You've Got Male

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?