Focus, Storm. Or, rather: Focus, Detroit.
“I’d be happy to tell you more about the soybean,” he said. “Someone in your position ought to be aware about it, since it was your ancestors who first cultivated it some five thousand years ago.”
“Really?” she said, like he was telling her someone had discovered a new continent or was revealing the true nature of the atom.
They drifted even closer. He could feel the heat of her body. He had become acutely aware of her eyes and, more specifically, his desire to spend an entire evening swimming in them.
“Yes, it’s true. We in the United States are relative newcomers to the plant. We’ve only been at it for three hundred years or so. And even though we’re now the world’s largest producer of soy products, we owe a great debt to your country for introducing it to us. Would you like to hear about a Chinese-American I consider the Johnny Appleseed of the soybean? I’d be happy to tell you about it, Miss…”
“I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself,” she said, making a business card materialize from he knew not where. She handed it to him. It was done in the Western style, with the first name first. It identified her as “Ling Xi Bang, Press Secretary, Ministry of Finance.”
“What an unusual last name,” he said. “Is it pronounced ‘Zi Bang’?”
“Actually, when Mandarin is Westernized, the ‘x’ is pronounced like ‘sh,’ ” she said. “So it’s ‘She Bang.’ ”
Storm only hoped she did not notice his Adam’s apple bob up and down from his gulping. “How… how interesting,” he said.
“Almost as interesting as the soybean,” she answered in a low purr. Their faces were nearly touching.
There was, of course, absolutely nothing interesting about it. And Storm knew that. He had to tread carefully. If she was a spy — as both the agent in Room 419 and Storm’s own intuition seemed to indicate — she would be feeling out him just as surely as he was feeling out her. If she knew he was also a spy…
But no. She couldn’t. Everything about Soy Trader Weekly’s Cleveland Detroit — from his press credentials to his website — had been meticulously constructed. There was no way she was onto him. He made his move.
“Ms. Xi Bang, forgive me for being forward, but as a journalist, I always try to tell the truth. And the truth is, I’d like to take you to dinner.”
“Can we have something made from soy?” she asked.
“Tofu?”
“Perfect.”
“I find it’s excellent when drizzled in soy sauce,” he said.
“Do you think we can find a bistro nearby that would serve it to us that way?”
“I happen to know of one. I’ll meet you in the lobby in fifteen minutes.”
“Make it ten,” she said.
She smiled. He winked. She turned. Storm gave the button camera the sight of her shapely legs as she departed.
As soon as she was a safe distance away, Storm’s earpiece came to life. “Storm, did you really just seduce a beautiful woman by talking about soybeans?” the agent asked.
“Happens all the time,” he replied. “Just your typical story of soy meets girl.”
As Storm performed one last sweep of the Lobby, the agent in Room 419 told him that Jones’s people had confirmed what he already suspected: The name Ling Xi Bang did not appear in any of the Chinese Finance Ministry’s materials. She was, apparently, a press secretary who had never written any press releases.
“Is it possible she’s just a new employee?” Storm asked.
“Yes,” the agent said. “But it’s more possible her handlers didn’t do a very good job establishing her cover.”
“Sounds like she needs a job at Soy Trader Weekly.”
“Just be careful, Storm.”
“Right.”
“She can’t get the slightest clue of who you are. We lost an operative in Shanghai just last month to this sort of thing. The Chinese don’t play nice. The Geneva Convention is a running joke to them.”
“Right.”
“And, remember, because it’s so small, the effective range of the equipment you’re wearing is only two thousand feet,” the agent said.
“If you get in trouble, we’ll have people on the ground who can give you backup. But you have to stay in range.”
“Right.”
“There’s a French-Asian fusion place along the Champs Élysées that’s close enough,” the agent said. “They even have a grilled tofu dish on the menu.”
“Sounds perfect,” Storm said.
Then he ripped out the earpiece, microphone, and camera and deposited them in the nearest poubelle.
For the next minute or two, a passerby would have heard something that sounded like a trash can saying, “Storm… Storm, do you copy?… Storm, are you there?”
She had changed into a red dress with even less leg coverage than her skirt had offered. The neckline was a style the name of which Storm couldn’t quite remember. Did they call that a princess cut? A cupid cut? Whatever. Storm just called it delicious.
As she walked toward him past the concierge desk, every male eye in the room followed her. The Englishmen in the lobby had to do it surreptitiously, so their wives wouldn’t notice them gawking. The Americans were slightly more obvious. The Frenchmen didn’t bother hiding it at all.
Cleveland Detroit was silently cursing that he had to be Cleveland Detroit. Derrick Storm would have had his Hermès tuxedo newly pressed, his Gucci shoes polished to a high shine, his black Brooks Brothers bow tie crisply knotted.
Then he reminded himself that, no matter what anyone says to the contrary, it’s the man that makes the clothes. He rose from the chair he had been holding down and greeted her with a light peck on the cheek. The electricity he felt when his lips brushed her skin was enough to weaken his knees.
“You look incredible,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Shall we?” he said, offering her his arm.
She locked arms with him in a way that allowed him to briefly feel her body pressed against his. It left him with a powerful urge to make sure that wasn’t the last time he felt that particular sensation. “We shall,” she said.
As they strolled arm in arm out of the hotel, down toward the Seine, Storm allowed himself one more admiring glance, then started his subtle interrogation with seemingly harmless questions about her childhood.
It turned out that, unlike most of the employees in the Finance Ministry, she did not have an important father or other family connections. She was from a poor peasant family in rural Qinghai Province. The One-Child Policy was firmly in place at the time of her birth, and many families in her village drowned their infant daughters and waited on sons to arrive. Despite cultural biases against educating girls, she had managed to excel in school. When she recorded the best score in the entire province on the Chinese version of the SAT, she was invited to attend Peking University in Beijing. There, she finished at the top of her class. Her credentials had been so impressive that the Finance Ministry had been willing to overlook her gender.
“Your English is so flawless,” he said at one point — and could have added you must be a spy. Instead, he gave her an easy out: “You must have studied abroad.”
“I spent a semester at USC,” she said.
“Ah, the University of Spoiled Children,” Storm said. “I went to journalism school there. Which was your favorite pizza: Roma’s or Geno’s?”
“Roma’s,” she said quickly. “They had the best crust.”
And that’s when Derrick Storm knew that everything Ling Xi Bang had said to him was likely a lie. He had fabricated the names of the pizzerias. He was almost surprised she fell for such an easy ruse. She obviously hadn’t been well briefed.
No matter. He had found what he came to Paris to look for. That was the first objective. The second was to woo her into trusting acceptance. It was not necessarily that she was going to tell him anything. But if he got close to her, he might overhear a conversation, or sneak a glimpse into her briefcase, or arrange for her to “lose” her phone and secret it off to a CIA tech. There was always a way.