She was chipped, of course. His Chinese counterparts could have all the biofeedback they wanted of an old man’s best effort at screwing his way toward a fleeting moment of escape from age and decay. But at the Lotus Flower Club, that also meant she was wired into the room’s screens on all four walls and the ceiling. The screens pulsed colors depending on her level of arousal. Whatever pills she took worked, because the explosions of light that finished off each session were unlike anything Sechin had ever seen. It was like an aurora borealis in the bedroom.
The concierge guided Sechin to his usual room and left him. Sechin knocked once, then entered.
But she was not the usual Twenty-Three.
The girl under the purple sheets had blue hair and sharp Nordic features.
Shit. Moscow must have sent her. If this was an attempt to kill him, it was not the way he’d thought it would happen. He turned to leave. Let them shoot me in the back, the cowards.
“Be’ ’IH mej ’Iv?” she said.
He froze.
Klingon. She had just spoken Klingon.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“Be’ ’IH mej ’Iv?” she repeated.
Now he was intrigued. This was too artful for the Directorate or his own intelligence service.
“Who leaves a beautiful woman” indeed?
He sat on the bed and placed one hand on her leg.
“So, we have a language in common — what shall we talk about?” he replied in Klingon.
“Come here,” she said. “I’m cold. I need you to warm me.”
“If you’re not careful, such clumsy talk may make an old man lose his will,” he said.
“Perhaps I can help.” Then she lowered the sheet, revealing her breasts. “I can make them bigger if you like,” she said. “Or smaller. Whatever you wish.” She put a device the size of a matchbox on the nightstand.
Biomorphic breast augmentation was increasingly common, and inexpensive, in China. In Russia, it was taboo and therefore a rarity. Whoever had performed the surgery was very talented.
“There’s no need,” said Sechin under his breath. “They’re perfect as they are. Really.”
He undressed quickly, leaving his clothes in a pile at the foot of the bed.
“Your socks,” she said with a giggle.
“What about them?” he said as he climbed in.
“You can take them off,” she said.
“Never. So I can make a quick getaway,” he said with a wink.
“Not too quick, please,” she said. She pulled the sheets over them. Then she pulled another blanket made of thin metallic fabric over the sheets.
She put a hand over his mouth, and her eyes turned cold and serious, and Sechin realized he was probably not going to get laid. Nor was he going to die. The good with the bad. Such is the intelligence business, he thought.
She stuck her hand out from under the bed’s blanket, and he heard a faint click. What he heard next stunned him. The sounds of Sechin and the previous Twenty-Three making love echoed through the room. Do I really sound like that? Like a boar with a spear stuck in its side, he thought.
“Our mutual friend from the Federation sends his best,” she whispered in his ear.
So the American had heard him after all.
“Then tell me this: Why did he not listen to me when it mattered?” said Sechin. “I risked everything just by using the word Cherenkov. He could have done something.”
“He is doing something now, and you can too,” she said.
“Wait, are you chipped?” he asked.
“Yes, but not by Lotus Flower. I’m still a new girl,” she said. “They’re going to wait to see if I work out before they invest in me. Now tell me about Cherenkov, and none of the Star Trek shit.”
The air under the blanket was heating up quickly and Sechin felt his face flushing from the warmth and his proximity to her. He watched a rivulet of sweat carve an arc between her breasts and move toward an enormous tattoo wreathing her waist.
“It was developed about three years ago at the Russian Foundation for Advanced Research Projects outside Moscow, our equivalent to your DARPA,” he said. “It’s nuclear-reactor detection from space.”
“How does it work?” she asked.
“There is not enough time now. I will get you something to take to them next time,” he said. “I suppose your superiors will also need to know why I am doing this?”
“Why you’re in bed with me, you mean?” she said.
“They would understand that, I hope. Americans are not that prudish,” he said.
“Okay, then, why?” she asked.
“Our dear leader so badly wants to matter in his old age that he fails to see that one day this will all go bad for Russia. America and Russia had our row in the last century, and it is done. I’ve been here long enough to know that the Directorate is the real threat, and this war only makes them stronger. Russia is merely the junior partner, and it just happens to have fifteen million Chinese residing inside its borders. It does not take an old spy to see that one day very soon the Chinese will assert their ‘right to protect’ their compatriots in Siberia, just as we once did to the weak states on our borders. So that is why I tried to warn your officer, for all the good it did.”
“It’s usually more personal. What do you want from this?” she said.
Sechin sighed and ran a finger between her breasts.
“My dear,” he said. “Don’t we all want the same thing? Money? Sex? A bit of power. Any of the three are fine with me. I’m not particular anymore.”
She rolled her eyes. At that moment, the recording of one of his sessions with Twenty-Three ended with an animal abruptness. She reached out to start the recording over.
“Don’t worry, it’s been modified so it will sound like we’re beginning again,” she whispered in his ear, then she pulled back and looked him in the eye as the grunts started once more. “I don’t believe you. We’ve seen your profile. You’re too much of a romantic for the usual banal causes.”
“ ‘Too much of a romantic’ says the whore I am in bed with.”
“Okay, have it your way,” she said. Her voice went from a purr to command mode. “Put your hand here.”
She took his hand and placed it at her waist, stopping at the tattoo. “Do you know what that is?”
He didn’t feel a thing, but he knew enough to make a guess. “It’s one of the new e-tattoos.”
She looked surprised for a second.
“I am not as old as you might think,” he said.
The ink of the tattoo was actually a derivative of the electronic ink used in the old tablet-computer readers. This modified version allowed the liquid injected into the skin to act as a sort of pillow above and below tiny embedded silicon chips wired together in an origami-like pattern. The liquid and microscopic serpentine wires formed a miniature network woven into her skin. He closed his eyes and traced its outlines while he hummed the middle section of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.
“I’m going to need you to do something for me, and I can’t lie, it’s going to hurt,” she finally said. “But we think it’s the best way to securely get us the information you offer.”
“I was afraid you might ask that,” he said.
She kissed him gently on the chin.
“How can you know pleasure without understanding pain?” she responded as she kissed him again.
North Fork of the Kaukonahua Stream, Oahu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone
“Push the pace,” Conan hissed, walking in the knee-deep river water. “Or we’re going to miss our window to get inside the perimeter.”