by David Drake
They crossed the Golden Horn on the Ataturk Bridge, early enough to miss the worst of the northbound traffic—tourists returning to the big luxury hotels in the Pera, and returning with them many of the personnel who had been catering to them among the ancient beauties of the Old City. Istanbul still had heavy industries, but there had been virtually no new development here since World War II. Only the tourists offered to preserve the city from sinking back into the state of somnolent ruin to which it had been reduced by the time the Ottoman Turks conquered it in 1453.
Elaine hadn’t used the long drive to pump him, which was just as well since the Porsche was too small a box for the hostility that would have resulted. Such of his plans as she didn’t know were things he hoped she wouldn’t learn, and the reality of what he was to do faded as the time for execution approached. It was hard to believe that he was really back in Turkey; and the notion that he was here to track down aliens with too many bones and far too many teeth in their circular mouths was as absurd as it would have been the day before he saw the dead thing.
“Doesn’t really matter if I believe any of it, does it?” Kelly said as Elaine swung the car around the rank of cabs waiting to load at the entrance of the Sheraton. “Just so long as I do my job.”
He had spoken as much to himself as to Elaine, but the woman raised an eyebrow over her smile and replied, “Are you going to have difficulty working under those conditions?”
Before Kelly answered, she stopped the Porsche and handed the keys to the attendant, who had scurried in a failed attempt to open the door for her, “It might be as well,” she said over her shoulder as Kelly too got out of the car, “if you carried the suitcase yourself. There’ll be people waiting in the room.”
“There’s no difficulty,” the veteran said as he tugged out the big case. “I spent years without thinking any of the people giving me orders knew what the hell they were doing. Doubting that I do’s something of a pleasant change.”
They took the elevators from the ground-floor service area. Kelly noted with amusement that Elaine waited a moment, watching him from the corner of her eye, before she touched the button for the seventh floor. Kelly grinned broadly at her, letting her wonder whether or not he knew which floor their rooms were on this time.
He didn’t want to talk business with Elaine, and he didn’t have anything but business—one way or the other—to talk with her. Unless—and he looked toward the ceiling of the elevator—he asked the question to which his mind kept returning, whether or not she ever wore a bra. His smile, carefully directed away from anything human, became innocence. A question like that struck him as a pretty good way to get his hand bitten off to the elbow, which would complicate his job a lot. . . .
“A penny for your thoughts,” Elaine said, her voice more guarded than the words.
Kelly shrugged and faced her, the bulk of the suitcase on the floor between them. “Just thinking that maybe my first priority was to get my ashes hauled,” he said, “so it doesn’t get in the way.”
She laughed as the elevator cage quivered to a halt. “Are you asking for a list of addresses,” she said, “or would you just like the equipment delivered to your room?” She pointed down the hall, her arm a shadow within the puffy translucence of her sleeve. “Seven-twenty-five.”
“Naw, no problem,” the stocky man said. He wasn’t embarrassed—cribs in the Anti-Lebanon had been ponchos pegged into three-sided windbreaks, which pretty well blasted the notion of sex being a private affair. It was useful to note that his case officer wasn’t embarrassed either.
“Well, it wouldn’t be a problem, you know,” Elaine said cheerfully as she, a pace ahead of Kelly, stopped at a door and tapped on it. “All part of the unobtrusive luxury service you’ve been promised.”
“Unobtrusive will do just fine,” Kelly replied. Doug Blakeley opened the door with a frozen scowl on his face. There were two other men within the room carrying radio-detection equipment. One of them was smoking a cigarette.
“You’ve met Doug,” Elaine said as she entered 725, moving Blakeley back away from the door by stepping unnecessarily close to him—giving Kelly and the suitcase room without need for the macho games of which both men were capable. “George”—she pointed to the fat, balding man with the tone generator—“and Christophe,” she indicated the pale, almost tubercular smoker who wore headphones connected to the wide-band receiver slung from his right shoulder.
“Christophe, put the cigarette out in the toilet and flush it,” Elaine continued. She kept her voice as neutral as if she were commenting on the view, being very careful not to raise the emotional temperature. “And where’s Peter?”
“What’s the matter with the cigarette?” demanded Christophe, taking the half-smoked cylinder out of his mouth to examine it rather than to obey. His English was accented, but it appeared to be German—Flemish?—rather than the French Kelly had expected.
“He’s next door in your room,” Doug was saying. “I thought we’d sweep his first, before we did yours.”
The tone generator which George carried put out a known signal which would trip sound-activated bugs and cause them to broadcast. Christophe swept up and down as much of the electromagnetic spectrum as his receiver covered, unless and until he picked up the tone signal in his earphones. At that point, George could lower the intensity of the generator and move it around the room until the bug was physically located.
If the bugging device was combined directly with a tape recorder, then there was no signal to pick up on the receiver—but that sort of installation required that someone enter the room at regular intervals to change tapes, and it very considerably increased the bulk of the bugging unit. Similarly, a hardwired bug was possible but impractical in a hotel room like this because of the holes that had to be drilled through walls between the bug and the listening post. No sweep could be perfect, but this team appeared to know what it was doing—especially if the piece of hardware in a separate case by the door was the spectrum analyzer Kelly assumed it was.
“Christophe, when you get an order from me you do it,” Elaine said in a deadly voice to the man at least a foot taller than she was.
Kelly walked over to the window, smiling, leaving behind him the suitcase and the incident developing in the room.
There was more to the woman’s reaction than her authority, though there was that too. She’d picked up on the way Kelly felt about cigarette smoke—surely that wasn’t in his psychiatric profile—and she had a not unreasonable concern that the veteran would use that as the excuse to void his grudging acquiescence to the wishes of a government he hated.
Hell, nobody’d twisted Kelly’s arm; he was a big boy. He’d go through with the deal, whatever that meant and whatever roadblocks his superiors threw in his way.
But it didn’t hurt to keep ‘em nervous.
The window had a nice view of Taksim Square and the Monument of the Republic. The square served for major ceremonies and public gatherings because there was nothing of suitable size in the Old City. The Golden Horn, to the south, was invisible beyond the buildings of the Pera District, and the skyline was dominated by the twenty-story tower of a nearby hotel—the ETAP Marmar, the city’s tallest building. Rooms on this side of the Sheraton were considerably cheaper than those with a view of the Bosphorus, but Kelly did find it pleasant to look out at the trees of Taksim Park—probably the only place in Istanbul that contained so much greenery.
Not that his choice of a room had anything to do with that aspect of the view.
Kelly turned. The exchange between Elaine and now both members of the sweep team had continued. Christophe’s cigarette had burned almost to his fingers and scattered a lump of ash as he gestured with it.
“Goddammit, Christophe,” Doug said sharply with his arms akimbo. “Put out the cigarette!”
The man with his headphones now loosely clasping his neck scurried to comply.
Kelly could afford to smile sardonically at Elaine’s slim, tense b
ack. And these were Europeans, not Arabs or even Moslems. Female officers must have a really great time working with locally-recruited teams. . . .
“Tell you what,” said Kelly, “let’s all just go next door, shall we?” He offered a clown’s broad smile, keeping his lips tight. “That way the boys can do whatever they need to do there. And from now on, just for fun, let’s not you or anybody you know come into 725, unless I invite him, huh?”
Doug started to bridle, but before he could reply Elaine said tiredly, “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea to me too.” She looked at Christophe returning from the bathroom, and added, “And when they’ve swept my room, Doug, I don’t want to see them again myself till you’re told different.”
Nobody moved for a moment. Then Doug snapped, “Well, why aren’t you packing your gear, dammit?” George and Christophe eyed one another as they obeyed, but they obeyed the blond man without question.
There was no door through the partition wall between rooms 725 and 727, but neither was there anyone in the hall to watch the four men and the woman—forming almost as many subgroups as there were individuals—traipse from one room to the other. The gray fiberglass cases holding the debugging equipment were not standard luggage, but neither did they hint that they contained more than expensive cameras.
George tapped on the door of 727. As Peter opened it, Elaine said to Doug, “Give him his own room key now.”
“Eh?”
Peter was black haired and heavily moustached, a very solid-looking man and younger than the sweep team. Kelly gave him a cautious once-over. There was no obvious reason why, but Kelly’s gut wouldn’t have let him keep Peter in a unit he commanded. Now he gave the man a friendly smile as they passed in the doorway.
“Give Tom the key to seven-two-five, I said,” Elaine snapped.
Doug reached into the side pocket of his suitcoat, which sagged, Kelly had guessed, with the weight of a spare magazine. That guess had been wrong: the key which Doug handed him was attachéd to a brass bar rather than a tag or thin plate. Guests were intended to leave their room keys at the desk when they went out, and the management did what it could to make that easy to remember.
The sweep team was already unpacking its equipment, though Christophe paused to light another cigarette first. George got out what was indeed a spectrum analyzer and began walking around the room with it, staring at the peaks and valleys on its cathode ray tube display. His partner waited to rezero his own equipment because the oscillators in Christophe’s wide-band receiver would themselves affect the electromagnetic spectrum within the room.
The view from Elaine’s window was practically the same as that of Kelly’s, something the veteran had counted on without being able to influence. So far, so good. Both rooms were of luxury hotel standards common across the portions of the world which served tourists. The spread of the double bed was a brocade of rich blue which clashed badly with the dress Elaine was wearing but matched the upholstery of the love seat facing the window.
Kelly sat down on the loveseat and spread his arms across the back, his big scarred hands dangling to either side. Peter watched him with a flat expression that Kelly recognized: the look that said the mind behind it was considering endgame in the most final and physical sense of the term, just to be ready when the time came.
“We have a car for you,” Elaine said. The light through the window behind her silhouetted her body against a sky that otherwise held from Kelly’s perspective only the upper stories of the ETAP Marmar.
“I don’t need a car,” the veteran said. “What I need is a cup of coffee, black; and I think it’d be real nice if you sent Peter down to get it”—he nodded toward the younger man, so nearly a physical double for Kelly himself—“instead of waiting for room service to bring it up.”
The woman looked sharply at Kelly. Then she turned her head slightly in Peter’s direction and said, “Yes, all right, get it. Get two. Anyone else?”
“Yeah, for God’s sake, bring up six coffees and be done with it,” said Doug to his subordinate. Then, proving that he had better judgment than Kelly would have credited him before, Doug added, “And don’t argue about it, just do like you’re paid to, take orders.”
Peter frowned, but he left the room without the objection that would have really lit Elaine’s fuse.
When the door closed she went on, “This is a Ford Anadol, like a million others in Turkey, Tom. You’ll need transportation.”
“I’ll take taxis,” he replied. He gestured to the door. “You know,” he went on, “that one, your Peter, he could really get on my nerves in a hurry. I’m not gonna shout and scream about this, but if I see him again after he brings up the coffee, I go home. This time it’s no shit.”
Doug looked from Elaine to Kelly in genuine puzzlement. Elaine nodded and said, “All right, we’ll see what we can do.” She cleared her throat. “It’s absurd for you to trust taxis to be where you need them. We can give you a driver, if you like.”
It’d be absurd to accept a car with the array of tracking beacons that anything she’d provide would have, Kelly thought. Aloud he said, “I’m a tourist, I take cabs. When I change my mind, I’ll let you know.”
The sweep team had moved into the bathroom. The receiver in the spectrum analyzer was of lower sensitivity than the one Christophe used to listen for the tone they would generate in a few minutes. In order to pick up a hump on the display, which was the low-powered signal of a bug, the unit needed to be fairly close to the transmitter. “What’s the bandwidth on that thing?” Kelly asked, nodding toward the bathroom.
“What?” said Doug. Elaine decided not to argue further about the car. Both of them followed Kelly’s nod toward the bathroom.
Kelly slipped the cavity resonator, a three-inch metal tube with a nine-inch antenna of flexible wire, between the back and the cushion of the loveseat. “I mean, what range in megahertz does the display cover? Eighty to three hundred? More?”
“I can’t imagine, but you can look for yourself if you feel you must,” the woman said in exasperation.
“That all we need to cover?” Kelly said, no more relaxed than he had been a moment before. “The car, I mean? Because if it—”
“There’s money,” Elaine said, lifting a Halliburton from the floor to the bed and opening it, “though you can always say you don’t need that either.”
“I don’t,” the veteran agreed, “but I’ll take what’s going.” Hard to tell whether the asperity in Elaine’s voice was fatigue, the difficulty in getting subordinates to take orders from a woman, or simply Kelly’s own arrogance. Probably a combination of the three; and probably things weren’t going to improve for the duration, because none of those factors were likely to change for the better.
Elaine tossed a fat, banded packet of Turkish lire onto Kelly’s lap. They were used bills, bearing, as did all denominations of Turkish currency, the face of Kemal Ataturk, the republic’s founder. “That’s a hundred thousand,” she said, closing the attaché case. Doug, literally and figuratively the odd man out, looked with his hands clasped from Elaine to the sweep team, which was beginning to make its circuit with the tone generator and receiver.
“It’d seem like a lot more,” said Kelly as he stripped off the banding, “if I hadn’t checked the exchange rate in the terminal. Do I sign for it?”
“It’s over a thousand dollars, Kelly,” said the woman, “which ought to be handy—unless you plan to pay your bloody taxi fares with credit cards. There’s more if you need it”—she spun the lock dials of her Halliburton with grim determination—“and if you need large sums, we’ll talk.
“And the answer is no, I signed for it,” she concluded with her eyes fierce.
Kelly wondered if she’d shoot him if he asked if she were on the rag just now. Probably not: she wasn’t the type who ever really lost it, any more than Kelly himself did. “I appreciate the way you’re covering for me,” the veteran said calmly as he rose.
He slipped half the lire�
��pounds, from the Latin, just like the Italian equivalent and the British symbol for currency—into the breast pocket of his jacket, and the other half, folded, into the right side pocket of his slacks. “I suppose I get this way because I figure the best way to be left alone is to make you all”—he smiled around the room—“want to keep clear. But I do understand that you’re keeping your side of the bargain. And that it can’t be easy for somebody in your position.”
He walked toward the door. Behind him, Doug called, “The coffee hasn’t come yet.”
“No,” agreed Kelly as he stepped out into the hallway, “but Peter left, which was all I had in mind.”
Room 725 had a pleasant feeling for Kelly as he shot the deadbolt lock behind him; not home, but a bunker. Bunkers were a lot more useful than homes.
A glance out the window at the sun told him that he had time to put his gear in order and still catch Ahmed Ayyubi at work. Before starting to unpack, he sat his little Sony radio up on the window ledge and scanned the FM band until he found a station—probably Greek, but that didn’t matter one way or the other—playing music. There was a good deal of static, and the red diode that indicated tuning strength fluctuated feebly—which mattered even less to ears trained like Kelly’s in the hard school of communications intercept.
He had not brought a great deal of clothing, and his choices emphasized variety rather than several versions of the same garb. He stripped off the sportcoat, hung it up with the slacks he had taken from the suitcase, and tossed the long-sleeved polyester shirt he was wearing on the bed. In its place he donned a checked wool shirt and a nylon windbreaker, both of them well-worn and of Turkish manufacture, as was the short-brimmed cloth cap he put on. He’d look a little strange to the lobby personnel at the Sheraton, but that was a cheap trade-off for avoiding comment when he talked to Ayyubi. The money in the sportcoat could stay there for the time being.
