Contrary to Miss Parker's expectations, Jarod led her past the line of glass doors marked ENTER in peeling letters, around a corner to the airport's staff entrance. Rather than entering, Jarod bee-lined for a spare rack of luggage carts, a relic of bygone dreams of this being a much bigger, more bustling air travel destination. Jarod tipped the rack on its side and, with the squelch of duct-tape coming unstuck, ripped a flattened duffel bag from the underside. He crouched, winced, and adjusted into a one-legged kneel favouring his good leg. Miss Parker anticipated a collection of IDs, elastic-bound stacks of cash, maybe even a gun or two inside. Instead, when Jarod unzipped the bag, it seemed to be filled mostly with clothing and some toiletries.
"I'm afraid I don't have a carry-on for you, Miss Parker," Jarod said. "Or — hang on one moment, I have an idea." He rummaged around and pulled out a briefcase, which he handed off wordlessly to Miss Parker. She recognized the design, an older model of DSA player. She took it with a dubious glance at the clothing-stuffed duffel.
"This is your cache? I've seen your bases post-Pretend, there's more that goes into their set-up than a few changes of clothes."
"A carry-on going onto an aircraft needs to look inconspicuous. Trust me, we've got all we need."
"Speaking of inconspicuous, if I were airport security I'd throw us out, we both looked like we've been mugged by a roving gang of Christmas trees." Before she could censor the instinct, Miss Parker reached out. With neither wince nor blink, Jarod watched her extricate a small twig from behind his ear. Why had she done that? He could fix his own hair.
"Thanks," he said. His voice was unexpectedly soft. "You're right, we're a mess. I have a change of clothes for myself, but nothing for you — sorry. You've got dirt on your face. Here."
And he reached out, too, and gently rubbed at her cheekbone, her temple, the underside of her chin. She kept as still as she could, aware throughout that she was clenching her jaw. He moved on to her hair, finger-combing tendrils of lichen and dry pine needles from the unkempt mass. Unprompted, her thoughts drifted back to the hospital roof, when she'd thought it was her last chance to seize a long-delayed opportunity. Her face felt hot, like it had so many years ago: a first kiss down in the sub-levels, when she was the only girl he'd ever met. The first raindrop of the evening hit her cheek and she could swear it sizzled.
The door opened and a butch-looking baggage handler with a cigarette pinched between her fingers barreled out. She spared Jarod and Miss Parker a brief glance, and snorted.
Jarod coughed. "So, westward? Flight tickets are on me." He waved a previously unseen wad of bills, and Miss Parker thought to wonder what kind of extra pockets could be concealed in the lining of a duffel bag full of clothing and toiletries. She followed him into the airport, a dingy single-storey building with plastic foliage decor and dead-eyed security staff. The bare attempt at security screening appeared to consist of two sets of conveyor belts, too few plastic tubs and a life time's supply of velvet-linked stanchions.
With a wordless nod at Jarod, Miss Parker ducked into the nearest restroom with a hand clamped over her bicep. She drafted a silent prayer of thanks for public single occupancy restrooms and locked the door behind her. Catching her reflection in the mirror, she almost burst out laughing. Her hair was a little tidier than it had likely been immediately post-tree collision, at least. Small mercies, she didn't actively have lichens growing on her face. The highest compliment she could pay her reflection was that she resembled one of the better kempt tumbleweeds. She peeled off her suit jacket, noting with a passing whiff that it smelled more than a little ripe. Then again, she'd had it in rotation with just one spare outfit since Friday, so she was probably lucky it didn't smell worse.
She wadded up a handful of paper towels and stuffed them down the sink drain until the sink stopped losing water when she turned on the faucet. This was enough to provide her a modest bath, a little freshening up at least. She washed her face and arms, avoiding for the moment the bloody mess along her right bicep. Her pantyhose were shredded beyond hope, so she balled them up and threw them in the trash. She wet her hair under the sink tap and pulled it up into a damp ponytail, serviceable given the circumstances. She had barely removed her blouse when a rapping sounded at the door. Her hands froze half-through pulling the blouse free of the waistband of her pants.
"Occupied," she said, just loud enough to carry through the door.
"It's me." It was Jarod's voice. "I got my hands on a first aid kit. Can I help you with the cut on your arm?"
"I can handle it," Miss Parker said, opening the door a crack. They awkwardly negotiated the kit through the crack after a brief moment of hesitation from Jarod.
"Let me know if you need any help," said Jarod, in the sliver of a second before the door closed again. Miss Parker thought he sounded a little disappointed.
The tap trickled out a gentle stream of water over the cut and Miss Parker dabbed gently at it, wincing now and again. It was shallow, only impressive in its length, running from the outside of her wrist almost to her elbow. That ruled out the usefulness of the average band-aid, however, so after dabbing Polysporin on the cut, she carefully wound gauze around it and fixed the end with medical tape. With her blouse back on and the bandages covered by long sleeves, she felt more-or-less good as new.
When she emerged from the washroom, she spotted Jarod loitering outside. He'd changed into a dark blue sweater, with a shoulder holster worn over it. He'd also somehow had the time to shave. It was the first time she'd seen him clean-shaven since the Isle of Carthis. It suited him, brought back a hint of his old boyishness.
"You planning on bringing guns through security?" she asked, eyeing the holster.
"Yes," said Jarod. He flashed an ID at her. "Jarod Spencer, Federal Air Marshal. Air Marshals have only become part of the TSA recently, so most of the staff won't have a full grasp on the logistics of boarding a marshal onto a flight." He paused and chuckled. "It's so surreal explaining a Pretend to you, Miss Parker. Generally the point is to keep you in the dark."
"And oh, how I've enjoyed it," Miss Parker said dryly. "Does this plan involve any ideas for getting me onto a plane? You said yourself, you don't have a change of clothes for me. More to the point, it'll get back to the Centre fast if I give security my real ID, and I assume you don't have a fake ID for me in that bag of tricks." She paused, then, only half-joking: "You don't, do you?"
Jarod smiled. "No, Miss Parker, I hadn't planned on this. I didn't have you meeting my mother pencilled into my day planner, funnily enough." He glanced over to the flimsy security checkpoint. "I thought about it while you were cleaning up. If we had more time, fixing up an ID wouldn't be a problem, but we don't. Without a fake ID, it'll be easier to fool a computer than to fool a pair of eyeballs. For once, I almost wish Broots were here. If you present your real ID, I should be able to go in after the fact and alter the details so they won't send up red flags at the Centre. But Broots would be faster."
"I'm sure he'd be flattered you said so," said Miss Parker, meaning it sarcastically but in all honesty, she wouldn't be surprised if it were true. Broots always seemed to hold a weird blend of fear, respect, and jealousy with respect to their long-time quarry. Hell if she knew what the jealousy was all about. Who wanted to be perpetually on the run?
"I can get your gun through, too, if you give it to me. I've got space for one more." He gestured to the empty holster on his right side.
"In other words, you'll be the only one armed out of the two of us?" she said.
Jarod rearranged his face into an expression of mock offense.
"What are you suggesting, Miss Parker? Aren't we on the same side now?"
Fair point. Also, she was the one who had flirted with parting ways altogether, not him. He'd have little reason to take advantage of having the upper hand in a fight. And she wouldn't be able to take the piece with her through security otherwise. She unbuckled her concealed holster — now not-so-concealed, since she'd ditched the suit jacket — and reluctantly handed over the gun. Jarod buckled it into the vacant holster without another word.
"First things first," she said, changing the subject. "Which flight are we taking?"
The marquee above the information desk displayed a couple of options that would take them relatively close to their destination, and in the end they decided on two one-way tickets to Boise, Idaho. Boise would take them the better part of the day with a lengthy layover in Denver, but it would get them far away from a conspicuous helicopter crash site ASAP and would put hundreds of miles between them and the last place they'd been seen by Centre employees. Jarod paid for the tickets, since Miss Parker was only carrying her credit card and wanted as much as possible to avoid a paper trail documenting her collusion with Jarod.
There was no line for the security checkpoint.
"Miss… Marcelle Parker?"
Miss Parker winced. "Yes?"
"Over to this window, please, we have some questions about your carry-on."
She had expected this, but it didn't make it any less annoying. The airport employee unbuckled the DSA player and swung it to face Miss Parker.
"Can you explain this technology in your carry-on?"
Miss Parker sighed. "It's a portable video player. The patent is currently being processed, I can't explain further without incurring the litigious wrath of my client." She gave the employee a long-suffering look and nodded at Jarod, who had passed unmolested through security. It was the flimsiest lie yet — why would an air marshal be developing a patent on a portable video player? — but she had to hope the TSA worker would consider questioning the eccentricities of a law enforcement official to be above her pay grade.
The airport employee's lips thinned, making her look even more like a constipated Boston Terrier.
"You understand, ma'am, that we can't be too careful these days. If you can provide a short demonstration that it is what you say it is — that is, it plays video — you can continue on your way."
Miss Parker gritted her teeth and picked a DSA at random from the storage compartment along the bottom. Once slotted into the device, the screen sparked to life and began to play a recording of much younger Jarod pouring over the Watergate tape recordings. The employee's eyebrows vanished into her low hairline.
"Home movies?" she asked.
"Student film. You'd have to ask the artist, I don't get it," Miss Parker said, curt but passably polite. She'd never found it helped to give attitude to airport staff. She saw the woman's eyes flit to the time and date in the corner of the screen. Just then, another employee came jogging up.
"Jen, you're needed on the perimeter," said the new arrival, slightly out of breath. Jen looked annoyed.
"The perime— I'm with a passenger, hang on. What do they need on the perimeter? Why me?"
"I dunno, something about a crash."
"A crash? But we don't even have any arrivals until —"
"Are we good, can I catch up with my client?" Miss Parker interrupted. The chopper had been found. That wasn't good. She and Jarod had probably not left anything immediately incriminating in the craft, but it would bring down extra suspicion on anyone who looked like they'd been in an accident. She tugged lightly at the gauze under her blouse sleeve and trailed her fingers along the cut. If it started to bleed through, she hoped she'd notice before someone else did.
Jen gave her a distracted look.
"Yeah, of course, thanks for your patience. Uh, good luck with the patent. Have a safe and comfortable flight."
Trying hard to pretend that she was not fleeing, Miss Parker fled in the direction she'd seen Jarod head out of the corner of her eye. It wasn't hard to find him — if the signage was anything to go by there were only two gates, and there couldn't have been more than a dozen passengers scattered between both seating areas. Jarod sat apart from the others, whether by his own choice or because people wished to avoid a visibly armed air marshal, who could say? He was hunched over his lap. As Miss Parker came nearer, she spotted the portable laptop computer that was the object of his attention.
"Bad news, Miss Parker," he said without looking up.
Of course. "Is there any other kind?"
"Our flight is delayed."
Miss Parker almost growled. "What, already? They could have told us that when we bought the tickets."
"Just happened. Apparently —" Here, he caught Miss Parker's eye with an eloquent look, having finally looked up from his work. "— Apparently someone has crashed a helicopter on the premises. All commercial flights are grounded for the time being."
"'For the time being', meaning until they locate whoever crashed the damn thing," Miss Parker finished. Damn, damn, damn. She turned on her heel and glared back in the direction of a group of security personnel huddled near the main entrance, as if they'd personally insulted her. "That's one plan in the toilet, then. Doubling back through security will attract attention, though, so we'll have to get out another way. You ready to start throwing that badge around, Air Marshal?"
"That'll be plan B," said Jarod. "I'm not ready to give up on a flight just yet."
"But flights are grounded."
"Commercial flights are grounded," Jarod corrected. Miss Parker experienced an all-too-familiar flicker of irritation at his know-it-all tone. "This airport mostly hosts private aircraft as it is, and the staff here aren't ready to ruffle the feathers of the wealthy private owners yet by constraining their freedom to fly. That could change any minute, though."
Miss Parker eyed the laptop. Computers had never been her area of expertise, that was Broots's thing.
"So you're looking for private flights out?" she guessed.
"That's third on the agenda. I'm finishing up alterations of your personal details in the system. It's taking a while, I have to be quiet about it or the Centre could notice the tampering."
Apparently computers were Jarod's thing too. Of course they were. Everything was Jarod's thing.
"And second on the agenda?"
"Wiping our presence from airport security footage."
In other words, nothing Miss Parker could help with. She should feel glad to leave the work up to Jarod for the moment. Instead, she felt impotent. She sat down next to Jarod and peeked at the screen. It was all gibberish, something about 'nmap'. The progress update shifted from seventy-eight-point-three to seventy-eight-point-nine percent. With a heavy sigh, she shifted down in her seat and settled in to wait.
Waking up with a crick in her neck was not a surprise to Miss Parker. She'd been through it twice in as many days after all, and the sleeping situation had only marginally improved since she'd set up a makeshift sofa-cot next to Jarod's hospital bed. Why did she hurt all over, though? And why was it so bright? She glanced over to check on Jarod, but an unfamiliar scene met her eyes: a row of shabby seats, a pair of muted television sets suspended from the ceiling, and a wall of windows beyond revealing an almighty downpour outside. An elderly couple occupied the row opposite, the rest of the seats left empty. As Miss Parker watched one of the pensioners unwrap a cough drop, the events of the last twelve hours rushed back to her.
She was on the run from the Centre. Maybe the Centre didn't know it yet, but functionally she was on the run from the Centre. She'd let Jarod go. At that moment, it was hard to remember why. He'd only managed to get her stranded in a rinky-dink airport in rural Wisconsin with no way out.
Miss Parker wriggled in her seat, trying to find a more comfortable position to continue her nap. Even at the hospital they hadn't had such knobbly pillows. She reached up to wipe a bit of undignified drool from the corner of her mouth.
The pillow moved.
Miss Parker stiffened.
"Jesus!" she yelped, and staggered out of her seat. "You scared the shit out of me, Jarod."
"Sorry," said her erstwhile headrest, only half-ironically. "I tried my best not to wake you. Sleep well?"
Jarod's mouth twisted, like he was trying his damnedest to conceal a smile. He reached over and wiped at his shoulder. Miss Parker coloured.
"Awful, but hey, I'm used to it," said Miss Parker, shifting from sleep to full sarcasm in no time flat. "My kingdom for a real bed. Hope they've got beds in Idaho."
"We're not going to Idaho."
This was news to Miss Parker. She sat back down. The passenger gate seats were almost as bad as the hospital waiting room seats. Hope they've got nicer chairs too, wherever we're going.
"… You found another flight? When does it leave?"
"Not yet. But then, we were never going to Idaho," said Jarod obliquely. Miss Parker opened her mouth to ask (for the nth time that week) for a plain answer, but was interrupted by a commotion over by the main entrance.
A woman with salt-and-pepper hair and square glasses had entered, thronged by a small entourage. By their postures of deference, Miss Parker judged the rest of the party to be either personal security, or employees of the salt-and-pepper woman. Miss Parker was familiar with that brand of audience, where the attention paid was a medley of respect, intimidation and reluctant obligation. This woman was The Boss, and she had Had It.
And no wonder. The newcomers were all drenched and splattered with mud, and there couldn't be more than two intact umbrellas among the entire party. The salt-and-pepper woman was nursing a cut on her forehead, and was bellowing loud enough that every word could be heard clear across the terminal. Heard but not understood, mind you, as she was bellowing in French.
Someone nearby — a small voice, coming from near Miss Parker's knee — snickered. Miss Parker looked down and blinked. A child sat on the floor, watching the ruckus across the hall and munching on a handful of potato chips. The kid had shoulder-length blond hair, and wore a bedazzled t-shirt and salmon-coloured sandals. He (as Miss Parker tentatively thought, he, because there was no tangible proof to say otherwise) snickered again and wiped greasy fingers on the hem of his shorts. Miss Parker guessed he must be around ten years old, but she'd never been good at gaging child ages. The kid looked up at her.
"Hey," said the kid. He dropped the 'h' sound, so it sounded more like 'ay'. The kid pointed at Miss Parker's feet. "I like your shoes. Is it hard to walk in shoes like that, with heels?"
Wit 'eels, he'd said. A French accent? Miss Parker looked down at her shoes, nonplussed. They were not very high heels, only a modest Cuban.
"Not very," she said, thrown. "Where're your parents, kid? Don't you know not to talk to strangers?"
The kid nodded to the bellowing woman by the main entrance.
"I'm with her," he said. Miss Parker supposed she could believe it. French woman, French kid. Mud-splattered rain slicker on the former, pristine salmon shoes on the latter. Huh. "And no, not really. I like strangers, they are interesting. Hey, do you know what a racketeer is?"
"A racketeer?" Unbidden, the image of Lorefice with a hole in his temple flickered to life in her mind's eye. Beside her, Jarod's head jerked up.
"Yeah. Sounds like a kind of pirate, but I don't think that is what they mean. What do you think?" said the kid, and he pointed to the set of televisions suspended from the ceiling across from them. The image on one of the screens was uncomfortably familiar: an exterior shot of the hospital in Philadelphia where they'd spent the better part of the weekend. Closed captions ran along the bottom of the screen in sporadically misspelled, all-caps English. The captions partially obscured the news headline, which read: SUSPECTS IN RACKETEER MURDER FLEE PHILADELPHIA HOSPITAL.
The display changed to two police sketches, one each of Miss Parker and Jarod. The sketch of Jarod wouldn't be much use, since he'd had a beard while recovering in the hospital. On the other hand, the sketch of Miss Parker only varied from her current appearance by small alterations in hair style and outfit. Her stomach twisted and she shared a silent look with Jarod. He mirrored her own tense wariness back at her. That was truly all they needed, another set of pursuers. Miss Parker looked around, but nobody seemed to be watching the news. Nobody except the kid. On cue, said kid gave her a sly look.
"She looks like you," he said. Not so much accusatory as knowing. 'I know that you know that I know.' "The same kind of pretty. Is a racketeer a bad person?"
Miss Parker narrowed her eyes. What did this kid want?
"Ye-es," she said. "A racketeer is someone who threatens to hurt someone if they are not paid a lot of money."
"Like a kidnapper?" asked the kid.
"No, not quite. They're both bad, though." Just within earshot, Jarod snorted lightly. Miss Parker shot him a glare. "Can I help you?"
"Oh, nothing," said Jarod innocently.
"So it's OK to kill a racketeer," the kid continued, ignoring the interruption. His eyes roved perpetually over her face, like he was watching her expression. With that in mind, Miss Parker coached her features into something innocuous.
"The cops wouldn't agree with you." She wasn't sure why she was still talking to a random child, especially one who seemed a bit too clever for his own good. Then again, what else was there to do? "What's your name?"
He didn't hesitate. "Alex."
Miss Parker frowned. The kid might not have the proper level of caution around strangers, but even considering that, the answer had been too fast.
"Is that your real name?"
Alex shrugged. "Maybe." He leaned his head closer to Miss Parker, and she unconsciously bent to close the gap further. His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "You think I will tell airport security about you. You do not have to worry. I won't. I do not want to talk to the cops either."
The kid leaned back and beamed, as though he'd shared a delightful treat with her. He seemed to be waiting for her reaction.
"You don't say," said Miss Parker, her mind working fast. If the kid connected the dots based on a momentary glimpse of a police sketch, others couldn't be far behind.
Alex nodded eagerly.
"I would get in a lot of trouble if they found me. You see that shouting woman over there?" He pointed towards the entrance, where the woman in square glasses was still tearing new rectums for each of her own staff and the building staff besides. The shouting had quietened down somewhat, but only because she'd grown hoarse. Miss Parker had learned French in school, but the accent was not what she was used to, an unfamiliar sing-song twang distorting the vowels. Something about a crash. The crash?
"I see her," said Miss Parker, playing along.
Alex's voice dropped to a stage whisper. "I cut her brake lines."
Miss Parker was so startled she almost laughed.
"You what?"
Alex grinned. "She was supposed to go up in a fiery wreck, but she only dented the front fender when she ran into a ditch. That is OK, though. I would not have wanted to hurt her employees. It is not their fault their boss is so very bad."
Miss Parker looked around to see if anyone was listening in. Jarod's hands had frozen, hovering over the keyboard.
"Kid, has anyone ever told you not to admit attempted murder to strangers?" she said finally. "And isn't that your mom? You said you were with her."
"She is not my mother!" said Alex, his voice rising. "My mother — it is her fault — that woman is not my mother."
"OK, OK," said Miss Parker. "I won't call her your mom if you do me a favour and quiet down."
Please note, she didn't ask for the kid's story. At no point did she prompt this bloodthirsty child to expand on what had provoked him to cut a woman's brake lines, with the explicit hope she'd 'go up in a fiery wreck'. Ostensibly, she had no interest in a random kid's tragic back-story, nor did she have the mental energy to devote to it.
She got the story anyway.
As Alex explained in a rushed whisper to Miss Parker's reluctant ear, he was a recent orphan. He'd been raised by a single mother, the kindest, smartest person in the whole world. The best person, really, because she knew best how to be good, and worked hard to be good all the time even when it was hard to do. She wasn't good at people, only Alex. The two of them were best friends, just the pair of them in a big, unnecessarily complicated world. This sainted mother had worked in the IT department of an insurance company in Montreal. One day, Alex's mother had discovered something secret, something the company should not be doing. Then she'd hacked into the insurance company's servers, and had discovered even more secret somethings.
For the first time since the kid's rant had begun, Miss Parker's interest was piqued. She lifted her head.
"Your mother hacked —?"
Alex shushed his new friend. "Let me finish, please."
He told of the afternoon at home when he'd been crawling under the bed when some people had entered without knocking at the front door. He remembered thinking that was pretty rude, coming right in without knocking. Then things spiraled towards madness.
"They killed her," said Alex. Up until then, he had kept remarkable composure, relating his story with the tone usually reserved for campfire tales. Here, his voice turned into a strangled croak, and he swallowed several times in succession. "People said later that she did it to herself. She didn't, I saw it. Nobody asked me whether I knew if she would kill herself, or no. I would tell them, she would not, and she didn't. She was killed because she knew that her boss did something wrong."
Miss Parker thought of the elevator, the gun shot, being carried away screaming, screaming herself hoarse.
"And her boss was —" She tilted her head towards the main entrance, where the shouting had finally quietened. Alex nodded.
"Sylvie Chabot. She was at the funeral, and she said very nice things about my mother. She brought with her two of the people who were there, who killed my mother. They shook my hand, and Mme Chabot said she was sorry my mother died. I am going to kill her."
Miss Parker felt Jarod shift next to her.
"Kid, you're not going to kill someone," she said.
But at that age, given the chance and the knowledge that her mother hadn't killed herself after all, would she not have made the same promise? It was a rhetorical question, but Miss Parker paused and gave it due consideration. Would she have, really? A scaled-down version of the current Miss Parker would be hell-bent on revenge, no question. But the little girl who had run around the Centre sub levels with Jarod and Angelo had little in common with the current model. The difference between Alex and a younger Miss Parker was the unshakable intention — not anger, but intention — in the former's expression. He didn't even bother to argue his murderer bona fides, only shrugged and looked past Miss Parker.
Miss Parker soon saw the reason for his distraction: Sylvie Chabot was gathering her carry-on and personal effects from the security booth's conveyor belt. In her wake trailed two staff members, a redhead in a floral print and a square-browed accountant type with a minnow-shaped smile. The rest of her entourage slunk off through the main doors, apparently dismissed from their boss's presence to run along home.
"Is she on our flight?" Miss Parker wondered aloud, not expecting an answer, but Alex obliged.
"No. She is rich, she has her own airplane."
"You know a lot, kid. Where are you getting all of this?"
Alex shrugged. "It was not hard, I am not doing anything else every day for many months. I followed her here, there is a company laboratory in Milwaukee and another in Oregon. She plans to visit the two, first Oregon, then Milwaukee. She will not get to Oregon." The promise was punctuated by a juicy squelch as the kid sucked salt and vinegar from his fingertips. "Thank you for listening. It is nice to tell someone who cannot cause problems for me."
The unstated threat being: if you tell on me, I'll tell on you. (Neener, neener.) The kid wandered off without a goodbye, weaving between the rows of chairs, gradually closing in on where Chabot sat surrounded by luggage and sycophants. Miss Parker canted her jaw to the side in thought and leaned her head to be within muttering distance of Jarod.
"If Chabot were a mark, how would you do it?"
Jarod looked up from his laptop and gave her a look of consideration.
"Is this a hypothetical, Miss Parker?"
"What? Yes," she blustered. It had to be. They were on the run. They had no time for her to keep her skills limber with another Sýkora.
"Oh, well, in that case." Jarod half-closed the laptop lid, all the better to devote a greater fraction of his squandered mind to the problem. "A lot of the work would be done in advance. I'd grab the info Whistle-Blower Mom was murdered for, which would be the most time-consuming part. I checked the company servers, they don't have any of the usual weak points on first pass."
Miss Parker blinked. "When did you do that?"
Jarod spun the laptop towards her.
"Just now."
The screen showed the splash page for a company called Yalient. Minimalistic, clean lines, muted colour palette. Alongside this screen was a window of white text on black background, not one word of which Miss Parker could parse, or cared to.
"What happened to finding a flight out? Wiping the security footage? Changing the manifest?"
Jarod shrugged. "I can multi-task. System infiltration takes time."
"Fine. So let's say the info the servers or whatever, it's incriminating. You just send it to the cops? That's putting a lot of faith in the law to handle it properly."
"Oh, I agree. And would be letting her off lightly, don't you think?"
Miss Parker thought back to the Centre's interview of a man Jarod had buried alive for the crime of… burying a guy alive. An eye for an eye in its frankest realization.
"Right, right, I forgot about the 'ironic justice' part. Something about suicide, then. Frame her for attempted suicide, maybe. That would damage her hold on her company."
"It's a start," said Jarod, with a too-eager smile. Miss Parker almost shivered; she'd intuited Jarod's bloodthirsty side from second-hand reports, but it was another thing entirely to see it poking through the cracks in his familiar face. The laptop made a noise like a frog coughing politely, and Jarod checked the screen. "Security wipes are done. And…" He paused. "Hm."
"'Hm', what's 'hm'?"
"Three private flights out in the next couple hours: Salt Lake City, Chicago and Portland. Salt Lake City is the closest to where we're going, there's a Latter Day Saints group headed back to Utah in two hours."
Portland. Oregon. The kid was right. Well, there was nothing to be done about that. Oregon wasn't on the way. They could only hope the kid's vendetta would lose steam when he ran aground on continual failure to assassinate Chabot.
"Salt Lake, OK. Wonderful. I look forward to your impression of a Mormon, Jarod, though I can't promise I won't laugh."
They were sitting close enough together that she felt Jarod's shoulder shake as he censored his own laughter. The butt of his gun knocked against her lacerated bicep and she leaned away with a wince. Speaking of which…
"Now that we're through security, I'll have my gun back now, thanks."
Jarod gave her a skeptical look but reached for his right holster, where she'd seen him stow her gun earlier. His jaw slackened in shock.
"Miss Parker…"
"What?" she said sharply. She was almost certain she knew what, but she wanted so very badly to be wrong. "Jarod, where's the gun?"
Jarod looked around wildly, patting every surface within reach. Dignity on hold for the time being, Miss Parker fell to her knees on the coarse carpet and felt around under the seats, hoping every second to feel her fingertips closing over cool gun metal. It never came. A named dread, in that moment so much more threatening than any nameless dread could ever be, pounded at the door to Miss Parker's mind. She answered it, and looked across the waiting area to where Chabot waited for her plane to be ready for boarding.
Alex, aspiring kid murderer, made his way with careful casualness and studied lack of purpose in Chabot's general direction. He'd been doing as much since their conversation came to an awkward end. Chabot seemed not to have noticed; she was absorbed in a paperback. Miss Parker knew what to look for, and spotted it easily: every couple of steps, Alex twitched the hem of his bedazzled t-shirt down further over the top of his shorts. The shirt fit poorly, however, and could not quite cover a sliver of matte grey peeking out between shirt and shorts.
"The kid," she breathed.
Alex had Miss Parker's gun.
Alex didn't plan on letting Ms. Chabot get to Oregon alive.
