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 beautifuclass="underline" 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.