by David Drake
The center of the shop was a large, cloth-covered table which supplemented the broad shelves around all four sides of the room. The wares were a medley of work, ranging from obvious antiques to the glisteningly recent. A copper cous-cous steamer, decorated with curves of hand-applied stippling, lay beneath a 20-inch bayonet. The weapon itself was French, of the narrow-bladed Gras pattern of the 1870s. The scabbard, however, was of brass lacework, almost a filigree—weeks or months of work for some craftsman in a Kabyle village. Elsewhere, the eye met lamps and trays and an incredible variety of bowls; brass and copper predominantly, but with an admixture of silver, gold, and even aluminum. Even at this juncture, their craftsmanship impressed Kelly. If Kabyles could execute Skyripper with the same meticulous ability, things were going to be fine.
The two Americans walked past the guard, feeling his eyes on their backs and hearing the paper in his lap rustle. In the shop’s rear wall were a curtained stairwell and a door. Posner hesitated at the door. Kelly wondered whether or not the Attaché had ever been through it before. With only the brief delay, however, the commander pulled the panel open. The agent followed him in to join the five men and two women already there.
This time the gun—one of them, at least—was quite openly displayed. A Mauser 98 was aimed squarely at the center of Kelly’s breastbone. The agent smiled, wondering what that implied about his status relative to that of Posner. “God be with you,” he said in French as he pushed the door closed.
The waiting group was varied. One man wore a suit as good as any of those Kelly owned, while another was the man the agent remembered as the late-shift guard at the Chancery. He was still in his khakis. Most of the Kabyles, including the women, were smoking. The odor of their tobacco was harsh and thick in the small office. The middle-aged man with the rifle bore a strong facial resemblance to the youth in the shop proper. He sat on the only chair in the room and supported the Mauser along the slanted top of an old writing desk. Even if he were the shop owner, however, his eyes glanced deference to the patriarch wearing a flowing white djellaba.
The old man nodded severely to Kelly. His moustache was huge and as white as his outer garment. Looking at the agent, he spoke briefly in a non-European language. His eyes were fierce.
Kelly glared back. He could make an educated guess as to what the Kabyle demanded. There was nothing to lose by trying—and perhaps a great deal to gain. Standing at a rigid parade rest, the agent retorted in French, “No sir, I cannot speak your own language—nor can I speak the Arabic of those who would demean you. I come to you as a man needing help—but as a strong man ready as well to help you and help your nation. If we can speak together as men in a tongue foreign to all of us”—he nodded around the circle—“so be it. If not, we each will fight our enemies alone.”
“I am Ali ben Boulaid,” said the old man in French. His face broke into an enveloping smile. The Mauser clicked on the desk as the hand of the man holding it relaxed minusculy. “Ramdan, coffee for your guests!”
The shop owner stuck his head back into the shop and shouted instructions. His Mauser disappeared behind a section of wall paneling and he brought out a rug for the office floor. There was no room for more chairs, even if they might have been available. Kelly joined the Kabyles, sitting with crossed ankles and no particular discomfort. Posner attempted to squat with his back against the shop door. He had to move when a woman bustled in with a beaten silver coffee set carried from the living quarters above the shop. The Attaché slid his balancing act into the corner by the desk. The unfamiliar posture cut off his circulation. At intervals during the discussion he had to hop up embarrassingly and massage his calves. A few years before, the Kabyle movement had been little more than demonstrations—often spontaneous—against the tendencies of the government. Every such attempt at public protest had been put down with riot sticks backed with machine guns. Arrests were ineffective against a movement without leaders. Mass beatings by the police were seen as more likely to get results.
The results they got were the creation of Kabyle leaders all over the country.
The old networks still existed among the survivors of the War of Independence. After the victory, leadership of the Front of National Liberation and of the new state had been taken by those who had spent the war in French prisons, planning their memoirs. Those who had done the fighting, though, were still in the rural areas and the Casbah. If a new need to fight arose, well . . . it mattered little, after all, if the enemies of freedom spoke French or Arabic.
As generally happens, the government itself had been the dissidents’—now rebels’—strongest recruiting agent. Now there were nodes around which could coalesce those dissatisfied with any aspect of autocracy, any aspect of rule: tribal chauvinists, goat-herds disgruntled by reforestation projects intended to block the advance of the Sahara; squatters evicted from public housing so that the proper applicants could move in. . . . The sufficiency of the reasons for which people will fight is determined by the individual fighters alone.
The coffee was thick and sweet, cloying on Kelly’s empty stomach. He continued to drink it anyway as he argued quietly and listened to the others wrangling among themselves. The agent had expected to meet a single leader. What he got instead was democracy with a vengeance. It was possible that Ali ben Boulaid could have made and enforced the decision himself, but the old man showed no sign of wishing to do so. There had been no decision on whether the group—they did not use any formal name in Kelly’s hearing—would go through with the operation.
Finally the agent opened his attaché case of 8x10 glossies of the Casbah. That killed theoretical discussions about whether an office in Rabat outweighed the risks of a gunfight in the center of Algiers. The arguments slid at once into the practical questions of who and where, how many and by which route. Kelly sipped his coffee. He made small comments when he had something useful to add . . . and he kept his smile inside, knowing that he had just begged a question that was likely to get a number of people killed.
After the initial discussion had burned out, Kelly took charge. He used both the map and the corresponding photographs. “Here,” he said, pointing with a blunt forefinger, then stirring the glossies to find the same location, “a truck blocks the complex of streets from the south by sliding across the intersections just west of the Institute. On the other end, the motorcade will be coming and we won’t be able to insert a blocking vehicle into it. We need to cut the intersection of the Boulevard de la Victoire and the, whatever, Boulevard Abderrazak. Can you handle that?” He looked challengingly around the circle of Kabyles.
A young man with sideburns and a black turtleneck sweater glanced at his companions. When no one else spoke, he shrugged and said, “There must be a drain there from the Institute . . . the main sewer’s on the east side of the boulevard. Twenty pounds of plastique in that and—” he gestured with his hands and lips. “Sure, we can cut the street.”
Kelly felt Posner beside him shiver. “Right,” the agent said, “and that’ll make the perfect signal for our boy to run. He’ll have plenty of company when pieces of the pavement start raining down—it won’t get him shot by his own people.” Kelly cleared his throat, hoarse and dizzy from the layering smoke. “Next,” he said, “we need to cut off visibility on the ground. We can fill the truck with oily rags and set them afire, that may help, but the wind’s going to be straight uphill from the sea unless we’re lucky. I’ve got a case of smoke grenades. If you’ve got a few people to volley them from upper floors at that end of the street, they’ll do the job for as long as we need it done.”
“The roof will be best,” said the man in the three-piece. He had a nervous trick of inserting a finger under his collar-facing, but to Kelly’s surprise he had been one of the hawks of the earlier discussion.
Now the agent shook his head in violent disagreement. “There’ll be troops on the wall and towers of the Institute,” he said. “Will be or should be. And look, this is dangerous, maybe the most dangerous
part of the whole deal. Those smoke grenades’ll leave a track back to where they come from as broad as a highway. The guards across the street won’t shoot down maybe because they won’t know what’s going on down there with so many of their own people. But they’ll damn well open up on the windows things’re being thrown from. We’ll tie the grenades in bundles of six. There’ll be plenty of range from a third floor window.”
“They won’t shoot if we’ve shot them first,” said the younger of the two women. “They made their choice when they put on the uniforms of the oppressors.” She mimed a throat-cutting with her index finger.
“Look,” said Kelly, “the less shooting, the better off we all are. Bullets’ll ricochet like a bitch between those walls and the pavement. Even if you know what you’re doing with a gun you don’t have any notion where the slug’s going to wind up. I’ve got some gas grenades which we can use as soon as the, ah, the target’s clear—”
“Tear gas?” interrupted the older woman. Her hair was black save for a thin white zig-zag that marked old scarring as surely as an X-ray could have.
Kelly met her fierce eyes. “CS,” he said with a nod of agreement. “The kind of ‘tear gas’ that makes people puke their guts up if they get a good whiff of it. Toss that into the smoke and you don’t have to worry about anybody on the ground chasing you.”
“Toss satchel charges into the cars,” said the woman, “and nobody chases you either.”
Posner was swearing or praying under his breath. Kelly shrugged and turned his palms up. “Look, what you do after my man clears the area is your business. But you might keep in mind that it’s not just troops and cops and security people going to be down there. There’ll be scientists from maybe fifty countries. I don’t know and you won’t know just who it is in the line of fire. Start throwing bombs and you’ll be able to read the body count in just about every paper in the world, right on the front pages. That won’t bother me a bit . . . but I’m not about to start a government in exile.”
“We will consider that among ourselves,” said ben Boulaid, his cracked voice sweeping through the others’ miscellaneous chatter like a horseman through wheat. “There is still the matter of price. Qadafi paid ten million dollars to have the Jewish athletes killed in Munich.”
“Did Qadafi stand with his gunmen or did he send them off alone to die?” the American agent snapped back. “I offer a million dollars and recognition that you would not be able to buy at any price, not even from the enemies of the government you oppose. And I stand with you, a warrior among warriors.”
“Good God, man!” blurted Commander Posner in English. “You know that’s against your orders. It must be!”
“If I must stand alone,” Kelly continued, ignoring the Attaché, “so be it. I do not need the help of those who can be bought for cash alone.” He was light-headed, had been for what seemed like hours. He almost burst out laughing at the image of himself charging the motorcade alone, hurling CS grenades with both hands. Might be better than going home and trying to explain to folks how he’d blown the deal before it even got off the ground, though. . . .
“I did not say that we were merely terrorists seeking dollars,” the old man said stiffly. “We will consider the offer among ourselves.”
“How are we to know the person you want?” asked the man who knew about the street drains. “You say ‘when he’s clear’—but who?”
Kelly took a thick 9x12 envelope from the lid of his case. Commander Posner was already saying, “Obviously, that has to wait until you have decided if you are going to—”
The agent opened the envelope and began handing fuzzy enlargements around the circle of Kabyles. “We are warriors,” he repeated. “Will we betray each other, even if we cannot agree? This one is Vlasov, a professor, a scientist. He wishes to escape to freedom. We wish to help him because that is our way.”
Ben Boulaid stared at the photograph and nodded solemnly. “We will reach you soon—through bou Djema, as usual.” The Chancery guard bobbed his head enthusiastically. The old man rose, his compatriots to either side braced to help him. They were unneeded.
Kelly quickly swept the photographs of the Casbah back into his case. The locals could study the site on their own, he could not. “Peace be on you,” he said, bowing first to Ben Boulaid and then to each of the other Kabyles in turn.
“The peace of God be on you,” replied the patriarch, bowing back to Kelly. “If it pleases God, we will speak again soon.” The agent tugged the weak-kneed Attaché erect and opened the door. The still, cool air of the shop washed his face like a shower.
The Americans had barely closed the door when they heard the voices behind them resume. The words were indistinguishable, but the tones were not those of peace and moderation. “Hooked them,” whispered Kelly in English as they passed the guard again. “Hooked them, by God, as sure as I got hooked myself!”
Posner turned the car in the street, heading back toward the embassy complex. As they cornered onto the Boulevard Victor Hugo again, Kelly caught a glimpse of something in the rearview mirror. He spun to look over the back of his seat, but the Attaché had already pulled through the intersection. If there had been a black sedan turning toward the shop from the direction of the Rue Boukhalfa, it did not follow them to the embassy. Kelly was quite certain of that, because he kept looking back the whole way.
XIX
Commander Posner had not spoken on the trip back, even to ask what his passenger expected to see out the window. Any hopes the Defense Attaché may have had that the operation would be bloodless—or better, would not even be attempted—had evaporated during the meeting with the Kabyles. There would be blood in the streets, and the leader on the ground would be an American working for the DIA, just as Posner himself did. . . .
The car stopped in the lane between the Chancery and the Villa Inshallah, the building in which Admiral Darlan had been assassinated in 1942. Posner set the emergency brake. He looked at Kelly and said with a deliberate absence of inflection, “I—am told that his Excellency received a cable regarding you this morning.”
The agent regarded the naval officer levelly. “I presume,” he said, “I would have been notified if I’d been booted out. So I presume further it wasn’t that. Shall we play ‘Twenty Questions,’ or are you going to tell me what it really was?”
Posner scowled. “I could only speculate about the contents, and I have no doubt that you can do that with at least equivalent accuracy yourself, Mr. Kelly, The—the DCM is a friend of mine. He was, I think, warning me. . . . Ambassador Gordon is very angry about what he sees as the situation. And while you will no doubt be going home, the rest of us may have an unpleasant aftermath to deal with.”
The commander paused. Kelly put his hand on the Peugeot’s door handle, but before he opened it the Attaché went on, “Mr. Kelly, I have no reason to doubt your abilities, since obviously they are held in high regard by my superiors . . . and of course, what you said earlier about a soldier following orders is quite correct. But I think there may come a time soon when I will take the second option you suggested and resign my commission. I only hope that if I do make that choice, I will make it soon enough.”
Posner got out and began walking rather quickly toward the Chancery. Quickly enough that the agent would have had to run to keep up with him. Kelly did not do that. The sea was already dark with the shadow of the mountains. After waiting long enough to permit the commander to get inside, Kelly strolled toward the Chancery himself. He needed to run a cable out to Paris. It was better to hold one of the Communicators over than to call one back as the Ambassador had done the night before.
Kelly still needed to clear out of the Aurassi and pick up his VW from the hotel lot. The place would be tight as a tick from midnight on; and Kelly had seen and heard enough about Algerian thoroughness to know that they would damn well clear things out themselves if he did not do it in time. When the Pan-African Games had been held in Algiers, the government had decided as an aest
hetic measure to clear the balconies of the high-rise apartments fronting the parade route. Clearance had been effected by squads of troops who marched from room to room. Everything found on a balcony was pitched over the rail. Not infrequently that meant the sheep which recently-rural families stabled on the balconies in anticipation of the Feast of Muharram. The pictures of sheep flung twelve stories onto concrete looked like nothing Kelly had seen since the days VC prisoners were transported by helicopter.
The Algerian employee at the reception desk admitted the agent before he had time to ask through the speaker. Kelly gave the local a V-sign and trotted up the stairs to Rowe’s windowless office next to the Attaché’s. There was no light on in the latter—Posner must have been with one of his friends elsewhere in the building. Sergeant Rowe was just setting down the intercom, however. His door was open and he gestured to Kelly happily when he saw him. “Say, that was for you,” he said. “Anna. Do you want me to buzz her back?”
“Business first,” the agent said, trying to manage a smile. He had not thought about drinking since he got up and started to install the communications rig in his room. Mention of Anna reminded him that he had meant to pick up a bottle in the Aurassi that morning. “I need a desk to draft a cable on,” he said. “Then you or I are going to have to encrypt it on the computer.” He smiled ruefully. “And we’re going to have to hold somebody to shoot it off, it won’t wait till morning. See if you can get DeVoe’ve got some other stuff to talk to him about. . . . Oh—and I want to sweeten the pot a little on that one, too. How do I get a bottle of booze around here?”
“Well, from the top,” Rowe said, smiling back, “you can have my desk while I go see that the computer’ll be free.” He frowned. “You know, the Code Room’s down in the basement with a lead lining on all sides and cushioned floors. There’s no way anybody could eavesdrop while they’re encrypting. The computer, that’s in one corner of a hallway with movable partitions around it—that was the only place there was room. It’s not exactly the most secure spot in the mission, you know.”