Elizabeth Bevarly - Overnight Male

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.”