Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (36 page)

XLII

The door had a spring latch and a draw bolt in the center of the panel. There seemed to be a second draw bolt just above the threshold. Kelly kicked the keyplate squarely with the heel of his boot. The blow tore the bolt from its seat in the jamb and left the lock sagging on half-stripped screws. The panel was only half-inch plywood.

“Brace me,” the agent muttered to Professor Vlasov. He kicked again, angling his heel toward the lower bolt. It gave and the spring latch fell off as well.

“I never figured,” Kelly said as he pushed the panel out of the way, “how anybody managed to knock a door down with his shoulder. Or why anybody’d want to try.”

Moonlight through the doorway let the agent find the cord to the desk lamp. He tugged it on, reaching past Vlasov to push the door closed now that they were inside. The office of the brass shop looked larger than it had with nine people filling it during the meeting. “Ramdan!” Kelly shouted. “Ramdan! Come down, we’re friends!”

“This is a friend’s house but you smash in the door?” questioned the defector.

“This isn’t the time to be standing in the street shouting,” Kelly said grimly. “Besides, I don’t think he’d have opened up for us.”

The alcove behind the paneling where the Mauser had been hidden was now empty. The agent had seen the rifle abandoned during the fire-fight outside the Institute, but it would have been nice if there were something remaining there now. A gun might change their negotiating posture somewhat for the better. Or again—perhaps this was just as well.

There were muted sounds from the living quarters above. They changed abruptly to footsteps on the stairs. Heavy steps, shuffling; and a lighter pair behind them as nervous as a mosquito readying to land.

Vlasov seated himself on the swivel chair and fiddled with the dark tie he still wore. As the steps neared, the Russian stood and took a half step toward the door. The agent stopped him with a shake of his head. “No,” he said, in French lest the Kabyles think something was being hidden from them. “We’ll wait here real quiet and not take a chance that anyone gets startled.” Kelly’s own hands were empty and in plain sight in front of him. They itched to at least palm his sheath knife.

Ramdan jerked open the door from the shop. He had lost weight, and the flesh of his face seemed to have been replaced by sagging gray wax. It was less than eighteen hours since the gunfight, but fear and his leg wound had aged the Kabyle a decade in that time. “What are you doing here?” Ramdan demanded in a voice as haunted as his eyes.

Behind the shop owner was the boy who had been in the front of the place during the meeting. His eyelids flickered but the pupils did not move a micron. They did not even tremble, as did the hand holding the Enfield revolver. The muzzle of the old gun wavered in an arc that covered Kelly and Ramdan’s kidneys about equally. The elder Kabyle was nuts, thought the agent, to allow the boy behind him with a gun. The kid was wired like a carnival wheel.

“We need a little help, Ramdan,” Kelly said aloud. His hands were still, his voice reasonable. “Everything’s fine. Just a little help, and that we’ll pay for.”

“
Help
,” Ramdan repeated. His tongue hissed on the French syllables. The shop owner took a further step into the office itself. He supported his weight on the right side with a crutch-headed cane. His slippered feet glided over the floor, rasping in the grit. “Three of us already have died—perhaps more!
My
leg, it could have been my
head
! They say ‘Flee!,’ but my leg . . . and who would look after my wares? And you want help!”

The boy behind the shop owner had not moved. His eyes glittered above the older man’s shoulder.

Kelly shrugged. “You wanted to make a battle out of it,” he said. “Me, I’d already seen as much shooting as I thought I needed to. . . .” He held Ramdan’s eyes, the cold certainty of his gaze quenching the Kabyle’s anger. “You’ve got channels across the border, Morocco or Tunisia, right? I want you to smuggle us out.”

“Madman!” Ramdan shouted. “Get out of here!” The Kabyle raised his stick to gesture or threaten. Weight shifting onto his right thigh seared him like a fresh wound. His mouth gaped soundlessly. The cane wavered, its ferrule flicking back to the floor and skidding. The heavy man started to fall.

Kelly did not move. The boy, startled back into reality, tried to catch the older man. The angle was wrong. The Enfield clubbed at Ramdan’s back as the boy grabbed reflexively. The agent stepped forward then and took the shop owner’s weight on his own shoulder and flexed knees.

Professor Vlasov stood and pulled out the chair. Kelly guided the older Kabyle into the seat as gently as if he held an equal weight of electronic gear. When the agent straightened, he plucked the revolver from the boy’s hand without looking around to give warning.

“We want you to smuggle us out,” Kelly repeated in a voice from which his control kept the need to pant with exertion. He thumbed the Enfield’s latch and dumped the six fat cartridges into his left palm. He laid the empty revolver on the desk top; the ammunition tumbled into the pocket of the agent’s shirt.

The boy snatched up the weapon again.

“How do you know we could get you out if we wanted to?” Ramdan asked in a sick, weary voice. His words were an affirmation of what had been no more than an assumption in Kelly’s mind until then.

“Hell, are we little children?” the agent sneered. He deliberately turned his back on the others and sauntered toward the alley door. His thumbs were hooked in his belt. “You need to raise money, to talk to journalists . . . to buy guns and ammo, for Christ’s sake! Don’t you?”

Kelly spun more abruptly than he would have done if the .38 S&W cartridges were not a shifting weight in his pocket. “And I don’t suppose your couriers get their visas stamped every week at the border, do they?” he continued, hectoring the injured man. need a quick trip out and we’ll pay for it, like I said. And I don’t mean some Swiss cloud-cuckoo land, either—green dollars, five thousand of them, cash in hand when you’ve earned it.”

Both of the Kabyles were watching Kelly with a different sort of interest. The boy had cradled the Enfield to his chest as if it were a kitten. Now, the fingers of his left hand paused in stroking the empty cylinder.

The agent unbuckled his heavy belt. His face wore a sneer as professional as a rock star’s. He slid the belt through the pants’ loops, stepping past Ramdan to use the desk front as a support. The belt was thin leather, folded lengthwise in three overlapping layers. Kelly raised the top layer.

The chair squealed as the shop owner swiveled to watch. Kelly reached into the pocket formed by the middle and bottom layers. He plucked out part of the stuffing and dropped it into Ramdan’s lap. “Forty-nine more where that came from,” the agent said. “Just get me and my friend across one border or the other.”

The Kabyle’s hands quivered as he opened what had been tossed to him. It is one thing to talk of a million dollars in the abstract. A US hundred-dollar bill, folded into sixteenths, is money in human terms.

“Just get us out,” Kelly said very softly.

Ramdan smoothed the bill with the edge of his right hand. “It is . . .” he said, staring at Benjamin Franklin’s face. “Just perhaps. . . .”

The telephone was in a lower drawer of the desk. The Kabyle took it out and dialed quickly. The instrument was balanced on one knee, the crinkled bill on the other. The phone rang repeatedly. Ramdan looked up in nervous embarrassment. Kelly was buckling his money belt on again.

“I’m afraid—” the shop owner began. All four men could hear the click of someone finally answering on the other end of the line.

Ramdan’s eyes immediately flashed down to his lap again, the telephone and the money. He began talking, low-voiced but very quickly. The burr of response was not to his liking. The shop owner began to speak louder and even faster. His voice gained back the timbre and animation it had had the previous day, before a bullet had tempered his spirits in his own blood. He picked up the hundred with his free hand and began to snap it back and forth in the air, as if the person on the other end of the line could see it.

The exchange in Kabyle was long and heated enough that by the end, the other voice was audible also. Ramdan lowered the handpiece but did not cradle it. He was breathing hard. “All right,” he said, “Tunis. But only one of you. That is all that will be possible for three weeks, perhaps a month. And the money in advance.”

For the moment, Kelly ignored the demand about the money. He slotted home the tongue of his belt and said, “Why only one? What’s the deal?”

Ramdan looked at the phone, then the agent. Vlasov was silent in a corner of the room. Only his eyes moved. The older Kabyle said at last, “It is a plane, a very small plane. We must land and take off outside the regular airfields, even in Tunisia. The ground is rough, we must not overload the plane.” He paused, then concluded with a note of anger, “It is only because there is room available that Sa’ad would agree. Not the money. And because he said you fought like a tiger yesterday.”

Kelly’s smile was as stark as a gun muzzle. “Does he say that?” the agent asked with a mildness that deceived no one. Then, “Well, I don’t try to fight the laws of physics, though. Okay. It’s a deal.” Everyone else in the room tensed. “You land near Tunis, I suppose?”

Ramdan nodded. The telephone blipped an interrogative. The shop owner snapped back at it in Kabyle without taking his eyes from Kelly’s face.

“Okay,” the agent repeated. “You’ll take my friend here. We aren’t going to use names, you understand, because I don’t like some of the things that happen when names are used. . . .” He looked at Vlasov. A tiny smile lifted the corner of the Professor’s mouth. “Sure, you hang out with crazy people and you start to get funny yourself,” Kelly added. He rubbed his face with the knuckles of his left hand.

“My friend will have the money in his pocket,” the agent continued in a stronger, certain voice. “He’ll hand it over as soon as somebody delivers him to Carthage-Tunis airport on”—Kelly looked at his watch—“Monday morning. He’ll also turn over that revolver”—he pointed to the Enfield—“which he’ll be carrying until then.”

The boy sprang back. “No!” he gasped. He pointed the weapon in what would have been a threatening gesture had it been loaded.

Ramdan looked up at Kelly and sighed. “In the base of the lamp,” he said, gesturing behind him. “I understand.”

Kelly nodded and unlocked the porcelain fixture from the wall. As the American slid the fiberboard cover off the bottom, Ramdan went on curiously, “But why at that time? That means we must feed him, hide him two days?”

There was a tiny Beretta .25 pistol in the lamp base. “Because,” Kelly said as he checked the magazine—it was full—“it’s going to take me that long to get there myself if you won’t take me.” He handed the autoloader to Vlasov. “Tell you the truth, Professor,” he went on in French, “I don’t doubt their honesty or I wouldn’t be doing this at all. But if I can’t be with you myself”—he smiled—“the next best thing is a gun.”

No one laughed.

Kelly sobered. “One more thing,” he said. “I’ve got a car of sorts, but I’ll need plates for it. 58 through 60 series’ll do, or out of country—I don’t care which. They just can’t be reported stolen until Tuesday, that’s all.”

Ramdan still held the telephone. He raised the handpiece and began talking into it in muted tones, looking up at the agent repeatedly.

“You are going to drive?” asked the boy. Both Kelly and Vlasov stared at him. That was the first connected sentence either of them had heard him speak. “They will stop you at the border if your license and registration do not match.”

“Yeah, I’ll have to think about that one, won’t I?” the agent said. The kid might have a future after all. Not for field operations, though. He was the sort who threw the igniter and crouched down holding the fused satchel charge until it went off.

Ramdan lowered the phone again. “No more demands, then?” he pressed. “The deal as you leave it now?”

“Well, clothes—a jacket, hell, that’ll do,” Kelly said. His smile was back and there was at last some humor in it. “And one more thing—a bed for a couple hours. Or a floor where people won’t mind stepping over me.” He stretched. His yawn camouflaged the stabs and ripples of pain that avalanched through his body.

Ramdan began speaking into the phone.

Aloud but to no one in particular, Kelly said, “Got a long way yet to go.” His mind chorused from “Sam Hall”—“Now up the rope I go, now up I go. . . .”

XLIII

The Temple of Minerva in Tebessa was almost four hundred years older than the city’s Byzantine walls. As one of the best-preserved Roman temples in the world, it was an obvious magnet for tourists passing through the border city. Kelly was pretending to study the Roman funerary monuments in the fenced temple yard when the Renault 18 pulled up across the street beneath the massive wall. The car had Tunisian plates. Even better, they bore a CD prefix—Corps Diplomatique.

The American agent continued to face the stele as he watched the two couples. They locked up the car, laughing. They were all on the young side, the women in particular. One of them had black hair and a bouncing giggle that cramped Kelly’s groin despite his nervousness. It was the men he needed to concentrate on, however, and one of them would do well, do very well. . . .

The couples were talking in French as they entered the gate. They passed Kelly with a murmured “Bonjour,” all around:” The temple had become a museum while Algeria was still a French colony, and the Algerians had kept it up to the extent of having a caretaker present.

The leader of the visiting couples was a half-step ahead of his companions. He was speaking volubly as he waved toward the carven transoms of the pillared but roofless entryway. He was in his mid-thirties with a dark complexion; he was Kelly’s height and weight besides, though he carried more of the latter in a chair-bottom spread. The Frenchman was contrasting the temple with the one they had seen in Djemila, and that was especially good. It meant that they were returning home after a stay of at least several days in Algeria. It would have been more awkward if they had just crossed the border, though you could finesse a lot with a diplomatic passport. . . .