“Might we sit down?” Ms. Dunfee lifted the hem of her dress more than she needed to, drawing his attention to her calves. The white leather of her sandals stood out in stark contrast to bronze legs and bright red toenails. “I wore the wrong shoes for this. My feet are killing me.”
Li motioned toward a large round sun lounge between the wheel and the saloon. A canvas cover blocked the view from party guests who milled on the other side of the windows, but the front was open to the helm.
“I don’t want to whinge,” Ms. Dunfee said. “But I was thinking out of the wind. Maybe someplace more private… where you’d feel free to talk.”
“And just what is it you want to talk about?”
“You, Dr. Li,” she said, as if it were obvious. He didn’t follow, so she gave up going inside and sat on the lounge, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. She looked up at him, batting her eyes. “The work you’re doing. Sources tell me it’s cutting-edge communications tech. The so-called Internet of Things — you know, the future of mankind. That kind of stuff. I don’t want you to talk about anything top-secret, of course — unless you want to, which I’d be fine with — but anything you could give me that could be open-source.” She patted the cushion beside her, beckoning him to sit down.
He remained standing. “A lot of top-secret stuff is open-source, if you know where to look.”
“True.” She made like she was pulling up the shoulder of her dress, but ended up toying with it for a moment and leaving it where it was, low, cutting a diagonal line from the bottom of her deltoid across the swell of her breast. “My source says your team has developed some remarkable communications systems between Wi-Fi-compatible devices.”
“If that is true,” Li said, “your source is telling you a lot more than I ever would. Who is it you’re talking to, exactly?”
“Nice try, Dr. Li,” Ms. Dunfee said, eyes sparkling in the sunlight as she looked him up and down. A stray lock of dark hair blew across her face. She left it there, as if she’d planned it that way all along. Her lips blossomed into a pout, which, in her case, was even more alluring than the smile. “How about you give me something on background so I can corroborate the things I already know?”
“Afraid not,” Li said, hackles up. She could very well be a journalist in search of a scoop, but she could also be working for the endless list of foreign intelligence services pecking away at the United States — China, Russia, North Korea, Iran… Hell, even Israel wouldn’t let a little thing like friendship get in the way of spying to learn what Li knew.
“Come on…” the woman whined — whinging, she called it — then suddenly brightened as if a novel idea had just popped into her head. “I can make it worth your while.”
Li laughed out loud at the audacity of that. “Are you actually offering me money?”
“I can pay,” Ms. Dunfee said. She was leaning back now, on both arms, knees swaying under the thin silk. “But it doesn’t have to be money.”
“Let me ask you something,” Li said.
“Yay, dialogue.” She clapped her hands. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Go ahead. Ask me anything.”
“Does this ever work?”
Dunfee raised a wary brow. “Does what work?”
“The Betty Boop shtick,” Li said. “I mean, I’m as red-blooded as the next guy, but I’m also smart enough to know I’m a little old for you.”
Dunfee shrugged, sticking out her bottom lip and tilting her head to look at him for a long moment. At length, she said, “You know what they say, sixty percent of the time, it works every time.”
“It’s been interesting talking to you, Ms. Dunfee,” Li said.
“Fiona, please,” she said.
He shook his head. “Not in a million years.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing.”
He’s not interested,” Fiona Dunfee whispered to the Asian man beside her at the fantail bar twenty minutes later.
“Maybe you’re losing your touch,” the man said. He was a member of the Chinese delegation to New Zealand, an economic adviser on paper. Off paper, he was an undeclared intelligence officer. The shoulder of Fiona’s yellow sundress was up now, still indecent, but not deliberately so.
“Come on,” she said. “Would you say no if I offered myself to you?”
The man looked around at the other guests milling on the deck, then leaned in shoulder to shoulder. “Are you offering?”
She didn’t answer, taking a long drink of vodka instead.
The man sat up straight again, apparently abandoning the idea of a fling. “Perhaps you came on a little too strong?”
“It wouldn’t have mattered.” She lit a cigarette and watched the smoke blow away on the wind. “That one is an oak. He’s an old man, but he has the look of a newlywed in his eyes.”
“Very well,” her handler said, his voice far away. “I do not trust our other option. That person is, what is the word you use… odd… weird…?”
