“I’ll make it worth your while. Let’s just talk about it before you say no. All I ask is ten minutes of your time, and then maybe a lift in your dinghy back to shore.” And then she did something that in his nearly twenty years as an intelligence operative he’d never seen anyone do. She winked at him. It wasn’t done provocatively; rather, it was surreptitious, as if she were imploring him to play along.
