Barry Eisler - Rain Storm aka Choke Point

I shrugged. “Yeah, you’re right. Beautiful woman, speaks Arabic, knows how to handle herself and then some, trying to set up a guy who supports various Islamic fundamentalist groups… I don’t know what I could have been thinking.”

“Is that really all you’re going on?”

“What else would there be?”

She took a sip of the Laphroaig and paused as though considering. Then she said, “No one works completely alone. Even if it’s just the people who are paying you, there’s always someone you can go to for information. If you share your theories about who I am with whomever you work for, it could make things dangerous for me.”

I hadn’t even considered that. I tend to focus only on whether a given action might create danger for me. Selfish, I suppose. But I’m alive because of it.

“We’re both professionals,” she went on. “We do what we have to. If you need information, you’ll seek it out. But what you learn might buy you little. It could cost me a great deal.”

“Why don’t you just level with me, then,” I said. “Tell me what I need to know.”

“What more do you need?” she asked, looking at me. “We’ve already learned too much by accident. We understand each other’s objectives, and we understand the situation we’re in. The more you push, the more you compromise my ability to carry out my mission. And the more dangerous you make it for me personally. The people I work with recognize all this. At some point, they may decide to overrule me when I tell them not to try to remove you.”

I put down my glass and stood up. “Delilah,” I said, my voice dropping an octave the way it does when I feel I’m seconds away from having to take decisive action, “we’re here to try to find a way to coexist. Don’t make me decide that you’re a threat.”

“Or what?” she said, looking up at me.

I didn’t answer. She put her glass down, too, then stood and faced me. “Will you break my neck? Most men couldn’t-I’m not so delicate, you know-but I know you could.”

She took a step closer. I felt an adrenaline surge and couldn’t put it in the right context. A second ago I’d reacted to her the way I reflexively do when something suddenly reveals itself as dangerous, but now…I wasn’t sure. My respiration wanted to speed up and I controlled it, not wanting her to see.

“Maybe I am a threat to you,” she said, her voice even. “Not because I want to be, but because of the situation. So? You’re a professional. Do what you have to do. Eliminate the threat.”

She took a step closer, close enough for me to smell her, to feel something coming off her body, heat or some electrical thing. I felt another adrenaline rush spreading through my chest and gut.

“No?” she asked, looking into my eyes. “Why? You know how. Here.” She reached down for my hands and brought them up to her neck. Her skin was warm and smooth. I could feel her pulse against my fingers. It was beating surprisingly hard. I could hear her breath moving in and out through her nose.

I hadn’t meant to bluff, but somehow I had. And now she was calling. Fuck .

But she wasn’t completely sure of herself. There was that rapid pulse, and the sound of her breathing.

And of mine, I realized. I looked for some way to regain the initiative, regain control of the situation. But looking into those blue eyes, seeing her face framed by my hands encircling her neck, her expression simultaneously fearful and defiant, I was having trouble.

She lowered her arms to her sides now and tilted her chin slightly upward, the posture maximally submissive, and yet, somehow, also mocking, insolent. I looked down at the shadowed hollows of her clavicles, one side, then the other, and was almost defeated by the thought of how easy it would be to sweep my hands down over her shoulders, catching the material of the dress on the way, bringing the garment and the lingerie beneath down to her wrists and belly in one smooth motion, exposing her breasts, her skin, her body.

It was there if I wanted it. I knew that, and I knew this was by design, our moves to be choreographed on her terms, where she would offer what I wanted like a kind homeowner offering milk to a starving kitten, maybe petting the little stray on the head while it greedily lapped at the leavings.

I was suddenly angry. The feline imagery helped. I removed my hands from her neck and took a careful step away from her. My mouth had gone dry. I picked up my Laphroaig. Took a swallow. Sat back down, as casually as I could.

“I was right about you,” I said, leaving her standing there. “You really can’t help yourself. This is all you’ve got.”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction, and I knew I was right. I’d competed against guys like this in judo. They had one money move, a technique that always worked for them, but if you could get past that one, if you could survive it, they were off their game and couldn’t recover.

“What’s it like?” I went on, feeling more in control now. “Can you even talk to a man without trying to give him a hard-on? What are you going to do a few years from now, when your pheromones start to dry up? Because there’s nothing more to you. Maybe there was, a long time ago, but there’s nothing left now.”

Her eyes narrowed more and her ears seemed almost to flatten in an oddly feral attitude of anger. Good , I thought. I needed that .

“Are you going to sit down?” I asked, gesturing to the couch. “I’m not going to fuck you. And I’m not going to kill you. Not here, not now. It took all afternoon to get rid of that guy from the elevator, and I’m not going through that again tonight.”

She smiled in a way that made me wonder if she had just imagined herself killing me, and dipped her head toward me as if to say, All right. Touché .

She moved back to the couch and finished what was in her glass. I picked up the bottle to pour her another. She raised the glass as I did so and I noticed that both our hands were shaking. I knew she saw it, too.

“Why don’t we call that one a draw,” I offered.

She smiled and took a swallow of what I’d poured her. “I think you’re being generous,” she said.

“I’m being honest.”

She smiled again, a little more brightly this time. “You’re good, you know. Exceptional.”

“Yeah, so are you.”

She took another swallow and looked at me. “It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if we’d met under other circumstances.”

“You want it to be more interesting than it already is?” I asked. We both laughed, and the tension broke.

Then we were silent for a moment, maybe collecting ourselves, adjusting to the new dynamic. I decided to try to keep things comfortable for a while, thinking it would be useful to make her feel good after that harsh exchange. I was aware that I also just wanted the exchange to be comfortable, that I didn’t want to spar with her and certainly didn’t want to fight, and I wondered for a moment where my decision was really coming from.

“You know, you almost dropped me in Belghazi’s suite,” I said.

She shrugged. “I had surprise on my side. I don’t think you were expecting much from a naked woman.”

“Maybe not. But you used what you had at your disposal, and you used it well. Who trained you?”

The question was straightforward, and I knew she wouldn’t take it as another attempt to glean something revealing.

She looked at me for a long moment, then said, “It’s Krav Maga.”

Krav Maga is the self-defense system developed by the Israeli Defense Forces. These days it’s taught all over the world, so experience in the system certainly doesn’t mean the practitioner is Israeli. But Delilah already knew that I suspected her nationality and her affiliations. In this context, her acknowledgment served also as a tacit admission.