Free Father Night by Eric Van Lustbader

opportunities for regret; nevertheless, not once did she think leaving him was a mistake. On the contrary, fleeing had saved her from drowning in his power. But now she had become his quarry, and she had no illusions regarding either his ruthlessness or his doggedness in tracking her down. His shadow continued to move on her horizon.
    For a long moment, she stood immobile in the center of the living room, studying all the subtle traps she had laid to alert her of an intruder’s presence. She had set throw pillows on the sofa in a certain color sequence and in a particular series of angles, she had left sections of The New York Times open to different pages, the pages overlapping one another in a specific way.
    In the bedroom, the creases in the bedspread were as she had left them and there were no fingerprints or tracks on the dresser tops or handles she had coated with hair spray before she had left. In her clothes closet, she measured the spaces between the hangers over which her dresses and skirts were folded. The cleaning staff were under strict orders not to enter the suite unless she was present. Satisfied that all was in order, she returned to the living room.
    Throwing her coat across the sofa, she sat down at her desk, opened her laptop, and inserted the flash drive. Then she took a small gray metal box from the floor of the hall closet, where she had secreted it in a shoe box that housed the Prada shoes she was wearing. This she took back to the desk.
    Opening it, she took out The Little Curiosity Shop , an old, battered children’s book she and Vera had shared. Opening the book to the middle section caused a space to open between the spine and the binding. Slipping her finger into the space, she drew out a micro SD flash memory card, which she fitted into the appropriate slot in her laptop. Navigating to the icon, she double-clicked it, activating the software program of her own design. It was much too valuable to keep on her laptop’s hard drive. When she powered off the laptop, traces of the program were completely wiped, leaving not one byte behind.
    Next, she accessed the starting IP address of the Web site she had downloaded from Vera’s iPad and ran it beneath her own software program. Instantly, the software used her laptop’s souped-up central processor and the Wi-Fi connection to begin its mind-bogglingly rapid calculations, following the IP’s trail as it morphed from one address to another.
    Caro discovered she was hungry. She punched a key on her cell. “Number Eleven,” she said, when the discreet female voice answered. “Ten minutes,” the voice replied, and Caro disconnected.
    She rose, padded into the bathroom, and scrubbed her hands and face. Toweling off, she stared at herself in the mirror for so long, with her gaze rock steady, that an outsider might have thought she was hypnotizing herself.
    The hotel phone rang, and she reached for the receiver beside the sink. “Send him up,” she said in response to the query. She left the towel draped over the edge of the granite sink. On her way to the door, she glanced at her laptop’s screen. It was filled with rapidly moving calculations that scrolled down the page, replaced by others.
    Grunting with satisfaction, she opened the door before the bell could be rung. She stood aside to let the man in, then closed and locked the door, engaging the security chain that she herself had replaced with one made of solid titanium. It could not be cut by anything less powerful than an electric saw with a diamond blade.
    By the time she turned around, he had put down his overnight bag, and her silk blouse was already unbuttoned. She wore no undergarments; the inside semicircles of her breasts were bared. She looked into Number Eleven’s face and her nipples were suddenly hard. He smiled at her in that way she liked so much, with nothing beneath it but desire for her. She didn’t believe his desire was actually for her, but didn’t mind the pretense.