style="font-size:15px;"> 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 view of the area outside the van. Yeah, indoors he could get a hot shower and a hot sandwich and some hot coffee. Life didn’t get much better than that. Unless maybe you substituted warmed brandy for the hot coffee and added a hot woman with hot hands to the hot shower. Preferably one with a hot name like Lola or Mimi or Fritzi or—
“Dixon?”
No, that wouldn’t work. That was the name he was going by himself these days. It would get way too confusing. So maybe he could just call her—
“Dixon?”
“What?” he said, grinding the words out irritably as his hot shower/hot woman fantasy receded to the back of his brain, leaving him even colder than before.
“You need anything?”
He bit back a grumble at the question that came through the earpiece of his headset. Hadn’t he just been thinking about that when the other agent rudely interrupted him?
“No, Gillespie,” he muttered into the microphone below his chin to the newly minted OPUS agent who’d been assigned to shadow him—more to keep Gillespie out of trouble than anything else, Dixon knew. “I don’t need anything.” Except for his usual partner to get back from her leave of absence so she could go into the field instead of him, the way she was supposed to. That way Dixon could go back to collecting the information she sent him and find the missing pieces. Indoors. Where he normally worked. Where it was warm.
Because that was standard operating procedure at Dixon’s employer, the ultrasecret Office of Political Unity and Security. Agents worked in teams of two, with one in the field collecting information and the other behind the scenes analyzing it. Assimilate, evaluate, articulate. That was Dixon’s three-word job description. He was the one responsible for making sense of the intelligence, not the one who gathered it. He was the one who analyzed and scrutinized, calculated and estimated, and then put everything together. He wasn’t the one who sat on his butt in a cold van waiting for something to happen. At least, he wasn’t supposed to be.
“Oh, there is one thing, Gillespie,” he said, picturing the other agent in his head. Blond, Dixon recalled. Too blond to be taken seriously, really. His dark blue eyes—cool and sharp and distant—were the only thing that had kept the guy from looking like some gee-whiz, what’s for-supper-Mom, all-American high school football hero.
“What’s that?” the other man asked.
“Stop calling me Dixon,” Dixon said. “That’s not my name.”
Gillespie snorted—or something—at the other end of the line. “Yeah, well, my name isn’t Gillespie, either, but you have to call me something.”
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 übergenius 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
