Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (63 page)

“For Chrissake, don’t call me that,” Kelly protested with a laugh. Fine, it was a friendly conversation and not an interrogation session. “Call me Tom—hell, call me muledick if you want . . . but not Tommy, huh?”

“Pun,” the woman said, a plosive sound rather than an attempt at words. Her smile toward the bumper of the leading car, a late forties Mercury, of all things, broadened. “We go to Asia, Tom, where you will meet people with whom you will discuss, not so? And if we choose to proceed, as I think we will, then this car will remain at the place of meeting, yes.”

Asia. Well, he’d known they were headed toward either the Bosphorus Bridge or the Black Sea, and the latter was a hell of a long way north. Kelly wasn’t in control, hadn’t
been
in control since the moment he agreed to meet Gisela Romer. His alternative had been to disappear, to hunt up acquaintances in Diyarbakir and hope that they’d lead him closer to the aliens.

Which might have worked. But gathering information was a lot like deer hunting: people who stomp around making noise are less likely to nail what they’re after than are the folks who settle themselves in a suitable location and let targets step into range.

“It . . .” Gisela looked over at her passenger again before continuing. “The crabs may appear again and you will be ready.” She was speaking in the didactic certainty of a teacher coaxing a student into proper behavior. “But usually they do not twice so soon between. And you
must
not threaten my colleagues. That would be worse for you and for your country than you imagine.”

“No problem,” said Kelly. “I don’t generally threaten people anyhow.”

He’d pulled the Walther from his pocket as they drove away from the Sheraton and lowered it between his seat and the door panel, where he held it now.

Pierrard’s gang had given Kelly credentials with the Dienst so solid that, it crossed the agent’s mind, perhaps it had all been part of the plan. That seemed unlikely, upon reflection. Even if they had been willing to write off six figures worth of cars and every operative within gunshot of Tom Kelly, both of those possible decisions by the Suits, there was simply no way to be sure that Kelly and the dancer wouldn’t be added to the butcher’s bill. That had been live ammo being fired from the Audis.

Perhaps they didn’t know the extent to which these German exiles were involved with the aliens. But there was no reason to have Kelly penetrate the group. They already had adequate access to it through Gisela. Who seemed to have played her American “employers” for right fools, feeding them information on illegal activities they would wink at—and hiding the very fact of the aliens, and of the Plan . . . which wasn’t Kelly’s job tonight either.

“We’ll need the toll,” Gisela said. “do you—? My purse is in the back.”

Kelly nodded and took a five hundred-lire bill from his breast pocket, left-handed. Gisela had tossed her purse behind the seat, into the coupe’s luggage compartment, with a thump almost as solid as that which the Sony radio in Kelly’s attaché case had made. He assumed she had another gun there, the standard place for a woman to carry her hardware, though it was a lousy choice unless she walked around with one hand under the flap the way Elaine Tuttle had done the night Kelly met her.

But why had Gisela tried to draw the awkward P-38 from her coat when the aliens appeared, rather than going for whatever she had in her purse? Well, people didn’t always do what you expected them to in a crisis. Kelly would trade a bad decision on pistols for the way she brought the car back for him any day.

The Bosphorus Bridge was lighted into a display unique in Turkey as the Mercedes slowed and eased into one of the multiple approach lanes to the toll plaza. The bridge was a mile long; and while there might have been more impressive engineering feats elsewhere in the world, this one joined two continents. The nearer of the five-hundred-foot-high suspension towers was in Europe, and the second was, as Gisela had said, in Asia. The span and its approaches curling uphill from either end were illuminated by closely-spaced light standards, and sidescatter from the floodlit towers picked out the higher portions of the suspension cables as well.

Gisela paid, then accelerated through the mass of other vehicles merging into the three eastbound lanes. There was no need for special haste, but the challenge had brought out the competitiveness never far beneath the surface of the dancer’s mind. She flicked her passenger a glance, saw him facing forward, smiling and as relaxed as a sensible man ever is with his hand on a gun butt, and downshifted again to surge into a slot in the traffic.

“You don’t like the way I drive,” Gisela said flatly as they settled into a steady pace.

“I love it,” said Kelly, patting her thigh with his left hand. “When I drive, I push when I don’t need to and get all tied up in knots.” He grinned.

“Yes, well,” she said as her hand squeezed Kelly a little closer to her, “someone must lead and someone must follow, that is so. That it should be
we
who follow—the minutes do not matter, but
that
does matter, perhaps.”

Kelly should have felt nakedly open on the bridge, with a two-hundred-foot drop to the water beneath them and a major sea to either side of the long channel over which they passed. There were people looking for him, and there were things that weren’t people—he didn’t need Gisela’s warning to tell him that. They wanted something from him, but the Dienst might be able to tell him what that was. Maybe not the best way to learn, asking somebody’s enemy what the first party intended, but it had the advantage of involving fewer unknowns than the direct approach.

There were some
real
unknowns in this one.

The lighting created a box around the huge bridge and the vehicles on it, separating them from sea, sky, and the feeling of openness. The illumination curtained even the city behind them, much less anyone searching the bridge with binoculars from the surrounding high ground. Someone could be following them, since there was no need of a close tail on a vehicle forced to a single direction and speed. Nonetheless, Kelly felt better for the blanket of light that hid his enemies from him. To the extent there was a justification for that emotional response, it was that when there was really nothing you could do, you might as well relax.

The contrast of the highway to Kisikli and Ankara beyond, lighted only by the heavy traffic, brought the American again to full wariness, though his left hand continued to rest on Gisela’s thigh. Camlica and the heights which gave a panorama of the whole city, its blemishes cloaked by darkness, led off on a branching road.

Just beyond that, but before they reached the cloverleaf that merged the Istanbul Bypass with the major routes through Anatolia, Gisela turned off. After a hundred yards on a frontage road serving a number of repair shops, closed and grated, the Mercedes turned again past the side of the last cinder-block structure in the row.

The roar of traffic dissipated behind them as the coupe proceeded, fast for rutted gravel and a single headlight, down a road marked by Turkish No Trespassing signs. There was brush and scrub pine, but no hardwoods and very little grass along the route. The one-lane road itself seemed to have been bulldozed from the side of the hill to the right and the rushes to the other side suggested at least a temporary watercourse. The possibility that a car was following the Mercedes had disappeared at the moment they turned to the frontage road.

“How far—” Kelly started to say as the coupe twisted again with the road and a ten-foot chain link fence webbed the road in the beam of their headlight. The red-lettered sign on the vehicle gate was again in Turkish, stating that this was the Palace Gravel Quarry, with no admittance to unauthorized personnel. There was a gatehouse within, unlighted, and no response at all to Gisela’s blip on the horn.

Kelly got out, closing the door quickly behind him to shut off the courtesy light. He walked a few steps sideways, knowing that the galvanized fencing still reflected well enough to make him a target in silhouette to a marksman behind him. Dust from the road drifted around him, swirling before the car as it settled, and the only sound in the night was a fast idle of the 280 SL’s warm engine.

“It’s chained,” he said loudly enough to be heard within the car, through the window he had left open. He held the P-38 muzzle-down along his pants leg, as inconspicuous and nonthreatening as it could be and still remain instantly available.

Gisela switched off the headlights and called, “There should be someone. Take this key and be very careful.”

Her hand was white and warm when Kelly took the circular-warded key from her. A high overcast hid the stars and the lights of a jet making an internal hop to Ankara, but the sound of its turbines rumbled down regardless. If there was a gun in Gisela’s purse, she had left it there.

At the loop-chained gate, Kelly loosed the heavy padlock and swung inward the well-balanced portal. There was still no sound but that of the car and of the plane diminishing with distance and altitude. He walked into a graveled courtyard, sidling to the right enough to take him out of the path of the coupe. He waved Gisela in with his free hand, the one which was not gripping the big Walther.

Subconsciously, Kelly had thought that the grunt of the Mercedes’ engine and the crunch of stones beneath its tires would cause
something
to happen. Gisela circled the car in a broad sweep in front of the building which the fence enclosed, a metal prefab painted beige where it was not washed with rusty speckles from rivet heads and the eaves. The headlight and the willing little motor shut off when Gisela faced the car out the open gateway again, and the night returned to its own sounds.

Gisela’s door closing and her footsteps were muted, not so much cautious as precise applications of muscular effort by a woman whose physical self-control was as nearly complete as was possible for a human being.

“Who are we looking for?” Kelly asked softly as the woman paused at arm’s length.

“I’ll try the building,” she responded, with enough tremor in her voice to indicate that she was as taut and puzzled as the American—which, perversely, was a comfort to him.

They walked toward the warehouse door, Kelly a pace behind and to the side. The weight of the pistol aligned with his pants leg made him feel silly, but he was willing neither to point the weapon without a real target nor to pocket it when the next moment might bring instant need. It would have been nice if he had known what the hell was happening, but as usual he didn’t—it wasn’t a line of work in which you could expect to understand “the big picture.”

Unless you wore a suit, in which case you probably didn’t understand anything, whatever you might think.

The warehouse had a vehicular door, made to slide sideways on top and bottom rails, and next to it a door for people. There was also a four-panel window, covered on the outside by a steel grating and on the inside by something that blacked out the interior.

Kelly expected the warehouse to be pitch dark. He stepped close to the hinge side of the door as Gisela opened it, so that he would not be silhouetted against the sky glow to anyone waiting within.

The big square interior was as well-illuminated as the courtyard, and as open to sky; what appeared from the ground to be a flat-roofed warehouse was four walls with no roof, only bracing posts along the hundred-foot sides. It held a vehicle backed against one corner of the structure, a van like the one which Gisela’s attendants had been entering when the shooting started. Apart from that, the interior seemed as empty as the courtyard.

“Come,” snapped Gisela, motioning Kelly peremptorily within and closing the door behind him, a precaution the American could not understand until the woman switched on a flashlight she had taken from a hook on the wall.

“What—” began Kelly, unable to see anything worth the exercise in the flickering beam of the light.

‘“Nothing, nothing,
nothing
!” the dancer said, her inflection rising into spluttering fury. She strode fiercely toward the van, the tight beam of the flashlight bobbling up and down on the windshield like the laser sighting dot of a moving tank. “They could’ve left a
note,
surely?”

The floor of the warehouse was gravel, marked in unexpected ways. There were the usual lines and blotches of motor oil and other vehicular fluids inevitable in any parking space. The drips, however, were absent from the center of the enclosed structure, so far as Kelly could tell. Why wall so large an area if only the edges were to be used?

Gisela jerked open the van’s door. The courtesy light went on but had to compete with the beam of the flashlight which the dancer had angrily twisted to wide aperture. “Nothing,” she repeated in a voice like Kelly’s the day they told him what had happened to Pacheco and another hundred of the
White Plains
’
complement.

“This is the one your—” the American began, touching the side panel of the van.

“Yes, Franz and Dietrich,” Gisela snapped as she straightened to slam the door of the vehicle closed. “They must have come back from the hotel, told them I’d been”—her hands writhed in a gesture that aimed the light skyward until she thumbed it off, plunging them back into darkness—“whatever, killed, captured. And they went off and
left
me!”

“They could get a job with some of
my
former employers,” the American said, briefly thinking of his own Kurdish guerrillas. “But look,” he added with a frown, “I saw your people go down. There was a flash and they went over when the whatevers were trading shots with ‘em.”

“That doesn’t mean they were dead,” the dancer said bitterly as she walked back toward the door through which they had entered. She couldn’t see any better than Kelly could, but she knew there was nothing in the way. “We’ve had it happen before, people they’ve shot but not taken away as they usually do, the crabs. They’ll come around again, in half an hour or so, and have headaches for a week—but live.”

“It doesn’t sound like your crabs,” Kelly said, frowning, as the woman opened the door and stepped out, “are quite as hard-nosed about what they’re doing as maybe I’d—”