of houses, buildings, and stores growing haphazardly up from the highway, no doubt, a farm where the family just stayed together, each one making a house besides the other, and then graduating into shops and offices. The predominant building was the Centre, a supposed think tank run by the Parkers.
Now when MacLean entered Blue Cove two evenings after his departure from South Africa, he saw it did look like a town. Whoever the original farmer was, he was a man of order. He saw houses with gardens, most in the old New English style, a few modern ones, and all with the Direct TV and Dishes on top of them and a few having the large Satellite dishes as well.
MacLean looked at the map. Miss Parker's house was down the next street, and across it from the back was a newly constructed house (in the last three years) of a lawyer who moved into the town. The lawyer's house must be the one with the large stone fence and grass covered slope.
It was around seven pm and as he drove up, he saw the lights of Miss Parker's on before the car stopped. That was puzzling for another car had sped by, and the lights did not go on. It was as if the inhabitants were expecting him and MacLean wanted it to be a surprise.
He climbed up the steps, remembering that when he saw the photograph of Blue Cove, the steps were not as steep and the basement windows were closer to the ground. The man opening the door was a stranger. He said he was Mr. Lambourni and was looking after the children until Lady Angela and Jarod returned.
"Lady Angela? I was expecting to see a Miss Parker."
"One and the same." He turned around and talked to someone in the background. "You will not use your mother's lipstick. Constance, see about Patricia."
"Yes father."
The girl was about twelve, but her eyes were older and wiser and not in the experienced prostitute type of way. She looked at MacLean like a cat eying a bird, and he felt a cold chill in his heart and then she went in the bedroom, talking to the unseen Patricia in a calm voice. "You must not use that Patricia. You are too young."
The appearance of the house, although probably constructed a century or so earlier, seemed to having gone through a major renovations, it now having an extension on the back and the sides along with new doors, a new carpet on the floor, and wallpaper repaired or replaced, although still keeping with the general old century feel. MacLean could that someone had added a nursery and as well as added an extra bedroom plus a bathroom, thus changing the general cottage setup of a two bedroom house room to a three bedroom one complete with hall, extra bathroom, nursery, and an enlarged major bedroom complete with insuite.
The reporter sat on the sofa, talking to Mr. Lambourni who was too charming and with a predatory feel about him. Oh, it was not like that of the psychopath that MacLean had interviewed. That man was suave, a born hypocrite, but Mr. Lambourni seemed to be on a higher plane.
"And then the client confesses," Lambourni said, "I used a brilliant defense, but he blew it. Said he did use too much water in the concrete mixture and he'll pay one million dollars to the families."
"I guess that hurt."
"It did. Good thing, I'm not a criminal lawyer yet, so McCoy can thank God for that fact. With my luck, the client will confess, shave his head, and attach the nodes to his extremities and pull the switch in the electric chair himself.
"Or get on the ladder and put the rope around his neck."
"We don't hang people nowadays, Mr. MacLean and why are you here?"
MacLean told of his travels as a reporter, how he had been in Iraq recently and seen all that Saddam had done and wondered why Bush hadn't removed him. He told of being in Africa, leaning back, talking about Georges, being a strange man with … He tried to remove the arm around his neck but couldn't and Mr. Lambourni had a revolver pointing at him and a slim brunette woman came in through the front door, also with a revolver and she looked deadly.
"What's this about Mr. Georges?" she asked.
"Miss Parker?" asked MacLean, after she motioned to the one behind the sofa. "I'd rather not talk about it."
"But you will. Why did he send you here? You are a reporter aren't you?" The arm squeezed a little harder. "Be quick with your answers. He can snap your neck like that."
"Okay Mr. Georges wanted to know how Jarod's reaction was not what he expected after the—"
"Assault?" said the man behind, now loosening his grip and walking in front. He H He was tall with long dark hair and brown eyes, had a camera, a bag, and wore a pair of dark navy blue trousers, a light blue shirt, socks, and shoes. He also had on a jacket and the bulge in it was not his wallet. "We don't have the emotions. Something about the DNA, what you gain in intelligence you lose in, isn't that the story?"
MacLean told them about the interview where he learned that the former Triumvirate was no more.
"Jarod's the member of a New Species, called Homo Dominants," said Miss Parker.
"Are you talking about the ones that a Walter Attwood announced on TV?"
"Yes, they don't have our emotions, but they can sense things, pick up our heat waves or aura, I guess and are stronger and more vicious than us. They came about as an experiment near the end of the Second World War to create a foil to the Nazi Aryan race plan. Have you heard of the Hercules Project?"
"I did. Wasn't it a failure?"
"No. Arranging unions between certain men and women, making sure only the strongest and slowest sperm fertilized the eggs and eliminating the faster damaged sperm. Do you know that they are not intended to fertilize the egg but to keep these slower ones from reaching it?"
"I gather when the strong slow swimmers entered the egg, the baby was born Homo Dominant. What other characteristics?"
"The girls have four uteruses, and have babies as young as eight or nine, all of them, not just a few. The boys can produce fertile sperm at nine or ten and I told you about their heightened senses."
"But they are human beings."
"Do you mean homo sapiens, no? Lambourni could explain it. He's one as well. They do not have the personality or the emotional level we have. The Centre took advantage of that. It was not like the Negroes back in the nineteenth century who are homo sapiens nor the Jews in the twentieth century under Hitler."
MacLean listened to Lambourni's rather detailed explanation which included, "When a homo sapien, well married a Neanderthal, the latter's DNA was destroyed. However the physical characteristics remained. If you want to go to the Bible, Adam, the beginning of all humanoids on earth, ergo the human race containing the seeds of all branches of humanoids, which is different from humanity, the latter meaning homo sapiens."
It took MacLean five minutes to figure this out and he did not want to get into a long discourse with the lawyer, knowing he would lose so he changed the subject. "One of my relatives back in the nineteenth century was a Monk and he wrote about a boy called Jarod saving The Centre. That's one of the reasons I asked to be put on the assignment to find if there was such a place. I've been all over the world, exploring various cults, para military organizations, and think tanks until I found there was this place in Delaware, a think tank which had an extra ordinary sense of success in the negative way. I also took notes from an inside source mentioning a Jarod or Jarred, and a Geraldo and that boy is?"
"Jeremiah," said Miss Parker, "our son."
"In veracity, a man and two boys with similar names, Jarod, Jeremiah, and my son Geraldo," said Lambourni who gave a detailed explanation and proved that you could not exactly take at face value anything found on a scroll intended to give great power but at a terrible price. It appeared that legends and prophecies not of the God type often could be interpreted in many ways.
The one behind the couch was Jarod, the one with the camera bag, the second, a toddler also called Jarod but renamed Jeremiah had been rescued from the subterranean depth of the Centre, implanted in the womb of a Brigitte a former cleaner (or executioner) later married to Mr. Parker, and was first assumed to be pregnant by him. That child was really Jarod's and Miss Parker's. Although Mr. Parker had named the toddler Jarod, Miss Parker explained that she changed his name to Jeremiah, keeping secret her fear that she hoped the child would not grow to be a mountain man with a beard while Jarod hoped he would not lead a bunch of rag tag survivalists of a limited plague that only attacked adults
The third candidate for the illustrious position was the one who really saved the Centre, Geraldo, Lambourni's son. MacLean looked at his photo, a boy of eight years old, who looked a bit like his father probably did when younger except the boy's hair was more redder. According to his father, Geraldo went on a campaign to destroy every effigy of the demon to whom the Parkers gave homage and what caused the original Parker to kill his original family and perpetuate a curse that caused the family to do evil to others in return for great power, position, and knowledge that man should not know.
"Kept us drugged sort of like the Stepford Wives," said Jarod and Miss Parker shot him a look and continued.
"I've been renting several DVDS; they kept Jarod from learning about movies. One of the henchmen said that he belonged to the Centre and something click, realization. He escaped along with another Pretender. I've been chasing Jarod for years, and when I caught him I made sure he knew what he was." She showed MacLean the bill of sale. "You have to take possession of your property. I gather that's what the Triumvirate wanted to see whether it was faked. It wasn't. I have to get the children something to eat." She walked into the kitchen.
Jarod still did not trust MacLean, but he told him about Frederick and Margaret, who unlike his second oldest was not made into Pretenders, that is, Raines did not insert an identification chip/bar code into their skull at birth. "I had no idea of how they came about."
"Surely you should know."
"I do know now, but then the Centre wiped my memory of the events. I was the property of the Centre and unlike Miss Parker, they kept all information about reproductive and sexual intercourse from me so when Mr. Parker put Miss Parker on me, I had no reference point to associate with."
Jarod told MacLean of the promise Miss Parker exacted from Raines, using her mother's Bible to make him promise to raise any child she would have as Parkers. He told how he was chained, stretched out and they (there was a nurse as well) brought a dazed Miss Parker in, lifted her dress, straddled her legs below his waist. They repeated this rape a couple of years later. The Centre then took charge of the children's education, hiring the best tutors, giving them the best of food and clothes, treating them like royalty, until they figured out the Centre for themselves.
"How did they escape?" asked MacLean, stating the obvious.
"By pretending to be nice, they got close and broke the guards' necks. Took the keys, and got out," said Miss Parker leading the children out to the living room. She gave them to Jarod who showed them how to construct a Lego city and told MacLean how the Centre found Lambourni.
"Daddy advertised in the papers read by the criminal underworld for someone born July on a certain date in a certain year to work for an esteemed organization. However, not all took the hint, so he sent out his goons to kidnap the remainder, including Antonio Lambourni and that's when the trouble started," said Miss Parker.
"What has Lambourni to do with you?"
"He's my son and Jarod's. When we were very young, we were playing doctor and got carried away. My parents never told me anything and I know they kept that stuff secret from him as well. The Parkers have a curse and until we were in the Church and had the curse removed, any child we had would have the curse as well."
"How did you find that Lambourni's your son?"
"He told us," said Miss Parker, "when the Father lifted the curse, he must have started to act different, not being so unpredictable. Oh we were at the Church going through the Official Joining."
Must be a Dominant term, thought MacLean looking at Jarod.
"Oh the Official Joining is a legal Dominant marriage ceremony. Actually there's three, depending on the rank or lack of one or both of the partners, but if you want more details, you could ask Lewison, a Mentor and married to my daughter."
"Mentor means teacher, I gather. I'll think about it." MacLean did not want to see this Lewison, at least not at this hour. He had heard stories of these Dominants, another reporter had been killed in California investigating the new species some years back, but MacLean was not interested in them, at least not yet. He had come for another purpose to find out if Miss Parker treated Jarod, as a sex slave and why the Pretender did not feel degraded, so he told them of Georges having some girls all dressed in well nothing at all.
"Their native costume?" asked Jarod.
"No, The men wore shirts and pants, the women sort of a wrap around dress, and some had cotton dresses, most a little out of style, twenty to thirty years ago. When they went native, the girls went bare breasted, but all wore skirts and the men wore the typical Zulu costumes. Georges forced those girls to have sex with him."
Jarod grew silent for a moment and Miss Parker started to feel a little nervous, but recovered.
"I can kill Jarod if he doesn't do anything I want, but I don't want someone like Georges coming in and gaping besides Jarod doesn't want it either." She put her revolver back in her purse. "They even bred Jarod with a Pretender girl, no memory of course, rather distasteful stuff. Tried to starve the baby to death, used Jarod to do it. They put him on the mother, they made him; they had a gun to his back." She thought it best not to go into details. "When you go to bed, keep your doors closed and don't start wandering around"
"I'll try." He had a rather restless sleep, dreaming of black girls dancing naked and Georges pouring blood over them. There was a unicorn in the room as well, and when Georges poured the blood over the girls, the unicorn dropped dead and faded away.
His dream now switched to Jarod and Miss Parker, about that video he saw. They were in a large room with a large box with a ribbon leaning against the wall and Jarod saying, "You know the store's policy. It was a sale. No returns."
MacLean woke up for a moment and then went back to sleep, this time dreaming of his mother's flat and saying that he had the story of a lifetime. Then the dream took a strange turn with him walking over a bridge covered with so many children's books. Just as he picked one up, two men would come up, one carrying a camera, the other a notebook and they would say, "That's my book you can't have it."
His dreams were so disturbing, MacLean decided that going for a drink would be better than that warning Miss Parker gave him. Besides when he saw that video of Jarod being whipped, trying to escape, and asked that question whether the Pretender had been stolen, he knew, although he would not admit it, the truth. He also knew that Miss Parker had been chasing the Pretender for so long that when she got him, no matter how much she felt for him, she would make him pay for those years of pursuit.
He passed the children's room; they were sleeping, curled up in rather strange positions, clutching some toys. The kitchen was just past the main bedroom, and MacLean hoped that both Miss Parker and Jarod were under the covers, but he knew he would not find that and he was right. They must have finished making love, for Jarod was partly on top of her and the top cover was on the bottom the event must have been spectacular. Then he awoke and turned his head to look at MacLean. For a moment MacLean thought he was looking in the eyes of a predator, and then he said, "sorry," closed the door, and left.
He took a glass from the cupboard in the kitchen, poured himself some water, and then went back to bed. Reading about slavery was not the same as real life, learning that once one went into bondage, one lost all privacy, and in most cases all self respect, unless one was a Dominant with a low emotional level, which the Centre had taken advantage with when they captured all those Pretenders.
