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sweetie. Let me just powder my nose first."
    The girl turned her back. As she headed toward the bathroom, X silently arose from the bed, tiptoed up behind her and clapped a hand over her mouth.
    "Don't move. I have a gun," he whispered in her ears.
    X was bluffing about the gun; he abhorred firearms and regarded any con man who toted a handgun an amateurish embarrassment to the trade. He was not ordinarily a violent man, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
    He pushed her onto the king-size bed, grabbed an errant sock and stuffed it in her mouth. He quickly whipped the belt out of his silk bathrobe on the bed and used it to hogtie her, face down. His hand slid under her blouse and slid up and down her torso, searching for a wire. Sure enough, there was a tiny microphone and transmitter taped to her creamy brown lower back.
    Stacy, though he doubted that was her name, began to make muffled protests.
    He tried to cover the noise by saying loud enough for any mike to pick up, "That's it. That's it. That feels fantastic. Your mouth feels so good."
    The undercover cop rolled her eyes in fury.
    The good news was there must not be any hidden cameras, otherwise her partners would have burst through the doors and busted him already.
    X crept up to the front door of the suite and peered through the peephole. He was 90 percent sure he would see two or three armed cops outside, backup waiting for a verbal signal from the undercover policewoman to move in. What he saw instead made him gasp. There was not one or two or even six. There had to be 10 FBI agents crowded in the hall, decked out in body armor and "Fritz" helmets, and toting MP5s.
    WTF ? Yes, he'd arrived at the hotel with a couple of bodyguards, but the raiding party looked like it was prepared to shoot it out with the private militia of a Colombian drug lord.
    Well, strolling out the front door isn't an option, he thought.
    X quickly hauled on his pants and shirt, and raced to the door to the adjoining suite. He always packed a lock-picking kit with him for just such occasions. But as he knelt he heard shuffling from the other room that told him G-men were on the other side. This was no avenue of escape - more than likely the other suite housed the command post of the FBI team, including their recording equipment.
    The "masseuse" continued to let out muffled protestations, which did sound for all the world as if her mouth was working magic on a male member. But he knew this stalling tactic had only bought him a matter of seconds. Assuming they were listening in, they would not want to burst in on the female agent and humiliate her in the act of fellatio. On the other hand, they wouldn't allow the supposed love act to go on for more than maybe two minutes before some cowboy decided it was time to kick down the door.
    He had to get out of the suite, but how?
    He raced to the slanting window. X had beaten a hasty retreat through more than one window in his day. During his stint pulling the classic Lost Puppy scam door to door, when the deal went sour he'd often used the bathroom window as an egress. But those were the first or second floors of homes. This was the 25th story.
    He futzed around for a moment, trying to recall how the slanted windows slid open, before succeeding. He poked his head out and looked at the wall sloping down 250 feet to the cement.
    I should have booked a lower floor, he thought.
    From the ground, the pyramid walls looked like perfectly smooth black glass, but upon closer inspection, X saw that there were subtle ridges where the giant blocks of glass met. The ridges looked just deep enough to accommodate human fingers and toes - perhaps. About 14 feet away another window was open. Tantalizingly close.
    X, whose mountaineering skills were meager, hesitated. If he slipped he'd go sliding down and slam into the pavement below as surely as if the angle was 90 degrees instead of 39. But X could NOT go to prison. The image of a concrete prison cell