Wind Raker - Book IV of The Order of the Air by Melissa Scott, Jo Graham

wasn’t actually lying, he reminded himself; he truly didn’t know who had been recruited to make the offer, even if he could guess exactly where the money had come from. But it didn’t really make him feel any better about the questions. Professor Buck was a great man in the field; it was degrading to have to deceive him this way.
    Although… He smiled. Dr. Ballard’s look of amused appreciation had almost been worth it. And of course Ballard had then managed to ask — so casually! — about Leo’s. That was a real club, not for the tourists or the latest horde of sun-worshipping he-men, and it had been impossible not to respond in kind. Dropping hairpins, one of his American friends had called it, that delicious dance of hint and innuendo, all the more exciting for being conducted under the noses of their normal companions. There had been a positive clatter of pins from Dr. Ballard.
    And he wanted very much to pick them up. Willi took a long swallow of his drink, fruit juice and heady rum in what seemed to be equal and generous measure, the breeze from the ocean cool on his face. Even knowing how dangerous it could be.
    Though maybe it was not as dangerous as all that, or at least no more so than usual. Ballard was hardly going to betray him, and even if something slipped, he wasn’t working in his usual field, and he was a long way from anyone who knew him. Except that he was expected to make reports to certain men at the consulate, and that brought him entirely too much into the government’s eye.
    There was also no knowing what Ballard’s part might be in this game. He was a Classicist, entirely the wrong man to be supervising this dig; yes, he had said he was doing it to prove that he could in fact manage a dig despite his missing leg, and that was not unreasonable on the surface, but — there were surely better qualified men available, even for a vanity project like this. He had been warned not to underestimate the Americans.
    And yet, Ballard had made the first move. That was not the act of an agent. The men from the consulate couldn’t question his spending time with his colleagues. It was merely devotion to his work. The trouble was, he wanted to take the chance, foolish and dangerous as it might be. He had read Ballard’s papers, even agreed with some of them; he liked the wry humor he’d seen in flashes over the afternoon, and he admired both the courage it took to ask and the careful way he’d done it. He’d left himself an out, could have claimed to be shocked himself up to the moment Willi had admitted knowing the place. And also — even crippled, he was an attractive man. Willi allowed his thoughts to linger on the well-cut suit, the crimson-striped tie, a nod to Ballard’s university and to his tastes, another hairpin slipping free. He imagined loosening that neat half-Windsor knot, unbuttoning the collar, his hands in the graying hair and a kiss that tasted of pineapple and tobacco. It had been a long dry winter in the desert, under the too-watchful eye of the Chinese authorities and of his own colleagues. Surely he could afford to indulge himself just a little.
    He drained his glass, and rose sedately from his chair, the sound of the surf hollow in the distance. The sensible thing to do would be to let it go, but he was not that sensible. He would see how far they could go before he had to call a halt.
    J erry slept better than he had expected, considering that the bed still seemed to move unexpectedly under him every time he started to fall asleep. Mrs. Patton had chosen his room carefully, close enough to the bathroom that he could make it there on his crutches without waking the entire household, and it had been nice not to have to worry about having to fumble with his leg in the middle of the night. But of course she was a military wife; it was a good bet that some of Colonel Patton’s friends were similarly handicapped, given that he was easily old enough to have been in the War. He