The reception back at Centre HQ was mixed.
They beat the morning rush back to headquarters, but only just. The assassination of Justice Gavin Rayner of the Illinois Supreme Court had shut down all public and private airports on the island, only opening up when Lyle shoved a patsy under the local police's collective nose. Both Centre aircrafts took off within minutes of each other in the wee hours of the morning. Lyle had insisted on travelling with Jarod, allowing Parker some peace but depriving her of the chance to cook up a cohesive story with her co-conspirator.
(When had the two of them become co-conspirators?)
Sydney had come in to the office early, too. He caught Parker's eye across the main entrance hall, looking just as alarmed and worried as she felt, but not half as tired. There wasn't time to regale him with their adventures in Puerto Rico, however, as Jarod was showing all the telltale signs of encroaching quicksilver madness. The worst part, this time, was the headaches. He had collapsed twice on the way back from the landing strip, his fingers digging into his temple like he could pry the vile thing out by the roots with his bare hands. Lyle looked on with bland impatience until Jarod found his feet again.
Cox was ready to meet them outside the Renewal Wing. With all her time alone on the northbound flight, Parker had thrown around many ideas about what she could say to Cox when she saw him again. He smiled when he saw her, betraying no sign that he knew his counteragent switcheroo had been discovered.
"Cox."
"Miss Parker."
"What was it you said before? 'Clear communication lets people do their jobs, but a clear lie works just as well', something like that?" Her voice dropped low in both senses of the word. "Only works once per target, though. Once you're found out as a liar, then you're just the boy who cried wolf."
Cox's smile slipped, but only barely. He was spared the impetus to respond when Jarod cleared his throat.
"If you two need to spar, can you point me in the right direction first?" he said. Pain coloured his voice. "This headache won't cure itself."
As Cox's attention shifted to Jarod, something unidentifiable changed in his expression.
"Of course, right this way," he said and, doing his best impression of a maître d', he swept his arm back to usher them past him, into the bright hallways of the Renewal Wing. Parker strained her ears as they passed Angelo's room, but the wing was unusually quiet.
Following close behind Lyle and Jarod, Parker almost ran into them as their pace slowed and came to a stop outside room six, Jarod's designated injection room. Likewise, something clipped her heels from behind.
"Sorry, Miss Parker," a low voice muttered. She turned — there was a sweeper team, a full complement, lurking silently behind the returning assassination squad, gently knocking shoulders like a set of smartly dressed bowling pins.
"I don't need the table," said Jarod, nodding in the direction of the injection room. "I'm not in danger yet, there's a good five hours left until I reach blood saturation. Just give me a shot and we'll call it a day."
"It's well documented that you tend to collapse upon administration of a full dose," said Cox with a click of his tongue, suggesting a broad impatience simmering under the polite exterior. "Let's not waste time, come on in. I have some blood work I need to run, too."
A look of pinched discomfort rolled across Jarod's features. He was suspicious, Parker realized. As soon as the thought struck her, her own suspicions rose, too. Why did they need a sweeper team along for the trip?
Reluctance pulled at Jarod's feet like Boston molasses, but without a reason to refuse outright, he stepped across the threshold. Like Angelo's room, the injection lab was a room-within-a-room, surrounded by a ghoulish viewing area. Said viewing area was empty save for Brigitte, who sat in a chair by the exit. Her back was stiff as a steel pole, like she'd left a hanger in her shirt when she'd put it on that morning. She looked up sharply as Jarod's growing entourage entered and pressed her lips together as if she were doing her best not to speak her mind.
"We'll have this taken care of in a jiff," said Cox, sing-song and sprightly. He disengaged the interior door, revealing the raised operating table surrounded by sterile whiteness. Angelo's room had not been quite this shade of white; it had been too well-used for that. Parker had forgotten about the cuffs on the table. Anyone could forgive Jarod a little caution, considering those cuffs. Cox tilted his head at the table. "After you, Jarod?"
Instead of stepping into the interior room, Jarod took a step back, again nearly missing a collision with Parker. He looked around, searching for clues in the eyes of Cox, of Lyle, of Miss Parker herself.
"What's going on?" he said carefully.
Cox's projected cheer vanished in a moment.
"Get in, Jarod," he said. "Don't make this difficult."
The uneasy feeling continued to grow in Parker's chest. Jarod was right — if this were a routine counteragent dose, why couldn't they just find a handy chair? Why not use Cox's clinic office? Why come all the way to the Renewal Wing?
"Cox…," she said, an edge of warning colouring the word. She didn't know how to complete the question.
Jarod looked around at the assembled sweepers, who straightened perceptibly on realizing that their role as Visible Muscle was being called upon. The message was clear: Jarod had nowhere to go but forward.
A man backed into a corner, Jarod stepped over the threshold. Cox did not move to follow him; instead, he shut the door behind Jarod and engaged the lock.
The bolts in the lock mechanism slid home.
A beat. Then:
"Don't do this. Please, don't do this."
Jarod's words were piped into the viewing room through speakers along the top of the one-way mirrors. He didn't sound like he was pleading; if anything, the weary, resigned "please" sounded like a token entreaty — necessary words, but not words he expected to be heeded. No one, later, could say he didn't ask.
His voice set something off inside Parker.
"Cox!" she said again. "What the hell are you doing?"
Cox turned a placid face her way.
"Jarod needs to understand consequences," he said. "You'd understand if you were a parent. You can't back down from a decision once you've established rules and applicable punishments. Jarod refused orders. We were all at that first meeting, this shouldn't come as a shock. If and when he refuses orders, his counteragent will be withheld. That's been true from day one."
Parker's mouth drew together like a draw-string purse and something vibrated in her chest. They were leaving Jarod to stew in his oncoming madness. Everything she'd been trying to avoid, bending over backwards after the fiasco in Oregon to dodge the Centre's wrath, only for it all to come down wrong… and by mistake, after all that!
"What! No, no — Jarod didn't refuse, you idiot. Rayner is dead, I saw him die."
Lyle snorted. "He is, but Jarod had nothing to do with it. Don't insult my intelligence, Parker."
Parker bit back a comment on the low-hanging fruit. He knew? "What are you talking about?"
"I didn't say anything at the time because I knew it would be easier to get you both back here without getting into an argument on-site, but, well." His smirk was self-satisfied. "It was a little obvious. You killed Rayner, not Jarod."
"Prove it."
Lyle gave a little laugh. "I don't need to prove it, it's enough that I know it happened. Even if you had cut your mics in time, the café isn't soundproof. Jarod wasn't too pleased when you took the shot, was he? I wouldn't have been either… though perhaps for different reasons."
So Lyle had never been fooled at all. Always a possibility — not one Parker had wanted to entertain, but now that it was on her plate, she had to deal with it somehow. Better to roll with it than continue to deny.
"That is exactly why you can't put this on Jarod," she insisted. "He didn't tell me to shoot Rayner. I made that call, not him. Get out of my way—" So saying, she lunged for the door to the inner room. More than one pair of thick hands caught her by the arm before she could reach the door and — "Get off me! Jarod!" — and what? Free him?
Much that is labelled "soundproof" is exaggerating for the sake of marketing. Jarod's head turned at the sound of her shout.
"Miss Parker? Miss Parker!" He grabbed the door handle and shook it hard. On the other side of the door, the locking mechanism remained resolute. His eyes sharpened and, after casting about for a sufficiently blunt object, he laid grasping hands on a stool sitting alongside the operating table. Jarod hoisted the thing over his shoulder and, with everything he had, hurled it against the glass.
The mirror barely vibrated. The stool bounced off and rolled across the padded floor.
The door was right there, the lock within reach, but she couldn't get it open without fighting through a full complement of sweepers… and then what? Parker stared around at her ostensible allies. It was not lost on her, the strangeness of fighting for Jarod's sanity after he'd done all he could for years to push her to the edge of hers. Something had happened in that room above the café in Old San Juan, something she'd never explicitly chosen, but she couldn't back out of now that she'd taken it on.
Much is made of someone who is willing to die for another; less reverence goes to she who is willing to kill for another. Dying is easy — there are never any consequences after the fact. Killing is messy.
There was a dash of uncertainty in there as well, souring the stew: she'd taken the decision out of Jarod's hands. As unlikely as it had seemed in the moment, if she had given him the time, would he have come round to the plain, blunt truth of 1 (1+x), the mathematical advantage of choosing to kill one to save a couple, a few, a smattering, a dozen? She hadn't let him follow the order.
"Brigitte, you have nothing to say about this?" she asked, a last gasp, knowing full well it was a poor attempt. Brigitte straightened in her seat as if zapped by static electricity. "I didn't realize Cox and Lyle had taken over this project. Too much heat for you?"
Even as Parker said it, she expected nothing back. At best, she expected Brigitte to close ranks with Lyle et al. and repeat the party line. What she wasn't expecting was the wary, silent look Brigitte shot her across the room. Like a queen surrounded by conspirators for the crown. What was that look about?
Beyond the one-way mirror, another headache had overtaken Jarod. He was curled in a ball on the floor, pawing at his head.
Parker wouldn't find any support here, that much was plain. Even if she could get at the door without a pair of sweepers wrestling her down, Parker needed the withheld counteragent, or she'd only be letting a red-eyed Jarod loose on the rest of the Centre. As angry as she was with present company, it would not help matters and, when he returned to the land of the sane, Jarod wouldn't thank her for it. So, she took the opposite route.
A sweeper stepped in her way as she made for the exit. He stared her down.
"Do you have a death wish?" she snarled.
"No, ma'am," said the sweeper, near expressionless. Then, as a casual afterthought: "Do you?"
She couldn't remember the last time a sweeper had dared to speak back to her, much less the hostility on display here. Was it the cane? When her leg had weakened to the point of near-uselessness, had she lost any capacity she'd ever had to intimidate her employees?
"Oh, cut it out," said Cox. The old cheerfulness was growing back like a tumour. "She's allowed to leave, goodness. She's just not allowed in."
The sweeper dutifully stepped out of Miss Parker's way. She swept past him and down the hallway; the door to the rest of the complex made that repulsive sucking sound once more as she opened it. Upon leaving the eerie stillness of the Renewal Wing, she almost ran face-first into Sydney.
"Miss Parker! What's going on, where's Jarod? He was with you—"
"They're withholding counteragent. He's been left to rot on the Renewal Wing."
Sydney's face slackened in shock. "Why would they do that? Did he do something to Lyle? Try to escape from him?"
"Do something to him? God, I wish. That would make things so much simpler," she said. "I shot Jarod's target for him."
She winced. Said like that, the blame all came down on her.
Sydney opened his mouth to unleash the inevitable torrent of questions. In Parker's peripheral vision, the rest of the group from the viewing room filtered through the sucking, sound-proofed door toward their respective posts.
"Not now, Syd," she said, heading him off at the pass before a single phoneme escaped. "I need to have a word with the old man."
Though Miss Parker headed straight for her father's office from the Renewal Wing, by the time she burst open the double doors, Brigitte was there to greet her with a tense, expectant look. The heated exchange within stuttered to a halt. Apparently, they'd both had the same idea to tattle to Mr. Parker on the other.
"Daddy!" she said. "She brought you up to speed, I take it? This is ridiculous. Jarod didn't do anything."
Mr. Parker leaned back against his desk and surveyed his daughter down the line of his nose.
"As I understand it, that's the problem," he said with a dry chuckle. "He didn't do anything. He didn't do as he was told."
Brigitte cut in, right out of the gate with a streak of heat. "He shouldn't have been told to do anything. It wasn't Lyle's call!"
Miss Parker balked.
"What?" she said.
She'd expected to find Brigitte bad-mouthing her, whinging about how the prodigal step-daughter had made a scene down on the Renewal Wing over Cox and Lyle's righteous dispensation of justice. Then again, there had been that wary stare across the viewing room, more warning than threat.
The double doors swung open once more, and Lyle swaggered in.
"I took the initiative," he said, without preamble. Apparently, he'd heard Brigitte. "Somehow, I doubt the Triumvirate will have an issue with that. They've been saying from the beginning that Jarod needs a concrete demonstration of his limitations. This worked pretty well, Brigitte, you have to admit."
"Did you take the initiative, or did you take a load off?" Brigitte shot back. "Rayner was supposed to be your hit. Passing the job off to Jarod smacks of laziness, to me."
"Work smarter, not harder," said Lyle in a sing-song voice. "I worked it out with the support staff as soon as I was handed the file. Cox agreed it would be a good fit for our needs."
"Wait," said Miss Parker. "A concrete demonstration of his limitations — so this wasn't about the job at all. It wasn't about taking an Illinois Supreme Court Justice out, was it? It was about giving Jarod an order you knew he wouldn't follow, to have an excuse to bring in the hot pokers and jumper cables again."
Lyle offered a correction: "I never used hot pokers."
"I was being rhetorical."
Lyle shrugged as if to say, fair enough.
"As far as I can tell, yes, that's what all this was for — creating an excuse to punish the asset," said Brigitte. She was seething, pacing up and down across Mr. Parker's ostentatious carpet. "This has completely fouled up this quarter's objective: ease Jarod into the new role. I had a plan. Nowhere in that plan does it mention giving him an assassination job the second time out, and smacking his hand when he won't do it. If the Triumvirate wants to trust me with this, they need to trust me with this, and not bring in unsolicited outside 'help' without warning." She formed finger quotes around the word "help". "Lyle is not the project manager here."
"He's not the asset handler, either," said Miss Parker. Privately, she could recall when Brigitte herself had been unsolicited "help" brought in on a project without warning, but she wasn't about to start scrapping with Brigitte when, for whatever reason, she seemed to be the only other person in the room who disapproved of the current direction of Project Quicksilver.
Lyle's mouth shrugged. "Maybe I should be."
"No," said Miss Parker and Brigitte in chorus. They caught each other's eye and looked away quickly. The sheer fact of agreeing with Brigitte in an argument with her father was enough to send Miss Parker reeling.
"Miss Parker stays where she is," Brigitte insisted. "She understands the job. When to use the carrot, when to use the stick."
It wouldn't have been how Miss Parker would put it. She was only trying to get through this miserable assignment intact.
"It seems to me, sweetheart—" Here Mr. Parker gave his wife the kind of warm, patronizing smile Miss Parker was all too familiar with. "—It seems to me that we are quibbling unnecessarily over decisions that we've already made and can't take back. Wasting time, in short. Yes, of course, you two ladies will stay in your assigned roles. You can't very well argue with the results, though, can you? Jarod didn't take this Rayner fellow out, but he'll be more used to the idea for next time."
"Next time?" Miss Parker interrupted. "I think the hell not. Since when does the Centre take assassination contracts, anyway?"
The smile Mr. Parker gave his daughter was even more patronizing than the one he'd given his wife. He beckoned to Miss Parker and, when she made no move to go to him, closed the distance himself with a warm, paternal arm around her shoulder. She stiffened.
"A while, sweetheart. It's not my preferred revenue stream, but occasionally the best way forward through a thicket, difficult though it may be to stomach, is to quietly prune back one troublesome weed. One! Rayner would have caused so much harm to our operations in the Great Lakes region. Real, human harm." He squeezed her shoulder and let go. "And for those once-in-a-blue-moon contracts, wouldn't it be handy to have a Pretender on hand to take care of the most unpleasant parts? I think so."
"No, Daddy," said Miss Parker. "I—"
"But for now, no assassination assignments for Project Quicksilver." Mr. Parker beamed around. "There. Better, Angel? At least until we've ironed out the kinks. I'm sure you had the best intentions, Lyle, but in my book, any operation that ends in my daughter shooting a man across a crowded intersection is not a successful operation."
Lyle hesitated, then nodded apologetically. "Not for nothing, but we got our man. You're not an awful shot, Parker."
"Piss off with the compliments," she returned. "I shouldn't have had to save your failed mission in the first place."
Mr. Parker tutted, waving a silencing gesture at both of his children. "That's enough of that, sweetheart, he's only being nice. Still — not a successful operation. Anything that involves the local police with eyes on a dead body is unacceptable. It was bad enough when the cops were called to the cottage earlier this year, when your friend was murdered. Gates, right? What a nightmare. These things need to be in-house, and only in-house."
Miss Parker's stomach dropped into her bowels. To mention Tommy's murder so casually, when it hadn't even been a year… it had come out of nowhere and left her breathless, and nobody seemed even to have noticed.
Nobody — nobody except Brigitte. At the pronunciation of the word Gates, Brigitte caught Miss Parker's eye from across the room. Her glance lingered long enough that Miss Parker felt bizarrely compelled to respond, so she returned the look with a nod of acknowledgement. Brigitte had barely even met Tommy, and she'd only ever been a pain about his presence in Miss Parker's life. What had shifted, that she was now the only one present who remembered that the memory of Miss Parker's dead boyfriend would likely hurt? Had Brigitte grown a heart, or had the quality and compassion of Miss Parker's usual company simply sunk through the floorboards in the last year?
Likely the latter. All Brigitte had done was catch her eye.
"Thi—" When Miss Parker next spoke, the word came out in a grief-thickened croak. She cleared her throat. "This doesn't deal with the current problem. Jarod will go into quicksilver madness in a matter of hours, and Cox has him shut up in a room on the Renewal Wing for a decision that I made. I can't be expected to carry on effectively as his handler if he thinks that any misstep I make will land him in insanity jail for the weekend, can I?"
"Week," said Mr. Parker.
"What?"
"He'll be there for the week. This is out of my hands, Angel. I understand that, apart from being a good deterrent for Jarod, the term length is a logistical issue. If you have more questions, ask Cox. It's his area." He attempted a faint smile. "As to your effectiveness as Jarod's handler, might I suggest not making missteps?"
A week. She couldn't imagine enduring a single night in that state, let alone seven strung together. Would the madness let him sleep, or would he be a twenty-four/seven human wrecking ball for the next one hundred sixty-odd hours?
"Daddy, you—! Cox is impossible and unreliable. He sent me to Puerto Rico with two vials of coloured saline, for God's sake. He won't give me anything."
Mr. Parker folded her in a one-arm hug and kissed her cheek.
"I believe in you, Angel. You can be very persuasive when you want to be. Get him alone, and I'm sure he'll be delighted to share anything that will put your mind at ease. The week will fly by, and you'll be back on assignment before you know it."
It was easier said than done. Cox seemed to be deliberately avoiding Parker. Whenever she caught him, it was in the company of one or more employees not authorized to know anything about Project Quicksilver, currently one of the Centre's best-kept secrets. If she tried to force the issue, Cox shook his head urgently and jabbed a finger at the closest unauthorized ear.
"Later, Miss Parker, please," he would hiss. But later never seemed to come. He would be called away to a meeting, or a medical consult, and she'd lose her chance to demand the reasoning behind Jarod's seven-day sentence.
It was always Cox who got called away, never Parker. Without Jarod free and functional, she barely had a job. Once she had filled out a report on the happenings in Puerto Rico and completed a mandated professional development seminar on managing one's mental health after shooting a civilian — the seminar had been co-opted from a Blue Cove Police Department-branded VHS with a couple of words swapped, "officer" changed to "field agent", "law" to "assignment parameters" — she had little left to do at headquarters.
So, on the third day of Jarod's confinement in the Renewal Wing, Parker decided to visit him.
It was a bad idea from the start, but she felt in some vague way that she owed it to him. He probably would have ended up in room six even if Parker had never made it down to Puerto Rico; if Lyle wanted him there, he'd be there. Nevertheless, when she thought of leaving him in room six, alone with no company for seven days, the tug at her gut was irritating.
The Renewal Wing was quiet again. Not a peep from Angelo's room, and little more from Jarod's. Two sweepers stood outside Jarod's temporary home, overseeing the rows of chairs arranged stadium-style opposite the one-way mirror; one of them was Sam, another some faceless grunt whom Parker would have difficulty picking out of a lineup. They patted Parker down for weapons before she was allowed in, enduring glares from her all the while. Sam confiscated her pen and her cell phone with promises to return them on the way out. With the red tape out of the way, they waved her into the viewing area.
Jarod was both much better than she'd feared and much worse than she'd hoped.
On the way down to the Renewal Wing, Parker had conjured visions of a destruction-fuelled Jarod, the same creature she'd met on that first afternoon on SL-25, but dialled up to eleven. Presumably, there would be screaming, threats, attempts to climb the walls, terrifically creative insults, objects ricocheting around the padded room whenever Jarod could put his hands on something sufficiently aerodynamic to throw.
There was none of that. No screaming or threats — he barely spoke. No climbing the walls or throwing — he barely moved.
"He's quieter today, thank God," said Sam. "He wouldn't shut up yesterday. I think he tired himself out. There's no saving the table, though."
He'd destroyed the table. Parker wondered about that, since Angelo's facilities had been largely intact, only a little scuffed. Angelo was a man with a relatively small build, though. Jarod, meanwhile — it was easy to overlook, as it wasn't his most threatening feature, but Jarod was a tall, broad-shouldered man who could be physically intimidating when the situation suited. Let loose on a small, featureless room for two days, said tall, broad-shouldered man could apparently dismantle an operating table and rip the walls down to the masonry. The cuffs had been removed from the table and flattened into rectangular strips of metal. He'd fashioned his own shanks. Lacking opponents, he seemed to have wielded his new weapons against the padded material lining the walls, sheering it off like wool off a sheep.
"He kicked them off," said Sam.
"What?" Parker had been thinking of the state of the walls, and the comment didn't make sense.
"The cuffs, right? He kicked at them for… what would you say, Ian, forty-five minutes? An hour?" Ian grunted one syllable, which Parker parsed as "hour". "Until they snapped off. That was after we got the straitjacket on him. It did a good job of tying up his arms, but his legs are still free."
Jarod was, in fact, wearing a straitjacket. It seemed to have a few extra bells and whistles.
"It's the second straitjacket we've tried," Sam continued. Even with Ian around, he must not have too many people around to talk to him, and Miss Parker's arrival had supplied a fresh, new audience. "He got himself out of the first one before nightfall, first day. The second one is doing the trick, I think. Again, it might be because he tired himself out."
Parker gave Sam a pointed look and side-stepped along the rows of chairs in the viewing theatre to the side furthest from the door, the better to get some peace and quiet.
She might have predicted the damage done to the room, remembering how Jarod had tried to wrench the bars of his cell apart down on SL-25. What she had not predicted, however, was the damage he had done to himself. Was doing to himself, still: as she looked on, Jarod scraped his shoulder over and over against the bared concrete. If he was trying to tear through the material of his straitjacket, it wasn't working. His jaw was the colour of an oil spill, bruised so dark and so completely that it gave him the impression of a lopsided beard, at least when seen from across the room. More bruises along his collar and the hems of his pants told of deeper hurts hidden by cloth from the casual observer.
No sound came from the speakers. If pressed to guess, Parker would say that Jarod had torn out the sound system as one of his first priorities.
Around the corner, the door to the hallway opened, and Cox let himself in. He exchanged a few indistinct words with Sam and the monosyllabic Ian.
He leaned towards Sam, frowning. "Sorry, who did you say? Miss…?"
"Parker," said Miss Parker, pushing herself to her feet. "I'm sure you've heard of me. Take a sec to put the name to the face, I'll wait. While you're at it, see if you can remember why you've been dodging all my calls."
Cox laughed politely.
"You may be on vacation while Jarod is on mandated confinement, but I'm not. I'm a busy man. Speaking of which—"
"What — another invented appointment? Must go see a man about a dog?" Parker snapped. "You could give Jarod a run for his money, for the goose chase you've been leading me on. We're going to have words, now."
Cox bristled.
"About what?"
"You know what. Even putting aside how barbaric this punishment is, seven days is way too damn long. My father let slip something about a logistical issue, something only you could comment on. Spill."
Cox muttered something under his breath. A few uncharitable words about Mr. Parker's sense of discretion caught Parker's ear.
"What was that?" she said sweetly.
"Nothing. He mentioned that, did he? I guess it couldn't hurt, if it would put to rest any suspicions that we've stuck him in there for the week just to be sadistic bastards."
"No, the sadistic bastard behaviour is only… what, a perk?"
Cox managed to look put-upon. "It was completely out of my hands. If I had a dose to give Jarod, I'd give it to him. I'm not heartless."
"What do you mean, if you had a dose to give him — why don't you have a dose?"
"We're all out. Not a single vial of the stuff in the complex."
Parker stared at him.
"We don't have any counteragent? Why the hell not?"
"It's missing. We had a dose ready, earmarked just for him, but it seems to have been taken. I can't imagine why anyone would want it. Other than Jarod, but if he'd taken it, he wouldn't now be trying to tear his way out of a straitjacket. He'd be as sane as you or I."
Parker's old instincts kicked into gear, the instincts she'd built up throughout her history running security and intelligence for the Centre. She beckoned Cox to sit down, and they settled into two of the viewing chairs overlooking Jarod's one-man coliseum showdown.
"It was stolen? When? From where?"
"Stolen seems like the most likely cause, yes. I'm not sure from where. Counteragent storage has been consolidated with the bodily fluids repository on SL-15, but I can't confidently say that's where it was last seen. It disappeared right after your return from Washington."
One moment, Parker was mentally mapping out the details of a theft, a juicy mystery to untangle. The next, her thoughts were paralyzed. She had stolen a vial of counteragent right after the field team's return from Washington. She was the thief.
On the other side of the one-way mirror, Jarod was slumped sideways against the ruins of the operating table, his body bent at an awkward angle to accommodate the straitjacket. He'd driven himself to exhaustion trying to escape and had fallen asleep right there on the floor. She'd never met anyone who craved freedom as much as he did.
"So he has to stay here like this because there's no counteragent to give him," she murmured, as if he might wake if she spoke louder. "Until you, what, you cook up some more?"
"That's the reality, yes. It will take another three days."
"Not four?" Her eyes stayed on Jarod.
"Three more days to manufacture, one day's rest. Jarod will be in rough shape by the time we're ready to bring him back."
It had been bad enough when she'd believed herself indirectly responsible for Jarod's incarceration, having done his job for him. It was a convoluted route to guilt, but adequate reason for his fate to weigh heavy on her mind. Now, the route was much more direct. She'd stolen the dose and given it to Angelo — Angelo, who had somehow been immune to its curative properties.
Jarod was living through the worst torment of his torment-choked life, all because of a split-second decision. Because of her.
"You can't let this happen again, Cox," she said, finally. "Build up an emergency stock. A single vial can't be the difference between keeping Jarod on track and… this."
She rose to leave.
"It's not that simple," Cox protested.
"Make it that simple."
Parker's dramatic exit terminated at the door to room two, Angelo's room. She wasn't sure she could stomach the sight of not one but two men with quicksilver-ruined minds, but she couldn't live her life by the caprices of her roiling stomach. She let herself in. After the wasted wreckage of Jarod's room, this room was an Eden of peace, order, and contentment by comparison. Angelo had a little cot where Jarod had none, Angelo had intact walls where Jarod had none. Angelo also had a visitor. Sydney knelt by his side, withdrawing yet another needle from the crook of a limp arm.
Sydney looked up as Parker entered the inner room.
"Welcome back," he said, voice hushed. The low volume was unnecessary, though an understandable reflex. Angelo wouldn't be roused even with a shout.
"What are you doing? That's not—"
"Taking some blood. Broots has a connection in the biology department who will have a look at it, Broots thinks, if we put the pressure on."
Parker knelt awkwardly next to Angelo and took his hand in hers. Her cane rolled away across the padded floor.
"What are you expecting to find?"
Sydney shrugged. "I don't have a road map for this, but I'm hoping for some insight on quicksilver saturation levels in his blood. Maybe once Jarod gets out, we can compare samples. How is he, by the way? I was going to swing by after this."
"Don't."
Sydney started, alarmed.
"Why?"
She cast about for a deterrent that wouldn't paint an even worse portrait than Jarod's current reality.
"He's not doing well, but you can't do anything about it. You'd tie yourself in knots over something you can't change when you should be helping Angelo." She reached for her cane. "Stay on Angelo, Syd. It's where you're needed."
If only I could take my own advice, she thought, once she'd left the Renewal Wing in her wake. She couldn't change the fact that she'd shot Rayner, couldn't change that she'd stolen the counteragent vial, couldn't change that the gesture had been wasted on a sanity-proof Angelo. She tied herself in knots, anyway.
"It's been a month, you know."
It was five days into Jarod's stay on the Renewal Wing. Parker's presence at headquarters was growing more redundant by the day. She'd decided to leave early and was sifting through her keys in Parking Garage B when the dulcet tones of Brigitte made her pause and turn.
"Since the beginning of the project? More than a month." Parker jammed her key in the lock and opened the driver's side door. "Your point being?"
"We had a deal," said Brigitte. "One month, and if it's not 'working out' — your words, not mine — you demanded the option of a reassignment." Brigitte leaned against the car. "So, Miss Parker. Is it working out?"
It wasn't. Obviously, it wasn't. But when Parker thought of the shit show Project Quicksilver would devolve into if it were handed to anyone else — hell, they'd witnessed a very real, very disastrous demonstration at the hands of Lyle only a week previous. If nothing else, she certainly wouldn't drop the whole mess without seeing Jarod released from the Renewal Wing.
Damn it all, Syd had been right. It was a shit job, but she was the only person in the world she'd trust with it.
Aloud she said, "As well as can be expected."
Brigitte's eyebrows raised to comical heights.
"Really? And here I was, thinking you'd bounce to the next assignment at the first opportunity. Getting attached, are you?"
Attached was a word for it. Attached had connotations of fondness, of reluctantly admitting soft and gooey feelings for all involved. Parker's attachment felt a little closer to the literal meaning. She was glued, stapled and buckled to this comet until it hit the Earth and flamed out into so much debris.
