“I was thinking about going somewhere for a drink,” I said. “Care to join me?”

She looked at me for a moment, then said, “Sure.”

We left through the street exit. As soon as we were out of earshot of the casino’s few patrons, she said, “Not the hotel bar. I’m too well known here. We’ll get a taxi in front of the hotel and go somewhere else. There’s not much chance that any of my acquaintances will show up right now, but just in case, we ran into each other in the Mandarin casino. It was dead. I mentioned that I was going to try the Lisboa. You asked if I wouldn’t mind you catching a cab over with me. Okay?”

I was impressed, although unsurprised. She was obviously in the habit of thinking operationally, and was as matter-of-fact about it as she was effective. I’d already concluded that she was trained. To that assessment I now added a probable minimum of several years of field experience.

“Okay,” I said.

I took us to the Oparium Café, a place I’d found near the new Macau Cultural Center along the Avenida Baia Nova while waiting for Belghazi and getting to know the city. The ground floor featured an oppressively loud band playing some sort of acid-funk and a bunch of deafened teenagers gyrating to the beat. Not the kind of place you’d find someone unfamiliar with the area, especially someone whose tastes ran to things like the Macau Suite at the Mandarin Oriental.

We went upstairs, where it was darker and quieter, and sat at a corner table in a pair of oversized beanbag chairs. The other seating consisted mostly of couches, some of them occupied by couples, a few of them locked in intimate embraces that the shadows only partially obscured. A pretty Portuguese waitress brought us menus. They were written in Chinese and Portuguese. Delilah smiled and said, “I’ll have what you’re having.”

In the dim light her eyes looked more gray than blue. I liked the way the lighting softened her features, the way it rendered her eyes, even her smile, alluringly ambiguous.

I glanced at the menu and saw that they didn’t serve any single malts worth drinking. Instead I ordered us a couple of caipirinhas, which I knew from recent experience would be delicious in the tropical heat.

The waitress departed. We were quiet for a moment. Then Delilah leaned toward me and, looking into my eyes, asked, “Well? You have something you want to give me?”

I looked at her. Why was it that her question seemed suffused with double entendre? She was attractive, of course, more than attractive, but that wasn’t all of it. She had a way of looking at me with a sort of confident sexual appreciation, that was it. As though she was seeing me just the way I might hope a desirable woman would see me.

And she made it seem so natural, so real. I would have to be careful.

“Like what?” I asked, curious to see her reaction if I hit a few back at her.

“Do I need to be more explicit?” she asked, maybe suggestive again.

I wondered what response she was expecting. I knew that my information about her cell phone and the computer boot log would make her view me as a potential threat. And she would probably expect me to try to exploit the video, to hang its existence over her head as a way of protecting myself. I decided to surprise her.

“The thing about the video was a bluff,” I told her. “I think you know that. I was afraid that, without it, you might take a chance on waking Belghazi.”

She paused, then said, “You’re not concerned that, without it, I might take other chances now?”

I shrugged. “Sure I am.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

I looked at her. “I’m not a threat to you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “This is like, what, a dog showing its belly?”

I smiled. “Well, I’ve already seen yours.”

She smiled back. “Yes, you have.”

The smile lingered, along with her eyes, and I felt something stirring down south. But I thought, Don’t be stupid. This is how she plays it, how she gets people to drop their guard.

“Well, you don’t have a video for me,” she said, after a moment. She was still looking into my eyes. “So what do we do next?”

The stirring worsened. I decided I’d have been better off if I could have just removed the damned thing and left it in a drawer for the evening.

But I saw a less extreme means of defending myself.

I thought for a moment about the scores of other men she would have played before me, about how, in her eyes, I was just a new fool, another mark to be led by his dick and manipulated. The thought irritated me, which was what I needed. It short-circuited my unavoidable mechanical reaction and gave me back some of the air I wanted to project.

“Hey, Delilah,” I said softly, letting her see a little coldness in my eyes, “let’s cut the shit. I’m not here to flirt with you. We might be able to help each other, I don’t know. But not if you keep trying to play me like I’m some testosterone-addled fourteen-year-old and you’re my date at the prom. Okay?”

She smiled and cocked her head, and of course her poise only added to her appeal. “Why would I be trying to play you?” she asked.

I wanted to snap her out of this mode, move her outside her comfort zone. So far, I hadn’t managed.

“Because you’re good at it,” I said, still looking at her, “and people like to do what they’re good at. Hell, if they gave out Academy Awards for what you do, I think you’d get Best Actress.”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction, but other than that she kept her cool. Still, I thought I might be heading in the right direction.

“You seem to have a rather low opinion of yourself,” she said.

I smiled, because I’d been half expecting something like that. Most men won’t do anything that could lessen their perceived chances of taking a gorgeous woman to bed. They’re horrified even at the thought that something might accidentally dim the temporary glow of an attractive woman’s sexual adulation, lest all those longing looks be exposed as farce, deflating the always fragile façade of the needy male ego. Delilah knew the dynamic. She had just explicitly acknowledged, even invoked it.

“Actually, I have a rather high opinion of myself,” I said. “But I’ve seen you working Belghazi, and he’s smarter than most. I know what you can do, and I want you to stop doing it with me. Assuming you can stop, of course. Or have you been running this game for so long that you can’t help yourself?”

For the first time I saw her lose a little poise. Her head retracted a fraction in a movement that was not quite a flinch, and her eyes dilated in a way that told me she’d just received a little helping of adrenaline.

“What do you want, then?” she asked, after a moment. Her expression was neutral, but her eyes were angry, her posture more rigid than it had been a moment earlier. The combination made her look quietly dangerous. I realized this was my first peek at the person behind the artifice, my first chance to see something other than what she wanted me to see.

The crazy thing was, it made her look better than ever. It was like seeing a woman’s real beauty after she’s removed the makeup that only served to obscure it, a glimpse of a geisha the more stunning shorn of her ritual white camouflage.

“The same thing you do,” I told her. “I want to make sure we don’t trip all over each other trying to do our jobs and both get killed in the process.”

“And what are our jobs?”

I smiled. “This is going to be tricky, isn’t it,” I said.

“Very,” she said. Her expression had transitioned from I’m-pissed-and-trying-not-to-show-it to something reserved and unreadable. I knew what I’d said had rattled her, although I wasn’t sure precisely what nerve I’d managed to touch, and I admired her swift recovery.

“Why don’t we start with what we know,” I said. “You want something from Belghazi’s computer.”

She raised her eyebrows but said nothing. That hint of incongruous good humor was back in her eyes.