You've Got Male by Elizabeth Bevarly Read Free Book Online Page A

stop her,” the other man said. “We still get calls from the Vatican. Not to mention Greenland.”
    “Then we better hurry,” Dixon said. “Because she could be finished with this thing anytime.”
    “I’ll take care of the paperwork right now,” his boss told him. “Get your temporary partner…what’s his name?”
    “Gillespie,” Dixon said. “Tanner Gillespie. Code name Cowboy.”
    “When’s She-Wolf due back?” his boss asked.
    “She’s had to take an indefinite leave of absence,” Dixon said. “Her mother passed away and she has some family matters to see to.”
    “Right,” the other man said. “We’ll give her all the time she needs, of course.”
    Dixon couldn’t imagine her needing much. One thing about She-Wolf—she never let life get in the way of her job, never let the personal overshadow the professional. She was a lot like him in that regard.
    “Collect Cowboy,” his boss told him again, “and bring in Avery Nesbitt today.”
    “You sure we have enough on her?”
    “We don’t need much.”
    Which was true. Even before 9/11, OPUS had operated outside the rules set up for other government agencies. Since then, they’d been moved under the jurisdiction of Homeland Security, their worth reevaluated, their mission refined, their rules of operation revised. Dixon’s boss, he knew, wouldn’t have any trouble getting papers signed that would bring Avery Nesbitt to heel.
    “Bring her in,” the man told him. “Now. We’ll have a room waiting for her when you get back.”
     
    T WENTY-FOUR HOURS AFTER deciding to send Andrew a farewell gift—not that she wanted him to fare well, of course, hence the farewell gift—things weren’t working out the way Avery had hoped. She’d been so sure she could create a virus that would turn his hard drive into tapioca—radioactive tapioca at that—but she’d hit a snag. And snags just didn’t happen to her. Well, not since the one that had sent her to prison ten years ago, which, granted, had been a pret-ty ma-jor snag. She’d been extremely careful since then not to set herself up for another one. Then again, being genuinely phobic about leaving one’s home did rather hinder one in getting oneself into trouble.
    And that one major snag ten years ago had only come about because she’d been driven by her emotions instead of her intellect. She’d just been too ambitious with this particular project, that was all. Vengefulness did that to a person sometimes—made them too ambitious. Now she’d have to go back and start over with a virus that was less damaging.
    Though this one was very intriguing….
    Still, it wasn’t as if she could send this thing out anyway. Just building another virus would get her in big trouble. If she actually sent it to Andrew, they’d toss her keister back in the slammer and throw away the key for good. Which was why Avery was building it on this particular laptop—it had no communication function whatsoever. It was the laptop she used for off-line gaming. Which was what building this virus was to her—a game. It was physically impossible for her to send it anywhere beyond her hard drive. Unless, you know, she moved it to another computer. Which, of course, she would never do.
    But she’d needed to do something to exorcise Andrew from her system—to serve him his just desserts, if only in her own mental bakery. And building him a virus, even one that would never go anywhere, made her feel vindicated. She was a woman scorned and all that, and you should never underestimate the power of one of those. Even the ones who had been effectively spayed in the ol’ revenge department.
    She studied the lines of code again, backtracking to see where she might have gone wrong. She didn’t want to abandon the project completely, because it really was a brilliant bit of work, if she did say so herself. But it wasn’t going to function properly the way she had it set up, theoretically or realistically.
    Let’s see….