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listening.
    The shower came on, but she didn’t move until she heard the shower door open and the pattering rhythm of the water change. Then, sure that he was in the shower, she went to her purse and removed the adapter she had secreted away there. She plugged one end into her iPhone and the other into his. His phone was password protected, but that didn’t matter. The software built into her phone broke the four digit code easily enough. Having his phone number already plugged in made the process so much easier.
    Her jail-breaking software completed the rest.
    She watched as the display on her screen recorded the software’s progress. One by one, the Unix-based limitations Apple had built into the phone began to crumble until at last her phone had total access to his iPhone’s operating system. E-mail, calendars, text messages, notepads: everything opened for her inspection.
    These Americans and their toys, she thought. Everything was here. His entire life, everything that mattered to him—and more important, to Senator Rachel Sutton—was right here for her to examine.
    It was almost too easy.
    When the process was complete, the software initiated an untethered jailbreak, and set up a worm that would migrate to his other Apple devices next time he synched them. From here on out, every update, every e-mail, every text would send a ghost copy to her device, giving her what the Americans so primly referred to as “the fly on the wall,” making his life, and hopefully that of Senator Rachel Sutton as well, an open book.
    The program finished its run right as the shower stopped. Moving quickly, Pilar unplugged her adapter from his phone and put it back in his pocket.
    She was a few feet from her purse, still wrapping the adapter around her finger when he stepped out of the shower, steam rising off his shoulders and a towel around his waist.
    “Hey,” he said. He glanced at the adapter in her hands and cocked his head to one side. “What’s that?”
    For a moment, she thought how easy it would be to kill him. A single strike with the blade of her hand to his throat, just below his Adam’s apple, and she could crush his windpipe. She could stand over him and watch as he choked and gasped away the last few seconds of his life. The whole pathetic display would be over in less than two minutes.
    Unfortunately, as long as the senator was alive, and as long as he was her most trusted aide, Paul Godwin was worth more alive than dead. Far more, in fact.
    Which meant this was a job for Monica Rivas.
    “I was going to charge up my phone,” she said and moved a little closer to him. “But I have brought the wrong charger.”
    “You can use mine if you want.”
    “But there is no time, is there? You must leave in just a few minutes.”
    “There’s a little time,” he said.
    He wasn’t a bad looking man, she thought. Just a hair shy of six feet, perhaps a hundred seventy pounds. When he hit his forties, perhaps his light brown hair would thin on top, perhaps his belly would lap over his belt, but for now, he had a good body and a dopey but still charming smile that made her assignment not altogether unpleasant.
    She tossed the phone and adapter cable on top of her dress, then stepped a little closer to him, her fingers toying with the loose knot holding the towel to his hips.
    “You have a few minutes still?” she asked.
    Pilar Soledad, back in character as Monica Rivas, stared up at him with her best doe-eyed innocent gaze.
    “I, uh—” he stammered.
    But he said no more, for with that the towel fell to his feet, and the woman he knew as Monica Rivas knelt before him, commanding his complete attention.

C H A PTER 3
    Outside her window, Dulles International Airport sank into the darkness. Pilar Soledad watched it fade to black, aware that something vital inside her was hardening. It was always the same on these return trips to San Antonio, as layer by layer she peeled away the fiction that was her life as Monica