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Oh, stop making it so easy, Dixon thought. “I keep forgetting your code name. What is it again?”
“Cowboy,” the other man said.
Yee-haw, Dixon thought. He just hoped he could say it with a straight face.
“Besides,” Cowboy added, “nobody at my level knows your name. Except for your code name. And you told me never to call you—”
“Okay, Dixon is fine,” Dixon hastily amended.
“—that,” the other man finished at the same time. “What? You thought I was going to say your code name out loud? Are you nuts? I’m not nuts. From what I hear, the last guy who spoke your code name out loud is still in the hospital. You’re a dangerous man.”
Damn straight, Dixon thought. And he wouldn’t have it any other way. Except that he’d be a dangerous man out of the cold. Literally if not figuratively.
The only thing worse than being in the field—where he wasn’t supposed to be anyway, in case he hadn’t mentioned it—was being in the field in New York City. Mostly because there were no fields in New York City. Except for those in Central Park, which, okay, were very nice, but they were nothing compared to the rolling green hills surrounding the Virginia farm where he’d grown up. And even though Dixon was currently parked right next to Central Park, he had to be focused on the big tidy building across from it instead. The big tidy building full of outrageously expensive condominiums that only people with more dollars than sense could afford to call their own.
The big tidy building where Daisy Miller lived.
Of course, her name was no more Daisy Miller than his was Dixon. But he’d had to have something to call her, just as he’d had to have something to put on his phony driver’s license, in case one of New York’s finest wandered by and wondered what a nondescript white van was doing parked in front of a Central Park West address for hours and hours and, oh, look, is that a dead debutante in the back the way there always is on Law & Order?
It was a pain in the ass trying to do surveillance in New York City. Yeah, he was good at what he did—quite possibly the best—but it would take an ?bergenius to clear up some of the audio crap he’d been trying to weed through all evening. Between the lousy weather—which the first week of November was way too early for—and the incessant cell phone use of millions of people and the twenty gazillion satellite channels beaming down from space and the simple proliferation of car and pedestrian traffic, listening in on Daisy Miller’s residence this week had been next to impossible. Though Dixon had gotten some decent info about a certain mutual fund when some stockbroker’s cell phone conversation had overlapped with Daisy’s frantic call to the veterinarian about her cat’s digestive problems. Not to mention a very nice tip on the seventh race at Hialeah tomorrow from some guy named Sal who seemed to know what he was talking about.
Fortunately except for that call to the vet and a follow-up the next day—her cat, thank God, was just fine once it passed that button—Daisy’s activity in her apartment was limited to the point of being nonexistent. But then, so was her activity out of her apartment. In fact, in the week that Dixon had been keeping an eye on the place, he was reasonably certain she hadn’t left the building once. And that bothered him a lot on some level he couldn’t even name. Yeah, there was a definite cold snap going on in the city, and lots of people worked at home these days, but to not leave one’s house one single time in a full week? Not even to go to a movie or pick up a gallon of milk or buy a lottery ticket? That was just…weird.
He wished he knew more about her. Which was a strange feeling for him, because anytime Dixon—or anyone else he worked with at OPUS—had wanted to know more about someone, it had taken less than a day to find out everything about that person. That was a big part of his job, after all—to find out whatever he could about suspicious characters. And thanks to all the sophisticated equipment and arcane networks he had at his fingertips—not to mention his superior brain—Dixon never had much trouble doing his job. With Daisy, though…
She was good. Better than he was, Dixon had been forced to concede reluctantly. Not only did she have some kind of screening device on her phone he couldn’t figure out, but she had a firewall on her computer unlike anything he’d ever seen before—both of them homemade and high-tech and very, very effective. He’d managed to chip a few chinks in the firewall through the course of the week, but only enough to be able to keep track of her when she was online with her desktop. And even then it was more because he’d been able to tap into her wireless server and track her from there. Her ’puter just thumbed its nose at his efforts. And her laptop—forget about it. Luckily for him, she rarely used that. Even so, Dixon hadn’t been able to fish any pertinent information out of her computer files. Not even her real name. He didn’t even know which apartment in the building was hers, only that she did live in this building. And he’d only been able to trace that much of her because, before this week, he’d been surveilling her online boyfriend, Andrew Paddington, and had intercepted some of the e-mails he’d sent to Daisy.
Not that Andrew Paddington’s name was really Andrew Paddington, either. Him, Dixon knew well. Too well. And he was a rank bastard. Of course, everyone at OPUS knew Andrew Paddington. Only they all knew him by his real name: Adrian Padgett. And they all thought he was a rank bastard, too. Because once upon a time they’d all believed Adrian was one of them and then had discovered, too late, that he was nobody’s man but his own. And a very bad man, at that.
It had been years since they’d heard from Adrian after he went rogue from his position at the Office of Political Unity and Security with millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains and a formerly secret network hanging out to dry. Then suddenly a year and a half ago he’d re-surfaced in, of all places, his hometown of Indianapolis. He’d been trying to pass himself off as a legitimate businessman by the name of Adrian Windsor, but there was nothing legitimate about Adrian. If he’d surfaced after years of being underground, it could only be because he was up to no good. OPUS had discovered his activities and deterred him in time to prevent him from doing any real damage, but they’d never quite figured out what exactly his activities were leading to, and he’d slipped away before they’d been able to find out. Something illegal, though, that was for damned sure. Because Adrian didn’t know how to operate inside the law.
They’d lost track of him for nine months after he’d left Indianapolis, in spite of making him their number-one priority for apprehension. Finally, thanks in large part to the efforts of Dixon and his partner, OPUS had unearthed Adrian again a few months ago, living in New York City…where he seemed to be doing little more than joining online dating services and chatting up young women on the Internet.
Oh, he was definitely up to no good. The bastard. Dixon just wished he knew what it was.
But Adrian’s OPUS code name hadn’t been Sorcerer for nothing. He could make magic when he wanted to. He could make himself invisible. He could make himself be anyone—or anything—he wanted. And he could mesmerize other people—ordinary, decent, moral people—into thinking they were doing the right thing by helping him out. Other people like, oh…Dixon didn’t know…Daisy Miller.
Who the hell was she anyway?
Not that she seemed ordinary in any way. Or decent, considering what Dixon had read in some of the snippets he’d been able to decrypt from her e-mails to Andrew/Adrian/Sorcerer. As for moral, well…the jury was still out on that. Could be she was just another one of Sorcerer’s clueless pawns. Or she might be someone as illicitly inclined as he was. Whoever she was, Dixon could see why Sorcerer wanted her. Not just because if she was living here, she had a bundle of money, but if her homemade phone screen and firewall were anything to go by, she also knew a thing or two about communication technology and software. And since Sorcerer’s last incarnation had been as a high-level executive for a computer software company in Indianapolis, it was a safe bet that whatever he was up to had something to do with that particular medium.
Although Dixon was fully prepared, and able, to break into Daisy’s apartment and bug the hell out of the place if she ever left long enough for him to manage it—and if, you know, he ever found it—he hadn’t had the opportunity to do so because she never went anywhere. So he’d had to make do with industrial-strength microphones that caught every other damned thing in a half-mile radius, too, and try to filter out what he could. And he’d had to intercept what he could of her online activity through the airwaves. But her firewall made even that hard to do.
Tonight Daisy seemed to be especially active, darting from one chat room to another without even posting in any of them. Not that that was so unusual, since she seemed to be following Sorcerer. Plus, she just spent a lot of time in chat rooms—enough so that Dixon suspected she was a bit neurotic.
But what he’d come to view as her regular haunts were a lot more esoteric than the ones she was visiting tonight. In addition to the Henry James site, she liked the Libertarian Party home page, the Ruth Gordon Fan Club, the Mo Rocca is a Total Babe site, one headed up by the words Love Animals Don’t Cut Them into Pieces and Ingest Them, several Magic: the Gathering sites and the Cracker Mysteries site.
That last was where she had declared on the message board that she wanted to have Robbie Coltrane’s love child and name it Clem. Dixon had tried to reassure himself that she must have been drinking pretty heavily that night. Somehow, though, that had brought little reassurance. All in all, had he met Daisy Miller at a cocktail party, he could safely say he’d want to keep his distance.
Nevertheless, she was very intriguing. And he couldn’t say he hadn’t enjoyed some parts of this week. Just not tonight, since it was so friggin’ cold and her activity online was so friggin’ weird. He was supposed to be on duty until daybreak, when Daisy’s activity generally started to ebb, whereupon he’d be relieved by another agent, whose job would be even more boring than his was, because the daylight hours seemed to be the time when Daisy shutdown.
He was about to contact Cowboy and tell the other man he was calling it a night when suddenly, out of nowhere, Dixon got his big break. Because right when he was thinking this was pointless and he might as well pack it in, Daisy Miller picked up her phone and made a call. When he picked up the sound of a man’s voice evidently answering the phone at the other end of the line with a cheery, “Hello, Eastern Star Earth-Friendly Market,” he quickly looked up the address on his laptop and saw that it was an all-night market three blocks away.
More satisfying than that, though, was when he heard Daisy—whose voice was very familiar by now—say, “Hi, Mohammed, this is Avery Nesbitt. I need some things delivered.”
Dixon picked up one of the more primitive tools he had at his fingertips—a pad and pencil—and listened as Avery Nesbitt, aka Daisy Miller, ticked off a list of essentials that she needed delivered to the very building where Dixon had parked his van. And then Mohammed confirmed that those should go to apartment number—Oh, yes, there is a God—7B, right? Yes, thanks, Mohammed, and please charge it to my account, as usual. And add fifteen percent for the delivery boy, twenty if he can deliver it tonight, ’cause I’m really running low on milk. He can? Great. Thanks again, Mohammed, you’re the best.
Avery Nesbitt. Dixon smiled at the words he’d scrawled on the pad of paper before him. Not Daisy Miller. And this week, from the market, Avery Nesbitt needed coffee, bread, peanut butter—the biggest jar you have, please, Mohammed—Froot Loops, Cap’n Crunch, a box of Chicken in a Biskit crackers, a six-pack of Wild Cherry Pepsi, some of those red-chili pistachios, a mondo bag of M&M’s, Sausalito cookies, tampons (she’d said that without an ounce of hesitation) and lots and lots of other stuff that had the nutritional equivalent of a big bag of lint.
Awful lot of caffeine and sugar on her list, Dixon reflected as he read his hastily jotted notes. Evidently Avery Nesbitt lived on nothing but carbohydrates. Which went a long way toward explaining why she stayed up all night, every night, the way she always did. And he found himself wondering what a woman could possibly have to do all night when she was home alone.
“Not playin’ Parcheesi, that’s for sure,” he muttered to himself.
And then he came to the last notation he’d made: Delivery tonight. That meant some guy would be bopping down the street very soon with a couple of big grocery sacks from the Eastern Star Earth-Friendly Market destined for Ms. Avery Nesbitt of apartment 7B.
Which gave Dixon an idea he really had no business entertaining.
He contacted Cowboy again, but this time it wasn’t to tell the man he was calling it a night. No, this time what Dixon told Cowboy was—
“I’m going in.”
“What?” the other man said.
“I’m going in,” he repeated.
“You’re coming in?” Cowboy asked. “It’s that boring?”
“Not coming in,” Dixon corrected him, “going in.”
“You mean going in as in…going in?”
Dixon smiled. “Yeah. I just a got a nice bit of intelligence and I want to follow up on it.”
“So you’re going in…where?”
Dixon rolled his eyes. Newbies. “To meet our girl,” he said.
“She-Wolf is back?” Cowboy asked, voicing the code name of Dixon’s regular partner and sounding very confused. “What’s she doing in New York? I thought she went home to Las Vegas to see her mother.”
“Not She-Wolf,” Dixon said. “Our other girl. Sorcerer’s contact.”
“Daisy Miller?”
“That’s the one.”
“But you can’t,” Cowboy said. “You don’t even know which apartment she’s in.”
“I do now. I told you. I just received some very nice intelligence. And it’s from an excellent source.” Himself. What better source could there be?
“Then you pass the intelligence along to me, Dixon,” Cowboy instructed. “And I figure out what to do with it. Assimilate, evaluate, articulate—that’s my job. And you don’t go in until I say it’s safe. Hell, you don’t go in, period, unless you’re the field agent.”
“But I am the field agent,” he reminded the other man, suddenly grateful for that anomaly.
“But you’re not supposed to be in the field,” Cowboy reminded him right back.
“Hey, I didn’t ask for this assignment,” Dixon said with all the mock innocence he could muster. “But you know how conscientious I am about doing my work the right way.”
“The hell you are. You’re as conscientious about that as I am.”
“And I want to make sure this job gets done right.”
“No, Dixon, you—”
“So I’m going in to make contact,” he told the other man finally. “I’ll let you know what happens when I get back.” He smiled to himself. No reason not to mess with the newbie a little. It was so much fun to hear them shriek. “If I come back alive, I mean.”
“What?” Cowboy shrieked.
“Wish me luck,” he said into the microphone before removing the headset altogether.
Not that that prevented him from hearing more shrieking.
“This is nuts, Dixon,” Cowboy told him. “Don’t go in there if it’s dangerous. You’re not even a field agent. You’re supposed to monitor the machines and analyze the data, like me. If anyone goes in to make contact, it should be She-Wolf. Wait for her before proceeding any further. She’ll be back in a couple of weeks. She’s the field agent. You don’t know what to do. You don’t know proper procedure.”
Oh, the hell he didn’t. He’d helped write the proper procedure. He’d been an OPUS agent when Cowboy was still fine-tuning his small motor skills.
“Dixon, I’m begging you,” Cowboy implored him. But he sounded resigned now. “You can’t go in. Please. You don’t have permission.”
Dixon chuckled as he flipped up the collar of his leather jacket and reached for the handle of the van’s side door.
No permission. Right. As if that had ever stopped him before.
CHAPTER TWO
AVERY WAS TOTALLY IMMERSED in creating the code to make her farewell gift to Andrew especially noxious when the doorbell rang and blew her concentration. When she glanced at the clock in the corner of her laptop computer screen, she saw that it was 4:08 a.m. Who on earth came calling at 4:08 in the morning? For that matter, who came calling at all? She hadn’t had any visitors to her apartment since…never. That was one of the things that happened when—cue the dramatic music in a minor key—debutantes go bad.
Then she remembered the groceries she’d ordered earlier. Duh. She really needed those tampons.
Saving the work she’d completed to her hard drive, Avery rose and made her way to the front door, switching on lights as she went, because she normally worked in the dark. She also launched herself into a full-body stretch, wondering how long she had been sitting still. It hadn’t been midnight yet when she’d started working, so more than four hours. Still, she’d gotten a lot done. In fact, she was doing a better job than she usually did for something like this, despite the fact that it had been years since she’d put one of these things together. Funny how productive you could be when someone pissed you off real bad.
Before opening the front door, she peeked through the peephole, frowning when the guy on the other side turned out to be neither Eddie, the usual night delivery guy, nor Mohammed, who from time to time made deliveries himself. Nor did the man out there look like someone who would make his living delivering groceries in the first place. No, thanks to his enormous size—although he was distorted by the fish-eye, he was clearly bigger than the average national monument—he seemed more like the kind of guy who would make his living as a longshoreman. Or a bouncer. Or a wrestler. Or a Mack truck.
Wow, just how bad was the economy, she wondered, if guys who looked like him were reduced to delivering groceries? Maybe she should start visiting CNN.com from time to time and see what was going on outside the walls of her apartment. Not that she really cared, quite frankly, but she was still a citizen of this state, even if she would have preferred to live in a different one. Like maybe the state of altered consciousness. Nice scenery there.
In spite of her misgivings about the delivery guy, Avery figured he must be legit because he was toting two brown grocery sacks with the Eastern Star Earth-Friendly Market logo on them. Pulling herself back from the peephole, she unfastened the four dead bolts and chain that she routinely kept locked in place, then dragged her front door open.
Holy cow. He was even bigger without the distortion of the fish-eye, she saw when she glimpsed the man in person. And now he really didn’t seem like someone who would be delivering groceries for a living. Once she got a better look at his face, Avery decided he was more the kind of guy whose job would involve being onstage somewhere—probably stripping down to his altogether while hundreds of screaming, frantic women stuffed their grocery money into his G-string. He was staggeringly handsome, from his finely wrought mouth to his ruggedly chiseled cheekbones to his aristocratic nose to his oh-my-God eyes.
But somehow Avery suspected the harshness of his features belied good breeding, since she had more than a nodding acquaintance with that—both good breeding and harshness. In spite of his tattered attire, he held himself as if he were someone who knew the rules and regulations of proper dress—he just chose not to abide by them. There was a strange mixture of majesty and menace about him, as if he would have been equally comfortable wielding a martini at a high-society function or breaking someone’s knuckles as an enforcer for the mob.
It was his eyes, though, that she found most unsettling. An icy, almost opaque green, they made her think of the deepest part of the ocean—where swam the most mysterious, dangerous creatures—frozen over. Instead of repelling her, however, the look in his eyes made her want to draw closer to him. But it wasn’t just his good looks that generated such a response in her. It simply had been so long since Avery had experienced the simple pleasure of being close to a man physically. Especially one who looked like him.
“Where do you want these?” he asked without preamble.
Automatically she jutted a thumb over her shoulder. “In the kitchen. Please,” she added as an afterthought, nearly forgetting the good manners that had been hammered into her during her years of after-school etiquette and deportment classes at Madame Yvette’s School for Genteel Young Ladies in East Hampton. “Thanks,” she added with some distraction. Wow. His eyes really were amazing. And the overly long black hair spilling out from beneath the driving cap he’d turned backward on his head only made their color seem that much lighter…and that much darker, too.
But the guy didn’t follow her instructions, only stood on the other side of the door gazing back at her. Incisively enough that she began to feel disconcerted, a feeling she really hated. In fact, it had been years since she had felt disconcerted, and she’d almost convinced herself she was incapable of feeling that anymore. Along with discomfort and shame and humiliation and all those other things that had once been her constant companions. The realization that this man, simply by showing up at her front door, could rouse even one of them—and so quickly, too, damn him—bothered her a lot.
She was about to snap another order at him when he inclined his head forward and said, “Do you mind?”
“Mind what?” she asked.
“Uh, stepping aside?” he told her. “So I can get through.”
Only then did Avery realize that he hadn’t come forward because she was blocking his way by standing there stupidly ogling him. Gee, had she felt disconcerted before? That was nothing compared to the mortification she felt now. Especially since she was leering at him again, thanks to the velvety pitch of his voice, a sound that skimmed over her like rough-calloused fingertips on naked flesh.
Oh, yeah. She’d definitely gone too long without physical closeness to the opposite sex if she was thinking a man’s request for her to step aside was the equivalent of foreplay. Good foreplay, at that.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” she apologized, moving to the side. “I…You’ll have to excuse me. I was working. My mind is still elsewhere.” Like on how the sound of your voice was making me orgasmic. “The kitchen is through there,” she added, pointing in that direction.
He sauntered past her, and she pushed the front door closed before following. As nice as his front side had been, Avery had to admit that the view from the rear—especially of his rear—was almost nicer. The faded jeans hugged his taut buttocks as snugly as Saran wrap—would that they were as transparent, too—swathing his lean thighs and calves. The leather of his jacket was cracked white in enough places to give it character, his shoulders broad and strong and hard-looking beneath it.
She bit back an involuntary sigh. She’d always loved a man’s back more than any other feature, liked how the muscles there were dense and plentiful and elegant and how the skin was smooth and warm and fine. She could have been perfectly content for days lying next to a naked man doing little more than running her open palm over his back. This man’s naked back, she was certain, would be spectacular.
When they entered her kitchen, she marveled at how much the room seemed to shrink with his presence. Funny, but she’d always considered the room to be larger than what most apartments in the city claimed. Unfortunately it was also messier than most apartments in the city, cluttered with empty cereal boxes and crumbled pretzel and potato-chip bags and dirty dishes that she hadn’t gotten around to putting into the dishwasher. Mostly because she hadn’t taken the clean dishes out.
Well, she’d been busy. Working. She had lots of work to do these days. Not to mention she was inherently lazy. In any event, there wasn’t even enough clear counter space for him to set down the groceries, so she muttered another apology and waved him toward the door that led to the dining room.
“Just put them on the table in there,” she said as she watched him head that way.
Where, she recalled belatedly, she had been working on Andrew’s gift, which was still sitting out in the open, where anybody could see it and get her into big, big trouble.
She started to call him back, then decided that if he was delivering groceries for a living, there was little chance he’d recognize what she was putting together on her laptop. So she let him go, crossing her arms over her midsection as she waited for him to return.
And waited. And waited. And waited.
Finally Avery took a few steps toward the other door and called out, “Is there something wrong?”
When she heard what sounded like the shuffling of paper, she bolted toward the dining room in a panic. She halted at the door, however, when she saw the delivery guy down on all fours, scooping up a sheaf of papers that he’d evidently spilled to the floor when he’d set the groceries down on the table.
“Oh, man, I’m sorry,” he said as he tried to straighten one piece of paper on top of another. “I knocked this stuff off when I set down one of the sacks. I hope I didn’t mess up anything you were working on.”
Only when her heart stopped slamming against her rib cage did Avery realize just how hard it had been pounding. Enough to make her light-headed. Though, truth be told, that might have been due to the fact that the delivery guy’s adorable butt was facing her, and bent over the way he was, she had an almost uncontrollable urge to go over there and sink her teeth into it.
Hoo-boy, she had to get out and meet some flesh-and-blood men. Though that might be a little difficult, since she was overcome with terror every time she even stepped out into the hallway. As it was, she tipped Billy the doorman to bring her mail up to her every day.
She gave herself a minute to calm down, then joined the delivery guy on the floor, gathering the papers closest to her. “Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “I was finished with that pile.”
It became clearer to Avery why he was working in the job he was as he tried to help her clean up. For every piece of paper she collected, he seemed to lose three, and although he tried to keep them in order as he gathered them, he kept turning them first one way, then another, as if he couldn’t tell which way they were supposed to go.
