He was close, temptingly close.  She could comfort him, like the friends they were trying to be, and he wouldn’t push her away.  She could sense it.  But she made no move, and neither did he.  Jarod was the touchy-feely person, given to spontaneous embraces, reaching out to the people he trusted like touchstones, even as a little boy.    Miss Parker had never learned to trust as freely.  The gestures of love between her and her father had all been practiced, planned, like they were reading out of a TV script for a show called This is What a Real Family Would Do Now.  In the Parker family, they were all pretenders, liars.    By pressuring him, she had refused to let Jarod pretend himself out of this pseudo-relationship.  She would not pretend them into it.  Instead, she would remind him that she was the woman who had chased him for five years, who swore to kill him.  Who had shot and, she thought, killed her own brother and walked away.  She turned and continued walking.    After a moment, she heard Jarod take a slow breath and follow her.    The hollow ache in her chest clawed at her, less satisfying and more painful than the familiar pain in her knees.  Who’s pretending now?    They passed by an open door which led into a small, neat office.  There were two filing cabinets pressed up against a wall, another bookcase filled mostly with how-to books, college and graduate school texts, and technical journals.  Quite a few of them were about identity disorders.   The bottom shelf was stuffed with thin red notebooks, those infuriating gifts he left her at the end of every Pretend he did while they were chasing him.  She had hundreds of them herself, stored away in the old simlab.  There were also newspaper articles tacked to a bulletin board.  She lingered long enough to read a few of them.    RETIRED MILITARY POLICEMAN SAVES MISSING BOY.  “GUARDIAN ANGEL” LAWER FREES INNOCENT MAN FROM DEATH ROW.  SURGEON REMOVES “IMPOSSIBLE” BRAIN TUMOR—THEN DISAPPEARS.  MYSTERY HACKER CRACKS STOCK FRAUD PLOT  And, more intriguingly, JAROD: THE SEARCH FOR THE VANISHING GOOD SAMARITAN.  There was a black-and-white silhouette of a man’s head and shoulders in the center of the article.  It had a big, white question mark printed over the face.  Jarod had scribbled a mustache and a halo on it.   The subhead was NBC TO CREATE SHOW BASED ON MYSTERIOUS, REAL-LIFE HERO.   That almost made her laugh.  They could call it The Pretender.  The only difficulty would be figuring out who the show was actually about.  Ha!  If the program was anything like their lives, it would be a flop.  No one wanted to watch a dozen wounded people hurt each other.  It was bad enough enduring it herself.    She hoped the actors would be better.   Jarod reached around her and closed the door.  “Let’s keep going,” he said.  There was no trace of pain in his voice.   And then they were at the end of the hall.  The door was surprisingly innocuous, for such a long trek.  It felt like they had walked a mile.  She opened it.  Within were floor-to-ceiling stocks of food, water, equipment.   Someone could hide for years in a place like this. There was also a vehicle, under a worn, tan tarp that looked like a refugee from Desert Storm.  Jarod removed it without ceremony.   It was a vehicle, dwindled by the incredible size of the room, but still a massive specimen of auto mechanics.  She could not have been more surprised if she tried.  Her initial reaction was:  Bastard.  That airplane pilot told me Jarod didn’t have a Jeep.  Her second was: Oh, my God.   “A Hummer?” she said, cocking an eyebrow.  The machine was covered in mud.  It looked like it had just been in Desert Storm.  Except most of the American vehicles had come back from that war as fresh as when they’d left for it.   She’d loved Hummers as a teenager.  They were almost as cool as red convertible Corvettes.   Jarod shrugged.  “At one point or another.”   She wondered what Jarod could do to a poor innocent Hummer to make it any tougher.  Laser-sight headlights?  “Don’t tell me it spits oil and smoke out the back to halt your pursuers.”   Jarod winked.  “Only tacks,” he said, but the joke lacked luster.   He reached into the glove compartment and brought out a silver whistle.  He blew it, and it didn’t make a sound.   A human-audible sound.   Carson, Jarod’s dog, emerged from underneath one of the shelves and hopped into the backseat, making a spot for himself between a box of military-issue, freeze-dried meals and another labeled POWDERED MILK.  She also noticed that the Radio Shack bags he’d brought with him to the cabin were there.    “Jarod, we are not taking your dog to Africa.”   “We’re not driving to Africa,” he pointed out.  “And I can’t leave him alone here.”   What?  Would the dog run out of his thousand pounds of freeze-dried Purina? However, she couldn’t bring herself to speak those words, either.  Something about the way Jarod hopped in the driver’s seat and ruffled the yellow Lab’s short hair, his exaggerated movements and forced jokes, because he was trying very hard to show Miss Parker that her words and her unconcern hadn’t affected him at all.  Carson drew back his black lips and let his tongue hang out in what could only be a doggie smile.   She got in the seat, beside Jarod, promising herself that she would be driving the next time they stopped.  She hated being a passenger.   Jarod pressed his thumb to the ignition button, another thumbprint-scanner, she guessed, though that wasn’t too unusual with most new cars.  She noticed that the vehicle didn’t have any switch to turn the car over to auto-drive, which meant they’d have to stay off the major highways that led into the larger cities.    That was all right, though; the auto-drive systems had only been implemented in New York, San  Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angles, as a kind of experiment.  They wouldn’t be going through any of those cities, she guessed, and the excision of “features” like auto-drive, On-Star, and Global Positioning would only make the Hummer that much more difficult to track.   “This is an awfully expensive car to be dragging through the mud.”   They were going up at a high angle.  She wondered how they could have gotten this low.  Their walk hadn’t been that far, nor the decline that deep.   “I wouldn’t have bought it if I wasn’t going to use it.  Don’t worry, Miss Parker, we’ll take it through a car wash before we leave Canada.”   There was only a detached moment, in the garage’s dark exit, for her to wonder where Jarod got all the money to build the cabin, and buy the Hummer, not to mention pay for the equipment and supplies and upgrades of this bizarre underground hideaway.  Certainly, he was capable of playing the stock market, probably with more skill than anyone else alive.  Of course, there were groups that investigated those types of winnings, and not just the SEC.  The Centre, which ran a few projects for the SEC, took a quick look at all the big stock winners, for example.