Parker's mouth tasted bitter when she awoke, face-down in her pillow with one foot hanging off the edge of the hotel bed. The inside of her skull was hellish, and the thing bouncing around in there like a screensaver… What was it? Noise or pain or some hybrid offspring of the two, she couldn't be sure.
It seemed to be morning. She opened one eye, hoping for some reprieve from the boxy numbers on the nightstand alarm clock's display. If she was hoping it would give her an excuse to drift off again, guilt-free, she was disappointed. Worse yet, laughter and chattering voices drifted in from the hallway, tempting her to cram her pillow over her ears.
A certain urgency held sway over hotel mornings, ingrained in her since her childhood, when hotels were for vacations rather than business trips. No sleeping in, for one. You had to wake up early, since the complimentary breakfast would be picked over by nine and gone completely by ten. Running on this pre-programmed instinct, Parker was showered, groomed, and down in the guest lounge with her jaws around a poppy seed muffin before her thoughts took any remotely human shape. As she picked a poppy seed out from between her teeth, said thoughts slithered toward her through a fog of pain. The act of thinking hurt.
"Feeling better?" said Sydney, appearing at her shoulder from the wild blue yonder. He was far too awake; by the state of his suit, he must have been up long enough to do some serious ironing.
Parker only groaned.
"I'll take that as a 'no'."
"Take it and shoveitupyourass," she mumbled into her coffee.
"Charming. Jarod's sleeping in, I suppose? He'll miss breakfast."
"That'll teach him." She chewed thoughtfully, scanning her memories of the previous night. "God. I don't even know what happened. You were helping with the catering, what the hell kind of champagne was that?"
"Hm? Champagne?"
Maybe she'd given Sydney's level of consciousness too much credit.
"The champagne. The champagne that sent me back here in the back of a — it doesn't matter." She finished off the muffin and tossed the liner in the trash. "I'll be so glad to get on the jet home, I know that. How'd the finishing touches go, by the way?"
Sydney leaned against the buffet table and crossed his arms against his chest, peering at her like she was an outlier in a mass human trial.
"The finishing touches?"
"Are you going to repeat everything I say? The finishing touches, yeah, whatever Jarod had to do, his chat with Angus on the way out. The blackmail. Stage three, I think he called it? You were there, you'd know better than me."
"But Jarod didn't have—"
He was interrupted by the sound of a ringing phone, Miss Parker's phone, coming from the direction of her suitcase. She raised a finger to silence Sydney before answering it. Broots's voice greeted her.
"Oh, hi," he said. "Sorry, I was expecting your machine. Thought you'd still be in the air."
"You lucked out, it's the real McCoy. What is it?"
"Nothing, nothing." He sighed. "Well, something I guess. I have this new protocol they've programmed in, networked to your tracker. Apparently, it's been setting off an alarm all night, but I only got to it when I got in this morning. It's in the new rulebook here: Notify all field team members when GPS tracking indicates they have gone outside the assignment zone. It doesn't make total sense to me, because obviously returning to Delaware would bring you outside the assignment zone, but. Well, I'm just following the rules. Did everything go okay? I didn't hear much from you guys."
Parker's brain was already on the back foot, coping with her inexplicable hangover. Add to it Broots's technical jargon, and it was like walking through a snowdrift. One idea did get through, however: a tracker was telling Broots that they weren't in "the assignment zone", whatever that was.
"How small is this assignment zone?" she asked. "We're only a couple blocks away."
"Away from what?"
"The campaign headquarters."
A tense silence on the line.
"… In Spokane? Washington?"
Suspicion encroached on the fog clouding Parker's brain.
"Yeah, of course. Spokane. That's where we've been for almost a week now. What's going on, are we expected back?"
An odd rattling sound — the sound of Broots hammering away at his keyboard.
"Um," he said.
"Broots. Spit it out, what's wrong?"
"It says you're in Oregon. Why would it say you're in Oregon? All three of you are there, in Spokane?"
"Didn't I just say that? Yeah, we—" But a horrible, thudding weight settled on her chest. Did she know that for certain? She was here. Sydney was here. Jarod was… sleeping in? "Shit. Stay on the line."
Without a word of explanation to Sydney, she darted for the elevator. His protests followed her down the hall, joining in chorus with the tinny questions bursting from the phone's speaker.
"Where are you going? What's wrong?" The refrain continued all the way up to the third floor. Parker had a copy of the keys for all three reserved rooms — 304, 306 and 308. Three-oh-eight was Jarod's. She didn't bother to knock, but unlocked the door and shouldered it open.
The room was dark and immaculate. Blanket edges tucked under the mattress, freshly laundered towels in the bathroom, wastebaskets empty, the end of the toilet paper roll folded into a neat little triangle. More to the point, there was no sign of Jarod anywhere. By the looks of it, he hadn't slept here.
"Damn it!" she shrieked. She spun on the axis of her cane, meeting Sydney as he barrelled in behind her. "He's gone. He's gone. Why would he do this? He knows what will happen! He knows he can't run, not now. Christ, I don't need this."
She'd been warned this would happen, not once, but twice over. Sydney had offered it as a consolation: it's Jarod, he'll find a way out of this. Brigitte had wielded the possibility as a warning: Jarod will test the boundaries of his deal. How had she become so complacent? She had put too much faith in Jarod's fear of causing others harm, and too little in his hunger for freedom.
Sydney stared around, slack-jawed.
"It doesn't look like he's been back at all," he said, echoing Parker's assessment. "Did you see him go to his room last night? Maybe we can get something from hotel surveillance, see where he might be headed long-term."
"No, of course not. I left before him, remember? Did you see him go into his room?"
"You left before—" Sydney broke off into laughter. "Ah, Jarod. He told me he was taking you back to the hotel. I take it he didn't?"
No, he hadn't. Jarod had offered each of his minders as an alibi for the other… but how could he have known that Parker would fall ill? In her mind's eye, she saw Jarod talking to Sydney, taking the champagne flutes — the flutes, dammit, why hadn't she watched his hands? — from him. She saw Sydney's look of concern across the dining hall, long minutes before she'd started succumbing to her drink. Like someone had just told him she wasn't feeling well. Parker groaned.
"Bastard. Bastard. Sydney, you raised some kind of jackass. No, he didn't take me back to the hotel. He must have…" She bared her teeth in an exasperated facsimile of a smile. "He must have skipped town straight from the Mathyssens' house. He's been on the road for hours. Damn it."
Parker badly wanted to hit something, so she did. Several somethings, where the dents wouldn't show. That was the one upside of carrying a cane: a handy, built-in weapon, perfect for victimizing inanimate objects in a fit of unspooling frustration. Jarod had drugged her, actually drugged her, slipped something into her drink when she wasn't looking. It wasn't outside the realm of what Jarod could resort to, especially when backed into a corner, so perhaps she had no excuse to be surprised. She was anyway. Surprised and boiling with anger.
Sydney sat on the bed and stared off into the middle distance.
"He must believe that he can neutralize the gland before his time runs out," he mused aloud. "Otherwise… otherwise, I don't understand this. He wouldn't take the risk. Could he have already neutralized the gland, is that possible? I know we saw the early effects of quicksilver madness the night before the fundraiser, but — well, what's one more act?"
"I don't think so," said Parker. She tried to call back that evening, to bring to mind how Jarod had looked, how he had acted. "No, I think… I think his eyes were getting a little bloodshot, a little pink. The gland must still have been doing its thing, he must have been less than twenty-four hours from blood saturation."
Sydney shrugged. "Eyes can be bloodshot for many reasons."
"This is pointless. Whether he's a ticking time bomb or not, we still need to find him." Parker remembered the phone in her hand and raised it to her ear. "Broots, you still there?"
"Finally," Broots gasped. "I couldn't hear anything, I thought you forgot about me. What's going on?"
"Jarod ran. You said something about a tracker?"
"Jarod — again?"
"Make your peace with it later. The tracker?"
"Right. Sorry. Uh, like I said, it's in Oregon. Last time I checked, he was south of Portland, heading south on the I5. He could be headed for California? Hang on—" More keystrokes and clicking around. With every passing second, Jarod was getting farther and farther away from them. The thought flayed her nerves; the only thing keeping her from bellowing down the phone line was the solitary rational thought that it would not help. "Oh. Huh. We lost the signal. But, but that's okay! I can still see his last transmitting location. South of Portland. He's almost to Salem."
Parker was already out of the room and down the hall.
"Then that's where we're going, too."
Was it almost nostalgic, being back on the trail for Jarod after her time off? Was there a silver lining, a cozy familiarity to being back on the road? Was it comfortable, in a way, to find herself in the well-worn, broken-in shoes of tracking down her childhood friend, instead of bushwhacking her way through the strange new tasks involved in managing an unwilling field agent?
No, Parker decided. No, it was not. It blew chunks.
She and Sydney peeled out of the hotel parking lot in their rental car, leaving a rattled front desk receptionist in their wake. The one saving grace of this rude wake-up call was that Parker's head had cleared spectacularly. She had no time for hangovers.
"Call Broots again, will you?" she said. She dug a pen out of the seam in the seat, where it was digging into her thigh. "I want to find out more about this tracker. Namely, who or what it's tracking — do we know for sure it's on Jarod? The last thing we want is to find the thing, and it's been stuck on the back of a semi going the wrong way down the highway."
In her peripheral vision, Sydney patted himself down.
"I… this is embarrassing, I think I may have left my phone at the hotel. Could I use yours?"
She tossed her phone Sydney's way without a word, not trusting herself to hold back an uncharitable comment about his competence. Once they were connected to Centre headquarters, Sydney fiddled with the settings until Broots's anxious voice filled the car.
"Tell me about this tracker," said Parker.
"Didn't I already—?"
"What kind of tracker is it? I have a hard time believing that Jarod wouldn't find it and dump it."
After some symptomatic sounds of research, Broots answered. "It really doesn't say much about the tracker on here. Just its signal location, whether it's the last transmitting location or current, how long it's been active…"
It wasn't much to go on.
"How about that last — how long has it been active?"
"Hm. Almost two weeks. Thirteen days."
Parker counted back thirteen days in her head.
"Wednesday," said Sydney under his breath. Presumably, they were thinking the same thing.
"The surgery," Parker mused. "That was the day of Jarod's surgery." A memory emerged. "Sydney! Jarod has two incision scars. The tracker must be—"
"In his head," said Sydney hollowly. "For heaven's sake. Well. We shouldn't have to worry about the immediate threat of Jarod sticking it to the back of a semi, as you said. Not if it's in his head, and especially if he doesn't know about it."
Once more, Parker remembered she had Broots waiting on the line.
"Thanks, Broots," she grunted, and Sydney made to hang up.
"Be careful, okay?" said Broots. Parker paused.
"Careful?" she repeated. "We've been doing this job for years. We'll be fine."
"It's different now, though, isn't it?" His voice was slow and worried. "He's dangerous. He always could kill people if he wanted to, but now, well. Now, sometimes, he wants to. Just be careful, okay?"
"We gave him a shot only two days ago. He'll still be the same old Jarod by the time we catch up to him."
Broots let out a long, shaky breath. "You're more optimistic than I am."
Yes, she was, wasn't she? Unbidden, the memory of the sheet they'd kept on the wall back at headquarters unearthed itself from Parker's memories, scrawled with bets on how long it would take to bring Jarod home. We were all sure we'd find him within the week, when we started, she thought. I underestimated him and thought he wouldn't be able to stay ahead of us. Sydney knew his abilities but thought he would want to come back, if he could only get through to him. Not Broots, though. Broots could tell from the beginning that it would be difficult. Coming back to the moment, she realized Broots was still talking.
"What?" she said.
"I said, should I let Brigitte know? That's the next step in the new protocol."
"No," said Parker. She didn't stop to consider it, she didn't need to. No, getting Brigitte involved was just about the worst conceivable move.
"Oh," said Broots, startled. "Okay. If you say so."
Once Broots was off the line, an intent, mutual silence enveloped the car, on some unspoken agreement that conversation could only slow them down. They had merged onto the I5 before Parker next spoke.
"Could he be calling their bluff?" Her words were only halfway directed at Sydney. Mostly, she wanted to hear what the idea would sound like, spoken aloud.
Sydney stirred. "I guess… I guess it depends on what you mean by 'their bluff'. The Centre's bluff?"
"Of course, who else's?"
"I haven't really thought about it. For better or worse, I've been taking them at their word so far throughout this operation." He ran a hand through his silvery hair. "Though perhaps that is naïve of me."
Parker snorted. "A little, yeah."
"What bluff are you talking about, then?"
"You name it, they could be lying about it. If you want a solid example, though, I can't see the Centre allowing Jarod to lose his marbles in a public place. What if he got on the news? What if he was arrested? They don't want that. Not if they want him as a long-term asset. So, they must have something in place other than Jarod's own will to prevent it from happening. He might be thinking the same."
Sydney was nodding along.
"True," he said. He drilled his fingertips against his armrest. "But I'm not convinced. We don't have any backup other than Broots and Mr. Lyle. If the threat of allowing him to go mad in public is a lie, then our understanding of how his new gland works must have some critical holes."
He unbuckled his seatbelt, turned around in his seat and started sifting around in the luggage behind them, scouring the few bags that hadn't made it to the trunk in the hurry to leave Spokane. Parker tried to figure out what he was up to without taking her eyes off the road.
"What are you doing?" she said.
"I feel like a complete idiot for leaving my phone behind." He straightened in his seat. "I was really hoping I'd just put it in a different pocket in my bags, but it's definitely not there. Could I have left it at the front desk? I can't see myself doing that, but I suppose it's possible."
"Here, call it," said Parker, handing him her phone again. "But I can't promise we'll have time to pick it up on the way back to Blue Cove."
Sydney dialled. No telltale ringing sound emerged from the pile of luggage, and then, on the other end of the line, someone picked up. Parker could just barely hear the voice on the line, muffled as it was by Sydney's ear.
"About time," said the voice.
A quick intake of breath from Sydney.
"Jarod," he said, a half-smile in his voice. "I knew I hadn't misplaced my phone."
Parker yanked the phone away and pressed it to her ear.
"You better hope somebody else finds you before I do," she snarled into the mouthpiece. "Better yet, turn yourself in. You spiked my drink, you bastard. Was that really necessary?"
"I'm sorry about that," said Jarod, and to his credit, he did indeed sound sorry. You never could tell with Jarod, though. If nothing else, his voice lacked that unctuous tone of mockery typical of Jarod-on-the-run. This was just plain old Jarod. "I'm… I'm trying to do as little harm as I can. You wouldn't let me out of your sight, I didn't know what else to do on short notice."
Next to Parker, Sydney mimed for her to turn on the speakerphone function. She ignored him, so he leaned his head closer to hers to pick up what stray words he could.
"I can think of a few ideas," she said. "Number one with a bullet is: don't ditch your handler. If you really wanted to mitigate harm, you wouldn't have left at all. Do you know how many days you have left until you turn homicidal?"
"Four days." Jarod's words dropped like cement shoes through lake water. The deadline must be weighing on him even heavier than it weighed on her. When he spoke again, though, he seemed to have summoned some confidence, some bravado. "It should — it will be enough. Then we can go back to our usual cat-and-mouse game, forget about that pesky gland. Won't that be nice?"
"A real treat." This wasn't working, this was what they always did, posturing at each other in some warped form of boxing-ring smack talk. She took a breath and coached her voice into something softer. "Jarod, you don't want this. Whatever you have planned, the risk of failure is too big a risk to take. You're risking people's lives. If I know you at all, I know that should matter to you."
Jarod was quiet. She took this as a good sign.
"Why did you leave the Centre back in '96?" she asked.
"You know why," he said, quiet and curt.
"Indulge me."
"I didn't want my work to hurt people," he said, as if reciting it off a card. "And the blackmail over my head threatens to force me to hurt more people, yes, I know that. Don't you think I've grasped that much? I'm hurting people whether I cooperate or not. What about Nikki Angus? What about the people she would help?"
"Politically kneecapped is better than dead. It may not be ideal, but I like how those scales settle."
Jarod started to reply, then rewound to the beginning.
"What do you mean? Better than dead? Who said anything about Angus dying? That was never on the table."
"Ah." So there was something else they'd left out of Jarod's briefing folder. "They didn't tell you what Lyle's assignment is, did they?"
Silence at the end of the line. When Jarod started up again, his words sounded muffled and too loud, like he was pressing the handset hard against his face.
"They wouldn't do that. They wouldn't kill her. That would cast suspicion on her opponent, he can't want that."
"You're assuming the opponent is the client." More silence as her words sank in. "Lyle's ready to swoop in whenever he's needed, when the news comes in that we failed."
"… But he hasn't yet. He hasn't killed her."
"No," she said, wondering where he could be going with this.
"Why?"
What Jarod needed now was a kind of hostage negotiator, where the hostages were all the faceless casualties that could result if this mission went as bad as it could possibly go. Miss Parker would make a terrible hostage negotiator — she didn't have the patience. Nevertheless, she gave it her all.
"Only Sydney and Broots know you bolted. We can still fix this." Had she mastered the art of sounding empathetic and understanding? Probably not. She was still too angry to pull off the impression flawlessly. "We both remember that whole counteragent will be withheld rant, but if you get back before your shot deadline this weekend, nobody needs to know. If it's any later, I won't be able to get you to Blue Cove without more backup. I don't have any extra counteragent to give you, we used up all we had before the fundraiser and they didn't give me any spares."
"So I have four days to fix this," said Jarod. "I can live with that."
Fix this? What could that mean?
"No, that's not what I — Jarod!"
But he had hung up. She dialled again, and then again, and twice more still. It went to Sydney's voicemail.
"Damn it!" she shouted, not for the first time that day. It was too loud for the small car, and Sydney winced.
"I'm going to guess from your reaction," said Sydney, "that he is not on his way back to meet us."
Parker swerved viciously into the passing lane.
"Gold star, Syd," she said.
"And apparently we're not telling the Centre that he fled? You said as much to Broots, but I assumed at the time that the decision was temporary."
"It is temporary. Jarod has until Saturday." She tilted her head to the side, calculating. "Which is overselling how much time he has, really, because if we get him on a plane any later than the crack of dawn on Saturday, we're going to experience some turbulence."
Sydney stared at her profile.
"Can I ask why?" he said, while asking why. "It would be a lot easier to get him back if we had a sweeper team at our disposal."
"You want me to tell on myself? I'll just strut up to Brigitte's office and admit that I lost Jarod on the first trip out? That would look great for me. For us both."
Sydney bent his head to catch her eye. "You don't care about getting in trouble with Brigitte. If you did, I wouldn't have had to beg you to accept the assignment."
Abruptly, the steam went out of her.
"You weren't there, Syd," she said quietly.
"Where…?"
"You weren't there, when he hit the, the whatever-they're-calling-it. The saturation threshold. The QSM. You weren't there when he lost it."
A loop kept replaying in her mind: Jarod's curled fingers shooting out between the bars, straight at her throat. If she'd moved a fraction of a second too late…
Her imagination shut down.
"He scared you," finished Sydney.
"No." She shook her head. He didn't get it. "Yes, of course he did — he tried to kill me! He could have succeeded, too, if not for the bars. That's not what I'm talking about." And then here, theoretically, she should continue on and say what she was talking about. Sydney gave her all the time in the world to do so. She didn't. She didn't know how to without showing her hand.
Sydney cleared his throat. "When you two were on the phone, you said something about Brigitte's rule. The one about withholding counteragent."
There was a reason Sydney had emerged as one of the preeminent clinicians in his field. The man could shrink a head.
"He doesn't want to be that again," she said, finally. "I tell Brigitte he tried to escape, she'll hold back his counteragent shot and he'll be forced into that state of madness, who knows for how long. If he can avoid turning… it's good leverage."
"… And you don't want him to be that again, either," said Sydney, filling in the conspicuous blank.
Parker kept her eyes glued to the road. "Of course I don't. It's like Broots said. He's dangerous now. I don't want to get in the way of that level of murderous rage if I can help it."
Sydney gave her a Look which said, eloquently and without words, that he knew she was deliberately misinterpreting his point.
