Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  She made a quick, dismissing gesture toward the glass door without bothering to look around to see how it was received. Kelly saw the attendant’s head go back in a nod of acceptance, but the motion might equally have followed a slap. The man strode away from the door, his back straight and his neck no longer swiveling. Christ, you’d think they’d be used to it, whatever the relationships were. . . .

  “I’d like to talk, Mr. Monaghan,” Gisela said as she touched the sleeve of his suitcoat and rubbed the fabric approvingly between thumb and forefinger. “I have a comfortable place, if you’re inclined. . . . and we can take your car or mine.”

  “Does yours come with a couple kibitzers?” the American asked, feeling his face smile as his mind correlated the two operations: meeting a valuable source who was not trustworthy, and meeting a woman whom he intended at an instinctive level to fuck. The second part of the equation should have been too trivial for present consideration; but, because Tom Kelly was as human as the next guy, it was going to get at least equal billing until he did something about it.

  “They’ll go in the van,” said the woman. She had exchanged her pumps for flats, and still only the thick Vibram heels on Kelly’s shoes put his eyes on a level with hers. “I have my own car—and it has only two seats.” Definitely a nice smile.

  “Let’s go,” said Kelly, thrusting the door open for his companion, after whom he stepped into the night.

  Mercury vapor lights on tall aluminum poles illuminated the Hilton lot well enough for Turkey, but the effect was very sparse by American standards. The lot was overparked tonight, as Kelly had expected. Close to the sidewalk was a British-style delivery truck, with roughly the wheelbase of a full-sized American car but a taller roofline than an American van. The sides were not painted with *GISELA* or a similar legend, but the attendant who had been watching over the dancer was walking toward the passenger side.

  The second through tenth floors of the hotel overhung the ground floor and basement so that the glow from lighted guest rooms curtained the wall near the doorway with shadows deeper than they would otherwise have been. Nonetheless, the eyes of Gisela’s attendant had been dark-adapted, and it was inconceivable that someone had been standing close to the door without being seen.

  “Thomas Kelly,” said a voice as clear and recognizable as what the agent thought he had heard on the tape in his room. He spun around.

  “Do not be afraid because we must speak.”

  There were three short men in overcoats and hats with brims, shadows amid shadows against the concrete wall. One of them carried a transistor radio, from whose speaker the voice issued. The figures would not have been there unnoticed earlier, they could not have stepped through the concrete, and Kelly would have caught motion from the corner of his eye had they come running toward him alongside the building. But they were there now, ten feet away, their radio speaking as the attendant just getting into the van shrieked a warning.

  Gisela cried out also. A purse dangled from her left wrist, but it was toward the side pocket of her coat instead that her free hand dived.

  First things first. The shorter attendant and his companion, who stood up on the driver’s side-step and looked over the van’s cab, were both reaching for hardware. Kelly threw himself sideways, toward the line of yews fringing the thirty-foot walkway to the parking lot. His hundred and eighty pounds meat-axed the dancer ahead of him, out of the line of fire.

  It occurred to him as the first shot banged from the cab of the van that he might be getting a personal demonstration of how Mohammed Ayyubi had died: in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Ricochets have a soul-freezing sound that rightly suggests the flattened bullet may rip a hole through you from any direction. This round cracked twice from the concrete, wall and overhang, before thrumming viciously into the night. Ten yards is spitting distance on a lighted pistol range, but shock and darkness made the gunman at the van as great a threat to the world at large as he was to his target.

  As they crashed through the prickly branches of the shrubs, Kelly expected to hit the ground on top of the woman he was trying to save. He had not considered the fact that she was his superior as an athlete. She twisted in the air, using Kelly’s own weight as a fulcrum, and hit the hard ground beyond him on braced fingers and toes. The weight of the gun in her right side pocket twisted the tail of the coat around behind her.

  “Kelly—” the radio voice in back of him called. There was a snap as the American scrambled to his feet. The sound was not a gunshot like the volley blasting from around the van; it could have been the release of a bowstring.

  “Your car!” Kelly cried to the woman beside him. Glass shattered from the building, and the man shooting from in front of the van splayed like an electrocuted squirrel as he fell backward.

  Crouching, Kelly aware that the woman’s light-colored coat made as good an aiming point as his own dark suit was a bad one, the couple broke for the asphalt lot at an angle which thankfully spread them further from the second attendant, who continued to shoot over the cab of the van. The three figures stood like sandbagged dummies, unaffected by the bullets. One round vanished in a violet flash that lighted the wall of the hotel instead of ricocheting away.

  “This one!” Gisela shouted, motioning with her right arm toward a car parked at the edge of the asphalt. It was a Mercedes coupe with the slight rounding of lines that marked it as ten or fifteen years old rather than brand new. The mercury-vapor lamp was reflected as a rich blue pool from the bodywork of metallic silver, a German hallmark which Japanese automakers attempted to match with less success than they showed in matters of pure mechanics.

  There was a second snap! and the remaining attendant catapulted from the van. Gisela, instead of dodging around the front bumper of the coupe, vaulted the hood which her dangling coattail struck with a clang. Kelly flattened himself on the ground, reaching up for the passenger-side door as he twisted his head back to see what weapons were being aimed. He had not attempted to clear the revolver attachéd to his waistband. All it was going to do under present circumstances was tie up his hand and make a target of him.

  A better target.

  Two of the figures, the men if they were men, ran toward him while the third’s radio shouted, “Thomas Kelly, for your planet’s sake—”

  The long burst of submachine gun fire from a parked Audi sedan drowned the cough-brap! of the six-cylinder Mercedes engine catching.

  Kelly expected the coupe’s door to be locked. It was not. He threw it open and tossed himself into the passenger seat of the low car, wishing he were half as agile as the woman he was accompanying. The nearer of the two figures running toward the car toppled limply. The second froze and remained standing in a violet blaze as two or three automatic weapons ripped at it.

  The Mercedes was accelerating before Kelly got his door closed. Gisela pulled a hard left turn, spinning the little vehicle in about its own length. The 280 SL had not been a dragster even when new, but its engine was in a sharp state of tune and snarled happily as the driver revved it through the powerband. Centrifugal force made the door in Kelly’s hand a weight worthy of his strength as he drew it closed.

  “Thomas Kelly!” the radio voice called over the roar of gunfire and exhaust. Shots raked the building in a cloud of pulverized concrete, lighted internally by spluttering arcs from the figure who stood in the midst of the bullets until he disappeared instead of falling.

  As the coupe straightened in the aisle, heading in the direction opposite to the way it had been parked, Gisela’s foot blipped the throttle so that the automatic clutch would let her upshift. There was a red and white glare from a second Audi, backing at speed across the head of the aisle to block them. The medley of tail and backup lights was as uncompromising as the muzzle flashes from the other German sedan.

  The shriek of the Mercedes’ brakes was louder than the angry whine of the Audi’s gearbox being overrevved in reverse gear. The coupe’s blunt nose slewed thirty degrees
to the left as that front disk gripped minutely before its companion. Kelly’s left hand was furiously searching the door panel for a way to roll down the window. Gisela had not switched on her lights, and the parking lot fixtures overhead did nothing to illuminate the car’s interior to eyes dazzled by muzzle flashes and the electric coruscance which bullets had drawn from the three figures.

  He poised the revolver in his hand, bumping the coupe’s low roof with it as he readied to smash out the side window with the gun butt. Instead, Gisela flung his unbraced body against her as she downshifted again and cut the wheel right.

  Inertia had carried the heavy sedan from its blocking position against the drag of its own brakes. As it lunged back against its springs when the tires got a firm grip, Gisela punched the coupe between the Audi and the rear bumper of the nearest parked car.

  The sedan’s bright headlights reflected explosively from the metallic side of the Mercedes squirming past it, accelerating. The Mercedes was too solidly built for competitive racing, but the little engine had enough torque to shoot them through a gap which neither Kelly nor the Audi’s driver thought was present.

  “Not yours?” Kelly shouted over the exhaust note reflected from the sides of parked cars. Lights scissored across the sky behind them as both sedans maneuvered in the parking lot.

  “I don’t know whose,” Gisela shouted back, shifting into third up the short ramp to Mete Street. The headlights of a car parked illegally on the street flashed on. “What are you doing?” Her gearshift hand batted down at Kelly.

  The car on Mete Street was a third Audi.

  “You drive,” said Kelly as he worked the gun from the woman’s coat pocket. “I’ll worry about the rest.”

  Gisela’s hand touched the control standard on the left side of the steering column, throwing her headlights on and bright. That might have spooked the passenger in the third sedan into putting his burst of shots into the dirt and driveway curb instead of through the Mercedes’ windshield. Alternatively, he might have been trying merely to disable the coupe by shooting out the left-side tires. Either way, the muzzle blasts and the ringing crash of a ricochet into one of the Mercedes’ rocker panels confirmed a decision Kelly had more or less made already. The guy who shot at them had just clarified the rules.

  Gisela had flinched as the bullet hit the car, but her hands were rock-steady now at the ten and two o’clock positions on the steering wheel. She crossed them right and straightened expertly to give the coupe room at the head of the drive if this Audi too attempted to drive across their path. The Mercedes lurched, brushing but not rebounding from the right-hand radius of the curb cut. Then they were in Mete Street, using the full considerable width of the pavement to hang a left turn while continuing to accelerate. There was more firing distantly behind them, but nothing passed close to the 280 SL.

  The dancer’s two attendants had carried pocket pistols, .32s by the sound of them: the highly-portable European answer to situations in which Americans tended to carry small revolvers. Both choices were guns you carried when you wanted to be armed but didn’t expect to have to use your hardware.

  The pistol Kelly hauled from Gisela’s coat was something else again: a Walther P-38, old enough to have a steel frame and grooved wooden grips. It fired full-house 9mm Parabellum ammunition through a five-inch barrel, which, with the projecting hammer, safety, and front sight, made the weapon as bad a choice for pocket carry as could be imagined.

  On the plus side, Kelly couldn’t have asked for a better weapon to use if he had to be limited to pistols.

  Behind them, the lights of a car bounced wildly as it plunged into Mete Street in pursuit. The Audi which had shot at them waited for its companion to clear the driveway before pulling a U-turn to follow. Kelly couldn’t be sure through the rear window whether or not the third sedan was following also; but two, crewed by men with submachine guns, were certainly enough.

  “Goddam,” he muttered, then raised his voice enough to add, “See if you can lose ‘em. They may not want us dead.”

  Men with submachineguns, and possibly a woman.

  The Taksim District with its broad streets and low-density development—public buildings and luxury hotels landscaped like no other area of the city—was as good a place to drive fast as anywhere in Istanbul. That made it the least suitable place for them to lose pursuers in cars which, for all the coupe’s sporting appearance, had the legs of them. Metallurgy and the technology of internal combustion engines had not stood still during the past fifteen years.

  Gisela sent the Mercedes snarling past the Sport Palace—the enclosed soccer stadium—without shifting up from third gear, and entered what was supposed to be a controlled intersection at speed. As it chanced, the light was in their favor—but a ‘56 Chevy, for Chrissake, being driven with almost as much abandon as the coupe, was running it from Kadergalar, the merging street.

  Kelly’s feet were planted against the firewall and his shoulders compressed the springs of the seatback, anchoring him despite the violent accelerations of the car. Gisela yanked her wheel left, trusting the gap in oncoming traffic, as the driver of the Chevy slammed on brakes which grabbed on the right front and started his car spinning just before the moment of contact.

  The result was something closer to elastic rebound than auto bodies collapsing within one another, though eight tires simultaneously losing their grip on the pavement sounded like a chorus of the damned.

  The coupe’s right headlight nacelle touched the left bumper of the taller American design, spraying glass and a cloud of tungsten which had sublimed in a green arc. The front ends counterrotated and the rear quarter-panel of the Chevy patted the Mercedes’ back bumper with the control of a handball player’s glove. Gisela, bracing herself on the wheel rim as her passenger did on the carpeted firewall, did not attempt input through the brakes or steering wheel until the tires regained enough traction to accept it.

  The Chevy, its back end drifting to the right in response to the second impact, broadsided the end of the iron-tube barrier intended to separate cars and pedestrians at the intersection. The scattering of individuals waiting to cross the street at this hour leaped into recessed shop fronts or tried to climb the grated window of a branch bank as the car sawed itself in half with trunk and rear wheels on the sidewalk and the remainder sliding in the street.

  Gisela’s 280 SL swapped ends twice in a hundred yards of skidding while its tires shrieked without fatal overtones of metal dragging as well. The coupe’s short wheelbase and tight suspension made the uncontrolled spin less physically punishing than it might have been in another vehicle, but the Chevy beside them separating in sparks both from friction and the sheared powerline feeding the traffic signal was a sight with heart-freezing elements of prophecy.

  They missed an Anadol at the next intersection, marked as a taxi by its band of black and yellow checkerboard, because its driver had braked hard to watch the Chevy disintegrate. The Mercedes’ left front brushed the little Ford just hard enough to give Gisela control again. She could not have managed the obtuse angle required to turn left onto Bayildim Street, but there was a cobblestone alley directly across the intersection. The Mercedes dropped into it like a bullet through the muzzle of a smoothbore.

  The alley ran between the dun-stuccoed courtyard walls of multistory apartment blocks. The coupe’s single remaining headlight filled the passageway, save for the black fingers of shadow flung ahead of the car by projections from the walls. Gisela’s eyes and mouth were both wide open in an expression more masklike than fearful. The engine stuttered and boomed as she downshifted, but she did not lose the car’s minimal traction except for the instant a driving wheel slipped on garbage and the coupe’s right side streaked the plaster silver.

  Kelly’s left hand massaged his thigh where the hammer of the P-38 had bitten him while the car spun. His thumb touched the safety lever. Christ, it was on safe! The woman knew a lot more about cars than she did double-action pistols. When he had clicked the
safety up to fire position, he also checked the little pin which projected above the hammer to show that a round was chambered.

  Kelly didn’t expect to need the gun now, given the likelihood that the collision would have screened their escape and possibly even blocked pursuit. The Chevy had not exploded as it well might have done—and he was glad it had not. Kelly lacked the willingness to ignore side effects displayed by certain of his superiors who would cheerfully have incinerated scores of Turkish civilians in a gasoline fire if it suited their purposes. The victims would be nonwhites, after all, wogs; and certainly non-Christians. Still, Kelly was not writing the Audis out; he unrolled his window as an unlighted lamp bracket beside a courtyard gate clacked against his door handle and Gisela braked hard. Only when she was sure of her clearance did she spin the wheel and the Mercedes hard right, up a slightly-wider alley leading back toward the Catholic church adjoining the grounds of the Technical School.

  There was an echoing cry of metal behind them. The car plunging down the alley they were leaving had scraped twenty feet of stucco from the same wall the coupe had touched. The dazzle of headlights made the vehicle itself invisible, but the only reasonable question about its identity was which of the three Audis this one was.

  “Pull right at the next street,” Kelly ordered loudly in a voice as emotionless as the echoing exhaust of the twin pipes. “Drop me half a block down, and go like hell till I take care of the problem.”

  The woman glanced at her passenger. Kelly had reached across his body left-handed to unlatch his door and hold it ajar. He held the P-38 vertical beside his head, so that the muzzle was clear of his skull no matter what shocks the weapon received in the next moments.

  “All right,” she said, and the agent realized from her tone that she knew how sure she had better be that it was all right.

  The Mercedes fishtailed onto Macka Street, losing just enough momentum in a downshift as it burst from the alley that it thrust a Fiat taxi out of the way, by presence rather than by collision, horns on both cars blaring. The taxi cut left, threatening oncoming traffic for a moment but giving the coupe what amounted to a third lane along the curb. Pedestrians and the shills in front of the few shops still open shouted more in enthusiasm than fear.