old man?”
“Well, both of you are men, but better a sausage than a string bean,” she answered, grasping the former in her soft left hand.
“Patience, girl, allow me to recover from the first race.” With that he lifted her body over his and let it down. She must really like me, Nomuri reflected. Three nights in a row. I suppose Fang isn’t the man he thinks he is. Well, can’t win ’em all, Charlie. Plus the advantage of being forty years younger. There was probably something to that, the CIA officer admitted to himself.
“But you run so fast!” Ming protested, rubbing her body on his.
“There is something I want you to do.”
A very playful smile. “What might that be?” she asked while her hand wandered a little.
“Not that!”
“Oh ...” The disappointment in her voice was noteworthy.
“Something for work,” Nomuri explained on. Just as well she couldn’t feel the shaking inside his body, which, remarkably enough, didn’t show.
“For work? I can’t bring you into the office for this!” she said with a laugh, followed by a warm, affectionate kiss.
“Yes, something to upload onto your computer.” Nomuri reached into the night-table drawer and pulled out a CD-ROM. “Here, you just load this into your machine, click INSTALL, and then dispose of it when you’re done.”
“And what will it do?” she asked.
“Do you care?”
“Well ...” Hesitation. She didn’t understand. “I must care.”
“It will allow me to look at your computer from time to time.”
“But why?”
“Because of Nippon Electric—we make your computer, don’t you see?” He allowed his body to relax. “It is useful for my company to know how economic decisions are made in the People’s Republic,” Nomuri explained, with a well-rehearsed lie. “This will allow us to understand that process a little better, so that we can do business more effectively. And the better I do for them, the more they will pay me—and the more I can spend on my darling Ming.”
“I see,” she thought, wrongly.
He bent down to kiss a particularly nice spot. Her body shuddered in just the right way. Good, she wasn’t resisting the idea, or at least wasn’t letting it get in the way of this activity, which was good for Nomuri in more than one way. The intelligence officer wondered if someday his conscience would attack him for using this girl in such a way. But business, he told himself, was business.
“No one will know?”
“No, that is not possible.”
“And it will not get me into trouble?”
With that question he rolled over, finding himself on top. He held her face in both hands. “Would I ever do something to get Ming-chan in trouble? Never!” he announced, with a deep and passionate kiss.
Afterward there was no talk about the CD-ROM, which she tucked into her purse before leaving. It was a nice-looking purse, a knockoff of something Italian that you could buy on the street here, rather like the genuine ones in New York that “fell off the back of the truck,” as the euphemism went.
Every time they parted, it was a little hard. She didn’t want to leave, and truly he didn’t want her to depart, but it was necessary. For them to share an apartment would be commented upon. Even in her dreams, Ming couldn’t think of that, actually sleeping at the apartment of a foreigner, because she did have a security clearance, and she had been given her security brief by a bored MSS officer, along with all the other senior secretaries, and she hadn’t reported this contact to her superiors or the office security chief as she ought to have done—why? Partly because she’d forgotten the rules, because she’d never broken them or known someone who had done so, and partly because like many people she drew a line between her private life and her professional one. That the two were not allowed to be separate in her case was something that the MSS briefing had covered, but in so clumsy a way as to have been disregarded even upon its delivery. And so here she was, not even knowing where and what here was. With luck, she’d never have to find out, Nomuri thought, watching her turn the corner and disappear from view. Luck would help. What the MSS interrogators did to young women in the Beijing version of the Lubyanka didn’t really bear much contemplation, certainly not when one had just made love to her twice in two hours.
“Good luck, honey,” Nomuri whispered, as he closed the door and headed to the