He looked at her. “What are you thinking?”
She took a sip of her drink—an Art Deco, another of the bar’s specialties—and smiled. “I was thinking I like that it’s whisky in Kamakura, and cocktails in Paris.”
“Is that really what you were thinking?”
There were several ways she might have answered. But the most eloquent was also the one she most wanted. She kissed him. She knew he liked when she did that, liked how physical she was with him, even in public. It had taken a while for him to become comfortable with it, to trust how much she enjoyed touching him. Once upon a time, her specialty for Mossad was honeytrap operations, and some aspect of John’s survival instincts, or maybe just his cynicism, had clung to the suspicion that she might be playing him long after she no longer was.
She felt her phone buzz. It was another compromise between his distrust of cellphones and her insistence on real-time accessibility. She took it from her purse and glanced at the caller ID. “Blocked,” she said. She didn’t get many calls, and she could feel his instant unease.
It buzzed again. “Go ahead,” he said. “Otherwise, we’ll just be in suspense.”
She answered. “Allo?”
“Delilah. Am I catching you at a good time?”
She recognized the voice instantly—gravelly, like the shake of a rattlesnake’s tail.
“Daniel. It’s good to hear your voice. Is everything all right?”
She could feel John’s unease increase at her mention of Larison’s name. He was probably worried it was something about Dox. For that matter, so was she.
“Everyone’s fine,” he said. “I’m not calling too late?”
“No, it’s evening where we are. You’re sure everything is all right?”
She saw John do a quick sweep of the room—the entrance, the hotspots, the other patrons with backs to the wall. Stimulus, response.
“All right enough. Dox and I took on a little job that turned out to be not as little as expected.”
“I see.”
“He didn’t want to bug you guys. But I think we could use backup.”
Alongside her worry, she felt a surge of irritation. “Daniel. What is wrong with you two? You don’t need the money. You have a good life, a person who loves you.”
“Stop. I already feel guilty.”
“Not guilty enough.”
“Can we talk about my feelings another time?”
“I wish we had talked about them sooner.”
“I wrote up the details on the secure site. I don’t know when you’ll be able to check it, but in the meantime, read the news out of Seattle. That was Dox and me. And the gist of it is, we think there’s more where that came from.”
The irritation escalated to an adrenaline rush surreal in its familiarity. “What’s the plan?”
“I’m not sure yet. Other than my sense that we’re not going to resolve this playing whack-a-mole. We need to figure out where the problem is coming from and take it out.”
John was looking at her. She knew he wanted the phone. But he was the one who refused to carry one. And besides, she wasn’t done. “What about Tom?” she said. “Can he help?”
“He’s the guy who hired us. He’s finding out what he can.”
“Is Livia involved with this?”
“No. Well, not yet. Dox is going to see her.”
She tried to suppress her resentment. “Of course.”