by David Drake
Kelly took the box. The metal foil seals of the two bottles winked above the cardboard cells. “Yeah,” he said, wetting his lips and pretending he had not heard the question in the woman’s voice. “Look,” he went on, facing the ground, “I need to get these inside. . . .”
“I’ll wait out here.” Annamaria spoke brightly, but as Kelly buzzed the Chancery door he noticed the flame of a cigarette lighter behind him.
Byrne turned out to be one of the vice consuls. If he was surprised at the agent’s request that he give the Scotch to DeVoe when he left, it did not show. Kelly had no intention of disturbing the Communicator while he was in the middle of sending Kelly’s own urgent cable. As for the sour mash waiting for the agent’s return—it was more than a temptation to open it and take a quick slug before walking back into the night. Kelly did not do so; but he was not sure he would not until he had closed the outer door behind him.
“Look, Anna,” he said as the woman stood again and the second cigarette joined the first, “maybe we need to talk, but I don’t think—this—is the place. . . .”
“I brought my car,” she said smiling. She held out her arm, insisting on linking it with Kelly’s despite his hesitation.
“Your husband—” the agent began as they walked to the Mustang.
“Hush, you said you didn’t want to talk here,” Annamaria retorted, patting the inner angle of Kelly’s elbow. “We’ll find a place that’s quiet. Here, I’ll drive.”
They pulled past the Residence gate, accelerating. Two Fiats were parked there again. For an instant a reggae beat puffed over the wall before Kelly rolled the side window firmly closed. Annamaria showed no sign of wanting to talk as she whipped the little car north. Kelly said nothing either. The woman was driving over her head at the moment, and the agent did not want to distract her. Besides, he didn’t really know what he was going to say. He very much wished he had brought the whiskey along.
They climbed west toward Village Celeste, around switchbacks so sharp that the tires squealed at little more than a walking pace. The gradient was well over 12%. Unexpectedly, Annamaria pulled hard right and braked. The headlights glared back from the pressed steel guard rail; then the black-haired woman cut the lights and the engine together.
Both of them sighed. Annamaria took out a cigarette but did not move to light it. “That’s Notre Dame de Afrique,” she said, gesturing through the windshield. Below, the dome of the 19th Century cathedral shone in the moonlight, barred by the shadows of its own towers. Beyond the black slither of National Highway 11, the main coastal road, the Mediterranean was itself a metallic shimmer. Mercury vapor lights were blue-white pinholes in the fabric of the dark city.
“You must have been there when your husband came out of the Chancery,” Kelly said finally as he studied the ghost of his own reflection in the windshield. “What did he say?”
“Nothing,” Annamaria said quietly from her side of the car. “Which is what I expected.” Her lips quirked. “Chuck Reeves said, ‘Goodnight, Anna.’ But Rufus didn’t say anything at all. When he gets very angry, he’s like that—he pretends I don’t exist.” She was looking at her fingernails, flared on the steering wheel in the moonlight.
She flicked the cigarette, still unlighted, up onto the dashboard as she continued, “The last time he did this was when I told him I was taking over the snack bar. Chuck had been complaining about the problems—they’d fired the local manager, he was robbing the place blind and couldn’t do even that well. I said I’d take over—I’d heard that an ambassador’s wife had run the place a few tours before, and I figured it was something I could do as well as anybody else. I told Rufus, and he said I wouldn’t, and . . . it was two weeks or so before he spoke to me again. I think he’d ruin Chuck’s career completely if he even suspected the notion had anything to do with him.”
Annamaria reached over and took Kelly’s hand with her own. “It bothered me, it bothered me a lot when we were first married. But not now, not for years. It’s only when I really do exist, when I’m doing something that isn’t being his shadow, that Rufus pretends I’m not there.”
Kelly leaned toward her. They kissed. His arm bumped the steering wheel as he reached around her shoulders, his fingers caressing the black suede and feeling the coat slide over the light shirt beneath.
Annamaria fumbled with the steering wheel latch. She swung the column as nearly vertical as it would go. She reached back for Kelly, her knee now pressing against the gearshift.
“Anna, wait,” the agent said. He caught her hands in his, bending to kiss the backs of them. Their bones and tendons were tense beneath his lips. “Listen,” he said, speaking to her hands as she had done moments before, “I want this a lot, more than—” he paused, swallowed and dropped her right hand into his lap. Her fingers gripped his erect penis through the trousers, stroking greedily, but he lifted her away again.
“A lot,” he continued huskily. “And I don’t give a God damn about what your husband can do to me, because he can’t do a thing. Wouldn’t matter anyway. And you”—he looked up, met her eyes —“you’re an adult, you know what kind of trouble you’re going to get in or not, that . . . that’s your business, not mine. My business is to finish a job, though . . . a job I’ve been sent to do.”
Annamaria squirmed, her left hand slipping under Kelly’s jacket and trying to tug him closer. His ribcage was as hard as an oak tree—and as immobile.
“Anna, listen,” the agent repeated desperately, “I can’t handle this, not without blowing the other—I just can’t. And I don’t want to screw it up because my mind’s on you. Please, Anna, for God’s sake, understand.”
“God?” Annamaria said. She straightened. “Oh, God, yes, God indeed,” she repeated and slammed the heels of her hands against the steering wheel. She bent forward, her face against the hub, her arms straining on the woodgrained plastic. At last she took a deep breath and faced Kelly again. In the lights of a passing car, her face looked calm except for the strand of hair twisting across it like an unnoticed serpent. “Yes, you’re really going to leave me this way,” the woman continued in a savage voice. “I really have a talent for bringing out the cold fish in men, don’t I? Rufus freezes up when he’s angry enough to chew nails, and now you—with a sense of duty that makes you impotent!”
The agent said nothing. He bent his head down but did not turn away. He had in fact lost his erection, but it was not a subject he would have debated in any case. “Anna,” he said into the waiting silence, “until Professor Vlasov’s in somebody else’s hands, you’re right. I’m no kind of man at all. Afterwards, if you really care, I’ll come to wherever you are, but . . . I’m sorry. My God but I’m sorry.”
Annamaria sighed. “Oh, lover,” she said under her breath, “you’re sorry and I’m sorry and we’re all a lot of sorry fools, aren’t we?”
She started the car, glanced over her shoulder and backed onto the road again. Before Kelly could speak, she had cursed and pulled the headlights on. “I’ll drop you by your car, then,” she said as they lurched forward and down the hill.
“Oh, Chancery gate if you would,” the agent said. “I’ve got. . . .” his voice trailed off. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault I’m a fool,” the woman responded coolly. After a moment she added the last words that were spoken between them until she let Kelly out of the car: “Or mine if you are, I suppose.”
XXI
The liquor in Kelly’s gut was sending little tendrils through his whole body like mold spreading across a bread loaf. He had not drunk much, well aware of how long it had been since he ate. Still, his step was jaunty and the bottle now had enough air in it to slosh. Byrne had found him a paper bag to carry it. Kelly shouldn’t have broken the seal—Lord knew what Algerian liquor laws were like. All he needed was to be jailed after a fender-bender because he had an open bottle in the car . . . and no trunk to lock it in, either.
As Kelly slanted across the street to the Annex, he sa
w in the corner of his eye the glow of a car’s courtesy light winking on as the door opened. A tall man was getting out of one of the parked Fiats. The distant street lamp turned the black of his aristocratic face to something near purple.
The agent stepped up on the far curb. He wondered if the Chaka Front could possibly do a more brutal job of governing South Africa than the present government did. Possibly, yes; it was barely possible. Look at Idi Amin, Macias Nguema . . . Bokassa the First—and, thank God, only—who gave diamonds to a European President and tortured young girls to death by the hundreds. Look, for that matter, at King Chaka himself . . . though in comparison to some of his European contemporaries, the great Zulu leader did not seem so bad. God knew that he hadn’t done as much bloody evil as Napoleon.
But that was State Department business at the national level. And here in Algiers, it was the business of his Excellency the Ambassador. No business of Tom Kelly, who had more than enough on his plate right—
Two men stepped from the shadowed trees between the street and the sidewalk. They were blocking the dirt pathway some twenty feet from the Annex gate. The men wore dark slacks and dashikis decorated with incongruous floral prints. They were smiling as they faced Kelly; at least, the agent caught the flash of their teeth. There was nothing at all cheerful in that.
“Hello, hello,” Kelly murmured and jumped back for the street. The third Zulu, the man Kelly had seen getting out of the Fiat, caught him about the arms and waist. He held the American with the ease of a father with a six-year old throwing a tantrum. The Zulu was not wearing shoes. The whisper of his long strides across the pavement had been lost in the buzz in Kelly’s skull.
A hundred yards up the street, the headlights of a parked car went on and froze the struggle in their glare. The car began to move with only the hiss of its tires on the pavement.
“Help!” Kelly shouted.
The car passed, still accelerating. It was large and black. The faces of the three men in the front seat were dim, silent blurs.
The absence of the headlights deepened the earlier darkness.
The man holding the agent wrestled him back onto the pathway, away from even the dim blue security of the distant streetlight. One of the two waiting Zulus joined him, seizing the American by the left wrist and elbow. Kelly kicked at the man’s groin, missed, and tried to stamp on the bare instep of the one holding him from behind. His crepe heel connected, but it did not affect the Zulu’s diaphragm-level bear hug. Kelly had no illusions about his ability to match three bigger, younger men in hand to hand combat.
The third attacker stepped forward; light danced over his right hand for the first time. He chuckled.
The weapon strapped to the Zulu’s hand and wrist was known the world over, but it was most common in societies existing in proximity to big cats. Four tines had been opened from a section of ductile iron waterpipe. The metal had been twisted and sharpened with a file into ragged edges that winked like diamonds where they caught the light. They could kill, of course, as even a rolled newspaper can kill; but the real purpose of the claws was more dramatic than mere death. . . .
The man with the claws laughed and feinted with his weapon. Kelly screamed and kicked harmlessly. There was no one on the street. The courtyard walls were as blank as those of a Roman amphitheatre. The three Zulus snickered together. The one to Kelly’s left grabbed a handful of the agent’s trouser front. He pulled. The belt held, but the fly and the cotton briefs beneath ripped away. The sagging fabric hobbled Kelly’s knees. The man behind the agent shifted his grip, now holding Kelly by both elbows. The claw-wielder said something abrupt and strode forward.
Kelly screamed again and slammed the liquor bottle down with all the strength of his freed right hand. The thick glass held, but bones smashed in the knee of the man behind him. The Zulu’s grunt of pain mingled with Kelly’s own outcry. The claws missed because the injured Zulu could not prevent the agent’s backward lunge.
One man still gripped Kelly by the left wrist. The American, supported in a half-squat by that grip, brought his paper-clad bottle around like a flyswatter. The Zulu threw up his free hand to protect his face. The side of the bottle caught the point of the man’s raised elbow. This time glass and bag burst together in a spray of sour-mash whiskey. The Zulu cried out and loosed Kelly to hold his own damaged limb. Kelly jabbed him twice in the face with the ragged neck of the bottle.
Like a sap glove, the iron claws were heavy enough to impede the user’s coordination. By the time the third Zulu had recovered from his vertical swipe at Kelly’s groin, his two companions were down. The Zulu’s face was in full shadow. Light washed between two tree boles and lapped about the American. Behind Kelly on the pavement, the man with the crushed knee was retching. The agent reached out with his left hand and peeled the remnants of the bag from the neck of the bottle. He held it advanced. The glass winked in a tight circlet. There were no long blades like those of resin dummies used in films. The stubby edges were smeared with blood and humours from the eyes they had just destroyed.
The Zulu raised his claws. Kelly lunged forward with a guttural cry. He stumbled on his torn trousers. The Zulu dodged around a tree and into the street. As he ran, he was calling to his companions and fumbling with the strap that bound his weapon to him. He had learned a lesson that his ancestors had taught the British at Isandhlwana: if your opponent is willing to die to get to you, you had best be willing to die yourself.
Kelly picked himself up from the dirt. He shuffled a step forward, then regained enough composure to tug his pants up with his left hand. He staggered to the Annex gate, walking with an adrenalin tremor. He banged on the steel with the heel of his right hand. Nothing happened. “This is Ambassador Gordon, you wog bastard!” Kelly shouted in English. “Open up or you’re out of a job!”
The gate swung open abruptly. Kelly stumbled within and closed the portal behind him with his shoulders. Then he doubled up in front of the nervous guard to vomit bile and whiskey onto the drive.
At last the agent managed to raise himself into a kneeling position. He mumbled in French, “Do you have something to eat?”
The guard gave him a terrified smile but did not speak. “Food!” Kelly shouted. He got control of himself again. He found the pocket of his torn trousers with some difficulty and drew out the money clip, “Food,” he repeated more calmly, peeling off a pair of hundred-dinar notes, enough to buy a meal in the best restaurant in Algiers. “I’m drunk, maybe you heard me shouting in the street . . . ? I just need to get something in my belly before I drive home.”
This time the guard nodded. He slipped back into his shelter. In the street a small car roared to life and squealed into a turn. The shouting was muffled by the wall and gate. But the time the guard returned with two navel oranges and a baguette of bread, the car had started again and was screaming north at too high a speed for the gear.
Kelly wolfed a bite of the crisp bread, choked, and swallowed it anyway. His fingers shook too badly to permit him to peel the oranges. After a moment’s hesitation, he took out his jackknife and cut each orange across the axis. He squeezed the halves into his mouth. The tartness of the juice masked and almost smothered the bite of stomach acids high in his throat. Then, methodically, the agent finished the bread.
The guard stared as Kelly stood. The American looked down at himself, torn and bloodied and reeking of his own vomit and urine. “Tsk,” he said, “I’ll certainly have to change before I go to his Excellency’s musicale tonight, won’t I?”
Kelly watched cross streets and his mirrors as he drove downtown to his new hotel. He was not followed so far as he could tell.
XXII
The window in the Defense Attaché’s office looked north, toward the sea and directly away from the Aurassi. Kelly, no less than Posner and Rowe, found himself staring anxiously through the glass anyway as they all waited for the radio to speak.
“I don’t know why I’m worried about this,” said the Attaché, turning sh
arply in his chair and standing up. He paced toward the closed door. “Best thing that could happen would be this whole house of cards coming down before anyone gets hurt. Either the equipment doesn’t work or your contact wasn’t told how to use it after all. I had nothing to do with that.”
And nobody said you goddam did, the agent thought. Aloud he said, “Well, if they didn’t make contact en route like they were supposed to, then we’ll have to arrange something here. Phone from the desk, ring off if the security man answers instead of Hoang. . . . I dunno, whatever. Right now, all that I’m afraid of is that our boy isn’t in 327 after all. Then we have got a problem.”
“For Christ’s sake, man!’’ the commander snapped, “you heard Tarek on the phone yourself. They’ve checked in, they’re in 327—and Hoang isn’t contacting us, for whatever reason!”
“Or Tarek,” Kelly said, standing to stretch his legs more than to look at the scintillating water again, “was afraid to tell us something went wrong for fear we’d jerk the kid’s visa again. Which we by God will if this falls through. I don’t care why!”
The intercom buzzed. The three men froze; then Sergeant Rowe, who would normally have screened incoming calls from his own office, reached over his superior’s glass-topped desk and took the instrument. “Rowe,” he said. He listened intently for a moment. Cupping the receiver with his palms, he whispered to the others, “There’s a crate like yesterday’s in the pouch for you, Tom.”
“Can they—” Kelly began. He pursed his lips. “No, I want to check it before we dump it in the armory after all. Doug, can you have somebody haul it up to your office until things are straight here?”
Rowe gave him the high sign. “Henri,” he said, “I’ll be down for that in a—”