Authors: Elizabeth Bevarly
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #General, #Suspense
Overnight Male (2 page)
“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.”
J
OEL
F
ARADAY 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, whiskey-voiced 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.