London Twist: A Delilah Novella

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 mechanical keyboard and not a virtual one—”
    “A lot of
ifs
.”
    “Yes. But if I could get you access to the app, you could download it to your laptop or your phone. With just a little bit of luck, you could have it running close to Fatima when she accesses her laptop. If you manage it, you could eavesdrop on her passwords, the websites she visits, the messages she types… everything. If you’re on a Wi-Fi network, the app automatically uploads to a secure site. Or you can do it yourself manually. At a minimum, you’d get her Firevault password and our black bag specialists could do the rest when she’s back in London.”
    “You haven’t tried this already?”
    “It won’t work in a public place—well, a library, probably, but certainly not the type of coffee shops Fatima favors when she’s out. But a hotel room would be about as good an opportunity as anyone’s ever likely to get.”
    “If it works, how will you explain my success to your people?”
    “If you succeed, I promise no one will even ask.”
    Delilah considered. She had nothing sensitive on her phone. Even if MI6 sent along any key loggers of their own in the downloaded app, they’d get nothing of value. And she’d just toss the phone when the op was done.
    “Good,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
    He nodded, his expression oddly grave. “There’s something else I shouldn’t tell you.”
    She wondered how much of what he “shouldn’t tell” her was real, and how much artifice, intended to get her to trust him, maybe even to sleep with him. It wasn’t easy to know. She raised her eyebrows.
    “According to the Americans,” he went on, “there’s been a lot of chatter just lately. You know, in all the networks their NSA monitors. And we’ve been picking up some quite worrying signals ourselves. The consensus is, some sort of mass-casualty attack is getting uncomfortably close to its launch date. And that Fatima’s brother Imran is at the heart of it. I’m afraid my people are