“Same here,” Dan piped up from beside her.
“I guess that leaves you and me.” Chelsea turned to Z, one brow raised. “Care to have a glass?”
Before he could answer, Penni leaned over to Dan and whispered, “Just because I’m not having any wine doesn’t mean you can’t have any.”
Chelsea felt Z immediately tense beside her. Together, they glanced across the table at Dan. She winced at the look of regret and humiliation that skittered across his face.
“It sorta does,” Dan said, rubbing a hand over his jaw. “Since I’m an alcoholic.”
The way he said the last word, so full of shame, it may as well have been “pedophile” or “murderer” or “tiny-baby-kitten-torturer.” Chelsea’s heart split down the middle in sympathy.
“Oh,” Penni said, her dark eyes going wide, blinking. “Oh, well…”
The silence that followed those three words was so crushing Chelsea thought she could hear her bones creaking under the pressure of it.
“Hey, we all have our shit, right?” She kicked Dan’s ankle under the table. Her expression the facial equivalent of Hold your head up, Dan Man. You don’t have anything to be ashamed of.
“Yeah.” Dan nodded, one corner of his mouth hitching down. “It’s just some people’s shit stinks worse than others’.”
Chapter Five
George Wodehouse sat at the bar in the posh hotel, nursing a pisco sour—a famous Peruvian cocktail—and wishing he could hear what the quartet at the table was saying. Unfortunately, he didn’t dare move closer for fear he’d draw unwanted attention to himself. And even if he did dare, he wasn’t certain it would do him any good. The acoustics inside the restaurant were terrible. He’d very likely need to be sitting on their laps to make out what they were discussing.
Bollocks!
He was conjuring up more creative curses when his mobile came to life inside the front pocket of his trousers. He thumbed on the device without looking at the screen. Spider had already phoned to demand an update on his progress, so there was only one person who would be ringing now.
“What have you learned about the woman?” George demanded of Benton? the computer whiz kid Spider had hired straight out of Oxford University.
George hoped the tall brunette who had joined Daniel Currington and Dagan Zoelner in the square earlier and who was now sitting and eating dinner with the two men and the woman, Chelsea Duvall, would yield more satisfactory answers than the others had. And hopefully let him know he was on the right track in ghosting those who were tracking down Winterfield. In the years he’d been under Spider’s purview, George had learned numerous things. One was that it was easier to hunt the hunters than the prey because the hunters were so much easier to spot. Another was that jumping from the shadows to kill the prey once he or she was located was the work of an instant.
“Quite a lot actually,” came Benton’s reply.
“Truly?” George asked, surprised. He took another leisurely draw on his drink, listening to Benton relay what he’d discovered about the newcomer. After a bit, George interrupted, “What does that mean? She was Secret Service. Was she sacked?”
“No. According to her file she turned in her resignation two weeks ago and officially turned in her badge less than seventy-two hours ago.”
George kept one eye on the group while using the other to peruse the menu the bartender plopped in front of him. “Considering the trouble you had finding out anything specific about the other three, it surprises me you know so much about this woman,” he admitted, pointing to the menu and indicating he’d take an order of the bean salad with tomato and onions. Since he was here and it was the dinner hour, he may as well enjoy some of the local flavor. “I’ll take the check too, please,” he told the bartender, dropping the mobile away from his mouth. “I might need to duck out in a bit.”
Another thing he’d learned since coming to work for Spider was eat when you can. He never knew when a mission might force him to go out on the hunt or else go into hiding. And neither occupation generally lent itself to readily available food.
“Sorry,” he apologized to Benton after lifting the phone. “So…the information on the woman?”
“The Secret Service is more of a policing body than an Intelligence body. So their employees’ records don’t receive the same brand of whitewashing by the government,” Benton said. George could hear the lad’s fingers flying over a keyboard, and he wondered what Spider had over on Benton. It had to be something pretty good to keep the kid on his payroll instead of going to work for some high-paying high-tech firm.