Free The Job by Janet Evanovich, Lee Goldberg

could shoot you, you know. I’m an FBI agent and you’re a felon.”
    “You don’t have a gun.”
    Damn.
He was right. She hated not having a gun. And she missed her FBI windbreaker. This whole out-of-country thing sucked.
    “What about the trap details?” she asked him. “Don’t you want to work out the details?”
    “I know we want to recruit your dad, and probably the crew we’ve used in the past. Tom Underhill, Willie, and Boyd Capwell. I’ll work out the rest of the details while I sleep.” He slipped under the quilt and patted the spot next to him. “Come to bedand leave it all to me. I do some of my best work when I’m in bed.”
    Kate was sure that was true.
    Jake O’Hare approached his Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast like one of the many covert military operations he’d led for Uncle Sam before his retirement. He nibbled at it from various angles, picking away at the egg whites until the yolk was completely exposed, conquering the yolk with some strategic stabs of bacon, then attacking the unprotected mountain of buttermilk pancakes in a full frontal assault that didn’t leave a surviving crumb. When he was done, he carefully mopped everything up with his toast until the plate was clean and there was no evidence he’d ever touched it.
    Kate had just come back to L.A. on a red-eye from Paris, and had cleaned her plate with a lot less cunning than her dad.
    “I love watching you eat, Dad,” Kate said. “You’re so methodical about it.”
    Jake took a sip of his coffee, black with no sugar, and leaned back in the booth, resting a tan, muscled arm on the top of the vinyl seat. He kept his body in lean fighting shape and his gray hair trimmed in a regulation buzz cut, more out of habit than anything else.
    “I’m methodical about everything,” Jake said. “And I’m cute. Yesterday I was in the supermarket and the checkout lady told me I was adorable.”
    “Kittens and baby shoes are adorable,” Kate said. “Do you really want to be lumped together with kittens and baby shoes?”
    “I was in the ten-items-or-less line with twelve items and she didn’t kick me out. Adorable can have its benefits.”
    Kate leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Is your passport current?”
    “I’m sure one of ’em is,” he said. “Who would you like me to kidnap?”
    “Nobody. And you can’t say things like that around me in public. I’m an officer of the law, remember?”
    “Sorry, I should have said ‘apprehend by extraordinary rendition.’ There’s nothing illegal about that. At least that was what I was told by the CIA when I was grabbing suspected terrorists out of their beds in one country and dragging them to a secret prison in another.” He accepted more coffee from the waitress. “Those were good times. How about regime change? Would you like a dictator toppled?”
    “Close. I need to take down the drug lord of a global narcotics empire. It’s a rogue operation. We’ll be on foreign soil without any backup, going up against a sadist and his army of trained killers.”
    “Just another day at the office.”
    And almost a decade ago, that had been a typical day for him. But that was before he collected his military pension and moved in with Kate’s younger sister, Megan, her accountant husband, and their two kids. The home was in Calabasas, California, justa few miles away from the Denny’s where they were eating. Now most of his battles were waged on the golf course, except when Kate occasionally asked for his help. Jake was the only one besides Bolton and Jessup who knew the truth about her and Nick … and the only one she could entirely trust.
    “Does your boss at the FBI know about this?” Jake asked.
    “I called Jessup from the airport and filled him in. He’s completely on board. It was an easy sell. This is exactly the kind of high-profile criminal that Deputy Director Bolton and Jessup broke Nick out of jail to catch. I’m going to stop by the office for a more