The Chase by Janet Evanovich, Lee Goldberg Read Free Book Online Page A

and checked it. “Says here you’re having problems with your network. Point me to the router and modem, and I’ll see what I can do.”
    “Actually, your repair skills aren’t what we’re interested in,” Nick said. “It’s your work with Gant Security Systems that impressed us.”
    Joe felt a twinge of anxiety grip his bowels. The one benefit of working for the Geek Squad was that it had given him complete anonymity. Nobody knew who he was or what he had done. He’d been able to leave his brief moment of infamy behind him.
    “Three years ago, you discovered that Gant Security, the company you worked for as an installation supervisor, was running a scam,” Kate said. “Gant sold celebrities high-end ultraexpensive homesecurity systems, then used those systems’ surveillance devices to spy on them, selling the dirt they discovered to gossip magazines and private detectives. You figured it out and blew the whistle to the LAPD. It was the honest and honorable thing to do. I admire that. Thanks to you, your boss and the installers who were getting kickbacks from him all went to jail.
    “But instead of being congratulated for what you did, you were fired, sued for violating the confidentiality clause in your contract, and blackballed in the corporate world,” Kate said. “Even your motives were impugned. The news media implied that the only reason you went to the authorities was resentment over being the one guy in the office not getting a piece of the action. Now you’re buried in debt and wearing a Geek Squad badge. How would you like to get back at the people who wronged you and earn a hundred fifty thousand dollars at the same time?”
    It would take Joe five years to earn that much money in his current job, and it was close to his annual paycheck at Gant before he’d let his conscience get him into trouble.
    Joe narrowed his eyes and wondered if he was being set up in some way. “What’s the catch?”
    “You’ll be committing a felony,” Kate said. If she and Nick were going to use civilians in their schemes, she wanted to be sure they knew exactly what they were getting into. “You could end up spending ten years in a federal prison.”
    “Who
are
you people?” Joe asked.
    “We’re with a private security company called Intertect,” Nick said. “We’ve been hired by a major museum to recover a stolen artifact that is in the possession of Carter Grove, CEO of BlackRhino, the parent company of Gant Security Systems.”
    “By ‘recover,’ ” Joe said, “you mean steal it back.”
    “Yes,” Kate said.
    “Will I be in any physical jeopardy?”
    Nick shook his head. “You won’t be part of the actual recovery effort. You will be a safe distance away, handling the technical side of things.”
    “What happens to Carter Grove if you pull this off?”
    “Legally? Nothing.” Nick said. “However, since the item in question was stolen to begin with, he can’t report the theft to the police or collect any insurance on it. So in a cosmic sense, he’s getting royally screwed.”
    Joe liked that idea. What he liked even more was that he’d be paid a lot of money to see it happen. He yanked the Geek Squad badge off his belt, pulled the clip-on tie from his collar, and tossed both onto the floor.
    “Pop the cork on that Cristal, and let’s get to it,” Joe said.

Artificial sunshine created by movie lights bathed the cheery kitchen of a Santa Clarita tract house that was serving as the location for a TV commercial. Two freckle-faced children, nine-year-old Missy and eleven-year-old Tommy, sat at the cottage table eating cereal from colorful bowls that perfectly complemented the placemats, the walls, the cupboards, and even the flowered apron their youthful mother was wearing.
    “Bran flakes for breakfast
again
?” whined Missy, listlessly poking at her cereal with her spoon.
    Tommy pushed his bowl away. “Why can’t we have something fun to eat?”
    “Because that usually means a bowl