Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (23 page)

Harry Warner saw Kelly approaching. He waved to silence the Attaché. Commander Posner turned, his face registering multiple levels of surprise.

Kelly smiled easily, the portion of his mind that was tuned to business slipping to the fore. Everything was stable, was crystalline, when he concentrated on the job. Though that was only by contrast, of course. “I won’t intrude now, sir,” the agent said, “but if you have a moment later, I’d like to check on our business.”

Warner waved dismissal. “Sure,” he said, “I was going to get another drink anyway.” The CIA officer smiled coldly at Kelly as he walked to the bar.

“For God’s sake!” Posner whispered, “what are you doing here? This is a Section Heads Only affair!” He looked around hastily. “You know I can’t pass you your code disk here.”

“No problem,” the agent said, swallowing more wine without really tasting it, “you can hold it. I just wanted to make sure the cable got off okay.”

“Well, I said it would, didn’t I?” snapped the commander. “You’re an
idiot
to come here tonight, you know. How did you ever get past the gate?”

The fountain was dry, but the alcove itself was tiled in a running-water pattern. Blue and yellow slip glazes rippled over a white background. More than a hundred individually different tiles had been arranged in a unitary design which had been planned at a factory . . . perhaps four centuries before. Kelly let his eyes rest on the soothing, hand-painted curves as he said, “Oh, I had something to attend to . . . and I felt like coming, I guess that’s the reason I do most things. Thank you, Commander.”

Both men were shaking their heads when they parted.

Annamaria was nowhere to be seen; neither was her husband. For all his bravado in attending the affair, Kelly rather hoped that he would not meet the Ambassador again. He was not sure what either of them would say.

The general language of the gathering was English, though there were varieties of it that had more to be translated than understood by a native speaker. At the hors d’oeuvres table was an obvious member of the jazz group, a gangling blond man in slacks, a long-sleeved shirt, and a red vest. He towered like a derrick over an Algerian girl who was perhaps older than the fifteen she looked. The American was offering the girl stuffed olives and very earnest conversation. To the musician’s other side was another, shorter, American in a light sport coat. He was equally earnest and far less relaxed.

The musician finally turned to the shorter man and said, “Say, Cal, can you speak to her? Don’t think she knows any American at all.”

“Gerry, when is the
set
going to start?” the other man demanded.

“When Dee gets out of the shitter, I suppose, Cal,” the musician said. He turned back to the girl. “Go tour-direct somebody else, man,” he added over his shoulder.

The girl was very nice indeed. She was wearing clothes from Paris with a style that belied her youth. Kelly grinned and started to join the couple as an interpreter. The girl was obviously flattered at the attention—and obviously, as even Gerry had surmised, completely innocent of English. Before the agent could speak, however, the musician made one last thrust at international understanding. He bent down so that his face was on a level with the girl’s. Then he asked with the exaggeratedly slow delivery of a Voice of America language lesson, “Would . . . you . . . like . . . to . . . fuck?”

Kelly turned, choking to keep from spraying out the mouthful of wine he had just taken. Annamaria stood three steps behind him, wearing a black silk dress and a look of delighted amazement.

“Angelo!” she cried, “you
did
come! What a surprise.” She touched Kelly’s hand in friendly greeting.

The agent checked his watch. “Well, I . . .” he said. “Things happen and things, ah . . . things change.” He wished to God his glass was not empty. “Look, Anna, I need”—he looked at his watch again, this time to take his eyes off the woman—“I’d like to borrow a phone for just a moment. But I”—he faced her but lowered his voice—“I don’t want to fall over your—his Excellency. I’ll go next door if I need to.”

“Not at all,” Annamaria said, using her fingertips on the back of Kelly’s hand to draw him after her. “We’ll use the extension in the front hall, if that’s all right. Rufus has been upstairs with—” her own voice fell “—someone from the MFA since the reception line closed. If he
does
come down, he’ll go out by the back door anyway.”

The wisteria overhanging the entrance was a rich purple fragrance that penetrated the flagged court within. It even touched the hall beyond. The ceiling light was small, but it glanced in more than adequately from the blank, white walls. A phone sat on a circular table, beside a coat rack of age-darkened wood. “I’ll wait around the corner,” Annamaria said, gesturing toward the instrument and walking on. “Call when you’re through.”

The agent opened his mouth to say that was not necessary; but then again, the less known. . . . God, she was lovely. Kelly’s mouth was dry again as he dialed the six-digit number he had memorized from the register on Sergeant Rowe’s desk. Dryness was good. It would change the timbre of his voice, and a trace of nervous anticipation was just what the doctor ordered on this one.

“Yes?” said a woman on the other end of the line. Kelly had never met the Ambassador’s secretary, but it was her home phone he had dialed.

“Buffy,” the agent whispered urgently, “this is Chuck Reeves. You’ve got to get him out
fast.
The Ambassador’s going to cover up for last night by getting them all thrown in Lambese Prison on open charges. The Minister’s just agreed and the arrest team’s on the way. If he’s still there in five minutes, he’ll only leave the prison when they put him on the roads!”

Kelly slammed down the phone on the yelp of alarm from the other end. He was smiling, and it was not a nice smile to see. Then he looked down the hall and saw Annamaria looking back at him, alerted by the clash of plastic. Christ, he was trembling again. “Let’s get out of here,” he said in an attempt at a normal voice, “and—but, hell, I’m sorry, you’ll have things to do.”

Annamaria’s heels clicked even through the thick carpeting as she strode back to the agent. “If his Excellency the Ambassador can disappear,” she said, linking arms as she had before, “surely her Excellency the Ambassador’s wife can do the same. My car?”

“No, I . . .” Kelly said. “I don’t really need to go anywhere. Let’s walk over to the Annex grounds, that’s—” The stocky man met her eyes, finally. He smiled without the murderous delight of a moment before. “Just want to talk, that’s all.”

They were another indistinguishable couple on the lawn as soon as they stepped beyond the lighted sidewalk. It was warmer than it had been for the past few evenings. Annamaria had not bothered to wear a wrap. Her dress was slashed off the right shoulder, leaving her skin to glow in the ambient light. Worth a glance, even in the darkness, but the attention of all those nearby seemed to be focused on the scene taking place at the guest house.

The front door was open, a harsh rectangle in contrast to the light diffusing through the window curtains. A slim woman with a splendid Afro stood in silhouette in the doorway, shrieking back into the house.

Annamaria missed a half step in wonder. Kelly continued walking, his gentle momentum drawing the woman on. “What on earth is Buffy doing?” Annamaria marveled in an undertone. “Goodness, if word gets back to Rufus that she’s had a public scene with her boyfriend tonight, with everyone here, she’ll be shipped back to America by the next plane. Of course,” she added thoughtfully, “he’ll have someone else sign the orders.”

A tall black man stamped angrily out of the house, snarling something to the woman. His shoes were in his hand. “God damn you!” she screamed in reply. “Go on! I won’t have them taking me too!” Her gesture was imperious. She looked like a back-lighted statue of Queen Ti.

The man bent to don his shoes, then changed his mind and loped for the gate. The house door slammed. He looked back over his shoulder and light from a window fell on his face. As Kelly had assumed, he was the man who had held the claws the night before. The American agent kept his right hand unobtrusively under his coat tails, thumb and forefinger resting on the steel hilt of his utility knife. There was no cause for concern. The Zulu was not looking at him, was not really looking at anything at all tangible. His sculptured face bore an expression melded of fear, anger . . . and the indescribable tension of something that knows it is hunted.

“Lovely sky,” Kelly remarked conversationally as they walked through the gate a moment later. He nodded past Annamaria toward the two policemen on duty there. One nodded back, but they were more interested in the Fiat. Its headlights dimmed with the starter whirr, then flared as the engine caught. Police the world over suspect the unusual, and a Zulu running from a diplomatic function with his shoes in his hand was nothing if not unusual. “Electric lights every few yards may make the streets safer,” the agent continued, “but it’s a shame the way they hide the stars over most cities.”

Annamaria looked at the American strangely. Her mouth quivered with the questions that she did not express. The Fiat pulled away hard enough to make its tires and engine howl. Kelly paused on the curb. The black-haired woman clung to him with a shade of nervousness. The policemen tracked the car with narrowed eyes as it accelerated past them. One man fingered his walkie-talkie.

Gasoline had been dissolving the plastic tape ever since Kelly had dropped it in the tank. Thirty wraps, thirty minutes, as a rule of thumb. The tape must have finally parted under the spoon’s tension a moment after the Zulu had started his engine. The timing could not have been closer if Kelly had been waiting to put a rocket-propelled grenade into the Fiat as it slid past.

The first result was a mild thump, as if the car—twenty feet down the street—had rolled over an empty box. The booster had gone off in the sealed gas tank. The explosion itself was almost lost in the engine noise. It was quite sufficient, however, to rupture every seam in the tank and spray gasoline over the road and the car’s undercarriage.

A fraction of a second later, five or so gallons of gasoline ignited. Because the fuel-air mixture was unconfined, the result could not technically be termed an explosion. The
whump
!
and the fireball from the finely-divided mist made a damned close equivalent.

Kelly swung Annamaria to his right side as the tank burst, interposing his own squat body between her and what was about to follow. The blast flicked across his neck between collar and hairline, heat in momentarily palpable form. The Fiat twisted, out of control but running on the gas still trapped in its fuel lines. It side-swiped a parked Mercedes and swapped ends in a spin. The street behind and beneath it was a gush of flames. A moment later the back tires exploded from the heat, one and then the other. They sounded like the double barrels of a shotgun, louder by far than the fuse detonation that had started the process.

The side-swipe had torqued the car body enough to wedge the doors shut. The driver was trying to get out. One of the Algerian policemen who had been directing traffic threw down his flashlight. He took two steps toward the car before the flames beat him back. The screams from inside could not be heard over the roaring fire, not really.

The patrolmen at the upper side of the embassy complex were gaping, forgetting the traffic they were there to control. The huge flaming barricade brought cars to a halt in front of the Chancery gate and back up the street in screeching sequence.

“Let’s cross quick,” the agent said. He still gripped Annamaria by both shoulders. People were jumping out of their stopped cars, babbling in polyglot amazement. Kelly and the woman darted between the bumpers of a Peugeot and a Dacia pick-up as quickly as Annamaria’s spike heels would permit her to follow the guiding hand. The flames, fed now by the asphalt roadway itself, threw their capering shadows down the street in demonic majesty.

XXV

The gate of the GSO Annex had been left open during the affair at the Residence. The guard was the man who fed Kelly the night before. He stood open-mouthed beside one of the gateposts, his eyes filled with the nearby inferno. He gave no sign of noticing Kelly and Annamaria.

The agent started down the drive, primarily from inertia. Annamaria halted him with a gentle tug on his arm. “People will be getting cars,” she said. “They won’t be able to leave, but they’ll be coming over here anyway. There’s a place we can talk, though. . . .”

Kelly let the woman direct him to the right, along the inner face of the compound wall. They passed the playground and buildings of the American School. Kelly had not realized the Annex area was so extensive. The path narrowed between the wall on one side and the steep hill down to the Conexes on the other. The shrubbery was rough, obviously untended. Suddenly there was a small, square building in the midst of the trees and brush. It was barely touched by the streetlight reaching over the wall and through the foliage.

The white exterior plaster had flaked somewhat at the corners and around the jamb of the round-topped door. It gave the squat building the look of a soldier who has gone through a battle in his parade uniform. A double band of ceramic tiles encircled it just below the roof line. The flat roof humped in the center into a dome.

Annamaria reached up and fingered one of the smooth tiles, the care of its decoration obvious though the dim light washed its varied colors into shades of gray. “The tiles are mostly Dutch, you know . . . here, the Residence, most of the really old buildings in Algiers. 16th Century Delft tiles here. . . . It was a saint’s tomb, a sidi was buried here. The body is long gone, of course.”

The door was a thin plywood panel, clearly not original to the building. It was held shut with a twist of wire, perhaps part of a coat hanger. “Why the mania for Dutch tiles?” the agent asked as he unwound the wire. “Not that they aren’t very pretty. . . .”

“The price was right,” Annamaria said. She was so close to Kelly that her breast touched his left arm. “Charitable societies in Holland used them for centuries to ransom Christian seamen from the pirates. The Barbary Pirates, the Berbers. . . . Do you suppose he slept better, the saint, knowing that his tomb was covered with the ransom of infidels?”