You've Got Male

He couldn’t figure her out.

There had to be a reason for why she had done the things she’d done and there had to be a reason for why she lived the way she did now—which was an odd way to live indeed. But there was nothing in her background that even hinted at what motivated her. It had only made her that much more intriguing to Dixon.

Pushing his tray away with the plate still half-full, he rose and returned to his office to gather up his notes and printouts. He reviewed them one last time to make sure he was prepared, then took the elevator down to the basement, to the office of his most superior superior, the One Whose Name Nobody Dared Say—mostly because Dixon didn’t know what his name was. OPUS was, after all, a top-secret organization within a top-secret organization, and everything everyone knew was strictly on a need-to-know basis. But very few knew who needed to know what, including Dixon. There were times when he wondered if the One Whose Name Nobody Dared Say even knew what his own name was.

Usually No-Name stayed nameless in Washington, D.C., since that was where the most superior superiors of OPUS dwelled. But since Sorcerer had been spied in New York, Mr. No-Name had been spending a lot of his time here with the senior agent of the New York office, Another One Whose Name Nobody Dared Say Because Nobody Knew What It Was Either. Or, as Dixon liked to think of her, Ms. No-Name.

Right now, though, he was going to go straight to the top, to the Big Guy himself. He was greeted by Mr. No-Name’s secretary, an efficient-looking, white-haired woman dressed in gray flannel, whose name Dixon also didn’t know—did she even know the Big Guy’s name?—and politely requested an audience with the Great and Powerful Oz. She glanced at her appointment calendar, picked up the phone, murmured a few words into it, then smiled.

“He says you can go right in,” she told Dixon before pressing her finger to a buzzer under the desk.

Dixon smiled in return as he passed her, knowing her own warm, outgoing demeanor was strictly for show. If she was like half the secretaries at OPUS, in addition to having a top-secret button under her top-secret desk that opened top-secret doors, she also had a bazooka under there. Maybe a flamethrower. Or even a surface-to-air missile. And, like the other secretaries there, she wasn’t afraid to use it and probably had on more than one occasion.

“Sir,” Dixon greeted the man sitting behind the big government-issue desk as he entered.

Mr. No-Name was about as remarkable as an insurance claims adjuster would be, wearing a boring gray suit, a boring white shirt and a boring blue tie. His hair was thinning a bit, but no more than that of any other man his age—which Dixon gauged to be somewhere between forty and sixty. In fact, his boss looked like just about every man between the ages of forty and sixty. And he doubtless worked hard at looking average. It wasn’t good to stand out when you were a big muckety-muck in a top-secret, bazooka-toting-secretaried organization.

Dixon’s superior looked at him through narrowed eyes. “Ah, yes. Your code name is—” He halted before saying it, however, which made Dixon think he really had gotten a bad rep about that code-name business. “Well, what name are you going by now?” the man asked instead.

“Dixon.”

“Right. So what do you have to report about Sorcerer?”

Oh, yeah. He was supposed to be keeping tabs on Sorcerer, too, wasn’t he? Dixon thought. Funny, but in the wake of Hurricane Avery, he’d all but forgotten the son of a bitch whose ass he wanted to nail to the wall more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. How odd.

“Actually, sir, there haven’t been any new developments with Sorcerer himself.”

“Meaning?” his boss asked.

Dixon gazed at the other man blandly. Meaning there haven’t been any new developments with Sorcerer himself, he wanted to say. Jeez, not everything in the spy business had to be cloak-and-dagger. “What I have to report is something about the woman Sorcerer’s been in contact with over the past month.”

“Ah. Daisy Miller.”

Dixon wasn’t surprised that his superior already knew about her. The Big Guy knew everything that went on in the organization. And anything that involved Sorcerer shot especially quickly to the top. “That’s the one,” he said.

“What about her?”

Dixon took a breath and wondered where to begin. “Well, we have a name for her now. Avery Nesbitt.”

His boss sat up stick-straight in his chair. “Nesbitt?” he asked.

Dixon nodded, puzzled by the reaction. His boss seemed to know the name well. “Yeah…” he said.

“Is her father Desmond Nesbitt?”

Dixon nodded, too surprised to speak.

“Of the East Hampton Nesbitts?”

“Well, yeah, she grew up in East Hampton,” he said. “But the family has a half dozen other residences, too, all over the world.”

His boss nodded. “I know. I know the family.”

This time Dixon was the one to narrow his eyes. “You know Avery Nesbitt?”

“Not so much her as her father. But yes, I’ve met her. Years ago. She couldn’t have even been in high school then. Scrawny kid. Long black hair. Big glasses.”

It was an apt description for her now, Dixon thought, except for the size of the glasses, which were fashionably smaller. Well, sort of fashionably smaller. Okay, just smaller.

“You’re sure Daisy Miller is Avery Nesbitt?” his boss asked.

“Positive.”

The other man nodded again. “Tell me what else you have on her.”

“Gee, sir, you may know more than I do, if you know the family.”

The other man shook his head. “No, as I said, it’s been years since I’ve had any contact with them. Desmond and I were in the same college fraternity. I hear about him occasionally through mutual acquaintances. And of course, everyone heard about that business with—” Again he halted before finishing. “Well, tell me what you’ve got.”

Dixon nodded. “Okay. I’ll just hit on the highlights for now and give you my full report at the end of the day. Twenty-nine years old, never married, no kids. Born and raised in East Hampton, New York. Parents Desmond and Felicia Nesbitt. Youngest of three children—she has an older brother and an older sister. Educated at the finest schools money could buy, traveled extensively as a child and teenager. Was accepted to Wellesley College and declared a major in computer science. Attended for two and a half years, but her education was interrupted.”

“Right,” his boss said.

But the way he said it made Dixon think the guy already knew what had interrupted young Avery’s studies. Then again, once Dixon had made the connection, he had remembered the incident himself.

“She was always an exceptional student,” he continued, “gifted in both mathematics and language arts. Scored a perfect twenty-four hundred on her SAT, a perfect thirty-six on her ACT. Fluent in French, Spanish and German by the time she graduated high school. Mastered anything computer-related with little effort from an early age. Won a national award when she was fourteen for designing an e-mail program that was then purchased and produced by a company named CompuPax. A few minor behavioral problems in school, but nothing you wouldn’t expect from any other exceptionally gifted kid. No black marks on her permanent record. From all accounts, she was the ideal student up until her junior year.”

His boss studied him in silence, his fingers steepled together on his desk. “Go on.”

Taking a deep breath, Dixon continued, “In her junior year in college, Avery Nesbitt, of the East Hampton Nesbitts, had her education interrupted. Because she earned herself a ten-year prison sentence instead.”

CHAPTER THREE

DIXON’S BOSS DIDN’T SEEM surprised by the announcement. “I remember that,” he said. “And I imagine you do, too. It’s become one of those ‘Where were you when’ things.”

“I remember it now,” Dixon said. “But I didn’t make the connection at first—it was ten years ago, after all. I couldn’t remember her name. But as soon as I read about her conviction, it all came together. I was twenty-nine when it happened and working in decryption. News of her arrest got a lot of buzz around the department. The virus she created was the stuff of legends, and she was just a kid. Even ten years later, no one’s figured out how she did it.”

Viral Avery. That was how the media had referred to her after the debacle, their too-clever spin on Typhoid Mary. But where an individual would have had to have personal contact with Mary to come down with the bug, Avery had taken out millions with the simple click of a mouse. The college junior had nearly shut down the planet with the computer virus she’d sent out into the world.

At the time of her arrest, she’d claimed it was an accident, that she’d only created the program and sent it in retaliation to a boyfriend who’d jilted her. She’d insisted she’d only wanted to destroy his hard drive and nothing else and that she’d had no idea she’d leave businesses all over the world stalled, scores of governments deadlocked and the Vatican in the dark. For days. By the time it was finally contained, Avery’s virus had taken out big chunks of North, Central and South America, Greenland and a good part of Europe, including the Vatican. As for Asia…forget about it.

All told, Viral Avery had cost her fellow man roughly a gazillion dollars in lost revenues, and she’d had people standing in line all along the equator who wanted to string her up for global target practice. Preferably with atomic warheads.

But they’d had to settle for seeing her get slapped with a ten-year prison sentence instead, something that had offended most people because they’d thought it too light a punishment. They were offended even more when two years later she was released on shock probation. Many suspected it had been more her father’s dollars and influence that had won her the release than any remorse or trauma on her part. She’d been painted in the media as a spoiled, privileged, snotty little geek who always got her way, thanks to family connections. Before, during and after her release, she was gleefully and thoroughly reviled.

Still, according to her prison records, she had been an exemplary inmate, living quietly and following the rules. And during her trial, the highlights of which Dixon also had studied, there really hadn’t been much evidence to indicate she had acted in malice toward anyone other than the boyfriend.

But now she was building another virus, he reminded himself. Within weeks of making the acquaintance of Sorcerer. And wasn’t that just the most interesting coincidence in the world?