Overnight Male

“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.”

CHAPTER THREE

“HOW CAN YOU KNOW THAT?” Faraday asked. “And why wasn’t it in your report?”

Lila tugged meaningfully on the handcuff that still connected her to his headboard. In a fantasy, she might have found the idea of being handcuffed to the bed of a sexy stranger profoundly arousing. In reality, it was damned annoying. Probably because Joel wasn’t a stranger to her anymore. She was getting to know him pretty well. What was weird—and unwelcome—was that she still found him sexy. Where getting to know him should have made her dislike him, she instead found herself feeling curious about him. Even worse, the stuff she was curious about had nothing to do with the job they both had facing them.

“Uncuff me,” she told him, “and I’ll reveal everything.”

He arched a dark eyebrow at that.

“Everything I know,” she clarified with an exasperated sound.

The eyebrow dropped back down again, and for a minute he almost looked disappointed. Interestingly, though, his expression registered no fear at the prospect of releasing her, and that, Lila had to admit, was pretty admirable. Stupid, but admirable. Most guys wouldn’t have had the gall to cuff her in the first place. Men who’d tried to restrain her in the past had generally ended up horizontal, usually unconscious and always bloody. And even if one of them had managed to capture her—yeah, right—no way would he have been brave enough to release her while he was still anywhere in the same ZIP code.

Of course, Joel Faraday wasn’t exactly hurrying to carry out her instructions, was he? So maybe he hid his fear well. Which, to Lila, was even more admirable.

“Promise me you won’t kick my ass to Abu Dhabi and back again,” he finally said.

Okay. She’d just kick his ass to Aberdeen and back again. “I promise I won’t kick your ass to Abu Dhabi,” she vowed.

“Or back again.”

“Whatever.”

But he still didn’t move. “Promise me you won’t even kick it as far as Arlington.”

She sighed heavily. Fine. She’d just kick his ass to Foggy Bottom. “I promise I won’t kick your ass as far as Arlington,” she repeated dutifully.

“Promise me you’ll leave my ass the hell alone.”

Well, now, she didn’t want to be hasty. She’d already noticed that, even in baggy pajama bottoms, his ass was kind of nice. She might have plans for it later. After she’d kicked it around for a little while. “Look, I promise I won’t kick your ass tonight, all right?”

“Ever,” he insisted.

She bit back a growl. “All right. I won’t kick your ass ever. Or any of your other body parts, either,” she added when he opened his mouth to say more.

“Promise?”

This time she growled quite distinctly. “You want me to sign something in blood?”

He actually seemed to consider it for a moment.

“All right.” She finally ground out the words. “I promise.”

He must have believed her, because he made his way cautiously to the nightstand where he’d placed the key. And watching him move, all fluid and stealth and leisure, Lila realized she had no desire to kick his ass anyway. It really was a nice ass. And it was attached to a very nice torso. Which had extremely nice shoulders. Fastened to lusciously nice arms. In fact, she decided as she watched him palm the small key and turn toward her, it would be a shame if anything happened to any of Joel Faraday’s body parts. Unless, of course, his body parts happened to be naked at the time, and Lila happened to be the one doing anything—and everything—to them.