Peering around the corner, her nameless hero held her back against the bus with the press of his long arm until the coast was clear, then he snagged her hand and took off running through the tree-laced back park, and the man ran so fast, he caused her to stumble several times. Duck and run. Weave and bob. Breathe and don’t breathe.

      Catching on that they headed for a lone, well-bushed building up ahead, she withheld complaint and concentrated on gasping for breath and staying on her feet.

      When they reached the amphitheater that housed the bird shows, they found the back door locked, but that didn’t defeat her hero. He snapped the lock on the door, ripped it away as though the steel gave him no pause, and he tugged her into the building and through several rooms until they reached an office.

      If Betsy hadn’t been so frightened of the Freedom Party, she’d have been flabbergasted to wonder what else this man kept up his sleeve. The squawking of a hundred-something caged birds of every variety served to jangle her nerves.

      Regaining her breath, Betsy pressed her back to an empty wall and watched as the big bear of a man rummaged through the first-aid kit mounted on the wall, tossing out supplies onto the floor until he found what he wanted, and set the gear on the desk. Baffled by his actions, she saw him move back into one of the examination rooms through which they’d passed, rummaged through that storage as well, and he came back with something wrapped in plastic and a fat felt-tip marker.

      Her savior took up her hand and guided her into the desk seat, put the marker up to her mouth, and instructed, "Bite this."

      "Bite this?" she repeated, not seeing how biting a sign marker was going to aid their escape from the Devil.

      "Do as I say, if you want to live on this side of steel bars for the rest of your life," he prompted in a thick Aussie accent, unwrapping the plastic-covered item to reveal a disposable scalpel. "Or live at all."

      Remembering the party leader’s vague threat about catching her in her lie about not working for the Libertines and afraid to debate the possibility that she may have no life if the Freedom Party identified her, Betsy placed the marker between her teeth, and watched as he raised the scalpel and stabbed her arm.

      Shocked at his violence on the heel of her rescue, she leapt from the chair and scampered into the corner of the office, clutching her bleeding arm, and she shrieked around the marker, "Ow! What kind of lunatic are you?"

      Snatching up a bundle of bandages, he took broad steps with long legs, grabbed hold of her now bleeding shoulder, and Betsy wasn’t sure trading an arrest by the Freedom Party for this man was all that much of a great idea.

      The mystery man ordered, "Shut up, and be still. They’ve injected you with a microchip. They’ll be tracking you in seconds by satellite if I don’t get that out of your arm."

      Before he even received compliance, he stabbed her arm again, and she released a much more appropriate whine covered by the squawks of the birds.

      Sure she’d end up eating that marker, Betsy stayed still while her hero probed her shoulder with the scalpel blade. She suffered a flash of nausea with the pain, and refused to watch, figuring feeling his surgery was enough of a challenge than to watch him carve her arm up.

      When she thought she’d break her teeth gritting so hard on the marker, he declared low, "Got it."

      He held his palm open to show her a tiny black flat speck smaller than a centimeter in size, pulled from her fresh wound. "Take it."

      As he dabbed her bleeding arm with gauze from the first-aid kit and drawing squeals of pain from her, she spit out the marker, took the flake into her free hand, and examined the nondescript thing. It was hardly anything but a simple tiny square of some material a satellite could detect. If it were a tracking device, it sure escaped her, but she admitted to herself she didn’t know what such high-tech junk would look like. She was lost when the pamphlet-folding machine at work jammed up.

      But what else could they have injected into her arm but exactly what this man claimed? Knowing just a few secrets of the Freedom Party convinced her that her defender spoke the truth.

      "Hold this," he instructed, pressing the bandage to her arm, "and pass the chip to me." She held the gauze to the wound as ordered, and he took all the bloody gauze and shoved it into the pockets of his jeans. Odd.

      "Collecting medical waste?" Betsy asked.

      "No, we aren’t going to leave them a sample of your blood for the citizen DNA database. They’ll identify every place you go, establish a time line, project where you might be heading. Too bad we couldn’t stop them from taking your thumb print. They only got your left thumb. Are you left- or right-handed?"

      "Right-handed."

      "Good. Still, a thumb print enough to identify you."

      She watched him tangle the chip into a clump of fresh gauze, then he strode to the cage of a big macaw, bright and beautiful. She couldn’t see what he did, but he brought the bird out of its cage, and she saw the gauze tied to its foot.

      "It’s freedom day for you, my friend," her enigmatic defender told the bird, as if the creature understood him. A smile spread over his face as he stroked the creature’s head feathers. "Don’t let the humans catch you again."

      His smile caused Betsy to notice how handsome man he was through his scraggly hair, quite a brawny guy and well over six feet tall with blue-flame eyes that were distracting. She liked hearing his light Australian accent.

      With a sure gait, he carried the big red and yellow macaw out the door and set it free.

      Watching him return to the room, she sputtered, "I hope I didn’t trade down following you from the bus. As hard as you hit those agents, you might have killed them."

      "Don’t worry," he replied, matter-of-factly. "They’ll reincarnate."

      Amazed by his answer, Betsy echoed, "Reincarnate?"

      The man went back into the lab, and she followed, watching him rummage through drawers again. Then he took hold of her left hand, and began to wrap her thumb in gauze.

      "I can always take you back to the Freedom Party, if you’d like to go. They were quick in deciding to kill me. Who knows what they’ve planned for you."

      But from what Betsy suspected of the leader of the Freedom Party, she figured she’d be better off with this stranger, even if he turned out to be Jack the Ripper.

      "Mister Slappy just might frisk you all day. He seemed to enjoy it quite a bit. And I really can’t blame him for that." Finishing the taping of her thumb, he muttered, "Now you’re anonymous again."

      "Smart thinking." Betsy let a titter slip over his insinuation of liking to put his hands on her, but kept herself from commenting that his frisking wasn’t half as unwelcome as Slappy the Secret Service Man’s was.

      This man was sardonically funny. "Mister Slappy ... Gee, you and I don’t even know one another, and already you’re dishing out both pain and pleasure. Reminds me of old boyfriends."

      Way too stoic, he led her back to the desk, pointed at the seat and she took it, not all that steady after the minor bloodletting. She’d always been a bit squeamish. He pulled a fat roll of clear packing tape from the desk, ripped away a strip, and tacked it over the gauze covering the hole he’d dug out of her shoulder.

      Then he snatched up her hand again, tugged her to the bird house exit. Opening the door, he peered around it in search of their pursuers, but Betsy saw no one. He must not have seen anything either, for he tugged her from the small building and headed for the nearby batch of thick woods at full speed. Betsy didn’t know if she should be following him, but the alternative of getting captured by the Freedom Party goons stunk.

      Her nameless guardian led them into a nearby parking lot, and they skulked between cars until he halted them at a sporty blue sedan. Betsy peeked her head up, spotted twenty men in black ties and white shirts, coatless on a hot summer day, disbursing into the woods, weapons drawn, heads scanning. Any unwitting witness would have thought the Libertine Party was attacking.

      Betsy ducked back into the cars before they looked her way.

      "Where’s your car?"

      "On the other side of the park."

      "We’ll have to improvise."

      Betsy watched him take hold of the handle of the car concealing them and he ripped the handle off the driver’s door. Opening it, he crawled straight in, dragging her by a fistful of her sun dress across the front seat behind him, intent to take her wherever he went.

      Stronger than she thought probable, she watched him twist the ignition hard enough to break the lock, and he started the car. Well, he was a big man, and probably damn strong, Betsy quickly told herself, and brushed the oddity away.

      "Drive," he instructed in a caveman’s grunt.

      Unwilling to question providence, Betsy put the car into reverse gear, and the car crept out of the parking lot just before searchers started heading their way.