by David Drake
“Sure,” Kelly agreed, “sure. The matter is that they want me to do something I’ve never done before. I’m not sure anybody could handle the job, and I swear to God I don’t see how I can. I’m over my head and I don’t mean a little bit.”
They were waiting to turn on the Boulevard St. Jacques, their view of the Place blocked by the closed deuce and a half van ahead of them. The driver turned and looked steadily at Kelly. “If you really thought that,” he said, “you’d have told them to stuff the job, wouldn’t you? You’ll be all right, Mr. Kelly.”
Traffic and the sedan began moving again. Kelly laughed, as pleased to be flattered as the next man. After a moment, though, he said with whimsey in only the overtones, “But you know why I didn’t? Because they fired me five years ago, booted my ass out of the—well, it’s no secret, the NSA. They couldn’t give me a damned thing that mattered after that, not a damned thing . . . except a chance to ram that termination back down their throats. And that’s what they offered me, that chance. Can’t lose, after all. If I pull it off, they were dopes to fire me. And if I screw up, well, I don’t have to worry about that or any other goddam thing ever again.”
Phillips did not speak as he took the sedan around the fountain of the traffic circle and south at increasing speed down the Avenue d’ltalia. He genuinely was not in a hurry. None the less, the mass of traffic jostling for position demanded the driver’s skills and awoke the aggressiveness that honed those skills. “Were you,” he said at last as he tucked behind the bumper of a Jaguar, “hitting the sauce a little heavier than they liked?”
Kelly glanced up at him sharply. “They do talk, don’t they?” he said with something like a smile. Then, “No, then I—I wasn’t very much of a drinker, to tell the truth. It was. . . . Well, I met a girl in Venice when I was back in port, pretty and she, she seemed to like me. I liked her, I—well.” Kelly cleared his throat, his eyes on the Jag’s British license plate again. “Smart as a whip, that’s God’s truth. Very sharp, she was.”
They were in the congestion of the Boulevard Peripherique, slowing with the car ahead, then slipping sideways as a motorcyclist accelerated up a ramp and opened a gap. The Boulevard was a gapped concrete roof overhead, tire noise echoing from its pillars in a deep-throated rumble. Phillips was taut at the wheel, his hands at ten o’clock and two, making the tiny motions necessary to keep the sedan tracking down what had become the Avenue de Fountainebleau. He seemed oblivious of his passenger as Kelly continued, “She was an American, Polish background but born in Chicago, I checked her passport. You get antsy, you know, when they keep telling you the Russkies are out to learn everything you’ve got to tell. So I checked her purse when she was asleep, but it wasn’t like I was worried, not really. And the passport was fine. Only. . . .”
Kelly wished he could forget they were on the Avenue de Stalingrad now. He didn’t need to think of Russians, and he assuredly didn’t need to say what he was about to say. But the words were finding their own way out, directed not at the stolid driver but perhaps at the self-righteous man who had been Tom Kelly one day five years ago when. . . . “Languages are my business, though. They were then. And there was something about her English . . . So I put in a query through channels, insisted they get me a picture from the file at State, no big deal . . . and I still didn’t think there was anything wrong, just a feeling. Funny. She knew something was up, but I didn’t, almost till—” He cleared his throat again.
To the left was the Thinis Cemetery, green shade and an occasional flash of stone past the vehicles in the northbound lanes. Hospitals and cemeteries, take them away and there would be a lot less of Paris. A lot less of the world, but you could have death and corpses without either, and all the canals of Venice flow to the sea. . . .
“The picture was wrong,” Kelly said to no one present. “She was a girl, a college student who’d gone to visit grandparents in Poland, her parents had died in a car crash. And one of her friends got a postcard from Greece, but that was all, she never was seen again. And now somebody with her passport and a new picture was living with an NSA field man. Oh, the CI boys loved it, they’d play her like a fish and see who she reported to. Only—” Kelly’s lips were very dry and the tendons on his neck were standing out “—some girl was gone, gone from the world so that they could play their games, all of their games. You kill enemies, sure, but some kid who just wanted to find her roots and didn’t dream a government would have her greased to get a US passport. . . . I—it bothered me. And I let something drop.
“It hadn’t been Janna’s doing . . . the kid, I mean,” the agent continued. “But she was wired, she’d been living with me long enough to—worry what might happen if I learned she’d set me up. So she made a bad move, went for a gun as if she could point it and I’d freeze. Me! And . . . well, some of the old reflexes were there. Reflexes don’t care, Phillips. Reflexes don’t love anybody.”
They were within the airport precincts now. The airliner taking off on a parallel course was an Aeroflot 11-62, carrying civilized diplomats and vacationers to Warsaw and beyond. “When she disappeared,” Kelly said softly, “my Janna who wasn’t Janna, they figured at first she’d been tipped off. Only they learned that people in the Russian Embassy—she was being handled from Rome, not the consulate in Venice—they were panicked too, thought she’d defected. And then they decided that they’d talk to me about it under pentathol . . . and I told them to go screw themselves . . . and they told me I’d just resigned for the good of the service.” Kelly managed a smile. “There were four of them in the room with me at the last, and I swear to God they were wearing bulletproof vests. Four of them and they were afraid of me.” He paused. “Well, I’m back,” he said. “Tom Kelly is back.”
Phillips pulled the sedan into the kiss and go lane in front of the south terminal. “Good luck, sir,” he said. “It’s nothing you can’t handle.”
“Hope to hell you’re right,” said Kelly. With his radio and his AWOL bag, the dour civilian began to walk toward his future.
VII
The pair of young customs officials peered into the packing crate with more bemusement than concern. The one with the pencil-line moustache turned to Kelly and said in French, “You understand, Mr. Ceriani, that this machine—” he tapped the case with his pen, over the stenciled “Rank Xerox—London”—“is cleared for demonstration purposes only? It must not be sold.”
Kelly nodded in agreement. His lightweight suit had borne up well on the short flight from Frankfurt, but he was already wondering whether April in Algiers would not demand a warmer selection of clothing than what he had brought. The other customs man was poking desultorily through Kelly’s suitcases, open on the inspection table beside the crated copying machine. “Yes,” Kelly said in his Italian-accented French, “we understand fully. I may invite clients to my suite to inspect the product, but by law there may be no store-front display, and all orders must be shipped from out of country rather than a local warehouse. Ours—Rank Xerox” —Kelly fumbled from a leather case a card identical in format to the ones he really used as an Olivetti representative—will ship from our warehouse in Marseilles. We understand that Algeria is choosing the route it deems proper to national self-sufficiency. We will comply fully with all national regulations.”
The moustached official riffled the spiral notebook prominently labeled SPESE. It was quite real, though from Kelly’s past and not his present persona. Its slap-dash listing of business expenses was the final proof that he was the salesman he claimed to be. The official said something to the other in Arabic, apparently a joke because they both laughed. He gave Kelly a friendly wave of his hand. “Good day, Mr. Ceriani,” he said. “Have a pleasant stay in Algeria.”
Kelly smiled back and quickly loaded his gear onto a hand truck. The line he had given the customs men would have been no more than the simple truth had he been in Algiers as a real business rep. The big corporations did not cut legal corners to do day-to-day business in foreign coun
tries. Only in the aerospace field did the bottom-line potential of a sale make it justifiable to bribe—a Dutch prince or a German defense minister, say. . . . Otherwise, the economic risk of being banned permanently outweighed the momentary advantage of selling your demonstrator to a customer who was hot to trot.
And Tom Kelly had learned as well that if you had a solid product to sell, you could work within any system. The Algerians restricted foreign corporations as a proof of their socialism and their rise from a colonial past. The restrictions hurt no one as much as the Algerians themselves. It would be generations, at least, before there would be any indigenous copier manufacture, judging from the dismal result when the Algerians tried to make their own televisions. But it was their own country, and they had a right to go to hell in their own way.
It was only as a representative of a sovereign government that Kelly could imagine himself flouting laws in order to do his job.
The first cab in the rank was a white Peugeot 201 with an enthusiastic driver named Hamid. He helped Kelly manhandle the crate and suitcases into the trunk, muttering instructions to himself under his breath. Hamid was obviously impressed both by his passenger’s air of importance and the fact that Kelly gave the Hotel Aurassi as his destination. The Aurassi was flagship of the state-owned system and a world-class hotel by any standards. “Ah,” said Hamid as he drove out of the cyclone-fenced parking area, “are you then a scientist come for the Conference?”
Gravel brushed from the lot spewed from beneath the tires as the taxi cut onto the highway. The rear wheels twitched, then bit against the two-lane blacktop. The roadway was unexceptional, practically identical to any state secondary road in Kelly’s one-time home of North Carolina. In the French fashion the trunks of the palm trees along the shoulders of the road had been whitewashed six feet up to provide cheap warning reflectors. “Ah, no,” the American agent said, “I’m only a salesman trying to turn a dinar in copy machines. Have you carried many Conference attendees already, then?”
Traffic was steady and heavy enough in both directions to make passing a suicidal impossibility. Hamid was relaxed, giving more attention to his passenger in the rear view mirror than to the road ahead. “Not as yet, no,” he said, “and no doubt they will travel in official cars with no thought of how a poor man like me should feed five children. But perhaps you are not aware, sir, that in three days the Aurassi will be cleared to accommodate guests of the Conference? Zut, out”—Hamid flicked his right hand in a gesture of full dismissal, turning directly to look at Kelly as he did so. The Peugeot quivered no more than the road surface would have demanded anyway”—460 rooms, all turned over to the Conference. There is still time, though—I can carry you to the St. George, very nice also and downtown?”
“Goodness, I didn’t know that,” Kelly lied with a realistic frown. “Still, the firm will have given the address to customers already. I’ll have to check in at the Aurassi, if only for a few days.”
Hamid kept up a flow of cheerful information throughout the long ride from Dar al-Beida to the hotel on the western heights of Algiers. There was nothing that could be called a circumferential road per se, but a long stretch of well-laid divided highway sped them more than they were slowed by its increased traffic. Cars were of typical European makes, but they appeared to Kelly to be unusually standardized. When he asked about that, the driver laughed.
“You see the license?” Hamid explained, pointing toward the sedan in front of them. It was a Renault 5 throughout the French-speaking world and ‘Le Car’ in the United States alone. “One-six means Algiers. One means a car, not a bus, whatever. And the next two numbers—79—are the year Sonacome imported it. All cars are imported by Sonacome except those for foreigners and the very wealthy for their own use. And except for a few limousines for the Presidency and heads of departments, all the cars each year are the same model, whoever offered Sonacome the best price. Still, there are colors—and a car is a car, no doubt.”
“Somebody goes first class,” the American said, pointing toward the pair of leather-suited motorcyclists talking on a grassed median. Their parked bikes were BMWs, blue-painted and obviously official even without the fact that the riders wore holstered pistols.
“Oh, yes,” agreed Hamid, “the National Police. They are first class, you must know, but yes, they do not buy their equipment on low bid. When Sonacome buys Volkswagens for you and me to ride in, the cars are built under license in Brazil. When the police buy Volkswagens, they come from Germany, yes.”
The terrain on the outskirts of Algiers reminded Kelly of the two trips he had made between Oakland and Travis Air Force Base, on his way still farther west. The hills looked dry, hinting at the harshness of rock; but this was not desert. Considerable construction was going on, multiple complexes of high rises. The workmanship appeared good and the buildings were attractive in detail. Colored tiles picked out the stuccoed concrete, and each unit had a balcony shaded by a concrete screen in one of a number of patterns. The size of the buildings, however, hit Kelly as his background reading had not done. Each block contained a good 1600 apartment units, and during a twenty mile ride they had passed at least a half-dozen being built. The population of Algeria was exploding. Gas revenues might keep the lid on for a time, but there would be a reckoning in the foreseeable future unless diversification provided something for the new citizenry to do beyond sitting in a government room.
The taxi swept up the long, curving drive to the Aurassi, confirming in Kelly’s mind the presumption he had already drawn from the briefing file: the operation would have to take place elsewhere. The Hotel Aurassi was as effectively separated from its immediate surroundings as if it had been on an island. Chopped into an expanse of rock which had been unbuildable until enough money became available—even the Moon is developable if enough money becomes available—the Aurassi could be reached by its drive, a ramped causeway. Even the most limited security precautions would make it impossible for a car to reach the highway if anyone thought it should be stopped before then; and security precautions were not the sort of thing the Algerians skimped.
The building itself, though obviously constructed according to expensive architectural advice, was less attractive than the massive apartment blocks which were being built for the citizenry. The architects were the problem, as a matter of fact. The mass units were built with an eye to efficiency. Because they were to be occupied by people, however, their lines were picked out with local touches, the tiles and moldings and vari-colored stucco Kelly had noticed on the way. By contrast, the Aurassi was classic Bauhaus: a box on a slab, with no more of taste or of beauty than an automobile’s radiator has—and far less real functionality than the radiator. Judging from their own attractive blends of practical necessity and human desire, the Algerians had probably wondered at the ugly, expensive block which foreign architects had designed for foreign travelers; but there are men who choose to sleep on nails, and there is no accounting for taste. . . .
Hamid pulled up under the concrete beams of the skeletonized porte-cochere. “Sir,” he said, sweeping Kelly’s door open. His left hand gestured expansively toward the lobby. ‘There is a bank at the desk if you . . . ?”
“Thank you indeed,’’ the American said, handing the driver a wad of sixty dinars he had bought from the Bank of Rome. There were ten Swiss francs folded into the midst of the local currency. A pair of liveried porters were approaching. One of them whistled for the boy with the hand truck when he saw the packing case. “If I am served as well during the remainder of my stay in Algeria, the business I do will delight my employers.”
Though that was probably a lie, Kelly thought as he followed the porters across the red carpeting of the lobby. This one wasn’t likely to delight anybody until, at best, years in the future. By then, most people would have forgotten the cost.
VIII
On the third ring from the embassy switchboard, somebody picked up the extension and said, “Attaché, Sergeant Rowe speaking.”
“Huh?”
Jesus Christ. Many of the ships standing far enough off-shore to be tiny white slivers in the sun were in fact supertankers. With a good pair of binoculars—“Yes,” Kelly said aloud, with a calm that he could not have managed without a moment to cool off, “my firm received the request through, I believe, a Mr. Pedler of your Paris branch. Perhaps if you would check with your superiors . . . ?”
“From a Mr.—oh. Oh!” Sergeant Rowe swallowed audibly. “Sure, that’s right, Mr.—well, we didn’t have the name is all. Are you at the airport? I’ll bring a car right out.”
“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” the agent said through a grimace. “The equipment isn’t set up yet, of course. But I’d like to drop by with a brochure shortly, and then later you and your superior may come here to my room at the Aurassi for a demonstration.”
“Right, of course,” the sergeant agreed. “Ah, well, I’ll inform Commander Posner. He’s been very interested in the new equipment. It, ah, it should really speed up office routine.”
Yes, friend, it surely will do that, Kelly thought. Aloud he said, “I’ll get a taxi, then. Good day.”
Of course, if he really wanted to look at ships, the Company doubtless had a Celestron telescope with a coupled 35 mm SLR taking pictures of everything in the roadstead. More and more it seemed to Kelly that he would be smarter to spend his time looking at boats rather than trying to make bricks out of locally available materials, not—it appeared—including straw.