Kitabı oxu: «Overnight Male»

Dear Reader,

I’d like to thank everyone for their patience while Overnight Male found its place in the schedule. I know from your e-mails how anxiously you’ve been waiting to see the book in print (as have I). I did have a very good time getting Lila and her experiences down on paper. And I think I fell in love with Joel right along with her. Here’s hoping you do, too.

Happy reading,

Elizabeth Bevarly

More delicious “special deliveries”from Elizabeth Bevarly and MIRA Books

EXPRESS MALE

YOU’VE GOT MALE

Overnight Male
ELIZABETH BEVARLY

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Wanda Ottewell,

who made every book better.

Thanks.

CHAPTER ONE

Darkness had always been Lila Moreau’s best friend. Throughout her life she had used different kinds of darkness to aid her in different kinds of ways. As a child, she knew the darkness under a bed or in a closet could protect her from her mother’s hurtful words. As a teenager, she felt the shadows of the city could shelter her from people, especially men, who wanted more from her than she was willing to give. As an adult, she used her shady character to keep others from getting too close. But this, the darkness that came with nightfall, was Lila’s favorite. Nighttime was when all the best stuff happened. It was when the world—or at least her world—came to life.

“Hey, lady, ya got a hundred bucks to spare? I ain’t been laid all week, and it ain’t cheap in this part ’a town.”

Lila growled her exasperation at having her profound—and kind of cool and gothic, if she did say so herself—musings interrupted. Okay, so maybe some of the life in her world was more of the low variety than it was of the high. She knew how to deal.

She turned from where she stood on the corner of N Street and Potomac in Georgetown and glared at the lowest-of-all-life who had emerged from the shadows behind her. He was maybe half a foot taller than her own five-four and probably outweighed her by a 150 pounds. Since he was dressed in double-knit sans-a-belt trousers and a shiny polyester shirt that was stained under each arm with perspiration, and since he clearly hadn’t bathed in days—also considering the way he’d just greeted her—he was too poorly dressed and not articulate enough to be a pimp. So Lila concluded he must just be a big scumbag. This part of the nation’s capital didn’t usually attract people like him, since it drew such a large tourist and college crowd and was home to so many of the city’s movers and shakers. (Well, okay, maybe there were one or two scumbags. Not to mention pimps.) But neither was it unheard of to find someone in Georgetown who wasn’t exactly the cream of Washington society.

“Uh, I think you’re a little out of your element here, guy,” she said to the, ah, guy. “Bubba’s Booty Barn is in Cheverly. But good news. You can take the orange line straight there and you won’t have to switch trains at all. Metro station’s that way,” she added, pointing in the general direction of Foggy Bottom, and hoping he’d take the hint.

Of course he didn’t. That would have been too easy.

Instead the guy grinned and said, “On second thought, sweetheart, maybe I won’t need that hundred bucks. You look like the kinda woman who’d be up for just about anything.”

Actually, dressed as she was from head to toe in black, complete with knit cap and gloves, what Lila looked like was a woman who was about to break in to someone’s home. Of course, there was a good reason for that. She was about to break in to someone’s home. Nevertheless, she hated it when men just couldn’t get the gist of the most basic fashion statement. Duh.

Damn. She really didn’t need a distraction like this right now. She had her schedule tonight timed down to the last second. There wasn’t any available room in it at all for a maiming.

But she knew it would be unavoidable when the guy winked at her, nodded his head toward the alley she’d been about to enter, and asked, “Whaddaya say? Do a good job, sweetheart, and I’ll give ya back half of the hundred bucks you’re gonna gimme, too.”

She smiled at him. “Oh, gosh, just keep the whole hundred, big guy. I mean, I should pay you for the privilege, shouldn’t I? A great-looking, charismatic man like you? C’mon.”

His flabbergasted expression in response to her enthusiasm was almost worth the interruption he was causing her. Almost.

It was a testament to his stupidity that he followed Lila into the alley without a speck of hesitation or suspicion. It was a testament to her skill that she unmanned him in even less than her usual five seconds. Oh, he’d still be able to father children someday. Unfortunately. After he regained consciousness. And, you know, found a woman who had the IQ of a piece of lint.

Now, then. Where was she? Oh, yeah. Darkness had always been Lila’s best friend…blah blah blah…the darkness that came with nightfall was her favorite…blah blah blah…nighttime was when all the best stuff happened…blah blah blah…that was when Lila’s world came to life.

Got it.

Brushing off the last lingering remnants of disgust at having come into contact with Mr. Scumbag quite literally, Lila looked around and assessed her situation. The alley between two rows of sleepy town houses was deserted this time of night, save the occasional unconscious—and unmanned—scumbag, and silent save the soft sigh of a late spring breeze that nudged a stray piece of newspaper from one side of the narrow pathway to the other. She gazed up at an unlit window on the third floor of one of those town houses—the one through which she would momentarily be crawling—confident that the occupant was by now fast asleep.

It would be a pretty standard breaking and entering, even though many Georgetown residents were protected by private security systems, this one included. In fact, this residence was even better protected than most, thanks to its owner’s occupation, and might prove a challenge to someone else. Someone who wasn’t familiar with sophisticated protection devices that ran on arcane power sources.

Fortunately, Lila knew everything there was to know about sophisticated protection devices. And she liked to think that she herself was something of an arcane power source.

She flexed her fingers inside the snug black leather gloves, then tucked an errant strand of blond hair back under the black knit cap she’d tugged low over her eyes. The long-sleeved, skintight turtleneck and pants hugged her body like a second skin and served two purposes. Not only did they keep her warm in the cool April night—and, it went without saying, looked fabulous on her—but there was no part of her attire that might slow her down, tangle her up, or offer purchase for a pursuer.

Not that Lila expected to be pursued—never mind purchased—but one always had to be prepared for the possibility. Never, though, had she been caught. At least, not when she didn’t want to be. She certainly wasn’t going to screw up something like this.

Effortlessly and without a sound, she scaled the side of the big brick building, finding footholds by turns in the mortar between the bricks, the rainspout and the thick ivy growing up the side. Having already dismantled the exterior part of the alarm system in the front of the town house, she was lifting the window and pushing herself over the sill within seconds. She paused, standing motionless for a moment to survey her surroundings and ensure everything was as it was supposed to be.

Enough pale blue light emanated from big, illuminated numbers on the nightstand clock to reveal a man’s horizontal form in the bed beside it. He was hunched deep under the covers, sound asleep, completely unaware of her presence. Had it not been for the low, regular thrum of his breathing and the steady rise and fall of his shoulders, Lila wouldn’t have known if he was even alive. Well, had it not been for that, and the fact that she’d scoped the place out yesterday and had seen not a single corpse lying around.

She smiled. She was about to enjoy her favorite thing about being a spy: the takedown. Silently she retrieved a pair of handcuffs tucked into her belt at the small of her back and crept across the room.

It was only after she had launched herself at her quarry that she sensed something wasn’t quite right. Unfortunately, her body was in motion by then, and although Lila Moreau was a woman of many talents, defying gravity wasn’t one of them. Before she could recover and retreat, the man who should have been sleeping was wrapping her in the covers, wresting the handcuffs from her grasp and snapping them—chink, chink—first around her wrist and then around the thick metal spokes in the wrought-iron headboard.

Immediately Lila began to fight, throwing herself completely into her assault. And even one-handed, Lila Moreau could wreak the havoc of ten men. But it quickly became evident that her adversary was more insidious than ten men, because he had her pinned to the mattress in record time. After more frantic struggling, she decided her assailant couldn’t possibly be human. And after still more frantic struggling, she knew she was right. Because she realized then that what had finally brought Überspy Lila Moreau to her knees—or at least facedown into a mattress—was…sheets. And a blanket. And a couple of fluffy pillows.

Damn. This was not going to look good on her report.

Eventually she managed to extricate herself—well, kind of, since she was still handcuffed to the bed. But even though a light had been switched on in the corner, she saw as she shoved the bedclothes off herself that there was no one in the room except her.

The furnishings were what looked like period antiques, but they seemed to be more functional than they were collectible, because all were clearly well used. Likewise, the Oriental rugs were richly colored but worn in spots, the hardwood floor beneath them polished but scarred in places. A fireplace on the other side of the room smelled faintly of burned wood, indicating it had been put to use recently. Its mantelpiece was crowded with models of wooden boats, and bisected floor-to-ceiling bookcases that were crammed full of old books. The remaining walls were hung with what appeared to be commendations of some kind and childishly executed works of art in baroque frames.

As masculine lairs went, this one was something of a departure from the ones Lila usually saw. Of course, most of the masculine lairs she saw had been decorated by men who were morally bankrupt, so there was a chance she wasn’t really in a position to judge the decor. It was nice, though, she had to admit. It made her feel…calm. Until she remembered she was shackled to the bed frame, wherein she felt more than a little pissed off.

Wondering where her target had disappeared to, she reached down into her sock for the spare handcuff key she always hid on her person for just such an emergency and had never had to use.

And discovered it was gone.

Dammit. It must have fallen out while she was trying to subdue the counterpane in the ass. No way could anyone have lifted it without her realizing it. She began to search furiously through the bedclothes as far as she could reach, but there was no sign of the key anywhere.

Great. Now she was going to have to gnaw off her hand to get away. She hated when that happened.

“It’s on the nightstand.”

She whipped around at the sound of the deeply timbred voice and saw a man lounging in the doorway. Although they’d never met personally, she knew who he was. She didn’t go around breaking in to the houses of total strangers. Who knew what kind of germs you’d pick up doing that? Lila only broke into the homes of her closest friends and enemies. And although Joel Faraday, code name Virtuoso, wasn’t exactly either of those, she did know him—as an archivist for her employer, the Office for Political Unity and Security. He was also her captor, she reminded herself. Which might cause a bit of trouble, considering the fact that he was her partner, too. At least for a little while.

What he wasn’t was what she’d expected. In all her years at OPUS, Lila had met only one archivist before tonight, but that one had been pretty much what she’d suspected all of the OPUS archivists were: a timid, wrinkled, eccentric little man she could sling over one shoulder. Joel Faraday was none of those things. Well, except for being a man. That part was obvious. Too obvious, in fact.

She guesstimated his age as mid-thirties, even though there was an air about him that suggested considerable life experience. His thick, dark brown hair hung almost to his shoulders and was shoved straight back from his forehead by a careless hand. Behind trendy, black-framed glasses his eyes were even darker than his hair, and the lower half of his face was shadowed by more than one day’s growth of beard. Slumped against the doorjamb as he was, she could only guess at his full height, but it certainly topped six feet.

And every last inch of it was very nicely put together. Broad shoulders strained at the seams of an otherwise baggy white T-shirt, and black hair sprang from the deep V-neck. Loose, dark blue striped pajama bottoms ended in bare feet, feet that were large enough to make her wonder about another fabled part of the male anatomy whose size was often compared to those, ah, appendages. One big hand was settled indolently on his hip, while the other cradled a half-empty snifter of something the color of rich amber.

“The far one,” he added, dipping his head toward the nightstand on the other side of the bed from where she was lying.

She turned her head to look where he indicated and saw the small metal key sitting on the farthest edge of the nightstand, just—

“Out of your reach,” he said. Then he grinned. “They told me you always do this. So I confess I had a little advance warning. If I hadn’t…”

He lifted a shoulder and let it drop, but left the statement unfinished. Not that it mattered. Had he not had his advance warning, he, not Lila, would be handcuffed to the bed. They both knew it. As he said, that was the way she broke in all her new partners. It was just her little way of letting them know up front that she would be the one in charge.

Not that Joel Faraday would be her partner for long. And no way would he ever be in charge. Well, not once the handcuffs were off, anyway. He would be on board for this particular part of her most recent assignment only long enough to reveal some information, impart his evaluation and share her speculation. As soon as she had everything she needed from him, she’d be completing the rest of the assignment on her own. And then she hoped to go back to working with her regular partner—which largely involved flying solo, just the way she liked it.

As she jerked her wrist against the cuff snapped snugly around it, Faraday’s grin widened. And the sooner she got back to flying solo, Lila thought with a silent growl, the better.

“I cannot believe I fell for this,” she muttered aloud.

“You were overconfident,” he said. “I’ve heard that about you.” Very matter-of-factly, he added, “And overconfidence will get you killed in this line of work.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

“What else have you heard about me?” she asked. Even though she was reasonably certain she already knew. Like checking one’s credit report from time to time, it was always a good idea to ensure one’s badass reputation was in order.

He gazed up at the ceiling, feigning deep consideration, swirling his brandy expertly in his glass without even bothering to make sure it didn’t slosh over the side. “Let’s see now,” he said thoughtfully. “What have I heard about Lila Moreau, code name She-Wolf?”

He lowered his head to look at her now, pinning his gaze on her face in a way that made hot little explosions ignite in the pit of her belly. Interesting.

“Probably,” he continued, “the same things everyone else has heard. That you’re one of the best agents—if not the best agent—we have. That you were recruited by OPUS before you even graduated from college. That until recently, your record was spotless.” When she opened her mouth to object, he quickly added, “Oh, but hey, that pesky attempted-murder thing has been all cleared up, and now you’re back to tabula rasa.”

“If I’d attempted murder, you can be damned sure I would’ve succeeded,” Lila said. “I never tried to kill anyone. Least of all him.”

Him being the big man in charge of OPUS. Or, as he was pseudo-affectionately known in the organization, He Whose Name Nobody Dares Say. Mostly because nobody knew what his name was.

“Not that everyone in OPUS hasn’t wanted to put a bullet in the guy at least once,” she qualified. “But that whole attempted-murder thing was just a desperate, trumped-up charge they hoped would turn up the heat and flush me out.”

“Yet still you managed to stay under their radar,” Faraday murmured.

“Like you said. I’m the best agent OPUS has.”

He grinned again. “I’ve also heard you’re not modest.”

“Modesty is overrated. Especially when it isn’t warranted.”

He neither agreed nor disagreed with her assessment of herself, and that bugged the hell out of Lila. What bugged her even more was that she actually gave a damn whether he agreed or disagreed with her assessment of herself.

“And I’ve heard that you’re smart and focused and dedicated,” he went on, sounding genuinely impressed, something that dulled the edge of her irritation. Which also bothered her. What did she care if he was impressed by her or not? “And that your number one goal in life right now is to bring Sorcerer to heel.”

Sorcerer was formally known as Adrian Padgett, and at one time had been an agent for OPUS himself—before turning to the Dark Side and choosing a life of crime. He’d been on their list—and on the lam—for years, and Lila was only the most recent agent trying to bring him in. So far he’d eluded her, something that had only served to make her more determined, but this time he wasn’t going to get away. Of that she was positive.

“And I’ve heard that if anyone can bring him in,” Faraday continued, “you can. Because I’ve also heard that you don’t quit until the job is done. And I’ve heard that you scare the hell out of most people. Oh, and I’ve also heard that you’re arguably the most dangerous woman in the world.”

“Arguably?” Lila echoed dubiously.

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t argue with it,” he assured her.

Smart man. “And do I scare the hell out of you?” she asked.

His eyes never left hers as he reminded her, “You’re the one handcuffed to the bed. What do you think?”

She opened her mouth to reply with a quick retort, then realized she wasn’t sure how he’d meant his remark. Was he saying he’d cuffed her to the bed because he was terrified of her? Or was he saying that since it had been a piece of cake for him to cuff her to the bed, she wasn’t scary at all?

Wow. A man she couldn’t get a read on. Lila couldn’t remember the last time she’d met one of those. In fact, she wasn’t sure she ever had.

“So you’ve heard quite a bit about me,” she said, deciding to ignore his last comment. For now. Considering the way he’d listed all her attributes, she figured her badass rep was still pretty much in place. “Do you believe it?”

This time his gaze drifted from her face and sauntered down her entire body, all the way to her toes and back again. And every last inch of her began to tingle and grow hot under his scrutiny. Wow. It had been a long time since she’d felt that, too. That immediate shudder of sexual awareness that started in the pit of her stomach and exploded outward, demanding satisfaction.

Damn. This really wasn’t a good time for her to meet a man who could do that to her. Especially one who could do it so quickly after meeting him. And do it with such amazing thoroughness.

“Well, handcuffed to my bed like that, you don’t look too dangerous,” he said. Ironically, there was something in the way he said it that made him seem very dangerous indeed.

Lila shoved her errant thoughts and feelings and tingling sexual awareness to the back of her brain and smiled at him. And she hoped like hell it was a convincing smile, and revealed none of the nervousness still quivering in her belly. “Good. Then why don’t you come over here and unlock me?”

He laughed softly as he lifted the brandy snifter to his mouth for an idle sip, taking his time to draw the liquor into his mouth, and savoring it for a moment before swallowing. Lila watched fascinated as he completed the action, wondering why she found such a simple gesture so provocative, and why it suddenly felt as if she, not he, was the one who had consumed something that seared her insides with heat. He didn’t answer her question, but when he remained rooted in place, she gathered that was pretty much all the response she was going to receive from him.

“I’d offer you a cognac, too,” he said, “but I’ve also heard you don’t drink. However, I stocked up on decaf green tea in anticipation of your, ah, arrival. If you’re interested.”

“Maybe later,” she said, thinking news traveled fast. She’d voiced that no-drinking policy and preference for decaf green tea at her sister’s house only a couple of weeks ago, and only in the presence of one other OPUS employee. “We need to go over the assignment,” she told him. She tugged at the handcuff again. “Come on. Unlock me. Joke’s on me. But now the joke’s over. Let me go.”

“Right,” Faraday said. “So you can kick my ass from here to Abu Dhabi. I’ll unlock you in a little while.”

“I’ll still kick your ass from here to Abu Dhabi,” she told him matter-of-factly. “It’ll just hurt more later.”

He considered her in that thoughtful way again as he enjoyed another sip of his drink. Another slow, thorough, fascinating, provocative, heat-inducing sip that went straight to Lila’s head. If he kept this up, she was going to be under the table soon.

“Maybe,” he finally said.

It took a minute for her to realize he was talking about the ass kicking, not the under-the-tabling. No maybe about that first one. She’d totally kick his ass, she thought. But she kept it to herself.

“So tell me what you know,” he said.

“Did you read my report?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Then you know everything I know.”

“Reports only cover the facts,” he said. “Not gut feelings. Not impressions. Not theories. So what are your gut feelings, impressions and theories on this thing?”

Faraday didn’t need to identify the thing any more than he had. Adrian Padgett had been the focus of Lila’s job for some time. Before she’d come along, he’d been arguably OPUS’s best agent. He’d operated by his own rules, to be sure—kind of like Lila, come to think of it—but he’d still stayed within the parameters of Doing the Right Thing. OPUS itself often bent its own rules to ensure political unity and security, so no one had really bothered to rein in Sorcerer, even when he started overstepping those parameters. He always collected exceptionally good intel, always bagged the bad guys, always got the job done. So who cared how he went about it?

Eventually, though, he began to stray so far beyond the parameters that there was no coming back. Several years ago Sorcerer had decided to become a free agent of sorts, and blackmailed the organization who employed him, threatening to expose it and many of its agents if he wasn’t paid millions of dollars and left alone. Had he not been such a good agent, the threat would have been laughable. OPUS was built on a framework of secrets—so many secrets that there were few in the organization who could honestly describe how it all worked.

With Sorcerer, though, as good as he was, the risk was too great to ignore the threat. Even so, before OPUS could amass the cash necessary to pay him off, Sorcerer leaked enough information to compromise dozens of assignments and agents. One assignment was so badly compromised, in fact, that the agent completing it ended up dead. Maybe the man hadn’t died by Sorcerer’s hand, but he’d died by Sorcerer’s actions. The agent had been the father of Lila’s regular partner, so there was a bit of personal vendetta involved in her desire to catch him, too.

She was surprised Faraday would want to know about her gut feelings and impressions and theories with regard to the assignment, since facts alone were the lifeblood of an archivist’s existence. There were twelve OPUS archivists in all, all headquartered here in Washington, and it was their job to keep records of every assignment ever conducted by OPUS. They were the ones who completed the final analysis and wrote up the final reports for every assignment. They looked at what went right and what went wrong during an operation and figured out why. Then they filed it all away somewhere, in case there was ever a need to reference a case again.

A case like, oh, say…Sorcerer. That guy probably had more paper and megabytes assigned to him than any other agent or event in OPUS’s history.

“You want to know my gut feelings about Sorcerer?” Lila asked. “My impressions? My theories?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know,” Faraday replied.

She nodded. “Then maybe I’ll have that tea after all. And you might want to refill that cognac. And make yourself a sandwich. This could take a while.”

CHAPTER TWO

JOEL FARADAY ENJOYED another taste of his cognac and watched the woman handcuffed to his bed daintily sip tea from the mug in her unbound hand. He hadn’t bothered with a sandwich. Something else he’d heard about Lila Moreau, code name She-Wolf, was that she minced partners, not words. Despite her assurances to the contrary, this wouldn’t take long. And he was reasonably certain he should keep at least one hand free at all times.

She wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d been hearing about her for years, just like everyone else who worked for OPUS, but the stories had made her sound like a larger-than-life legend. A brisk, brassy bombshell with a big mouth, bigger cojones and no moral fiber to speak of. A woman who put the job before anything and did anything to get the job done. Joel had pegged her as a tall, voluptuous siren, whiskeyvoiced and two-pack-a-day redolent, with the hard eyes of a woman who was edgy and brittle and coarse.

Instead, she looked like the girl next door. Small in stature, slender in frame, pretty more than beautiful in an almost wholesome-looking way. She’d removed her knit cap, and a mass of pale blond hair now cascaded down to her shoulders, scooped back from her face with a careless hand. Although the clingy fit of her clothing revealed some very nice curves, she was by no means the bump-and-grind type. Her voice was a clear, euphonic tenor, and as he’d wrestled with her on the bed, he’d noted the faint scent of lavender about her. As for her eyes…

Well, now. The eyes were certainly something. A clear sapphire-blue that shoved Joel completely off balance. Her eyes were indeed the stuff of legend. With them, he could see how Lila Moreau had earned her rep as a woman who could glean just about anything she wanted from any man she wanted, be it information or something else entirely.

But he detected no edge to her, nothing bitter or coarse. She didn’t even seem all that brassy, truth be told, threats to kick his ass notwithstanding. She’d spoken of that as if it were a simple statement of fact, which, he had to admit, it probably was.

Nevertheless, the realization that this woman, who was a good foot shorter than he and probably almost half his weight, had earned herself a bona fide, justified reputation as the most dangerous woman in the world certainly gave a man pause.

The jury was still out on the moral fiber thing—she had, after all, broken in to his house for the express purpose of imprisoning him and showing him who was boss—but he was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Besides, morality, like so many things, was relative—and fluid. His own moral history being what it was, he was the last person to make a judgment call on something like that.

He’d managed to leave her tea on the nightstand closest to her without losing a limb, so he figured they were off to a pretty good start. Still, he’d completed the action in record time and immediately retreated to the opposite side of the room when he was done. Now he leaned back in his wooden desk chair with an ominous creak, swirled his cognac in its snifter and never once took his eyes off Lila Moreau.

Instead of offering him the information he’d requested of her a little while ago, however, she asked him a question of her own. “Do you know exactly where Sorcerer is right now?”

“I haven’t pinpointed his exact position, no,” Joel admitted. “But I’ve gotten pretty close.”

“And do you know what he’s doing?”

He shook his head. “Not really. That’s your job.”

She nodded. “And I’ve done my job. I know exactly what Sorcerer is doing.”

Her intimation being, of course, that Joel hadn’t done his job, since he didn’t know exactly where Sorcerer was. Not that he cared about impressing her. Although it might come as a shock to Lila Moreau, she wasn’t the one in charge of this operation. Nor was she the most important cog in the machine. Naturally, he didn’t tell her that. He only said, “You didn’t include your discovery in your report.”

“That’s because it’s a theory,” she said.

Joel narrowed his eyes at her. “You just told me you know it for a fact.”

“No, I said I know exactly what he’s up to.”

“But—”

“I just don’t have any proof. Yet.”

He leaned back in his chair again. “Then you don’t know exactly what he’s up to. Like you said, it’s still a theory.”

She set her tea back on the nightstand and met his gaze defiantly. “No, it isn’t.”

“But you just said—”

“I know exactly what he’s doing,” she repeated.

“You can’t know for sure if you don’t have proof.”

“Yes, I can.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Yes. I can.”

“No. You can’t.”

“Can.”

“Can’t.”

“Look, Faraday—”

“Call me Joel.”

He could practically see her back go up when he said it.

Obviously she didn’t like addressing her coworkers by their first names. Or, more likely, she resented being told what to do. Which was too damned bad. Because Joel was going to be giving her a lot of instruction in the days ahead. And she’d sure as hell have to get used to following orders.

“Virtuoso,” she amended, using his code name instead.

Which was strange to hear spoken aloud, since archivists were a pretty chummy bunch and rarely referred to each other by their code names. They were supposed to do so in professional situations, but…They were left so much to their own devices that over the years they’d splintered off into their own group within the organization, with their own practices and policies. Joel and the other archivists just weren’t as formal as the rest of OPUS.

But fine, he and Lila could compromise on this one. Compromises weren’t such bad things. Joel just liked being the one who offered them, not the one who agreed to go along with them. He’d be magnanimous. This time.

“Whatever,” he replied, telling himself he did not sound ungracious when he said it.

She grinned at him, smugly, and it surprised Joel how much he wanted to walk over to the bed and do something about that smugness. What surprised him even more was that the something he wanted to do was in no way professional. He’d learned a long time ago to temper his knee-jerk reactions and not to let his emotions get the better of him. Lila, he was beginning to realize, could jerk a hell of a lot more than a man’s knee. And he didn’t want to think about what she could potentially do to a man’s emotions.

“Between what I know about Sorcerer and his comings and goings the past couple of years,” she continued, “and what I learned over the past few months, I can safely say that what the guy is trying to do is take the entire planet hostage.”

Joel narrowed his eyes at her. “What are you talking about? How can he take the entire planet hostage?”

She picked up her tea, sipped it carefully, swallowed slowly, sipped it again. And never once did her eyes leave Joel’s. She was baiting him. Trying to make him impatient for whatever information she might have. Trying to make him lose his cool. Trying again to show him who was in charge. Well, as she’d said earlier, the joke was on her. If there was one thing Joel Faraday had in spades, it was patience. He could wait all night if it came to that. At least he could take bathroom breaks. The way Lila was sipping her tea, she’d figure out soon enough who was really calling the shots here.

Finally she lowered her cup and said, “Sorcerer’s trying to create a massive computer virus that will infect systems around the world with enough velocity, tenacity and toxicity to cripple the entire planet’s commercial, political and financial momentum. Not that he necessarily wants to unleash it,” she quickly qualified. “Since taking advantage of the planet’s commercial and financial arenas is one of his favorite pastimes, and watching its political machinations is his greatest source of amusement. He’s greedier than he is power mad. What he’d rather do is blackmail the planet into paying him billions of dollars not to unleash it.”

Joel thought about that for a moment, weighing her information with what he knew himself. He’d developed his own theory about what Sorcerer was doing, but hers made more sense, since, ultimately, it was infinitely more profitable. “So it’s your classic Mafia neighborhood protection racket,” he finally said.

“Yep,” she replied. “Except that Sorcerer has brought it into the twenty-first century with global, high-tech potential. Pay up or be burned to the ground, figuratively speaking.”

“I suppose it’s possible that’s what he plans to do,” Joel said. “But frankly, something of a scope that massive doesn’t seem possible to effectively execute.”

“Maybe not,” she agreed. “But if anyone can pull it off, it’s Sorcerer.”

“Unfortunately, I can’t argue with you about that. And even more unfortunately, what you just described fits well with what we learned about him while we still had him in our sights in New York.”

For years, Sorcerer had been popping up in various parts of the country and causing trouble, then disappearing just as quickly without OPUS getting any closer to capturing him. Six months ago he’d turned up in New York, misrepresenting himself online to lure a lonely young woman into helping him further his plans. Unfortunately, although the young woman, Avery Nesbitt, had done her best to help OPUS catch him, Sorcerer had managed to evade them yet again.

“If what you theorize is true,” Joel said, deliberately emphasizing that word to piss Lila off—hey, two could play her power game—“then Sorcerer can’t do it alone. As smart as he is, he doesn’t have that specific kind of know-how. He knows computers, sure. But not sophisticated programming like that. That’s why he approached Avery Nesbitt. Because he knew she did. But she’s out of the picture now,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, but there are other people like her in the world,” Lila countered. “People who are whizzes with all things programming-related, including viruses. Hell, especially viruses. Some of those people are just kids. And a lot of them, regardless of their ages, are socially backward enough that they could easily be manipulated. Especially by someone like Sorcerer.”

“He’s looking for another patsy to help him do his dirty work,” Joel said. “Maybe more than one patsy. Avery Nesbitt wasn’t the only person he contacted when he was trawling the Net for virus builders, though she was without question his prime target. Understandable, considering her history. But when we had him under surveillance in New York, Sorcerer seemed to be shopping around a lot, contacting a number of people, as if he were trying to put together a geek squad of sorts.”

“So is he still looking?” Lila asked. “Or has he found the people he needs?”

“Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it?” Joel replied. “He’s been off our radar for a while now. What we have working in our favor is that guys like Sorcerer tend to be creatures of habit, no matter how much they might think otherwise. The fact that they’re convinced their behavior is untraceable, not to mention the fact that they have staggering great egos, only helps us out, because people like that aren’t always thorough in covering their tracks. At least, not as well as they should.”

“How close have you gotten to finding him?”

Joel set down his cognac and rose from his chair to bend over the mahogany rolltop desk that had belonged to his great grandmother. It was overflowing with untidy heaps of files, notebooks, maps, sketches and other paper paraphernalia, but he knew exactly where to locate what he wanted. Picking carefully through the mess, he withdrew a diagram he’d sketched himself of precisely the geographic region he was talking about. Moving to the foot of the bed, he unrolled it so that it was facing upside down from himself and toward Lila.

“I’ve narrowed it to an area of roughly three hundred square miles,” he told her as he ran his hands briskly over the paper to smooth it out. When the edges began to turn up again, he retrieved his iPod and cell phone from the desk, placing one on each side of the drawing to anchor it down again. By then, Lila had repositioned herself on one hand and both knees, her handcuffed arm extended behind her, to inspect the map.

“Three hundred square miles isn’t what I’d call narrowed down,” she said.

“It’s not as big an area as it sounds like,” he told her. “It’s pretty much relegated to one city and its immediate environs. And within that area, there are two smaller ones that I think will produce Sorcerer for us.”

“You know for a fact he’s here?”

“Not for a fact, no,” Joel admitted. “No one’s registered a physical sighting of him since your sister’s house.”

Five months after disappearing from New York, Sorcerer had turned up again, this time in Cleveland, Ohio, because he’d mistaken Lila’s twin sister, Marnie Lundy, who lived and worked there, for Lila herself. And although Marnie, too, had aided in the investigation, even posing briefly as Lila because Lila had been keeping a low profile at the time, Sorcerer had again slipped through their fingers. His disappearance then had just made Joel that much more determined to locate him now.

“Taking into account Sorcerer’s past actions and appearances, his personal history and his proclivities,” he said, “I’m reasonably certain he’ll turn up in one of two places within this city. All you have to do is go into those places and flush him out.”

“So what city are we talking about?” she asked, looking up at him. And Joel had to give himself a good mental shake to keep from falling into the fathomless depths of her blue, blue eyes. “You haven’t labeled any streets or landmarks here.”

“Haven’t gotten around to it yet. But don’t worry.” He pointed to his temple. “I’ve got them all stored up here.”

“Feel like sharing any of them?” she asked. Sounding impatient. Glaring at him impatiently. Giving her handcuffed wrist an impatient jerk.

Just like that, Joel felt the upper hand slip firmly back into his grip. This time he was the one to grin. And he hoped he didn’t look too smug when he did.

Oh, who was he kidding? He went out of his way to look as smug as possible.

He told her, “It’s a city known for showbiz mayors, tasteless pornography and dubious art exhibits.”

“Oh, great,” Lila groaned, looking down at the map again. “I have to go back to Vegas?”

He shook his head. “Not Las Vegas. Cincinnati.”

“Cincinnati?” she echoed incredulously, sitting back on her heels. “Just how much have you had to drink tonight, guy? Cincinnati is the heartland of America. It’s Ohio, for God’s sake. Have you ever been to Ohio? Me, I just left Ohio a couple of weeks ago. Walt Disney would gag on its sweetness. How does all that stuff relate to Cincinnati?”

Joel lifted a hand and counted them off. “Jerry Springer,” he said in response to item number one, extending his index finger. “Larry Flynt,” he added, thrusting up another—rather significant, at that—finger. “And the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit,” he concluded, adding a third finger to the mix. “Trust me. Cincinnati has a dark side you can’t begin to imagine.”

She burst out laughing at that. “Dark side. Cincinnati. Right.”

“Yeah, okay, maybe that’s pushing it,” he conceded, dropping both hands to his hips. “It’s still the place where we’re going to find Sorcerer. Mark my words.”

“How do you figure?”

“Like I said, he was in contact with several people when he was reeling in Avery Nesbitt. An inordinate number of them were located in the Cincinnati area. Also located in the Cincinnati area is a very small, very exclusive private college. Waverly College. Ever heard of it?”

“Yeah, it’s like a small-scale MIT.”

Joel nodded. “Except a degree from Waverly is more prestigious, and it’s a harder school to get into. What you end up with is a streamlined student body full of big brains that are light-years ahead of the intellectual norm, all of them tech majors, the vast majority in the field of computers. The place is thick with hackers. In fact, a few years ago, a small group of underclassmen was arrested, tried and convicted on charges of treason after hacking into top secret CIA files and selling them to terrorists to pay for their pornography and gaming habits.”

“I remember that,” she said with a nod that nudged a stray lock of pale blond hair over one eye. She immediately shoved it back behind one ear, but not before Joel’s fingers curved instinctively in preparation to do that himself.

Terrific, he thought. Barely an hour after meeting Lila, he was responding to her in a way that he really couldn’t afford to be responding. Wanting to touch her, however innocently. Hell, wanting to touch her in ways that weren’t innocent at all. Being mesmerized by the incredible blue eyes to the point of momentarily forgetting what he’d intended to say. Battling a very uncharacteristic—never mind completely politically incorrect—wave of arousal every time he looked up and saw her handcuffed to his bed. It had been months, maybe years, since he’d experienced such an immediate attraction to a woman. And Lila was the last woman he should be experiencing it for.

She added, “So you think Sorcerer stopped by Waverly on the way home from work to pick up a dozen eggheads with his usual gallon of milk?”

He nodded. “I think it’s extremely possible. And very likely.”

She thought about that for a minute. “Makes sense. Especially when you consider his recent appearance in Cleveland. It’s only a few hours’ drive from Cincinnati.”

“Also interesting, and significant,” Joel continued, “is the fact that there have been a rash of online scams and crimes committed in recent months that have been traced back to a user or users in this part of the country.” He pointed at the map again. “They started off as petty mischief, like worms and viruses and hoaxes, exactly the sort of thing college students enjoy most. But whoever’s been creating them and sending them out has covered his or her—or their—tracks well. We’ve only been able to pinpoint the city, not an actual address. Over the past several weeks, however, the crimes have escalated into some pretty major—and pretty ballsy—thefts and cons that are starting to rake in some significant money.”

“You don’t know who’s perpetrating them?” Lila asked.

He shook his head again. “Only that it’s someone in the Cincinnati area. Most likely someone at Waverly. But the activity shows signs of having started off with amateurs, becoming more sophisticated just recently.”

“Like maybe someone or a handful of people who were once only in it for the fun are now also in it for the profit.”

“Exactly like that.”

“Like maybe someone suddenly joined up with this person or persons and injected them with a little more ambition and organization.”

“Yep.”

“Like maybe Sorcerer has indeed found his band of merry hackers.”

“Which means he’s now stronger and smarter than he’s ever been before,” Joel concluded.

He traced his finger on the map in a circular motion around an area near the Ohio River. “Dormitory housing is pretty sparse at Waverly, so a good number of the students live in the city proper. And there’s an area downtown around Vine Street that especially caters to students. Lots of student-type apartments, coffee shops, clubs, student-friendly retail establishments, that kind of thing. I think that’s probably the best place to start looking. There and on Waverly’s campus. If my calculations are correct—and it goes without saying that they are,” he added, since Lila was right about modesty being overrated when it wasn’t warranted, “you’ll find Sorcerer in one place or another. Along with his accomplices. It’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.”

“And being uncharacteristically lucky,” she added.

He smiled. “So all that good karma you’ve been scoring over the years will come in handy now.”

She laughed at that, a deep, full-bodied, throaty laugh that made something inside Joel shimmy like mirage heat on a strip of desert highway. Only, instead of being way off in the distance like mirage heat usually was, it surrounded him and closed down hard. Once again he reminded himself that he was in no position to be feeling such things. Even under the best of circumstances, he did not need a sexual attraction to a woman whose emotions—at least the positive ones—ran about as deep as a fingerprint.

Note to self, Faraday: You’re not into meaningless sex anymore. Remember?

Well, evidently not…

“Do you have a list of the people in the area Sorcerer contacted and may or may not have followed up on?” Lila asked.

Joel shook off his wayward thoughts—again—and focused on the matter at hand. Which happened to be the woman he was trying not to think about. Damn. “We do,” he said. “It will be in a dossier with other information I have for you. But remember, there are almost certainly others we don’t know about.”

“Do you know if Sorcerer established any contact with any of the people you did identify?”

“You’ll receive a detailed account, but yes, we intercepted a number of e-mails between him and several students at Waverly. They were mostly exchanges of inconsequential information, though. Getting-to-know-you type stuff, the same thing he initially sent to Avery Nesbitt. Sorcerer assumed several different identities, each tailored to be most attractive to whomever he was in touch with. Most often, he was a young student at another university close enough to arrange for a physical meeting, should it come to that. With women, he invariably went the romantic route. With the men, he posed as another gamer and attempted to strike up a friendship through those avenues. Online gaming is huge at places like Waverly.”

“And did any such physical meetings take place?” Lila asked.

“A couple of times either Sorcerer or his mark would extend an invitation to meet up somewhere, but to the best of our knowledge, no such physical meetings ever took place.”

“To the best of your knowledge,” she repeated. “That means it’s entirely possible that he has made physical contact. With any number of those people.”

She was right, as much as Joel hated to admit it. Intelligence and surveillance could go only so far. And Sorcerer certainly knew how to keep himself from being tailed. He’d built a career on it. Not to mention, according to Sorcerer’s past habits—which, lately, Joel had been building his own career on—Sorcerer would delight in putting one over on OPUS by completing such a meeting just for the hell of it. He’d be careful, as he’d been in New York when he lured Avery Nesbitt into such a meeting, but he’d carry through. Unfortunately, Joel had an even bigger reason to agree with Lila.

“It’s more than possible,” he admitted. “It’s probable. Except for those few appearances in Cleveland, Sorcerer’s been off our radar for a while now. That’s given him ample opportunity to operate with total freedom. And there were plenty of gaps in our surveillance even when we did have him in our sights. Not that he can be sure he hasn’t been under constant surveillance, so there’s still some small chance he’s gone into hiding and stayed there, but—”

“Oh, he’s been sure he wasn’t under surveillance,” Lila told him with what sounded like absolute certainty. “He’s known about every gap and failure. You can count on it.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’d count on it,” Joel said, “but somehow the guy always does seem to know what OPUS is doing. Sometimes it even seems like he knows it before we do.”

“There’s no somehow to it,” Lila said. “And no seems, either.”

Joel looked up from the diagram where his gaze had fallen to find Lila staring at him with a very troubling expression. As if she knew something he didn’t. Which, if Sorcerer was involved, wasn’t good. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean the reason he manages to stay one step ahead of OPUS is because he does know what we’re doing. Every step of the way. And he knows it, sometimes, before the field agent even gets handed the assignment.”

Joel narrowed his eyes at her. “That’s impossible. The only way he could know that would be if—”

He halted before finishing, not wanting to put voice to the thought that flashed into his head.

So Lila finished his statement for him. “Someone inside the organization has been helping him all along.”