Hi

First, I'm going to apologize for not posting part 2 sooner. It took me much longer than expected to write this chapter because I kind of had to plan out where things were going :P In any case, thank you to the people who reviewed and sent me messages, I really hope you continue reading this fic of mine.

PART (II)

10:45 a.m. Jerry's office.

She stormed into Jerry's office, causing him to shoot his head up from his computer. "Sam, what a pleasan—

"Why is Scam's research still in WOOHP's classified archives?" she yelled, though after a moment she refrained. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't be screaming at you Jerry, I apologize, but why? Why do you still value his work so much that you would keep it after all that he's done to the organization, to us, to you—

"Sam, you don't understand." Jerry frowned and walked around to the front of his desk, gesturing for her to sit down on the red velvet couch. "Sam, perhaps I failed to mention this earlier but… the software for Scam's old project was not the only thing stolen, so were his prototypes for the missiles. Every inch of his home and WOOHP and all possible areas have been searched without success. You must understand that when Scam was terminated, I was wary of the possible dangers that would arise if his work had fallen into the wrong hands, and now it has. Fortunately, his research was the only thing that wasn't stolen because it was locked away in WOOHP's heavily secured archives—something that cannot be said for the actual software and prototypes themselves."

She listened tentatively, and all the anger that had boiled up in her simmered down.

"His research is very valuable, Sam, it could possibly be the only way Tim Scam can recover his previous work… without it, we might have been at a total loss."

"Jerry, I'm…. so sorry. I jumped to conclusions without thinking…"

"It's quite alright; if I were you I might have been a little indignant myself." He smiled. "While you're here, I might as well inform you that Clover and Alex have been sent to Provence. One of our sources has tipped us off that the LAMOS's main headquarters might be in the Solliès-Pont area; they've gone there to make sure and gather any information they can."

Sam smirked, "I can only imagine how miserable they must be going there."

"Of course, they'll be awfully annoyed at having to experience the lovely weather, living in the historical midst of van Gogh, Gauguin, and Picasso, dining on Bouillabaisse… I'm sure they'll hate it."

"You say it like they're going on a vacation."

"Don't you girls always find the time to relax during missions?"

"Uh, not really…but enough about Provence, I'm getting jealous by the second!"

"Samantha," he laughed heartily, "I'll send all three of you anywhere in the world after this mission is completed successfully."

"Yeah, well, that's seeming impossible by the second too."

"What do you mean, is something wrong? Is it Tim?"

"What? No… Well, yes, but only because it's Scam," she lied. "I can't say a word to him without wanting to strangle him."

"Promise me you'll restrain yourself until after the mission."

She laughed, "No promises."

They both laughed.

"Well, I should probably get back to Scam…it's not very smart to leave him alone for so long.."

"That's quite true, though you shouldn't be too worried about him, Sam. I'm keeping an eye on him and keeping him under control," Jerry said.

"Under control, that—that beast? I find that a bit hard to believe," Sam said.

"I have my methods, Sam," Jerry said with a sly smile. She smiled a bit nervously at Jerry, wanting to be let in on the secret. But when Jerry seemed unwilling to tell her and went back to his work, she took leave of him and left.

But she didn't know where Scam was. Last she had seen him, when he threatened her, he was still in the archives with Dean, but it had been half an hour since then. Was he still there?

Sam returned to the archives section of WOOHP and found a security guard outside the door, which was weird because the archives barely needed them with all the tech security installed into the building, and seeing as Scam was already in the restricted section, who else would try to break in?

The security guard saw Sam approaching and straightened up. They knew each other and often exchanged hellos and brief causalities when they crossed paths. "Samantha."

"Hi Jeremy. Uh, why are you..?"

"Oh, I was sent here by Dean. I'm supposed to inform you that Tim Scam has left the archives and returned to the seventh floor."

"Oh, well, thanks. It was hardly necessary to wait for me to say that. Dean should have just contacted me on my communicator." Sam felt a bit uneasy about having information from Dean mediated through someone else. Was he trying to avoid talking to her?

"Yes, that might have made more sense. But no worries, it was a nice excuse to see your lovely face, Samantha," he said smiling.

She grinned widely. "You say that to every girl in the building, Jeremy. I've actually heard you recite Sonnet 18 to Clover."

He laughed while adjusting his tie. "Well, in my defense, she didn't know what I was talking about."

Sam laughed. "No, she doesn't really read Shakespeare. You're lucky her boyfriend isn't in this branch."

"Does that mean I have a shot?"

"Hardly, he's a keeper."

Sam jokingly punched Jeremy in the arm and he took of his shaded glasses to wipe off a tear from all the laughing he'd done. He had beautiful blue eyes, Jeremy did. And he was quite tall too with a husky physique that suited him perfectly.

"Well, I better catch up with Scam. I get a bit nervous thinking he's alone in the building."

"He's not completely alone, Sam. Jerry has guards watching him."

"Right, I'd forgotten." Sam looked downed and forced a tight-lipped smile. "Does having a couple of guards ensure that he won't try to kill me? Or carry out whatever plan he's concocting to take over WOOHP or burn it to the ground and then kill me and all my friends?"

"Sam," Jeremy said affectionately, putting a large hand on her shoulder. "If you have any problems with that maniac, you call me, okay?"

"Yeah, thanks Jeremy," she said with a nod. She left slowly, trying to collect herself and her energy. She didn't know what she was going to do when she saw Scam.

xx

"He can't hurt you Sam, not right now. Now, he needs WOOHP just as much as we need him," she told herself. Sam was on the seventh floor now, in front of the door that separated her from Tim Scam. She sighed and then slowly turned the handle.

As she walked in, her eyes briefly searching for Tim Scam, she noticed a total of five guards interspersed throughout the vast room. The one closest to her caught her eye. "Uh…?"

"Ma'am, we've been told to monitor Timothy Scam's behavior by Jerry," he said.

"Oh, right. Um, well, I'm here now so I guess you can leave."

"Ma'am, we've received no such orders from Jerry. We cannot leave."

Scam screamed from the other end of the room, sitting at one of the long conference tables near the glass walls and making her head shoot towards him, "Samantha Simpson! Make these assholes leave and I'll let you watch me work!" His voice was loud and irritated. Supposedly, he hated guards watching him more than he hated her watching him, but perhaps that was because they had guns on them and she didn't?

Sam watched him for a brief moment and held his eyes. Even at her distance she noticed how deep the annoyance played on his face. She turned on her communicator and in a few seconds saw Jerry. He looked tired. "Jerry, these guards have to go," she said, loud enough for Scam to hear her. "He's already throwing a hissy fit." Quietly she whispered, "And I'm not too glad to have them here either."

"Sam, I know I've thrown you into this situation but I'm not all too sure about leaving you alone with him," Jerry said.

"I know, but, I think he might be a bit more co-operative if the guards left. I can take care of him myself. Plus we have the security cameras so if anything happens, you'll know." She hoped she sounded convincing. What really made her nervous was the fact that if Scam said anything remotely threatening to her, the guard positioned behind him would most definitely hear him and inform Jerry, who might be inclined to worry about her safety more than the plan and scrap it all together. She didn't want Jerry's worrying about her to jeopardize the plan. And Scam, his bargain with WOOHP probably didn't matter that much to him anyway. If he was put back in his cell he would just break out again and think about bringing WOOHP down and killing them some other way; he most probably didn't need this alliance as much as they did and therefore would be willing to break it.

"But Sam—

She sighed. "Jerry, please don't make me have to bargain with you in front of this creep…"

Jerry sighed. "Alright Sam, I'll get rid of the guards. Be careful."

"Thanks, I will." She closed her communicator and behind her, the guard closest to the door talked into his Bluetooth. He motioned to the other four and all five black-suited men filed out of the room.

"Thanks, Red!" Scam yelled as the men were almost gone. "I was really close to offing the one behind me!" From afar he noticed the last guard, the one who had been positioned behind him, flinch. He smirked and got back to his laptop.

Sam walked towards him and as she neared she noticed that very briefly, his eyes drifted from his screen to her, not looking at her but noticing her arrival, and went back to his work. From the way he was dressed and the way he was so calmly positioned in a chair at the table she thought he seemed almost normal. Wearing black pants and a dark grey turtle neck sweater with the arms bunched up to his elbows, he looked sophisticated and devastatingly handsome. But at the thought, she mentally berated herself, "Oh my god, Sam! He has tried to kill you more than five times and plans on doing it again! Get your head on straight!" Very cautiously, she sat next down to him.

"I didn't know you could say thanks," she said to him, no hint of sarcasm in her voice. But he did not answer and continued to type away on his laptop. The silence went unbroken and she sighed inwardly. As she looked on to the screen Sam was surprised that she couldn't figure out what was happening. "What's he doing? I can barely understand any of it".

"If I really did kill that guard then the deal would have been off," Scam said without looking away.

"You don't really care about the deal, do you Scam?" she said in all seriousness, turning towards him and scooting back when she realized how close in proximity she was to him, their legs only a few centimeters away.

A crooked smile spread across his face and he turned to stare at the redhead. After a moment he said, "You don't know, Samantha, I might actually care."

She almost let out a laugh, that's how much she believed him, but instead she returned his smile with a smirk of her own. "Oh please, you don't fool me, Scam. We've known each other for a few years now and we both know that you can get whatever you want on your own."

"Perhaps it's something only Jerry can give." He paused. A thought came to him and his smile only grew larger. "Or perhaps this has nothing to do with what I want but what I can do, huh Samantha?"

Sam clenched the side of the table while glowering at him. He saw this and chuckled.

"You're scared, aren't you, about earlier?" That struck a chord as Sam tensed even further and glowered at him. "Well, no sense in worrying about that at the moment, sweetheart, that'll come later. First, we take care of this," he said, turning back to his laptop and resuming his work.

That word, 'sweetheart,' really bore into her skin and made her shiver. He'd already used it before to scare her, in that sick-sweet voice that made goose bumps run rampant from the back of her neck down to her spine. He's not even trying to cover up after himself! He's very clearly stating that he's going to try to kill me! Cool down, Sam. He's right, this really isn't the time to be worrying about that and why should I anyways? He's tried before and failed, and when he does again I will be ready for him. She squeezed her eyes shut and gave herself a small nod before attempting to not blow her lid and lash out at Scam. Now really wasn't the time.

She noticed that there were a few books and thick folders on Scam's left-hand side. Those folders were probably his research. "So, what's your plan, Scam?"

"Excuse me?" he said turning his head towards her.

"Your plan. Jerry said you were going to create a program to override your original one and I want to make sense of it."

"And why would you need to make sense of it? We both know you're here to babysit me for Jerry, so shut up and just watch."

"Yeah, no. I'm going to make sure you hold up on your end of the bargain and don't double cross us. So, if you be so kind," she said condescendingly, "get me acquainted with your program."

Scam smirked and in an annoyed, deep voice said, "More and more do you tarnish the reputation of being the smart angel."

"Yeah, I don't get that reference, so…"

"Ugh, never mind. Here," he said, pushing the laptop towards her.

"Uh, thanks. Wow, you're being surprisingly co-operative. I imagined more-more assholishness?"

"Haha," he sneered. "The fact is I don't have the patience and tenacity to deal with a child such as yourself, and if I'm not in the midst of strangling you, I have no particular fondness or interest in dealing with you. And as for my assholishness, as you say—great vocabulary by the way— I'm not in the mood to argue with you." In an almost aggressive fashion, he got out of his chair and walked away from Sam, towards the middle of the large room, and sat on one of the large tables and hugged his legs.

"Since when has he been so broody and irritable? You can almost always count on him and his sarcasm," Sam thought to herself, but shrugged off the thought and went about looking over the content of his work on the laptop and his thick research files on the table.

"I can't deal with this right now," Tim thought tiredly, as he pushed his forehead into his knees in an effort to relieve the severe throbbing headache he'd been suffering from since yesterday morning. The contract had been signed and he returned to his old home. He knew Jerry hadn't been completely loyal and had cameras installed in the entire place, but the extent to which he searched his house and found not a single blind spot dampened his plans. He'd have to be a lot more creative in making sure Jerry didn't find out what he was doing.

"That's great, really, Scam," Sam said after a long while, almost absentmindedly, with a forced smile to highlight her displeasure at him though she looked down at the laptop screen and not at him directly. Scam turned his head towards her, interrupted in his thoughts. By this point he'd completely stretched out on the table and lay with his back flat against the cold surface. "That just means we can do the most minimal amount of actually talking to each other."

Scam screwed up his face in response, a bit confused by her late response, then rolled over on his side, his back facing her with his left hand bent under his head acting as a pillow. He really hadn't been able to sleep last night and he couldn't quite understand why. Was it the headache? No, couldn't be that—he'd suffered through worse conditions when he was constantly on the run from WOOHP. In any case, he thought lying down for a bit would make him feel a bit better.

Sam continued to look through Scam's files and the data on the laptop. Luckily, she'd gotten the gist of what Scam was doing. She'd gathered that he hacked into his old program and scanned it through to see if any modifications had been made. Because he'd designed his program to control the launching and direction of missiles, all he had to do was create a virus that would effectively and completely corrupt its configuration. Unfortunately, Sam noticed through Scam's work that his program had been modified drastically and analyzing all these changes and writing codes to counteract them would take a while. The Brain's handiwork was so expansive that creating an effective virus could prove difficult for even Scam. The more and more Sam began to understand of the endeavor the greater it dawned upon her that she couldn't do here what Tim Scam could and that WOOHP really did desperately need him. He'd "accessed" his old program (now in the possession of the LAMOS and The Brain) by hacking into Boogie Gus's computer. That guy was such an idiot and so horrible with technology that it surprised Sam that the LAMOS trusted him to be in charge of something as valuable to their plan as Scam's old software. Though, Sam guessed, Scam was probably in charge of the I.T. before he left the LAMOS, so there was that. Except, were the they really so stupid that they would leave Boogie Gus in charge of something so important when they had The Brain on their side, the man who'd previously programmed G.L.A.D.I.S. to be evil?

Sam's thoughts began to wonder about this when her gaze lifted up and she noticed Scam lying down a short distance away; her mind began to drift. He was a few tables away, but not too far ahead that she couldn't notice the even rise and fall of his form. Was he possibly asleep? Without knowing it, Sam began to trace the silhouette of his body with her eyes. She slowly took in every detail of him, of his back. His dark brown hair was neat and short; she traced his partially hidden neck to wide shoulders and the back of his torso. He'd bent his left arm in such a way that his shoulder blades and muscles had contorted and became so much more apparent than they normally were under his dark grey turtle neck. As Sam looked closer, she'd noticed the contour of his entire back as it pressed against the fabric that stretched over it. She continued to linger over his muscles and bones until she came to gaze upon his waist. "I wonder if he finds the time to work out and weight lift when he's on the run…" she thought, until she quickly came to her senses before she went on any further. "God, Sammie! Ew, think about who you're thinking about! She shook her head to straighten herself out, yet her eyes went back to him.

She slowly got up from her chair, careful not to make a single sound lest Tim Scam wake up and find her drawing near, otherwise she wasn't sure what he would do. She asked herself, "Sam, what do you think you're doing?" Still, she didn't stop—as though she were in a trance. Like Sleeping Beauty possessed and obediently drawing close to the spindle, Sam moved languidly and quietly between the tables that separated her from him, up and down their rows, until she stopped at the table where he laid, his back still facing her. She slightly shifted her weight and hovered above him for a few moments, surprised that he hadn't noticed her yet. He was usually so quick and attentive. "Tim Scam, if I didn't know you better, I'd think you were genuinely relaxing. But you couldn't be, could you?" Wanting to confirm the possibility of this, she walked around the table while keeping a continuous eye on his form to see if he moved. But he didn't. When she came to finally face him, his body at the height of her waist, she peered down. Red locks fell on either side of her face and she brushed them behind her ears. But she couldn't quite see his face, so with a smooth motion, ever so carefully, she bent down onto her knees and stared up at him. The expression he wore was peaceful and bereft of any anger or hate. Was this, perhaps, how he must have looked before? When he worked at WOOHP, was good, and so cherished, was this how Timothy Scam must have appeared? In wonderment of his tranquility, Sam thought, "Tim Scam, how can you be so vulnerable? So at peace? In this place you so deeply hate, how can you be at ease? But even in her trance she was aware of what she was doing. "I have to stop, I have to…"

Slightly, his lips tightened. Warning bells went off in her head and she worried that he hadn't actually been sleeping. Sam quickly got to her feet and began to walk away when her communicator went off. "Shit." If he wasn't awake before, he was now.

Scam's eyes shot open and Sam rushed to answer the beeping as casually as possible. Jerry's projection appeared and in a painfully nervous and un-casual voice she said, "Hey, bossman! What's up?" Her face contorted trying to keep her cool.

"Er, I need you and Tim Scam to come down to my office immediately; it's about Clover and Alex."

"What about them? Are they okay?!" she asked a bit panicked.

"No, they're fine. Just get down here ASAP."

Jerry's face disappeared from the communicator and Sam fumbled a bit to leave, wanting to avoid Tim Scam altogether because she knew he was awake and didn't need to be relayed the message. As she turned to leave a hand caught her dead in her tracks. She looked at his still lying figure, propped up by his left arm and holding on to her with the right. His face was angry and his eyes were clouded with suspicion.

"What were you doing so close to me?" He spoke in a deep and serious voice, his tone threatening and making her hair stand on end. What was she going to say to him?

"Let go, Scam," she said, struggling to free her wrist from his strong grip.

"What were you doing, Samantha?" With every word his voice got louder and more menacing. His hand was pulling her to him and bore into her skin. She struggled to keep her feet firm on the ground but she felt herself being slowly dragged towards him.

"Nothing! I wasn't doing anything!" she said a bit more loudly, a bit more confidently, but still being drawn to him further and further. "Jerry he-he called earlier so I was just coming to get you, that's all!"

Sam faced was composed but his voice bellowed like thunder. "You're lying, Samantha!"

"I am not! Let go, Scam!" she screamed while finally breaking out of his grip. When she was free she dashed out of the room, heading towards Jerry's office. She'd never been so terrified of Tim Scam in her life, but now, having been so close to him and seeing his composed anger made her weak in the knees. "I can't—I can't do this anymore," she said to herself while she ran.

Back in the conference room, Tim Scam sat at the edge of the table looking after the door through which Sam had escaped. He rested his head on right hand which rested on his knee, wondering what had just happened. What had Samantha been doing? He knew she was lying before, he knew there was some other reason she had been so close to him. She had done something, but what? Scam inspected his surroundings and himself, but found nothing odd about him. If her communicator hadn't gone off she wouldn't have been caught because he knew he'd fallen into a deep sleep. Finally, he got up from the table and made his way to Jerry's office. "I'm going to find out what you were doing, Sam. Even if I have to drag the truth out of you."

PLEASE REVIEW! :D