Barry Eisler - Rain Storm aka Choke Point

He laughed at that, which was good. I needed him to understand who was in charge, but didn’t want to beat him down too hard. His goodwill, his naïve sense of fairness, was a potential asset, and not something to toss away needlessly.

“I’ll check the bulletin board,” I told him. “If you find anything about the woman, just put it up there.”

“Okay.”

I paused, then added, “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said, and I thought he might be smiling.

AT ABOUT six o’clock the following evening, I dropped by the Mandarin casino. Delilah had said eight, but I like to show up for meetings early. It helps prevent surprises.

I used the street entrance, preferring to avoid the hotel for the moment. Keiko was out, but I wanted to minimize the chances of my running into her while she was coming or going. I walked up the escalator, nodded agreeably to the guards, and went inside.

The room was large, and largely empty. The pace would pick up later in the evening. For now, the action comprised just a few lonely souls. They seemed lost in the expanse of the room, their play joyless, desultory, as though they’d been looking for a livelier party and found themselves stuck with this one instead.

I spotted Delilah instantly. She was one of a handful of people quietly attending the room’s lone baccarat table, and the only non-Asian in sight. She was dressed plainly, in black pants and a black, shoulderless top. Her hair was pulled back and I saw no signs of makeup or jewelry. If she’d been trying to downplay her looks, though, she hadn’t been notably successful.

I checked the usual hot spots and saw nothing that set off any alarms. So far, my assessment that she wouldn’t yet do anything precipitous seemed correct. But it was too soon to really know. After all, the casino, with its cameras, guards, and other forms of security, would have made a poor place for an ambush. An attack, if one were to come, would happen later.

I bought a handful of chips, then took a seat next to her.

“Early for baccarat,” I said, meaning it’s early for our appointment, but trying to be oblique in case anyone nearby spoke English.

“For both of us, it seems,” she replied, putting her chips down on player and looking up at me sidelong.

I smiled, then placed a bet on the bank. “I hate to get a late start. You get there, the place is already filled up, the odds aren’t as good.”

She returned the smile, and I got my first good look at her eyes. They were deep blue, almost cobalt, and they seemed not only to regard, but somehow to assess, with intelligence and even some humor.

“Yes, early is better,” she said. “It’s a good thing not everyone realizes it. Otherwise you could never beat the crowds.”

I noted that her English, though accented, was idiomatic. She would have learned it young enough to pick up the idiom, but not quite young enough to eradicate the accent.

The banker dealt the cards. I said, “Looks like we’re the only ones who recognize the advantages of a timely arrival.”

She followed my gaze, then looked back at me. “Let’s hope so.”

The dealer turned over the cards. Delilah won, I lost. She collected her chips without looking at me, but made no attempt to hide her smile.

I wanted to get her someplace where we could talk. The casino was a good starting point because it offered us a relatively safe, neutral venue. Also, it provided automatic cover for action: if anyone, Belghazi, for example, saw us here, our presence together would look like a coincidence, each of us presumably having arrived separately for a few rounds of cards or the dice. A corner table in a bar, or a park bench in the shadows, or a walk along the harbor, would offer none of these advantages. But we weren’t going to get anywhere at the baccarat table. Besides, I was losing money.

“I was thinking about going somewhere for a drink,” I said. “Care to join me?”

She looked at me for a moment, then said, “Sure.”

We left through the street exit. As soon as we were out of earshot of the casino’s few patrons, she said, “Not the hotel bar. I’m too well known here. We’ll get a taxi in front of the hotel and go somewhere else. There’s not much chance that any of my acquaintances will show up right now, but just in case, we ran into each other in the Mandarin casino. It was dead. I mentioned that I was going to try the Lisboa. You asked if I wouldn’t mind you catching a cab over with me. Okay?”

I was impressed, although unsurprised. She was obviously in the habit of thinking operationally, and was as matter-of-fact about it as she was effective. I’d already concluded that she was trained. To that assessment I now added a probable minimum of several years of field experience.

“Okay,” I said.

I took us to the Oparium Café, a place I’d found near the new Macau Cultural Center along the Avenida Baia Nova while waiting for Belghazi and getting to know the city. The ground floor featured an oppressively loud band playing some sort of acid-funk and a bunch of deafened teenagers gyrating to the beat. Not the kind of place you’d find someone unfamiliar with the area, especially someone whose tastes ran to things like the Macau Suite at the Mandarin Oriental.

We went upstairs, where it was darker and quieter, and sat at a corner table in a pair of oversized beanbag chairs. The other seating consisted mostly of couches, some of them occupied by couples, a few of them locked in intimate embraces that the shadows only partially obscured. A pretty Portuguese waitress brought us menus. They were written in Chinese and Portuguese. Delilah smiled and said, “I’ll have what you’re having.”

In the dim light her eyes looked more gray than blue. I liked the way the lighting softened her features, the way it rendered her eyes, even her smile, alluringly ambiguous.

I glanced at the menu and saw that they didn’t serve any single malts worth drinking. Instead I ordered us a couple of caipirinhas , which I knew from recent experience would be delicious in the tropical heat.

The waitress departed. We were quiet for a moment. Then Delilah leaned toward me and, looking into my eyes, asked, “Well? You have something you want to give me?”

I looked at her. Why was it that her question seemed suffused with double entendre? She was attractive, of course, more than attractive, but that wasn’t all of it. She had a way of looking at me with a sort of confident sexual appreciation, that was it. As though she was seeing me just the way I might hope a desirable woman would see me.

And she made it seem so natural, so real. I would have to be careful.

“Like what?” I asked, curious to see her reaction if I hit a few back at her.

“Do I need to be more explicit?” she asked, maybe suggestive again.

I wondered what response she was expecting. I knew that my information about her cell phone and the computer boot log would make her view me as a potential threat. And she would probably expect me to try to exploit the video, to hang its existence over her head as a way of protecting myself. I decided to surprise her.

“The thing about the video was a bluff,” I told her. “I think you know that. I was afraid that, without it, you might take a chance on waking Belghazi.”

She paused, then said, “You’re not concerned that, without it, I might take other chances now?”

I shrugged. “Sure I am.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

I looked at her. “I’m not a threat to you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “This is like, what, a dog showing its belly?”

I smiled. “Well, I’ve already seen yours.”

She smiled back. “Yes, you have.”

The smile lingered, along with her eyes, and I felt something stirring down south. But I thought, Don’t be stupid. This is how she plays it, how she gets people to drop their guard .