I looked at her closely. “Yeah?”

She looked back. “You don’t believe me?”

I was suddenly unsure again. Which was frustrating. Ordinarily, I know exactly what to do, and I do it.

“Maybe I do,” I said. “Let me see your cell phone.”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction. Then she shrugged. She reached into her purse and pulled out a Nokia 8910, the sleek titanium model.

I popped open the sliding keypad and the screen lit up. The service provider was Orange, a French company, and the interface was in French. I checked the call log. No entries-she’d purged it. No surprise there. She was smart. I turned the unit off, then back on. As it powered back up, the phone number appeared on the screen. I didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t one of the ones I’d seen on the unit I’d taken from the guy at Sham Shui Po.

The exercise proved nothing, though. She might have had another phone with her. I could ask for her purse, rifle through it. But then, when I didn’t find anything, I’d wonder if she hadn’t just left the other phone in her room, or hidden it somewhere, or whatever. I knew she was in the habit of thinking several moves ahead.

I handed the unit back to her. “Who’s in my room?”

“I’m not sure. My guess is it has something to do with your reasons for being in Macau.”

“If you’re not sure-”

“I overheard him in the lobby of the hotel this morning. He was speaking in Arabic, so he assumed no one around could understand him.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You speak Arabic?”

By way of answering, she said something suitably incomprehensible. It sounded Arabic to me.

“All right,” I said. “Tell me what you overheard.”

“He said he would wait in your room in case you returned unexpectedly from Hong Kong. He didn’t use names, but I don’t know who else they could be talking about.”

I considered. It’s not all that hard to get into a hotel room if you have some imagination and know what you’re doing. I would have known he was in there before I entered, of course. That morning, while Keiko waited for me in the lobby, I’d taped a hair across the bottom of the doorjamb, as I do whenever possible before leaving a place where I’m staying. I’d hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door to make sure the maids didn’t spoil the setup. If the hair was broken when I returned, I’d know that someone had been in the room, and might still be there.

“Why are you warning me, then?” I asked.

She looked away for a long moment, then back at me. “I think your cover is blown,” she said. “Forget about this job. Leave Macau.”

A contrivance? A way to get me out of her hair? Maybe. But if she really did have a confederate in there, warning me could easily get him killed, which your standard confederate ordinarily won’t appreciate. And if the room was empty, I’d be sure to find out when I checked it, and I’d know the whole thing had been a ruse.

“It would serve your interests if I walked away from this,” I said. “So you’ll have to forgive me if I doubt your motives.”

“I don’t care what you think about my motives. I could have let you go into your room. Then you wouldn’t walk away, you’d be carried out. My interests would be served in either case. So do what you want. I have to go.”

She stood up and started walking toward the elevators.

“Wait a second,” I said, moving with her.

She ignored me, then stopped in front of the elevators. “I don’t want to be seen with you,” she said. “Just go.”

“Look,” I started to say. I heard the ping of an arriving elevator and we both glanced over. The doors opened.

Another Arab started to come out. He saw us. He looked at my face, then to Delilah. He froze. His mouth dropped open.

He’d clearly recognized me. He’d also clearly seen that I’d been chatting with Delilah. The way he’d looked from me to her-he was connecting us.

He started to step back into the elevator. His hand reached out for the buttons.

It happened fast. I didn’t think about it, didn’t think about the risk. I leaped into the elevator and bodychecked him into the wall. His head slammed against the wood paneling and bounced off. He got his arms up on the rebound and grabbed at me. I returned the favor, catching his shoulders with an inside grip and shooting a knee into his balls. He doubled over with a loud grunt. I stepped behind him and slipped my left arm around his neck in hadaka-jime, the inside of my elbow pressing up against his trachea, my biceps digging into his carotid. I put the same side hand over my right biceps and brought my right hand to the back of his head. I squeezed hard. He struggled wildly for less than three seconds, then went limp, the blood supply to his brain interrupted.

Delilah had stepped into the elevator with us. The doors were closing-she must have pressed the button. “Five,” I said. “Hit five.”

She did as I asked. But had she moved inside to help this guy, then hesitated when she saw that it was impossible? I wasn’t sure.

As soon as the doors closed, I released the choke and hoisted his limp body onto my shoulder. If we were seen now and we played it right, someone might think I was just carrying a friend who’d passed out from too much drinking. Not an ideal scenario, but less problematic than being seen dragging the guy by his ankles with his face blue and contorted.

“That’s him,” she said. “The one I overhead in the lobby.”

I nodded. Maybe it was true. Maybe he’d gotten antsy when no one was checking in or returning his calls, and had decided to move on.

Second floor. Third. Fourth. No stops along the way.

The doors opened on five and we filed out and started walking down the hallway. Still all clear.

I felt the guy’s limbs begin to move in what I recognized as a series of myotonic twitches. It happens sometimes when someone emerges from an unconsciousness induced by blood flow interruption. I’d seen it many times training judo at the Kodokan and recognized the signs. He was waking up. Shit.

I leaned forward and dumped him on the ground. His arms and legs were jerking now, his eyes starting to blink.

I stood behind him and sat him up. Then I leaned over his left side until we were almost chest to chest, wrapped my right arm around his neck from front to back, grabbed my right wrist with the other hand, and arched up and back. His arms flew up, then spasmed and flopped to his sides as the cervical vertebrae separated and his neck broke.

I took hold of one of his jacket lapels and stepped in front of him. Lifting and hauling back on the lapel, I went to my knees, snaked my head under his armpit, then stood, shrugging him up by degrees until I had him up in a fireman’s carry. I reached into my pants pocket and pulled out my room key. “Here,” I said, flipping it to Delilah. “Five-oh-four. Open the door.”

She caught it smoothly and headed off down the hallway.

I stayed with her. I wanted to see whether that hair had been disturbed. I stopped her outside the door and squinted down to see.

The hair was broken. Which didn’t prove anything more than her cleared cell phone had; it simply failed to prove that she had been lying about someone being in my room.

My next thought, of course, was bomb. The guy goes in, plants it, gets out. No timer, because they didn’t know when I was coming back. It would be rigged, to the door, a drawer, something like that. Backup in case the ambush in Hong Kong failed.

Delilah must have been thinking the same thing. That, or she was doing a good job acting. She was running her fingers lightly along the doorjamb, tracking closely with her eyes. I didn’t think a device, if there was one, would be triggered to the door. First, you’d need sophistication to pull it off: mercury switches, vibration switches, a way of arming the device electronically afterward for safety. Simpler means would require time spent outside the door, where the technician could be seen. In all events, working with the door would likely mean less time and less privacy than would be offered by the many other possibilities inside.