Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (40 page)

“Where I come from, we dress for the cold,” Vlasov grumbled without bitterness. The agent’s good humor was infectious, and the Russian, too, seemed to feel that they were at least in reach of safety. Like Kelly, he was damp from the drizzle. They had started to run the block from the train station to the hotel, but the events of previous days had simply not left either man enough strength or energy.

The desk clerk brightened as he saw the men. “Ah, Mr. Kelly,” he said, “I had almost given up hope of you. Welcome.”

“Emil,” the agent said, “I almost gave up hope a time or two myself. Can you find a double room for my friend and me? Sorry I didn’t phone ahead, but things got rushed. Oh—and our luggage is back in the airport somewhere. Do you suppose you could find a place to deliver a couple suits after hours? We’ll pay what it takes to be able to change into something dry.”

‘“Why yes, I can arrange that,” said the clerk. He handed Kelly a registration card and a key with a long brass tag. “But I believe the lady said she had brought some luggage of yours along with her.”

“The . . . lady?” repeated Kelly. He turned smoothly, his eyes wide open so that he had the full arc of peripheral vision that he might need. In front of him, the stairs; to the left, the front door and the rain-slicked dark beyond; to the right, the passage to the dining room and the tiny lobby beneath the stairwell. Kelly’s lips smiled, and his right hand was firm on the butt of the gun in his pocket.

“What?” said the clerk. “Oh—”

“Good evening, Tom,” said Annamaria Gordon. She walked from the lobby toward the reception desk. “I suppose I can call you that here.” Her smile was nervous, but when she stopped a pace from Kelly she stood with lady-like dignity.

Vlasov was puzzled but not concerned. He looked from the woman to Kelly and said, “I had not understood you would be meeting us here, madame.”

“How?” Kelly mouthed. His hand was still in his pocket. His eyes were staring, trying to scan everything that might be a threat, a target.

Annamaria reached into her purse with a thumb and forefinger. She brought out Kelly’s account book. “You left this in your luggage,” she said. Her smile was suddenly brighter. “All I knew was that you were making up your route as you went along. You didn’t have to come to Frankfurt, but it was logical, you know the city and you had to go somewhere you knew—” She riffled the pages of the spiral notebook. “You always stayed at the Excelsior when you came here. And Tom—I had to go somewhere.”

“Mr. Kelly?” said the puzzled clerk.

The agent turned abruptly and completed the registration card. Over his shoulder he muttered, “I’d have come back.” He looked up at the clerk. “Emil,” he said, “we’ll wait on the suits, thank you, until we sort things out.” He started to take the room key in his right hand but stopped.

Holding the key in his left, Kelly led his companions to the stairs. His free hand hovered near the pocket of his coat.

Annamaria said in a low voice to the agent’s back, “No, I had to leave. Buffy came and told me what . . . what Rufus had done. She had to talk to someone, poor thing. I . . . it was me by default, I suppose.”

Kelly unlocked the door nearest the stairhead on the second floor. “If she told you that, I suppose you got a notion of what I did, too.” He gestured the others past him with his left arm.

“You acted by the rules you lived by, Tom,” the woman said as she entered the room. “Rufus acted by no rules at all, his or yours or anyone’s. That makes him not a man but a bomb, ready to go off at random.” She turned and smiled, at Vlasov and past him to Kelly. “If you get random, I’ll leave you too, dear Angelo. But until then, I’ll stay if you’ll have me.”

The agent shot the deadbolt lock. Then he reached for Annamaria. Professor Vlasov smiled and edged aside, but Kelly stopped himself anyway.

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” the defector said. He looked around the room. It was plainly furnished with a desk, a pair of chairs, and two single beds with feather ticks. “I can—or there is another room, the one you have, madam?”

“No!” Kelly snapped. He took a deep breath and forced a smile. “First things first, Professor,” he said. “You don’t leave my sight until I put you in the hands of General Pedler or somebody I’ve met on his staff. We’re not going anywhere near the Consulate-General here, either. There isn’t anybody there at night who’d be able to figure out what I was talking about. And even in the morning—well, I trust Pedler, I don’t trust a Consul General I’ve never met. Not to make decisions that might be your life and mine if they’re wrong.”

“I thought you might go straight to Paris instead of—dodging again,” Annamaria said. “Or Rome, or—but there aren’t too many direct flights from North Africa. A friend in the Paris embassy would tell me if you were heard from there, and I—I thought I’d wait here for a few days, and then make plans if I had to.”

“I’ve got visions of being tracked down by a world-wide network of embassy receptionists,” Kelly said with a grin. He squeezed Annamaria’s hand. “Anyhow, I’m glad that this time when I left clues, it was somebody I wanted to see who picked them up.” He stepped over to the phone, taking off his damp jacket as he did so.

“Actually,” the woman remarked with some asperity, “it wasn’t a receptionist. In Paris, the Marines do that anyway. It was the Deputy Chief of Mission.”

For the first time, Annamaria appeared to notice how wet both men’s clothing was. “But here,” she said in a cheerful voice again, “I really do have your suitcases in my room.” She glanced at Vlasov. The Russian had seated himself on a corner of one of the beds. “At least you can sit in something dry, Professor,” she added, “though I don’t suppose it’ll fit you any better than an outfit of mine would.”

“Ah, take the key,” the agent said. Looking at his own outstretched hand, he added, “That was a pretty dumb thing for me to say. I’ll work on doing better.”

Annamaria’s touch and her smile were electric. Then the door clicked shut behind her.

Kelly dialed the desk. “Need to start the ball rolling,” he remarked to Vlasov. As he waited with the phone to his ear, the agent noticed his coat on the bed where he had tossed it. He reached into the side pocket and brought out the pistol. “Suppose I’ll have to deep-six this when you’re clear,” he said. “Tempted to keep it for a souvenir, but that wouldn’t be fair to—”

“Yes?” said the phone.

“Emil,” the agent said, “see if you can get the US Embassy in Paris for me—I don’t have the number either. I need the Defense Attaché’s Office, General Pedler himself if he’s around. I’ll wait as long as it takes.”

As the phone hissed, Kelly tucked the pistol back into the coat. He began to massage his scalp. “Never occurred to me I’d need to phone Pedler,” he said to the Russian, filling the empty seconds, minutes. “Figure there’ll be somebody there in the office who can raise him in an emergency. And he must have got enough word from Algiers already to know this is an emergency.”

The defector was edging backward on the bed. His eyes flicked from the window to the door.

“What the hell’s the matter?” Kelly demanded tensely. “Professor?”

There was a sound in the hall. Kelly looked from Vlasov to the door, his scowl smoothing to greet Annamaria. The panel swung inward without a click from the latch. There were three men in black, filling the doorway. One held an open badge case. The other two pointed objects that looked less like guns as they stepped forward. The door swung shut behind them.

The phone in Kelly’s hand made a sizzling sound. Then it went dead.

“Professor Evgeny Vlasov?” said the one with the badge. He spoke in Russian with neither accent nor tone. “We are from Section T of the Bundespolizei.”

“What is Section T?” Kelly asked, putting the handset down very carefully without cradling it. He watched the intruders. The distance to his coat, to his pistol, he measured in his mind rather than with his eyes or his poised right hand.

It was too far.

The intruders did not respond to Kelly, though one of them kept his—gun—trained on the agent. “You must come with us, now, Professor Evgeny Vlasov,” the middle one said.

Without changing expression, the third man in black turned. He was already raising his weapon when the hall door burst inward.

If the self-styled “Federal Policeman” thought his gun was a magic wand, he reckoned without Nguyen Van Tanh. The Vietnamese colonel knew he had to kill everyone in the room; he started even as the door swung. The first five shots were so fast they could have come from an automatic weapon. Two through the torso of the man facing him, two through the spine of the man who had spoken to Vlasov. The 87-grain steel bullets howled through their initial targets; one of them shattering a window pane as it exited the room. All five shots ripped out in less than a quarter second. The last of them was kidney level through the intruder covering Kelly.

As it tore out of the body, the Tokarev bullet hit the man in black’s gun. The narrow entryway dissolved in a white flash.

The muzzle blasts had been deafening in the confined space anyway, but even later the survivors were sure that the flash had been almost soundless. It was as dazzling as a magnesium flare, however, and it was by blind memory alone that Kelly dived for the coat and his pistol within it. He scrabbled to find the pocket.

Nguyen, blind as his opponent, caught the blur of motion and aimed for it by instinct. His trigger finger was as much a part of his pistol’s lockwork as the firing pin itself. As it started to squeeze, Annamaria threw a jacket over Nguyen’s head and jerked him backwards.

The Colonel’s sixth shot cracked above Kelly’s head. Kelly fired twice through the fabric of his coat. The plastic bullets smacked audibly as they hit. Nguyen thrust behind him with his left hand, weighted with a spare magazine. Annamaria caromed back into the hallway, tearing the blindfold from the Vietnamese even as Kelly shot him twice more—once in the center of mass, once behind the ear—and the Tokarev slipped from fingers which had already swung it on target one final time.

The pistol skidded on the carpet. Its owner did not. He sprawled instead like rice pouring from a fifty-kilo sack.

Kelly raised himself. His coat was smoldering, adding its fumes to those curling from the muzzle of his pistol. White sulphur smoke mixed in layers with the sweeter odor of nitro powder. The American stared at the fallen Tokarev. The pistol looked as worn and as deadly as a Marine sniper.

Annamaria was getting up. Kelly stepped to her, over Nguyen’s body. “Are you all right?” the woman asked before the agent himself could speak.

“Bastard was better than me,” said Kelly, tossing his own empty weapon to the nearer bed. Professor Vlasov had stood up also. There was an expression of hope dawning slowly over his face.

“Good thing I wasn’t alone this time,” the agent said. He drew Annamaria up with a controlled grace that belied the adrenalin tremors shaking all his muscles. “Best thing in the world that I’m not alone any more,” he said.

“They can be defeated,” the Professor said. “By guns, by my devices. By thousands of my devices above Earth.”

Kelly released Annamaria. “It was the KGB,” he said loudly. “It was the KGB, and one of them dropped a grenade!”

Doors were opening, spilling bursts of pop music and questions in a variety of languages. Wet air through the broken window swirled the powder smoke.

Professor Vlasov bent. The body of only one of the intruders remained after the blast, eyes staring upward. Vlasov ran the fingers of one hand over the floor. In the center of the area, the carpeting was gone and the hardwood surface beneath was charred through to the concrete base.

Inches further from the heart of the blast, the nylon nap had melted and been drawn up in long spikes toward a momentary vortex. Annamaria knelt beside the defector.

There was a loud gasp from the hall. Emil stood there, gaping into the room. Kelly could not be sure whether the clerk was more horrified by the dead bodies or the blast-eroded walls and floor. “Mr. Kelly!” Emil said. “Mr. Kelly!”

Kelly nodded. “It’ll be taken care of, Emil,” he said. “You know me. It’ll be taken care of.”

The clerk opened his mouth, but further words would not come. He turned briskly and clattered down several steps before he paused. “Oh, Mr. Kelly,” he said, a good servant even in the midst of disaster, “there was a fault with the line, somewhere; but your call has been put through now.” He bounded down the rest of the steps to his desk.

The phone muttered. Kelly looked from Vlasov to Annamaria. The woman was running her fingers over the face of the man in black. Kelly picked up the fallen handpiece. “Hello?” he said.

“Hello!” the phone repeated. “I said, this is Major August Nassif. You’ll have to state your business to get through to the general, I don’t care
who
you are, and I’m not going to hold this line much longer!”

“This is Tom Kelly,” the agent replied. “I’m about to be waist deep in Frankfurt cops.” He looked from the living humans to the body on the floor. “I think General Pedler’s looking for me. Tell him my business is Skyripper.”

Annamaria’s hand gripped and tugged. The face of the thing on the floor was the color of raw cinnabar. The nose was a single slit, the mouth a round hole with teeth like a lamprey’s around the inner margin. Fragments of the mask Annamaria had removed still clung to the skin like tendrils of white gauze.

“Tell him,” Annamaria said in a clear voice, “that the business of the world is Skyripper.”

Fortress

DEDICATION

To Tom Doherty,

who published my first book also,

and most of those in between.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Among the people who helped with bits of unclassified

background on this one are Glenn and Helen Knight;

Bernadette Bosky and Arthur Hlavaty; and Congressman

Newt Gingrich and his personal assistant, Laurie James.

Many thanks to all of them.

Prologue

Another 1965

Sergeant Tom Kelly listened to John F. Kennedy’s fifth State of the Union Address—his so-called “Buck Rogers Speech”—at a firebase in the Shuf Mountains, watching Druse 122-mm rockets arc toward Beirut across the night sky.