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the theft was the White House chief of staff. It would be an even bigger scandal and embarrassment than the one we’re trying to avoid.”
    “Carter Grove isn’t White House chief of staff anymore,” Kate said, dabbing at the sauce on her jeans with the napkin. “He hasn’t been in years.”
    “But he was, and if that wasn’t bad enough, now he runsBlackRhino, the elite private security agency the Pentagon has been using to outsource the ugliest, dirtiest aspects of fighting our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we go after Carter head-on for stealing the rooster, he’ll expose every black op the Pentagon has ever hired him to do, which would only whip up the scandal into a media firestorm of epic proportions. You’ve got to steal the rooster from him. It’s the most expedient option.”
    “It’s not a run-of-the-mill break-in we’re talking about here,” Kate said. “Carter Grove’s house is going to be protected by a state-of-the-art alarm system and a bunch of BlackRhino operatives, the best-trained and best-armed mercenaries money can buy. If we’re caught, they’ll torture us to find out who we work for and then feed us into a tree shredder.”
    “So don’t get caught. I thought you were a tough cookie.”
    “I am. But I’m not suicidal.”
    “I’m sure Nick can come up with something,” Jessup said. “You can remind him that this is exactly the kind of situation we broke him out of prison to solve.”
    “Uh-huh,” Kate said, slurping up the last of her shake. “And when he talked you into doing that for him, did it ever occur to you that you were being conned?”
    “Sure it did,” Jessup said. “That’s why we teamed him up with you.”
    A little over an hour after her meeting with Jessup, Kate sat at the kitchen table in her sister Megan’s house in Calabasas, a San Fernando Valley community of guard-gated tract house neighborhoods. The neighborhoods were built around a shopping center with a clock tower that held the biggest Rolex on earth.
    Megan shared her chair at the kitchen table with Jack Russell,her Jack Russell terrier, who’d squeezed himself between her butt and the backrest. The sisters were eating the remaining half of a banana cream pie.
    Megan was married, had two kids, and was three years younger and thirty pounds heavier than Kate.
    “You should take advantage of all the opportunities that being single, childless, and disgustingly thin give you,” Megan said.
    “I am,” Kate said. “I’m eating this pie after having a three-by-three, fries, and a shake at In-N-Out.”
    “I hate you, but that’s not what I was referring to.”
    “I know what you’re leading up to, and I’m telling you right now that I am not going on a blind date with some guy you met in line at Costco.”
    “He’s not
some guy
. He’s an accountant at Roger’s firm, and I’ve thoroughly vetted him. He could be the man of your dreams.”
    Roger was Megan’s husband. He was watching
Iron Man 2
in the den with their two kids, four-year-old Tyler and six-year-old Sara.
    “Forget it, Megan.”
    “He is stable, rational, and dependable.”
    “Gee, he sounds thrilling,” Kate said. “I’ve heard cars described in more passionate terms.”
    “He’s also a fantastic lover.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because he’s an accountant,” Megan said.
    Kate scraped up the last of the pie. “I don’t see the connection.”
    “They are very tactile. They have amazing fingers from tapping their calculators all day. And they are extremely methodical in their work. So what you get is a man who will tirelessly explore every line item until he can file a strong return and get you a whopping refund.”
    The analogy was totally disturbing, and yet it made sense to Kate. “I’m doing fine. I can get my own dates, thank you.”
    “The only man in your life is Nicolas Fox, and he’s a criminal that you’re chasing. That’s just sad.”
    “Do I look sad to you?”
    Megan studied her