The Chase Read Online Free Page B

referring to my code of honor.”
    “You don’t have one.”
    “I’ve never revealed the identity of a client before.”
    “Because no one ever asked you. Besides, you’re retired. What do you care?”
    Duff stroked his beard. “I have to look at myself in the mirror.”
    “Hard to believe. If you’d ever looked in a mirror, you’d have shaved off that mangy beard ages ago.”
    Duff scraped his chair back and stood. “I’ll sleep on it.”
    Nick leaned forward. “C’mon, Duff, stop being so ornery. It’s early, and it’s been years since we saw each other. Let’s have a few pints and talk about old times.”
    “If we do that, I might remember that I want to kill you.”
    “Good point.” Nick pushed away from the table and walked to the door, motioning for Kate to get the bags. “See you in the morning.”

Kate waited until they were down the road, out of sight and out of earshot of the pub, before she dropped Nick’s bag into a puddle.
    “I’m your bodyguard, not your Sherpa,” she said. “And two million dollars? Are you insane?”
    “The rooster is worth twenty million. I think a ten percent commission for telling us where to find it is fair and reasonable.”
    “You never said anything before we left L.A. about making a multimillion-dollar payoff to a crook.”
    “It’s the cost of doing business.”
    “We’re the FBI. We don’t do business with international criminals.”
    “What do you think
I
am? You should know better than anyone that sometimes you have to get in bed with the Devil. Speaking of which, we need to get a room. The hotel is the last building on the street.”
    Kate stared ahead at the whitewashed building. It looked lesslike a hotel than an overgrown bed-and-breakfast—two stories high, plus small windows on the third floor that might belong to attic rooms.
    The sturdy woman at the desk informed them that there was just one room left. “Very nice, though,” she said. “Got a four-poster bed.”
    Nick thanked the woman, gave her his credit card, and took the key. The room was on the second floor. No elevator. Just a narrow, creaky staircase. He unlocked the door and pushed it open.
    “Maybe I should carry you across the threshold,” he said to Kate.
    “Maybe you should be careful you don’t run into my fist with your face,” Kate said.
    The room was cozy and snug, barely big enough to hold the single four-poster bed, which was covered with a handmade quilt, a heavy comforter, and several pillows.
    Nick stepped into the room and dropped his bag. “It’s perfect.”
    Except that there was no furniture to sleep on besides the bed, Kate thought. That left the floor. In the military, Kate had slept in the wet mud of a South American jungle and on the hot sands of the Afghan desert, so she supposed she could spend the night on a hardwood floor if she had to.
    “We’ll flip for it,” Kate said.
    “For what?”
    “The bed.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re sharing it.”
    “In your dreams.”
    “I think we can share a bed together without giving in to our raging desires.”
    “I don’t have any desires, raging or otherwise, that involve you.”
    “So what are you worried about? Are you afraid I’m going toattack you? You’re a trained commando and crack FBI agent who just threw a couple of muscle-bound, besweatered apes through a window.”
    When he put it like that, it did seem pretty ridiculous.
    “
Two
windows,” she said with a smile. “And there’s no such word as besweatered.”
    “It’s like bespectacled, only with a sweater.”
    “I get the meaning, but there’s no such word.”
    “Sure there is. It was common in the days of yore. Trust me, I’m a very educated man. I went to Harvard.”
    “They threw you out for cheating.”
    “But not before I learned many things about the days of yore. I’ll tell you about them over dinner.”
    There was only one restaurant in town, and only one item on the restaurant’s dinner menu. It was