Then they’d get a few hours sleep in one of the sweeper barracks on SL-5, buy the supplies they wouldn’t pick up in Africa, and then catch a commercial flight from Dover to Atlanta, Atlanta to New York, and the twenty-three hour flight from New York to Nairobi, under the names Mr. and Mrs. Jamison, a retired couple out to live their thirty-year anniversary fantasy on an incredible African safari, which Jarod had ever-so-intelligently registered the Jamisons for.  They’d buy souvenirs, send postcards, eat at five-star restaurants and stay in the best and stay in most extravagant hotels, too, all of it immortalized on Jarod and Samantha Jamison’s Smart Chip Visa account.    Miss Parker was just glad that the imaginary Jamisons were reasonably wealthy and not to cautious about throwing away that money.  It meant they would ride first class.  At the moment, she was too tired and too worried to regret that she wouldn’t actually be going on the African safari.   At the same time, the private jet reserved for the transportation of the Director would bounce around the country a bit, and Miss Parker would conduct some very smart, and very obvious, business deals through her laptop, and maybe even have a few teleconferences, a technology trick carefully arranged by Broots.  In the meantime, Keating, who’d turned out to be a pretty good kid despite his ambitions, would ensure that business at the Centre went on as usual.  The real Jarod and Miss Parker would disappear, for six weeks at best—if Lyle had kept a mediocre hacker on her trail—or two weeks, if there was someone with the same skill level as Broots doing the electronic detective work.   This, Miss Parker and Jarod had worked out on cell and pay phones during their journey, though she was not surprised to hear that all the pieces for this little shindig, which were from Broots’ and Jarod’s ends, had already fallen into place.  All that was necessary was for Jarod to say the word.   It was a good plan, and it sounded like an infallible one.  However, Miss Parker knew how easily even the best of plans could be foiled; Jarod himself had proven that, time and time again.  And she was still stuck with the same painful problems: how to get Broots, Sydney, Daddy, Kara, and Nathan to safety.  Oh, and Broots’ daughter, Debbie, too.  Miss Parker had only spoken to the young doctor a few times, first when Debbie was a child—she’d had rescued Debbie from the more…malicious interests in the Centre once—and, infrequently, as an adult.     Debbie had made it onto Miss Parker’s short list of people she’d protect because her survival meant something big to Broots, and therefore, something big to Miss Parker.   Their trip was fraught with danger, and Parker wasn’t undertaking all of that danger herself.  That was the price she paid for allowing herself to care, and make that care obvious to the world.  She’d often told herself that she had learned from her mistake with Jarod:  you try to stop needing a person enough, you stuff down those feelings and hide them and pretend they don’t exist, and eventually, they stop existing.   Eternal love was a sweet story, but unless encouraged, fueled with constant contact and communication, that fire burned out for almost everyone.   She bit her lip.  She would hightail it to Blue Cove.  She had to find some way to protect her blood and surrogate families, and there were only a few short hours to do it in.  She focused her stinging gray eyes on the yellow line and switched back to her high-beams.   Morning had dawned, and so had two McBreakfasts, with greasy hash browns and eggs which had evolved from a carton.  Technology certainly hadn’t changed the food service industry very much, except that now you could take the short line and have your meal dispensed in thirty seconds by a talking computer.   Parker, in the end, had forgone the McBreakfast and made do with a McCoffee, which was plastered with warnings about how the beverage was very hot, and could cause severe scalds if poured on the delicate areas of one’s anatomy.  Though, Miss Parker thought, anyone who didn’t know that was too stupid to read or drink from a cup, anyway. Jarod, who’d woken from his coma, ate hers. They were in Blue Cove proper now, and Parker, who was in a giddy and uninhibited mood from lack of sleep and too much caffeine, recognized everything.  Her stomach clenched when she passed the road which would have led her home and turned onto the street which would take her to work. “You’re quiet, Jarod,” she commented acerbically.  “Feeling nervous?  You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to.”  She cursed herself for not paying attention to what she was saying.  She was being cruel. “I remember the first time I went down this road,” he murmured, clenching his hand into a fist.  “It was darker.  And I was going the other way.” “Jarod,” she said, struggling to be comforting, “I gave you your truce fourteen years ago.  I’m giving it to you now, and you can have it when this is all over, if only,” she smiled, “because you’re too damn annoying to chase.  I promise you that a sweeper team isn’t going to swoop onto your souped-up Hummer as soon as we drive through the entrance.  I’m in charge, remember?” “‘Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly’,” Jarod retorted.  “Maybe I should drive.”   It has to be frightening, for him to come back after so many years, a more aware part of herself said.  However, even without sleep, those deeper feelings would never come to the surface.  Perhaps they weren’t dead, but they were buried, and it would take more than a shovel to dig them up.  “Take it easy, Jar,” she said instead.  “You wouldn’t remember the way, and it’s only fifteen minutes.”   Of course, he would remember the way.  It would be etched, larger-than-life, into that clever photographic memory of his.  And, of course, he’d come back here as an adult, twice, once seeking refuge, and a second time, to make a deal with the old-time “family” he’d left behind.  She remembered that day vividly.  He was smiling coolly, teasingly, every sweeper’s gun in the place trained on his head, including, if she recalled correctly, her own.    He’d been glib and nonchalant, and though Miss Parker knew, even then, the reason the prisoner always made sarcastic jokes, in movies and in real life—because he was terrified—she had been impressed.  The deal was simple:  her father, who Jarod held hostage, for the young Jarod clone.   Simpler, in fact, then the plan before them.  She had come away from that particular encounter with a bullet in her back from her own people, a bullet she had taken for her father, another spontaneous risk she’d assumed without thought for someone that she loved.  She’d always thought that was strange, not because she ever would have stood by and watched as her father was killed, but because she’d always though natural survival instincts would always overpower something as human as love.   What does that mean, Sydney? Jarod had asked that question when they were doing a simulation regarding the positioning of Secret Service personnel in order to protect the President.  It was one of the first simulations she’d been allowed to watch.  Sydney had just told him that any one of those men would willingly get shot, get killed, in order to protect someone he probably hadn’t ever known before.  The questions in his mind were the same ones that lingered in hers, while she struggled to recover in the Centre medical ward.   The simulation was over; Sydney could help, and he smiled paternally, at his prize project’s naivety.  “It means, Jarod, that rational instinct doesn’t always overpower emotions.  That’s what makes us all human.  Secret Service agents protect the President because they care about him and the greatness that he represents.”