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security.”
    “Security? Who are we talking about here? The Premier of China?”
    “Something like that.”
    I took a close look at Raymond’s face, but he wasn’t smiling. Obviously, smile or not, he had to be kidding, but now I was becoming intrigued in spite of myself.
    “I appreciate this, Jack. I really do.” Raymond stood up and pointed to my empty dinner plate. “You want something else to eat?”
    I shook my head.
    “Okay, I’ll set something up and call you first thing in the morning,” he said, and with a wave he wandered off to talk to the guests at another table.
    I finished my wine wondering what I was getting myself into. When I was done, I stood up and dropped some Hong Kong dollars on the table for the waiter. No reason he should lose his tip because of Raymond’s unaccustomed fit of generosity.
    I gave Raymond a wave across the room and headed out into the night.

SIX
    I CROSSED THE ROAD to wait for a taxi going in the direction of the MGM. The fog had thickened while I was inside Henri’s, and the bright lights of the Macau Tower were now an indistinct glow in the grey mist shrouding the city.
    “I thought you were never going to stop eating.”
    I looked around to see who it was who had spoken, and if they were speaking to me, but all I saw in the darkness and the fog was a silhouette of someone sitting about thirty feet away on the low brick wall that separated the roadway from the harbor.
    “I’m out here waiting for you,” the voice went on, “and I’ve had no goddamned dinner, and what do I have to do for an hour? I have to sit here and watch you through that window while you fucking eat.”
    That was when I realized it was somebody talking to me, and in the next moment I also realized exactly who it was.
    “You could have come inside and joined me, Pete,” I said. “There was plenty.”
    “Nah…” Pete drew the word out like he was thinking about what he had missed. “That would have been a really lousy idea.”
    I took my time about it, but I walked over and sat down on the wall next to Pete Logan. He had short, dark hair, small eyes, and thin, narrow lips. He couldn’t have looked more like a cop if he had been wearing a baseball cap that said COP on it.
    “I suppose there’s absolutely no point in asking how you knew I was having dinner at Henri’s,” I said.
    “None at all.”
    “Then should I get straight to asking you why you’re sitting out here waiting for me?”
    “Wouldn’t get you anywhere either. I’ll tell you when I’m good and ready.”
    Pete Logan was a cantankerous son of a bitch who had been the legal attaché in the American Embassy in Bangkok for a couple of years. I had always thought legal attaché was a terrific title. It sounded sort of old world to me and invoked visions of cutaway coats, red sashes covered with medals, and formal parties in enormous, gold-trimmed ballrooms. Sadly, as with a lot of titles, the reality of it is far less than what it sounds like. Legal attaché is simply the State Department’s designation for the resident FBI man posted in an American embassy.
    And that’s what Pete was: a special agent of the FBI posted in Bangkok. At least, that’s what Pete said he was. Sometimes I wondered a little. Pete had a habit of turning up right in the middle of all kinds of strange stuff and offering lame explanations as to what he was doing there. Was he really a CIA guy operating under FBI cover? Frankly, it wouldn’t have surprised me one bit.
    Pete and I had some history together. A lot of history, actually. We had been on the same side a few times, and we had been on opposite sides a few times, but through it all we had remained friends, although it admittedly had been touch and go there once or twice. Like the time a few months ago when Pete arrested me for a murder that he knew full well wasn’t actually a murder. He even did it right in my hospital room, when I was lying in bed nursing two bullet wounds.
    “So, Pete,