Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  The driver’s door thumped closed an instant before Kelly’s own did, Gisela was already striding toward the hotel’s uniformed attendant. The agent caught up with her just as she handed the Turk a bank note folded at a slant so that the numerical 1000 on two corners was clearly visible. “No trouble if we run in for a few minutes, is there?” she asked cheerfully in Turkish, smiling down at the attendant from her six-inch height advantage.

  “Well . . .” the door man temporized, but his fingers had closed over the bill and were refolding it apparently of their own volition.

  “Another one for you when we return,” Gisela promised, taking Kelly’s left arm with her own right hand and beginning to stride toward the entrance.

  The doorman looked at the thousand-lire note, then toward the back of the leggy beauty who had given it to him. Kelly himself got only a bemused glance, though from the rear his coat and trousers were in worse shape than the coupe’s battered right side.

  “Listen, this may get hot,” Kelly hissed in angry German as he pushed open a door for them. He had not spoken earlier because he did not know of any language he had in common with Gisela which the doorman did not share. “Having you along makes it worse.”He was trying to read her expression at the same time that he searched the lobby and alcoves for an observer or even an ambush.

  “It makes it better, darling,” Gisela purred as her hand moved up to stroke his shoulder blades as they walked toward the elevator. “You want to convince them there’s nothing wrong, it’s all innocent—we’ll convince them.” She giggled—was the woman really that relaxed?—and added, “All not innocent, not so?”

  Christ, thought Kelly as he stepped onto the elevator. She was probably right, but if the shit hit the fan again . . . The P-38 would be even harder to clear from his pants pocket than it had been from Gisela’s coat, and the snubbie was positioned for concealment rather than instant use.

  But maybe nothing like that would be necessary. Maybe he’d waltz into his room, change clothes—pick up the radio and tape recorder—and waltz out again. By now, Elaine or whoever had survived the mess in the parking lot and afterwards would know that something had blown wide open . . . but in the darkness, with at least four sets of participants involved, nobody might be absolutely sure of Kelly’s own role in the business. Not even George, who, at best, saw not Kelly but a dark suit and a pistol aiming at him. They’d want to talk to him, but to brace Kelly now—with his target, if they recognized Gisela, or with an innocent bystander if they didn’t—would be breaking too many rules.

  Unless they knew already what their agent had done to the teams in the Audis.

  There was no one in the seventh-floor hallway.

  “Well, I tell you, honey,” Kelly said as he slipped his left hand around Gisela’s waist, “you give me a few minutes to change, and then you can show me how to show you the best time in Istanbul.” He shifted Gisela to his other side and drew the Walther from his pocket, using the bulk of both their bodies to shield it from sight of anything but the door of 725.

  Left-handed, he inserted the room key, which he had cut from its brass tag to make more portable. Kelly had not expected to reenter the Sheraton looking like something the cat dragged in, but he had considered the possibility that he would.

  There was no sound from 727, the next door down, and there was no tense aura of someone waiting within Kelly’s room. Electronics weren’t the most trustworthy indicators available to a trained human.

  He closed the door and bolted it before turning and taking a deep breath with his palms flat against the panel. That was as close to collapse as Kelly could permit himself to come for a good long time yet.

  Moving again with deliberate speed, Kelly strode to the window and closed the mechanical slide-switch of the Sony 2002, shutting off the recorder hidden in the battery pack as well. He telescoped the antenna and locked it in place, then put the units, still linked so that no one would open the pack simply because of ignorance as to its outward purpose, in his limp attaché case.

  “Say, honey,” he called over his shoulder as he straightened, shrugging off his abraded jacket and turning instinctively so that the butt of the snubbie would remain concealed from his companion, “you wanna use the john, go ahead, it’s—” Kelly’s tongue missed a syllable, two syllables, as he looked at the woman for the first time since they entered the room, “just like America,” he concluded.

  The light between the twin beds had gone on when Kelly flicked the switch in the short hallway. Its shade was the color of old parchment and the wallpaper was cream. Between them they enriched the sheen of Gisela’s hair, of her beige knit dress, and of the breast which she had lifted above the scooped-out neck of that dress.

  “I want a good time right now,” she said.

  Kelly scowled angrily. He would ignore her, dammit! He started to bend to unlace his shoes since their thick soles would catch in his trouser legs if he tried to change pants without taking the shoes off first. The P-38 jabbed his thigh with its front sight and safety lever, it was a terrible gun to carry unholstered, and he drew it from his pocket to toss it on the bed next to the dancer’s overcoat.

  The Walther wasn’t perfect but it did its job; so what was he bitching about?

  “Come on, honey, that’s right,” the woman said, leaning her shoulders against the wall where the hallway broadened into the room proper and thrusting her hips out toward Kelly. There was a smile in her voice, but her face was as neutral as Kelly’s own and the laugh with which she followed the words was brittle. She was tight, the American realized, tight as a cocked mainspring, but she was too accomplished a professional to let that show to the audience on the other end of the possible listening devices.

  She seemed to know exactly how she wanted the show to proceed.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Kelly, fumbling at his shoelaces so badly that he had to look down to see what he was doing. Dammit! “I’ve got reservations. . . .”

  The lie was an unintended pun, and in any case his body had no reservations at all. His erection was so obvious when he stood again that it brought a really cheerful giggle from the dancer’s lips. “That’s right,” she said again.

  Kelly stepped closer to Gisela as he tried to unbutton his shirt. It, like the coat, was torn in back and probably bloodied as well. Since his fingers didn’t goddam work at the moment, and he needed some sort of release under the circumstances, Kelly gripped his shirttails and ripped it open.

  Buttons rather than fabric gave, popping and pattering around the laughing dancer like the leading edge of a sleet storm. The cuffs still held him, and he hooked his fingers in the left one as he bent closer to Gisela. “How the hell long do you think we’ve got?” he whispered. “Later!” He jerked his hand downward and, after the sleeve button popped off, the whole cuff tore away in his hand.

  “How long did you think it was going to take?” Gisela murmured back. There was nothing wrong with her fine motor control as she unbuckled Kelly’s belt. Kelly’s trousers dropped around his ankles abruptly, pulled by the hidden snubbie, leaving him bare though he scarcely noticed it.

  Gisela’s whole body was taut as a guitar string, and like a string it vibrated as he met her lips. He was thinking with his dick, which was about as good a way to get killed as he knew of; and right now, nothing he knew mattered except the way that his left hand cupped her bare breast and lightly pinched the already-erect nipple. She began to lift her dress with one hand while the other gripped Kelly’s member firmly to the soft fabric still covering her groin.

  “I was going to fuck you tonight, not so?” she whispered in German as she laid her cheek against Kelly’s, eyes closed. She tongued the lobe of his ear. “Why should I not because you save my life and make me want you?”

  Who the hell expects anything to make sense, thought Kelly. His free hand fondled her buttock, bare now that she had raised the hem of her dress high enough. There could be somebody in the room after all, waiting for the right mome
nt to deck him from behind, or a team in the hallway poised to smash through the door as soon as Gisela shouted the code word. She could have a dozen diseases, ranging from loathsome to incurable. God knew who’d dipped his wick in her over the years—

  And none of it fucking mattered, because just now fucking was the only thing that mattered.

  Gisela wore a slip, but no hose or underwear, which helped explain the speed with which she had changed from her costume to street dress in the Hilton. Her hip muscles were ripplingly powerful, but the layer of subcutaneous fat common to all women, whatever their level of exercise, was like plush beneath Kelly’s palm.

  Gisela’s pubic hair was darker than that of her head or the fine down covering her body, but like the mane of a lion its bronze highlights made it more than simply brown. Kelly’s shirt still dangled from the agent’s right wrist; now he stepped on the tail and pulled off everything except the cuff itself.

  The dancer rose onto her toes to increase her height advantage and, gripping Kelly’s member firmly, rubbed the head of it against the lips of her sex. She was dry and tightly closed, her body in this event rebelling against her will. She was murmuring something, but Kelly could not tell whether actual words were intended.

  He bent to the nipple of the breast he held awkwardly from the dress, aware that the pair of them must look ridiculous. He was more concerned at some level of his mind about that than he was over the fact that he had just killed a number of people and that he might die himself before the night was out. He chuckled mentally at himself and, though he did not lose his erection, fully regained intellectual control over what he was doing.

  Kelly shifted his weight and cupped her groin from the front with his right hand. The knit dress spilled down and both of them made simultaneous left-handed clutches for the garment. ‘“Good,” Gisela muttered in German with her eyes still closed as Kelly inserted a finger. “Good. Good.”

  The one-syllable approval was delivered in a technical tone, but the dancer’s muscles were in full operation, clamping with a rhythmic pulse which drew him more deeply within her.

  Gisela’s eyes opened and the corners of her mouth spread widely in a smile of beatific happiness. Like Kelly himself, she expected her equipment to work when and as required, and that included the hardware she had been issued at birth.

  She turned away, still gripping the shaft of his member with her own right hand. “What . . . ?” Kelly said as her hips brushed his groin and he was nestled momentarily between her buttocks while she pulled the hem of the dress up to her waist.

  “Now,” Gisela said firmly as she planted her left palm and forearm on the wall and rested her forehead against them. She inserted the head of his member into her vulva where his thrust and her eagerness drew it home at once.

  It also drew Kelly into a climax more sudden than anything he had experienced since being rotated to base after sixty-three days in an outpost with no female company save a ewe with a smile that had begun to look flirtatious.

  Gisela’s simultaneous gasp passed unnoticed, but her cry a moment later as her hips pumped was loud enough to be heard in the next room with no need for bugging devices.

  No partner of Kelly’s had ever come as quickly as that, and certainly the dancer was as well able to fake a climax as anyone he’d met. Still, the vaginal spasms as he continued to thrust seemed uncontrolled; and the Lord knew, they’d both been ready for this or it wouldn’t have had even the chance to happen. The whole business had taken approximately a minute and a half; and hell, he’d needed to undress anyway.

  “Oh,” Gisela said in a fairly normal tone. She chuckled as she straightened up with a friendly twitch of her buttocks against the man. “Yes, a very good time. Very good.”

  Kelly leaned over and scooped the tatters of his shirt from the floor. He held it to their paired groins before he withdrew from her and began to wipe himself dry with the tail. “Wonder if you can buy terry cloth shirts,” he murmured as Gisela mopped at herself with a sleeve. “Might lay in a stock before the next time you’n me get together.”

  Gisela turned, dropping the damp shirt sleeve and letting her dress fall normally. She kissed him lightly on the tip of the nose, knelt, and, brushing away Kelly’s hand and the shirt, engulfed very nearly the full length of his still-erect member with a momentary pause for adjustment at the halfway mark.

  She released Kelly, rising again and flashing him the smile which had already become his identification point for memories of Gisela Romer. “Another time, we will take more time, not so? When we come back tonight, I think. But now you must dress.”

  Perfectly, Teutonically, correct, Kelly thought as he shuffled to the closet and chose another pair of slacks. He palmed the snubbie as he stepped out of his ankle-lapping trousers, uncertain as to whether the woman had already caught sight of the gun or not. The point of a real hideout gun is the surprise it offers the user, not primarily its function as a weapon. If people already know you’re armed, then you may as well go for something that’ll really do the job—like an automatic rifle.

  Not that the P-38 he also stuck into the side pocket of the clean pants would be a surprise to anybody likely to be interested in the fact. You did what you could. . . .

  “If it’s okay to ask where we’re going,” Kelly said as Gisela drove east on Ciragan Street, away from the hotel and beyond it the Old City, “then I’d kinda like to know.”

  He kept his eyes on the fender before him, bent up at a sharp angle like a foresight where it should have been curved smoothly over the headlight. If he looked at her while he spoke, it would imply that he was pressing for the information. He did want to know, but pushing her was a damned bad way to learn anything.

  She looked at him, the planes of her face a pattern of reflections moving at the corner of his eye. When she did not speak for a moment further, he went on, “Look, this car’s going to be pretty conspicuous. I’ve got an address’r two where we might find something a little less so.” He turned squarely toward her and smiled. “Isn’t going to be as nice, but maybe for a couple days . . . ?”

  “First, we’re going to Asia, Tommy,” Gisela said, beginning to smile herself as her eyes returned to the traffic.

  “For Chrissake, don’t call me that,” Kelly protested with a laugh. Fine, it was a friendly conversation and not an interrogation session. “Call me Tom—hell, call me muledick if you want . . . but not Tommy, huh?”

  “Pun,” the woman said, a plosive sound rather than an attempt at words. Her smile toward the bumper of the leading car, a late forties Mercury, of all things, broadened. “We go to Asia, Tom, where you will meet people with whom you will discuss, not so? And if we choose to proceed, as I think we will, then this car will remain at the place of meeting, yes.”

  Asia. Well, he’d known they were headed toward either the Bosphorus Bridge or the Black Sea, and the latter was a hell of a long way north. Kelly wasn’t in control, hadn’t been in control since the moment he agreed to meet Gisela Romer. His alternative had been to disappear, to hunt up acquaintances in Diyarbakir and hope that they’d lead him closer to the aliens.

  Which might have worked. But gathering information was a lot like deer hunting: people who stomp around making noise are less likely to nail what they’re after than are the folks who settle themselves in a suitable location and let targets step into range.

  “It . . .” Gisela looked over at her passenger again before continuing. “The crabs may appear again and you will be ready.” She was speaking in the didactic certainty of a teacher coaxing a student into proper behavior. “But usually they do not twice so soon between. And you must not threaten my colleagues. That would be worse for you and for your country than you imagine.”

  “No problem,” said Kelly. “I don’t generally threaten people anyhow.”

  He’d pulled the Walther from his pocket as they drove away from the Sheraton and lowered it between his seat and the door panel, where he held it now.

  Pierrard�
�s gang had given Kelly credentials with the Dienst so solid that, it crossed the agent’s mind, perhaps it had all been part of the plan. That seemed unlikely, upon reflection. Even if they had been willing to write off six figures worth of cars and every operative within gunshot of Tom Kelly, both of those possible decisions by the Suits, there was simply no way to be sure that Kelly and the dancer wouldn’t be added to the butcher’s bill. That had been live ammo being fired from the Audis.

  Perhaps they didn’t know the extent to which these German exiles were involved with the aliens. But there was no reason to have Kelly penetrate the group. They already had adequate access to it through Gisela. Who seemed to have played her American “employers” for right fools, feeding them information on illegal activities they would wink at—and hiding the very fact of the aliens, and of the Plan . . . which wasn’t Kelly’s job tonight either.

  “We’ll need the toll,” Gisela said. “do you—? My purse is in the back.”

  Kelly nodded and took a five hundred-lire bill from his breast pocket, left-handed. Gisela had tossed her purse behind the seat, into the coupe’s luggage compartment, with a thump almost as solid as that which the Sony radio in Kelly’s attaché case had made. He assumed she had another gun there, the standard place for a woman to carry her hardware, though it was a lousy choice unless she walked around with one hand under the flap the way Elaine Tuttle had done the night Kelly met her.

  But why had Gisela tried to draw the awkward P-38 from her coat when the aliens appeared, rather than going for whatever she had in her purse? Well, people didn’t always do what you expected them to in a crisis. Kelly would trade a bad decision on pistols for the way she brought the car back for him any day.

  The Bosphorus Bridge was lighted into a display unique in Turkey as the Mercedes slowed and eased into one of the multiple approach lanes to the toll plaza. The bridge was a mile long; and while there might have been more impressive engineering feats elsewhere in the world, this one joined two continents. The nearer of the five-hundred-foot-high suspension towers was in Europe, and the second was, as Gisela had said, in Asia. The span and its approaches curling uphill from either end were illuminated by closely-spaced light standards, and sidescatter from the floodlit towers picked out the higher portions of the suspension cables as well.