Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (46 page)

Kelly tried to switch off the VCR. When his thumb touched the Eject button on the controller as well, the tape whirred and cycled itself halfway out of the feed slot. The veteran’s anger flared, though no one in the world but he knew the act was nervous clumsiness instead of deliberation. He was allowing himself to be spooked!

“We need a Kurdish speaker,” Doug said with a toss of his head that seemed to clear a dark aura from his soul, “and we may need someone who was involved with Operation Birdlike—assuming Ayyubi wasn’t the only member of that group who’s gotten involved in this new business.”

“Go home.” Kelly spoke flatly as he shook himself and set the remote unit back on Bianci’s desk. “Go home so I can lock up behind you and go home myself.” He rubbed his eyes with his left forearm. “Been a long day, been a long three years. I’m just not in a mood for government-issue bullshit any more.”

“It’s not bullshit, Mr. Kelly,” the woman said as she watched him with the inscrutable eyes of a cat viewing a bird too big to be prey. “Earth has been visited by aliens—
is being
visited, we think. Men who you know have been in contact with them.”

“Don’t you think,” Doug Blakeley interjected, “that it’s time the USG got involved instead of leaving things to barbs whose only link to the twentieth century is a machine gun?”

Kelly turned toward the other man, prey indeed if he chose—as he did not. Doug was trash, the discussion was trash, and Elaine—

Elaine stepped between the two men, close enough to Kelly that she had to tilt her face to meet his eyes. “He doesn’t matter, Mr. Kelly,” the black-haired woman said as if she had read the veteran’s mind. “This matters very much, if it’s true. You know it does.”

“And
you
know a videotape doesn’t prove jack shit!” Kelly shouted, as if to drive her back by the violence of his reaction.

“Then come look at the body itself, Kelly,” Elaine said with an acid precision. “If you’re man enough.”

She would not back away from him and he would not face her glare, so Kelly spun on his heel to stare out at the reception area. “Figured you’d tell me that, ‘Gee, the Turkish police had it’—or maybe the plane bringing it back to the World had flown into a mountain.” Even five years after the last tour in the Lebanon, Kelly had the veterans’ trick of referring to the continental United States as “the World.”

“The evidence—the body—is at Fort Meade,” said the woman behind him. “We have a car. We can have you there in forty minutes to examine it yourself.”

“Are you doing a job on me, honey?” Kelly said as he turned again to face her. “Is this all a way to get me behind walls with no fuss ‘r bother?”

“Oh, come now, Kelly,” said the blond man standing behind Elaine, arms akimbo. “Don’t you think you’re being overly dramatic?”

There were only two things in the office which were not Congressman Bianci’s—or alive. Kelly stepped toward the VCR. Elaine, who thought he was trying to close with her companion, sidestepped quickly to block the veteran. She was wearing sequined flats rather than the high heels to be expected with the formality of her suit. The sensible footgear saved her from falling when Kelly’s shoulder slammed her back as remorselessly as a hundred and eighty pounds of brick in motion.

Doug shouted something that began as a warning and ended in a squawk as his hands by reflex clasped the stumbling woman. Kelly bent, his back to the couple momentarily as he took the videotape from the VCR. The cassette was cool, its upper edge rough beneath his fingers. As Elaine’s hands touched Doug’s, in part for balance’s sake but also to restrain her companion as both stared at Kelly, the veteran pivoted and smashed the tape down on the aluminum attaché case.

The impact did not scar the anodized surface of the Halliburton, but the polystyrene videocassette shattered with a sound like the spiral fracture of a shin bone.

“Hey!” Doug shouted. Elaine’s hands clamped in earnest on those of the man behind her.

Kelly slammed the cassette down again. The lower half of it disintegrated like a window breaking, spilling coils of half-inch tape along with the take-up sprocket. The veteran raised his right hand and opened it, letting the remainder of the cassette fall to the floor. Bits of black plastic clung to the sweat of his palm, and an inch-long shard had dug a bloody gouge into his flesh.

Kelly grinned at the others with his hand still lifted like a caricature of a wooden Indian. “You know,” he said in a voice so light that only his eyes suggested what he was saying was the baldest truth, “I figured when I walked in here it was fair odds I’d kill you both. Guess I’ll go back to Meade with you instead—but no more jokes about me acting crazy, okay?”

“You can call Representative Bianci and tell him where you’re going,” the woman said, twisting sinuously out of Doug’s arms and stepping to the side, her fingertips smoothing the lines of her skirt.

“
I’m
doing this to me,” Kelly replied, dusting his palms together like a cymbals player to clear them. Sweat stung the open gash, and he felt like a damned fool; overdramatic just like the blond meathead had said. “I don’t want Carlo getting involved if it’s me being too dumb to keep my head down.”

Doug massaged each wrist with the opposite hand, then knelt and began gathering up the tape and the larger bits of the cassette as well. Elaine said, “It might reassure him, you know.”

“He’ll be happy enough if he doesn’t get a call from Housekeeping about the blood on ‘is upholstery,” the veteran said with a savage laugh. “Look, let’s get this over, okay? I said I was going, didn’t I?”

The attaché case contained no files or papers of any sort, not even a manila envelope into which Doug could pour the remnants of the tape cassette, so they had to lie loose on the nylon-covered polyurethane foam instead. There was, however, a compact two-way radio in a fitted niche. The radio had no nameplate or manufacturer’s information on it, but neither was the unit a piece of government-issue hardware that Kelly recognized. Well, he’d been out—way out—for three years, and equipment was the least of what might change.

The stub of the coiled whip antenna hobbled as Doug spoke into the radio, glaring unconsciously at Kelly as he did so. All data was useful somewhere, in some intelligence paradise—you couldn’t spend a big chunk of your life in Collection and not think so. But it was only reflex that made Kelly’s mind focus on the chance of hearing a one-time-only code word, and that no more than the means of summoning a car. Doug’s bridling was an empty reflex as well—and both reactions were complicated by the fact that each of the men had been top dog for a long time, in ways that had nothing to do with chains of command.

Kelly was just loose enough at the moment to both recognize the situation and find it amusing. “Hey, junior,” he said to Doug as the radio crackled a muted, unintelligible reply, “I think you lost your place in the pecking order.”

“Let’s go,” said Elaine in a neutral voice, waving Doug out the door ahead of her and falling in behind him—separating the men since she knew that Bianci’s aide must be last out of the office to lock up.

The guard tonight at the side entrance of the Longworth Building was a heavy black woman. Kelly had seen and smiled at her a hundred times over the years as she rummaged harmlessly through whatever briefcase he happened to be carrying. It wasn’t an effective way to defeat a serious attempt to blow up the building, but it didn’t hurt Kelly—who, even when he was on active duty, had not traveled with documents he minded other people inspecting. Today the guard drew back as she saw the trio approaching her post from down the corridor. “Good night, Ethel,” Kelly called, never too tired—or wired—to be pleasant to anybody with a dismal job like guard, refuse collector, or code clerk. This time Ethel only nodded back, her concentration preoccupied by Doug and the Halliburton he had carefully locked. There was no reason in the world not to have opened the case like a citizen when he entered the building. Instead, Doug had obviously flashed credentials that had piqued the curiosity of even a guard who saw the stream of visitors to members of the House of Representatives. It was the same sort of bass-ackwardness that caused CIA officers operating under embassy cover in foreign venues to be issued non-American cars. They could therefore be separated with eighty percent certainty from the real State Department personnel by anyone who bothered to check traffic through the embassy gates.

“By the way,” Kelly goaded in a voice that echoed on the marble, “who do you work for? SAVE? Or are you Joint Chiefs Support Activity?”

“You
stupid
bastard,” Doug snarled, twisting in midmotion to glare at the other man, his palm thumping on the door’s glass panel instead of the push bar.

“Mr. Kelly,” said Elaine as she reached past her companion to thrust the door open, “you might consider whether in a worst-case scenario you wish to have involved a number of outsiders in this matter.” Her voice was clear but not loud, losing itself in the rush of outside air chilled by the shower that had been threatening all day.

Two cars pulled up at the curb outside just as the trio exited the Longworth Building. The follow-car was a gray Buick with a black vinyl roof, but the vehicle its lights illuminated was a bright green Volvo sedan. The Volvo’s driver got out quickly, leaving his door open, and trotted around to the curb side.

Elaine muttered a curse at the weather and hunched herself in her linen jacket, Doug strode forward as if there were no rain, the attaché case in his left hand swinging as if it weighed no more than a normal leather satchel.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” Kelly said as he and the woman hesitated under the roof overhang. “Shouldn’t let my temper go when I’m around innocent bystanders. Not for silly shit, especially.”

“Let’s go,” the woman said, darting across the wide sidewalk as a gust of wind lashed raindrops curving like a snake track across the pools already on the concrete.

The driver had opened both curbside doors for them. The veteran paused deliberately to see whether or not Elaine would get in before he did. She slid quickly into the back seat, showing a length of thigh that amused Kelly because it really did affect him. There were people who thought that sex was something physical. Damn fools.

“You can sit anywhere you please, Mr. Kelly,” the woman called from the car with a trace of exasperation. “All the doors work normally.”

The front seats were buckets, so they really hadn’t planned to sandwich him between the two of them—or more likely, between the former driver and Doug, who was now behind the wheel of the Volvo adjusting the angle of the backrest. “Right,” said Kelly, feeling a little foolish as he got into the front for the sake of the legroom. The man who had brought the Volvo to them closed both doors and scurried back to the follow-car.

Doug did not wait for the former driver to be picked up before goosing the Volvo’s throttle hard enough to spin the drive wheels on the wet pavement. The right rear tire scraped the edge of the curb before the sedan angled abruptly into the traffic lane and off through the night.

“If these’re the radials I’d guess they were,” said Kelly, angling sideways in the pocket of the seat, “then that’s a pretty good way to spend twenty minutes in the rain, changing the tire with a ripped sidewall.”

Doug glanced at his passenger, but then merely grunted and switched the headlights to bright. Raindrops appeared to curve toward them as the car accelerated.

Doug’s face had a greenish cast from the instrument lights. Kelly glimpsed the woman between the hollow headrests, her features illuminated in long pulses by the oncoming cars. The black frame of Elaine’s hair made her face a distinct oval even during intervals of darkness.

You couldn’t really see into a head like that, thought Kelly as the hammer of tires on bad pavement buzzed him into a sort of drifting reverie. Not in good light, not under stress. Sometimes you could predict the words the mind within would offer its audience; but you’d never know for sure the process by which the words were chosen, the switches and reconsiderations at levels of perceived side-effects which a man like Kelly never
wanted
to reach.

The veteran straightened so that his shoulder blade was no longer against the window ledge. He was physically tired, and the meeting in Bianci’s office had been as stressful and disorienting as a firefight. If he didn’t watch it, he’d put himself into a state more suggestible than anything an interrogation team could achieve with hypnotic drugs. Even the thought of that made Kelly’s skin crawl in a hot, prickling wave which spread downward from the peak of his skull.

“Which of you’s in charge?” he asked. The hostility implicit in the question was another goad to keep him alert.

“You’ll meet some of the people in charge tonight, if you care to,” the woman said, her face as expressionless in the lights of an oncoming truck as it was a moment later when backlit by the follow-car.

“No,” Kelly said. “I mean which of
you
two has the rank. When it comes down to cases, who says ‘jump’ and who says ‘how high?’ “

Doug turned with a fierceness which their speed and the turnpike traffic made unwise, snapping, “For somebody who claims he doesn’t intend to talk to anybody, you show a
real
inability to know when to shut the fuck up!”

Kelly grinned. The woman in the back seat said to his profile, “Would you take a direct order from either one of us, Mr. Kelly?”

The veteran looked at her directly and laughed. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t guess I would.”

“Then our ranks don’t matter,” she said coolly, and Kelly decided that wasn’t much of a lie in comparison to other things he’d heard tonight. And would hear later.

“Oh, Christ on a crutch,” Kelly muttered, locking his fingers behind his neck and arching his shoulders back as fiercely as he could in the cramped confines. “You know,” he said while he held the position, headlights flicking red patterns of blood to his retinas behind closed eyelids, “This’s going to be a first for me. I worked eighteen years for NSA, more’r less, and I never set foot in the building.” He opened his eyes, relaxed, and as he stared through the windshield toward the future added, “Can’t say I much wanted to.”