French doors opened off the master suite onto a balcony on which Kate could see Nick Fox facing her. He was sitting on the four-foot-high masonry balcony wall, his back to the city skyline. He smiled at Kate and gestured to her shirt.
“I see you tried the canapés,” he said. “I made them myself.”
Kate looked down at her splattered jacket and shirt, swiped up a glob of green and white goo and tasted it.
“Avocado and spinach dip,” she said. “Needs salt.”
“You’ll have to let me cook you dinner sometime.”
“I’ll pass on that. I’m not crazy about prison ingredients.”
“Neither am I.” He glanced over his shoulder at the twenty-story drop to the ground.
Kate didn’t like what the glance implied. “o it, Nick.”
“Would you miss me?”
“Yes!”
“How much would you miss me?” he asked her. “A lot?”
“Don’t push it.”
“Admit it, deep down inside you like me. You think I’m cute.”
Kate narrowed her eyes. “Are you going to jump, or what?”
Nick smiled, sent her a little wave, swung his legs over the wall, and disappeared from view.
Kate felt her heart give a painful contraction. “No!” she shouted. “You idiot! I didn’t really want you to jump!”
She crossed the balcony to the wall and peered over at Nick in time to see his customized handheld parachute open. She watched him for a minute as he glided toward the skyscraper canyons of downtown Chicago, ate a meatball that was stuck to her jacket, and then called Gunter. Next in line was a call to Jessup.
“I tried calling you,” Jessup said, “but you weren collection of golden idols.”
Kate filled him in. “Gunter is coordinating a chase with cooperating local law enforcement,” she said.
“If you need help with follow-up, I can send someone,” Jessup said. “Cosmo, maybe.”
“No! Not Cosmo.”
The FBI, the Chicago Police Department, and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office all put choppers in the air, but they couldn’t find any sign of Nick or his parachute. Kate led a search of the surrounding neighborhood, but she knew it was futile. There was too much ground to cover, and Nick had a head start. So she armed a bunch of agents with copies of The Complete Directory of Episodic Television Shows and sent them off to look for TV characters trying to leave town by planes, trains, or automobiles.
Somehow all of Nick’s crew had managed to slip out of the building, but a third of the golden idols were left behind on the loading dock, so it wasn’t a complete loss. And Kate had the satisfaction of knowing that her instincts had been 100 percent right.
She straggled back to her hotel just as the sun was coming up. She was exhausted, and done with smelling like cocktail meatballs. She wanted to shuck her food-stained clothes, take a hot shower, and wash the spinach dip out of her hair.
She unlocked her door, stepped into the room, and froze. There were Toblerone wrappers on the bed, room service dishes on the table, a bouquet of roses, and an unopened bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket of ice. Her first thought in her sleep-deprived state was that she’d walked into the wrong room. She was about to double-check the number on the door when she realized that a pink handkerchief was tied like a ribbon around the champagne bottle. She’d seen the handkerchief before … in the breast pocket of Nick’s white tuxedo.
Un-freaking-believable, she thougDon’t d
Excerpt from The Heist...
Kate O’Hares favorite outfit was her blue windbreaker with the letters FBI written in yellow on the back, worn over a basic black T-shirt and matching black Kevlar vest. The ensemble went well with everything, particularly when paired with jeans and accessorized with a Glock. Thirty-three-year-old Special Agent O’Hare didn’t like feeling exposed and unarmed, especially on the job. That all but ruled her out for undercover work. Fine by her. She preferred a hard-charging style of law enforcement, which was exactly what she was practicing on that 96 degree winter afternoon in Las Vegas when she marched into the St. Cosmas Medical Center in her favorite outfit with a dozen similarly dressed agents behind her.
While the other agents fanned out to seal every exit in the building, Kate pushed past the security guards in the lobby and made her way like a guided missile to the first-floor office of Rufus Stott, the chief administrator of the hospital. She blew past Stott’s stunned assistant without even acknowledging her existence and burst into Stott’s office. The startled Stott yelped and nearly toppled out of his chrome-and-mesh ergonomic chair. He was a chubby, bottom-heavy little guy who looked like a turnip that some bored wizard had tapped with a magic wand and turned into a fifty-five-year-old bureaucrat. He had a spray tan, tortoise-shell glasses, and crotch wrinkles in his tan slacks. His hand was over his heart, and he was gasping for air.