Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (49 page)

“You didn’t get the keys from Doug before you came out,” Kelly said while they waited at what he remembered as the last of the traffic lights, if they were headed back into the District as they seemed to be.

“I’d given him my spare set,” the woman said, coming off the light as if she were dropping the hammer at a drag strip. “I’ll pick them up tomorrow.”

Eyes on the entrance ramp and the possible traffic on the turnpike into which they were merging, she added, “Blakeley doesn’t get
only
on your nerves, Tom. But let me keep my mind on what I’m doing right now, okay?”

They were heading south for the skyglow above the capital much faster than Doug had brought them to Meade, though there was no similarity between the styles of the two drivers. Doug had a heavy foot for brake and accelerator, and a muffled curse for other vehicles which did not behave in the manner he wished them to.

Elaine dabbed, sliding diagonally through interstices in traffic with a verve which Kelly had thought only a motorcycle could achieve. She was anticipating not only the cars nearest in front and beside them, but the next tier of vehicles as well, so that the drive had the feel of a chess game. Most of the time she kept the Volvo’s engine snarling in third gear or fourth. Only on the rare stretches of really empty pavement did she shift up into the overdrive fifth, trading acceleration for the car’s absolute top end.

“Motor’s to European specs,” she called in satisfaction over the engine note at one of the fifth-gear upshifts. “And the suspension’s had a little work.”

The team in the follow-car must be royally pissed, thought Kelly as he relaxed against the seat cushions, but they had a destination and might even be used to this sort of run if they were assigned regularly to Elaine. She wasn’t in a hurry, particularly, and she wasn’t trying to prove her competence—or manhood, though it was a joke to think about it that way—to Kelly.

Driving on the edge of control—and control was what was important, not speed—was a hell of a good way to burn away hormones and emotions which had to be bottled up in social situations. If you understood what was going on, you could achieve catharsis without acting as if you were furious with everyone else on the road at the same time. Elaine knew that very well, and she drove with a razorlike acuity not muffled by the need for false emotions to justify it.

“You know,” said the veteran as they halted at the first traffic light in downtown Washington, “you could fool me into thinking that you don’t like the people you work for a whole lot better than I do.”

“You had an escape valve in that meeting.” Elaine proceeded through the intersection sedately. The sodium-vapor street lights emphasized the color raised on her cheeks by the high-intensity drive. “You could always decide you were going to try to kill everybody else in the room. I didn’t have that luxury.”

Kelly turned sharply to stare at her profile. Her hair had fluffed during the drive, shading her cheeks, but she cocked her head enough toward the veteran to let him see her grin.

He smiled as well, releasing the catch of his seatbelt in order to shift the weapon in the hollow of his back. “I wouldn’t have, no sweat,” he said. “But yeah, sometimes it’s nice to know that endgame’s
your
choice, not some other bastard’s.”

Kelly was wondering idly at the facades of Central Washington buildings, lower and more interestingly variegated than those of most comparable cities, when the Volvo cut smoothly toward the curb. The veteran glanced from Elaine, thumbing the trunk-latch button on the console, and back with new interest to the hotel at which they had stopped. The ground level expanse was of curtained glass and glass doors printed with “The Madison” as tastefully as gold leaf can ever be. Despite the hour, a uniformed attendant was coming out almost simultaneously with the muffled pop of the trunk.

Elaine had her door open and was stepping into the street before Kelly could even start around the car to hand her out. “They’re gonna confiscate my shining armor, lady,” he called plaintively over the green roof.

“Get the case, Tom,” she replied as she pointed out the keys still in the ignition to the attendant, who slid behind the wheel.

The sound from above was unmistakable, but it was so unexpected in the present context that Kelly could not fully believe what he was hearing even after he paused to stare up into the darkness. “What the hell?” he said as Elaine walked back to him and glanced upward as well. “There’s a helicopter orbiting up there.”

The clop of rotor blades was syncopated by echoes from building fronts and the broad streets, but the whine of the turbine waxed and waned purely as a result of the attitude of the aircraft to the listeners below.

“Get the case,” Elaine repeated calmly. “It’s not us—not that they told me.” She shrugged and pursed her lips in a moue. “The President of Venezuela’s in town. He’s probably staying here.”

Kelly hefted out the black Halliburton in the trunk. The attaché case was not so much heavy in the abstract as it was disconcertingly heavier than the norm for things that looked like it. “I congratulate you on the excellence of your expense accounts, ah—” he said as he slammed the trunk, “Elaine.”

He followed the woman at a half step and to the side as they strode through the lobby, heeling really, as if he were a well-trained dog. Which was true enough, very true indeed, though he wasn’t sure just whose dog he was right at the moment. Not NSA’s, certainly not that of the bastards he’d just met at Meade, whatever their acronym turned out to be for the moment.

The hell of it was, the
hell
of it was, Tom Kelly probably still belonged to an abstraction called America which existed only in his mind. It didn’t bear much similarity to the US government; but he guessed that was as close as you came in the real world.

Fuckin’ A.

Elaine had fished a key from her purse as they walked between a quietly-comfortable lobby and the reception desk. She ignored the clerk as she strode toward the elevators, but Kelly noticed the man turned and spun his hand idly in the box that would have held messages for room 618. Kelly winked, and the clerk waved back with a broad grin.

The graveyard shift was boring as hell, even if you were pretty sure the other side had you targeted for a night assault.

Kelly entered the brass-doored elevator at the woman’s side and pushed the button for the sixth floor before she lifted her hand. “This isn’t the briefcase you had earlier?” he said, staring at his poker-faced reflection in the polished metal.

“No, it’s the one that stayed under guard in the car until we knew we’d want it,” Elaine said, eyeing the veteran sidelong with an expression resembling that of a squirrel in hunting season.

Keep ‘em off balance, Kelly thought as his expression of wide-eyed innocence looked back at him. Especially when you don’t know which end is up yourself.

Room 618 had a king-sized bed, a window that would show a fair swath of the city by daylight, and a Persian carpet which didn’t look like anything near the money Kelly knew its equivalent would cost in the shop in the lobby.

There was also a small refrigerator in one corner.

Kelly set the attaché case down on the writing desk and knelt beside the refrigerator. “Gimme the key,” he said, holding out his left hand behind him. When nothing slapped his palm, he turned and seated himself on one buttock on the edge of the desk.

Elaine stood with the thumb and index finger of either hand on the keys, the larger one for the door and the small one that unlocked the refrigerator which formed the room’s private bar. Her face was as blank as it would have been if construction workers had whistled at her from across a street.

“You’ve got no right to judge me, woman,” Kelly said. His right leg was flexed, and his hand gripped the raised knee in a pattern of tendons and veins. “No fucking
right!
” he shouted as if volume could release the pressure inside him or crack the marble calm of the woman who met his eyes.

“I have the job of judging you, Tom,” she said with no emphasis as she bent and handed the paired keys to him. “Shall I get a bucket of ice?”

“Naw, I’m not warm,” the veteran said, his throat clogged with residues of the emotion he hated himself for having let out. “Thanks.” He fitted the key into the lock and opened the little door. “I’m not warm, just thirsty. Anything for you?”

“Orange juice,” Elaine said as she rotated the three-dial combination of the attaché case. “Grapefruit, something citrus.”

At least, and for a wonder, it wasn’t Perrier—which Kelly had always found to taste like water from a well contaminated with acetylene. And at least she did not stare at what Kelly brought out for himself, a minibottle of Jack Daniel’s and a can of Lowenbrau.

“There’s a really good Pilsner beer in Turkey,” he said as he twisted a chair so that he could see both the woman and the files that she was beginning to place on the desk. “I got to like it.” He twisted the cap off the bottle of whiskey, took a sip, and washed the liquor down with a swallow of beer.

When Elaine still said nothing, the veteran prodded, “You’ve got a dead Kurd and a dead alien. And you’ve got me, until I drink myself into a stupor, hey? So why don’t we get to it?”

“I don’t like self-destructive people,” the woman said as she set the emptied case to the floor and sat at the other chair by the desk. “I like it even less when an exceptionally able person I have to work with seems bent on destroying himself. But I don’t like it when an airline manages to lose my luggage, either, and I’ve learned to live with that.”

Kelly finished the whiskey, his eyes meeting the woman’s. “My work gets done,” he said, wishing that his tone did not sound so defensive.

“And it’ll continue to get done,” Elaine responded coolly, “until one day it doesn’t. Which may mean that people get dead, or worse. But since it’s like the weather, something that can’t be helped, then we don’t need to talk about it any more,”

She wasn’t particularly tall, Kelly thought, but she looked just as frail as her black linen jacket, through which light showed every time the fabric fluffed away from her body. He felt like a pit bull facing a chihuahua which was smart enough to be afraid, but wasn’t for all that about to back down.

He got up, carrying the can of beer, and walked toward the bathroom. “What is it you think I can do for you?” he called over his shoulder, the phrasing carefully ambiguous. He poured the rest of his beer down the sink and ran water into the aluminum can.

Elaine, still seated, twisted to face him when he returned from the bathroom. “Your personal contacts with the Kurds are more likely to get you information about what’s going on than the formal information nets are. The fact that we’ve heard so little about something so major proves that there’s a problem.”

“What
do
you have?” Kelly asked, stretching himself out on his back on the carpet between the bed and the window. He set the can of water down beside him and cupped his hands beneath his skull as a pillow.

“Reports of men going off for military training,” the woman said. “Many of them men we’d had on the payroll ourselves during Birdlike.”

“Mohammed Ayyubi one of them?” Kelly asked from the floor. Rather than relaxing, he was bearing his weight on shoulders and heels with his belly muscles tensed in a flat arch. Elaine could not tell whether his eyes were closed or just slitted, watching her, and the effect was similar to that of being stalked in the darkness.

“No,” she said, “but he’d been closely associated with some of the people who disappeared. He was living in Istanbul, living well and without a job, you know? He’d make trips east and we think probably to Europe, though we were never able to trace him out of Turkey. Or even far in-country, except after the fact. Somebody would tell us that somebody’s wife had a lot of money, now, and her husband had gone off with Mohammed Ayyubi, in a new struggle for Free Kurdistan. That sort of thing.”

Kelly rolled onto his side, facing Elaine, and took a deep draft of water from his can. “Haven’t found much use for hotel glasses but to stick your toothbrush in,” he said with a disarming grin. “The .22 Shorts of the container world.” Without changing expression, he went on, “What do they say when they come back, Elaine? Who’s training them?”

“Russia, we thought,” the woman said. She shifted on her chair, crossing her right thigh over the left and angrily aware that there was no normal etiquette for discussions with a man who lay at one’s feet. “Now, of course, we’re not sure. And none of the—recruits we’ve targeted seem to have come back, on leave or whatever, though their families get sizable remittances in hard currency, not lire.”

“You’ve tried to get people close to Mohammed before now,” Kelly said, his flat tone begging the question. “I don’t think money’d do much to turn his head if he’s—he was—convinced somebody was offering a real chance for Kurdish independence . . . but you people’d think money was the ticket, wouldn’t you? What’d he say?”

There was nothing lithe about the man sprawled on the carpet, Elaine thought. He was as close-coupled as a brick, built like a male lion—and with all the arrogance of the male lion’s strength and willingness to kill his own kind.

“We don’t know,” she said carefully. “There was a car bomb explosion—in Diyarbakir—the day before the shooting. Three people were killed, two of them as they came out of the hotel in which they were to have met Ayyubi. We don’t know whether they did or not, or what was said.”

“Hardball, aren’t we?” said the veteran in a very soft voice to the beer can. He held it between thumb and middle finger, at the top where the braced crimp in the cylinder would have made it impossible for even Godzilla to crush the can with two fingers. The mottled skin and the way the tendons stood out proved that Kelly was trying, though, or at least spending in isometrics an emotional charge that would otherwise have broken something. “Amcits, I suppose?”

“Our personnel were American citizens, yes,” Elaine said. “They were assigned TDY to the missile tracking station at Pirinclik, just out of town.”

“NSA’s being cooperative after all.” Kelly put the can down again. His eyes, as calm as they ever had been, were back on hers. Elaine had read enough between the lines of the psych profiles in the veteran’s file to know that he really didn’t have as short a fuse as he projected under stress. The anger was there, but there was a level of control that could handle almost anything.