“Give it to me, or I will shoot you,” she said.

Handing the prototype over to someone who could be an agent of the SVR — the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service — was not a very attractive option. But getting shot didn’t really appeal to me, either. I decided that it might be easier to let her have it and then steal it back from her later. After all, she wouldn’t remember that someone else was after the prototype.

Careful to make no sudden movements, I reached down to the pocket holding the prototype and took it out. “Here it is.”

“Put it on table,” she said, pointing to one of the lab workbenches.

I complied.

“Turn around and lie down on floor.”

I lay down.

She must have walked to the door very quietly, because I didn’t hear her footfalls. I heard the door open, then shut.

I gave her a one minute head start, then got up and raced to the lab door. I needed to get out of the building in time to follow her or I might lose her trail.

I opened the door and rushed into the hallway, and almost bumped into her. She stood with her hands held behind her head. Her gun lay on the floor. A few feet down the hall, a guard pointed a gun at her.

“¡Alto!” said the guard, swinging the gun toward me.

I raised my hands. At least the Russians weren’t going to get the prototype. And maybe I could try again later, although security would probably get tighter after this.

Making a run for it wasn’t an option, because then the guard might follow me and allow the woman to escape with the prototype. But I might be able to get the guard to concentrate on her instead of me.

“Jorge,” I said, reading his nametag, “I’m a CIA officer.” I hoped this guard’s English was as good as Carlos’s. “This woman is a Russian spy I’ve been tailing. I tried to stop her from stealing—”

“He lies,” she said. “I never—”

“Stop!” Jorge shook his gun for emphasis.

We both shut up.

“Take off your masks,” he said.

I stripped mine off and dropped it on the floor. She did the same. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of auburn braids pinned up on her head.

“Now your pants, mister,” he said.

“What?” I said. “You’re not serious.”

“You have too many pockets,” he said. “Take them off.”

Reluctantly, I obeyed. I had to take off my shoes to get the pants off, and I piled everything on top of my ski mask. It was embarrassing, but at least I had the consolation that no one but me would remember this ridiculous scene.

“And your shirt,” said Jorge.

“It doesn’t have any pockets,” I said.

He shrugged. “I don’t trust you.”

I took off my shirt, revealing the bulletproof vest.

“That also,” said Jorge, so I added it to the pile.

Standing there in nothing but my boxer shorts and socks, I straightened to my full height, looked him in the eye, and said, “If you want me to take off any more, you’ll have to buy me dinner first.”

Beside me, the woman let out a tiny, soprano snort. “You are right not to trust him,” she said, pointing at me. “This man kidnap me and force me to help him break in here. I grab his gun and run away when you found me. Thank you for saving me.” Her tone was so desperately earnest, if I hadn’t known she was lying I might have believed her.

“Don’t trust her,” I said. “Arrest us both, and we can sort it all out later.”

Another guard came running down the hall to join Jorge — Carlos from the front desk. Jorge turned his head to see who it was, and the woman dove toward her gun on the floor.

* * *

Becoming a thief was only partly out of necessity. At the time, I was a friendless teenager who had just lost the only person who cared about me, and I was angry at the world. Stealing was my revenge.

But my mother had not raised me to be a thief. She taught me right from wrong, of course. But more than that, she believed I had a destiny.

“You have your talent for a reason,” she would say. “God must have something special he wants you to do.” I guess that was her way of justifying the sacrifices she made for me — that it was all part of some grand plan. She was so sure about it that I believed her.

Until the night of the fire.

My mother was the reason I ended up joining the CIA: so that in some small way I could be the hero she always believed me to be.

But the CIA didn’t spend much time training me for combat — partly because my instructors couldn’t remember what they had already taught me, which led to some wasted time. But the most important reason was explained to me by my unarmed combat instructor, a petite blonde named Lydia.

“You’re my instructor?” I asked, as she walked over to me in the training room.

“I am,” she said. “Edward’s just explained to me about your unique skills. Try to take me down.”

“Take you down?” At six-two, I was about a foot taller than her, and I outweighed her by seventy pounds or more. I didn’t want to hurt her.

“Yes, please,” she said.

I reached out to grab her arm. She had me face down on the blue mat in less than five seconds. Her knee pinned my right arm behind my back.

She leaned in close to my ear and said, “You don’t want to fight.”

Even if she only weighed a hundred pounds, it all seemed to be concentrated on my lungs. “I don’t?” I finally managed to say.

“No.” She eased up, and I drew in a deeper breath. “You don’t have the killer instinct.”

“Can you teach me that?”

She laughed. “You can’t teach instinct. Sometimes you can awaken it. But that’s often a nasty process. Sometimes you can learn to fake it. But that’s the wrong choice for you.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Your talent is meant for someone who runs away and hides. That has to be your instinct. Training you to overcome that would be wrong. I’ll teach you stuff to help you get away. But that’s your focus: get away. Hide. Run, not fight. Don’t try to be a hero.”

* * *

So I could have dived for the gun and tried to keep it away from the Russian woman. Or I could have grabbed my bulletproof vest and used it to shield the guards from her.

Instead, I stood still and hoped nobody would shoot me if I didn’t look threatening. Lydia’s advice had destroyed my remaining illusions of becoming a James-Bond-style spy, but I had realized the wisdom of what she said and learned to play to my strengths.

Jorge must have noticed the woman’s movement. He reacted quickly, stepping on her wrist as her hand closed around her gun. She cried out in pain. He pointed his gun at her face and said, “Drop the gun.”

She did.

Carlos arrived and kept me covered with his gun. At Jorge’s prompting, the woman got up and stood next to me again, hands behind her head.

“I warned you not to trust her,” I said.

“Silencio,” said Carlos.

They made her strip down to her bra and panties and then searched her clothes, where they discovered the prototype chip.

“I told you she was the thief,” I said. “I’m on your side, really.”

She glared at me. Jorge and Carlos ignored my comment and proceeded to discuss things in Spanish. The gist of what I could understand was that Carlos wanted to call the police, and Jorge wanted to talk to management first.

Police was good — I would eventually get away. Management could be better, or worse. There weren’t a lot of prosecutions for corporate espionage, because the companies involved didn’t want the stockholders to know how vulnerable they were. Sometimes management would pay a “security consulting fee” to a thief as an incentive to stay away and keep his mouth shut. And sometimes management decided that more permanent shutting up was necessary.

My Spanish wasn’t good enough to determine which way the decision went, but Jorge pulled out a pair of handcuffs. Carlos became the subject of some rather heated scolding when it turned out he didn’t have his handcuffs with him.

Finally, Jorge cuffed my left wrist to the woman’s right wrist. Paying no attention to my requests that I be allowed to go to the bathroom, Jorge and Carlos then took us in the elevators down to the third basement level and shoved us into an empty storage room. The metal door clanged shut, and keys jingled as the lock clicked.

I smiled. In sixty seconds, Jorge and Carlos wouldn’t remember who I was. When they came back for the woman, I would tell them some story about how I ended up here by mistake — although my state of undress might be kind of tough to explain.

First, though, I had to get out of the handcuffs, and my lockpicks were gone along with my pants.

“What’s your name?” I asked the woman.

Her hazel eyes looked at me coldly. “Why should I tell you?”

“No reason, I guess. But can I borrow one of these?” I reached up to her hair, and before she could object I pulled out a bobby pin. An auburn braid flopped down beside her cheek.

“Ow,” she said. “You pulled some hair.”

“Sorry.” With practiced ease, I bent the bobby pin at its curve until it snapped in two. Then I held my handcuffed wrist up so I could access the keyhole. The police generally don’t spread this information around, but handcuffs are about the easiest locks in the world to pick. Once I get a bit of wire in the keyhole, it takes less than a second to pop the lock.

Except there was no keyhole. I blinked and twisted my arm around to look at the handcuffs from the other side. Where the keyhole should have been, there was only smooth metal.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said.

“I make no joke,” she said.

I shook my head. “That means ‘I don’t believe it.’ These handcuffs have no keyholes.”

“Oh,” she said. She pulled her handcuff closer, dragging my arm along with it. “Is magnetic lock. Only opens with special key.”

Obviously I needed to subscribe to Cat Burglar Monthly or Handcuffs Illustrated to keep up to date on the latest developments. In any case, this complicated things. I tried to visualize myself explaining my situation to Jorge or Carlos: “I was looking for the bathroom, and I accidentally lost my clothes and ended up here in this storage room, where this strange woman somehow unlocked one of her handcuffs and put it on me.” No way that was going to work. And if management decided to put us in permanent storage, I wouldn’t have another chance to escape. I wondered if my corpse would be forgotten.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s find a way out of here. I need a bathroom.” As long as she didn’t have the prototype, I didn’t have a problem with helping her escape.

“Yelena,” she said.

“What?”

“My name.”

“Oh, right. Pleased to meet you. I’m Nat.” I suddenly realized I was alone with a beautiful woman, and both of us were in our underwear. My face grew hot.

* * *

I didn’t date much as a teenager — or as an adult, for that matter. My talent did provide me with an initial advantage in meeting women, as I could try approaching a girl several times in order to find out what she liked.

As for the end of a relationship, I never had to worry about breaking a girl’s heart or being pursued by a jealous ex-girlfriend. A minute after I left, she would be over me.

While all that would have been great if all I wanted were one-night stands with women I’d just met, I longed for something more than that. I would have been thrilled just to have a real date. I lost track of the times I’d take a woman out to dinner, only to have her go to the restroom and forget she was out with me. And begging a woman not to go to the restroom doesn’t make a good impression. Neither does following her to the bathroom and trying to carry on a conversation through the door.

In that situation, bathrooms were not my friends.

* * *

A broken bobby pin worked great on normal handcuffs, but made for an awkward pick of a door lock, even after grinding it down on the concrete floor. After about fifteen minutes, I was getting close to opening the storage room door. Then I heard Jorge’s voice in the hallway. He paused, then spoke again, like he was talking to someone on a cell phone.

“Quick,” I said, handing Yelena the bobby-pin lockpicks. “Kneel here and pretend you were trying to pick the lock.” I stood and pressed my back against the wall next to the door, with my handcuffed arm stretched awkwardly across my stomach.

She knelt, but said, “They expect we try to escape.”

I chuckled. “They expect you. Not me.”

Frowning, she glanced up at me. Then, with a jingle of keys, the door unlocked and swung outward.

“Move back,” Jorge said. I still couldn’t see him because he was standing outside the room.

Yelena scooted backward on her knees, holding her hands up so her right wrist wouldn’t pull my left hand into Jorge’s view.

“How did you undo the handcuffs?” Jorge asked, probably remembering having cuffed her hands together or to something in the room. And he moved forward enough that I could see his gun.

The situation was not ideal. Jorge was holding the gun in his right hand, with his finger on the trigger. I was to his left, which meant that in order to twist the gun out of his hand, I would have to turn the barrel toward me. From what Lydia had taught me, I knew I wasn’t supposed to do that — especially not while wearing only my underwear.

So I varied the technique as I grabbed the top of his gun, pointing the barrel upward as I twisted the gun in his hand. I must have surprised him enough that he didn’t think to pull the trigger, and I managed to wrench the gun from him.

Jorge didn’t stay surprised for long. Holding the top of the gun, not its grip, meant there was no way I could fire it. He lunged toward me, reaching for the gun with both hands.