Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  “I am glad to see you,” said a voice speaking French. Kelly whirled, just as the Professor touched him on the shoulder. The tall Russian looked the agent over carefully. “You are at least no worse,” he said, sounding a little surprised. “Except—your finger?”

  “Cost of doing business,” the agent said, glad for the momentary pressure of the other’s hand. He switched to Russian and added, “I’m expecting our papers to arrive in”—he checked—“half an hour. The papers or God knows what. I’m counting a lot on somebody I only knew six hours. No trouble on your end?”

  Vlasov shook his head. He was guiding Kelly back to the corner from which he had spotted the agent. “Your friends were honorable,” he said. “The gun would not have been of much use many times, of course.”

  “Yeah, well,” Kelly said. He was staring at his hands, unconsciously curling the maimed, bandaged finger out of sight. He looked up at Vlasov. “Professor, do you know how we—how everybody—intercepts microwave communications? I don’t mean the signal, that’s just a matter of sticking up an antenna in the right place. But how you get one phone call that you want out of a million that’re just garbage so far as intelligence value goes?”

  Vlasov frowned. “No . . .” he said. Then, “This is important?”

  “Professor, I—” Kelly said. “I don’t know what’s important.” He shook his head, then continued. “Anyway, the trick is you run everything through a computer. The computer’s programmed to kick out transmissions that have key words in them. ‘Qadafi,’ for example. Then a human being checks the few transmissions with the key word in them—and we get a tape of Qadafi telling a buddy in Ethiopia how he’s going to go about killing the President of the United States.”

  “It still seems very burdensome,” the Professor commented.

  “Sure,” Kelly agreed, “sure; there’s still mostly garbage, and that’s why the business costs the USG five, ten billion dollars a year. That’s a fact. But it works, and my friend”—the agent gestured with his index finger—“I think your buddies on Dzerzhinsky Square have come up with a way to do the same thing with ordinary speech. I think they’ve been keying on your name since before you set foot in Algiers, trying to scope out the opposition.”

  Professor Vlasov was too much of a scientist to speak before he had done the math in his head. After he had done the math, he was also too much of a scientist not to blurt, “Why, that’s absurd, absurd. Even if the KGB could collect conversations the way antennas do radio signals, the magnitude is—my name is not uncommon, surely you know?”

  The agent nodded glumly. “Sure,” he said, “in the right places it’s like yelling ‘Levy’ in Brooklyn. But I’m telling you, Professor, they’ve been on top of us or just a step behind all along the way. The one place your technical people have had the jump on ours—our spooks—is in bugging devices.” He spread his palms, flipped them an instant later to hide the bandage again. “As for impossible . . . if I read the background data right, there’s about a hundred people on our side of the line who say what you claim to be able to do is impossible. I’ve met you, and I don’t doubt you at all . . . but I’ve been picked up by the KGB too often on this run to doubt that something’s up. And it’s been okay since we’ve stopped using—that word.”

  Vlasov smiled sadly. “You believe that of human science,” he said, “and still you refuse to believe that I might be correct—”

  “I believe in AKs and BTR-60s and Mi-2 helicopters,” the American said in a rising voice. “That’s what I’ve been seeing on this run. And if any of the bodies were green, I guess I missed them.” His face and tone went neutral again. He added, “And I believe that’s Don Marshal. Wait here a minute, Professor, while a friend and I make a little trip to the men’s room.”

  The intervening years had been harder in some ways on the CIA operative than they had on Tom Kelly. Marhsal had been soft; now he was fat. The walk from the parking lot had beaded his face even in the dry Tunisian air. On the other hand, Marshal’s suit fit him and he had not been prevented from shaving—as the agent had—by his scraped face.

  The CIA man saw Kelly approaching and shifted the attaché case to permit him to shake hands. His glance at the agent was an appraising one. If not warm, then it was at least less hostile than Kelly felt he deserved for clamping down on Marshal’s guilt glands the way he had.

  “This shouldn’t take very long,” Marshal muttered as he followed Kelly to the rest rooms.

  “No problems, then?” the agent pressed.

  “Only with my conscience,” the other man said glumly, “And I suppose that was going to be a problem either way.”

  The CIA man took the first stall that came open. He locked the door behind him. Kelly waited for one of the adjacent stalls. He tapped on the partition as he seated himself in one of them. “Okay,” he said.

  Marshal passed a manila envelope under the partition. There were two worn-looking passports in the envelope—Austrian, which was a nice touch since Austria had business and refugee communities from all across Europe. The fuzzy photograph of “Jean Gastineau” looked surprisingly like Professor Vlasov. That of “Axel Brandt” did not look anything like Kelly, but neither did the photograph in Kelly’s own real US passport.

  “Fuckin’ A,” the agent murmured. “Snake, your people did a job to be proud of. I owe you one.”

  “Just don’t saw off the branch behind me, you bastard,” Marshal whispered back. “Here. And if anybody hears where you got this, I’ll cut your balls off if I have to break into Lubyanka to find you.”

  The CIA man was passing another envelope under the partition. This envelope contained a gun.

  General Electric had run off a batch of them under contract to the Department of Agriculture—a subterfuge which fooled only Congressional staff members who were trying to track down the billions of dollars spent annually on the intelligence establishment. The weapon was made entirely of a form of Lexan plastic. It was light amber to human eyes, and it was absolutely transparent to fluoroscopes and magnetic detectors.

  That transparency extended to the ammunition. The gun had four barrels, stacked in pairs. Each barrel was sealed at the factory with a .60 caliber plastic bullet and a charge of black powder which was clearly visible through the wall of the tube. The lockwork was piezoelectrical, and the only part of the system that would show up on an X-ray was the tiny pellet of lead azide that primed each load.

  It wasn’t a cannon. The plastic bullets shed velocity like a suicide hitting the sidewalk, making it a weapon for across the room at the farthest. But as Kelly had said, he could not have taken a Karl Gustaf sub-machine gun aboard the plane, even if one were available. This would serve his need—if it had to.

  “Like I say, man,” Kelly said, “I owe you and Unk owes you—though he’ll never know it. Hang on a minute.” The agent slipped the pistol into his pocket. It was bulkier than a Chief’s Special, but its light weight kept it from significantly bulging the coat. Kelly unclipped his little sheath knife and passed it under the partition to Marshal.

  “What the hell is this for?” the operative demanded tensely.

  “It’s been a friend for a good long while,” Kelly explained quietly. “I ought to ash-can it right here, since I can’t take it on the plane this time, but . . . look, snake, hold it a month for me. Open letters with it or something. If you don’t hear anything by then, do what you please with it.”

  Across the thin panel, the CIA man muttered in irritation. The knife was not merely fifty bucks worth of double-edged steel to Kelly, however. For five years, the agent had sunk himself in a world without a human being to cherish. The human emotions had spilled out onto objects. Understanding the phenomenon did not make it any the less real to Kelly.

  “Well,” said the agent, “I’ll be seeing you later.”

  “Hope to hell you don’t,” Marshal snapped back. But as Kelly started to open the door of his stall, the operative added softly, “Keep your head down, snake. And
you don’t owe me—we’re even.”

  No one looked at Kelly with unusual interest as he left the restroom. Professor Vlasov followed the agent around to the Lufthansa ticket counter. Kelly did not bother to watch for Marshal, knowing that the CIA officer would wait a minute or two before he exited. Kelly had never taken an action simply because it would put someone else in his debt. Certainly he had never risked his life on the slim chance of a survivor’s future gratitude. But favors were like the clap: what goes around, comes around. This one had come around at a very good time.

  Kelly paid for the round-trip tickets in American dollars, took his change in Tunisian dinars. The Tunisian dinars had been originally pegged to the New Franc rather than the Old, so that it was even now worth about ten times as much as an Algerian dinar . . . and all the currency he had in either form was so much waste paper to Kelly now. He had no intention of ever seeing the wrong side of a North African border again, just in case somebody figured out his responsibility for the previous day’s carnage in Algiers.

  While the blonde female clerk made out the tickets, Vlasov kept up his end of a conversation in French about the one-day conference the two would be attending in Frankfurt. There was nothing illegal about traveling without luggage, but it made the fugitives memorable. A bad story was perhaps better than none at all, in case somebody checked passenger lists with the clerk.

  It was nice to see a woman working again. Beyond everything else, the Arab world would forever be imprinted in Kelly’s mind the same way SouthEast Asia was. Blood, bodies, and a paranoia that was not psychotic only because it was necessary.

  “How are your instincts doing, Professor?” the agent asked as they walked slowly toward the exit control stations. They were clutching their Austrian passports and the forged currency and customs-control cards which Marshal had supplied as a necessary part of the package.

  “Instincts?” repeated the defector uncertainly. He had been glancing about the crowd with animation.

  Kelly grinned. “When you figure things are about to go through the floor, you’re jumpy as a frog on a hot plate. I figure things must be okay by you if you can stand and talk like a tourist, huh?”

  Vlasov smiled back. “Yes,” he said, “but you must also remember that I am insane and therefore untrustworthy, yes?”

  Kelly began to laugh. But not immediately.

  The short man watching the fugitives in the window’s reflection had brown skin and wore a djellaba. Even a glance at the man’s face would have displayed his Oriental features, the flat nose and the epicanthal folds at the corners of his eyes . . . but the watcher was a careful man. In any case, Kelly’s perceptions had been whip-sawed to nothing by exhaustion and elation combined. The American had not noticed the watcher as a local, much less as the Cultural Attaché of the Vietnamese Mission to Tunis.

  As Kelly and the defector moved off to have their papers stamped, the Vietnamese turned to look at them directly for the first time. Then he strode briskly for the bank of pay phones in the lobby. His call was brief and simple.

  It was the staff at the embassy proper, after all, who had the problem of relaying the information through an international operator.

  XLIX

  “Colonel,” the voice whispered. “Colonel. . . .”

  Nguyen rolled upright. His right hand snaked under his pillow in a motion the embassy clerk did not recognize. The pistol was not needed here, of course. But Nguyen Van Minh had been back in the jungle while he slept, not in an office of the Paris Embassy of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

  The clerk was holding out a phone. Beyond the blinds, rain was spattering the windows of the dark office. “It is Tunis,” the functionary said. “You asked to be awakened. . . .”

  Nguyen took the phone. He waved the other man away. “Yes,” he said, “Nguyen here.”

  “Colonel,” said the thin voice on the other end of the line, “we have spotted them in Tunis-Carthage Airport. Their flight is Lufthansa 505, arriving Frankfurt at 18:32 local time. Today, that is.”

  Nguyen cursed under his breath. He had gambled that the fugitives would head directly to Paris. Well, Frankfurt was workable, the trains were fast and direct. . . .

  Anything was workable. Nguyen had a man to kill, and nothing would prevent him from doing so. Honor demanded it. He would describe the act to his superiors as a duty to the State when he finally made report; but the reality went much deeper. Headlines and the colonel’s identification card had carried him through some obstacles. It was Nguyen’s own personality, however, that had enabled him to run rough-shod over bureaucratic delays even before Hanoi cabled assent.

  “You’re sure of your identification?” the colonel asked. There had been no photographs available, and only Nguyen himself of the personnel in the West had seen either Vlasov or the American who had killed Hoang.

  “There can be no question,” the voice from Tunis insisted. “The Russian, Vlasov—tall, pale . . . his right arm missing? And he was in company with another European, not certain, of course, but he could be the man you described.”

  “Right,” Nguyen said. “Well done.” He hung up abruptly, staring for some minutes at the dial of the telephone.

  “Is there anything else you need, sir?” asked the clerk who still stood near the door.

  Nguyen looked up as sharply as a firing pin releasing. “Yes,” he said, “a line to the Frankfurt Consulate. They should be expecting the call.”

  He would need someone to follow the fugitives from the airport, someone else to meet him at the train station and pass on the information. Simple enough, even for a three-man consulate which included only one intelligence officer.

  The last of the work might be tricky, but that would be the colonel’s pleasure to handle himself. It was work he did as well as any man alive.

  Nguyen checked the magazine of his Tokarev by habit before he replaced the weapon in his holster.

  L

  “Come on, Professor,” Kelly panted as he swung open the front door of the hotel, “you people are supposed to be used to real cold where you come from.” The agent was tired, but he now had a loose sense of victory. Besides, he felt as if he were returning home after a long trip. Kelly always stayed at the Excelsior when he had an overnight in Frankfurt. Coming back to the hotel was a return to more than a building.

  “Where I come from, we dress for the cold,” Vlasov grumbled without bitterness. The agent’s good humor was infectious, and the Russian, too, seemed to feel that they were at least in reach of safety. Like Kelly, he was damp from the drizzle. They had started to run the block from the train station to the hotel, but the events of previous days had simply not left either man enough strength or energy.

  The desk clerk brightened as he saw the men. “Ah, Mr. Kelly,” he said, “I had almost given up hope of you. Welcome.”

  “Emil,” the agent said, “I almost gave up hope a time or two myself. Can you find a double room for my friend and me? Sorry I didn’t phone ahead, but things got rushed. Oh—and our luggage is back in the airport somewhere. Do you suppose you could find a place to deliver a couple suits after hours? We’ll pay what it takes to be able to change into something dry.”

  ‘“Why yes, I can arrange that,” said the clerk. He handed Kelly a registration card and a key with a long brass tag. “But I believe the lady said she had brought some luggage of yours along with her.”

  “The . . . lady?” repeated Kelly. He turned smoothly, his eyes wide open so that he had the full arc of peripheral vision that he might need. In front of him, the stairs; to the left, the front door and the rain-slicked dark beyond; to the right, the passage to the dining room and the tiny lobby beneath the stairwell. Kelly’s lips smiled, and his right hand was firm on the butt of the gun in his pocket.

  “What?” said the clerk. “Oh—”

  “Good evening, Tom,” said Annamaria Gordon. She walked from the lobby toward the reception desk. “I suppose I can call you that here.” Her smile was nervous,
but when she stopped a pace from Kelly she stood with lady-like dignity.

  Vlasov was puzzled but not concerned. He looked from the woman to Kelly and said, “I had not understood you would be meeting us here, madame.”

  “How?” Kelly mouthed. His hand was still in his pocket. His eyes were staring, trying to scan everything that might be a threat, a target.

  Annamaria reached into her purse with a thumb and forefinger. She brought out Kelly’s account book. “You left this in your luggage,” she said. Her smile was suddenly brighter. “All I knew was that you were making up your route as you went along. You didn’t have to come to Frankfurt, but it was logical, you know the city and you had to go somewhere you knew—” She riffled the pages of the spiral notebook. “You always stayed at the Excelsior when you came here. And Tom—I had to go somewhere.”

  “Mr. Kelly?” said the puzzled clerk.

  The agent turned abruptly and completed the registration card. Over his shoulder he muttered, “I’d have come back.” He looked up at the clerk. “Emil,” he said, “we’ll wait on the suits, thank you, until we sort things out.” He started to take the room key in his right hand but stopped.

  Holding the key in his left, Kelly led his companions to the stairs. His free hand hovered near the pocket of his coat.

  Annamaria said in a low voice to the agent’s back, “No, I had to leave. Buffy came and told me what . . . what Rufus had done. She had to talk to someone, poor thing. I . . . it was me by default, I suppose.”

  Kelly unlocked the door nearest the stairhead on the second floor. “If she told you that, I suppose you got a notion of what I did, too.” He gestured the others past him with his left arm.