After a few minutes, the trademark Windows logo appeared on the screen, the accompanying notes barely audible under the cushion of fluffy down pressed southward from above. The woman paused for a moment, then removed the pillow and returned it to its original place on the bed. I noted that she hadn’t tossed it on the floor, or otherwise thrown it randomly aside. She was keeping the room as she found it, which is to say the way Belghazi had left it, down to the details. Another sign that she had good instincts, or that she was trained. Or both.

The woman walked back to the desk and pulled a cell phone from her purse. She spent a moment configuring it in some fashion, then pointed it at the laptop. She started working the phone’s keypad.

Several minutes went by. She would input some sequence on the phone’s keypad, look at the laptop for a few seconds, and repeat. Occasionally she would glance at Belghazi. I could see the laptop screen while she was doing this and it hadn’t changed. My guess was that the computer was password-protected, that her “cell phone” was more than it seemed, and that she was using the device to interrogate the laptop by infrared or by Bluetooth, most likely trying to generate a password or otherwise get inside.

Five minutes went by, then another five. We were getting to the point where Belghazi might have metabolized enough of the drug to regain consciousness. Another five minutes, ten at the most, and I would have to abort.

But how? I wasn’t worried about getting out. Belghazi wouldn’t be in any kind of condition to stop me, even if he were fully awake when I made my departure, and I didn’t expect that the woman would pose a significant obstacle. But if Belghazi saw me, especially after making my acquaintance at the Lisboa earlier that evening, or if the woman reported that there had been an intruder, I would be facing an even tougher security environment. I’d have a hell of a time getting a second chance.

I heard Belghazi groan. The woman froze and glanced at him, but he stirred no further. Still, she must have decided he might be waking up, because a second later she dropped the cell phone back in her purse, set the purse on the floor, and logged off the laptop, using the pillow as she had before to eliminate any farewell melody. When the screen had gone dark, she closed the lid and placed it back in its case, returned the pillow to the bed, and began to undress.

Shit.

The situation was deteriorating. I couldn’t count on her to get to sleep quickly enough, or to stay asleep deeply enough, to enable me to slip out unnoticed. Hell, from what I’d seen so far, she looked like she might sleep as lightly as I do. Also, from the care she had displayed so far, I knew she would have engaged the suite’s interior dead bolt, that most likely she would have done so deliberately, as part of a mental checklist, and that she would therefore remember doing it. If she found it disengaged in the morning, she would be more likely to conclude that someone had been in the room than she would be to doubt her recollection.

Kill them both? Impossible to do “naturally,” under the circumstances. Kanezaki had stressed that payment was conditioned on no evidence of foul play, so I wouldn’t use overt violence unless I had to. Besides, what I do, I don’t do to women or children. There had been one recent exception, but that had been personal. I had no such extenuating issues at work with Belghazi’s companion. On the contrary, I found myself liking this woman. It wasn’t just her looks. It was her moves, her self-possession, her air of command. And the instincts and brains I thought I had just silently witnessed.

There was one possibility. It was risky, but certainly no worse than the other alternatives among my currently meager range of options.

I waited until the woman had fully disrobed, the moment when she would feel maximally helpless and discomfited. She was just moving toward the bed, presumably to get into it, when I strode into the bedroom.

She startled when she saw me, but overall kept her composure. “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked in a low voice, in some sort of European-accented English. She stressed the “you” in the question, and sounded more accusatory than afraid.

“You know me?” I whispered back, thinking, What the hell?

“From the casino. And I’ve seen you in the hotel. Now what are you doing here?”

Christ, she was as observant as he was. “Any luck with Belghazi’s computer?” I asked, trying to regain the initiative. My gaze was focused on her torso, the area I always watch, after confirming that the hands are empty, because aggressive movement tends to originate in the midsection. In this instance, though, the view was distracting. She looked even better naked than she had in the black couture I had seen her in earlier.

She kept her cool. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I flashed the SoldierVision, still secured to my wrist, and bluffed. “Really? I’ve got it all right here on low-light video.”

She glanced at the device, then back to me. “On a SoldierVision? I didn’t know they recorded video.”

Damn, she knew her hardware. Whoever she was, she was good, and I needed to stop underestimating her. “This one does,” I said, improvising. “So why don’t we make a deal? I don’t know who you’re working for, and I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, this never happened. You didn’t see me, and I didn’t see you. How does that sound?”

She was silent for a long moment, seemingly oblivious to her nakedness. Then she asked, “Who are you with?”

I smiled. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

She was silent again. My gaze dropped for a moment. Her body was beautiful: simultaneously muscular and curvaceous, like a figure skater’s or that of an unusually tall gymnast, with delicate, pale skin that seemed to glow faintly in the light diffused through the curtains.

I looked up again. She was watching my eyes. “You’re probably bluffing about that video,” she said, her voice even, “but I can’t take the chance. I can’t let you leave with it.”

I was impressed by her aplomb. I nodded my head in Belghazi’s direction. “He’s going to come out of it any minute now. If he wakes up and I’m here, it’ll be bad for both of us.”

She rolled her eyes as though exasperated and said, “I’m going to get dressed.”

I almost bought it. It seemed natural enough-she was naked in front of a stranger, she wanted to put clothes on. But her nakedness hadn’t seemed to bother her a moment earlier. And exasperation wasn’t an expression she wore very convincingly.

“Don’t,” I said sharply. The pen was in my pocket now, and I wouldn’t be able to deploy it in time. Even if I could have, pointing a Montblanc at someone tends to be less attention-getting than, say, employing a Glock 10-millimeter for the same purpose. I wouldn’t have been able to use the pen to control her, only to shoot her, and I didn’t want to do that.

She ignored me. I saw that she was going for her purse, not her clothes.

She must have had a weapon there. I closed the distance in two long steps and kicked the purse aside. As I did so, she straightened and I saw her left elbow whipping around toward my right temple. By reflex I moved in closer to get inside the blow and started to get my hands up. Her elbow missed the mark. But she instantly snapped her hips the other way and caught me with the other elbow, from the opposite side. Boom. I saw stars. Before she could chain together another combination, I dropped down, wrapped my left arm around her closest ankle, and drove my shoulder into her shin. She went down hard on her back.

To keep her from landing an axe kick with her free leg or otherwise attacking with her feet, I got a hand on her thigh and shoved away from her. I stood and backed up, watching her carefully.

“Are you crazy?” I said, my voice low. “What’s he going to think if you wake him up?” That was the point, though, wasn’t it. If she’d wanted, or been willing, to wake him, she already would have done so. She didn’t want him to know about me, maybe because of the “video,” maybe for other reasons, as well. Trying to take me out had been a calculated risk. Then there would only be one side of the story afterward.