London Twist: A Delilah Novella by Barry Eisler Page B

and drinks.”
    He nodded, looking at her. After a moment, he said, “You’re right, of course. I should have thought of that myself. Tell me what you have in mind.”
    She outlined what she’d pitched Fatima—an all-expenses-paid trip for two to French Polynesia.
    “Are you mad? MI6 is never going to pay for this. And I doubt your bean counters would go for it, either. I doubt even the Americans would, and they’ve got more money than God. Not to mention, how the hell are we going to get this backstopped on such short notice?”
    She liked that he was raising practical objections. Practical objections meant the other side had already agreed in principle. Now it was just a question of negotiating a price.
    “You mean to tell me that between MI6 and the CIA, you can’t find even one more malleable editor at the right magazine?”
    “I have no idea what might be found. I only know it’s going to be a mad scramble, assuming it happens at all.”
    “Well,” she said, enjoying the feeling of holding a winning hand, “it’s what I told her. It will look strange if I come back to her now and say, ‘Sorry, the Polynesia assignment didn’t work out, but I did manage to get something at a budget hotel in Bristol.’”
    “You’re damned right it would look strange, and you knew that from the start.”
    “What if I did? It’s the right move, Kent, and you’re smart enough to know it. Take her someplace different, someplace far away, someplace where she’ll relax and get swept away and forget about what occupies her mind when she’s in London. Someplace with a lot of activities—yoga, water sports, whatever gets her to forget to close her laptop before getting in the shower or diving into the lagoon or going for a spa treatment.”
    “Spa treatments? That’s also part of the package?”
    “Look, if your people’s priorities are so fucked up they’d rather risk a sarin attack than the possibility a foreign agent might enjoy certain elements of an op, you’ve already lost this war, and I’m wasting my time trying to help you.”
    Kent sipped his drink, watching her. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She also didn’t care. She knew she was right.
    “That’s actually a pretty good line,” he said, after a moment. “The ‘risking a sarin attack’ part, I mean. I’ll use that with the zealots in finance. It might even work.”
    She didn’t permit any of the satisfaction she felt to rise to the surface. “Whatever hotel reservation you make, remember, it’s just for me. The magazine shouldn’t know I’m bringing a friend—it’s not the kind of thing I’d tell them myself.”
    “Yes, if they knew, they’d probably cut your per diem. And we wouldn’t want that.”
    She didn’t respond. What mattered was that she’d won. She wouldn’t engage him beyond that.
    He drummed his fingers on the table, looking away, obviously considering something, weighing it. Then he said, “Oh, what the hell. I’ll probably get fired for this, but if I do, at least we won’t be colleagues anymore and I’ll be able to ask you out on a proper date.”
    She smiled. She didn’t want to like him, but it was hard not to. “All right, it’s good to know you win either way.”
    “Here’s the thing. Our tech people have developed an application. It can run from a computer, a tablet, even a smart phone. It’s very sensitive to certain sounds. Particularly the sounds of keystrokes. I’d be surprised if your lab geniuses weren’t working on something similar.”
    She waited, intrigued.
    “Essentially, it’s a key logger program. Every key on a computer keyboard has an individual sound signature. The differences are far too subtle for the human ear to detect, but the program can make them out clearly enough. If there’s sufficient proximity, if the person isn’t taking care to type very quietly, if there’s not too much background noise, if the acoustics are right overall, if the person is using a