Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  “Look, you ought to understand,” said Kelly with his eyes on the television, “the people in Israeli service who—got that tape to the guy who released it. It wasn’t just personal payoffs, and it wasn’t in-house politics alone, either. There were some people who thought shooting allies in lifeboats was a bad idea . . . and thought getting away with it once was an even worse one.”

  “That really doesn’t concern us, Mr. Kelly,” Elaine said flatly, and the murmur of empty tape gave way to a segment recorded without an audio track.

  “Sonofabitch,” muttered Kelly, for the location was unmistakable to him despite the poor quality of the picture. The segment had been shot with a hand-held minicam, like the footage of the White Plains before, but the earlier portion had at least been exposed in the bright sunlight of a Mediterranean afternoon. This scene had been recorded at night in the angle of massive walls illuminated by car headlights, while drizzle flicked the beams and wobbled across the lens itself.

  But there was no other stretch of fortification comparable to that on the screen save for the Great Wall of China. Kelly had trained Kurds for two years at Diyarbakir. He could recognize the walls of the great Roman fortress even at a glance.

  “Corner by where the Turistik meets Gazi Street,” the veteran said aloud, a guess rather than an identification—the sort of thing he did to keep people off-balance about what he knew or might know; the sort of thing he did when he was nervous and off-balance himself.

  The walls of black basalt were gleaming and lightstruck where their wet lower surfaces were illuminated; the twenty feet above the quivering headlights was only a dark mass indistinguishable from the rain-sodden sky as the cameraman walked forward and jiggled the point of view.

  Close to the wall was a clump of figures in dark overcoats, who shifted away abruptly, backs turned to the approaching camera.

  “Who filmed this?” asked Kelly, looking up at the woman who watched him while her companion seemed mesmerized by the television itself. “And when?”

  “It was taken three days ago,” Elaine said, nodding toward the screen to return the subject’s attention to where it belonged. “And officially, everyone at the site is a member of Turkish Military Intelligence.”

  There were two bodies on the ground near where the men in overcoats had been standing. The wall sloped upward at a noticeable angle, providing a broad base of support for the eight-foot thick battlements at the top.

  “Didn’t think relations between us and MIT had been so close since Ecevit was elected Prime Minister,” the veteran said, pumping them because it had always been his job to gather information.

  “Watch the screen, please,” the woman said as Doug snorted and said, “No problem. Third Army Command, old buddy. No problem at all.”

  Elaine paused the tape and gave her companion a hard look. Kelly faced the television and grinned, amused at the two others and amused at himself—for gathering data on a situation that didn’t concern him and which he wouldn’t allow to concern him, no matter what.

  The tape resumed. One of the cars must have been driven forward as the cameraman walked up to the bodies, because his shadow and those of some others who had scurried out of the scene were thrown crazily across the basalt wall. The point of view moved even closer, shifting out of focus, then sharpening again as the cameraman adjusted.

  The screen steadied on a head-and-torso view of a man facedown in a puddle with one arm flung forward. He wore a dark blue coat and a leather cap which had skewed when he hit the ground. A gloved hand on an arm in a black trenchcoat reached from out of frame, removing the cap and lifting the dripping, bearded face into full view of the camera.

  “Son of a bitch,” Kelly repeated, softly but very distinctly this time. “Mohammed Ayyubi. He was one of my section leaders back, back when I was workin’ there and points south. . . . He was from the district himself.”

  “Ayyubi has been living in Istanbul for the past three years,” Elaine said coolly, watching the screen to keep Kelly’s attention on it. “Recently he began to travel extensively in Central Europe.”

  The hand holding the Kurd to the camera dropped him, letting his face splash back onto the puddled stone. It didn’t matter to Mohammed, whose eyes would never blink again until somebody thumbed the lids down over the glazed pupils; but Kelly’s own body grew very still for an instant.

  “He had a brother in Istanbul,” the veteran said softly. “Think I met him there once. . . .” When the brother came to see Mohammed in a base hospital so expertly staffed that all but one of the Kurd’s fingers had been saved despite the ten days since they were mangled.

  “Ahmed, yes,” said the woman as the cameraman walked his point of view over to the other body. The same hand and arm reached into the frame to angle the victim’s face toward the headlights.

  Kelly glanced from the arm’s wristwatch, a momentary black smear on the screen before the cuff of the overcoat hid it again, to the Omega which Doug wore. The quality of the data proved nothing but possibility, and the possibilities were endless. . . . don’t know that one,” said Kelly to the television.

  “No, you sure don’t,” said Doug, and there was more in his voice than mere agreement.

  The cameraman had panned the second body only incidentally in maneuvering for a head shot. The figure appeared to be of average height, perhaps a little shorter if American rather than Anatolian males were the standard of comparison. Its clothing was ordinary, trousers of a shade darker than the coat—both of them brown or taupe—and a cloth cap that lay beside the head. The features were regular and unusual only in having no facial hair. In Turkey, where a moustache was as much a part of a man’s accoutrements as a pack of cigarettes, that was mildly remarkable.

  There was a silvery chain and a medallion of some sort high up on the figure’s neck. The hand and overcoat sleeve entered the field of view to touch the bauble.

  The camera jumped a moment later, the lens panning a crazy arc of the walls and night sky as the cameraman’s heels slipped on the pavement. Doug’s right hand gripped his left as fiercely as if it belonged to someone else and was holding a weapon. Elaine was taut, watching Kelly until the veteran glanced at her.

  Kelly was affected only at a conscious level, touched by wonderment at the emotional reaction of the others to what was, after all, a fraud. TV trickery, makeup, and muddy camerawork to make the gimmickry less instantly patent. But it couldn’t frighten an adult, not somebody like Tom Kelly who knew that the real face of horror was human. . . .

  The camera steadied again, though it was six feet farther from the subject than before, and it was some moments before the cameraman thought to adjust his focus. Not makeup at all, thought Kelly, squinting. The “head” above the necklace was smaller than that of any human beyond the age of six, so whoever was responsible had used a dummy. . . . “Roll back and freeze it where he touches the necklace,” Kelly said.

  He expected the woman either to make excuses or ignore him. To his surprise, she reached over with the remote-control unit and said, “Go ahead, Mr. Kelly. Freeze any part of the film you choose to.”

  The veteran cued the tape back in three jerky stages, angry that he had not been paying enough attention to get to the point he wanted in two tries at worst. Neither Elaine’s stillness nor Doug’s outthrust chin disguised the fact that the pair was nervous; and this time the cause was not the very real one of Tom Kelly’s anger.

  The bland, human face, only partly hidden by the gloved hand reaching for the medallion. Then the hand jerked back and, in the instant before the startled cameraman jumped away also, Kelly was able to pause the VCR into as close an equivalent of freeze-frame as a television’s raster scanning could achieve.

  Somebody was pretty good. Kelly couldn’t see any sign of the transition, but what filled the screen now was nothing close to human.

  Not only was the head the size of a grapefruit, it had no apparent eyes. There was a mouth, though, a blue-lipped circular pit lined with te
eth hooked like blackberry thorns. The nose was a gash like that of a man Kelly had met in a village near Erzerum, his limbs and appendages eaten away by the final stages of leprosy. Either water droplets were creating an odd effect, or the surface of the dummy was scaly, and the scales divided at the midline of the face in a row of bony scutes.

  Kelly thumbed the Pause button and let the tape roll forward. When the camera achieved focus and steadiness again there was a somewhat clearer view of the alien visage, but nothing beyond what Kelly had already seen. “All right,” he said, “what happens next? The mothership comes down and vaporizes Diyarbakir? You know, I’d miss the place.”

  “There’s nothing more on the tape,” Elaine said shortly. The screen dissolved into diagonal static again as if it were ruled by her voice.

  Kelly tried to switch off the VCR. When his thumb touched the Eject button on the controller as well, the tape whirred and cycled itself halfway out of the feed slot. The veteran’s anger flared, though no one in the world but he knew the act was nervous clumsiness instead of deliberation. He was allowing himself to be spooked!

  “We need a Kurdish speaker,” Doug said with a toss of his head that seemed to clear a dark aura from his soul, “and we may need someone who was involved with Operation Birdlike—assuming Ayyubi wasn’t the only member of that group who’s gotten involved in this new business.”

  “Go home.” Kelly spoke flatly as he shook himself and set the remote unit back on Bianci’s desk. “Go home so I can lock up behind you and go home myself.” He rubbed his eyes with his left forearm. “Been a long day, been a long three years. I’m just not in a mood for government-issue bullshit any more.”

  “It’s not bullshit, Mr. Kelly,” the woman said as she watched him with the inscrutable eyes of a cat viewing a bird too big to be prey. “Earth has been visited by aliens—is being visited, we think. Men who you know have been in contact with them.”

  “Don’t you think,” Doug Blakeley interjected, “that it’s time the USG got involved instead of leaving things to barbs whose only link to the twentieth century is a machine gun?”

  Kelly turned toward the other man, prey indeed if he chose—as he did not. Doug was trash, the discussion was trash, and Elaine—

  Elaine stepped between the two men, close enough to Kelly that she had to tilt her face to meet his eyes. “He doesn’t matter, Mr. Kelly,” the black-haired woman said as if she had read the veteran’s mind. “This matters very much, if it’s true. You know it does.”

  “And you know a videotape doesn’t prove jack shit!” Kelly shouted, as if to drive her back by the violence of his reaction.

  “Then come look at the body itself, Kelly,” Elaine said with an acid precision. “If you’re man enough.”

  She would not back away from him and he would not face her glare, so Kelly spun on his heel to stare out at the reception area. “Figured you’d tell me that, ‘Gee, the Turkish police had it’—or maybe the plane bringing it back to the World had flown into a mountain.” Even five years after the last tour in the Lebanon, Kelly had the veterans’ trick of referring to the continental United States as “the World.”

  “The evidence—the body—is at Fort Meade,” said the woman behind him. “We have a car. We can have you there in forty minutes to examine it yourself.”

  “Are you doing a job on me, honey?” Kelly said as he turned again to face her. “Is this all a way to get me behind walls with no fuss ‘r bother?”

  “Oh, come now, Kelly,” said the blond man standing behind Elaine, arms akimbo. “Don’t you think you’re being overly dramatic?”

  There were only two things in the office which were not Congressman Bianci’s—or alive. Kelly stepped toward the VCR. Elaine, who thought he was trying to close with her companion, sidestepped quickly to block the veteran. She was wearing sequined flats rather than the high heels to be expected with the formality of her suit. The sensible footgear saved her from falling when Kelly’s shoulder slammed her back as remorselessly as a hundred and eighty pounds of brick in motion.

  Doug shouted something that began as a warning and ended in a squawk as his hands by reflex clasped the stumbling woman. Kelly bent, his back to the couple momentarily as he took the videotape from the VCR. The cassette was cool, its upper edge rough beneath his fingers. As Elaine’s hands touched Doug’s, in part for balance’s sake but also to restrain her companion as both stared at Kelly, the veteran pivoted and smashed the tape down on the aluminum attaché case.

  The impact did not scar the anodized surface of the Halliburton, but the polystyrene videocassette shattered with a sound like the spiral fracture of a shin bone.

  “Hey!” Doug shouted. Elaine’s hands clamped in earnest on those of the man behind her.

  Kelly slammed the cassette down again. The lower half of it disintegrated like a window breaking, spilling coils of half-inch tape along with the take-up sprocket. The veteran raised his right hand and opened it, letting the remainder of the cassette fall to the floor. Bits of black plastic clung to the sweat of his palm, and an inch-long shard had dug a bloody gouge into his flesh.

  Kelly grinned at the others with his hand still lifted like a caricature of a wooden Indian. “You know,” he said in a voice so light that only his eyes suggested what he was saying was the baldest truth, “I figured when I walked in here it was fair odds I’d kill you both. Guess I’ll go back to Meade with you instead—but no more jokes about me acting crazy, okay?”

  “You can call Representative Bianci and tell him where you’re going,” the woman said, twisting sinuously out of Doug’s arms and stepping to the side, her fingertips smoothing the lines of her skirt.

  “I’m doing this to me,” Kelly replied, dusting his palms together like a cymbals player to clear them. Sweat stung the open gash, and he felt like a damned fool; overdramatic just like the blond meathead had said. “I don’t want Carlo getting involved if it’s me being too dumb to keep my head down.”

  Doug massaged each wrist with the opposite hand, then knelt and began gathering up the tape and the larger bits of the cassette as well. Elaine said, “It might reassure him, you know.”

  “He’ll be happy enough if he doesn’t get a call from Housekeeping about the blood on ‘is upholstery,” the veteran said with a savage laugh. “Look, let’s get this over, okay? I said I was going, didn’t I?”

  The attaché case contained no files or papers of any sort, not even a manila envelope into which Doug could pour the remnants of the tape cassette, so they had to lie loose on the nylon-covered polyurethane foam instead. There was, however, a compact two-way radio in a fitted niche. The radio had no nameplate or manufacturer’s information on it, but neither was the unit a piece of government-issue hardware that Kelly recognized. Well, he’d been out—way out—for three years, and equipment was the least of what might change.

  The stub of the coiled whip antenna hobbled as Doug spoke into the radio, glaring unconsciously at Kelly as he did so. All data was useful somewhere, in some intelligence paradise—you couldn’t spend a big chunk of your life in Collection and not think so. But it was only reflex that made Kelly’s mind focus on the chance of hearing a one-time-only code word, and that no more than the means of summoning a car. Doug’s bridling was an empty reflex as well—and both reactions were complicated by the fact that each of the men had been top dog for a long time, in ways that had nothing to do with chains of command.

  Kelly was just loose enough at the moment to both recognize the situation and find it amusing. “Hey, junior,” he said to Doug as the radio crackled a muted, unintelligible reply, “I think you lost your place in the pecking order.”

  “Let’s go,” said Elaine in a neutral voice, waving Doug out the door ahead of her and falling in behind him—separating the men since she knew that Bianci’s aide must be last out of the office to lock up.

  The guard tonight at the side entrance of the Longworth Building was a heavy black woman. Kelly had seen and smiled at her a hu
ndred times over the years as she rummaged harmlessly through whatever briefcase he happened to be carrying. It wasn’t an effective way to defeat a serious attempt to blow up the building, but it didn’t hurt Kelly—who, even when he was on active duty, had not traveled with documents he minded other people inspecting. Today the guard drew back as she saw the trio approaching her post from down the corridor. “Good night, Ethel,” Kelly called, never too tired—or wired—to be pleasant to anybody with a dismal job like guard, refuse collector, or code clerk. This time Ethel only nodded back, her concentration preoccupied by Doug and the Halliburton he had carefully locked. There was no reason in the world not to have opened the case like a citizen when he entered the building. Instead, Doug had obviously flashed credentials that had piqued the curiosity of even a guard who saw the stream of visitors to members of the House of Representatives. It was the same sort of bass-ackwardness that caused CIA officers operating under embassy cover in foreign venues to be issued non-American cars. They could therefore be separated with eighty percent certainty from the real State Department personnel by anyone who bothered to check traffic through the embassy gates.

  “By the way,” Kelly goaded in a voice that echoed on the marble, “who do you work for? SAVE? Or are you Joint Chiefs Support Activity?”

  “You stupid bastard,” Doug snarled, twisting in midmotion to glare at the other man, his palm thumping on the door’s glass panel instead of the push bar.

  “Mr. Kelly,” said Elaine as she reached past her companion to thrust the door open, “you might consider whether in a worst-case scenario you wish to have involved a number of outsiders in this matter.” Her voice was clear but not loud, losing itself in the rush of outside air chilled by the shower that had been threatening all day.