“And you, too.”
“You knew I wouldn’t let you put my back to the stairs, especially after you chose the place. This was a compromise.”
“That’s true.”
“Anyway, you’ve got that weight about you, the feel of experience and competence, even though I think you’re adept at concealing it. I told my people that removing you wouldn’t be easy and would probably involve a mess. The kind of mess that could alert Belghazi that something was wrong. He has very keen instincts, as I think you know. I doubt that anyone has gotten as close to him as you did.”
“Only you.”
She smiled, and I saw the bedroom eyes again. “I have resources that you don’t.” She took a sip of caipirinha. “So I think my description of our positions as ‘mirror image’ is apt.”
“All right. What do you propose?”
She shrugged. “I told my people that moving against you would be a poor option, although we couldn’t rule it out if you insisted on behaving unreasonably. If you gave us no choice.”
I looked at her, letting her see some coldness again. “I doubt that your people were able to get you any background on me,” I told her, “but if they had, they would have told you that I react poorly to threats. Even irrationally.”
“I’m not threatening you.”
“Convince me of that.”
“Look, you know what we want from Belghazi. And we know what you want. Stand down for a few days. Let me get what I need. When I have it, I can get you access.”
“I already have access.”
She shook her head. “That was one in a million. You or someone else must have put something in what he was eating or drinking. If that happens to him again, he’s going to know something is wrong. He’ll react accordingly, stiffen his defenses. And he moves around a lot. You tracked him here, all right, but are you sure you could track his next move?”
She sipped again. “But if you work with me, you have someone on the inside. Once we have what we need, we don’t care what happens to him.”
I thought for a moment. There was something obvious here, something she was avoiding. I decided to test it.
“I’ve got a better idea,” I said. “Help me get close, and I’ll do what I’m here to do. You can take his computer when I’m done.”
She shook her head. “That won’t work.”
“Why not?”
She shook her head again. “It just won’t. I can’t tell you why. We have to do it my way. Give me a little time, and then I’ll help you.”
It was what I thought. The information on Belghazi’s computer would lose its value if Belghazi died before Delilah accessed it.
I looked at her and said, “Even if I needed your help, and I don’t, why would I trust you? Once you’ve gotten what you wanted from the computer, you’d just walk away.”
She shrugged. “But that’s your worst case, isn’t it? You wait a few days and then I’m out of your way. Your best case, though, is that I stick around to help you. And I’ll tell you why you can believe me. Because it would be very much to our advantage if, after we acquire what we need from his computer, Belghazi were to expire naturally. As opposed to… violently.”
“You’d have to be pretty confident that I could make that happen.”
She shrugged again. “Your behavior in his suite tells me that you intend for it to happen that way. And if you are who we think you are, we’re also confident that you have the capability.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“You were right, I had my people run a background check on you,” she went on. “I didn’t have too much for them to go on: Asian male, about fifty, American-accented English, adept at close-quarters combat, good with surreptitious entry, very cool under pressure.”
“Sounds like something you came across in the personals,” I said.
She ignored me. “And probably intending to put Belghazi to sleep in a way that would look natural.”
“Any response?” I asked, my tone mild.
“We had nothing specific in our files,” she said, “but we did come up with some interesting information from open sources, primarily Forbes magazine. A series of articles written by a reporter named Franklin Bulfinch, who died not so long ago in Tokyo. His articles suggested that there is an assassin at work in Japan, an assassin expert at making murder look like anything but.” She paused, looking at me. “I think we may be dealing with this man.”
Whoever they were, they were good, no doubt about it. I liked the way they used open sources. Your typical intelligence service suffers from the belief that if it’s not stamped Top Secret and not nestled between the service’s own mauve-hued folders, it’s not worth considering. But I’ve been privy to some of the secret stuff, as well as to the work of the Bulfinches of the world. I know the spooks would learn more reading Forbes and The Economist than the magazines would learn from perusing “intelligence assessments.”
“How long are we talking about?” I asked.
“Not long. Two days, maybe three.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can’t tell you that. But we know.” She took a sip of caipirinha. “Just trust me.”
I laughed.
She retracted her head in mock indignation. “But I trusted you. I got you out of his suite, didn’t I?”
“When you thought I had a videotape. That’s not trust, it’s duress.”
She smiled, her eyes alight with humor. “You need me to get to him, and you can’t get to him while I’m in the way. This means you’ll have to trust me. Why use an ugly word like ‘duress’?”
I laughed again. What she said was true. I didn’t have a lot of attractive alternatives. I would have to try “trusting” her.
Because direct means of contact would be unacceptably dangerous, we agreed that, if I needed to see her, I would place a small, colored sticker just under the buttons in the Oriental’s four elevators. I had seen the stickers in a local stationery store. The elevator placement would enable me to leave the mark in private, would give Delilah the opportunity to check for it several times a day without going out of her way or otherwise behaving unusually, and would be so small and discreetly placed that anyone who didn’t know what to look for could be expected to take no notice. She would do the same if she needed to see me. The meeting place would be the Mandarin Oriental casino; the time, evening, when Belghazi liked to gamble at the Lisboa.
“I don’t see how Belghazi would hear that we left the casino together tonight,” she said. “But just in case, we’ll use the original story, that I told you I was going to the Lisboa and you asked if we could share a taxi. There are taxis lined up in front of the Oriental all evening, so even if he were inclined to do so, he would never be able to check the story.”
“There are cameras all over the Lisboa casino,” I said, wanting to see how many moves ahead she was thinking. “There won’t be a record of your having gone in tonight.”
“I know. But he has no access to those security tapes. Even if he did, I would tell him that I wanted to get rid of you because you seemed a little too interested, so I went shopping in the hotel arcade, instead. There are no cameras there.”
“What about me?” I asked, already knowing the answer but enjoying her thoroughness.
She shrugged. “You’re Asian, much harder to pick out of the crowd, so it would be harder to be certain that you weren’t there tonight. And even if they could be certain, how would I know why you had decided not to go in? Maybe you hadn’t wanted to go to the Lisboa tonight at all, you were only trying to pick me up. Maybe you were discouraged when I brushed you off, and left.”
I took a long swallow from my glass. “Which would also explain our failure to acknowledge each other if we happen to pass each other in, say, the Mandarin lobby. Ordinarily people who’ve shared some time at the baccarat table and a cab afterward wouldn’t act like strangers afterward.”