LITMIR.BIZ

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at her electric-blue pajama pants spattered with images of French landmarks and numbly sat down, adjusting the oversize purple sweatshirt boasting Wellesley College as she did. Then she wiggled her toes in her fuzzy pink slippers to warm them, adjusted her little black-framed glasses on the bridge of her nose, pushed one of two long, thick black braids over her shoulder and studied the screen more closely.

      Maybe she was wrong, she thought as she watched the rapid-fire exchange scroll by. She shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Surely Andrew wasn’t the only guy out there in cyberspace who used the handle Mad2Live. It was a phrase from On the Road, after all. And there were probably lots of Kerouac fans online. Andrew loved Avery. He’d told her so. He wouldn’t cheat on her like this. Especially not with some brainless ninny who said things like, “ur 2 kewl mad.”

      Please, people! she wanted to shout at the screen whenever she saw message-board shorthand. Speak English! Or Spanish! Or French! Or German! Or some legitimate language that indicates you’re at least halfway literate! And capitalize where necessary! And for God’s sake, punctuate!

      Even though she was a computer geek in the most extreme sense of the word, Avery couldn’t bring herself to type in anything other than the language she’d learned growing up in the Hamptons. Tony private schools could mess with you in a lot of ways, she knew, but at least they taught you to be well-spoken. That shouldn’t change just because your language of choice was cyber-speak.

      She watched Mad2Live and Tinky Belle—gag—swap warm fuzzies for as long as she could stomach it and ultimately decided there was no way that this Mad2Live could be Andrew. Andrew would never, ever concede that the Survivor series was, as Tinky Belle claimed, “qualty educatnl programing u cn wach w/ the hole famly.”

      Oh, yes, Avery thought. It’s definitely mus c tv.

      She was about to leave the chat room to visit another—she was, after all, supposed to be working—when Mad2Live posted something that made her fingers convulse on the mouse: You, Tinky Belle, are a dazzling blossom of hope burgeoning at the center of an unforgiving cultural wasteland.

      Acid heat splashed through Avery’s belly when she read that. Because those were the exact words Andrew had used to describe her that first night they met in a Henry James chat room. Except for the Tinky Belle part, since Avery’s screen name—at least that night—had been Daisy Miller. There was no way there could be two Mad2Lives on the Internet flirting with women by calling them dazzling blossoms of hope who burgeoned in cultural wastelands. That was Andrew—her Andrew—through and through.

      After that it was impossible for Avery to ignore Tinky and Mad’s conversation. And as she watched the lines of dialogue on her screen roll past, she read more and more from Mad2Live that was pulled verbatim from some of the e-mails Andrew had sent to her. And she should know, since she’d practically memorized some of them.

      Had she mentioned he was a complete bastard?

      Eventually Tinky bade farewell to Mad and evaporated from the chat room, and Avery watched in astonishment as he immediately began to flirt with another occupant, this one calling herself Deb2000. But Deb wasn’t impressed by any of Mad’s cajoling, so, obviously disgruntled, Mad signed out of the chat room.

      And Avery followed him.

      Luckily she had dozens of screen names she used for her work and she could log in to rooms under several that Andrew would never recognize. And luckily, too, she knew the online community better than she knew even her own Manhattan neighborhood. Because the Internet was where Avery worked every single night. And it was where she played after she knocked off work. It was also where she shopped, where she learned and where she socialized. It was where she found her music, her books, her entertainment and her dinner selections. Hell, she pretty much lived on the Net. And she knew Andrew almost as well as she knew the online community.

      Or at least she’d thought she knew him that well. But now she was beginning to think him a complete stranger. Because he flitted from one chat room to another, all of them themed around shallow pop-culture subject matter—everything from Pilates to low-carb cuisine—and in every one of them he waited long enough to identify which of the room’s inhabitants were female and which seemed to be the least, uh, bright. And then he chose one and began to work on her in exactly the way he had worked on Avery that first night he’d encountered her. And shame boiled within her when she realized that she had capitulated to his pretty words as easily as had women who thought deep-fried pork flesh was an essential part of good nutrition.

      How could he do this to her? How could he think she was stupid? She? Avery Nesbitt? She wasn’t stupid. She was a criminal genius! Even Time magazine had said so! And even if the criminal part was debatable, once a genius, always a genius. How could he cheat on her this way? And be so obvious about it? He knew how good she was. He knew what she did for a living and how much time she spent online. He knew everything about her. She’d even told him about her past transgressions, and he hadn’t flinched. He’d told her her past didn’t matter, that anything that had happened before the day he met her wasn’t important because he didn’t start living until the day he met her.

      Oh, he was such a bastard.

      Well, she’d fix Andrew. Not only would she dump him faster than you could say, “Survivor: Up Yours,” but she’d give him something to remember her by, too. She’d blow off work and stay up all night if she had to to concoct just the right farewell gift.

      Of course, being up all night wasn’t exactly a sacrifice to Avery, since she pretty much lived her life at night anyway. Nighttime didn’t have rules or expectations the way daytime hours did. So when most people were coming home from their jobs and starting to wind down, Avery was rising and revving to go. And when most people’s alarm clocks were going off and signaling the beginning of their workday, Avery was pouring herself a scotch and popping a DVD of a Cracker mystery into the player and trying to wind down. Unfortunately, she’d never been as good at winding down as she was at revving up.

      Because Avery Nesbitt was what some people—those who claimed an ounce or two of compassion—called “a bit neurotic.” She was what other people—those who didn’t give a damn about compassion—called “totally whack.” Hey, what else could you call a woman who lived in her pajamas on the Internet and never left her apartment unless it was to take her cat to the vet, and even then had to load up on half a bottle of scotch just to get herself over the threshold? What else did you call a woman who bought into the tripe men like Andrew Paddington fed to unsuspecting morons?

      But Avery didn’t care what anyone thought about her these days, any more than she’d cared when she was a kid. She especially didn’t care tonight. Tonight and tomorrow night—and all the hours in between—she had other things on her mind. Her gift for Andrew would take the better part of the next forty-eight hours to create.

      Fortunately for Avery, she was totally whack and had nowhere else to go.

      

      “HEY, HOW’S IT FEELING OUT there, Dixon?”

      “Like Antarctica. Only without all the warm toastiness.”

      “Well, we’ll see if we can’t get you something closer to Greenland next time you’re in the field.”

      “How many times do I have to remind you people—I’m not supposed to be in the field!”

      Because the field was cold and harsh and unforgiving. Even with a laptop and a decent cup of coffee.

      Dixon tugged the zipper of his leather jacket higher, curled his hands around a quickly cooling cup of espresso and pulled his backward-facing driver’s cap farther down over inky black hair that was badly in need of a trim. But that did little to warm him below the waist, and faded blue jeans, though normally his favorite garment, weren’t all that effective in warding off the cold.

      Even the cold found in the back of a van that was insulated with high-tech surveillance equipment.

      He was infinitely more suited to the great indoors, he thought as he switched his attention from the laptop monitor to a television screen that offered a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree

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