Parker and Sydney sat in a supermarket parking lot in downtown Spokane, a couple of blocks down from the main campaign office. They'd been sitting there for hours, listening to Jarod schmooze. Today was their first real chance at glimpsing Nikki Angus's sought-after closet skeleton. Said skeleton couldn't show up soon enough, in Parker's opinion. If she had to spend another afternoon in a stuffy rental, ignoring Sydney's attempts to make small talk, she'd invent her own version of quicksilver madness.

If there had been a perk to hunting Jarod, it was this: it had never been dull. The hunt kept her busy, sometimes busier than she wanted to be. She was always sifting through clues, darting across the country, trying not to turn an ankle as she chased her quarry on foot. To Parker's dawning annoyance, being Jarod's handler was not nearly so hands-on as her former position. To be blunt, it was boring. It made little logistical sense for her to be on site for the lion's share of the job, which meant that she spent the bulk of her time sitting in a car near the action, instead of being involved in the action. Some days, she didn't see Jarod at all, only heard his baritone over her earpiece dropping periodic updates.

The spit of static filled her ears, followed by Jarod's voice. "Mathyssen is leaving the campaign office, I'm on her."

"We'll follow in the car," said Parker, eager for something (anything) to do. She jammed the key in the ignition.

"No, don't." His irritation came through loud and clear even over their shoddy radio set-up. "You'll tip her off. She's not headed for her car, I can tail her on foot. I'll update you if she gets in a vehicle."

Parker sat back against her seat, silently fuming. Sydney gave her a sideways look.

"Roger," he said. "We'll stay put."

Parker had never seen one of Jarod's Pretends go down, not really. She'd witnessed the immediate fallout many times, of course. The irate real estate moguls, the traumatized project directors, the recklessly litigious CEOs, she'd seen all the marks after the fact. What she'd never seen was the lead-up, the laying of track. She'd never seen how thoroughly Jarod could immerse himself in a character and roll with an unfolding plan.

So far, things were going swimmingly. If this was Jarod testing his boundaries, as Brigitte had warned, well… he didn't seem to be fighting very hard. To all appearances he had buried himself in the con, doing his best to ignore the fact that his Pretending was for the Centre's benefit.

Jarod had fallen into campaign manager Carol Mathyssen's life like an old friend. In fact, that's what he'd convinced her he was: an old friend from college. Jarod's thin manila folder had included documentation to back up a cover story, but he had used none of it. The first time he met Carol, he whipped out an impromptu cold read and described her post-secondary memories to her beat for beat. Carol had come alive while listening to his inventions, chiming in with her own details and laughing at their fictional shared experiences. Even knowing for a fact they'd never met before, Parker could only remember they weren't old classmates when she focused on the fact.

It made her squirm, wondering at what he saw when he looked at her.

From there, it had been a simple matter for Jarod to breach Mathyssen's confidences, get himself hired to the Angus campaign team, and convince Carol of the importance of his role as a public relations specialist. My job is to shield Nikki from scandal. I can't do that unless I know what kind of scandal I should be prepared to fight, he'd said. Or something to that effect; Parker and Sydney had heard it second-hand from their field agent after a long, dull day of surveillance. In any case, it had worked. Jarod was confident that if today went well, they might cut the projected assignment length in half. Parker was daydreaming of her bed at home already.

"Was he this good at lying when he was a kid?" she asked.

"Hm?" grunted Sydney. He turned off his mic. Parker did the same, silently cursing her forgetfulness. They usually left the lines open unless Sydney had some inane intricacy of the mind to discuss, so she'd forgotten to turn hers off before speaking. If Jarod had heard her question on his end, he gave no sign.

"You raised him," she continued. "I was a kid once, I remember how often little kids lie. Was he this good at it when he was a kid?"

Sydney stared out the front windshield into the middle distance, giving the question due consideration.

"If he lied much when he was a kid, I didn't notice. That is, he was convincing enough that I believed him. I don't think it occurred to him to lie with the frequency most kids do, though. I don't know why. Perhaps because he spent little time with other kids his own age. He's always been a Pretender, but Pretending never demanded another person's deception until he escaped. He was a good kid, he did as he was told." Sydney paused. "Until he didn't."

Parker snorted. "I can think of a few times when little Jarod didn't do as he was told."

"Oh, sure, so can I. Not as many as you'd expect, though." Sydney squinted at her. "Speaking of doing as you're told, you seem to be adjusting well to the new assignment."

"You mean after throwing a tantrum about it?" Parker wriggled in her seat. Her leg was killing her, bent at the same angle for hours on end. "God, this is the worst, hang on—" She cracked the driver's side and pushed her leg through the gap, closing her eyes as the cool air hit her skin. Even a slightly different posture was a gorgeous relief. "There. Hm. I'm adjusting well, am I? I must be fooling you better than I'm fooling myself."

"You don't think you are?"

"Nothing about all this is well-adjusted." She sighed. "I stand by what I said, it can't end well."

"As far as I can tell, Jarod has been focusing remarkably well."

"Sure, Jarod's… functioning, but it's been less than a week on the job. If we get through a brush with Jarod's new weekly demon intact, maybe then I'll start feeling more confident that we'll all survive the year."

The car fell silent as Parker reviewed in her head the disorganized slides depicting Jarod's brush with insanity down on SL-25.

Boring though it was, this first assignment was going much more smoothly than expected. She'd never say as much to Sydney, but truth be told, what had made the mission relatively easy so far — easy, yet boring — was the built-in distance between herself and Jarod. The mission to ruin Nikki Angus hadn't forced the two of them into constant proximity, as she'd feared when she accepted the post. She heard from him a couple of times a day, but that wasn't so unusual. Back when she'd been hunting him, it hadn't been out of the ordinary to talk to him on the phone once or twice a week. They had simply subbed out maddening clues and taunts for updates on the comings and goings of Washingtonian politicians. She could almost pretend, four times out of five, that she was simply exchanging intel with an unusually resourceful sweeper.

Would future assignments be nearly so kind? Somehow, she doubted it.

Sydney craned his neck in his seat, looking past her to the open door.

"Your leg is bothering you?"

"It's fine," she grunted. She didn't want to talk about the leg. Before she'd left, Cox had tried his very best to convince her to take a wheelchair with her on the jet, "just to have," he'd said. "Better to have it and not need it!" She'd refused on principle. No, it was not better to have it and not need it. The cane was bad enough, reminding her constantly that she needed a third limb to get around comfortably. A bulky wheelchair would take up space and signal to everyone who spotted it (including herself) that the simple task of walking was now too much of a hardship for the once formidable Miss Parker. It would haunt her.

Again, the spit of static.

"I'm still on Mathyssen, but I have my own tail now. That guy I told you about, the volunteer coordinator. I don't know if he suspects anything, but he's trying to catch up to me. I need one of you to waylay him. He should have passed your position twenty seconds ago, you can head him off if you hurry."

On another day, Parker might have made some crack about Jarod's competence, might have mocked him for failing to shake a tail without help. Today, she was just glad for the opportunity to get out of this stuffy rental. She made to step out of the car, groaned, and groped for the cane lying across the backseat.

"Uh, Miss Parker?" said Sydney.

Damn cane. It had rolled backwards during the trip here, just out of her grasp. She swore under her breath.

Sydney activated his mic. "I'm on it, Jarod."

Her fingers finally curled around the cane and she wrestled it into the front seat. There was no way in hell she'd stay in the car for this. Nothing would stand between her and the first taste of fresh air in hours.

"Forget it, Syd, I'm taking care of it," she spat.

Sydney made a pained face. "I'm sorry, Miss Parker, but you won't catch up."

"The hell I—"

"There's no time to argue about this. I'm sorry. I'll see you soon."

He was out of the car before she summoned an argument. He was halfway down the block, still, before she summoned an argument. She didn't have an argument. Sydney had almost caught up to the over-curious volunteer coordinator by the time Parker extricated herself from the car, steadied herself on her feet, and spotted the target. She could see the two of them a block and a half down. Sydney had pulled out his wallet and appeared to be weaving some farce about having seen it fall from the man's jacket pocket. As she watched, Sydney leaned forward with an indistinct comment and a sly look, and the man laughed. Sydney, making a joke. Will wonders never cease?

It would do the trick. Jarod had all the time he needed to slip the tail.

Parker took a deep breath of Spokane air. Her grip tightened around the handle of her cane as she fought the urge to hit something. Beaten out in a foot race by a seventy-something. Is this who she had become? Someone who hung back while others took care of things without her?

It wasn't as if she desperately yearned to help Jarod shake a tail. She hated the handler assignment, and she'd rather be doing almost anything else. Given that this job had fallen in her lap, however, she wanted to deal with it her way. It hadn't gone her way, not at all. So far, the job had amounted to her acting as little more than a bump on a log.

Her frustration unwound in a single moment of reckless energy, and she flung her cane across the parking lot. It bounced on the gravel and came to rest behind the back wheels of a pickup truck. After a beat, she sighed and limped off to fetch it.


They reconvened at dusk. The Centre had booked three hotel rooms at a three-star joint, a walkable distance from campaign headquarters. Rooms 304, 306 and 308, all in a row. Sydney's room was in the middle, and by unspoken agreement, they had designated it the meeting room, for whenever they couldn't avoid debriefing in person.

"Thanks for the assist, Sydney," said Jarod. He'd arrived last, looking windswept but subtly triumphant. "Following Carol was… ah, it was informative, I'm glad I didn't have to miss that opportunity to throw Lennie off."

Lennie, Parker could only assume, was the volunteer coordinator.

Sydney nodded graciously. "Of course."

Miss Parker took the weight off her leg and sat at the provided desk. The desk was round-edged and lacquered to within an inch of its life, and lined with brochures advertising local tourist attractions. These brochures represented the only literature in the room aside from the Gideon bible in the nightstand drawer.

Seething, Parker leaned over and pulled a pre-mixed cocktail — a Bloody Mary — from the minibar. As she cracked open the can, she caught Sydney's inquiring glance.

"What?" She took a spiteful sip. "It's on the company card."

"Oh, I know," said Sydney. "But a Bloody Mary? In the evening?"

"I wanted one. Get off my back," she snapped. She turned her attention back to Jarod, who had watched the exchange with a raised eyebrow. "What's going on, Jarod? I want to get back to my room, let's get on with it."

"I wanted to tell you both the good news," said Jarod, business-like and cheerful. "We should be able to head back to the Centre in two days. I have one more thing I need to do tomorrow, and we'll be done. We can leave bright and early the next day."

If he expected cheers, whoops and applause, he didn't get any. One more thing, he said. This was in keeping with a trend Parker had noticed over the course of the mission so far: Jarod preferred to allude to his plans in the vaguest terms possible. "I'm going to the office to take care of something," he'd say. "Carol shared some critical information this morning," he'd tease, and it would take a pair of proverbial pliers to get anything more substantial out of him. One more thing, indeed. Like she and Sydney were the marks, instead of Nikki Angus and her campaign team. Parker's eyes narrowed.

"So you'll be able to figure out what Angus is hiding and produce actionable proof of it tomorrow?"

The slightest, most minute pause.

"Yes."

Parker pushed herself to her feet. Her left leg wobbled.

"You must think I was born yesterday," she hissed, hobbling right up into Jarod's personal space. He didn't step back, but followed her with dark eyes. The air between them buzzed. "Last you told us, you were still cozying up to Carol. No hint of Nikki's dark secret. Now you expect us to believe that one day will be enough to both uncover the secret and secure documentation of it. How could you know that you'll have access to all that in one fell swoop?"

Jarod held her stare, the silence stretching out, long and taut and bristling. Sydney cleared his throat.

"Miss Parker, you know better than most what Jarod is capable of. If he says—"

"Oh, I know what he can accomplish. I think he's hiding what he's already accomplished. You've been leaving details out of your updates, haven't you, Jarod?"

Sydney didn't have an answer for that. He looked to Jarod, who closed his eyes for a moment and, finally, backed away.

"… I've only kept back unverified information," he admitted. A heavy sigh from Sydney. "I don't want you reporting back to the Centre with a pile of rumours. I needed proof."

Parker twisted the can of Bloody Mary between her palms, a bitter smile spreading across her mouth.

"So you already know Angus's dirty secret."

Jarod folded his arms across his chest, defensive. "I've had a good idea since I met her, yes. Since I heard her run through her platform with the rest of the staff."

"You didn't think we needed to know?"

"You didn't. You don't. Not yet."

Parker laughed, low and humourless. "You don't get to make that call."

But Jarod was standing firm.

"I'll tell you tomorrow. When I have proof," he said quietly.

Parker opened her mouth, her lips already curled in vehemence — and stopped. The moment hovered as she searched his resolute expression. Her first instinct was to insist on her way, but there was something childish in that instinct. Everything in her wanted to push the issue, but what was the difference? If ruining a gubernatorial candidate's career tomorrow rather than today would somehow appease Jarod's moral standards, then let him have this small comfort. As long as that was all it was — a moral comfort.

She reclaimed her seat at the desk.

"What's so vital about tomorrow?" she asked. "Is there something important on Angus's agenda?"

Careful relief showed on Jarod's face.

"Mathyssen is hosting a fundraiser at her house," he said. "She's funding most of the campaign herself — the Mathyssens have big coffers — but the campaign needs a boost in funds to give her the edge for the final push. The records are at her place. The fundraiser will be packed and I'll have a good reason to be there, I'm invited. It's the perfect opportunity."

"Definitely?" said Sydney. He'd been picking aimlessly at the bedspread during his coworkers' standoff, head down and eyes averted, apparently to give them some privacy. Now he raised his head. "You know for certain that these records are there?"

"I'm certain," said Jarod. "Everything's in place. I told Mathyssen that I had an extra hand available to help with catering, Sydney, and took care of the vetting details. They're expecting you."

"Oh," said Sydney, taken aback. "I didn't — alright, I suppose I can do that. What will be expected of me?"

"Setting out food and drinks and things, it's not complicated."

A growing sense of suspicion crept over Miss Parker.

"Aren't you leaving something out?" she asked.

"Right," said Jarod, discomfort crumpling his expression. "Yes. I, ah. Need a shot."

"Not that," she said dismissively. "What am I doing at the fundraiser?"

He blinked. "… I didn't think you'd want to be there."

She kneaded the spot between her eyebrows with one finger.

"Of course I don't want to be there. I'm not champing at the bit for the chance to balance a dozen mini-quiches on a platter and walk around offering to refill champagne glasses. It's my job. I'm your handler, not Sydney. If Sydney is there, I need to be there too."

"I don't need you there." He kept his tone carefully polite. "We have it covered."

"I'm sure you do. I'm coming anyway."

Again, it wasn't as if this was something she wanted to do. Staying back at the hotel room would make for a peaceful, if boring, night. What she couldn't bear was the thought of once again being left on the sidelines, feeling like a useless, spoiled encumbrance.

She hadn't ruined herself. She was still here.

"I don't—"

Parker snapped. "This isn't a suggestion, Jarod. It's an order."

The hotel room went still. No one spoke. For a moment, Parker figured she'd successfully got in the last word for once. Then, the implications unfolded before her.

If you disobey the orders of your handler, counteragent will be withheld. That was what Brigitte had said, wasn't it? Something like that. She would have to keep that in mind. Order held weight. Order was a threat. Do this, or the Centre will torture you with an awful, aching madness.

She wasn't about to take back her words, however. She couldn't lose face.

"Fine," Jarod muttered, after a terrible pause. "But I can't get you on the catering staff on such short notice. I'll get you in as a guest. I'm allowed a plus one."

A guest? That was better. She wouldn't have to serve a single mini-quiche.

"That works," she said.

"It's semi-formal. I'll be wearing grey."

"Okay? Good for you."

Impatience and irritation congregated on Jarod's brow. "I'm telling you so you can choose something to match."

Parker snorted. "Why the hell would I want to match?"

"Because you're his plus one," said Sydney. Of the three of them, he was the only one whose patience wasn't frayed past endurance. In fact, judging by his expression, he'd just been told the best joke he'd ever heard. Jarod let Sydney's evident glee pass without comment, though not without an irritated glower shot his way.

"Right. It can't look like I picked you up off the street. We have to look like we came together."

A creeping inconvenience spread out across Parker's immediate future. Why, again, had she refused to spend the night at the hotel, watching late-night TV and raiding the minibars?

(Answer: To prove to herself that she didn't have to spend the night at the hotel, watching late-night TV and raiding the minibars.)

"I'll be ready," she said. "What time?"

Jarod scribbled down the event information. The plan was for him to pick her up so they could drive to the Mathyssens' together.

That done, he turned to leave. He was two steps to the door when he swayed sideways into the wall, clutching at his skull with an accompanying moan of pain. Sydney rushed to his side and slid a forearm under Jarod's to steady him. Jarod yanked his arm away.

"M'fine," he snapped.

"You're not," said Sydney, a gentle reminder. "It's like you said, you need a shot. At this pace, your system will be completely flooded before the fundraiser tomorrow. The other guests won't care much for that."

Jarod straightened, and his face cleared. Perhaps it was Parker's imagination, but he looked a little embarrassed.

"Right, yeah. Let's get that over with." He sat on the bed and held out his left arm, the same arm Cox had jabbed that first afternoon on SL-25.

Parker zipped open the pouch she'd found tucked into her carry-on luggage when she boarded the jet. It was small and discrete, like a travel-sized first aid kit. Inside was a single dose of counteragent in a fat syringe. Brigitte was keeping them on a tight deadline — no spare doses.

Cox had trained her on counteragent administration during Jarod's time off. How to tie the tourniquet, how to find a vein, how to get rid of air bubbles before injection. Parker had spent a good hour and a half poking away at volunteer limbs until she could do it blindfolded; hell, she could probably do it stone drunk.

"Is there a problem?" asked Jarod.

The needle had been hovering a scant inch from the surface of his skin for a beat too long. Parker gathered herself.

"No. Keep still."

She'd hesitated. She'd hesitated because she'd caught Jarod's eye when she closed in with the tip of the needle, and had seen the hate and fear there. Don't look at me like that, she thought. I'm not doing this to you.

But she was.

In the end, there was nothing to worry about. Bare seconds post-injection, Jarod sagged bonelessly across the bedspread.

"Is he—?" Sydney stammered.

"I think it knocks him out for a couple seconds," said Parker. "That's what happened last time. He'll be up in a sec."

Jarod was, in fact, up in a sec. He blinked blearily at the two of them, pushing himself up into a seated position.

"Thanks," he murmured. He blinked some more. "Hm. I feel better. I thought I had a handle on how to tell the difference between myself and the gland's effects, but I guess not," said Jarod. He stared at his hands, clenching and flexing before him. "I'm getting complacent. Over the last few days, I've had to be so much more aware of every emotional reaction. Every time I feel angry, I—"

He broke off, seeming to realize his audience. Perhaps he'd be comfortable telling all this to his pseudo-parent Sydney, but Miss Parker was a different story.

"You don't trust it," she said, an inadvertent mutter.

Jarod looked at her in surprise.

"Yeah," he said.

Parker avoided his eye. She shoved the syringe back into the pouch and zipped it back up as fast as her tripping fingers allowed.

Foul. This was foul, every inch of it and her and this was foul.