Sit down with Scott and work something out that I can agree to, and we’ll have State explain the rules to our friends in Beijing.” And who knows, maybe it might even work this time. Not that Ryan would bet money on it.
This would be the important evening, Nomuri thought. Yeah, sure, he’d banged Ming the night before, and she seemed to have liked it, but now that she’d had time to think it over, would her reaction be the same? Or would she reflect that he’d plied her with liquor and taken advantage of her? Nomuri had dated and bedded his share of women, but he didn’t confuse amorous successes with any sort of understanding of the female psyche.
He sat at the bar of the medium-sized restaurant—different from the last one—smoking a cigarette, which was new for the CIA officer. He wasn’t coughing, though his first two had made the room seem to spin around some. Carbon monoxide poisoning, he thought. Smoking reduced the oxygen supply to your brain, and was bad for you in so many ways. But it also made waiting a lot easier. He’d bought a Bic lighter, blue, with a facsimile of the PRC flag on it, so that it appeared like their banner was waving in a clear sky. Yeah, he thought, sure, and here I am wondering if my girl will show up, and she’s already—he checked his watch—nine minutes late. Nomuri waved to the bartender and ordered another Scotch. It was a Japanese brand, drinkable, not overly expensive, and when you got down to it, booze was booze, wasn’t it?
Are you coming, Ming? the case officer’s mind asked the air around him. Like most bars around the world, this one had a mirror behind the glasses and bottles, and the California native examined his face quizzically, pretending it was someone else’s, wondering what someone else might see in it. Nervousness? Suspicion? Fear? Loneliness? Lust? There could be someone making that evaluation right now, some MSS counterintelligence officer doing his stakeout, careful not to look toward Nomuri too much of the time. Maybe using the mirror as an indirect surveillance tool. More likely sitting at an angle so that his posture naturally pointed his eyes to the American, whereas Nomuri would have to turn his head to see him, giving the surveillance agent a chance to avert his glance, probably toward his partner—you tended to do this with teams rather than an individual—whose head would be on the same line of sight, so that he could survey his target without seeming to do so directly. Every nation in the world had police or security forces trained in this, and the methods were the same everywhere because human nature was the same everywhere, whether your target was a drug dealer or a spook. That’s just the way it was, Nomuri said to himself, checking his watch again. Eleven minutes late. It’s cool, buddy, women are always late. They do it because they can’t tell time, or it takes them fucking forever to get dressed and do their makeup, or because they don’t remember to wear a watch ... or most likely of all, because it gives them an advantage. Such behavior, perhaps, made women appear more valuable to men—after all, men waited for them, right? Not the other way around. It put a premium on their affection, which if not waited for, might not appear one day, and that gave men something to fear.
Chester Nomuri, behavioral anthropologist, he snorted to himself, looking back up in the mirror.
For Christ’s sake, dude, maybe she’s working late, or the traffic is heavy, or some friend at the office needed her to come over and help her move the goddamned furniture. Seventeen minutes. He fished out another Kool and lit it from his ChiComm lighter. The East is Red, he thought. And maybe this was the last country in the world that really was red ... wouldn’t Mao be proud ... ?
Where are you?
Well, whoever from the MSS might be watching, if he had any doubts about what Nomuri was doing, they’d damned sure know he was waiting for a woman, and if anything his stress would look like that of a guy bewitched by the woman in question. And spooks weren’t supposed to be bewitched, were they?
What are you worrying about that for, asshole, just because you might not get laid tonight?
Twenty-three minutes late. He stubbed out one cigarette and lit another. If this was a mechanism