Barry Eisler - Rain Storm aka Choke Point

“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.”

She smiled, apparently pleased that I was keeping up with her. “Maybe you were unhappy about the results of our meeting and are in a bit of a sulk?”

“Maybe. But you can’t count on any of this. Even when there’s a reasonable explanation for something, people can overlook it and go straight to assuming the worst.”

“Of course. But again, the overwhelming odds are that no one noticed us and no one cares. The rest is just backup.”

I nodded, impressed. I knew her explanations would go even deeper, positioning her for increasingly remote possibilities. Belghazi learns she was seen in this bar with me; she tells him she was bored because he was gone so much. When I invited her, she came along, then thought better of it. She had lied to him because she didn’t want him to be jealous or to think poorly of her. Confessing to some lesser offense to obscure the commission of the actual crime.

Yeah, she was good. The best I’d come across in a long time.

“I’ll leave first,” she said, getting up. She didn’t need to explain. We didn’t want to be seen together. She started to open her purse.

“Just go,” I told her. “I’ll take care of it.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Our first date?” She said it only with that attractively wry humor, not playing the coquette.

I smiled at her. “Maybe you better pay up after all. I don’t want you getting the wrong idea.”

She looked at me for a moment, as though considering whether to say something. But in the end she only smiled, then turned and left. I imagined her checking the street through the windows downstairs before moving through the door.

I finished my caipirinha . The couples on the couches continued in their embraces, their soft laughter just reaching me above the music from the ground floor.

I paid the bill and left. I wondered if Keiko would be waiting for me back at the room.

Strangely enough, I hoped the answer was no.

KEIKO AND I spent the next two days doing the things tourists do. We visited Coloane Village and Taipu. We went to the top of the Macau Tower. We toured Portuguese churches and national museums. We gambled in the Floating Casino. Keiko seemed to enjoy herself, although she was a pro and I couldn’t really know. For me, it all felt like waiting.

I found myself wishing I didn’t need the cover Keiko provided. She was a sweet girl, but much as I enjoyed her body I had tired of her company. More important, I didn’t like that Belghazi and Delilah both knew that I was staying at the Mandarin. The risk was manageable, of course: Belghazi had no way of knowing that I presented a threat, and Delilah had reason to refrain from moving against me, at least for the time being. The risk was also necessary: if Belghazi somehow learned that I had checked out of the hotel but saw me again in Macau, it would look strange to him, suspicious. I knew he was attuned to such discrepancies. So I had to stay put, and simply stay extra alert to my surroundings.

Twice we took the TurboJet ferry to Hong Kong. I gave Keiko money to indulge herself in the island’s many boutiques, a small salve for what I recognized as my recent remoteness. While she shopped, I wandered, observing, imitating, practicing the Hong Kong persona that helped me blend here and in Macau: the walk, the posture, the clothes, the expression. I bought a pair of nonprescription eyeglasses, a wireless, sleek-looking design that you see everywhere in Hong Kong and only rarely in Japan. I picked up one of the utilitarian briefcases that so many Hong Kong men seem to carry at all times, part of the local culture, I think, being comprised of a constant readiness to do business. I bought clothes in local stores. I was confident that, as long as I didn’t open my mouth, no one would make me as anything but part of the indigenous population.

At the outset of the second of these Hong Kong excursions, I noticed an Arab standing in the lobby of the Macau Mandarin Oriental as we moved through it. He was new, not one of Belghazi’s bodyguards. I noted his presence and position, but of course gave no sign that he had even registered in my consciousness. He, however, was not similarly discreet. In the instant in which my gaze moved over his face, I saw that he was looking at me intently, almost in concentration. The way a guy might look, in a more innocent setting, at someone he thought but wasn’t entirely sure was a celebrity, so as not to appear foolish asking the wrong person for an autograph. In my world, this look is more commonly seen on the face of the “pedestrian” who peers through the windshield of a car driving through a known checkpoint, his brow furrowed, his eyes hard, his head now nodding slightly in unconscious reflection of the pleasure of recognition, who then radios his compatriots fifty meters beyond that it’s time to move in for the kidnapping, or to open up with their AKs, or to detonate the bomb they’ve placed along the road.

General security for Belghazi, maybe. Watching hotel comings and goings, looking for something out of place, someone suspicious.

But my gut wouldn’t buy that. And I don’t trust anything more than I trust that feeling in my gut.

Delilah , I thought. I felt hot anger surging up from my stomach. I don’t get suckered often, but she had suckered me. Lulled me into thinking that our interests could be aligned.

But they were aligned, that was the thing. What she had told me made sense. Moving against me, rather than trusting me to wait as I had told her I would, was unnecessarily risky. And even if she had decided to take the risk, she would know not to be so obvious. A non-Asian, standing in the lobby of the hotel, getting all squinty-eyed and flushed with excitement at my appearance? Not on her team. She was good, and she knew I was good. She wouldn’t have used such a soft target approach.

But I might have been missing something. I couldn’t be sure.

Drop it. Work the problem at hand.

Okay. Keiko and I kept moving, smiling and talking, just a couple of happy tourists, wandering around in a daze. I might have turned around and taken us out through the back entrance. But that would have interfered with the spotter’s sense that I was clueless, and that sense might offer some small advantage later. Besides, I didn’t think they’d move against me in a public place, if a move was what this was about. Macau is a peninsula, after all, and they’d want a venue that would enable them to slip away. So I stayed with the front entrance, where we caught a taxi for the brief ride to the Macau Ferry Terminal.