LITMIR.BIZ

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right?”

      She clicked off and dropped the phone in horror, unable to believe what had just happened. Everything had been so perfect. It had felt like fate, the stars aligned. She’d never felt more poised or ready for anything. This was supposed to have been her shining moment. And he’d ruined it. This was all his fault.

      She began to sob and swear and beat on the unconscious man, oblivious to the video camera trained on her. It was held by a silent, shrouded figure who was concealed by the same thicket of bushes where she’d been planning to drag the body. Priscilla may have dodged one bullet this morning, but there was another gun aimed straight at her.

      6

      Darwin LeMaster couldn’t remember how to answer his cell phone. It was his own damn phone, too, the one he’d designed, patented and turned into a revolutionary new communications system, according to technology reporters. It came with one-touch concierge access, a GPS system, biometric fingerprint recognition and the ability to make not only secure, but untraceable, calls. The Darwin phone had made him a twenty-eight-year-old man of means and a phenom, whatever that meant, in the field of electronic networking.

      BFD. He still couldn’t answer it.

      Right now, it was playing “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath at high volume, the equivalent of getting kicked in the head by a donkey, which was what it took to get Darwin’s attention most of the time. But this was no ordinary call. From the moment he’d seen the incoming number in the digital display—her number—his brain had vapor-locked. What good was an IQ at the genius level if you couldn’t take a phone call from a steaming-hot woman?

      The noise stopped, and he breathed a sigh of relief. The call had gone to voice mail. But he also felt a body slam of recrimination. What kind of man was he? Sometimes he wondered if he even had a penis.

      All around him in the cavernous, cluttered office that his coworkers called Command and Control Center 1, electronic equipment whirred, interrupted by mysterious intermittent beeping. The aroma of stale coffee sullied the air, wafting from the dozen forgotten plastic cups that were stranded wherever he’d set them when an idea hit. This morning’s breakfast, a glazed doughnut with one bite out of it, had been abandoned to a napkin on the file cabinet next to his desk. Mostly he forgot to eat, but even when he remembered, he couldn’t seem to gain weight.

      He picked up the doughnut and bit a hunk out of it, chewing absently. Women worried about men who couldn’t gain weight. It brought out the mother in them—and while his boss and longtime friend, Lane Chandler, didn’t openly bug him about putting on poundage, she’d brought the doughnuts by this morning.

      She had openly bugged him about sprucing up the command center, said it was the nexus of the entire concierge service and a selling point for prospective clients. She’d suggested professional organizers and decorators, but he’d been putting her off.

      He rose and stretched, imagining a cat as he rippled the vertebrae of his spine. This was his lair, and he didn’t feel like conducting tours. He’d been chided for being reclusive and secretive with his pet projects, and maybe his critics had a point. He had actually boarded up the office windows, preferring the eerie phosphers of LCD screens to natural light.

      He could run the world from here. On the wall opposite his desk, several large GPS grids, glowing with red dots and streaming arrows, covered the most populous areas of the country. The electronic maps meant Darwin could locate any of their forty-five members with a Premiere Plan and a fully featured Darwin cell, as long as they were within range and their phone was on.

      He had also designed the circuitry necessary to scramble signals. If a Premiere member called in and requested a secure line, Darwin could hook them up with a couple clicks of his mouse, at which point the call could not be intercepted or recorded. Well, except by Darwin, of course. Any system was only as secure as the person who created it.

      But no one worried about Darwin. He didn’t have a penis.

      He kicked a box of old circuit boards out of the way and dropped to the floor. “Give me twenty, you pussy,” he grunted.

      The homophobic drill sergeant who rented space in Darwin’s brain got exactly seven military-style push-ups before Darwin collapsed. While he was lying there on the floor, surrounded by boxes of high-tech detritus and thinking about all the ways he needed to overhaul his life, the revolutionary cell phone sounded again. Sharp staccato bursts, each one more imperative than the last. The hotline.

      He rolled over and stared at the ceiling. Thank God, a crisis. He didn’t have to face the terrifying prospect of inviting a woman—make that the ultimate sexual-fantasy woman of the new millennium—to dinner and then maybe to his place, and then maybe to something approaching the sexual realm, like his bed?

      A one-man Pluto shot would have been more realistic.

      “Darwin, you have voice mail,” said a come-hither female voice.

      The phone was giving him a reminder, just as he’d programmed it to. If it had had legs, it would have jumped off the desk and strolled over to him. He would have to work on that feature.

      He pushed to his feet, grimacing as he limped over to the desk, grabbed the phone and thumbed the Talk button. “What is it, Lucy?” That was her name from the old days when they lived together on the streets.

      “Please, Dar, call me Lane,” she said. “I need you. Can you come to my office right away?”

      

      Lane unbuttoned her suit jacket and flapped the lapels to create a breeze. She liked to think that she’d come by her reputation as a cool customer deservedly, although right now she was anything but. Her face was flushed and her cleavage damp. Why did women always perspire there first? She really should plan for that when she was deodorizing in the mornings.

      At any rate, she’d just run a crazed segment producer off at the pass and narrowly averted some kind of crisis. She didn’t know what kind because Priscilla Brandt had hung up on her before Lane could ask. But at least Ms. Pris would get another shot at success.

      Congressman Carr and Simon Shan might not.

      Ned Talbert certainly would not.

      “Hey, what’s going on?”

      Lane looked up to see Darwin shambling into her office, tall and floppy as an Olympic pole-vaulter, his mop of dark curls bouncing, and his baggy, worn jeans hanging on his narrow hips. He was nearly thirty, but he really hadn’t changed all that much in the fifteen years she’d known him, except that he was a millionaire now instead of a juvenile delinquent—and so was she.

      “Shut the door, Dar. Lock it, too.”

      His dense, expressive eyebrows lifted. “We have a receptionist out there,” he said. “Why don’t I tell the gray angel that we don’t want to be disturbed.”

      The gray angel was their vibrant seventy-year-old receptionist, Mary O’Dell, who could have stalled a tactical squad of marines, she was so good. But TPC had an open-door policy, and anyone really determined to see Lane was unlikely to be stopped for long.

      “I don’t want Val barging in on us,” Lane explained.

      Darwin shut the door and locked it. Val Drummond had started in the mailroom and his fortunes had risen with the company’s. He ran the administrative arm, but he was also handling concierge operations now that Lane was busy with the company’s new expansion plan. But Val’s promotion hadn’t eased the tension between him and Darwin. Val was like the solid and steady but less gifted younger brother with a bad case of sibling rivalry. He was competitive with Darwin for Lane’s time, and he seemed to resent that she and Darwin were much more than just the creative spark behind TPC. They were close friends with a bond that almost defied explanation, even to them…although, oddly, Darwin himself had been cutting ties with Lane lately.

      But maybe it wasn’t odd at all, Lane allowed. He had his eye on a sweet young thing he’d met at a comic-book convention. Seems they’d been friendly for a while, but now

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