Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (50 page)

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
bull
shit
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 the 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—”

“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.