LITMIR.BIZ

      PROLOGUE

      Frisco, Colorado

      Rolling his chair back from the desk, Gabriel Fox stared once more at his latest creation, shivered, then cursed himself under his breath. He’d created a monster, one he damn sure intended to slay. But first, he’d have a cigarette and maybe another drink.

      Getting to his feet, he crossed the luxuriously appointed bedroom, moved to a window and, turning a small hand crank, opened it. He was supposed to leave them shut. That’d been the first thing the craggy-faced CIA agent had warned him against.

      We have the whole place wired, every entrance, every door, the guy had said. You want to open a window, you come find me and we’ll bypass the alarm for you. I’ll have a couple of guys sit in here and baby-sit you. Otherwise, leave the windows alone. Don’t fuck with me on this, Gabe.

      Which, of course, had been all the challenge Fox needed. It had taken him all of five minutes to bypass the alarm system, allowing him to open the window—a heavy pane of bulletproof glass—undetected and at will. With the grounds outside the mountain chalet crawling with armed guards, he assumed it’d only be a matter of time before he got busted by the dour security chief, a tight ass named Oliver Stephens, and suffered a severe tongue-lashing for it.

      But hell, getting caught was half the fun.

      Grinding out his cigarette, he tossed the butt out the window and watched as it fell three stories before hitting the sidewalk, joining two others he’d dropped earlier that night. He figured the guards would eventually see them there, put two and two together, and figure out that he was opening his window and having a smoke. Let them, he decided. He already was a dead man. Why delay the inevitable?

      Leaving the window open, he walked to the bed, perched himself on the edge of the mattress and considered whether to light another cigarette. Or maybe dive into that glass of whiskey he’d promised himself. Dive in and drown.

      That seemed to sum up how he felt. His life to this point had been anything but seamless. But, within the last couple of weeks, it had turned into a damned horror show. The cold mountain wind blew through the window, raising gooseflesh on his tattooed arms. He rubbed them, trying to generate some heat. At six feet, six inches, head shaved bald, body covered in tattoos—a multicolored montage of eagles, Sanskrit symbols, big-busted women and alcohol logos—Fox usually turned heads. Not admiring glances, but the surreptitious kind people cast after you’ve already passed, a sort of morbid fascination, like watching paramedics drag a bloodied corpse from a mangled car. He didn’t care. His rule in life had been that negative attention was better than no attention, so he took what he could get.

      And lately he’d been getting plenty of attention, all of it negative.

      He headed for the dresser, stopping only long enough to close the window, and poured himself three fingers of whiskey. He downed it in a loud gulp, poured another and returned to his desk. Seating himself, he enjoyed the whiskey’s warmth as it enveloped the inside of his stomach. A glance at the laptop’s screen doused the pleasant burn and brought him back to reality.

      Lord help him, what had he done? Fox stared at the lines of code he had written and felt an avalanche of guilt fall over him, smothering him. When the lines had sprung from his fingertips, he hadn’t fully considered their implications. He’d been in the zone, unaware of reality. He’d felt more like a pianist, like Ray Charles or Ahmad Jamal, a maestro unleashing his creative juices, making something beautiful, an extension of himself.

      Only after he’d completed the worm, the product of three days’ straight work, his weary body fueled by caffeine and alcohol, had he realized just what he’d created. And it was horrible.

      His handlers at the CIA had dubbed his latest work Project: Cold Earth. It was a benign name for a malignant computer worm capable of shutting down the cooling systems for nuclear reactors. It was, for all intents and purposes, a digital gateway into hell. It was his, and he couldn’t wait to be free of it.

      Unfortunately he wasn’t sure when that moment might come. Once he created one of these little beauties, he then had the unenviable task of reverse engineering them, tearing them apart and creating defenses for them. He had created the disease and it was up to him to find the cure. And until then, he’d stay locked away in this mountain chalet with Agent Tight Ass and his posse of paramilitary robots, having them try to control his every move and him having to score little victories, like figuring out how to bypass the alarm and open a window.

      It was just like reform school, where he’d first shown an aptitude for computers, not only as a programmer and repairman, but also as a practitioner of the dark arts, particularly hacking and authoring malignant code. Except now the government gave him a security clearance, a paycheck and at least feigned respect for him.

      Scanning his surroundings again, taking in the stone fireplace, the mahogany furniture and fully stocked bar, he grinned tightly. At least now when they jailed him, they did it in style.

      He set to work at the computer once again, his thoughts and fingers greased by the whiskey, and began to analyze the code for Cold Earth. In theory, anyway, it should have been easy for him to backtrack and write security patches capable of stopping the malignant program from harming anything. In theory. The reality was that without Maria, who’d helped him write the program, he was having to learn its every nuance before he could create a good defense.

      An image of her—strawberry-blond hair, golden eyes, cheeks colored by a perpetual blush—flitted across his mind. Grief squeezed his heart followed by a dull ache in his throat. He doused both with another swallow of whiskey, replacing the sensations first with rage, followed by the gray numbness he’d blanketed himself with for the past few days, ever since his world had been turned upside down back in Langley, Virginia.

      Forget about it, he told himself. So, after a third drink, he did. Enjoying the light-headedness, he immersed himself into his work, his fingers gliding over the keyboard as he worked on the code. The technicians back at Langley had yanked the modem card from the computer, which also

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