Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  “Tonight?” said Kelly. He had just enough of a buzz to resent the move he had rung bells in Washington to achieve. “Christ on a crutch!”

  The clerk shrugged helplessly and handed over the key to 327. “Very sorry,” he repeated.

  Kelly had not bothered to unpack the copy machine or his suitcases, so the move was quick and simple. The packing case skidded acceptably over the carpet when he lifted the front end; the suitcases and radio made only one further load. Kelly plugged the receiver in and draped its wire antenna from the top of the closet door to stretch it out. A commentator on the BBC Italian service was considering and discounting the possibility of a clash as the US Sixth Fleet and the Soviet Mediterranean Squadron prepared to hold simultaneous exercises in the Western Mediterranean. Kelly wondered if he could buy a bottle in the hotel. He didn’t like drinking in bars, it made him feel too much like a zoo specimen.

  Someone knocked in the hallway.

  Kelly had been taking off his shirt. He froze and the knock was repeated, not on his door but on one nearby. He stole across the carpet and put his eye to the wide-angle lens set in the door panel.

  Three men stood with their backs to him in a semicircle around the door of 324. From behind and through the fisheye lens he could not be sure, but the trio was certainly dressed like the men who had been waiting in the lobby when he came in. There had been a number of people in the sedan that followed him, too, but—

  The man in the center held a wallet open in his hand, obviously official identification. After the second knock went unanswered, another of the waiting trio opened the door. All three slipped into 324 without wasted motion. The door closed behind them.

  Kelly blinked at his distorted view of the empty hall. 324 had a spring lock as well as a deadbolt to be engaged with the key. Kelly had not bothered to throw the deadbolt when he left the room; but the visitors had not seemed to fumble with a passkey to open the spring lock either.

  A moment later, the door opened again. The three men left as quickly as they had entered. One was replacing something in a breast pocket—or a shoulder holster. The strangers were down the hall and out of view in a moment. They moved with quick, short steps, all three sets of legs in unison. None of them glanced at 327 as they passed.

  The agent relaxed slowly. Using both hands to keep from jabbing himself, he put his double-edged knife back in its sheath. Police of some sort, clearly. Presidential Security Office?

  But what had he done so far to concern the Algerians? Kelly himself had had no contact with the underground as yet . . . and why had they gone to the wrong room—if it had been a mistake.

  After a moment’s further consideration, Kelly slid one of the chairs over to his door and tilted it under the knob. The chain bolt was a joke, scarcely even a delay for a pro who knew how to use his boot. Not that it really mattered. If the authorities wanted in, they were going to get in. But why?

  The Italian Service had closed out its broadcasting for the day. The Kenwood hissed with static. Kelly started to play with the tuning, then changed his mind. He stripped and lay down on the bed with the lights out. The radio dials shone as cats’ eyes, but he had dimmed them also.

  Kelly wanted a drink very badly, but he had no intention of opening his door again that night. After a time, he slept.

  XVII

  “Seven-zero,” Kelly whispered to the mirror front of the bathroom medicine chest.

  After a moment, the speaker of his short-wave receiver rasped, “Go ahead,” in French.

  “Up five,” the agent said in the same language. He was still speaking toward the shaving mirror. He reached down and adjusted the receiver so that its digital read-out said 10.430 in megahertz instead of 10.425. He cut the power. From the mirror came the faint, tinny sound of someone counting to ten in French.

  At ‘dix’ Kelly whispered back, “Got it. Four-one out.” He turned. Sergeant Rowe was standing in the bathroom doorway. “There it is, Doug,” the agent said. “Now, if the rig’ll just keep working for the next couple days, we’ve got our link to Doctor Hoang.” He frowned. “Not that that puts us out of the woods either, but it’s a start.”

  The sergeant stepped past Kelly and slid open the left door of the medicine cabinet. “Pretty slick, even if I do say so myself,” he remarked.

  A transmitter and a separate receiver, neither of them much larger than a standard hearing aid, had been glued to the inner surface of the mirror. Hair-fine wires spliced them into the circuit serving the shaving lamp built into the cabinet. Spray enamel had melded the wires into the metal surface; it reeked at the moment, but the odor would have dissipated by the time Kelly surrendered the room the next day.

  The transmitter had, as a matter of fact, been an off-the-shelf bugging device, powered by and broadcasting on the building’s own electrical circuitry. It was sound-activated with an interlock to keep it from re-broadcasting noises from the receiver. Ideally the transmitter would have been monitored within the Aurassi, but Conference security measures would make that impossible. Instead, Kelly and the sergeant had been forced to position a separate and far more powerful transponder in the outside wall of the bedroom. It broadcast on an integral antenna, easily capable of driving a signal to the American Embassy.

  The transponder installation was behind a sculptured divan. All the fragments of drywall had been swept into a bag which Sergeant Rowe would carry away with him. The hole had been covered with an aluminum plate 150 mm square, anodized to a close match for the beige wall paint. With luck, even someone who took the time to cut loose the plate—it was sealed to the wall with quick-setting epoxy—would still assume that the featureless gray box of the transponder had something to do with the power line to which it was connected.

  The receiver had been more of a problem.

  “Damn thing was a good 25 kilocycles off,” Kelly grumbled to the sergeant. “I don’t see how a sealed unit like that could slip off frequency, even being flown to Algiers in the guts of a Xerox machine. Either it works or it doesn’t work—it doesn’t just decide to work on a different frequency.”

  Rowe slid the cabinet door closed again. In order to see the paired devices, one had to actually stick one’s head into the cabinet. That would require more than a mild suspicion that there was a bug in the room. Anyone who searched the medicine chest would already have dismantled all the light fixtures and wall receptacles in the living quarters. “They’d have tested it, wouldn’t they?”

  Rowe asked. “Whoever made it, I mean?”

  The agent cracked a smile. “I wonder who Pedler and the boys did get this one from?” he mused aloud. “It’s not quite the NSA’s cup of tea, is it? And if it came from the Company’s Tech Services Division,”—he laughed aloud—“I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it had a tracer built into it someplace.”

  More soberly, Kelly shook his head as if lulling his fantasies to rest. “No,” he said, “they probably tested it, but not under field conditions.”

  “Like the commander wanted to do?” the sergeant suggested.

  “Right, right,” agreed the older man, nodding vigorously. “If we’d tried this next to the transmitter the way Posner suggested, it’d have worked fine because the signal was so strong. Hell, you can make a light bulb talk if you drive a signal at it hard enough. But a few miles away with some walls in between, well . . . that little matter of 25 kcs”—Kelly had been in radio before “hertz” replaced “cycles per second”—“isn’t so little any more.”

  “Lucky thing we had your shortwave so that we could be sure it wasn’t the base unit that was messed up,” the sergeant said, kneeling for a closer look at the Kenwood.

  The agent raised an eyebrow. “Luck?” he said. “Luck isn’t planning Skyripper, Doug my boy, Tom Kelly is.” He paused, then went on, “God knows we’re going to need more luck than I expect us to have. . . . But that doesn’t mean I haven’t crossed as many Ts as I could.”

  The two men looked at one another for a moment. “Well,�
� Rowe said, rising, “it’s time to get ready for the meeting. It took longer than I expected, setting up this commo.”

  “Yeah,” Kelly agreed. He unplugged the Kenwood and lifted it carefully. “It’d have been quicker if I’d run it up first, instead of going down fifty kcs before working up from what it was supposed to be.”

  “If you’d done that,” said Sergeant Rowe, following the agent out of the bathroom, “they’d have been off on the low end instead.”

  The communications set-up, including the transponder, was live only when the bathroom light was on. There were ways to control units from a distance, switching them on and off as the person monitoring desired; but that added a level of complexity and potential failure. If a switch failed in a satellite, tens of millions of dollars might be pissed down the drain. If one failed here it would very likely mean Kelly’s ass . . . and that was not something the stocky agent trusted to high-tech solutions when there was any other way.

  There was a fair likelihood that Hoang—or rather, the security people sure to accompany the physicist—would sweep the hotel room for bugs as a matter of course. The usual technique involved a sensitive receiver that lighted in the presence of a signal. The searcher walked around the subject area, talking in a normal voice and seeing if the indicator lighted up as a bug broadcast his speech. Unless the bathroom fixture were on, the bug would not be live; and it was very unlikely that the searcher would turn on the light and risk masking the weak glow of his own indicator.

  Kelly took from his closet a brown corduroy blazer and stuffed a blue knit cap in the side pocket. He folded the jacket over his forearm, lining outward. “Let’s go, then,” he said. He glanced sidelong at Rowe as they walked to the door. “Ah, Doug,” he added, “you’ll be at the meeting too?”

  The sergeant shook his head sharply. He did not look up from the carpet as they strode down the hall. In a low voice he said, “No, I . . . the commander won’t let me get into something like . . . illegal. I’ve got a red passport, you see. The commander’ll drive you. Anyway, he’s had all the contact with the group himself.”

  Kelly had said nothing about the three visitors across the hall. Rowe was too subdued by his own circumstances to notice that his companion kept darting glances to the rear as they walked toward the elevators. Someone could run up behind them, his or their footfalls swallowed by the soft green carpeting. “What about your passport?” Kelly responded in vague irritation, wholly alert but only partially listening to what was being said.

  “Oh—red,” Rowe explained. “Official, not black like a dip’s. The Attaché has a black passport—and diplomatic immunity. Staff travels on red and takes its own chances when something blows up.” He pressed the elevator button, staring morosely at the bag of wall fragments in his hand. “He’s doing it for me, really; but it’s the way the book says, and that’s the way the commander was going to do it anyway. Well, it’s a direct order.”

  The elevator signal pinged. “Look,” said Kelly in sudden decision, “meet me at your car. I’m going to walk.”

  Before the elevator doors slid open, the agent had rounded the corner to the stairs. Rowe heard his shoes echo briefly within the smoke tower before the door swung shut behind him. Frowning at last in perplexity, the sergeant waited for the passengers within the car to exit before he could ride it down.

  XVIII

  Kelly got into Posner’s rented Peugeot 204 before the vehicle had come to a full stop. Cigarette smoke twirled into phantom hands at the suction of the door.

  The commander pulled away from the curb with only a glance of irritation at his passenger. Wearing the brown jacket and knit cap, the dark-complexioned Kelly was scarcely distinguishable from the local men lounging back at the Chancery gate.

  “I don’t know what you’re playing at,” said Commander Posner in a tight voice. “There’s nothing suspicious about two foreigners visiting an antique shop. Perhaps it’s as wise not to use a car with diplomatic plates, I’ll agree. But that doesn’t mean you have to dress up like a thug. . . . And it certainly doesn’t mean I have to pick you up on a street corner, instead of at the Chancery as we’d arranged previously.”

  The agent rubbed his temples tiredly. “Tell me, Commander,” he said, “how many salesmen do you take on shopping trips?”

  Posner cleared his throat. He glanced sideways in more of an apology than Kelly had expected to receive.

  It didn’t make the agent feel more comfortable, however. The excuse was fine for silencing the Defense Attaché, but Kelly himself knew that he had begun acting irrationally. There could be reasons for his sudden paranoia; but if there were, he was not consciously aware of them.

  He wasn’t sure which was worse—having premonitions or going nuts. Kelly had wondered the same thing toward the end, there, with the girl in Venice whose name was not Janna. He had not reached a solid conclusion that time either.

  “No problems with the radio gear at your end, then?” Kelly asked to break his own train of thought.

  Posner stubbed his cigarette out into the ashtray and tried to get another one-handed from the pack in his pocket. “No, no, it appears to be quite in order, once we found that fuse this morning,” he said. He looked at the agent more fully. “Once you found the fuse, I should say.”

  “Sometimes they’re blown right out of the box,” Kelly agreed mildly. “There’s people pretty much that way too, so I guess we ought to figure it for fuses.” The Attaché was trying to pull a disposable lighter from between the cellophane and the liner of his cigarette pack. The Peugeot did not have a resistance lighter. “Here,” said Kelly, taking the pack. “I’ll do it.”

  Commander Posner was not a natural driver; he constantly overcorrected with jerky movements of the wheel, brakes, and gas. Still, he relaxed a trifle with the fresh cigarette between his lips and said, “I’m surprised there’s no scrambler in the system. Of course, it’s possible that no one will be monitoring the frequencies—but quite frankly, I can’t conceive of Washington authorizing you to give operational directives this sensitive in clear.”

  “Yeah, there’s people who’d have conniptions if they knew,” agreed the agent with a wry smile. He cranked his window down an inch but found as he expected that it simply drew more smoke past him instead of clearing the air. “Thing is, there’s no way to fit a scrambler/unscrambler to hardware as small as what we’ve got to use in the Aurassi. Our contact’ll almost certainly be sharing the room with a security man. We can’t just stick a PRC-77 in the closet for him to use . . . or phone him.”

  “I should have thought that a risk of the sort you intend to . . . put us all through would have had to be cleared at very high level,” Posner said distantly. The car wheels thumped on the right curb and rubbed for several yards. The commander continued on, apparently unaware of the scraping.

  Kelly wiped his chin with the back of his hand. His whiskers bit at the skin. “Look,” he said, “we do what we can. Nobody’ll be talking on the system but me and the contact—and we’ll be using Vietnamese. Sure, it can be recorded; but unless we’re completely SOL, it’ll be days before anybody here’ll have time to figure out what the language was, much less translate it. There are risks; but that’s a fact of life.”

  The Defense Attaché snorted in what turned out to be an unexpected outburst of humor. He looked at Kelly despite the fact that a boxy, green bus was stopping in their lane. “There was a Vietnamese community in Algiers during the last years of the French, you know,” he said. He looked up just in time to jam on the brakes. Algerian passengers, loaded like cattle in a truck, peered down from the back window.

  “Yes, secret police—refugees after Dien Bien Phu,” Posner continued. “The French brought them here to deal with the FLN. Torturers, of course. . . . The FLN blew up a barracks full of them, killed over fifty. And after Independence, well—I don’t think we need worry about local Vietnamese speakers, you’re correct.”

  The two-stroke Fiat diesel of the bus whined. After a
moment, the commander realized that the lane was no longer blocked and drove off himself. “I think it’s— Yes, we turn here.”

  They were far to the south of the Casbah, in one of the small connecting streets near the Boulevard Victor Hugo. The buildings lining the street were two-story. They had flat roots with iron railings around the upper-floor balconies. At street level, most of the buildings were shops. Plaster, originally painted white or light gray, flaked in patches from the masonry beneath. Save for the ironwork, the block could have passed for an aging downtown anywhere in the United States.

  Posner pulled up behind a panel truck. The shop directly beside them had no sign, but the metalwork displayed on faded velvet in the windows was an adequate description. Kelly got out quickly, scanning the street in both directions as unobtrusively as haste permitted. There was nothing untoward. The parked cars were the usual mixture of small European makes, with light colors predominating. The Defense Attaché was slow locking his door. Kelly waited for him, needs must, but he felt a helpless fury at the delay that kept them in the open. It was like the moment your chopper hovers, just before dropping to insert you in somebody else’s jungle.

  Brusquely, concerned only about political and not physical danger, Commander Posner strode past Kelly and into the shop. A string of bells rang. Within, the unassisted light through the display windows was barely adequate. It would have given the advantage—should the need arise—to the teenager seated in the corner to the left of the door. “Ah—good afternoon,” the Attaché said in his stilted French. “My American friend here is looking for brass of exceptional quality.”

  Instead of answering, the boy gestured toward the back with his left thumb. His right hand was in his lap, under a copy of El Moudjahid, the French-language official newspaper. Not lazy or disinterested, Kelly realized. The kid was so hyper that he was afraid to attempt anything as complex as speaking.