Free Hot Pursuit by Gemma Fox

one large creamy-white shoulder, Stella said, ‘Although maybe I ought to go home; I haven’t got a towel or a toothbrush with me.’
    ‘Don’t worry, sweetie. I’m sure I can find you something,’ he said, flicking off the lights.
    ‘Thank you,’ Stella murmured, sounding genuinely touched.
    Bernie grinned. He couldn’t give a stuff whether she brushed her teeth or not.
    It might be very late, but in his office Danny Coleman was still seated at his desk, caught in a jaundiced arc of lamplight and staring fixedly at the computer screen wondering what the hell was going on.
    He was in two minds over what to do; there were all manner of protocols in place within Stiltskin for a variety of situations, but not this one. In theory Nick Lucas’s cover had been compromised, but how and when and by whom? Should Coleman arrange for a Stiltskin recovery team to go in and pick him up, bring him in? Was he in any immediate danger? Or could the joins be papered over and things left as they were?
    Coleman turned a pen between his fingers, still staring at the screen. At this stage he was reluctant to draw attention to Nick Lucas by renaming and moving him. Some part of him still hoped that Bernie Fielding might turn out to be a secure identity after all. Change always made ripples, and ripples, however small, always showed up on the surface. And changes made too hastily – well there was no telling how big those ripples might get if there was a knee-jerk reaction to the Nick Lucas situation. That was the official line from the guys upstairs.
    Coleman puffed out his cheeks thoughtfully; maybe if Lucas just moved area, he mused, doodling on his phone pad, all the while instinctively knowing that there was no way the answer was ever going to be that simple.
    Something was horribly wrong, something was leaking somewhere. His superiors had suspected it for some time. But how, and where? In his gut Coleman knew that things would only get worse, probably much worse before they got any better. The problem with the whole Nick Lucas thing was that it didn’t fit into any pattern that made sense. Stiltskin had never coughed up a real person before. Coleman ran his fingers back through his thinning hair and looked at Nick’s call as it had been transcribed alongside the details of the new identity that had been set up for him.
    Surely it made more sense for anyone who hadinfiltrated the system to just expose Nick Lucas and shoot him, rather than put him into a house with a real family. Or perhaps he was meant to be linked to…Coleman glanced down at the notes to check the names…Maggie Morgan, or Bernie Fielding, but why, for God’s sake? He made a mental note to run the pair of them through the computer to see if anything came up. Unless they weren’t after Nick Lucas at all but had bigger plans pinned up on the drawing board. Perhaps someone wanted to compromise the whole relocation procedure and Nick Lucas was involved purely by chance.
    Trouble was that Coleman couldn’t get any kind of handle on how that was possible from this piece of nonsense. He closed his eyes, trying to glimpse the big picture, but any connections totally eluded him. He’d get Ms Crow to take a look at the data trail to see if they could find out what had gone wrong, but from where he was sitting this didn’t feel like a leak, it felt more like a total cock-up. Coleman pulled a nasal spray from his inside pocket, squeezed once, twice, sniffing hard as he did, waiting for the moist chemical hit to clear his sinuses and from there his head. First thing in the morning he’d get Ms Crow on the case, and meanwhile he just hoped that the wheel didn’t come off.
    The cold splintery taste of the nasal spray ran down the back of his throat and flooded his taste buds.
    ‘I reckon you’re addicted to them things, you know, Mr Coleman,’ said the security guard, pushing the door to Coleman’s office open a little wider. ‘They rot your nostrils you know, burn