The Detachment - Barry Eisler [31]
She smiled, just a hint of Oh, well in the way her eyes lingered on his. “Can I bring you anything? A towel, water…?”
“No, I’m good. Thanks for asking.”
“Okay, then.” She held his gaze for another instant, then turned to head back to the front of the room. Treven was about to follow her when a muscular, crew-cut guy in a dark suit came in. Treven made him instantly as a bodyguard—the build, the watchful presence, and no way was the guy here for a workout wearing a suit.
“Oh, one thing,” Treven said to Alisa, who turned back to face him. “The spa. There’s a steam room in there, right?”
He was stalling for time, wanting to see what the bodyguard did and who might come in behind him. It wasn’t necessarily going to be Shorrock. The Wynn did a lot of business with VIPs. Whoever it might be, he knew he’d look less noteworthy chatting up one of the attendants than he would on his own.
“There is,” Alisa said. “The steam is infused with Eucalyptus, so it’ll really clear out your pores and open up your sinuses.”
“I’ll have to give it a try. I don’t think I’ve ever had a Eucalyptus steam bath before.”
She smiled. “You’ll like it. I use the women’s every day I’m here.”
Treven tracked the bodyguard in his peripheral vision. The man scoped the room, but not carefully. Treven had the sense he was only confirming there was no other way in or out. And why be more thorough than that? Shorrock was important, true, but it wasn’t as though he was the president. And like Rain had said, if Shorrock was doing something unscheduled, the security detail would be more focused on someone following him than they would be on people who were already there.
“Every day?” Treven said. “You must have the cleanest pores in Vegas.”
Alisa laughed. “I don’t know about that, but it’s definitely good for your skin.”
The bodyguard walked back to the glass doors and held one open, and bam, in walked Shorrock. Treven felt his heart rate kick up a notch. Son of a bitch, they had him.
“I’ll tell you,” Treven said, keeping Shorrock in his peripheral vision, “I’ve always been jealous of people who get to work out for a living.”
“You look like you’re doing okay,” Alisa said, glancing down at his torso. “What are you in town for?”
The guard, he noted, hadn’t come back in. Shorrock was heading for the back of the room, where the free weights were.
“Just a reunion with some friends,” Treven said. She’d pinged him with that glance and the question about his plans. If he pinged back, she’d escalate. “Play some poker, maybe see that Cirque de Soleil show.”
She nodded, noting, no doubt, that this was the second time he’d failed to return a volley. “Enjoy,” she said. But then, keeping the door open: “And let me know how that steam bath goes.”
He smiled. “I will.”
He knew it would look odd if he stuck around much longer, but he thought he could afford to take just a few minutes more and see if he could pick up anything operational.
He walked to the water cooler and filled a cup, then strolled over to the front of the room to grab a towel. Through the glass he could see the bodyguard, pacing slowly in front of the salon, which put him between the elevators and the entrances to the gym and the spa. Yeah, the guy wasn’t worried about people who were in the gym already, but he might key on new arrivals. Treven thought Dox should hold off, that it was time to send in Rain. Rain was the only one of them whose size wasn’t itself conspicuous, plus he was Asian, or Asian-looking, anyway, which likely put him generally outside the kind of profiling Shorrock’s bodyguards would be doing. And beyond that, there was something about Rain’s demeanor that made him easy to overlook. There was a stillness about him when he was in public that might initially be mistaken for blandness, or even timidity. It was the mistake the contractors had made, and Treven would never forget the way the average-sized, meek-seeming Japanese guy he had assumed Rain to be had suddenly decloaked and dropped the two much larger men with his bare hands before anybody could even get there