Read The Job for Free Online Page B

to Giray for a translation.
    “Very bad word,” Giray said. “A lady would not like it.”
    Atalay climbed halfway out the window and stopped. He looked at the drainpipe and then at the street. It was a long drop down if he didn’t connect with the pipe. He ducked back into the room, and Kate heard him shout instructions to his men.
    She tipped her head back and watched Nick do a slow run across the rooftop toward the terrace that ran the length of the next wing. It was easy to underestimate him, she thought. He had a hidden athleticism. His body was perfectly hinged together, and he had the muscle tone and coordination of a cat. How he stayed so toned was a mystery since she never saw him work out. She told herself it was wrong, wrong, wrong to look that hot while breaking the law, but that didn’t alter the fact that he
was
breaking the law, and he
was
damn sexy up there on the roof, backlit by the twilight sky.
    He slid down the slanted end of the roof, dropped onto a third-floor terrace, and disappeared inside the building. Kate dashed back to the lobby and joined a half dozen Turkish cops who were running toward the main entrance. Everyone burst out of the hotel onto the street and gave a collective gasp. Fox was standing on the second floor balustrade. He jumped onto one of the three flagpoles in front of the hotel and, without missing a beat, he flung himself onto the roof of a passing minibus. The minibus sped down the hill into the warren of narrow streets that led to the waterfront.
    Kate thought of the old adage that sometimes it was better to be lucky than to be good. In Nick Fox’s case, he was both.
    Some of the cops scrambled for their cars while others gave chase on foot. Kate was part of the foot chase, sprinting down the narrow street and around a corner. She saw Nick crouch on the roof of the minibus and jump for a balcony on a crumbling old building. He hoisted himself over the railing and disappeared inside.
    The police ran into the building through a shoe store, but Kate remained outside and waited. She heard dogs barking, people yelling, and things crashing. A moment later, Nick appeared on a neighboring rooftop. He was wearing a long coat and a Fedora that he’d pilfered somewhere along the way. He looked like some kind of superhero, his long coat fluttering like a cape. Nick blew Kate a kiss and dashed away again along the rooftops and into the creeping darkness.
    Atalay ran up beside her just as Nick disappeared. “How did he know that we were coming?”
    Kate stared resolutely at the rooftop where Nick had stood. “There were a lot of cops outside the Four Seasons. Someone may have come to meet with Fox, got spooked by what he saw, and warned him. It doesn’t matter
how
it happened, only that it
did.
He’s very clever.”

The manhunt in the Old City continued fruitlessly until Atalay finally called it off at midnight.
    Kate trudged back to her hotel and up to her third-floor room, which was barely large enough to hold the four-poster bed. The pillows on the bed were flat, and there was only a single rough top sheet. As an ex–Navy commando, she’d slept on much worse. She wasn’t sleeping on rocks, and as far as she knew she wasn’t sleeping with scorpions, so it was all good. She was asleep ten seconds after her head hit the pillow.
    She was awakened at 3:30 in the morning by the call to prayer from the mosque, and it took her another hour to fall asleep again, only to be awakened a little over two hours later by the dawn call to prayer.
    She lay in bed for another forty-five minutes, mulling overwhat investigative steps she could take next to flush out the fake Nick without nailing the real one. No brilliant ideas occurred to her, so she showered, got dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved white T-shirt, and went to the rooftop terrace for the hotel’s buffet breakfast.
    There were already two dozen hotel guests scattered among the long communal tables inside the dining room and at