Chapter 5 – Defensive Maneuvers

Sydney pulled into the parking lot of the convenience store outside Dover and, as Jarod had instructed him, pulled his duffel bag and briefcase with him and left them sitting on the ground near the front driver's tire before walking into the store. Very quietly, the door in the light-colored mini SUV beside him opened, and a hand drew the two pieces of luggage into the SUV – and then the engine started. The SUV pulled out of the parking lot and drove slowly and visibly down the street for three blocks before turning off and finding the alleyway and speeding back toward the back door of the store.

The tires screeched as the SUV pulled to a halt, and the sound brought Sydney out the back of the store and into the passenger seat of the SUV. "Go!" he exclaimed, and Jarod floored the vehicle. They sped down the highway headed north until Jarod jerked the wheel to the left and put them on a smaller lane that wound in among the low hills. The vehicle didn't slow down at all – and it was soon apparent that Jarod knew the road very well.

"Were you followed, do you think?" the Pretender asked his mentor tersely, keeping his eyes carefully bouncing between the road in front of him and the rear-view mirror.

"I don't think so," Sydney replied, and then started when a smaller hand landed on his shoulder. "Hello, Debbie," he greeted the young girl behind him.

"Hi Sydney," she smiled at him, her face pale in the moonlight.

"Where are we headed?" he asked Jarod curiously.

"There's a house in Dover that I use every once in a while – when I need to stick close to the Centre and watch what's happening a little closer than normal," Jarod told him with a quick glance. "We don't want to get TOO far away – we won't be able to do anything for those who are caught inside." The Pretender jerked his head toward the back seat. "Did you bring it?"

"Everything we'd managed to put together before people started disappearing left and right," Sydney replied. "And there's plenty to go through – trust me."

"Good. We'll need all the clues we can get at this point," Jarod stated pessimistically.

Things were quiet in the car for a long moment, and then Debbie asked from the back, "Do you think my dad and Miss Parker are OK, Sydney?"

The two men in the front seat exchanged quick glances. "We hope so," Sydney answered first, knowing how important to her frame of mind it would be to keep things hopeful until there was no alternative but to put forth a negative reality. "We'll know more when Jarod does a little poking around – he's almost as good as your dad at things like that."

"OK," Debbie replied, sounding a little more satisfied and reassured.

Jarod gave Sydney a long look and mouthed "almost as good" at him with brows raised in obvious question.

Sydney shrugged and turned to watch the darkened road ahead of them.

"I want to help." She pushed her chin forward defiantly when Sydney turned to look at her over his shoulder. "He's my father – and Miss Parker is my friend too."

"I'm certain there are going to be things that each of us is going to have to do to pull this off," Jarod told her with another quick and startled look at his mentor. Broots had turned out to be a remarkably tenacious man, more than willing to stick his neck out for Jarod while the Pretender had been trying to unravel the puzzle that Damon had left behind implicating the otherwise mild-mannered computer technician. Evidently the trait was genetic, for from the sounds of her declaration, Debbie intended to be just as involved as possible.

Sydney merely sighed and returned to watching out the windshield. Miss Parker had once remarked upon the way Broots' daughter was almost too intelligent for her own good and easily as stubborn as she herself was – here was proof. He and Jarod would have to tread very lightly if they were going to be able to shield her from the dangers inherent in trying to retrieve ANYBODY from the Centre.

Then again, Debbie was old enough to understand at least superficially what was going on – shielding her might not be doing her any favors in the long run. The way things were going, it was entirely possible that all of them, including those that had yet to be rescued, would have to remain on the run from the Centre for a very long time. They'd have to play the game of how much to tell her and how much to keep from her by ear.

"So what did our Miss Parker do when she got to work this morning?" Jarod asked in a conversational tone. He might as well know what Miss Parker, with her tendency to shoot from the hip and act before thinking clearly, might have done to trigger the current situation.

Sydney leaned back against the headrest. "You know how she is, Jarod. I couldn't talk her out of going straight to Raines with her suspicions," he groaned. "I told her it would be useless – that they'd deny everything, and threatening them would only make things harder." He smiled grimly. "Although, I have to admit, watching her put Willy down without a single sound or breaking a sweat did do my heart good."

Jarod broke out chuckling. "That sounds like her," he commented with a strange tone to his voice. "When did you figure out she was gone?"

The older man sighed. "I didn't see her after we split up after going up to the Tower. She had security clients to see to, and I had my research subjects coming in later that morning that would take me most of the rest of the afternoon to work with. But we'd made arrangements to touch base at quitting time – we were going to get together and think things through."

"Ah." Jarod understood now. "And she didn't answer her phones when she was supposed to."

"Not only didn't answer them, but they were already out of service," Sydney complained. "And when I went up to her office, I saw sweepers swarming all over the place – Willy included."

Jarod nodded to himself. "So let me get this straight – Sam vanished a couple of weeks ago, and then Broots yesterday, and Miss Parker today, right?"

Sydney nodded. "That's right."

"I wonder what the delay was," Jarod mused aloud.

His mentor cleared his throat. "Broots was doing some research on some clues that we discovered about Sam and evidently tripped an alarm. He came to me the afternoon before, shaking in his boots and filling me in on what he'd found before anybody could get to him. When he came into work yesterday morning like normal, I figured that maybe his panic attack was just a bad case of nerves. Then he disappeared…"

"What kind of alarm – did he tell you?"

"One that froze his terminal and had some kind of warning plastered all over it," Sydney answered. "I'm not exactly sure. Then again, there was another document he tried to access that immediately started to encrypt itself…"

"That would have sent off warning flags too," Jarod told him soberly. "Didn't he have anybody else's password with a higher security clearance…"

"He told me he forgot," Sydney closed his eyes, "until it was too late."

The dark road turned a corner, and suddenly the SUV was on a narrow residential street of Dover. He steered the car to the first major cross street and turned right. "We're almost there," he announced.

"I didn't even know you could get from Blue Cove to Dover that way," Sydney shook his head. "And I've lived here longer than you have."

"But I've studied the road maps of the entire area," Jarod smirked, "and I'll bet you've never had to."

"Touché."

Jarod maneuvered the SUV around several more corners and then was pulling slowly and carefully into the driveway of a thoroughly mundane-looking home – totally unremarkable in any way from any of the homes that surrounded it. "You come here often?" Sydney asked, impressed.

Jarod grinned as the garage door slowly lifted, illuminating his face in the interior light. "If I told you how often I HAVE come here over the years…"

"Forget I even asked," the older man chuckled.

oOoOo

Jarod looked up as Sydney walked back into the kitchen from the front of the house. "Is she asleep?"

"She's in bed," Sydney hedged. "From the looks of things, I seriously doubt that she's been sleeping much at all."

"I think she cried herself to sleep last night, after Miss Parker left," Jarod sighed and tapped a few more keystrokes into his laptop. "You should have seen her face when I told her we had to pack up and move because Miss Parker had gone missing too."

"I can imagine." Sydney put the briefcase down on the kitchen table. "This is all of it."

Jarod looked up into his mentor's face and then pushed the laptop aside so he could pull the briefcase to him and open it. Inside was a folder with a few papers in it, a pile of small, loose-leaf notebooks, a glass vial with something dried at the bottom of it and a floppy disk. "That's it?" he asked in surprise.

"The folder is, to the best of my ability, copies of the documents at the beginning of Broots' search on the day before he disappeared. Miss Parker wanted to know what happened to Sam – now known at the Centre as Jerry Silva – and Broots was digging into the personnel files." Sydney watched as Jarod pulled the folder out and began flipping through the documents.

"What's 'Contingency'?" Jarod pointed to project name that had appeared on every last page of Jerry Silva's file.

"That was what led him to the document that encrypted itself – but not before he'd seen 'Formula 837A.' I was the one who followed up on that eventually," Sydney admitted quietly. "Everything I was able to find on THAT is either on the floppy disk or – I hope – in those research notebooks."

"You got information on Formula 837A that Broots couldn't get to?" Jarod was shocked as he reached for the top notebook. "How'd you manage that?"

Sydney smiled, but the smile didn't reach his eyes. "Mr. Raines made the mistake of logging onto his computer with me in the room a few months ago. I know which keys are which on a keyboard, even upside-down… I wrote down what I saw the moment I was alone."

Jarod tipped his head appreciatively. "Oh, Sydney, they do tend to underestimate you, don't they?" he began with a conspiratorial tone and then looked down into the notebook and blinked in surprise. "What the Hell…"

"I know," Sydney stated very matter-of-factly, understanding exactly where Jarod's exclamation had come from. "I figure that was why they left the notebooks in the lab where Formula 837A was developed, rather than collecting them after the researcher had a car accident and was transferred to a convalescent home with a serious head injury – the Mount Pleasant Home, to be precise." Jarod looked up at him sharply. "That doesn't look like any language or code I've ever seen before – and I'll bet that the cryptography department didn't get anywhere with it either."

"Somebody didn't want their notes to be read by anybody else," Jarod frowned and ran his finger down the page, seeing repetition in the characters that implied either an alphabet or syllabary.

"Her progress reports to her superior are on the floppy disk, written in intelligible English at least," Sydney pointed out tiredly. "I'm not exactly sure what this Formula 837A was, but I know that Dr. Morrison wasn't comfortable with the kind of experimentation she was doing…"

"You read the reports?"

Sydney nodded. "Most of it went over my head – but there were sections where she was talking about the responses of some of her human subjects, and she was expressing real concerns over their welfare."

Jarod reached out and pulled the floppy from the briefcase and inserted it into the drive on the side of his laptop. "You look pretty well wiped, Sydney," he commented in a kind voice. "How about you head upstairs to rest, and I'll keep working on this for a while longer?"

"Do you want me to make you some coffee first?" the older man asked, rising.

"Uh-unh," Jarod shook his head and smiled as he pulled a Pez dispenser from the pocket of his leather jacket, which he'd draped over the back of his chair. "I prefer sugar to caffeine. Goodnight, Sydney."

"Goodnight, Jarod. Don't work too late."

"Oh, Sydney?" Jarod called as one question came to him that he knew he needed to decipher this entire mess. "How did Broots know what name to research in order to find out what happened to Sam?"

"Oh, that." Sydney turned with a sour face. "One of my colleagues asked me if Miss Parker had fired her sweeper – and then told me he'd seen someone that looked like Sam working out with Willy. Miss Parker, of course, went down there first thing in the morning and got herself chased away – but not until she'd heard him referred to as Jerry and recognized his trainer. Broots chased down the trainer's schedule from there."

"So in other words, you had a clue dumped into your laps?" Jarod asked suspiciously.

The old Belgian blinked a couple of times, turning the sequence of events over in his mind in a different direction than he had before, his face eventually sagging into surprise. "I suppose it could seem that way…" he admitted, appalled at the very idea.

"So it's safe to assume that this entire situation could be a trap." Jarod piled the notebooks next to the laptop, which he'd once more pulled closer.

"I suppose it could be," Sydney replied. "But for whom?"

Jarod snorted without looking up at the older man. "This is the Centre, Sydney – and everyone who's gone AWOL has had something to do with the effort to put me back in my nice, comfy cage on a sub-level. It doesn't take a genius to do the math."

"That's going an awfully long way around just to get you back in the Centre's clutches," Sydney complained. To be of value, not for his own talents and abilities, but only as a means to an end that involved harnessing the talents and abilities of another was not only demeaning, but outright insulting.

"You never know," Jarod replied a little distractedly as he typed a few more keystrokes into his laptop and waited for the Internet connection to log him into the Centre mainframe. "You never know."

oOoOo

"What do you mean, you lost him?" Raines was livid, and Lyle was looking distinctly uncomfortable. "He's an old man, for heaven's sake – he can't run that fast…"

Tim shifted back and forth on his feet nervously. "We followed him to this little convenience store, Mr. Raines – but we knew better than to follow him inside. He's a cagey one, that one – he'd have known he was being staked out. So we pulled to the curb in front of the store and waited. After about fifteen minutes and he hadn't come back out again, we pulled in next to his car and went inside. The shop owner said that he'd left out the back almost immediately."

Raines rounded on Lyle. "This is YOUR fault. You said you had all the possible circumstances under control."

"He must have gotten into touch with someone without our knowing about it," Lyle was steamed. It was bad enough to be shown up regularly by his sister – but by Sydney? That was insulting. "The bastard must have figured out we'd be watching and listening to him and used a random phone line to arrange something. They must have been waiting for him in back while we were watching for something to happen in front." He glared at Tim. Yes, he'd most definitely be calling Willy and having this loose end – and apparently defective sweeper – taken care of, perhaps even that very evening.

"This is unacceptable," Raines wheezed with difficulty. "We won't be able to attract Jarod's attention without both Sydney and Miss Parker in our control. Our latest independent psychological profile of him indicates…"

"With all due respect, Jarod doesn't fit a regular psychological profile… sir," Lyle remembered the honorific only belatedly, "and I doubt that someone who has never met him could build up a profile that was worth enough powder to blow to Hell. I know that Sydney gave up even trying to draw up a new psych profile for him after about six months of freedom – justifying it by saying that Jarod's personality would be undergoing great transformation now that he was without the influence of the Centre to direct things along. He explained that while we might understand his motives and actions in retrospect, the longer Jarod stayed free, the more difficult it would get to accurately predict Jarod's next moves."

"Sydney was a traditionalist," Raines countered sourly, "and an obstructionist to boot. His psychological skills have done nothing to get us closer to catching Jarod for years – which is why we need to trust in the profile Dr. Abrams drew up for us. His assessment of Miss Parker's condition and her reaction to Formula 837A – as well as the actions that predicated our gaining control of her – were pinpoint accurate."

"If he's so damned smart, why didn't he predict Sydney's access to outside resources?" Lyle retorted sharply.

Raines chose to ignore the barb, and turned to Willy. "Spread your men out – and keep a sharp eye out for Jarod AND Sydney. Nine chances out of ten, they haven't gone that far – they probably think they're going to be able to rescue their friends." Raines pulled hard on the oxygen. "Besides, Jarod is arrogant – he thinks he can waltz in and out of the Centre without getting trapped. We're going to show him the error of his ways, aren't we?"

"Yes, sir, Mr. Raines." Willy nodded seriously. It was the order he'd been waiting for – to turn his high-powered elite team loose to look for the prodigal Pretender properly. "We'll find him for you, don't worry."

"Now get out of here!" Raines barked at Lyle. "Make sure you don't botch Miss Parker's custody – she's central to the entire Contingency project."

"She's not going anywhere…" Lyle began.

"She'd better not," Raines growled hoarsely.

oOoOo

"Oh, now, that's clever!" Jarod chortled as he was staring at the first page of the second notebook. The diagrams were easily recognizable as molecular and biochemical diagrams, and the frequency of certain elements within any known diagram was quite predictable. The number and type of bonds each element had available to it made recognizing exactly which element was being represented child's play for him. This notebook was like a Rosetta Stone, giving him the first few equivalences of symbol to letter. And he'd been right – this WAS an alphabet.

He took a clean piece of paper and began writing down the code, and then looked at a section of straight text. He used blanks to hold the places for the unknown characters and substituted English letters for the ones he was assuming were now known – and then frowned again. Whatever he was coming up with, it wasn't English.

He yawned and looked out the kitchen window, noticing that the sky in the east was already starting to get a slight glow to it. He'd worked all the way through the night. With another yawn, he collected the papers he had scattered about the table and put them back into order before returning them to the folder. Then he collected all the pages that he'd printed out from the documents Sydney had saved to the floppy disk and set those to the side – he'd have to read those after he had a chance to rest.

Jarod turned off the laptop after firing another email off to his contact inside the Centre and slipped it back into its case. He used a blank paper to save his place in the notebooks and filed those back into Sydney's briefcase and closed that – and then carried both of the articles up the stairs with him. A pause at the first door gave him the chance to hear Sydney's soft snoring within. The second door was Debbie's – he'd shown her which room to take before they'd left to pick up Sydney. The door at the end of the short hallway was his room – the one closest to the bathroom, not to mention a conveniently placed trellis, in case of Centre infiltration.

He placed the briefcase and laptop under the bed and then lay down, kicking off his shoes from there and listening to them land with dull thuds on the floor. What he'd discovered about Formula 837A was troubling – even if he hadn't had a chance to read Dr. Morrison's research notes yet. Evidently the formula was a psychotropic drug causing hallucinations upon first introduction; convulsions, apparently random incidents of blindness and confusion with continued application; and amnesia if the dosage was strong enough.

The last report had mentioned that the amnesia was of a highly selective kind, taking out conditioned responses completely and some memory. Patients detailed in that report had been given psychological treatment at the same time, and the amnesia had proven itself to be controllable. With the proper care, precise facets of personality and long-term memory could be affected, erased; and a new set of memory engrams and personality traits implanted without the patient being aware of the change.

From the sounds of things, this was what must have happened to Sam – for him to have not responded to Miss Parker calling his voice, he must have had all of his self-conditioning toward her erased, and even his memory of who he was and where he came from.

Still, the reports had indicated a flaw in the formula – a weakness that rendered the formula unusable in a mass-application setting. Dr. Morrison hadn't detailed exactly what that weakness was in her progress reports, but it was the one thing that Jarod would be looking for as he gained the upper hand on translating those research notebooks. If she were as meticulous as every other scientist he knew, she would have defined the precise terms of that weakness and tested the depth of the patient's vulnerability to memory recovery – and the consequences of retrieving those memories after long periods of amnesia.

Jarod threw his arm across his eyes and took a deep breath. He knew himself too well – he'd be working on this problem even in his sleep and probably wake up at least as tired as he was when he fell asleep. In many ways, it was just like old times: Sydney had brought to him all the information he needed to run a complete SIM, it was just up to him to put the pieces together to paint a coherent picture.

The difference this time, of course, was the welfare of Miss Parker and Broots – people that he knew and in some way cared about.

oOoOo

Willy knocked on Lyle's office door first thing in the morning – before Lyle had even had a chance to put his coffee on his desk and get settled in his chair. "What is it?" the younger Parker demanded.

"Your 'loose end' has been handled," the African-American sweeper announced in his bland and cold manner, "as you ordered."

Lyle didn't necessarily even want to know what kind of fate Willy had decided would be appropriate for Tim – he was just glad that the man was gone. "Thank you," he said with a very vague nod. "Is there anything else?"

"No, sir," Willy replied and let himself out of Lyle's office.

Lyle turned in his chair and sipped at his coffee as he stared out of the window at the broad expanse of green that stretched over the top of the hillock and ended nearly at the ocean's edge. He'd hoped that Willy would have found the wily psychiatrist that had been such a thorn in his sister's side all those years, but evidently Sydney was just as good at vanishing as Jarod ever thought of being. Like mentor, like protégé, he thought sacrilegiously.

Thinking of Jarod brought his sister to mind, and he rose to head down to the security branch of the Renewal Wing to check on her condition. When he got there, the door to the ward was wide open.

"What the Hell's going on here?" he demanded, barging right on in – only to pull quickly to a stop. Miss Parker was struggling desperately against her padded restraints at wrist and ankle, her torso arched into the air and her eyes closed. Lyle grabbed at the arm of the white-garbed psychiatrist monitoring the display of her pulse and blood pressure monitor. "What the Hell's happening to her?" he repeated.

"This is normal, Mr. Lyle," Dr. Abrams reassured him. "We can expect a certain amount of seizure, considering the size of doses of 837A we've been administering to her since we got her here."

"It… won't harm her… or…" Lyle worried.

"Don't worry," Abrams smiled at the Vice-Chairman of the Centre. "No elements of the project will be compromised by the administration of 837A at this stage of the game. My profile, however, has indicated that your sister's upbringing has made many of what would be conditioned responses in others more deeply engrained – and so, to be able to erase those parts of her personality, we'll have to press her system harder chemically. But…" The psychiatrist returned his gaze to the monitor, "…by the time it needs to be, we should be able to reduce the dosage without compromising the results – and it won't be of any consequence to the… project's final results."

"You'd better be sure," Lyle threatened. "There's an awful lot riding on the successful implementation of this project."

"I'm very sure of my figures, Mr. Lyle," Abrams replied without looking away from the monitor. "Now, if you don't mind, I'm rather busy monitoring your sister's condition…"

oOoOo

Sydney looked out into the back yard and smiled. Debbie had at last found something she could do to pass the time while cooped up in this safe house without driving the rest of them nuts. She'd taken her CD player and headphones outside and spread a couple of bath towels on the soft grass. She was now engrossed in a paperback romance novel she'd brought with her, listening to the caterwauling that she called 'music' quite contentedly.

The old psychiatrist glanced back over his shoulder at his former protégé before returning his attention to the carrots he was peeling and slicing for supper that night. Jarod was behaving just the way he remembered him behaving while on the research end of a particularly complex SIM – withdrawn and quiet and pensive when seated amid the materials, moody and uncommunicative when taking a break, slowly wearing himself to a frazzle from lack of sleep. Were it not for the far more pleasant surroundings and the fact that the food he was serving was the best that he could manage with what Jarod had provided, the two of them could easily have been back in the Sim Lab carrying on as they always had been.

"HAH!" Jarod exploded suddenly. "That's it!"

Sydney turned and saw that his old student had a huge smile on his face and was writing madly, glancing at the notebook that sat open at his left and then writing on the legal pad in front of him. "That's what?" the psychiatrist inquired carefully, not wanting to break the mood, but curious after three days of little interaction with Jarod at all.

"I have it," Jarod responded, still moving back and forth between notebook and legal pad. "This Marjorie Morrison was a wily woman – and no wonder the crypto boys at the Centre didn't get anywhere with her code. She was speaking Chumash, of all things…"

"Chumash?" Sydney frowned. "What's that?"

"The Chumash are a tribe of coastal California Indians that settled in the Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo area. What Dr. Morrison did here was to render a language with no written form into her own set of alphabet glyphs, and then write all of her research notes in a language that is literally on the verge of dying out."

Sydney's brows were up – he was impressed. "And you understand Chumash?" he asked incredulously.

Jarod shrugged. "I did a Pretend up near the Red Wing reservation – some developers were trying to cheat the tribe out of a particularly valuable hunk of property. I got in close with a couple of the elders – and they took me under their wing for a while…"

Sydney could only nod. Jarod brought out the best in people generally. "And you have this knack for languages."

"It's serving me in good stead, you gotta admit," the Pretender looked up briefly with his cat-ate-the-canary smirk and then went back to work. "I'm guessing at some of this – our Dr. Morrison was a little creative with her use of the language – but I should have the gist of it soon enough."

"And then?"

"And then we'll see what we're up against."

oOoOo

"OK, I think I have the picture now," Jarod announced around the breakfast table. "837A is a hallucinogen – it makes you see and hear things that aren't there," he explained for Debbie's benefit.

"I know the word," the girl told him frankly. "Teachers talk about them in school."

Jarod nodded. "But this is a very special hallucinogen. One of the side effects it can have is to make someone forget things – like who they are and who their family is and what they normally do."

"Do you think they made my father forget?" Debbie's eyes were wide. "Miss Parker too?"

"I can't be sure," Jarod started.

"And indication of permanency?" Sydney asked next, concerned.

This time, Jarod shook his head. "The research notes end before Dr. Morrison had had a chance to observe patients who had received the drug over a period of time when the drug wasn't administered. The research was incomplete when Dr. Morrison had her 'accident.'"

"Which you are thinking wasn't so much of an accident," Sydney guessed from his tone.

"I'm thinking that Raines – maybe Lyle, possibly both – decided that the research was taking too long for whatever plans they'd dreamed up, and moved Dr. Morrison out of the way."

"How does this help us?" Debbie looked from one sober face to another.

"Well, if your father and Miss Parker received the drug, it means there's hope. Dr. Morrison was investigating a flaw in the formula – a vulnerability to the drug as a means of wiping away a previous personality so that a new one could be implanted courtesy of intensive psychiatric therapy. She mentioned it in her progress report in passing, but was only really starting to get a handle on the parameters of that problem when…"

"She had her accident," Sydney finished for him. "What's the flaw?"

"The memories aren't completely erased, just locked away chemically in the brain. However, particularly strong memories – the sight of a loved one, a smell, a taste, a sound, anything that would evoke strong emotions – can break the lock, so that the submerged memories can surface again."

Sydney was nodding. "THAT'S why Lyle was keeping Parker away from Sam – they didn't want to kick in that flaw…"

"Very likely," Jarod nodded too. "It also explains why they came for Debbie after taking her father, if you think about it."

"You're SURE that you can break this amnesia drug, Jarod?" Debbie asked, leaning forward anxiously.

"I'm fairly certain," Jarod hedged. "I won't know, however, until I have someone to test out the theory."

Sydney shot him a discouraging look. "You don't mean…"

"I mean that we need a guinea pig – so that we can find out just how difficult it is to trigger this lock-breaking flaw." Jarod's face was stony. "We can't afford to try anything on Broots or Miss Parker until we know the consequences of messing with their minds again."

"You need Sam," Debbie stated, seeing where Jarod's thinking was heading.

"You're going to break into the Centre…" Sydney was sounding more incredulous by the moment. "Do you have any idea just how dangerous…"

"We have no choice, Sydney – unless you intend to raise Debbie yourself for the next six or eight years."

Debbie gazed at the kindly psychiatrist who was one of her father's closest friends. "I want my dad back, Sydney," she told him in a soft voice. "I want Miss Parker back. But I don't want anything bad to happen to Sam either…"

"Just how the Hell do you intend to GET Sam, Jarod?" Sydney's frown grew deeper.

"I have an idea…" Jarod replied, "…but I'll need a little help."