by David Drake
Kelly turned sharply to stare at her profile. Her hair had fluffed during the drive, shading her cheeks, but she cocked her head enough toward the veteran to let him see her grin.
He smiled as well, releasing the catch of his seatbelt in order to shift the weapon in the hollow of his back. “I wouldn’t have, no sweat,” he said. “But yeah, sometimes it’s nice to know that endgame’s your choice, not some other bastard’s.”
Kelly was wondering idly at the facades of Central Washington buildings, lower and more interestingly variegated than those of most comparable cities, when the Volvo cut smoothly toward the curb. The veteran glanced from Elaine, thumbing the trunk-latch button on the console, and back with new interest to the hotel at which they had stopped. The ground level expanse was of curtained glass and glass doors printed with “The Madison” as tastefully as gold leaf can ever be. Despite the hour, a uniformed attendant was coming out almost simultaneously with the muffled pop of the trunk.
Elaine had her door open and was stepping into the street before Kelly could even start around the car to hand her out. “They’re gonna confiscate my shining armor, lady,” he called plaintively over the green roof.
“Get the case, Tom,” she replied as she pointed out the keys still in the ignition to the attendant, who slid behind the wheel.
The sound from above was unmistakable, but it was so unexpected in the present context that Kelly could not fully believe what he was hearing even after he paused to stare up into the darkness. “What the hell?” he said as Elaine walked back to him and glanced upward as well. “There’s a helicopter orbiting up there.”
The clop of rotor blades was syncopated by echoes from building fronts and the broad streets, but the whine of the turbine waxed and waned purely as a result of the attitude of the aircraft to the listeners below.
“Get the case,” Elaine repeated calmly. “It’s not us—not that they told me.” She shrugged and pursed her lips in a moue. “The President of Venezuela’s in town. He’s probably staying here.”
Kelly hefted out the black Halliburton in the trunk. The attaché case was not so much heavy in the abstract as it was disconcertingly heavier than the norm for things that looked like it. “I congratulate you on the excellence of your expense accounts, ah—” he said as he slammed the trunk, “Elaine.”
He followed the woman at a half step and to the side as they strode through the lobby, heeling really, as if he were a well-trained dog. Which was true enough, very true indeed, though he wasn’t sure just whose dog he was right at the moment. Not NSA’s, certainly not that of the bastards he’d just met at Meade, whatever their acronym turned out to be for the moment.
The hell of it was, the hell of it was, Tom Kelly probably still belonged to an abstraction called America which existed only in his mind. It didn’t bear much similarity to the US government; but he guessed that was as close as you came in the real world.
Fuckin’ A.
Elaine had fished a key from her purse as they walked between a quietly-comfortable lobby and the reception desk. She ignored the clerk as she strode toward the elevators, but Kelly noticed the man turned and spun his hand idly in the box that would have held messages for room 618. Kelly winked, and the clerk waved back with a broad grin.
The graveyard shift was boring as hell, even if you were pretty sure the other side had you targeted for a night assault.
Kelly entered the brass-doored elevator at the woman’s side and pushed the button for the sixth floor before she lifted her hand. “This isn’t the briefcase you had earlier?” he said, staring at his poker-faced reflection in the polished metal.
“No, it’s the one that stayed under guard in the car until we knew we’d want it,” Elaine said, eyeing the veteran sidelong with an expression resembling that of a squirrel in hunting season.
Keep ‘em off balance, Kelly thought as his expression of wide-eyed innocence looked back at him. Especially when you don’t know which end is up yourself.
Room 618 had a king-sized bed, a window that would show a fair swath of the city by daylight, and a Persian carpet which didn’t look like anything near the money Kelly knew its equivalent would cost in the shop in the lobby.
There was also a small refrigerator in one corner.
Kelly set the attaché case down on the writing desk and knelt beside the refrigerator. “Gimme the key,” he said, holding out his left hand behind him. When nothing slapped his palm, he turned and seated himself on one buttock on the edge of the desk.
Elaine stood with the thumb and index finger of either hand on the keys, the larger one for the door and the small one that unlocked the refrigerator which formed the room’s private bar. Her face was as blank as it would have been if construction workers had whistled at her from across a street.
“You’ve got no right to judge me, woman,” Kelly said. His right leg was flexed, and his hand gripped the raised knee in a pattern of tendons and veins. “No fucking right!” he shouted as if volume could release the pressure inside him or crack the marble calm of the woman who met his eyes.
“I have the job of judging you, Tom,” she said with no emphasis as she bent and handed the paired keys to him. “Shall I get a bucket of ice?”
“Naw, I’m not warm,” the veteran said, his throat clogged with residues of the emotion he hated himself for having let out. “Thanks.” He fitted the key into the lock and opened the little door. “I’m not warm, just thirsty. Anything for you?”
“Orange juice,” Elaine said as she rotated the three-dial combination of the attaché case. “Grapefruit, something citrus.”
At least, and for a wonder, it wasn’t Perrier—which Kelly had always found to taste like water from a well contaminated with acetylene. And at least she did not stare at what Kelly brought out for himself, a minibottle of Jack Daniel’s and a can of Lowenbrau.
“There’s a really good Pilsner beer in Turkey,” he said as he twisted a chair so that he could see both the woman and the files that she was beginning to place on the desk. “I got to like it.” He twisted the cap off the bottle of whiskey, took a sip, and washed the liquor down with a swallow of beer.
When Elaine still said nothing, the veteran prodded, “You’ve got a dead Kurd and a dead alien. And you’ve got me, until I drink myself into a stupor, hey? So why don’t we get to it?”
“I don’t like self-destructive people,” the woman said as she set the emptied case to the floor and sat at the other chair by the desk. “I like it even less when an exceptionally able person I have to work with seems bent on destroying himself. But I don’t like it when an airline manages to lose my luggage, either, and I’ve learned to live with that.”
Kelly finished the whiskey, his eyes meeting the woman’s. “My work gets done,” he said, wishing that his tone did not sound so defensive.
“And it’ll continue to get done,” Elaine responded coolly, “until one day it doesn’t. Which may mean that people get dead, or worse. But since it’s like the weather, something that can’t be helped, then we don’t need to talk about it any more,”
She wasn’t particularly tall, Kelly thought, but she looked just as frail as her black linen jacket, through which light showed every time the fabric fluffed away from her body. He felt like a pit bull facing a chihuahua which was smart enough to be afraid, but wasn’t for all that about to back down.
He got up, carrying the can of beer, and walked toward the bathroom. “What is it you think I can do for you?” he called over his shoulder, the phrasing carefully ambiguous. He poured the rest of his beer down the sink and ran water into the aluminum can.
Elaine, still seated, twisted to face him when he returned from the bathroom. “Your personal contacts with the Kurds are more likely to get you information about what’s going on than the formal information nets are. The fact that we’ve heard so little about something so major proves that there’s a problem.”
“What do you have?” Kelly asked, stretching himself out on his ba
ck on the carpet between the bed and the window. He set the can of water down beside him and cupped his hands beneath his skull as a pillow.
“Reports of men going off for military training,” the woman said. “Many of them men we’d had on the payroll ourselves during Birdlike.”
“Mohammed Ayyubi one of them?” Kelly asked from the floor. Rather than relaxing, he was bearing his weight on shoulders and heels with his belly muscles tensed in a flat arch. Elaine could not tell whether his eyes were closed or just slitted, watching her, and the effect was similar to that of being stalked in the darkness.
“No,” she said, “but he’d been closely associated with some of the people who disappeared. He was living in Istanbul, living well and without a job, you know? He’d make trips east and we think probably to Europe, though we were never able to trace him out of Turkey. Or even far in-country, except after the fact. Somebody would tell us that somebody’s wife had a lot of money, now, and her husband had gone off with Mohammed Ayyubi, in a new struggle for Free Kurdistan. That sort of thing.”
Kelly rolled onto his side, facing Elaine, and took a deep draft of water from his can. “Haven’t found much use for hotel glasses but to stick your toothbrush in,” he said with a disarming grin. “The .22 Shorts of the container world.” Without changing expression, he went on, “What do they say when they come back, Elaine? Who’s training them?”
“Russia, we thought,” the woman said. She shifted on her chair, crossing her right thigh over the left and angrily aware that there was no normal etiquette for discussions with a man who lay at one’s feet. “Now, of course, we’re not sure. And none of the—recruits we’ve targeted seem to have come back, on leave or whatever, though their families get sizable remittances in hard currency, not lire.”
“You’ve tried to get people close to Mohammed before now,” Kelly said, his flat tone begging the question. “I don’t think money’d do much to turn his head if he’s—he was—convinced somebody was offering a real chance for Kurdish independence . . . but you people’d think money was the ticket, wouldn’t you? What’d he say?”
There was nothing lithe about the man sprawled on the carpet, Elaine thought. He was as close-coupled as a brick, built like a male lion—and with all the arrogance of the male lion’s strength and willingness to kill his own kind.
“We don’t know,” she said carefully. “There was a car bomb explosion—in Diyarbakir—the day before the shooting. Three people were killed, two of them as they came out of the hotel in which they were to have met Ayyubi. We don’t know whether they did or not, or what was said.”
“Hardball, aren’t we?” said the veteran in a very soft voice to the beer can. He held it between thumb and middle finger, at the top where the braced crimp in the cylinder would have made it impossible for even Godzilla to crush the can with two fingers. The mottled skin and the way the tendons stood out proved that Kelly was trying, though, or at least spending in isometrics an emotional charge that would otherwise have broken something. “Amcits, I suppose?”
“Our personnel were American citizens, yes,” Elaine said. “They were assigned TDY to the missile tracking station at Pirinclik, just out of town.”
“NSA’s being cooperative after all.” Kelly put the can down again. His eyes, as calm as they ever had been, were back on hers. Elaine had read enough between the lines of the psych profiles in the veteran’s file to know that he really didn’t have as short a fuse as he projected under stress. The anger was there, but there was a level of control that could handle almost anything.
The flip side of that, and the thing that made him so much more dangerous than a man who simply lost his temper, was that Kelly did not go out of control when he chose to act.
People were entering the room next door, jostling and cursing as more than one husky man tried to get through a narrow hotel doorway at the same time. Kelly grinned and thumbed toward the common wall. “The cavalry’s arrived,” he said. “You can breathe normally again.”
Elaine scowled, realizing that she was just as tense as the words implied—not that the arrival of the team from the follow-car would change anything to her benefit if the shit really hit the fan. She stretched in her chair, twining her fingers behind her neck and, elbows flared, arching her chest forward.
Nothing in the file indicated whether Kelly was a leg man or a breast man.
“You know,” he was saying, “you’re a hell of a driver.”
She relaxed her body and said, “For a girl.”
“Goddam,” said Kelly as he twisted to his feet and walked toward the bathroom with the can emptied now of water. “You know, I hadn’t noticed that.”
His delivery was so deadpan that the woman’s mouth opened in shocked amazement—replaced by a flush by the time he returned with more water and a broad smile at how effectively he had gotten through her professional facade.
“They’re not going to talk to me either, you know?” the stocky man said as he seated himself normally on the chair beside Elaine’s. “Some folks I worked with might remember me, sure. But I was US, just as sure as the boys who got blown away the other day. Free Kurdistan is a lot more important to—to somebody like Mohammed—than any personal chips I could call in.”
“Word of how you terminated from the service got around very quickly when you didn’t return from leave,” Elaine said. Her voice had never lost its even tenor, and her mind was fully back to business as well. “Around the personnel of Operation Birdlike. Even though there was an attempt to stop it or at least replace the”—she smiled—“truth with rumors less embarrassing to the USG.
“Since the indigs—the Kurds—were Muslims and strongly religious, the fact that you’d dynamited the government of Israel did you no harm with the men you’d been training. And they’re quite convinced that you aren’t—won’t ever be again—an agent of the United States.”
Elaine paused. Then she added, “Besides, I think you underestimate the level of personal loyalty that some of your troops felt toward you. It was a matter of some concern during the interval between the time you—terminated and Birdlike was wrapped up.”
“You wouldn’t believe,” said Kelly to his hands flat on the desk, “how many people’d follow you to hell if you’re willing to lead ‘em there. We got thirty-seven MiGs in their revetments at Tekret the one night.”
He looked up and his voice trembled with remembered emotion. “The whole sky was orange from ten klicks away. Just like fuckin’ sunrise. . . .”
Kelly stood abruptly and turned away. “Shit,” he snarled. “Don’t fuckin’ do this to me, okay?”
“The only reason,” Elaine said softly, “that we’d ask you to use the people you know is that it might take too long to reopen normal channels. We don’t know how long we have before the—apparent hostiles—execute whatever plan they have in progress.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Elaine,” he said as his hands clenched and the muscles of his shoulders hunched up like a weight lifter’s. He faced her again and went on deliberately, “You wouldn’t be where you are if you had a problem with asking your grandma to penetrate massage parlors. You sure as hell don’t have a problem with askin’ me to burn people who trust me.”
“I’ve got a problem with wasting my time,” she said calmly, leaning back to look up at the angry man. She uncrossed her legs. “I wouldn’t waste time asking you to do something you wouldn’t do with a gun to your head. This one’s necessary, you know it isyou know that whatever your friends may think, nobody’s coming to Earth from another planet to set up an independent Kurdistan! Don’t you?”
“Well, there’s that,” Kelly agreed with a sigh. He sat down again on a corner of the bed. “How many recruits are we talking about? Kurds, I mean.” He was studying the backs of his hands with a frowning interest that would have been justified for a fat envelope with a Dublin postmark.
“About twenty that we’re pretty sure of,” Elaine said, genuinely relaxing again. She gestured toward th
e files with red-bordered cover sheets, which she had spread on the desk. “It’s here, what we have. Certainly we’ve got only the tip of the iceberg—but at worst we’re not talking about—” She smiled; it made a different person of her, emphasizing the pleasant fullness of her cheeks and adding a touch of naughtiness to features which otherwise suggested wickedness of a thoroughly professional kind.
“—a land war in Asia,” she concluded.
“I’m not subtle, you know,” Kelly said. “If I go in, I’ll make a lotta waves. If I think it’s the best way to learn what’s going on, I’ll tell people every goddam thing I know. And if it gets rough, it’s likely to get real rough.”
“Slash and burn data collection,” the woman said with a grimace, though not a particularly angry one. She shrugged. “The more waves you make,” she went on, “the more likely it is that the wheels come off before you—or we—learn anything useful. But there isn’t a lot of time, and the people who picked you for this operation had seen your profiles too.”
“Goddam, goddam, goddam,” the veteran said without heat as he lay back on the white bedspread and began to knuckle his eyes. His feet were still flat on the floor. “It’s going to take me a while to get my own stuff on track. Maybe a week. Couple—three days at least.”
“You won’t need a cover identity,” Elaine said. Because Kelly’s eyes were closed, it was only in his mind that he saw her face blank into an expression of professional neutrality. “Your job with Congressman Bianci has taken you out of the country in the past, and—”
“No,” Kelly said. He neither snapped nor raised his voice, but there was nothing in the way he spoke that admitted of argument. “Carlo doesn’t get involved in this.”
“The congressman will agree without question, Tom,” Elaine said in a reasonable tone. “I don’t mean we’d put pressure on him—you can clear it with him yourself. He’s a, well, a patriot, and if you tell him you’re convinced yourself that it’s a matter of national security then—”
