Parker took another bite of her dinner and reached out for a warm piece of sourdough.  Underneath the table, Jarod’s dog laid its heavy muzzle on top of her foot.

  She waited until the light left his eyes.  They’d had vanilla ice cream with hot chocolate syrup after dinner, chuckling about their grown-up lives and dodging their worst memories.  It was hard not to dredge up all the things she’d forgotten, with such an integral piece of her past sitting next to her and acting like he’d always acted.  She was sure there were some pretty terrible experiences Jarod didn’t want relive, either.
  “Why do you live here, Jarod?” she asked after a while.  “It’s nice.  Cool vacation house.  But for goodness sake, it’s completely empty here.  There’s nothing to do.  You must be going nuts.”
  He lifted an eyebrow at the word cool, unsure of its usage, probably.  He hadn’t exactly grown up with a thorough knowledge of slang. 
  “I’m hiding.”  His eyes trailed to the large window which let starlight into his kitchen.  He’d tapped the control panel in the wall and dimmed the kitchen lights an hour ago.  He peered at it as if he thought someone might jump up behind it.
  Or shoot through it.
  For a hideaway, this place had pretty lousy security, Miss Parker thought suddenly.  She wished she’d been allowed to bring her Smith and Wesson, but the checking-weapons policy only applied to U.S flights. Canada had very strict anti-gun laws.  Not that that would matter to a criminal.
  “Jarod, I stopped hunting you when I let you out of that house.  I know my father pushed for the search to continue, but you don’t have to worry…”
  “You think the Centre was the only corporation interested?  Or the only organization involved?  You may have been able to stop running from your past, Miss Parker, but mine is still haunting me.  Every day.”  The look on his face now was definitely pain.  Pain and battle-weariness, feelings she’d worn like banners for most of her life.
   She could still read him, if not as well.
  There was only one organization she could think of.  Other groups would be interested, but not as daring, not as cruel.  Nobody had the big brass ones or the money to capture and imprison a fleeing genius like Jarod except her Centre, which had given up, and… “The Triumvirate,” she breathed.   They were still so terrifying, and still had so many eyes and tentacles in the corporation that to whisper them felt like a sin.  There hadn’t been any official contact with them for years.  Parker had likened the atrocities they committed to those of concentration camps.  The Triumvirate.  Bigger than international law.  Bigger than the Centre.  Bigger than Jarod.
  His expression was raw.  He stared at the floor.  “Mostly,” he murmured.  There were still traces of the precocious and abused boy in him.
  “We should go to the living room,” he said.
  After a moment, she nodded carefully.  She felt like she was standing at some kind of precipice, and the wrong move would send her plunging to her death.  Jarod could have asked nearly anything of her now, and she would’ve said yes, her guilt weighing her down.  “All right,” she agreed, gently.    She got to her feet and walked through the open door.  After a moment, without looking behind her, she felt Jarod get up and follow.  She sat down on the couch and watched as he moved across the room, slowly, as if carrying a great weight on his shoulders.
  Jarod sighed heavily, and sat on the loveseat, within touching distance.  He turned away from her and pressed his thumb against what was ostensibly a wrought iron keyhole in the drawer of an oak side table, the kind of drawer most people kept coasters with wry comments on them and old copies of Reader’s Digest in. It beeped, and when he lifted his hand, a small light glowed green from within.    It made her want to retract her earlier thought about security.  This place was wired pretty creatively, and Jarod had a lot of time on his hands here…no telling what he could have worked into this place.
  Like drawers that had thumb scanners.
  He pulled open the drawer, lifted a thin manila file folder from it, and closed it.  “We can save this until tomorrow.  Maybe you should get some sleep.”  He thought for a moment, resting his hand on top of the file.  “Because you are never going to sleep the same again after seeing what’s in here.”
  He should know what he could do with his sleep.  She couldn’t wait.  Not anymore.  His words had only strengthened her curiosity, and her determination to get to the bottom of this before she returned to her job and her life.  She almost snatched the file from him, but something in Jarod’s tense form and seriousness stopped her.  This man, this portion of his personality, was different from any part of Jarod she’d seen before.
  “At the Triumvirate facility in Africa, Miss Parker, there are approximately one hundred and fifty children.  Stolen from their parents.  Growing up miles from civilization, in dormitories.  Apparently, they all have above-average intelligence.  Gifted children.”  His words dripped with scorn.  He might as well have been talking about himself.  “They live in squalor.  They’ve been harmed.  But worst of all, these children…”  He froze, as if he couldn’t speak.  There were no words for that kind of evil.
One hundred and fifty children.  Prisoners.  They’ve been harmed. Parker felt sick with horror, dizzy with anger.  Violated.  She’d worked so hard, to end the presence of children at the Centre, Jarod’s legacy… and they were still committing atrocities.
  Jarod had comforted her in the coffee shop that morning—had it only been that morning?—now, she did what she never expected she’d do.  She rested a manicured hand on top of Jarod’s, feeling a flood of warmth that came from contact with another human being as much as Jarod’s slightly-higher-than-normal temperature.
  Jarod jumped like he’d been shot.  But he didn’t pull away, and it was enough of a prompt for him to go on.  “These children…they’ve been brainwashed, by someone we both knew a long time ago.  They’re sociopaths.  All of them.  I’ve seen these children, Miss Parker.  I took the photographs in this file.  And their eyes… Maybe, some of the younger ones can be deprogrammed, if we can get them out.  But the reason I invited you here was because you know the man in these pictures.  You, as well as anyone.”
  With his spare hand, he reached across his chest and held out the file, daring her to take it.  I had the guts to look at these, Miss Parker.  Do you?  They’d competed when they were eleven, with Syd’s medical textbooks of human brains and eyes and mottled livers, and somehow, this had the feel of the same kind of game, taken to a new, morbid level.
  When she lifted her hand from his to take it, he turned away.  He didn’t want to see what these pictures would do to her.  He clicked his tongue, calling Carson to him in a shaky voice. 
  He really loves the goddamn dog.
  She took a breath and opened the file.