Alex had Miss Parker's gun.

Alex didn't plan on letting Ms. Chabot get to Oregon alive.

Miss Parker was across the room in a half-dozen strides. Her fingers closed on Alex's t-shirt collar just as he reached around behind his back for the grip of the gun. With a quick jerk of fabric, she wrapped her injured arm around his body from behind. The gesture could, to the casual eye, be mistaken for a poorly-planned hug. He didn't scream or try to hit. Perhaps he knew as she did that attracting attention would only hurt his cause. He did wriggle and squirm like a champion, however. Miss Parker was forcibly reminded of the experience of trying to hold her pet rabbit, who invariably did not want to be held.

"Alex," she hissed in his ear. "Or whatever your name is. Stop. Let us help you."

The child in her arms started to cry, not noisy tears but silent sobs, the kind children resort to when they're embarrassed or simply don't have any reason to believe they can reach out for help. Adult crying, in short. Miss Parker looked wildly over her shoulder at Jarod. She found him standing not far behind, reaching helplessly for the squirming bundle of frustration in Miss Parker's arms. His face was crumpled, a picture of misery.

"Is your hypothetical still a hypothetical?" he asked Miss Parker.

Without sparing a second to consider, Miss Parker shook her head.

"Can you get us on that plane?" she whispered.

Jarod jerked his head to the far side of the room, silently suggesting they reconvene as far as possible from Chabot's earshot. Nobody in the woman's retinue had spared the near-assassination a glance. Miss Parker confiscated the gun, took Alex by the hand and lead him firmly back to gate A. He sniffled indignantly all the way back to their seats. When they passed a family of four, the mother offered a commiserating smile. Miss Parker returned it, only realizing belatedly that the woman must assume Alex was their — hers and Jarod's — child. Obviously. Otherwise, they would have long since had security called on them.

"I've got good news for you, kid," she said. She stuck with the moniker 'kid', based in part on his slight nose-wrinkle whenever the name 'Alex' was invoked. "You remember what you saw on the news? You were right, racketeers are bad people, just like Mme Chabot. Me and my… friend, Jarod, we stopped one together." She caught Jarod's eye. This was deeply surreal and would only encourage Jarod's most sentimental daydreams, but she didn't care. Her top priority was talking the kid down off the edge. "That's why we're in trouble now. Jarod has a — what would you call it, Jarod, a hobby? He likes making bad people pay for the bad things they've done. He's annoyingly good at it."

"You're not too bad at it yourself, Miss Parker," said Jarod, laughter in his voice. She ignored him.

"Let us help, kid, and you'll get revenge so much better than just a dead CEO. I promise."

Alex's eyes darted between the two of them, radiating extreme skepticism.

"A gun shot would be easier. I want to do it myself."

"Would your mother want you to —" Jarod started, but Miss Parker shushed him. For someone as painfully earnest as Jarod, 'What would the spirit of your dead mother think?' might work, but this kid was a little too life-tarnished for that approach.

"The best revenge is living well, kid, and you can't live well from juvie. Give us a try, OK? If you don't like it, I'll re-arm you myself."

She wouldn't. But then, she remembered being a kid. It wasn't exactly surprising for an adult to lie to a child; often, it was expected. She could deal with any collateral feelings of betrayal better than she could deal with watching a child commit murder. Still, she hoped the kid knew she was lying about that part.

"You really want to help me? Why?" he asked. The suspicion had begun to drain from his voice.

"We're headed that way anyway. Plus, I'm developing a new skill of mine," said Miss Parker. She looked to Jarod. "This does make it harder to get on the plane, though. You can get on easy with the air marshal credentials, I assume. Let's say I pose as a flight attendant, I can bear that for a couple hours. But Alex, I don't know how we'd get you on. She's met you, it's a miracle you haven't been recognized yet. We might —"

"You're not leaving me behind," said Alex vehemently.

"Of course not." She gave him a rare smile, a real one.

"Miss Parker, could I talk to you for a moment?"

Jarod's expression of Earnest Concern ominously forebode annoyance in Miss Parker's near future. She followed him over to the window. Beyond it, a torrent of rain was coming down in sheets.

"What is it?" she said, ready for the worst.

"As cathartic as it would be for this boy to see his mother's killer go down, I'm not sure bringing him along is the best call."

"Jarod —"

"Let me finish. You need to hear this."

"Excuse me?" As if he could predict what she was going to say, and had dismissed it preemptively. That Pretender status really gave him a God complex.

"I know you see yourself in Alex. I would be surprised if you didn't, the way both of your mothers ended up. But just because you can handle the fallout from a confrontation with Raines, doesn't mean a 10-year-old can emotionally handle being involved in a con to ruin his mother's killer. This could get very messy. You've committed to helping take down Chabot, and I'm on board if you are. But there's been minimal prep time and if we do this on the plane, as you seem to be planning, there's no safe exit strategy for a child."

Where had this defeatist attitude come from, this caution? She'd seen Jarod take on much worse odds with much less provocation. A shiver coursed down her back, courtesy of a chill in the air. The screaming storm outside sent emissary tendrils of wind through some cracked window or door left ajar.

"As if you don't project your childhood onto every underdog you've ever met," spat Miss Parker. "Pot, meet kettle. And since when do you need an exit strategy?"

"I don't exactly advertise my less successful Pretends," Jarod hissed. "A botched con doesn't send a message to the Centre to spite them. I try to cut ties early from a failed Pretend, whenever it's necessary. But they do happen. I'd like to avoid this being one of them, and a recognizable child in a confined space is an element we don't need. He'd be better off with family. He must have relatives somewhere."

Miss Parker's fingers twitched with the temptation to shake Jarod by the shoulders, to shake the nonsense and this novel caution from his mind.

"You and family," she groaned. "It's not the answer to everything. You don't know this kid, much as you'd like to think you can summarize any person you meet by the archetypes Sydney drilled into you when you were, by the way, even younger than this kid is now. He needs to see her go down, he needs that."

"Because you'd need it."

"Yes! OK? Yes, because I'd need to see it too. Happy? If he'd been kidnapped or experimented on you'd be saying the same, but since it's my turn to project, you can't meet me half-way?"

Jarod stared at her. Out of her peripheral vision, Miss Parker was vaguely aware they'd acquired a small audience. An elderly man and woman were ignoring their shared crossword puzzle in favour of spectating the argument. Hopefully they'd assume the bits about kidnapping and experimentation were scripted lines from the next off-Broadway show.

Jarod's mouth worked silently. He let out a long-held breath.

"OK," he said, though he looked only half-convinced. "You've made your point. I'll figure out how to get him on board." As one, they turned back to look at Alex.

Alex, who was gone.

"… Where is he?" said Miss Parker. She took off at a half-jog across the departure terminal, searching between each row of seats. No Alex.

Jarod hadn't moved, but he was searching in his own way.

"Miss Parker," he said to attract her attention, and pointed across the waiting room to a pair of double-doors. One door was not perfectly flush with its partner. She thought back to the slight draft, the shiver of storm wind. Alex was outside.

Miss Parker ran over and pushed open the door. The next moment, the wind seized the door and sent it crashing against its hinges. It bounced and rebounded into Miss Parker's body, and she staggered. Powerful floodlights surrounded the building, but for the most part the light simply bounced off the rain, the reflections making Miss Parker squint against the glare. She tried to shelter under the overhanging roof, but the rain fell at a severe angle, leaving no crevice unwashed.

Not too far from the doors a hulking shape loomed, barely visible through the downpour — a plane, idling on the tarmac. The rain abruptly changed direction, and a view of the plane's port side was briefly visible. There was no visible airline logo on the side, only an expanse of white. The Centre had owned three very similar aircrafts, now down to two since Jarod had crashed one. This craft was slightly more upscale. Miss Parker would be willing to put down money that this was not the plane taking Mormons back to the motherland.

She heard a muffled shout through the wall of windows behind her as she took off at a sprint for the plane. The shout was too distorted to recognize the voice — could be Jarod, could be an airport staff member. She didn't spare it a thought as she clambered up the stairs to the passenger entry door and wrenched the door open. The wind screamed into the relative quiet of the plane. When she closed the door behind her, the storm's cacophony muted as quickly as if someone had jammed the pause button on a remote.

The plane's interior may have been impressive to the average passenger back in the airport waiting room, but it was nothing Miss Parker had never seen before. Again, quite similar to the Centre's planes, but with a royal blue theme. The passenger seats were arranged in sets of four with spacious, cushy arm rests and a drinks bar.

From the back of the plane came the sound of a throat being pointedly cleared.

Miss Parker looked to the sound and spotted a man sitting in the back row of seats. He was nursing a drink, something dark that clinked when he leaned out into the aisle to look at her.

"Hell of a storm," she said, channeling the bombastic energy of some of her keener co-alumni from business school. The figure nodded. "Everything OK in here for take-off, once Chabot boards and the storm lets up?"

She was taking a gamble that this was, in fact, Chabot's plane. It could be the plane bound for Chicago. If she were mistaken, she could always say she'd lost her sense of direction in the rain.

"Who are you?" said the man.

"I'm a flight attendant," said Miss Parker. She ran through all the M-names she could think of and landed on — "Marie."

"We don't need a flight attendant, Marie. You can return to the airport, thank you."

This guy was like a brick wall.

"I figured as much, yes," she said. She knew brick walls. Her father had been a brick wall for most of her life, until they'd finally started to bond over grief. "I need to get to Oregon, I've transferred to a new airline and they need me on a flight from Oregon to Los Angeles tomorrow morning. I was told I could hitch a ride if I work through the flight."

More information would only give the man more ammunition, should he become suspicious. With that in mind, she shut up and let the man fill in the rest with his imagination. He nodded and turned back to his drink.

"If you've OK'd it with Chabot, it makes no difference to me," he grunted.

"Sure, thanks," said Miss Parker. Deference did not come naturally to her, like she was straining an under-exercised muscle. "Everything is in order, then? You haven't seen any other persons on board?"

The man blinked at her, deliberately giving her all the time in the world to let her feel foolish. It didn't work. It took a much, much more formidable presence than this guy could muster to make Miss Parker feel foolish.

"I am on board, as are the pilot and co-pilot. Are you expecting someone else?"

"Nope." Miss Parker shot the man a tight, barely polite smile and slid into a seat by the entrance.

So Alex wasn't on board, but it didn't make sense to scour the tarmac for him. He was ten years old, not four, and he'd know if he wanted to go to Oregon, he'd have to board the plane. If she left now, they might miss each other in the storm. Better to stay put.

The only sounds for a long time were the clink of ice in the man's glass, the muffled conversation between the pilot and co-pilot, and the gradually abating storm outside. Miss Parker looked up only when the passenger door clunked and swung outwards to reveal Sylvie Chabot and the unnamed redhead from her entourage. The latter held an impressively large umbrella over their heads, which she wrestled closed as Chabot stepped in. Chabot paid no mind to her employee's battle with the umbrella as she wiped the toes of her mud-splashed boots, black and criss-crossed by laces up the side, on the carpet. The man with the minnow smile followed Chabot and the redhead through. He was the only one of the three who looked at Miss Parker, offering her a polite smile. Miss Parker belatedly returned it, only remembering at the last possible second that, theoretically, a flight attendant is a force for hospitality.

Jarod followed up the rear.

"Did you find him?" he whispered as he passed Miss Parker, lips barely moving.

"No," she muttered out of the side of her mouth. "He must still be out in the storm. I'll —"

"Who is this? Excuse me, can I help you?"

It was the unmistakable voice of Sylvie Chabot, last heard bellowing at her employees back in the airport. She sat alone, having settled into one of the wide-set chairs immediately. She was apparently unaware of her entourage struggling to stow both her luggage and their own in the designated area closer to the entrance. She directed a focused beam of brittle politeness at Jarod and Miss Parker.

"Flight attendant," grunted the man at the back of the plane. He hadn't looked up since the others boarded.

"Both of — oh-oh, where are you going?"

Miss Parker paused in the act of re-opening the passenger door. That voice was already starting to grate. She turned back.

"I'm grabbing a couple of things before take-off," she said.

Chabot sighed heavily and smiled a small, exasperated smile.

"You really should have taken care of this in advance. We're about to take off, we need to be in the air soon before this squall returns with a vengeance. Very well, you may have five minutes."

Miss Parker stared. Was she, a grown adult, actually being scolded?

"… Thanks," she said, incredulous.

Back in the airport, she asked around, but nobody had seen Alex. The security staff hadn't seen him enter the airport or pass through security in the first place, and were baffled to say the least. Miss Parker stopped asking, lest it draw unwanted attention. She checked the washrooms, did a loop around the outside wall, even poked her head into the staff area she'd seen when Jarod retrieved his cache from alongside the building.

No Alex.

Where could he have gone? The airport itself was the only place to hide. The area around the building was flat and featureless in all directions, up to the distant collection of trees that had grounded the helicopter.

By Miss Parker's internal clock, four minutes had passed since her exit from the plane before she heard the engine of Chabot's plane rumble to life. The plane was in no way ready to set off for the runway — the stairs up to the passenger door were still in place, for one — so to all appearances they'd started the engine specifically as a childish threat to Miss Parker to be back to the plane on time. She ran back, splashing her bare calves with rain water. Jarod was waiting for her at the stairs up to the passenger door. Unconsciously, he massaged his thigh around the wound he'd incurred in Pennsylvania.

"Anything?" she asked him.

"No," he said with a grimace. "This is your play, Miss Parker. Do we go without him?"

She had seconds to decide; as if to impress the deadline, she could swear the plane revved its engines.

"Yes," she said. "We need to go west anyway, and we're not stopping the plane now without resorting to something drastic, something we wouldn't be able to take back. We can still take this bitch down without the kid, and hopefully he'll hear about it wherever he ends up. Damn it. We've had no time to plan. Can you get the dirt on Yalient from Chabot?"

Jarod hesitated for a half-second, but he nodded.

When they re-entered the plane, the only acknowledgement from the rest of the passengers was a performatively patient smile from Chabot.

"Can we expect a flight safety tutorial from you, miss? Emergency exits and putting your head between your knees, all that?" Chabot tittered.

Miss Parker forced out a laugh.

"I'm sure you know your craft's safety features better than I do, ma'am," she said.

The pilot announced impending takeoff, so Miss Parker took a seat. The airplane roared to life, built up speed, then Miss Parker felt the familiar swoop in her stomach as the wheels parted company with the tarmac. The steep ascent after takeoff, watching the cars and buildings below shrink like Alice in Wonderland… that was always her favourite part when she was a little girl, the rare times she and her parents all went on a trip together.

She looked over at Jarod. He was glued to one of the porthole windows, so apparently enraptured you'd think it was his first time flying. She frowned. They'd have to find some way of communicating during the flight. They hadn't established any reason 'Marie' and 'Air Marshal Spencer' would know each other personally, nor would a flight attendant and air marshal have much to chat about professionally beyond pointing out the emergency exits and the provision of ginger ale and pretzels. They could pass notes, but that would be cumbersome and wouldn't work in any situation in which she wouldn't be able to stop, pull out a piece of paper and a pen, and jot something down. There was one other possibility, but that was assuming — well, it was Jarod. It was worth a try.

She coughed. Jarod continued to stare out the window. She coughed again, and again until he looked over, curious. She raised one hand to her chest so that it was visible to him but not to the passengers in the rows behind them, finger-spelled 'ASL', then pointed to Jarod.

Jarod's face broke open in delight. He raised one fist and nodded it twice — 'yes'.

Miss Parker's gift for picking up languages had frequently come in handy in the field, though she'd never imagined putting sign language to use in quite this way.

Twenty minutes later, they reached cruising altitude. Miss Parker got to her feet and made her way back to the other passengers. If she was going to Pretend to be a flight attendant, she might as well act the part. It wasn't quite the same as her first foray into Pretending back in Iowa. Back then, she'd had a loose script and all the bells and whistles had been preplanned and wired to blow (literally) by Jarod. This time, they were flying by the seats of their pants. This time, she had more riding on the outcome.

Chabot and her employees were engaged in an ongoing attempt to one-up each other by transparently bragging about their respective tastes in literature. Chabot, as it turned out, was a Pinter fan. Miss Parker felt further validated in her dislike of Sylvie Chabot — she'd always hated Pinter. The chatter broke off when Miss Parker approached.

"Our stewardess!" said Chabot. "Or no, I'm sorry, what is the new English term you said earlier? Flight attendant. Welcome. Marc has told me that you are going to work for your passage to Oregon, but you'll have to forgive me, I don't see how you can. Are you going to bring us drinks? The drinks are here, each set of four seats has a drinks bar. Are you going to bring us some salty peanuts? What will you do?"

It was a fair question. What the hell do flight attendants do?

Miss Parker tried to reign in her growing irritation with the woman. "If you need anything communicated to the pilot and co-pilot —"

The redhead laughed, a tinkling laugh which made Miss Parker's fingers itch. Chabot tapped something at her elbow.

"I have a phone here for that. Your reasons for being here dwindle by the second, miss."

Miss Parker almost growled. Chabot was asking for a boxed ear.

"If you have no use for a flight attendant, why did you let me stay on board?" she asked. It couldn't hurt to ask. Nobody was going to be thrown off the bus now, up at thirty-five thousand feet.

Chabot pouted. "In part, to see you try to defend your position, but you've given up already. A shame." She took a sip of her drink, a painfully sweet ice wine. Her mannerisms as she did so — the careful curve of her fingers, the knowing eye contact throughout — spurred Miss Parker to realize exactly who Chabot reminded her of: Brigitte. The comparison didn't do Chabot any favours. "I felt like being generous, that's all. The more, the merrier. Speaking of which, how about the other flight attendant?"

"The other —" Miss Parker realized she must be talking about Jarod. "Oh, he's not a flight attendant."

"He's not?" said Chabot, with a carefully raised eyebrow. She raised her voice. "Sir! The gentleman up in the first row! Come here, please!" Jarod bent his head around the seats. His expression was bland and stony, and looked wholly alien on such a familiar face.

"Hm?" he said.

Chabot jerked her head towards the back of the plane.

"Come on back, sir, tell us your story. I like to know the people who stow away on my aeroplane."

Jarod obeyed, and Miss Parker noted that even his posture had changed: straight-backed, long strides, all of it suggested some kind of military background.

"Hello, ma'am," he said. His voice was atypically soft, less expressive than Miss Parker was used to. As a long-time student of Jarod's work, in a way she found it exhilarating to watch it unfold first-hand, without any impetus to run in and interrupt things with sweepers and guns and sweepers with guns. "Jarod Spencer, Federal Air Marshal. Is everything all right?"

Miss Parker watched Chabot's eyes rove over Jarod shamelessly, paying special attention to (among other areas) the straps of the shoulder holster and their flattering effect on Jarod's chest and shoulders. Miss Parker couldn't fault her taste — it was a good look on him.

"Perfectly fine, I just wanted to meet you. An Air Marshal, is that right? Should I be concerned? I've never had to fly with an air marshal before. Please, sit down and talk with us." Jarod did so with a precision that suggested a well-oiled inner machinery.

"Things change, ma'am. The air marshals have been expanded to more adequately support air travel security, to increase our presence on both international and domestic flights."

Chabot looked blank for a moment, then: "Oh, right, since the —" She waved her hand dismissively. The redhead next to her blushed on her boss's behalf. "Right. You Americans are so wound up over these things now. On private flights, too, though? I would have thought that would apply only to commercial flights."

"All flights, ma'am."

Miss Parker had to admit, the just-the-facts-ma'am, no-muss-no-fuss approach was working. A more talkative character would be expected to supply more detail, and more detail would lead to more opportunities to slip up.

The man from the back row of seats — Miss Parker supposed this must be the aforementioned 'Marc' — hopped up by two rows so he was kitty-corner from Jarod.

"Did I hear you right? You said you're an Air Marshal?"

Miss Parker caught Jarod's quick once-over of the newcomer. She wondered if anyone else had.

"That's right," said Jarod.

"Oh." Marc sounded thrown. "Right. Thanks."

"Has my presence caused a problem?" Jarod's approach shifted slightly to project a kind of bureaucratic earnestness.

"No no, it's perfectly all right," Chabot assured him. "As I said, the more the merrier. I am afraid your skill-set will go to waste on this flight, however, just like those of your fellow stowaway. We're really very boring at Yalient. And if anything did happen, Marc would take care of it. He is my head of security."

Marc nodded and tapped the name tag pinned to his sweater. It read 'MARC LAROUCHE, CSO' in a serifed font.

Jarod frowned. "Yalient?"

Chabot smiled, with a tinge of impatience.

"My company. We provide all kinds of insurance, mostly in Canada right now but we're trying to expand into the states."

Jarod nodded thoughtfully.

"I've heard of you," he said. Chabot smiled. "You were in the news." Chabot stopped smiling.

"Oh, because —" said the minnow-mouthed man, but Chabot shushed him.

"I try to stay away from the news, it makes me too upset," his boss mused. "You have to take everything with a grain of salt."

"Something about a suicide," Jarod continued.

Just then, Miss Parker thought she head a distant, muffled thunk. The sound shook her out of her reverie. Where had that sound come from?

"Ye-es," said the redhead. "Poor Annick. She was a friend of mine, or." She pressed her lips together. "At least, I counted her as one of my friends. She was very troubled. I'm Christiane, by the way. Nice to meet you, Air Marshal."

Jarod nodded, and the gesture was punctuated by another thunk. The sound came from below their feet. The wheels folding up into the body of the plane? But no, Miss Parker had heard the chorale chunk of the wheels long before they'd reached cruising altitude.

"Yves," said Yves, previously the minnow-mouthed man. "Yves Boulerice. I didn't know Annick well, but I was sad to hear that she made such a terrible choice. I understand she left behind a little boy, now with no family at all. So very sad."

"So very sad," Chabot parroted, and the three of them shared a self-congratulatory head- bob. "I understand that depression is a disease, ben, a sickness, but you would hope a dependent would be enough to keep you on the side of the living, if nothing else."

Miss Parker felt fabric give under her fingertips, and she realized she had torn a hole in the seat headrest she'd been gripping. It's not enough that she's dead and you killed her. No, you have to go and insult her memory, too. Jarod's eyes flicked towards her. He put a hand on his knee, pointed to Chabot, and finger-spelled 'R-A-I-N-E-S' for Miss Parker to see. She let go of the head-rest, tension melting out of her shoulders. The fact alone that someone else knew how angry she was, and understood the source of her anger, was comforting enough to tide her over.

The air currents buffeted the plane, sending everything inside a-jiggling. The Yalient employees gripped their armrests and giggled nervously at each other. The cabin became muffled and quiet as Miss Parker's ears plugged from a shift in air pressure, and Jarod raised a hand to his chest. At first, Miss Parker assumed he was signing something, before his shoulders jerked in a full-body wince. He palmed the gun shot injury to his chest.

"Are you OK?" asked Marc, who had noticed the movement.

"Yes," said Jarod, though his voice came out thin and under-powered. "An old injury."

"To the chest?" said Chabot incredulously. "You must have been very lucky to survive that."

"I was," said Jarod. "Someone stepped in just in time to save me. I owe her my life."

Chabot laughed, though it plainly had not been a joke. Miss Parker stared at Jarod's profile in incredulity, daring him to look up at her and answer for that painfully earnest — arguably unearned — admission of gratitude. He didn't.

Christiane spoke up, looking intrigued.

"You were sa — oh!" She broke off and swore, the characteristic blasphemes of a quebecoise's vocabulary. Yves joined in concert. A cabinet across from Marc's seat had banged open, and something soft and bulky tumbled out into the aisle. At once, both Marc and Jarod jumped to their feet and, in sync, reached for the cabinet. Jarod got to the cabinet first, his step turning into a hobble. Marc noticed the limp.

"Another old injury?" he guessed. Jarod grunted in reply, his head buried in the contents of the cabinet.

"I keep asking to have that fixed," said Chabot. Her accent had noticeably thickened, the only external sign that she, too, had been startled by the sudden noise. "The mechanism, the latch for closing, it's loose. Do not concern yourself, Marshal, Marc can attend to it."

"I'll do it," Miss Parker said. She pasted on a customer service smile.

"You don't —" Marc started.

"Please take your seat, sir," she insisted. "You haven't let me do anything else to pay my way, do me a favour."

The fallen item appeared to be an over-stuffed backpack. Miss Parker picked it up and drew alongside Jarod, who for a moment did not move. He hailed her attention by touching his pinky finger to hers. He signed a word, but she failed to catch it, so she signed 'again'.

'Safety for falling. Some damaged. How many? How many not?'

His ASL was telegraphic, but she got the idea. These were —

"My parachutes," explained Chabot, following along like a caboose on Miss Parker's train of thought. She turned back to the seated group. "Have you ever sky-dived, Marshal?"

"I have, yes."

Miss Parker remembered that case. He'd poisoned the mark with belladonna.

Chabot's entire person came to life.

"Oh, isn't it wonderful? My friends say I must have a death wish, to have sky-diving for my hobby. But no, I have a life wish. I want to feel alive."

Miss Parker was not the least surprised to hear that Chabot was an adrenaline junkie, much as her outward appearance did not fit the most common stereotype. She'd gone to school with the children of the rich and powerful — hell, she'd been a child of the rich and powerful — and corporate had been full of the under-achieving progeny of the nouveaux-riches. They didn't have any real problems and faced no real risks, so they created risks and problems to feel something. Anything.

She focused on the cabinet. On first glance, there was one glaring problem: the back-up chutes were all missing. All of them, not some, which didn't jive with Jarod's observation. It also didn't constitute damage so much as negligence. He must have seen something else. Presumably Jarod had not unpacked any of the chutes in the few seconds he'd stood in front of the cabinet, so the evidence must be external. With this in mind, Miss Parker examined the deployment mechanisms, and — oho.

Super-glue gummed up the mechanism in six of the eight bags.

"Are you having trouble? Marc, why don't you help her?" said Chabot.

Miss Parker heaved her shoulder into the outer-most parachute bag and closed the cabinet door.

"I got it," she said. Catching Jarod's eye, she signed 'six damaged, two good'.

When she re-joined the group, all too aware of Marc's eyes on her, she found the Yalient employees discussing recent news with Jarod. Or rather, at Jarod, since the latter was listening in silence as the rest of the group chattered away.

"A hundred-fifty homes, all up in smoke," said Yves.

"Two hundred, I heard," countered Christiane.

"And everyone had to evacuate, I'm sure. It's been a week, I wonder how long they'll have to stay away."

"I've never heard of Kelowna, it's in Alberta?"

"British Columbia. They get a lot of wildfires there."

Kelowna. Bizarrely, it rang a bell, though Miss Parker would be the first to admit she knew next to nothing about Canadian geography. Then it came to her — she'd landed at Kelowna International Airport with an ostentatious assortment of international contraband only a week or so previous, when Lyle had nearly beaten her to a Jarod collar. Mr Lyle was still her top suspect for that misdirect to British Columbia. Assuming he was the guilty party, had he known when he'd passed along the fake tip that the town was on fire? If she ever saw him again, she had another reason to knee him in the gonads.

"Did you hear this news out of Philadelphia?" said Marc loudly. He plopped down in the seat across the aisle from Jarod. "I think you'll find it interesting."

Miss Parker tensed. Jarod's hands froze in his lap.

"Do please tell us," said Chabot. Miss Parker couldn't tell if her speech was slurred from the ice wine, or her accent had thickened again, or both.

"A suspected racketeer was found dead, shot to death. This is nothing special, there are people shot every day in this country. But here is what is exciting: the police suspected two people of killing the man, and they went to arrest them at a hospital. But guess what?"

He did not immediately continue, as he was one of those terrible people who say 'guess what' and genuinely want other people to guess.

Christiane gasped. "What? Did they take a nurse hostage?"

Chabot flapped at her.

"Don't encourage him. Tell us, Marc, we are not playing guessing games with you."

Marc was undeterred. Miss Parker had not moved; she was rooted to the spot.

"They stole a helicopter and flew away!"

"A helicopter!" Christiane clasped her hands in delight.

"But I haven't told you the most interesting part."

Chabot groaned. "Spit it out!"

For a moment, all that could be heard was the rumble of the engines and, somewhere below their feet, a muffled scraping sound.

"It was a woman and a man, both tall and dark-haired. And here's my favourite part: they brought in a police sketch artist, and sent the pictures out to every airport in the country. And the woman… looked remarkably like you."

And he looked up at Miss Parker.