by David Drake
“Stop,” said Kelly. He had taken his hands away from his eyes, but he continued to look at the ceiling, and it was toward the ceiling that he spoke in a voice as cold and flat as the work-face of a broadax: “Carlo hired me to keep him out of shit. He doesn’t get into this bucket if he swears on a stack a’ Bibles he wants to.”
Kelly paused, for breath rather than for rhetorical effect. “I’ll go in as a civilian tech advisor, Boeing or RCA, that sorta thing. There must be a couple thousand Amcits like that. Pick one with the right build who’s rotating home and make me up a passport. God knows you can square it with Boeing. I may be carrying some electronics, so make that reasonable enough for Customs.”
Elaine did not even consider arguing the Bianci matter again. “Check,” she said. “Though there’s no need for you to carry things in country yourself.”
“There’s no need for me to carry a lucky charm,” said Kelly, shifting his weight a little, though the mattress was too soft to make more than a mild discomfort of the weapon in the hollow of his spine, “but if it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it.
“Besides . . .” As he spoke the planes of his face changed, tiny muscles reacting to mental tension. “I want to keep clear of whatever you’ve got on the ground already. I for damn sure don’t want to be showing up at the US Mission to collect my mail.”
“If you need something in a hurry and it isn’t pre-positioned,” the woman warned, “the chances are it’ll have to come in by pouch.”
“If I ask you for something, it’s my lookout,” the veteran said as he sat up and met Elaine’s eyes. “But don’t hold your breath, because, because I’d rather call in favors of my own than trust”—The woman smiled, and perhaps for that reason Kelly softened the remainder of his sentence to—“people who don’t owe me.”
He stood up again, stretched his arms behind him as the woman watched in silence, and went on. “What I want from you people is to be tasked and left the fuck alone. Don’t ask me for sitreps, don’t try to help, and for God’s sake, don’t get in my way.”
“You expect too much,” Elaine said calmly.
“I expect to be fucked around to the point I can’t work,” Kelly answered in a harsh whisper, “and then I expect to pack up and go home. That’s what I expect.”
“You’ll have a case officer,” Elaine replied as if there had been no threat. “Me, unless you prefer otherwise. And there’ll be support available in country. If you don’t need it, that’s fine, but throwing a tantrum doesn’t give you the right to flout common sense. Mine. But nobody’s going to hamper your activities, Tom.”
Kelly smiled broadly and rubbed the heavy black stubble on his chin. “Well, that’s something for the relationship,” he said mildly. “You tell the lies you gotta, but it seems you stop there. Hell, maybe this thing’s going to work.”
He stepped over to the desk and riffled one of the files there. “Look,” he said, “go off to your friends or wherever”—he gestured toward the partition wall behind him—“for however long it takes me to read in. It’ll go quicker if I’m alone in the room.” He didn’t bother to add that he wasn’t going to try to leave.
Elaine nodded, stood up, and walked toward the door. She paused just short of it and said, with her back toward Kelly and the well-stocked refrigerator, “Would you like some coffee from room service before you start?”
“Don’t press your luck, Elaine,” the veteran said in the glass-edged whisper again.
She turned, wearing her professional smile again. “And don’t press yours, Tom,” she said. “Don’t pretend, even to yourself, that you can walk out on this now that you’re in.”
Kelly laughed. “Hey,” he said with a cheerful lilt, “who greased Mohammed?”
“We presume,” Elaine replied in a neutral voice from a neutral face, “that the car bomb and the shootings were the work of the same parties. Either the aliens or their agents made an error, or there are third parties already involved in the matter.
“Good night, Tom.”
The brass bolt and wards clacked with finality as Kelly’s case officer drew the door shut behind her.
It had been a long night. Around the edges of the rubber-backed outer drapes, saffron dawn was heralding what would probably be a long day. The veteran sighed, set the chain bolt behind Elaine Tuttle, and got to work.
There was a telephone on the bedside table and another extension, weatherized like a pay phone, on the wall of the bathroom. Kelly unplugged the modular jack from the base unit of each phone. He was too tired to trust his judgment, though his intellect floated in something approaching a dream state, functioning with effortless precision in collating information. By allowing habit to take over, Kelly could for the time avoid the errors of judgment he was sure to make if he tried to think things out.
There were a lot of ways to bug a room. Some of the simplest involved modifying the telephone to act at need as a listening device. A fix for the problem was a small, battery-powered fluorescent light. When it was turned on and set near the phone, the radio-frequency hash which its oscillators made in raising the voltage to necessary levels completely flooded the circuitry of most bugs. Unplugging the phone was even more effective, though no one could call in or out while the unit was disconnected, Kelly didn’t need the phone, so that didn’t matter.
Of course, no sound he was going to make in room 618 mattered either—but it was habit, and it wasn’t going to hurt either.
Kelly unplugged the television set next to the refrigerator and then wiggled loose the bayonet connector of the coax to the hotel’s common antenna. Lord! how people worried about bugging—some of them with more reason than others—and how rarely any of them hesitated to have cable TV installed. There is a perfect reciprocity in many aspects of electricity and magnetism: if you reverse cause and effect, the system still works. As a practical matter here, that meant that the television speaker also acted as a microphone monitoring every sound in the hotel room—and that the data was available for pick-off through the antenna connection or, with more difficulty, through the hotel’s power circuitry.
“If they want to know what I’m doing, they can damn well ask me,” the veteran said as he straightened.
The key ring clinked against the face of the refrigerator as his knee bumped it. Kelly looked down. For a moment, the unobtrusive appliance was the only thing in his mind—or in the universe. It had been a long time since the whiskey, a bloody long time.
“You’re too goddam smart for your own good, woman,” Kelly muttered; his palms were sweating. “Too smart for mine for sure.”
The hell of it was, she didn’t think he couldn’t stop drinking, she thought he could. She was right, of course; Tom Kelly could do any goddam thing he set his mind to . . . but why he cared about disappointing some bitch he’d just met, some hard-edged pro who’d spend him like a bullet, that part of his mind was beyond his own understanding.
Coffee’d do for now.
Kelly tossed his jacket on the bed, then went over to his own zippered, limp-leather briefcase to remove the small jar of instant coffee and the immersion heater. He looked at the beer can and grimaced. He could cut the top off to insert the heater, but that would leave a jagged edge, and a thin aluminum can wasn’t a sensible man’s choice for drinking hot liquids.
A few ounces of coffee at a time was better than none. He needed fluids to sip while he worked, and if coffee was the choice this time—there were four glasses in the bathroom; he filled them all, brought them to the writing desk where he dusted them with instant coffee, and inserted the immersion heater in the first.
Next, from his briefcase, Kelly took a radio rather smaller than a hardcover book. It was an off-the-shelf Sony 2002, and for less than $300 it would pick up AM, FM, and short wave signals with an efficiency NSA would have spent $15,000 a copy to duplicate a few years before.
Hell, governments being what they are, NSA was probably still paying fifteen grand for similar packages.
&n
bsp; The little world-band radio ran either from batteries or from an AC/DC converter; but the latter caused a hum on shortwave, and batteries—unlike public power grids—were the same voltage worldwide. Sound in the background, even if it was no more than the hiss of static, was as necessary to Kelly’s study habits as something beside him to drink. He used the scanner to pick up an FM station, classical music, something he had last heard on Radio Sophia when he was a long fucking way from the United States.
Funny. Music cared less about time and nationalities than just about anything except stones. Of course, politicians were pretty similar worldwide, too. As were spies.
Tom Kelly unplugged the immersion heater. There was one final preliminary to getting comfortable. He drew the snub-nosed revolver nestled at the small of his back and set it on the desk beside the bubbling glass of coffee.
The exposed metal of the weapon had been sandblasted and anodized an unattractive dull gray about the color of phosphate-protected steel. There was a line of wear around the cylinder where the registration lug rubbed, but the weapon had actually been fired only a handful of times in the thirty-five years since its manufacture.
A patch of Velcro—hook-side—had been epoxied to the right side of the barrel just ahead of the five-shot cylinder, and there was a corresponding patch of Velcro fuzz sewn at the back of the waistband of every pair of pants Kelly owned. There were a lot of circumstances in which a holster was slower to ditch than the gun itself. The Velcro was unobtrusive, added neither bulk nor weight, and was actually more secure than the usual belt-clip holster.
Apart from its finish and the nylon hooks, the revolver looked like a standard Smith and Wesson Chiefs Special, the choice of tens of thousands of people who wanted the punch of a .38 Special cartridge in a small, reliable package. Kelly’s gun was something more than that. Though it was dimensionally identical to the ordinary version, the only steel in the weapon was the slight amount in the lockwork: frame, cylinder, and barrel had all been forged from aluminum in response to an Air Force request for the lightest possible revolver to equip pilots who came down behind enemy lines. Almost the entire run had been melted down shortly thereafter, when the decision was countermanded; but not quite all.
Tom Kelly didn’t care that the gun weighed ten ounces empty instead of the steel version’s nineteen. He cared very much that its magnetic signature was so low that it would not show up on airport magnetometers unless they were set low enough to trip on three or four dimes in a pocket as well.
The ammunition Kelly had handloaded for the revolver was also nonstandard, though the components were off-the-shelf items. He’d used commercial 148-grain wadcutter bullets, swaged from pure lead instead of being cast with an alloy to harden them, ahead of three grains of Bullseye, a powder fast enough to burn almost completely within the snubbie’s short barrel. The bullets were formed with a hollow base, a deep cavity meant to be upset against the rifling grooves by the powder gases in the manner of a Civil War minié ball. Kelly had loaded them back to front, and the deep cup had expanded the soft metal very efficiently in a gelatine target despite the relatively low velocity of the bullet on impact.
Keeping pressures within levels that a cartridge-company engineer would have found acceptable in 1920 had been the bottom line for the load. The all-aluminum revolvers had been tested by the Air Force with ordinary ammunition and with blue pills—proof loads developing forty percent greater pressure than normal. There was no reason to believe that in the ensuing thirty-five years the metal would have work-hardened into a state that made it more likely to rupture.
Still, better safe than sorry. . . . Kelly wasn’t particularly worried about being hurt if the revolver blew up—the person holding a handgun at arm’s length is the one least likely to be harmed if the chamber bursts. He was very much concerned that in a crisis so severe that he had to use the weapon, it would fail and give him one shot when he desperately counted on having five.
The master sergeant who’d sold him the gun at Wheelus had said that no government was going to put an unsafe weapon in the hands of its troops. That would have been more confidence-building if Kelly hadn’t seen the USG issue a tactical nuke, the Davy Crockett, with a fallout radius greater than the range of the launcher. Not that anybody’d explained that at the time to the Marines who were expected to fry themselves with the thing.
For the remainder of the morning, the veteran read files and made plans. He had two bars of Bendicks chocolate, the Military and Sportsmen’s blend, in his briefcase. They did little to quell the roiling of coffee and fatigue in his stomach, but the caffeine in the dose of fifty-seven percent pure chocolate did its own share of good.
The files were a maze, reports pared to the bone and beyond, filled with agent designators which could be collated with real names only through separate documents. There had been no evident attempt to censor what Kelly was being given: his own name appeared in one report as the source of a case of M14 rifles said to have been received by another Kurd who had disappeared shortly thereafter. Kelly remembered the agent from Operation Birdlike and was amused to note that the man’s present reporting officer classed him as “generally reliable.” Kelly wouldn’t have taken the fellow’s word for whether the sun rose in the east.
And that was the problem with most of the information: the three agents among the Kurdish community whom Kelly did know were venal, cowardly, and thoroughly untrustworthy. Results suggested that the remainder of the reports were from similar trash, men and women who had, at best, secondhand information on whatever Mohammed Ayyubi was involved in. Had been involved in, until somebody shot him and a monster dead on a rain-sodden street.
The files covered approximately the past year. There was nothing in them regarding aliens, and for all but the past two months they were concerned solely with the normal collection from a nationalist movement: money and arms; smuggling and training camps; foreign contacts in general and the dark suggestions of Russian involvement certain to show up in reports approved by American station chiefs.
Not that the KGB and other Russians paid to meddle in Third World problems were any less likely to be doing so than their US counterparts.
There was a change in March which was so abrupt that it must have resulted from a change in emphasis at client level—the members of the US government who received the information—rather than a watershed in what the agents themselves chose to send in. Suddenly Kurds were making UFO reports which would have been right at home in small-town papers throughout America.
There were no, thank God, conversations with little green men, although one case officer had sent a number of reports of angelic revelations before somebody further up the line had rapped his knuckles. There were airplanes that flew straight up, huge cylinders with lighted windows along their sides, and a score of other shapes and styles. Some reports referred to incidents as much as thirty years in the past, proving to a certainty that the sudden spate of reports was only a result of tasking.
In general, the only similarities between objects sighted occurred when two or more reports were made by the same agent. There was a single exception: disks twenty meters in diameter which lifted silently, wrapped in auroral splendor—from locations separated by a hundred miles, and with no duplication in the chain of data. That could mean something; and certainly there was something to be learned; the dead alien proved that. But even if one or all of the reports were true, they were garbage which did absolutely nothing to indicate what was really going on.
And that was all there was. No wonder Pierrard and his crew were willing to try a card as wild as Tom Kelly.
A thing with a mouth like a lamprey, and a couple dozen—maybe a few hundred—Kurds whose families thought they were going off to be armed and trained in the cause of Kurdish nationalism. Well, the connection would be obvious just as soon as Kelly learned what it was.
When the files were stacked neatly again on the top of the desk, the veteran walked to the bathroom. The toothbrush and t
oothpaste from his briefcase, and the hot shower that he let play over him helped but could not wholly remove the foulness throughout his system. Fear and anger and fatigue, but most especially fear, leave their hormonal spoor on a man.
Kelly looked at himself in the fogged mirror when he stepped out of the shower, but that was another mistake. His outline was intact, but the condensate on the glass turned his hundred and eighty pounds, tank-solid and scarred with experience, into a wistful ghost. He was crazy to get back into this; aliens or no, none of it would matter when he was dead.
But death would come regardless.
He lay down on the bed, his skin warm with the harsh toweling he had just given it. He’d have them book him into the Sheraton in a room facing the Golden Horn. He’d treat it as a perk—they understood perks, these folk in suits they never saw the bills for, and no eyebrows would lift because Kelly wanted a room in the most expensive hotel in Istanbul. They would understand the implied test, also, the precise instructions which they could either carry out or not—and the implications if they did not or even chose to argue.
And because they understood both those things, they would not foresee their agent’s—“their agent’s”—real reason for wanting a room just there.
He needed to talk to people after he shook free from the box Elaine would try to put around him no matter what she said. There were folks who owed him, though the good ones didn’t keep score any more than Kelly did himself. Individuals, unlike nations, were capable of keeping faith.
For now, however, what he needed most of all was sleep. He closed his eyes, and sleep came with the fireshot dreams Kelly had expected. But the dreams changed, and by the time he awakened at twilight he could remember nothing but moving figures and black walls that reached toward heaven.
Airport terminals have certain worldwide similarities, but Istanbul’s had more in common with the military portion of Beirut Airport than with any civilian structure Kelly’d walked through. Luggage from the Pan Am flight that had just landed was arrayed on a single long, low table in the center of a hangar converted for baggage examination.
