Overnight Male

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.