RainStorm

The
    light went on in the bedroom.
    I reached into the backpack and withdrew the Mont Blanc. I
    heard the sound of footsteps in the room. Belghazi, softly groaning.
    Then a woman's voice: "Achille, to vas bien?" Achille are you all
    right? To which Belghazi, clearly out of it, continued only to
    groan in reply.
    The blonde, I thought. I slipped the pen into my left hand and
    used my right to ease out my key chain, and the shortened dental
    mirror I keep on it. I padded silently to the edge of the door and angled
    the mirror so that I could see the suite's bedroom reflected in it.
    It was she, as I had expected. She must have had her own key.
    I grimaced. Bad timing. Another ten minutes and this would
    have all been over.
    I watched her shake Belghazi once, then harder. "Achille?" she
    said again. This time there wasn't even a groan in response.
    I saw her take a deep breath, hold it for a beat, then gradually
    push it out, her chin moving in, her shoulders dropping as she did
    so. Then she strode quickly and quietly over to a wall switch and
    cut the lights. The room was now lit only by the ambient glow of
    buildings and streetlights without. I watched her glance at the
    room's gauze curtains, which were closed.
    She moved to a desk across from the bed. I glanced over and saw
    Belghazi's computer case, the one I had seen him with in the lobby
    and then again in the casino. Interesting.
    She unzipped the case and took out a thin laptop, which she
    opened. Then she walked over to the bed, gingerly took one of the
    pillows from next to Belghazi's head, came back to the desk, and
    held the pillow over the laptop's keyboard. It took me a second to
    figure out what she was doing: muffling any chimes or other music
    heralding that the operating system was stirring to life. A nice
    move, which showed some forethought, and maybe some practice.
    She wouldn't have known where Belghazi had left the volume of
    the machine when he had last used it; if it had been turned up, the
    computer's musical boot tones might have disturbed his slumber.
    After a few minutes, the trademark Windows logo appeared on
    the screen, the accompanying notes barely audible under the cushion
    of fluffy down pressed southward from above. The woman
    paused for a moment, then removed the pillow and returned it to
    its original place on the bed. I noted that she hadn't tossed it on the
    floor, or otherwise thrown it randomly aside. She was keeping the
    room as she found it, which is to say the way Belghazi had left it,
    down to the details. Another sign that she had good instincts, or
    that she was trained. Or both.
    The woman walked back to the desk and pulled a cell phone
    from her purse. She spent a moment configuring it in some fashion,
    then pointed it at the laptop. She started working the phone's keypad.
    Several minutes went by. She would input some sequence on
    the phone's keypad, look at the laptop for a few seconds, and repeat.
    Occasionally she would glance at Belghazi. I could see the
    laptop screen while she was doing this and it hadn't changed. My
    guess was that the computer was password-protected, that her "cell
    phone" was more than it seemed, and that she was using the device
    to interrogate the laptop by infrared or by Bluetooth, most likely
    trying to generate a password or otherwise get inside.
    Five minutes went by, then another five. We were getting to the
    point where Belghazi might have metabolized enough of the drug
    to regain consciousness. Another five minutes, ten at the most, and
    I would have to abort.
    But how? I wasn't worried about getting out. Belghazi wouldn't
    be in any kind of condition to stop me, even if he were fully awake
    when I made my departure, and I didn't expect that the woman
    would pose a significant obstacle. But if Belghazi saw me, especially
    after making my acquaintance at the Lisboa earlier that evening, or
    if the woman reported that there had been an intruder, I would be
    facing an even tougher security environment. I'd have a hell of a
    time getting a second chance.
    I heard Belghazi groan. The woman froze and glanced at him,
    but he stirred no further. Still, she must have decided he might be
    waking up, because a second later she dropped the cell phone back
    in her purse, set the purse on the floor, and logged off the laptop,
    using the pillow as she had before to eliminate any farewell melody.
    When the screen had gone dark, she closed the lid and placed it
    back in its case, returned the pillow