LITMIR.BIZ

      IT WAS PAST HIS LUNCH hour when he finally took a break, if for no other reason than that he needed to refuel before taking his findings to his superior or he’d get woozy from sheer exhilaration. If Dixon didn’t get a major promotion out of this—to nothing less than Exalted Supreme Sovereign of Every Damned Thing There Is—then there was no justice in the world.

      Avery Nesbitt was going to be quite a catch.

      And Dixon was going to be the one to catch her.

      His head swam with his findings as he blindly selected food from the company cafeteria and paid for it. The headquarters for the Office of Political Unity and Security were in Washington, D.C., but the organization had field offices in a handful of major cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Miami. Dixon normally worked out of D.C., but his search for Sorcerer had taken him and his partner She-Wolf to a half-dozen cities in the past year. He was no stranger to New York, though, having earned his master’s degree from Columbia University. Nevertheless, he’d had little opportunity to enjoy himself since his return.

      Yeah, he was going to enjoy bringing in Avery Nesbitt for questioning, even if he had to bring her in kicking and screaming.

      As he ate his lunch without tasting a bite of it, Dixon connected and divided and reconnected all his discoveries in his brain. She was a fascinating piece of work. But as much as he’d learned about her over the past several hours, he still couldn’t get to the core of her—her motivation. Everybody was motivated by something. Something that had happened to them, or something that they wanted or something that they needed. Motivation defined who a person was. Dixon was no different. He understood his motivation perfectly. But Avery Nesbitt…

      He couldn’t figure her out.

      There had to be a reason for why she had done the things she’d done and there had to be a reason for why she lived the way she did now—which was an odd way to live indeed. But there was nothing in her background that even hinted at what motivated her. It had only made her that much more intriguing to Dixon.

      Pushing his tray away with the plate still half-full, he rose and returned to his office to gather up his notes and printouts. He reviewed them one last time to make sure he was prepared, then took the elevator down to the basement, to the office of his most superior superior, the One Whose Name Nobody Dared Say—mostly because Dixon didn’t know what his name was. OPUS was, after all, a top-secret organization within a top-secret organization, and everything everyone knew was strictly on a need-to-know basis. But very few knew who needed to know what, including Dixon. There were times when he wondered if the One Whose Name Nobody Dared Say even knew what his own name was.

      Usually No-Name stayed nameless in Washington, D.C., since that was where the most superior superiors of OPUS dwelled. But since Sorcerer had been spied in New York, Mr. No-Name had been spending a lot of his time here with the senior agent of the New York office, Another One Whose Name Nobody Dared Say Because Nobody Knew What It Was Either. Or, as Dixon liked to think of her, Ms. No-Name.

      Right now, though, he was going to go straight to the top, to the Big Guy himself. He was greeted by Mr. No-Name’s secretary, an efficient-looking, white-haired woman dressed in gray flannel, whose name Dixon also didn’t know—did she even know the Big Guy’s name?—and politely requested an audience with the Great and Powerful Oz. She glanced at her appointment calendar, picked up the phone, murmured a few words into it, then smiled.

      “He says you can go right in,” she told Dixon before pressing her finger to a buzzer under the desk.

      Dixon smiled in return as he passed her, knowing her own warm, outgoing demeanor was strictly for show. If she was like half the secretaries at OPUS, in addition to having a top-secret button under her top-secret desk that opened top-secret doors, she also had a bazooka under there. Maybe a flamethrower. Or even a surface-to-air missile. And, like the other secretaries there, she wasn’t afraid to use it and probably had on more than one occasion.

      “Sir,” Dixon greeted the man sitting behind the big government-issue desk as he entered.

      Mr. No-Name was about as remarkable as an insurance claims adjuster would be, wearing a boring gray suit, a boring white shirt and a boring blue tie. His hair was thinning a bit, but no more than that of any other man his age—which Dixon gauged to be somewhere between forty and sixty. In fact, his boss looked like just about every man between the ages of forty and sixty. And he doubtless worked hard at looking average. It wasn’t good to stand out when you were a big muckety-muck in a top-secret, bazooka-toting-secretaried organization.

      Dixon’s superior looked at him through narrowed eyes. “Ah, yes. Your code name is—” He halted before saying it, however, which made Dixon think he really had gotten a bad rep about that code-name business. “Well, what name are you going by now?” the man asked instead.

      “Dixon.”

      “Right. So what do you have to report about Sorcerer?”

      Oh, yeah. He was supposed to be keeping tabs on Sorcerer, too, wasn’t he? Dixon thought. Funny, but in the wake of Hurricane Avery, he’d all but forgotten the son of a bitch whose ass he wanted to nail to the wall more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. How odd.

      “Actually, sir, there haven’t been any new developments with Sorcerer himself.”

      “Meaning?” his boss asked.

      Dixon gazed at the other man blandly. Meaning there haven’t been any new developments with Sorcerer himself, he wanted to say. Jeez, not everything in the spy business had to be cloak-and-dagger. “What I have to report is something about the woman Sorcerer’s been in contact with over the past month.”

      “Ah. Daisy Miller.”

      Dixon wasn’t surprised that his superior already knew about her. The Big Guy knew everything that went on in the organization. And anything that involved Sorcerer shot especially quickly to the top. “That’s the one,” he said.

      “What about her?”

      Dixon took a breath and wondered where to begin. “Well, we have a name for her now. Avery Nesbitt.”

      His boss sat up stick-straight in his chair. “Nesbitt?” he asked.

      Dixon nodded, puzzled by the reaction. His boss seemed to know the name well. “Yeah…” he said.

      “Is her father Desmond Nesbitt?”

      Dixon nodded, too surprised to speak.

      “Of the East Hampton Nesbitts?”

      “Well, yeah, she grew up in East Hampton,” he said. “But the family has a half dozen other residences, too, all over the world.”

      His boss nodded. “I know. I know the family.”

      This time Dixon was the one to narrow his eyes. “You know Avery Nesbitt?”

      “Not so much her as her father. But yes, I’ve met her. Years ago. She couldn’t have even been in high school then. Scrawny kid. Long black hair. Big glasses.”

      It was an apt description for her now, Dixon thought, except for the size of the glasses, which were fashionably smaller. Well, sort of fashionably smaller. Okay, just smaller.

      “You’re sure Daisy Miller is Avery Nesbitt?” his boss asked.

      “Positive.”

      The other man nodded again. “Tell me what else you have on her.”

      “Gee, sir, you may know more than I do, if you know the family.”

      The other man shook

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