“You okay?” I asked, after a moment.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m okay.”
“You want to talk?”
“No, I want to get out of here.”
“Is that going to help?”
“No.”
“Then maybe we should talk.”
There was a pause. She looked down at what was left of her blouse and bra, then let them slide off her arms to the floor. She stepped out of her skirt.
“Tell me one thing, okay?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me that you haven’t done that before. Without a condom, I mean.”
I thought of Naomi, and, even more, of Midori. “Not in a few years.”
She nodded. “Good. Although at this point AIDS or whatever ought to be the least of my worries.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
She walked over to the shower and took a robe off the peg next to it. She pulled it on. I walked over and did the same. We moved over to the bed and sat on it.
“Those men you killed in Manila,” she said, looking at her hands. Her voice was slightly husky. “Two of them were CIA officers.”
I looked at her. I saw that she was being straight with me.
“Shit,” I said.
She didn’t respond. After a moment I said, “How bad is it?”
“My people are afraid the Agency will find you and you’ll talk. They don’t want to take that chance.”
“So they sent you.”
She shrugged. “What would you have done?”
“You came here to set me up?”
“I thought I did. Now I’m not sure.”
“That’s not quite what I was hoping to hear.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Couldn’t pull the trigger yourself?”
“What I do is hard enough.”
We were silent for a minute while I digested the news. I said, “What’s next?”
She brushed away a few strands of hair that were clinging to her face. “I’m supposed to call my contact, let him know when and where you’ll be vulnerable.”
“What are you going to tell him?”
She looked up at the ceiling and said, “I have absolutely no idea.”
“What changed your mind?” I asked, and thought, Maybe you haven’t, though. Maybe this is just the best set-up you’ve ever pulled off.
I’d have to keep testing for that. I didn’t think the way her body had responded could possibly have been acting. But maybe there were a bunch of dead men out there who had all convinced themselves of the same thing. And maybe I would be a fool to assume that the body would always follow the mind. Or vice versa.
There was a long silence. Then she said, “You’ve been lucky so far. I don’t know anyone who’s been luckier for longer. But nobody’s bulletproof. I can’t keep bailing you out.”
“Bailing me out?”
“I warned you about that guy in your room in Macau.”
“I didn’t need your warning.”
“No? You took it.”
I let it go. “And this time?”
She looked at me. “Enough, all right? You know why. I don’t want to be responsible for your death. You fucked up in Manila and I don’t know if you’re going to survive it. I just don’t want to be the one who kills you. Or helps make it happen.”
“I wouldn’t want to put you out.”
She glared at me. “Stop being a child. You caused this situation, and now I’m caught in it, too.”
I paused and took a breath. I needed to think. There had to be a way out of this.
“What did they tell you happened in Manila?” I asked.
“Only what you told them. That you tried to hit Lavi in a restroom but his son came in and got in the way. Then the bodyguard and the other two guys burst in and Lavi and the boy got away.”
“Yeah, that’s about right.”
“Why don’t you give me your perspective, with details?”
I told her, leaving Dox out of it.
When I was finished, she said, “That tracks with everything my people told me. At least they were being straight.”
“Do they know what Manny was doing with Agency operators?”
“If they do, they didn’t tell me. Other than to say that Lavi is a known CIA asset.”
Something was nagging me, jostling for my attention. I parsed the facts, tried to identify the assumptions. Then I realized.
“How do your people know those men were CIA?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
I thought for a moment, then said, “From what your people told me, Manny is a world-class bad guy. Not the kind of person the Agency can acknowledge is on the payroll. In fact, even post nine-eleven, employing a character like Manny is highly illegal. If it got out, there would be a lot of embarrassment. The people involved would probably have to take a fall.”
“I don’t understand.”
I nodded. “No, you don’t, and your people might be having the same problem. You all work for a small, tightly knit organization that operates with little oversight and few constraints. But the CIA isn’t like that. I’ve worked with them on and off for years and I know. They’ve been ripped apart again and again-the Church Commission, the purges under Stansfield Turner, now again with this guy Goss-and they’ve developed a Pavlovian aversion to risk. Should they be recruiting terrorists? Absolutely. But if you’re the guy who does it, if you recruit, run, and God forbid pay someone who has American blood on his hands, and if the paperwork has your name on it, the first time some Congressional committee starts trying to assert its prerogatives, or the first time someone needs a sacrificial lamb, or the first time you make a bureaucratic enemy, you will absolutely be crucified.”
“You’re assuming they were running Lavi. They might have been there to kill him, like you were.”
I shook my head. “That wasn’t it. The way they rushed into that bathroom after Manny hit the panic button, they’d spotted trouble and were on their way to protect him. Trust me, I know the difference.”
“All right, so they weren’t there to harm him.”
“That’s right. You see what I’m getting at? Something’s not right here. Manny’s not like some Second Secretary in the Chinese Consulate that everyone wants to take the credit for. He’s an explosives guy, a terrorist with American blood on his hands. If someone’s running Manny at the CIA, they’re going to treat him like he’s radioactive. They wouldn’t send two officers to meet with him face-to-face. It doesn’t make sense.”
She looked at me. “If they weren’t CIA…”
“Then I don’t have a problem with the CIA. Or at least no more of a problem than usual. Maybe the situation is more fluid than it seems right now. Maybe I can take another crack at Manny.”
“I see your point.”
“Can you find out how your people know what they think they know?”
She glanced to her right, a neurolinguistic sign of construction. She was imagining how she was going to go about this. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
“What are you going to tell Gil?” I asked, trying to plug into exactly what she was envisioning.
“That…”
She looked at me, realizing what I’d done and how she had slipped. But the damage was done and she went on. “I’ll call him in the morning. I’ll tell him I’d suggested we go snorkeling at a certain beach at a certain time, and that the suggestion had made you suspicious. That when I woke up you were gone.”
I figured it would be Gil. A killer knows a killer.
“Will he believe that?” I asked.
“He’ll suspect. But it’ll buy us time.”
“Do you trust him?”
She frowned. “He’s very… committed.”
“Yeah, I got that feeling.”
“But he’s a professional. He does what he does for a reason. Take away the reason, and he’ll move on to the next thing that keeps him awake at night.”
I nodded. Her assessment tracked with my own.
She rubbed her eyes. “I need to sleep.”
I leaned over and touched her cheek. I looked in her eyes, wanting to know what I would see there.
Whatever it was, it was good enough. There was nothing more to say. We turned off the light and got under the covers. For a long time I listened to her breathing in the dark. After that I don’t remember.