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

6

I CALLED THE Hong Kong Peninsula from a pay phone and reserved a Deluxe Harbour View room. I like the Peninsula because it occupies an entire city block in Kowloon’s Tsim Sha Tsui district, has five separate entrances, multiple elevators, and more internal staircases than you can count. Not an easy place to set up an ambush.

Also, it’s one of the best hotels in Hong Kong. And hey, it had been a rough day. A little luxury along with the usual dose of security didn’t seem objectionable.

I could imagine what Harry would have said: You trying to impress her?

Nah. It’s just about the security, I would have told him.

He would have known not to believe that. It made me miss him, and for a moment I felt bleak.

I made my circuitous way to the hotel and checked in. I paid for the room with a credit card under the name of Toshio Okabe, a sufficiently backstopped identity I use from time to time for just such transactions. A porter escorted me to room 2311. The room was on the south side of the new tower and, as promised, had a stunning view of Hong Kong across the harbor.

I shaved in the shower, then soaked for twenty minutes in the oversized tub. I’d been forced to stay mostly at more anonymous, downmarket properties to protect myself since leaving Tokyo two years earlier, and damn if a Deluxe Harbour View room at the Peninsula didn’t feel good.

I changed into a pair of charcoal gabardine trousers, a fine cotton mock turtleneck of the same color, and a pair of dark brown suede split-toe lace-ups and matching belt. Then I spent a half hour refamiliarizing myself with the hotel layout-the placement of the internal staircases and which ones could be accessed without a staff key; the positions of the numerous security cameras; the movements of security personnel. When I had decided on how I would arrange to meet Delilah while continuing to ensure my own safety, I went out.

I stopped at an Internet café. There was a message waiting from Kanezaki on the bulletin board. Six guys matching the descriptions of the ones I’d taken out had left from Riyadh for Hong Kong two days earlier. Plus, the Saudi embassy in Hong Kong was involved in the investigation of the recent deaths in Hong Kong and Macau. And Delilah had mentioned that the guy she had overheard had a Saudi accent. Apparently, she’d been telling the truth, at least about that. It looked like my erstwhile friends had indeed been Saudi. A connection with half-Algerian, Arabic-speaking Belghazi seemed likely under the circumstances. What I didn’t know was why. Or how.

The last part of the message said, “Checking on the phone numbers and on the woman. Nothing yet. Will be in touch.”

I typed, “Follow up on the Saudi connection to our friend. Monitor Riyadh to Hong Kong air traffic for movement of similar teams.” Not likely that they could have put together another unit so quickly, but it couldn’t hurt to be watching for one.

I uploaded the message, purged the browser, and left.

I thought about Delilah. European, I’d been thinking, although I hadn’t been able to place the slight accent. I’d been half-assuming, pending further information, that she was French. Partly it was her appearance, her dress, her manner. Partly it was her involvement with Belghazi, who, when he wasn’t moving around, was said to be based in Paris. Even her Arabic could fit the theory: France has a substantial Algerian population, and there is a long and violent history between the two countries. The French intelligence services, domestic and foreign, would have well-funded programs in Arabic. Delilah might have been one of their graduates.

But there was another possibility, of course, one I was beginning to think was increasingly likely. I decided to look for a way to test it.

I bought a prepaid cell phone from a wireless store, to be used later. I dropped it in a pocket, then used a pay phone to call Delilah.

“The Peninsula,” I told her. “Room five-forty-four.” I wasn’t ready to tell her the correct room number, or even the correct floor. Not with all the reasons she had for wanting to see me off. We would do this sensibly.

“Thirty minutes,” she said, and hung up.

There was a liquor store near the phone. On impulse, I went inside. I found a bottle of thirty-year-old Laphroaig for twenty-five hundred Hong Kong dollars-about three hundred U.S. Extortionate. But what the hell. I stopped at an HMV music store and picked up a few CDs. Lynne Arriale, Live at Montreux. Eva Cassidy, Live at Blues Alley. Bill Evans Trio, Sunday at the Village Vanguard. All the next best thing to being there.

I went back to my room at the Peninsula and took two crystal tumblers and a bucket of ice from over the minibar. I set them down on the coffee table with the Laphroaig, along with a bottle of mineral water. I popped the CDs into the room’s multidisk player and chose “random” and “repeat.” A moment later, the music started coming through a pair of speakers to either side of the television. I paused for a minute, and listened to Eva Cassidy doing “Autumn Leaves,” the lyrics and the melody the more poignant by virtue of the singer’s untimely death. The song’s melancholy notes seemed to clarify, and somehow to frame, my feelings about Delilah-part pleasant anticipation at seeing her again, part deadly concern at her possible role in what had recently come at me in Hong Kong and Macau.

I used the room’s speakerphone to call the prepaid cell phone I had just bought, picked up the call, and left, closing the door behind me. I plugged a wire-line earpiece into the cell phone and listened. The music was soft but audible. As long as I could hear it in the background, I would know the connection was good.

I took the stairs down to the fifth floor. Room 544 was at the end of a hallway, with the entrance to an internal staircase opposite and about three meters ahead of it. I waited inside the doors that led to the staircase, where I could see the room through a glass panel. If anyone had managed to listen in on my call to Delilah, which was unlikely, or if she had decided to inform her people of my whereabouts, which I deemed less unlikely, I would see them coming from here. If they tried to use the staircase, as I had, I would hear them. And, if for some reason that I had completely missed, someone tried to get into my room while I was out, I would know it through the cell phone. Layers. Always layers.

Delilah arrived fifteen minutes later. As she passed my position, I checked the direction she had come from to ensure that she was alone. When I saw that she was, I opened the door and said, “Delilah. Over here.”

She turned and looked at me. She didn’t seem particularly surprised, and I wasn’t surprised at that. She was familiar with my habits and wouldn’t have expected me to just be waiting at the appointed place at the appointed time.

I held the door open as she walked past me. Harry’s detector was in my pocket, sleeping peacefully, the batteries fully juiced from an earlier daily charging. She wasn’t wired.

I led her along various stairways and internal corridors back to the room, listening in on the earpiece while we moved. All I heard from my room were the quiet notes of Lynne Arriale. Neither of us spoke along the way. We encountered no surprises.

I unlocked the door to the room and we went inside. “Sorry about the procedures,” I said, removing the earpiece. I turned off the cell phone and left it by the door.

The apology was perfunctory. So was the shrug she offered in response. I bolted the door behind us.

Feeling secure for the moment, I took in a few more details. She was wearing a midnight blue dress, something with texture, maybe raw silk. It was cut just above the knee, with three-quarter-length sleeves, an off-the-shoulder neckline, and a deep V cut in the back and front. Her shoes were patent leather stilettos with sharp toes. There was a handbag to match the shoes, and a gold Cartier watch with a gold link band encircling her left wrist. It was a man’s watch, large and heavy on her wrist, and its incongruous heft served to accentuate her femininity. Her hair was swept back and away from her face in a way that accentuated her profile. Overall the look was controlled and sleek, sophisticated and sexy. None of it, especially the shoes, would be ideal for escape and evasion, if it came to that, so I realized she must have chosen it all for some other operational imperative. There are all sorts of weapons in the world, and I reminded myself that when this woman was dressed for work she was anything but unarmed.

She reached into her purse and took out her cell phone to show me that it was turned off and unconnected to anyone who might be listening in. Then she opened the purse so I could see there was nothing else inside that might have been problematic. I nodded to show that I was satisfied.

She raised her arms away from her sides and looked at me. She smiled in that sly, subversive way she had-teasing, but also amused, and inviting the recipient of the smile to join in the amusement. “You’re not going to search me?”

I didn’t think it would be necessary. And it certainly wouldn’t be wise. If I put my hands on her body, my previous reaction, when I had watched her leaning over the bedstand in my room at the hotel in Macau, would have seemed shy and retiring by comparison. She knew that, and she was showing me that she knew.

“Why would I want to do that?” I said, aware that my heart had started a little giddyup just at the prospect. “We trust each other, right?”

She lowered her arms, letting the smile linger for a moment, maybe acknowledging that I’d handled her suggestion about as well as anyone could under the circumstances.

“Shall I take off my shoes?”

“Why?” I asked, thinking of that idiot shoe bomber who had tried to bring down a flight from Paris.

She shrugged. “Isn’t that the custom in Japan?”

Cute. A way to confirm a biographical detail, to increase or decrease the probability that the guy her people had read about in Forbes had been me. She’d have to do better than that.

“I think they do it in houses, not so much in hotels,” I said. “Either way is fine.”

She bent forward, raised her right leg behind her, and reached around to a strap at the back of her ankle. She didn’t need to touch the wall or otherwise support herself to perform this maneuver. Her balance was good. But I had already seen that, in Belghazi’s suite when she had nearly put me down with that elbow shot.

She repeated the procedure for the other shoe. In the half-light where we stood by the door I caught a tantalizing glimpse of skin and curves as the front of her dress slipped momentarily away from her body. The view wasn’t accidental, I knew, but it was undeniably good.

I took off my shoes, as well, and followed her into the room. I’d left the lights on low so that their reflection against the floor-to-ceiling window glass wouldn’t obscure the view of the harbor and the lights of the Hong Kong skyline beyond it, but still I saw her logging the room details before appreciating the panorama outside. I couldn’t help smiling at that. A civilian would never have paused before taking in that spectacular scenery.

She glanced over at the coffee table. “Laphroaig?” she asked.

“The thirty-year-old,” I said, nodding. “You know it?”

She nodded back. “My favorite. I like it even better than the forty. That sherry finish-divine.”

Not bad, I thought. I wondered what else she would know. She was obviously adept when it came to languages, clothes, spycraft. And now whiskey. Food? Wine? Poetry? Tantric sexual techniques? I tried not to speculate too much on that last one.

“Can I get you a glass?”

“I’d love one. Just a drop of water.”

I poured us each a healthy measure in the crystal tumblers, adding a drop of water to hers as she had requested. I handed her her glass, raised mine, and said, “L’Chaim,” smiling into her eyes as I did so.

She paused, looking at me. “I’m sorry?”

I smiled innocently. “ ‘To life,’ right? Isn’t that the custom in Israel?”

For one second I thought she looked angry, and then she smiled. “Kanpai,” she said, and we both laughed.

It was a good recovery. But that pause, and the momentary reaction that had followed, seemed telling.

We sat by the coffee table. Delilah took the couch with her back to the wall, her right side to the window. I took the stuffed chair next to the couch. My back was to the wall next to the window, so I didn’t have the view. But I preferred to look at her, anyway.

We sipped for a moment in silence. She was right-the thirty-year-old, finished in sherry casks, mingles ocean tang and sherry sweetness like no other whiskey, offering a nose and taste unparalleled even among Laphroaig’s other outstanding bottlings.

After a minute or two she asked, “How much do you know about me?”

“Not a lot. Mostly speculation. Probably about what you know about me.”

“You think I’m Israeli?”

“Aren’t you?”

She smiled. The smile said: Come on, you can do better than that.

I shrugged. “Yeah, you’re right. Beautiful woman, speaks Arabic, knows how to handle herself and then some, trying to set up a guy who supports various Islamic fundamentalist groups… I don’t know what I could have been thinking.”

“Is that really all you’re going on?”

“What else would there be?”

She took a sip of the Laphroaig and paused as though considering. Then she said, “No one works completely alone. Even if it’s just the people who are paying you, there’s always someone you can go to for information. If you share your theories about who I am with whomever you work for, it could make things dangerous for me.”

I hadn’t even considered that. I tend to focus only on whether a given action might create danger for me. Selfish, I suppose. But I’m alive because of it.

“We’re both professionals,” she went on. “We do what we have to. If you need information, you’ll seek it out. But what you learn might buy you little. It could cost me a great deal.”

“Why don’t you just level with me, then,” I said. “Tell me what I need to know.”

“What more do you need?” she asked, looking at me. “We’ve already learned too much by accident. We understand each other’s objectives, and we understand the situation we’re in. The more you push, the more you compromise my ability to carry out my mission. And the more dangerous you make it for me personally. The people I work with recognize all this. At some point, they may decide to overrule me when I tell them not to try to remove you.”

I put down my glass and stood up. “Delilah,” I said, my voice dropping an octave the way it does when I feel I’m seconds away from having to take decisive action, “we’re here to try to find a way to coexist. Don’t make me decide that you’re a threat.”

“Or what?” she said, looking up at me.

I didn’t answer. She put her glass down, too, then stood and faced me. “Will you break my neck? Most men couldn’t-I’m not so delicate, you know-but I know you could.”

She took a step closer. I felt an adrenaline surge and couldn’t put it in the right context. A second ago I’d reacted to her the way I reflexively do when something suddenly reveals itself as dangerous, but now…I wasn’t sure. My respiration wanted to speed up and I controlled it, not wanting her to see.

“Maybe I am a threat to you,” she said, her voice even. “Not because I want to be, but because of the situation. So? You’re a professional. Do what you have to do. Eliminate the threat.”

She took a step closer, close enough for me to smell her, to feel something coming off her body, heat or some electrical thing. I felt another adrenaline rush spreading through my chest and gut.

“No?” she asked, looking into my eyes. “Why? You know how. Here.” She reached down for my hands and brought them up to her neck. Her skin was warm and smooth. I could feel her pulse against my fingers. It was beating surprisingly hard. I could hear her breath moving in and out through her nose.

I hadn’t meant to bluff, but somehow I had. And now she was calling. Fuck.

But she wasn’t completely sure of herself. There was that rapid pulse, and the sound of her breathing.

And of mine, I realized. I looked for some way to regain the initiative, regain control of the situation. But looking into those blue eyes, seeing her face framed by my hands encircling her neck, her expression simultaneously fearful and defiant, I was having trouble.

She lowered her arms to her sides now and tilted her chin slightly upward, the posture maximally submissive, and yet, somehow, also mocking, insolent. I looked down at the shadowed hollows of her clavicles, one side, then the other, and was almost defeated by the thought of how easy it would be to sweep my hands down over her shoulders, catching the material of the dress on the way, bringing the garment and the lingerie beneath down to her wrists and belly in one smooth motion, exposing her breasts, her skin, her body.

It was there if I wanted it. I knew that, and I knew this was by design, our moves to be choreographed on her terms, where she would offer what I wanted like a kind homeowner offering milk to a starving kitten, maybe petting the little stray on the head while it greedily lapped at the leavings.

I was suddenly angry. The feline imagery helped. I removed my hands from her neck and took a careful step away from her. My mouth had gone dry. I picked up my Laphroaig. Took a swallow. Sat back down, as casually as I could.

“I was right about you,” I said, leaving her standing there. “You really can’t help yourself. This is all you’ve got.”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction, and I knew I was right. I’d competed against guys like this in judo. They had one money move, a technique that always worked for them, but if you could get past that one, if you could survive it, they were off their game and couldn’t recover.

“What’s it like?” I went on, feeling more in control now. “Can you even talk to a man without trying to give him a hard-on? What are you going to do a few years from now, when your pheromones start to dry up? Because there’s nothing more to you. Maybe there was, a long time ago, but there’s nothing left now.”

Her eyes narrowed more and her ears seemed almost to flatten in an oddly feral attitude of anger. Good, I thought. I needed that.

“Are you going to sit down?” I asked, gesturing to the couch. “I’m not going to fuck you. And I’m not going to kill you. Not here, not now. It took all afternoon to get rid of that guy from the elevator, and I’m not going through that again tonight.”

She smiled in a way that made me wonder if she had just imagined herself killing me, and dipped her head toward me as if to say, All right. Touché.

She moved back to the couch and finished what was in her glass. I picked up the bottle to pour her another. She raised the glass as I did so and I noticed that both our hands were shaking. I knew she saw it, too.

“Why don’t we call that one a draw,” I offered.

She smiled and took a swallow of what I’d poured her. “I think you’re being generous,” she said.

“I’m being honest.”

She smiled again, a little more brightly this time. “You’re good, you know. Exceptional.”

“Yeah, so are you.”

She took another swallow and looked at me. “It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if we’d met under other circumstances.”

“You want it to be more interesting than it already is?” I asked. We both laughed, and the tension broke.

Then we were silent for a moment, maybe collecting ourselves, adjusting to the new dynamic. I decided to try to keep things comfortable for a while, thinking it would be useful to make her feel good after that harsh exchange. I was aware that I also just wanted the exchange to be comfortable, that I didn’t want to spar with her and certainly didn’t want to fight, and I wondered for a moment where my decision was really coming from.

“You know, you almost dropped me in Belghazi’s suite,” I said.

She shrugged. “I had surprise on my side. I don’t think you were expecting much from a naked woman.”

“Maybe not. But you used what you had at your disposal, and you used it well. Who trained you?”

The question was straightforward, and I knew she wouldn’t take it as another attempt to glean something revealing.

She looked at me for a long moment, then said, “It’s Krav Maga.”

Krav Maga is the self-defense system developed by the Israeli Defense Forces. These days it’s taught all over the world, so experience in the system certainly doesn’t mean the practitioner is Israeli. But Delilah already knew that I suspected her nationality and her affiliations. In this context, her acknowledgment served also as a tacit admission.

I wondered how best to pursue the slight opening she seemed to have deliberately created. I said, “I like Krav Maga. It’s practical.”

“It’s all in how it’s taught,” she said, nodding. “And how you train. Most martial arts are taught as religions. They’re about faith, not facts.”

I smiled. “People need to believe something, even if they have to invent it.”

She nodded again. “Even if it’s wrong. But we don’t have that luxury. We need something that works.”

We. She was getting ready to tell me something.

But don’t push it. Let her get to it the way she wants to.

“How’d they train you?” I asked.

“You know how. A lot of scenario-based conditioning. A lot of contact. My nose was broken during training, can you see it? I had it fixed, but you can still see the scars if you look closely.”

I looked, and saw a hairline mark at the bridge, the remnants of a bad break repaired by a good plastic surgeon. It wouldn’t have meant anything if you hadn’t known to look for it.

“Sounds pretty rough,” I said.

“It was. They took it further for me than for most because my missions are special. I’m alone in the field for a long time, usually without access to a weapon, or at least not to a traditional weapon.”

We were silent again. She took a sip of the Laphroaig and asked, “And you?”

“Mostly judo,” I said. “The Kodokan.” If she’d trained in Krav Maga, she would know both.

She looked at me. “I thought neck cranks were illegal in judo.”

“They are,” I said, seeing that I’d been right about her knowledge. “I learn the special stuff elsewhere. Books and videos. I used to practice it with a couple partners who shared some of my interests.”

“What else?” she asked. “The way I saw you move, you don’t learn that doing judo as a sport. Even with the extra books and videos.”

“No. You don’t. It helps to have spent a decade or so in combat. You develop a certain attitude.”

Silence again. Then she said, “So you are who I think you are.”

I shrugged. “I think you know part of it, yes.”

“Well, you know part about me, too.”

There it is, then. “You’re Israeli,” I said. “Mossad.”

She looked away and cocked her head slightly as though considering what I had said, meditating on it. Then she said, “What difference does it make who I am, who I’m with? From your perspective, none.”

She wasn’t going to tell me, I’d been wrong about that. Or maybe she already had told me, in her own oblique way, and I’d missed it. I wasn’t sure.

She took a sip of the Laphroaig and went on. “But from my perspective, your affiliations matter a great deal. The information we were able to put together on you suggested that you work for the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party. But I don’t see what interest the LDP could have in Belghazi. So I assume that, at least this time, you’re being paid by the Americans. And that concerns me.”

“Why?”

She waved her hands outward, palms to the ceiling, as if to say, Isn’t it obvious? “They’re big and factionalized,” she said, “so they’re not discreet. You have to be careful with them. You never know quite who you’re dealing with.”

“How do you mean?”

Now she put her hands on her hips, leaned back on the couch, and dropped her shoulders. The gesture read, Is he just playing dumb, or is this the genuine article? She started talking a moment later, so I figured she had decided it was #2. It shouldn’t have bothered me-on the contrary, in fact-but it did, a little. I assuaged my pride by reminding myself that it’s generally good to be underestimated.

“Did they explain to you why they want Belghazi removed?” she asked.

“They did.”

“Did you believe them?”

I shrugged. “I was barely listening.”

She laughed. “They must have told you about his arms networks, though, terrorists, fundamentalist group connections, blah, blah, blah.”

The disparaging idiom, rendered in her accented English, surprised me, and I laughed. “What, were they making it up?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. It’s all true. And I’m sure that some parts of the U.S. government are upset over it, and might even be trying to do something about it. Some parts.”

“Meaning?”

She smiled and said, “You know, you haven’t even told me your name.”

I looked at her and said, “Call me John.”

“John, then,” she said, as though testing the sound of it.

“You were saying, ‘Some parts.’ ”

She shrugged. “Let’s just say that America is a very big place. It has a lot of competing interests. Not all of them might think Belghazi is such a bad guy.”

“Meaning?” I said again.

“Have you thought about why they want you to be ‘circumspect’ about the way you go about this particular assignment?”

“I have a general idea.”

“Well, consider this.” She leaned forward and brought her hands up, her fingers slightly splayed and her palms forward, as though framing a photograph. “Whatever faction hired you, they’re being oblique. They need deniability. Who do they need deniability from? And have you considered the position this puts you in?”

The relatively marked body language was new. I was seeing a different part of her personality, maybe a part that she ordinarily kept hidden. Interesting.

I thought for a moment. “The same position I’m always in, I would say.”

“Qualitatively, maybe,” she said, waving a hand, palm down, perhaps unconsciously erasing my point. “Quantitatively, the situation might be worse. Who do you think sent the man in the elevator?”

I paused, thinking, I half thought it was you. Instead I said, “I don’t know.”

The wave stopped and she stabbed the air with her index finger. “Correct. Any number of players could now be trying to counter you. Anyone who stands to benefit from what Belghazi does.”

Or who wants to keep him alive long enough to get access to his computer, I thought. I wondered if she was telling me all this to throw me off her scent. Or maybe she was trying to emphasize the hopelessness of my situation, to encourage me to quit. Maybe.

“I’ve always known that being in this business was a poor way to win a popularity contest,” I said.

She laughed. I picked up the bottle and refreshed first her glass, then mine.

I liked her laugh. It was an odd collection of incongruities: husky, but also sweet; womanly, in the sophistication that informed it, but somehow also girlish in its delighted timbre; spiced with a hint of irony, but one that seemed grounded more in a sense of the absurd than in sarcasm or cruelty. I smiled, feeling good, and realized I was getting a little buzzed from the whiskey.

She leaned back and took a sip, pausing with the glass under her nose. I liked that, liked that she appreciated the aroma. I did the same.

“The one thing you do know,” she said, “is that someone is on to you. Do you understand what that means for me? Someone could make the connection. And I don’t operate the way you do. I don’t have the luxury of being able to hide. To do what I need to do, I need to be close, and stay close.”

So now an appeal to sentiment. A two-pronged approach: logic, to the effect that the situation had changed and I could no longer accomplish my mission; emotion, to the effect that, if I continued to try, she would pay the price.

“I understand what you’re saying,” I told her. “But I also understand where you’re coming from. The second is what gives me pause about the first.”

It made me feel a little sad to say it. Things had been so relaxed for a while. Christ, the whiskey was getting to me. I’m not usually sentimental.

“That’s fair,” she said, nodding. “Nonetheless, what I’ve told you is accurate. Do a little digging-leaving me out of it, if you can, please-and you’ll see.”

I nodded. “The digging is already happening. Discreetly, you’re not part of it.” Not entirely true, but how my inquiry to Kanezaki might affect her was something I would think about later.

I took a sip of the Laphroaig. “Anyway, I need to figure out where this leak is coming from, so I can close it.”

“You think the problem is on your side?”

I shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time. I learned a long time ago that democracies are dangerous to work with. They’re hindered by all those annoying checks and balances, all that meddlesome public opinion, so they have built-in incentives to find ways of doing things off the books. Sometimes it gets a little hard to follow who you’re dealing with.”

She smiled. “Want Castro whacked? Hire the Mafia.”

I smiled back. “Sure. Or, if Congress won’t cough up the appropriations, fund the Contras through the Sultan of Brunei.”

“Or bankroll almost anything by getting the Saudis to pay for it.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, I see your point.”

She moved her hands up and down like a pedestrian trying to slow down an oncoming car, the gesture both impatient and suppliant. “Sorry to belabor it. But you have to understand, Nine-Eleven put America into a bad state of schizophrenia. The country committed itself to a ‘war on terrorism,’ but still pays billions of oil dollars to the Saudis, knowing that those dollars fund all the groups with whom America purports to be at war. Fifteen of the nineteen Nine-Eleven hijackers were Saudi, but no one wants to talk about that. Can you imagine the reaction if the hijackers had been Iranian, or North Korean? I think if America were a person, a psychiatrist would classify her as being in profound psychological denial. I don’t know how you can trust an employer like that.”

“Do you trust yours?” I asked.

She looked down. Her hands descended gently to her lap. After a moment, she said, “It’s complicated.”

“That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.”

She sighed. “I trust their intentions. Some of the… the policies are stupid and outmoded. But I don’t have to agree with every decision to know I’m doing the right thing.”

From her body language and her voice, I knew that my question had troubled her. But not for the reasons she had just articulated. There was something else.

“Do they trust you?” I asked.

She smiled and started to say something, then stopped. She looked down again. “That’s also… complicated,” she said.

“How?”

She looked left and right, as though searching for an answer. “They trained me and vetted me,” she said after a moment. “And I’m good at what I do. I’m resourceful and I have a track record to go on.”

She took a sip of the Laphroaig and I waited for her to go on.

“But, let’s face it, what I do, I sleep with the enemy. Literally. It’s hard for people to get past that. They wonder what it makes me feel, whether it might… infect me, or something.”

“How does it make you feel?” I asked, unable not to.

She looked away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I nodded and we were silent for a moment. Then I said, “You’re taking a lot of risks with this operation. Maybe more even than usual. Some people might argue that, with me in the picture, with the guy at the hotel, things have gotten unacceptably hot for you, that you should get out. But you haven’t.”

She smiled, but the smile didn’t take.

“Are you trying to prove something?” I asked. “Trying to earn someone’s respect by putting your life on the line here?”

“What would you know about that?” she asked. Her tone was a little sharp, and I suspected I was on to something.

I smiled gently. “I fought with the U.S. in Vietnam. Against ‘gooks’ and ‘zipperheads’ and ‘slopes.’ Look at my face, Delilah.”

She did.

“You see my point?” I said. “It took me years to realize why I was willing to do some of the things I did there.”

She nodded, then drained what was left in her glass. “I see. Yes, you would understand, then.”

“Are they worth it, though? They send you out on these missions, at huge risk to you, you bring back the goods, and still they don’t trust you. Why bother?”

“Why bother?” she asked, tilting her head to the side as though trying to see something she had missed in me before. “Have you ever seen an infant with its legs torn off by a bomb? Seen its mother holding it, insane with grief and horror?”

A rhetorical question, for most people. Not for me.

“Yes,” I said, my voice quiet. “I have.”

She paused, looking at me, then said, “Well, the work I do prevents some of these nightmares. When I do my job well, when we disrupt the flow of funds and matériel to the monsters who strap on vests filled with explosives and rat poison and nails, a baby that would have died lives, or a family that would have grieved forever doesn’t have to, or minds that would have been destroyed by trauma remain intact.”

She paused again, then added, “I should quit? Because my superiors who ought to know better don’t trust me? Yes, then I can explain to the bereft and the amputees and the permanently traumatized that I could have done something to save them, but didn’t, because I wasn’t treated sufficiently respectfully at the office.”

She looked at me, her cheeks flushed, her shoulders rising and falling with her breathing.

I looked back, feeling an odd combination of admiration, attraction, and shame. I took a big swallow of the Laphroaig, finishing it. I refreshed her glass, then mine.

“You’re lucky,” I said, after a moment.

She blinked. “What?”

I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples for a moment. “To believe in something the way you do…” I opened my eyes. “Christ, I can’t imagine it.”

There was a long pause. Then she said, “It doesn’t feel lucky.”

“No, I’m sure it doesn’t. I used the wrong word. I should have said ‘fortunate.’ It’s not the same thing.”

I rubbed my temples again. “I’m sorry I said what I said. That you shouldn’t bother. Over the years, I’ve developed the habit of… preempting betrayal. Of thinking that the possibility of betrayal, and defending against it, is paramount. And maybe that’s true for me. But it shouldn’t be true for everyone. It shouldn’t be true for someone like you.”

For a few moments, neither of us spoke. Then she asked, “What are you thinking?”

I waited a second, then said, “That I like the way you use your hands when you talk.” Telling her part of it.

She glanced down at her hands for a second, as though checking to see whether they were doing something right then, and laughed quietly. “I don’t usually do that. You pissed me off.”

“You weren’t only doing it when you were pissed.”

“Oh. Well, I do it when I forget myself.”

“When does that happen?”

“Rarely.”

“You should do it more often.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“Why?”

“You know why. You have to protect yourself.”

Her expression was so neutral that I knew she had to be consciously controlling it. She took a sip of the Laphroaig and asked, “And you? What do you do?”

“I don’t get close.”

“I told you, I don’t have that luxury.”

I looked at her and said, “I’ve never thought of it as a luxury.”

She looked back. The look was noticeably long. Definitely frank. Possibly inviting.

I got up and sat down next to her on the couch. One of her eyebrows rose a notch and she said, “I thought you just said you don’t get close.” But she was smiling a little, those warm notes of irony and humor in her eyes.

“That’s the problem with making your own rules,” I said. “There’s no one around to straighten you out when you break them.”

“I thought you said you weren’t going to fuck me.”

“I’m not.”

I looked at her for another moment, then leaned slowly forward. She watched me, her eyes focusing on mine, then dropping momentarily to my lips, and moving back to my eyes again.

I paused. Our faces were a few centimeters apart. There was the hint of rare perfume, maybe something she had bottled uniquely for her in expensive cut glass at an exclusive shop in Paris or Milan. The scent was there but you couldn’t quite get ahold of it, like the remnant of a dream upon waking, or an afterimage fading from the retina after an intense flash of light, or the memory of a face you knew and loved a lifetime earlier. Something just real enough to bring you in, to make you want to pull it closer, to get it back before it flickers away again and is irretrievably lost.

I inclined my head further and kissed her. She accepted the kiss but didn’t exactly embrace it, and after a moment I drew back slightly and looked at her.

“Some people might call what you’re doing ‘mixed signals,’ ” she said. She was smiling a little, but her tone was serious enough.

“I have a conflicted nature. All the military shrinks said so.”

“A few minutes ago you were slapping me down, remember?”

I shook my head. “That wasn’t you. It was your alter ego. I’m not interested in her.”

“How do you know you’ll be interested in what’s behind her?”

“I like what I’ve seen so far.”

She looked at me. “Maybe you were right. Maybe I can only be an actress. A poseur.”

“That would be sad if it were true.”

“You’re the one who said it.”

“I was trying to get under your skin.”

“You did.”

“Show me I was wrong.”

“I don’t know that you were.”

I looked at her legs and breasts with mock lasciviousness, then said, “All right, I’ll take the alter ego.”

She laughed, then stopped and looked at me, another long one. She leaned forward and we kissed again.

The kiss was better this time. There was an uncertainty about it, the tentativeness of a cease-fire, the sense of something moving slowly but with a lot of momentum behind it.

She opened her mouth wider and our tongues met. Again the feeling was tentative: an exploration, not a hasty charge; a testing of the waters, not a heedless plunge.

A minute passed, maybe two, and the kiss grew less cautious, more passionate; less deliberate, more a thing unto itself. It waxed and waned as though in obedience to some force that was slipping from our control. I took in all the different aspects of her mouth, each shifting through my consciousness like images illuminated by a strobe light: her tongue; her lips; her teeth; her tongue again; the delicious feel of the whole, this new threshold to so much of whoever she was.

She took my lower lip between her teeth and lips and held it there for a moment, then released it and gradually eased away. We looked at each other. She smiled.

“I like the way you taste,” she said.

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Must be the Laphroaig.”

She made a sound of agreement that was something like a purr. “That’s part of it. The other part is you.”

I smiled at her. “The exotic taste of the Orient?”

She laughed. “Just you.”

We made love on the bed. There was some jocular debate in the midst of the proceedings about who should be on top, debate that we resolved by recourse to each of the alternatives in question, along with several others. Her body was as luscious and beautiful as that glimpse in Belghazi’s suite had promised, and she moved with an unaffected experience and enthusiasm that made me think of the confidence I had first seen in the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental.

We used a condom, something I assumed was one of several practical items she would typically keep in her purse. It was smart. In my unfortunately infrequent encounters with real passion, I’m rarely as careful as I ought to be. The rationalization goes something like: With all the bullets and mortar rounds I’ve survived, I must be immune to sexually transmitted diseases. Stupid, I know. More likely, fate will indulge its taste for irony by killing me with AIDS or some other unpleasant alternative.

We lay on our sides afterward, facing each other, heads propped languorously on folded pillows. She reached over and traced my lips with a fingertip.

“You’re smiling,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow. “What did you think, I was going to frown?”

She laughed. Her words, her attitude, it all felt authentic enough. But she was a pro. If she was letting her hair down, I had to assume it was tactical, a means to an end. And I still couldn’t be sure about her motives, about what she might have tried back at the Mandarin Oriental. A shame, to have that knowledge lying on the bed coldly between us, but there it was.

I asked her, “How did you get involved in your work?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes I ask myself the same thing.”

“Tell me.”

“I answered an ad in the newspaper, same as you.”

I waited. There was no sense saying more. If she didn’t want to talk about it, she wouldn’t.

We were quiet again. Then she said, “I was a skinny kid, but when I was fourteen, my body started to develop. Boys, men, started looking at me. I didn’t know why they were looking, exactly, but I liked it. I liked that I had something they wanted. I could tell it gave me a kind of power.”

“You must have driven them crazy,” I said, remembering what it was like to be that age, testosterone-poisoned and single-minded as a heat-seeking missile.

She nodded. “But I wasn’t interested in boys my age. I don’t know why; they just seemed so young. My fantasies were always about older men.”

She pulled herself a little higher on the pillow. “When I was sixteen, a friend of my father’s from the army moved to our city because of a job opportunity. He stayed with us for a couple months while he looked for an apartment and got settled. His name… I’ll call him Dov. He was forty, a war hero, dark and handsome and with the softest, most beautiful eyes. Every time I looked at him I would get a strange feeling inside and have to look away. He was always proper with me, but sometimes I would catch him looking at me the way men did, although it seemed that he was trying not to.

“When I realized he was looking at me that way, it was… exciting. Here was this man, this war hero, handsome and intelligent and so much older and more sophisticated than I was, and still I had this power over him. I started… experimenting with the power. Testing it, in a way, to try to figure out what it was. I would laugh at something he said and hold his eyes a moment too long. Or brush against him when I walked past. I didn’t intend for it to lead anywhere; I didn’t even know that it could lead somewhere with a man like Dov, or where that place might be.

“One day, when he was home and my parents were out, I put on what I thought of as my sexiest outfit-a white bikini top and matching sarong. I knocked on his door. My heart was beating hard, the way it always did when I was near him or even thought of him. I heard him say, ‘Come in,’ so I did. He was sitting at the small desk in his room, and when he saw me he stood up, then flushed and looked away. My heart started beating harder. I told him I was going to walk down to the beach-we lived near the ocean-and asked him if he wanted to go for a swim. He didn’t say anything-he just looked at me for a second, then away again. I realized I could hear his breathing. I was so young at the time, I didn’t even know what that might mean, but it excited me. And I felt awkward because he hadn’t answered me. I didn’t know what to say, so I fanned my face a little and said, ‘It’s so hot in here!’ which it suddenly was. He still didn’t say anything, he just looked at me with the oddest expression-smiling, but almost a little sick, too, as though he was in pain and trying to be brave about it-and I saw that his hands were trembling. It made me nervous that he wasn’t answering me, so, just trying to think of something to say, I said, ‘It’s okay if you don’t want to swim,’ and I realized my voice was as shaky as his hands.

“His lips moved, but no words came out. Then he reached out and touched one of my cheeks with the back of his fingers. I was surprised and took a quick step away. He pulled his hand back and told me quickly he was sorry. I didn’t know what he meant by that or why I had stepped back; all I knew right then was that I wanted him to touch me, wanted it more than anything, and without another thought I took his hands in mine and said, ‘No, no, it’s okay!’ Then he looked at me with his beautiful, dark eyes, took my face in his hands, and kissed me. It was my first real kiss and I felt like I would faint from the pleasure of it. I could hear myself moaning into his mouth and he was moaning, too. And you know what? When he put his hands on my body, just my hips and my breasts, I came. That was another first for me-I didn’t even know what was happening, I couldn’t breathe, there was this explosion of pleasure and then I was sagging against him and crying. He held me and stroked my hair and told me over and over that he was sorry, and I couldn’t speak so I just kept shaking my head and crying because it was so wonderful, he was so wonderful.”

I smiled, wanting to believe that the story was true, that she was showing me something more of the person behind what she had called the “poseur.” Maybe she was. Even if it was a pseudonym, Dov was an Israeli name. From what I could tell of the timelines, Israel’s Six Day War might have been the conflict in which he had distinguished himself. Her city by the sea? Tel Aviv? Eilat?

Or maybe it was a story she had told so many times and for so many reasons that she’d come to believe it herself. Maybe it was part of a campaign to get me to develop an attachment, to warp my objectivity, cloud my judgment.

But I could remind myself of all those unwelcome possibilities later. I didn’t see the point of dwelling on them now.

“Did he make love to you?” I asked.

“No. Not that time. Although he could have. He could have done anything with me.”

“What happened after?”

She smiled. “We promised each other that it would never happen again, that it was wrong because he was so much older and if my parents found out it would be a disaster. But we couldn’t stay away from each other. My brother was in the army then, and he was killed that year. I don’t think I could have gotten through that without Dov. He understood war and had lived through a lot of loss. He was the only one who could comfort me.”

“That must have been hell for your parents.”

“They were devastated. A lot of people didn’t think we should even have been fighting where we were, so their feeling was, ‘our beautiful son died for what?’ It wasn’t like losing someone in the other wars, which everyone knew had been forced on us. It was more like… more like just a waste. You know what I mean?”

She could only have been talking about Lebanon. If she was making all this up, it was an impressive piece of fabrication.

I looked away, thinking about my first trip stateside from Vietnam, when the best you could expect from your average fellow American when he learned you’d been in the war was polite embarrassment and a desire to change the subject. Often you could expect much worse.

I said, “One of the cruelest things a society can do is send its young men off to war with a license to kill, then tell them when they get home that the license wasn’t valid. America did the same thing in Vietnam.”

She looked at me and nodded. We were quiet for a moment. I asked, “How did things turn out with Dov?”

She smiled. “He moved away. I went to college. He has a wife and two sons now.”

“You still see each other?”

She shrugged. “Not very often. There’s his family, and my work. But sometimes.”

“Your parents never found out?”

She shook her head. “No. And he never told his wife. He’s a good man, but you know? We can’t help ourselves. There’s something there that’s just too strong.”

I nodded and said, “Most people only dream of a connection like that.”

She raised her eyebrows. “What about you?”

I looked away for a moment, thinking of Midori. “Maybe once.”

“What happened?”

Nothing really, I could have said. Just, she figured out I killed her father.

“She was a civilian,” I said, finessing the point. “She was smart enough to understand what I do, and smart enough to know that our worlds had to stay separate.”

“You never thought about trying to get out of this world?”

“All the time.”

“It’s hard, isn’t it.”

There’s no home for us, John. Not after what we’ve done. As spoken by that philosopher, my blood brother Crazy Jake.

I nodded and said, as though to his ghost, “There are things you do that you can’t wash off afterward.”

“What was it between you?”

“I screwed up. I hurt her.”

“Not that. The good part.”

“I don’t know,” I said, imagining her face for a moment, the way she would look at me. “There was this… frankness about her. In everything she did. I could always tell how I made her feel. She was experienced and sophisticated, even renowned, in her field, but somehow when I was with her I always felt I was with the person she was before all that. The real her, the core that no one else could see. I made her happy, you know? In a way that made no sense and caught me completely off guard when it started to happen. I don’t think I’ve ever had anything like that before. I can’t imagine I will again. Making her happy”-I paused, thinking it would sound corny, then said it anyway-“was the thing that made me happy.”

“You’re not happy now?”

“This very moment? I feel pretty good.”

She smiled. “Generally.”

I shrugged. “I’m not depressed.”

“That’s a pretty minimalist way of defining happiness.”

“I take pleasure in things. A good single malt, good jazz, the feeling when the judo is really flowing. A hot soak afterward. The change of seasons. The way coffee smells when it’s roasted the way it ought to be.”

“All things, though.”

I was quiet for a moment, thinking. “Yeah, mostly. I suppose that’s true.”

“Someone once said to me, ‘If you live only for yourself, dying is an especially scary proposition.’ ”

I looked at her, but didn’t say anything. Maybe the comment hit home.

“You don’t trust,” she said.

“No.” I paused, then asked, “Do you?”

“Not easily. But I believe in some things. I couldn’t live without that.”

We were quiet for a while, thinking our separate thoughts. I said, “You can’t do this forever. What’s next?”

She laughed. “You mean when my ‘pheromones dry up’? I don’t know. What about you?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe retire someplace. Someplace sunny, maybe by the ocean, like where you grew up. A place with no memories.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Yeah. Don’t know when I’ll get there, though.”

“Well, in your line of work, you’ve got a longer shelf life than I do, I suppose.”

I laughed. “What about a family? You’re still young.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I could give up Dov, so I’d need a pretty understanding husband.”

“Don’t tell him.”

“I’d have to not tell him about what I’ve been doing for the last dozen years, too. You know, if a man learns that you can be an actress in bed, he’ll always wonder afterward whether you’re acting with him. Men tend to be insecure about those things.”

I realized that the comment might have been directed at me. Maybe a probe, to see if I would admit to something along those lines. Better to sidestep. I said, “It must be hard being so close with someone like Belghazi, knowing what he does.”

She nodded. “You have to be able to compartmentalize. But it’s not so bad with him. He’s not one of the killers. He’s much higher up the food chain than that. Besides, he’s intelligent and not unkind. Attractive. Remember, I like men. It’s part of what makes me good at what I do.”

“But after you’ve gotten what you want from him…”

Her expression occluded slightly. “Someone else will take care of that. Maybe you, if we can manage this relationship properly.”

“How will you feel then?”

“The way I always do. But you don’t shrink from doing what’s right just because it’s not comfortable.”

I looked at her, impressed. Most people don’t realize it, but ninety percent of morality is based on comfort. Incinerate hundreds of people from thirty thousand feet up and you’ll sleep like a baby afterward. Kill one person with a bayonet and your dreams will never be sweet again.

Which is more comfortable?

Which is worse?

Maybe it doesn’t matter. In the end, you get over everything. We’re such resilient creatures.

It was strange, lying in bed with her. The room felt like a haven. I realized my ease of mind was borne both of the precautions I had taken and of my confidence that she wouldn’t have allowed herself to be followed. But also, perhaps, of some part of me that wanted to feel this way, for its own reasons, independent of the evidence of the outside world. Not a good sign, I knew. And possibly an indication that I was growing less well adapted to the game, and less able to survive in it.

Delilah got up and took a shower. She brought her purse in the bathroom with her, knowing I would have gone through it if she hadn’t. Not that I would have found anything useful. She was too careful for that.

I lay on the bed and listened to the water running. I knew there was at least a theoretical possibility that she would use her cell phone while she was in there, alerting her people to my whereabouts. My gut told me the possibility was remote, but my gut might have been feeling the effects of whiskey and lovemaking. The fact was, she would still be concerned about the danger I posed to her operation. I had to stay sensible.

When she came out she was already dressed. She looked relaxed and refreshed. I had pulled on one of the Peninsula’s plush bathrobes and was sitting on the bed, as though ready to turn in for the night.

She sat down next to me and said, “What do we do now?”

I put my hand on her thigh. “Well, I’m ready for round two, if you are.”

She laughed. “About the situation.”

“Oh, yeah. Can you send text messages with your phone?”

“Of course.”

I gave her the URL of one of my encrypted bulletin boards. “The password is ‘Peninsula,’ ” I told her. “The name of this hotel. Tell me when you’ve gotten what you need from Belghazi and where I can find him then.”

“You’ll do that?”

I shrugged. “I’m still waiting to hear from my contacts, who should be able to shed some light on who came after me and why. And how. For the moment, I don’t have access to Belghazi, anyway. Standing down seems sensible.”

“It is. Whoever was coming at you in Macau won’t have unlimited resources. It will take them time to get new forces in position.”

“I know,” I said.

“But you need to be careful. I know you know this, I know you’re a professional. But Belghazi is a dangerous man. Remember when I told you that I’ve known men who could act without compunction? Never more so than with him.”

“What do you mean?”

“In Monte Carlo, I saw him kill a man. With his feet and bare hands.”

“Yeah, he’s got a Savate background, I know.”

She shook her head. “More than a background. He has a silver glove in Savate and was a ring champion in Boxe-Francaise. He works out on sides of beef. With his kicks he can break individual ribs.”

“He ought to market it. ‘Belghazi’s meat tenderizer.’ ”

She didn’t laugh. “And he carries a straight razor.”

“Good for him,” I said.

She looked at me. “I wouldn’t take it lightly.”

“You know what they teach salesmen?” I asked, looking at her. “Don’t sell past the close. I already told you I would stand down, for now. You don’t need to keep trying to persuade me.”

She smiled, and for an instant I thought the smile looked strangely sad. “Ah, I see,” she said.

We were quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Tell me, do you think I went to bed with you… tactically? To manipulate you?”

I looked at her. “Did you?”

She dropped her eyes. “That’s something you have to decide for yourself.”

There was a kiss, oddly tentative after our recent bout of passion, and then she was gone. I waited fifteen seconds, then slipped off the bathrobe and pulled on my clothes. The rest of my things were still in my bag. I waited a minute, looking through the peephole and using the SoldierVision to confirm that the corridor outside the door was empty. It was. I moved out into it, taking various staircases and internal corridors until I reached the ground floor. I used one of the rear exits, which put me on Hankow Road, cut across Nathan, and took the elevator down to the MTR. I made some aggressive moves to ensure that I wasn’t being followed. I wasn’t. I was all alone.