Storm Front

“And, remember, because it’s so small, the effective range of the equipment you’re wearing is only two thousand feet,” the agent said.

“If you get in trouble, we’ll have people on the ground who can give you backup. But you have to stay in range.”

“Right.”

“There’s a French-Asian fusion place along the Champs Élysées that’s close enough,” the agent said. “They even have a grilled tofu dish on the menu.”

“Sounds perfect,” Storm said.

Then he ripped out the earpiece, microphone, and camera and deposited them in the nearest poubelle.

For the next minute or two, a passerby would have heard something that sounded like a trash can saying, “Storm… Storm, do you copy?… Storm, are you there?”

She had changed into a red dress with even less leg coverage than her skirt had offered. The neckline was a style the name of which Storm couldn’t quite remember. Did they call that a princess cut? A cupid cut? Whatever. Storm just called it delicious.

As she walked toward him past the concierge desk, every male eye in the room followed her. The Englishmen in the lobby had to do it surreptitiously, so their wives wouldn’t notice them gawking. The Americans were slightly more obvious. The Frenchmen didn’t bother hiding it at all.

Cleveland Detroit was silently cursing that he had to be Cleveland Detroit. Derrick Storm would have had his Hermès tuxedo newly pressed, his Gucci shoes polished to a high shine, his black Brooks Brothers bow tie crisply knotted.

Then he reminded himself that, no matter what anyone says to the contrary, it’s the man that makes the clothes. He rose from the chair he had been holding down and greeted her with a light peck on the cheek. The electricity he felt when his lips brushed her skin was enough to weaken his knees.

“You look incredible,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“Shall we?” he said, offering her his arm.

She locked arms with him in a way that allowed him to briefly feel her body pressed against his. It left him with a powerful urge to make sure that wasn’t the last time he felt that par tic u lar sensation. “We shall,” she said.

As they strolled arm in arm out of the hotel, down toward the Seine, Storm allowed himself one more admiring glance, then started his subtle interrogation with seemingly harmless questions about her childhood.

It turned out that, unlike most of the employees in the Finance Ministry, she did not have an important father or other family connections. She was from a poor peasant family in rural Qinghai Province. The One-Child Policy was firmly in place at the time of her birth, and many families in her village drowned their infant daughters and waited on sons to arrive. Despite cultural biases against educating girls, she had managed to excel in school. When she recorded the best score in the entire province on the Chinese version of the SAT, she was invited to attend Peking University in Beijing. There, she finished at the top of her class. Her credentials had been so impressive that the Finance Ministry had been willing to overlook her gender.

“Your English is so flawless,” he said at one point — and could have added you must be a spy. Instead, he gave her an easy out: “You must have studied abroad.”

“I spent a semester at USC,” she said.

“Ah, the University of Spoiled Children,” Storm said. “I went to journalism school there. Which was your favorite pizza: Roma’s or Geno’s?”

“Roma’s,” she said quickly. “They had the best crust.”

And that’s when Derrick Storm knew that everything Ling Xi Bang had said to him was likely a lie. He had fabricated the names of the pizzerias. He was almost surprised she fell for such an easy ruse. She obviously hadn’t been well briefed.

No matter. He had found what he came to Paris to look for. That was the first objective. The second was to woo her into trusting acceptance. It was not necessarily that she was going to tell him anything. But if he got close to her, he might overhear a conversation, or sneak a glimpse into her briefcase, or arrange for her to “lose” her phone and secret it off to a CIA tech. There was always a way.

This, he knew, would involve some romance. Perhaps even physical contact. It was hard work, sure, but for the good of national security, Derrick Storm would make the sacrifice.

They found a small café a block in from the Seine. The evening was warm enough that they dined al fresco, allowing them to see the spires of the nearby Notre Dame illuminated against the night sky. He ordered a bottle of Domaine Viret and offered a toast to “our two great cultures.”

They touched glasses and began a free-ranging discussion. He talked about the chemistry that made glycine, found in abundance in soybeans, the best-tasting of the nonessential amino acids. She told stories from the finance minister’s trip to Indonesia, where she attended the ritual sacrifice of a water buffalo. They laughed. They lied. They drank wine in great volumes.