"Rain Storm aka Choke Point" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eisler Barry)

2

THE NEXT MORNING, Keiko and I enjoyed another leisurely breakfast in the hotel’s Café Girassol, then whiled away an hour browsing the hotel shops, all of which offered splendid views of the lobby. But Belghazi never showed.

Around noon, I went to an Internet café to check the electronic bulletin board that I was using to communicate with Tomohisa Kanezaki, my contact inside the CIA. Before going further, I downloaded a copy of security software and installed it, as I always do, to confirm that the terminal I was using was free of “snoopware”-software, some commercial, some hacker-devised, that monitors keystrokes, transmits screen images, and that can otherwise compromise a computer’s security. Hackers love to remotely place the software on public terminals, like the ones you see in airports, libraries, copy shops, and, of course, Internet cafés, from which they then harvest passwords, credit card numbers, bank accounts, hell, entire online identities.

This one was clean. I checked the bulletin board. There was a message waiting: “Call me.”

That was all. I logged out and left.

Outside, I turned on the encrypted cell phone the Agency had provided me, punched in the number I had memorized, and started walking to make it harder for anyone to triangulate.

I heard a single ring on the other end, then Kanezaki’s voice. “Moshi moshi,” he said.

Kanezaki is an American sansei, or third-generation Japanese, and he likes to show off his language skills. I rarely indulge him. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he said, conceding. “I’ve been trying to call you.”

I smiled. Kanezaki was part of the CIA, which in my book rendered him automatically untrustworthy. Of course, he probably had the same misgivings about me. But in Tokyo I had declined a contract that his boss wanted to take out on him, and in fact had warned him about it. You’d have to be a world-class ingrate not to appreciate a favor like that, and I knew Kanezaki felt he owed me. He’d feel that way not just because of what I had done, but also because he was much more American than Japanese, and Americans, whose self-image is so tied up with “fairness,” wind up making themselves suckers for the concept. His sentiment would take us only so far, of course-in my experience, one of the guiding principles of human relations seems to be “what have you done for me lately”-but it was something, a small antidote against the potential poison of his professional affiliations.

“Unless I’m talking on it,” I said, “I leave this thing turned off.”

“Saving the battery?”

“Guarding my privacy.”

“You’re the poster boy for paranoia,” he said, and I could see him shaking his head on the other end. I smiled again. In some ways I liked the kid in spite of his choice of employer. I’d been impressed by the countermeasures he’d taken against his boss after my warning, and some part of me enjoyed being able to watch his development from naïve idealist to increasingly seasoned player.

“Our friend just got in,” he said.

“I know. I saw him last night.”

“Good. You know, we’re tracking him. If you’d leave the cell phone on, we might be able to contact you with some timely information.”

Although I didn’t know for sure, I suspected the Agency had been keeping tabs on Belghazi through a compromised cell or satellite phone. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake.

“Sure,” I said, my tone neutral to the point of sarcasm.

There was a pause. “You’re not going to leave it on,” he said, his tone half-resigned, half-bemused.

I laughed.

“We’d have a better chance of success if we could work together,” he said, earnest as ever.

I laughed again.

“All right, do it your way,” he said. “I know you will anyway.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. It would really be nice if you could account for some of those disbursements.”

“C’mon, we’ve been over this. I need the cash to get into the high rollers’ rooms. I saw a guy from China drop a million U.S. at one of the baccarat tables the other night. That’s where our friend plays. I need to get near him, and they don’t allow spectators. Or low rollers.”

He was probably just giving me a hard time to try to make me feel like I’d won something. I knew this whole program was as off the books as anything the Agency had ever run. The last thing Kanezaki or his superiors would want would be a paper trail for the General Accounting Office to follow.

“What if you actually win something?” he said.

“I’ll be sure to report it as taxable income.”

He laughed at that, and I said, “We’re done?”

“Sure. Oh, just one more thing. A little something. Last night someone got killed in your neighborhood.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Broken neck.”

“Ouch.”

“You would know.”

I knew what he was thinking. Kanezaki had once watched me take someone out with a neck crank.

“Actually, I wouldn’t know,” I said. “But I can imagine.”

I heard a snort. “Just remember,” he said, “even if we’re not there in the room with you, we’re still watching.”

“I’ve always suspected that you guys self-select for voyeurs.”

“Very funny.”

“Who’s being funny?”

There was a pause. “Look, it might be that I owe you. But not everyone here feels that way. And you’re not just dealing with me. Okay? You need to watch yourself.”

I smiled. “It’s always good to have a friend.”

“Shit,” I heard him mutter.

“If I need anything, I’ll contact you,” I told him.

“Okay.” A pause, then, “Good luck.”

I pressed the “end” key, purged the call log, and turned the unit off.

He hadn’t seemed particularly perturbed about the late Karate. Possibly indicating that the CIA wasn’t affiliated with him. Or maybe there was an affiliation, and Kanezaki-san was simply out of the loop.

I kept walking. Macau breathed around me, deeply, in and out, like a winded animal.

IN THE EVENING, Keiko and I decided to enjoy a little gambling at the Lisboa. I couldn’t continually set up for Belghazi in the hotel lobby without drawing attention to myself. And trying to wire his room the way I had Karate’s would have been too risky-if his bodyguards swept for bugs and found something, they might harden their defenses. So I decided my best shot at intercepting him would be not to follow, but to anticipate him.

This can be easier than it might sound. All you have to do is put yourself in the other party’s shoes: if I were him, what would I do? How would I look at the world, how would I feel, how would I behave? Just good, sound, Dale Carnegie stuff. Appreciating the other guy’s viewpoint, that kind of thing. I’m-okay-you’re-okay. I’m-okay-you’re-going-to-die.

Performing this exercise with someone as security-conscious as Belghazi, though, is tough, because the security-conscious tend to eschew patterns in favor of randomness. Random times; random routes; when possible, random destinations. They deliberately avoid getting hooked on anything-lunch at a certain restaurant, haircuts at a certain barber, bets on the horses at a certain track-that the opposition can dial into.

But Belghazi’s security consciousness wasn’t perfect. His behavior suffered from what software types call a “security flaw”-in this case, his compulsion to gamble.

That compulsion was probably part of what had enabled the Agency, and, perhaps, Karate, to track him to Macau to begin with. It was the same compulsion I was now working with to get inside his head. Because, if you’re addicted to high-stakes baccarat and you’re in Macau for a few days, there’s really nowhere but the Lisboa. Everything else feels small-time.

Belghazi would know better, of course. And maybe he’d heed that knowledge and put his chips down someplace less exciting, less glamorous, less predictable. But I didn’t think he would. If he had that kind of self-control, he wouldn’t be playing the tables in the first place. No, he’d gamble, all right, and rationalize by telling himself that there was nothing to worry about, that no one knew he was in Macau anyway, that besides, he always traveled with the bodyguards, just in case.

Keiko and I enjoyed a dinner of Macanese cuisine-an exotic mix of Portuguese, Indian, Malay, and Chinese influences-at the O Porto Interior, a charming but somewhat out-of-the-way restaurant. The location gave me ample opportunity to check our backs on the way to our meal, and also afterward, when we got in a cab and headed to the Lisboa.

I had spent time in all of Macau’s casinos, of course, while reconnoitering the territory, but that had been only part of my preparation for the Belghazi operation. I needed to be comfortable not just with gambling in Macau, but with gambling generally, and I wanted more exposure to the tics and rites of the subculture so that I could better absorb them, reflect them back, achieve the proper level of invisibility as a result. Macau was a start, but I knew that the persona I was inhabiting-moneyed Japanese gaming enthusiast-would lack crucial verisimilitude if the persona in question had never set eyes on Las Vegas.

So I had spent a week there, staying at the Four Seasons on the south end of the strip because it seemed to be the only good hotel that could be accessed without first fording a casino floor, and I knew I would need refuge from the smoke and the noise and the frenzy. I played baccarat at the upscale Bellagio; roulette at the off-strip Rio; craps at the fading Riviera, whose attempts to match the gayness and glitter around her felt forced, artificial, like makeup layered on by a woman who recognizes that she was never beautiful to begin with and has now, in addition, grown colorless and old.

When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I would wander off into the desert west of the strip and walk. The noise faded quickly. The lights took longer to escape, and even after miles they still obscured the stars in the desert sky. But eventually it would all come to seem sufficiently inconsequential in the distance, and I would stop and look back on what I had left behind. Standing silently on those indigenous reefs of sand, breathing the still, desiccated air, I decided that the improbable town I now beheld was a sad and lonely place, the shows and the restaurants and the neon all just a gaudy bandage wrapped around some irrefutable psychic wound, the city itself a bizarre and passing spectacle in the eyes of the reptiles that watched as I did unblinking from afar, who must have understood in their primitive consciousness and from this distant vantage that soon enough it would all be scrub and sand again, as it had always been before.

The reprieve was inevitably brief. I would return to the strip and all would be excess: Hummers purchased on tax breaks for use on flat asphalt, without even a pothole to challenge them; quarter-mile-long buffets vacuumed down by impossibly corpulent diners; pensioners drugged by a lifetime of television and enticed to this place by a craving for more spectacle, more and ever more.

I had thought that 9/11 might have changed some of this, might have been the occasion for reflection, for focus. But if the trauma of attack had produced any such effect, the benefits had been short-lived. Instead, during my mercifully brief time stateside, I saw that nothing had really changed. Sacrifice was the duty only of the few, who were of course hypocritically lauded by the many, the latter barely pausing in their infantile partying to wish the soldiers good luck at war.

But none of it mattered to me. I had seen it all before, when I had first returned from Vietnam. I’d done my bit of soldiering. It was someone else’s problem now.

Keiko and I got out of the cab in front of the Lisboa, and I felt my alertness bump up a notch. I don’t like casinos, in Macau, Las Vegas, or anywhere else. The entrances and exits tend to be too tightly controlled, for one thing. The camera and surveillance networks are the best in the world, for another. Every move you make in a gaming hall is recorded by hundreds of video units and stored on tape for a minimum of two weeks. If there’s a problem-a guy who’s winning too much, a table that’s losing too much-management can review the action and figure out how they were being scammed, then take steps to eliminate the cause.

But it’s not just the operational difficulties. It’s the atmosphere, the scene. For me, gambling when there’s no hope of affecting the odds always carries a whiff of desperation and depression. The industry recognizes the problem, and tries to compensate with an overlay of glitz. I suppose it works, up to a point, the way a deodorizer can mask an underlying smell.

We went in through a set of glass doors and rode a short escalator up to the main gaming hall. There it was, triple-distilled, a circular room of perhaps a thousand square meters, jammed tight with thick crowds shifting and sliding like platelets in a congealing bloodstream; high ceilings almost hidden above clouds of spot-lit, exhaled tobacco smoke; a cacophony of intermingled shouts of delight and cries of despair.

Keiko wanted to play the slot machines, which was fine, freeing me as it did to roam the baccarat rooms in search of Belghazi. I gave her a roll of Hong Kong dollars and told her I’d be back in a few hours. More likely, if things went according to plan, I would go straight to the hotel. In which case, when we hooked up again, I’d tell her that I’d looked for her but couldn’t find her, and had assumed that she’d gone back ahead of me.

I set out for the stairs that would take me out of the low-stakes pit and up to the high rollers’ rooms above. I passed rows of pensioners, each mechanically communing with a slot machine, and I thought of pigeons taught to peck a lever in exchange for a random reward. Next, several interchangeable roulette tables, the troupe hovering around them younger than the slot players they would eventually become, their jaws set, eyes shining in cheap ecstasy, lips moving in silent entreaty to the selfsame gods that even at the utterance of these foolish prayers continued to torment their worshipers with Olympian caprice.

I bought chips with four hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars-about sixty thousand U.S. I’d already squeezed Kanezaki for that much and more in “expenses”-the disbursements of which he had complained earlier. Then I wandered from room to room, never actually going inside, until I found what I was looking for.

Outside the Lisboa’s most exclusive VIP room, on the fifth floor, the highest in the casino, were the two bodyguards, flanking the entrance. Belghazi must have felt sufficiently safe inside not to bother himself arguing about the “no spectators” rule. And sure, the guards could effectively monitor the entrance this way, and deal appropriately with anyone they deemed suspicious.

Unfortunately for them, I’m not a suspicious-looking guy. And their presence told me exactly where to go.

I walked right past them and into the room. Only one of the three baccarat tables was in play. The rest were empty, save for their dealers, of course, who stood with postures as crisp as the starched collars of their white shirts, ready for the players who would surely drift in as the evening deepened into night; and for a few attractive Asian women whom I made as shills, there to attract passing high rollers with their bright smiles and plunging necklines.

I glanced over at the active table. There they were, Belghazi and the blonde, both dressed tastefully and a bit more stylishly than the other players: Belghazi in a white shirt, open at the neck, and navy blazer; the blonde in a white silk blouse and black bolero. Most of the fourteen player slots were taken, but Belghazi and his girlfriend had empty seats to either side of them. They were the only foreigners in the room, and had probably taken the isolated seats so as not to offend anyone who might consider a foreigner’s presence unlucky. I didn’t have such qualms. Quite the contrary tonight, in fact.

I’d been in this room before, and had seen bets of as high as one hundred thousand U.S. for a single hand. Some of the patrons here, I knew, might gamble all night, and on into the next night. A few of Belghazi’s cohorts, their eyes glassy, their complexions pasty beneath the chandelier lighting, looked as though they might have done just that.

The dealer turned over the player’s hand and cried out, “Natural eight!” An excited murmur picked up around the table: eight was a “natural,” and could be beaten only by a nine. The round would be decided based on the cards already on the table-nothing new could be dealt. With almost painful deliberation, the dealer next turned over the bank’s cards, calling out, “Natural nine!” as he did so. There was an outburst of cheers and curses, the former by those who had bet on the bank’s hand that round, the latter by those who had bet on the player’s. As the dealer passed the cards across the table to the other two dealers, who began paying off the winning bets, many of the players dipped their heads and began marking up the pads the casino had provided, attempting to discern some pattern in the randomness, a lucky streak they might lunge at and manage to grab.

I walked over and took the seat to Belghazi’s right, so that he would naturally look away from me to talk to the blonde or to follow the action of the player in Seat 1, who was designated to act as the bank. I noticed the computer briefcase, nestled against his leg where he would feel it if it were somehow to move.

He turned to me. “I’ve seen you, haven’t I,” he said in French-accented English, his dark eyes narrowing a fraction. The effect was half attempt at recollection, half accusation. The blonde glanced over and then away.

This was a slight breach of high roller etiquette, which is generally predicated on respect for the other players’ anonymity. “Maybe at the tables downstairs,” I answered, concealing my surprise. “I have to build up the bankroll a bit before a trip to the VIP rooms.”

He shook his head twice, slowly, and smiled, still looking into my eyes. “Not downstairs. At the Oriental. With a pretty Asian woman. She’s not with you tonight?”

“You’re staying at the Oriental?” I asked, sidestepping his inquiry as would any self-respecting philanderer who’d just been questioned about his mistress by a stranger.

“It’s a good hotel,” he replied, doing a little sidestep-ping of his own.

I was impressed. I had been taking care not to stand out or to otherwise become memorable, and he had spotted me anyway. He was well-attuned to his environment, to the patterns that might at some point make the difference between winning and losing. Or living and dying.

The dealer advised us that it was time to place our bets. “Yes,” I said, putting down the minimum of about U.S. ten thousand on the bank, “but this is the place for baccarat.” Belghazi nodded and put down fifty thousand on player, then turned to the banker to watch the hand get dealt. I saw from this movement that he wasn’t truly concerned about me. If he had been, he wouldn’t have turned his back. No, he had only been reflexively probing, firing into the tree line, checking to see whether he’d hit anything and whether anyone fired back.

The banker handed the first card to the dealer. As he did so, I leaned forward and crossed my hands, my right fingers settling across the Traser P5900 I was wearing on my left wrist. On the underside of the watch was a thumbnail-sized squib containing a little cocktail, one unlikely to be served by the casino’s bar girls. The concoction in question consisted primarily of staphylococcus aureus-a rapid-onset food poisoning pathogen-and chloral hydrate, a compound that causes nausea, disorientation, and unconsciousness within one to four hours. The first would get Belghazi back to the hotel in a hurry. The second would ensure that he slept soundly, if not terribly comfortably, when he got there. I eased the squib free and held it at the junction of my right middle and forefinger. I’d wait for the right moment-one of Belghazi’s head-turns, or a big win or loss for one of the players, or some other distraction-and then make my move.

I realized there was an important side benefit to my plan: the symptoms of staph infection are so acute, and set in so quickly, that there was a good chance Belghazi would return to the hotel room without, or at least ahead of, the blonde. And, even if she came back with or only shortly behind him, he might very well send her away for a while, so he could endure the effects of his rebelling stomach in privacy.

I won the first round. So far so good: I didn’t know how long this would take, and, even with baccarat’s favorable odds and leisurely pace of play, Kanezaki’s money wouldn’t hold out forever.

A pretty attendant came by. Belghazi ordered a tonic water. At fifty thousand a hand, I supposed he wanted to exercise a little alcohol discipline. I followed suit.

The blonde leaned toward Belghazi and said, “Je vais essayer les tables de dés. Je serai de retour bientôt.” I’m going to try the craps tables. I’ll be back in a little while. She got up and left.

Perfect. I stole a glance, just a quick one, the kind Belghazi would find neither surprising nor disrespectful. She was wearing a black skirt to match the bolero. Her legs were stunning, and she walked with the unpretentious confidence of someone who long ago came to understand that she is beautiful and today finds the fact neither remarkable nor worthy of flaunting.

Belghazi doubled his bet on the next round. I stayed with the minimum. This time we both won.

The attendant came by with the drinks, carrying them perched on a silver tray. She placed Belghazi’s on the table next to him, then leaned forward and moved to do the same with mine. He was watching the banker, who was getting ready to deal. Now.

I half rose from my seat, reaching for my drink with both hands as though concerned that I not spill it during the transfer. As my right hand passed over Belghazi’s glass, I paused for an instant and squeezed, and the seal at the squib’s bottom, thinner than the surrounding plastic, parted silently and released the contents within. I used my torso to obscure the move from above, where the overhead cameras might otherwise have recorded it. Done. I eased back into my seat, tonic water in hand.

Belghazi ignored his drink during the next round, and during the one after. The ice in his glass was melting, and I began to grow concerned that one of the attendants would come and replace it. I had another squib, of course, but didn’t want to have to repeat the risky maneuver of getting it into his glass.

As it turned out, there was no need. At the end of the fifth hand, he picked up his glass and drank. One swallow. A pause, then another. He put the glass down.

That was enough. It was time for me to go. I played one more hand, then collected my chips. “Good luck,” I said to him, moving to stand.

“So soon?” he asked.

I’d been there less than an hour-a twinkling, by the standards of the room’s diehards. He was still probing, I saw. He had a cop’s instinct for irregularities. I nodded and smiled. “I’ve learned to quit while I’m ahead,” I told him, holding up my chips.

He smiled back, his gaze cool as always. “Yes, that’s usually wise,” he said.

On my way out of the casino I stopped to use one of the restrooms. A full bladder would be a nuisance later this evening, and I also wanted to thoroughly wash my hands. Staph is nasty stuff, and I had no wish to consume some of it inadvertently.

I took a cab to the Oriental and went straight to my room. Keiko was out, presumably still gambling with the money I’d given her. I grabbed what I needed from the safe, placed it in a small backpack I’d brought along for just this occasion, and went straight to Belghazi’s suite. He would start feeling sick shortly and could be expected to return soon after that, and I needed to let myself in ahead of him. If he got in first, he might engage the dead bolt-low tech, but inaccessible from the exterior-and I would lose this opportunity.

I used the SoldierVision before going in. The blonde had said she was going to play craps, but people change their minds. The room was empty. I let myself in with my homemade master key. It would have been nice if I could have just stood in the closet or lain down under the bed, but those would be among the first places the bodyguards would check if they performed even a cursory sweep. Instead, I moved quickly to the larger of the suite’s two bathrooms. I saw two sets of toiletries arranged across the expansive marble countertop around the sink-Belghazi’s, presumably, and the blonde’s.

There was a vertical slab of marble joined to the front edge of the countertop, extending about a quarter of the distance to the floor. I took a SureFire E1e mini-light from the backpack-three inches, two ounces, fifteen bright white lumens-squatted, and looked under the slab. Hot and cold water pipes ran down from the sink handles above and disappeared into the wall. I saw the curved bottom of the ceramic sink, and an attached drainage pipe snaking down, then up, then, with the other pipes, into the wall behind.

I smiled. If Belghazi had taken a more modest room, I wouldn’t have been able to get away with this, and would have had to come up with something less optimal. As it was, the countertop was sufficiently grand to leave a sizeable gap between the back of the vertical marble façade and the underside of the sink basin behind it. It would be a bit of a squeeze, but there was just enough room in there for a man of my size.

I reached into the backpack and took out a specially designed nylon sling, which, unfurled, looked something like an uncomfortably thin black hammock with four aluminum cams on its ends. I squatted down again, held the SureFire in my mouth, and looked for places to secure the cams. I could have replaced the cams with suction cups or with several other means of attachment, but there was no need: the marble countertop must have weighed at least a couple hundred pounds, and it was buttressed by a series of wooden supports, each of which provided a convenient gap for a cam. I attached the cams, tightened the horizontal straps of the sling, then hauled myself and the backpack up into it. I lay on my side, curled around the curve of the sink, the backpack tucked under my upper arm. It was uncomfortable, but not intolerable. I’d certainly put up with worse, and didn’t expect to have to wait long in any event.

I knew that the bodyguards, if they were any good, were likely to inspect the suite before Belghazi entered. But I also knew that, in his current condition, Belghazi would want to be alone and would therefore probably order them out-if he allowed them in at all-before they had done a thorough sweep. Still, ever the good Boy Scout, I was equipped with a CIA-designed,.22-caliber single shot pistol, artfully concealed inside the body of an elegant Montblanc Meisterstück pen, which I now removed from the backpack. If pressed, I would use the disposable pen to drop whoever was closest to me and, in the ensuing melee, improvise with whoever might be left. Of course, if it came to this, I wouldn’t be paid, so the gun was only for an emergency.

I didn’t have to wait long. Twenty minutes after I had gotten in position, I heard the door to the suite open. A light came on in the outer room. Then the sound of feet, rapidly approaching. The door to the toilet stall slammed against the wall, followed immediately by the sounds of violent retching.

Another set of footsteps. A male voice: “Monsieur Belghazi.. .”

The bodyguard, I assumed. There was more retching, then Belghazi’s voice, low and ragged: “Yallah!” I didn’t know the word, but understood what he was saying. Get out. Now.

I heard the bodyguard walk off, then the sound of the exterior door opening and closing. Belghazi continued to groan and retch. In his haste he hadn’t bothered to turn on the bathroom light, but there was some illumination from the suite beyond and I could make out shadows under the sink where I was suspended.

I heard a metallic thump on the marble floor and wondered what had caused it. Then I realized: his belt buckle. Staph causes diarrhea, and he was struggling to keep up with the onset of symptoms. The sounds and smells that followed confirmed my diagnosis.

After about ten minutes I heard him stumble out of the room. The bedroom light went off. A safe assumption that he had collapsed into bed.

I raised my arm slightly and looked at the illuminated dial of the Traser. I would give him another half hour-long enough to ensure that the chloral hydrate had been largely processed through his system and therefore maximally difficult to detect, but not so long that he might start to wake up. The staph would turn up in a pathologist’s exam, of course, but staph occurs naturally, if unfortunately, in food, so its presence postmortem wouldn’t be a problem. With luck, in the absence of any other likely explanation, the staph might be blamed for the heart attack Belghazi was about to suffer.

In fact, the heart trouble would be the result of an injection of potassium chloride. I would try for the axillary vein under the armpit, or perhaps the ophthalmic vein in the eye, both hard-to-detect entry points, especially with the 25-gauge needle I would use to go in. An injection of potassium chloride is a painless way to go, recommended, at least implicitly, by suicidal cardiologists the world over. The potassium chloride depolarizes cell membranes throughout the heart, producing a complete cardiac arrest, immediate unconsciousness, and rapid death. Postmortem, other cells in the body naturally begin to break down, releasing potassium into the bloodstream, and thereby rendering undetectable the presence of the very agent that got the ball rolling to begin with.

Twenty minutes passed, with no sound other than Belghazi’s occasional insensible groans. I rolled out of the harness and lowered myself silently to the floor. Just a few more minutes, and I would begin preparing the injection. I had a small bottle of chloroform that I would use if he started to stir during the procedure.

I heard a card key sliding into the suite’s door lock. I froze and listened.

A moment passed. I heard the door open. It clicked closed. The light went on in the bedroom.

I reached into the backpack and withdrew the Montblanc. I heard the sound of footsteps in the room. Belghazi, softly groaning. Then a woman’s voice: “Achille, tu vas bien?” Achille are you all right? To which Belghazi, clearly out of it, continued only to groan in reply.

The blonde, I thought. I slipped the pen into my left hand and used my right to ease out my key chain, and the shortened dental mirror I keep on it. I padded silently to the edge of the door and angled the mirror so that I could see the suite’s bedroom reflected in it.

It was her, as I had expected. She must have had her own key.

I grimaced. Bad timing. Another ten minutes and this would have all been over.

I watched her shake Belghazi once, then harder. “Achille?” she said again. This time there wasn’t even a groan in response.

I saw her take a deep breath, hold it for a beat, then gradually push it out, her chin moving in, her shoulders dropping as she did so. Then she strode quickly and quietly over to a wall switch and cut the lights. The room was now lit only by the ambient glow of buildings and streetlights without. I watched her glance at the room’s gauze curtains, which were closed.

She moved to a desk across from the bed. I glanced over and saw Belghazi’s computer case, the one I had seen him with in the lobby and then again in the casino. Interesting.

She unzipped the case and took out a thin laptop, which she opened. Then she walked over to the bed, gingerly took one of the pillows from next to Belghazi’s head, came back to the desk, and held the pillow over the laptop’s keyboard. It took me a second to figure out what she was doing: muffling any chimes or other music heralding that the operating system was stirring to life. A nice move, which showed some forethought, and maybe some practice. She wouldn’t have known where Belghazi had left the volume of the machine when he had last used it; if it had been turned up, the computer’s musical boot tones might have disturbed his slumber.

After a few minutes, the trademark Windows logo appeared on the screen, the accompanying notes barely audible under the cushion of fluffy down pressed southward from above. The woman paused for a moment, then removed the pillow and returned it to its original place on the bed. I noted that she hadn’t tossed it on the floor, or otherwise thrown it randomly aside. She was keeping the room as she found it, which is to say the way Belghazi had left it, down to the details. Another sign that she had good instincts, or that she was trained. Or both.

The woman walked back to the desk and pulled a cell phone from her purse. She spent a moment configuring it in some fashion, then pointed it at the laptop. She started working the phone’s keypad.

Several minutes went by. She would input some sequence on the phone’s keypad, look at the laptop for a few seconds, and repeat. Occasionally she would glance at Belghazi. I could see the laptop screen while she was doing this and it hadn’t changed. My guess was that the computer was password-protected, that her “cell phone” was more than it seemed, and that she was using the device to interrogate the laptop by infrared or by Bluetooth, most likely trying to generate a password or otherwise get inside.

Five minutes went by, then another five. We were getting to the point where Belghazi might have metabolized enough of the drug to regain consciousness. Another five minutes, ten at the most, and I would have to abort.

But how? I wasn’t worried about getting out. Belghazi wouldn’t be in any kind of condition to stop me, even if he were fully awake when I made my departure, and I didn’t expect that the woman would pose a significant obstacle. But if Belghazi saw me, especially after making my acquaintance at the Lisboa earlier that evening, or if the woman reported that there had been an intruder, I would be facing an even tougher security environment. I’d have a hell of a time getting a second chance.

I heard Belghazi groan. The woman froze and glanced at him, but he stirred no further. Still, she must have decided he might be waking up, because a second later she dropped the cell phone back in her purse, set the purse on the floor, and logged off the laptop, using the pillow as she had before to eliminate any farewell melody. When the screen had gone dark, she closed the lid and placed it back in its case, returned the pillow to the bed, and began to undress.

Shit.

The situation was deteriorating. I couldn’t count on her to get to sleep quickly enough, or to stay asleep deeply enough, to enable me to slip out unnoticed. Hell, from what I’d seen so far, she looked like she might sleep as lightly as I do. Also, from the care she had displayed so far, I knew she would have engaged the suite’s interior dead bolt, that most likely she would have done so deliberately, as part of a mental checklist, and that she would therefore remember doing it. If she found it disengaged in the morning, she would be more likely to conclude that someone had been in the room than she would be to doubt her recollection.

Kill them both? Impossible to do “naturally,” under the circumstances. Kanezaki had stressed that payment was conditioned on no evidence of foul play, so I wouldn’t use overt violence unless I had to. Besides, what I do, I don’t do to women or children. There had been one recent exception, but that had been personal. I had no such extenuating issues at work with Belghazi’s companion. On the contrary, I found myself liking this woman. It wasn’t just her looks. It was her moves, her self-possession, her air of command. And the instincts and brains I thought I had just silently witnessed.

There was one possibility. It was risky, but certainly no worse than the other alternatives among my currently meager range of options.

I waited until the woman had fully disrobed, the moment when she would feel maximally helpless and discomfited. She was just moving toward the bed, presumably to get into it, when I strode into the bedroom.

She startled when she saw me, but overall kept her composure. “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked in a low voice, in some sort of European-accented English. She stressed the “you” in the question, and sounded more accusatory than afraid.

“You know me?” I whispered back, thinking, What the hell?

“From the casino. And I’ve seen you in the hotel. Now what are you doing here?”

Christ, she was as observant as he was. “Any luck with Belghazi’s computer?” I asked, trying to regain the initiative. My gaze was focused on her torso, the area I always watch, after confirming that the hands are empty, because aggressive movement tends to originate in the midsection. In this instance, though, the view was distracting. She looked even better naked than she had in the black couture I had seen her in earlier.

She kept her cool. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I flashed the SoldierVision, still secured to my wrist, and bluffed. “Really? I’ve got it all right here on low-light video.”

She glanced at the device, then back to me. “On a SoldierVision? I didn’t know they recorded video.”

Damn, she knew her hardware. Whoever she was, she was good, and I needed to stop underestimating her. “This one does,” I said, improvising. “So why don’t we make a deal? I don’t know who you’re working for, and I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, this never happened. You didn’t see me, and I didn’t see you. How does that sound?”

She was silent for a long moment, seemingly oblivious to her nakedness. Then she asked, “Who are you with?”

I smiled. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

She was silent again. My gaze dropped for a moment. Her body was beautiful: simultaneously muscular and curvaceous, like a figure skater’s or that of an unusually tall gymnast, with delicate, pale skin that seemed to glow faintly in the light diffused through the curtains.

I looked up again. She was watching my eyes. “You’re probably bluffing about that video,” she said, her voice even, “but I can’t take the chance. I can’t let you leave with it.”

I was impressed by her aplomb. I nodded my head in Belghazi’s direction. “He’s going to come out of it any minute now. If he wakes up and I’m here, it’ll be bad for both of us.”

She rolled her eyes as though exasperated and said, “I’m going to get dressed.”

I almost bought it. It seemed natural enough-she was naked in front of a stranger, she wanted to put clothes on. But her nakedness hadn’t seemed to bother her a moment earlier. And exasperation wasn’t an expression she wore very convincingly.

“Don’t,” I said sharply. The pen was in my pocket now, and I wouldn’t be able to deploy it in time. Even if I could have, pointing a Montblanc at someone tends to be less attention-getting than, say, employing a Glock 10-millimeter for the same purpose. I wouldn’t have been able to use the pen to control her, only to shoot her, and I didn’t want to do that.

She ignored me. I saw that she was going for her purse, not her clothes.

She must have had a weapon there. I closed the distance in two long steps and kicked the purse aside. As I did so, she straightened and I saw her left elbow whipping around toward my right temple. By reflex I moved in closer to get inside the blow and started to get my hands up. Her elbow missed the mark. But she instantly snapped her hips the other way and caught me with the other elbow, from the opposite side. Boom. I saw stars. Before she could chain together another combination, I dropped down, wrapped my left arm around her closest ankle, and drove my shoulder into her shin. She went down hard on her back.

To keep her from landing an axe kick with her free leg or otherwise attacking with her feet, I got a hand on her thigh and shoved away from her. I stood and backed up, watching her carefully.

“Are you crazy?” I said, my voice low. “What’s he going to think if you wake him up?” That was the point, though, wasn’t it. If she’d wanted, or been willing, to wake him, she already would have done so. She didn’t want him to know about me, maybe because of the “video,” maybe for other reasons, as well. Trying to take me out had been a calculated risk. Then there would only be one side of the story afterward.

There was a dull throbbing in my head where she’d connected. I moved over to the purse and picked it up to make sure she couldn’t try to get to it again. I didn’t know what was inside: lipstick Mace, edged credit cards, a pen-gun like mine, maybe.

Belghazi groaned again. I’d need at least a few minutes to prepare him for the injection, even assuming I could do it without interference from my new sparring partner, and it looked like I’d run out of time.

“It would have been nice if we could have met under different circumstances,” I said, rubbing my sore left temple, taking a step toward the door.

“How are you going to get past the bodyguard?” I heard her say.

That off-balanced me. I had expected them to depart after they saw Belghazi to his room.

I aimed the SoldierVision at the wall and checked the monitor. Sure enough, there was a human image just on the other side of the door. Oh, shit.

“Give me the video,” she said, “and I’ll send the guard away. You can go.”

I shook my head slowly, trying to figure out a way to improvise out of this.

Belghazi groaned again. She glanced at him, then back to me. “Look,” she whispered sharply, “I don’t know who you are, but you’re obviously no friend of his. You’ve figured out that I’m not his friend, either. Maybe we can help each other.”

“Maybe,” I said, looking at her.

“But show me some good faith. Give me the video.”

I shook my head again. “You know I can’t. You wouldn’t, in my place.”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “I don’t think there even is a video. So when he wakes up, it’s going to be your word against mine. And I promise, he’ll be inclined to believe me, not you.”

I shrugged. “What if I told him to check the boot log on his computer? I’m sure Belghazi has it enabled. Or to take a good look at your ‘cell phone’?”

She didn’t have an answer to that one.

“But I agree that we can help each other,” I said. “And here’s how we can do it. I’m going to hide again. You get the bodyguard in here, tell him Belghazi seems really sick, he’s been throwing up and is barely conscious, and you need to get him to a hospital. You and the bodyguard walk him out of here. No one’s going to search the room after he’s been in it, and as soon as you’re gone, I’ll be gone, too. You can have the video after that.”

She was silent for a long moment. If I were caught here now and Belghazi got ahold of the “video,” or if I blabbed about his boot log or her cell phone, her cover, whatever it was, would be blown for certain. If I were to leave with the “video,” she’d be taking a risk, but she might be okay. She understood these odds, and she knew that I understood them, too.

“How do I contact you?” I asked, closing the deal.

She pursed her lips, then said, “You can look for me in the casino after eight tomorrow night.”

“The Lisboa?”

“No, here, the Oriental.”

“What do I call you?”

She looked at me, her eyes coolly angry. “Delilah,” she said.

Belghazi groaned again. I nodded once and moved quickly back to the bathroom. I took out the Meisterstück, then hauled myself back into the sling under the sink.

A moment later, I heard the door to the suite open, followed by a muffled conversation in French. Delilah’s voice and a man’s. I heard them come into the suite, where they started trying to rouse Belghazi. I could pick out a few words in French: “sick,” “hospital,” “doctor.” Then Belghazi’s voice, low and groggy: “Non, non. Je vais bien.” No, no, I’m fine. Delilah’s voice, closer now, urging him to see a doctor. More demurrals, also closer.

Shit, he had gotten up and they were coming my way. I willed myself to relax and breathed silently through my nose.

“Je vais bien,” I heard him say again from just outside the bathroom. His voice sounded steadier now. “Attendez une minute.” I heard his feet lightly slapping the marble floor, coming closer. Then the sound of a faucet turning, of water coursing through the pipes around me. I turned my head and looked down. A pair of feet and lower legs stood before the sink. If I’d wanted to, I could have reached down and touched them. I noted two bare lines running the length of his shinbones, where the hair had been worn away, along with a slight rippling effect in the surface of the bone itself-both signature deformations of Thai boxers and other practitioners of hardcore kicking arts. The bones enlarge in response to the trauma of repeated blows, eventually developing into a nerveless and brutally hard striking surface. Belghazi’s file had said something about Savate-a French style of kickboxing. It looked like that information had been correct.

I heard him splashing water on his face, groaning “merde” as he did so. Then the rhythmic sounds of a hasty scrub with a toothbrush-an ordinary enough urge after vomiting.

The sounds of the toothbrush stopped. The water was turned on again. Then something clattered to the floor, practically underneath me.

I turned my head and saw it: he had dropped the toothbrush. Fuck.

My heart rate, which had been reasonably calm under the circumstances, kicked into overdrive. Adrenaline surged from my midsection into my neck and limbs. I tightened my grip on the Meisterstück. I breathed shallowly, silently. My body was perfectly still.

Belghazi knelt and reached for the toothbrush. I saw the top of a close-cropped scalp; the bridge of a nose, bent from some long-ago break; the upper plane of a pair of prominent cheekbones; his shoulders and back, thickly muscled, covered with dark hair.

All he had to do was glance up, and he would see me.

But he didn’t. His fingers closed around the toothbrush and he straightened. A moment later the water stopped running, and he padded out of the bathroom.

I heard voices again from the bedroom, but could only make out a bit of what they were saying. It seemed that Belghazi was adamant about not seeing a doctor. Christ, I was going to have to spend the night slung up under the sink like a rock climber sleeping alongside a mountain.

I heard Delilah’s voice. Something about “médecine.” The door to the suite opened and closed.

Two minutes passed. Silence from the suite. Then the sounds of footsteps, rapidly approaching. Someone burst into the bathroom and blew past me into the toilet stall. The stall door slammed, followed immediately by the sounds of Belghazi retching.

I heard Delilah’s lighter footsteps. She headed straight for the sink and squatted down so she could see me. She must have given it some thought and realized that this would be the only decent place to hide. Again I was impressed.

“I’ve sent the guard to get some medicine,” she whispered. “This will be your only chance.”

Without a word I rolled out of the harness and dropped silently to the floor on one hand and the balls of my feet. I started to reach up to undo the equipment, but Delilah stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. “Leave the rig,” she said. “There’s no time. I’ll take care of it later.”

From behind the stall door, Belghazi exclaimed, “Merde!” and retched again. I nodded at Delilah and headed for the exit. She followed me closely. I paused before the door and used the SoldierVision to confirm that the hallway was clear before leaving.

I moved into the empty corridor. She shut the door behind me without another word.