Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (56 page)

“I’d have thought you had sources of your own, Tom,” Elaine said. Her smile asked more than the words themselves did.

“Yeah, needs must,” agreed the veteran with false frustration. “I mean, it wasn’t a turndown. But things’re tight now,
real
tight, with Ecevit trying to get a grip on things. Somebody could take a
real
hard fall if, you know, something went wrong and the piece got traced back.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t
want
anything,” Kelly insisted, “but you know—if I do, something standard, a forty-five auto, a nine millimeter. And it’ll just be a security blanket, if I turn out not to have enough guts to stay on an even keel without something to wrap my hand around.”

“Doesn’t sound like a problem,” the woman said, nonchalance adding weight to the words. “Doesn’t seem to me either that you need to feel you’re going off the deep end if you choose to carry a personal sidearm under the—present circumstances.”

They were walking down Independence Boulevard, which was flooded with traffic noise and the sound of music, mostly Turkish, from the open doors of many of the shops. A triple-tier Philips sign over an electronics store threw golden highlights over Elaine’s short hair, Kelly bent closer to her to say, “I used to carry a piece all the time I was in uniform, a snubbie that wasn’t good for a damn thing but to blow my brains out if things got too tough. Just as soon not get into that headset again, you know?”

Elaine nodded; and Kelly, his task of misinforming his case officer complete, focused on finding a place to eat.

A few doors down a sidestreet shone the internal lighting of a red and blue Pepsi-Cola sign with, lettered below, the name Doner California. “
There
we go,” Kelly said, pointing with his offside arm to direct Elaine.

“Authentic Turkish, right,” the woman said in mock scorn as she obeyed. “Do they have a quartet lip-synching the Beach Boys?”

“I’ll eat every surfboard on the walls,” Kelly promised as he pushed open the glass-paneled door and handed her within. “Watch the little step.”

The floor of the diner was of ceramic tiles with a coarse brown glaze. There were half a dozen white-enameled tables, several of them occupied by men or groups of men dressed much as Kelly was. The sides and top of the counter were covered with green tile, similar to that of the floor in everything but color; but there was a decorative band just below the countertop, tiles mixing the brown and green glazes in an eight-pointed rosette against a white background.

Elaine was the only woman in the restaurant.

Though the evening was beginning to chill fog from air saturated by the Bosphorus, warmth puffed aggressively from the diner, heated as it was by a vertical gas grill behind the counter. A large piece of meat rotated on a spit before the mesh-fronted grill that glowed orange and blue as it hissed.

All eyes turned to the newcomers—particularly to Elaine—as they entered. The owner, behind the counter in an apron, made a guess at what variety of Europeans they were, and called, “Wilkommen!”

“God be with you,” Kelly responded, in Turkish rather than German.

Elaine slid onto a stool at the counter instead of a hoop-backed chair at one of the empty tables. “If we’re going to do this,” she replied to the veteran’s quizzical glance, “we may as well do it right. And you were right about the surfboards.”

A ten-year-old boy with the owner’s features and the skull-cap haircut universal among prepubescent Turkish males set out two glasses of water with a big smile.

“You hungry?” Kelly asked.

Elaine set her palm across the top of Kelly’s glass and held his eyes. “The water’s almost certainly okay,” she said. “Worst case is you’ll do anything
we
need you for before you’re disabled by amoebiasis. Your choice.” She slid the glass toward him and removed her hand.

Kelly hesitated. “Look,” he said, “I’ve drunk—”

“And if you were in the field,” Elaine interrupted calmly, “you might have to now. Your choice.”

“Two Pepsis,” Kelly said, smiling back at the boy. “And two dinners with double helpings of doner kebab, please,” he added to the father.

“Turkish for shish kebab?” Elaine asked as the boy opened small bottles with the familiar logo.

“Shish kebab
is
Turkish,” said Kelly, “and you can get it anywhere in the world. Doner’s pretty localized by contrast, so I’m making you a better person by offering you a new experience. Not necessarily better than the familiar, but different.”

The woman’s body tensed into her “neutral” status while she attempted to follow the ramifications of what Kelly had just said. Her legs crossed instinctively, then uncrossed and anchored themselves firmly to the footrail of the stool when she realized what she was doing.

Kelly, grinning broadly, turned to watch the owner slice doner while his son readied the plates with cooked carrots, cooked greens, and ladlesful of rice.

The meat rotating before the gas flame was not the roast or boned leg of mutton it at first appeared. It was in fact a large loaf of ground mutton, recompressed into a slab in the ovine equivalent of hamburger, homogenous and broiling evenly on the vertical spit.

As the Americans watched, the man behind the counter swung out the spit and the integral driptray onto which juices spluttered with a sound that would have started Kelly’s saliva flowing even if he had not gone most of a day without food. With a knife the length of his forearm, the Turk sliced away a strip of mutton so thin that it was translucent as it fell onto his cooking fork. The man pretended that he was not aware of the foreigners watching him, but his boy chortled with glee at the excellence of the job.

Rotating the spit with his fork—the motor drive shut off when the spit was removed from the fire—the owner stripped another portion of the loaf’s surface.

“Aren’t many useful things you can do with a knife sharp enough to shave with,” said Kelly approvingly, “but this is sure one of them.”

“You don’t believe in sharp knives?” Elaine asked in surprise.

“I don’t believe in—work knives,” Kelly replied with a grin, “so sharp that the edge turns when you hit, let’s say, a bone.”

The meal was everything Kelly had hoped, hot and good and profoundly real in an existence that was increasingly removed from what he had known and done in the past. If incongruity were the essence of humor, then what Tom Kelly was doing with and to Pierrard’s little playmates ought to be the laugh of a lifetime.

He sipped his Pepsi, put on a serious expression, and said, “I can never remember: should I have ordered lemon sodas instead with mutton?”

Elaine laughed, relaxed again. “We could ask the maitre d’, I suppose,” she said with a nod toward the owner beaming beside his grill.

“Who would tell us,” Kelly said, slumping a little, “Efes Pilsen—like everybody else.” His eyes swept the tables of other customers, crowded with the fat brown bottles of Pilsner beer. “And he’d be right, it’s great stuff, but I don’t suppose . . .”

Elaine touched the back of his fingers. “Tom,” she said, “you’ve got more balls than anybody I ever met in my life. And it isn’t because you act like you could tell the world to take a flying leap.”

“Which it damned well can,” Kelly grumbled. He was pleased nonetheless at the flattery, even though he knew that the woman was a professional and would have said the equivalent no matter what she really thought.

“I’m so very glad you’re using me the way I’m here to be used,” Elaine continued without taking her hand away from Kelly’s. “We both want the same thing.”

Except that one of us would really like Tom Kelly to survive the next couple weeks, the veteran thought as he turned over his hand and briefly squeezed her fingers. And the other cares more about what the weather in Washington’ll be like when she gets back. But nobody was holding a gun to his head just now.

“Let’s go see,” he said, rising with a broad smile for the owner and everyone else in the restaurant, “just how efficient a team we’re all gonna be.”

Elaine checked the clasp of her little purse as they approached the door of 727. Kelly caught the angry red wink of a light emitting diode and the woman stutter-stepped, not quite a stumble, before halting.

“Problems?” the veteran said, unaware of the growling catch in his voice as he stepped to the hinge side of the door.

“No, we were expecting a courier, weren’t we?” Elaine mumbled back, but she tapped on the door panel instead of inserting her key.

Doug opened the door. The LED warning went off. “I’ve been
waiting
here with the file,” the blond man said.

“Very tricky,” said Kelly with an approving nod toward the intrusion indicator.

“Not in the goddam
hallway
,”
snapped Elaine, using the purse as a pointer to thrust her big subordinate back in the room.

Kelly closed the door behind them. “The light wouldn’t come on if somebody hadn’t opened the door?” he asked.

“Amber if the door hadn’t been breached, no light at all if the transmitter had been tampered with,” said Elaine absently. She kicked off her shoes. “Doug, thank you for bringing the file. You can leave us to it now.”

She looked at Kelly. “Unless you want to be alone with this, Tom?” she asked, gesturing with the red-bordered folder Doug had just handed her from his Halliburton.

“We’ll take a look together,” the veteran said, seating himself at the desk. He felt momentarily dizzy and, squeezing his temples with both hands, brought the world he saw back into color and focus.

“Are you all right?” the woman asked. “Doug, wait a minute.”

“No problem,” said Kelly. “Haven’t slept in, you know, the whole flight. And with food in my belly, the brain isn’t getting all the blood supply it’d like to have. But no sweat, we’ll run through this and get a jump on what we need.”

“Blow?” Doug offered.

“You wouldn’t like me on coke,” Kelly said with a grin that widened like that of a wolf launching itself toward prey. “
I
wouldn’t like me on coke.”

He opened the folder and let his face smooth. “Quicker we get to work,” he said, speaking into the frozen silence, “the quicker I get to sleep.”

Elaine gestured Doug through the door, but he was already moving that way of his own accord.

“Well, what’ve we got here,” Kelly murmured, not a question, as Elaine set a straight-backed chair against the doorknob to jam the panel if anyone tried to power through it from the hallway. She damned well
was
more paranoid than the agent she was running. . . .

What they had was a sheaf of gatefold paper, the sheets still articulated, printed on a teletype or something with an equally unattractive typeface. Each page was headed with an alphanumeric folio line, but beneath that the first page was headed: Romer, Gisela Marie Hroswith. Good enough.

Kelly began to read, tearing each sheet off when he finished with it and laying it facedown on the desk. The woman, sitting on the bed, leaned forward and took the pages as Kelly laid them down. Neither spoke.

Gisela Romer was thirty-one, an inch taller than Kelly, and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. At five-ten, that didn’t make her willowy by Western standards, but it was as exotic a touch as her blond hair in a Turkish culture where a beautiful woman five feet tall would weigh as much. The telecopied newspaper photograph appended to the file was indistinct enough to have been Jackie Kennedy, but the high, prominent cheekbones came through.

As Elaine had said in the elevator, Gisela Romer was a Turkish citizen; but her father and mother were part of a sizable contingent of Germans who had surfaced in Turkey in the late forties, carrying South American and South African passports that might not have borne the most careful scrutiny. By that time, Berlin was under Soviet blockade and the Strategic Air Command was very interested in flight paths north from the Turkish bases they were constructing. Nobody was going to worry too much about, say, a Waffen-SS Oberfuehrer named Schneider who might now call himself Romer.

Information on Gisela was sparse through the mid-sixties—no place of residence and no record of schooling, though her father was reaching a level of prominence as a power in what was variously called the Service League or simply the Service—der Dienst.

“Is there an annex on the Dienst?” Kelly muttered when he got to the reference in Gisela Romer’s bio.

“You’ve got the file,” Elaine noted simply. “I can give you a bare bones now if there isn’t. An import-export cooperative for certain expatriate families. Almost certainly drug involvement, probably arms as well in the other direction.”

“There’s an annex,” Kelly said as he thumbed forward from the back of the clumsy document.

The printout on the Dienst was obviously a synopsis. The organization had been penetrated decades before, possibly from the very date of its inception. The file was less circumspect than Elaine had been about drug and arms trafficking. CIA used the Dienst as one of the conduits by which it increased its unreported operating budget through worldwide drug dealing. Drugs were not, by the agency’s charter, its problem; and morality became a CIA problem only when one of its officers became moral and went public with the details of what he had been doing while on the agency payroll.

Clients for the Dienst’s gunrunning were a more catholic gathering, though various facets of the US government were prominent among them. A brief notation brought to Kelly’s mind the shipment of automatic rifles with Columbian proof markings which he had issued to his Kurds. It was useful—generally—to carry out policy through channels which permitted bureaucrats to deny government involvement. The Dienst was indeed a service organization, and not merely on behalf of the war criminals it had smuggled out of Germany.

“These guys are a bunch of Nazis,” Kelly said wonderingly as he tossed the annex on the desk and returned to the main file.

“They appear to have no political ends, here or in Germany,” his case officer replied. “There is—and it may not be here”—she tapped the paper with an index finger—“an involvement in espionage, with us and probably with the Russians. Perhaps just another way of buying safety by becoming useful to both sides.”