“Whoa, come on, Connie, stay with me.” Langer jumped to her side, arm around her waist, helping her don a blue chenille robe twice the size of her slender frame. “We’re on the third floor. We turn right out the door, twenty steps to the second door on the left, three flights down, handrail all the way. You hear me? Push-bar door at the bottom opens directly outside. There’s a black van at the end of the path. The back doors will open as you approach. There are clothes for you inside.”

“Why?” Carson whispered as she sank back onto the bed, deciding for the moment not to press the button that would summon a nurse. She was wondering whether Langer could be trusted—whether she had hallucinated the entire episode. Suddenly the door opened and he was back, this time pushing a gurney.

“Get on.”

“You didn’t answer me.”

“What was the question?”

“Why should I trust you?”

Langer lifted her like she was a three year old and set her firmly on the gurney. She had already parted her lips to scream by the time his response reached her ear.

“Wiki Chang.”

“Wiki—”

“We’re trying to save your life, Connie.”

In bed, Jana thought of herself not as the girl in the movie, the slut who spread her thighs for any hero, any villain, but as the great film director. She was the girl, yes, but she was completely in control. Sometimes the girl looked like Jana’s own reflection, a sultry twin with shiny dark hair. Sometimes she was a younger Jana, a Jana as she had once been, the naïve younger sister of brothers who’d taught her too soon what girls like her were good for. Sometimes she was a remote ivory-skinned blonde. The director in Jana rarely enjoyed the kind of opportunity afforded by the Dubai suite: champagne glasses on the bedside table; satin sheets glinting in softly diffused light. This was no cheap porno reel, but a James Bond-like thriller, an upscale fantasia.

Crane, she admitted to herself, hardly looked the part. His long limbs were fish-belly pale. His hair was dull, his nose long, but he was surprisingly muscular, very sturdy. Jana watched the reflection in the ceiling mirror, studied the splay of Crane’s limbs as he lay across her dark skin.

There was little Jana would change about her body. She was pleased with the swell of breast and hip. She wished her nose were shorter, a touch more retroussé. More than that, she wished she did not sweat. The movie girl always looked glossy and cool in bed, during and after the most passionate of exertions. A Bond girl shimmered and glowed. Jana sweated; it interfered with her close-ups, making them uncomfortably real.