by David Drake
Two cars pulled up at the curb outside just as the trio exited the Longworth Building. The follow-car was a gray Buick with a black vinyl roof, but the vehicle its lights illuminated was a bright green Volvo sedan. The Volvo’s driver got out quickly, leaving his door open, and trotted around to the curb side.
Elaine muttered a curse at the weather and hunched herself in her linen jacket, Doug strode forward as if there were no rain, the attaché case in his left hand swinging as if it weighed no more than a normal leather satchel.
“Sorry ‘bout that,” Kelly said as he and the woman hesitated under the roof overhang. “Shouldn’t let my temper go when I’m around innocent bystanders. Not for silly shit, especially.”
“Let’s go,” the woman said, darting across the wide sidewalk as a gust of wind lashed raindrops curving like a snake track across the pools already on the concrete.
The driver had opened both curbside doors for them. The veteran paused deliberately to see whether or not Elaine would get in before he did. She slid quickly into the back seat, showing a length of thigh that amused Kelly because it really did affect him. There were people who thought that sex was something physical. Damn fools.
“You can sit anywhere you please, Mr. Kelly,” the woman called from the car with a trace of exasperation. “All the doors work normally.”
The front seats were buckets, so they really hadn’t planned to sandwich him between the two of them—or more likely, between the former driver and Doug, who was now behind the wheel of the Volvo adjusting the angle of the backrest. “Right,” said Kelly, feeling a little foolish as he got into the front for the sake of the legroom. The man who had brought the Volvo to them closed both doors and scurried back to the follow-car.
Doug did not wait for the former driver to be picked up before goosing the Volvo’s throttle hard enough to spin the drive wheels on the wet pavement. The right rear tire scraped the edge of the curb before the sedan angled abruptly into the traffic lane and off through the night.
“If these’re the radials I’d guess they were,” said Kelly, angling sideways in the pocket of the seat, “then that’s a pretty good way to spend twenty minutes in the rain, changing the tire with a ripped sidewall.”
Doug glanced at his passenger, but then merely grunted and switched the headlights to bright. Raindrops appeared to curve toward them as the car accelerated.
Doug’s face had a greenish cast from the instrument lights. Kelly glimpsed the woman between the hollow headrests, her features illuminated in long pulses by the oncoming cars. The black frame of Elaine’s hair made her face a distinct oval even during intervals of darkness.
You couldn’t really see into a head like that, thought Kelly as the hammer of tires on bad pavement buzzed him into a sort of drifting reverie. Not in good light, not under stress. Sometimes you could predict the words the mind within would offer its audience; but you’d never know for sure the process by which the words were chosen, the switches and reconsiderations at levels of perceived side-effects which a man like Kelly never wanted to reach.
The veteran straightened so that his shoulder blade was no longer against the window ledge. He was physically tired, and the meeting in Bianci’s office had been as stressful and disorienting as a firefight. If he didn’t watch it, he’d put himself into a state more suggestible than anything an interrogation team could achieve with hypnotic drugs. Even the thought of that made Kelly’s skin crawl in a hot, prickling wave which spread downward from the peak of his skull.
“Which of you’s in charge?” he asked. The hostility implicit in the question was another goad to keep him alert.
“You’ll meet some of the people in charge tonight, if you care to,” the woman said, her face as expressionless in the lights of an oncoming truck as it was a moment later when backlit by the follow-car.
“No,” Kelly said. “I mean which of you two has the rank. When it comes down to cases, who says ‘jump’ and who says ‘how high?’ “
Doug turned with a fierceness which their speed and the turnpike traffic made unwise, snapping, “For somebody who claims he doesn’t intend to talk to anybody, you show a real inability to know when to shut the fuck up!”
Kelly grinned. The woman in the back seat said to his profile, “Would you take a direct order from either one of us, Mr. Kelly?”
The veteran looked at her directly and laughed. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t guess I would.”
“Then our ranks don’t matter,” she said coolly, and Kelly decided that wasn’t much of a lie in comparison to other things he’d heard tonight. And would hear later.
“Oh, Christ on a crutch,” Kelly muttered, locking his fingers behind his neck and arching his shoulders back as fiercely as he could in the cramped confines. “You know,” he said while he held the position, headlights flicking red patterns of blood to his retinas behind closed eyelids, “This’s going to be a first for me. I worked eighteen years for NSA, more’r less, and I never set foot in the building.” He opened his eyes, relaxed, and as he stared through the windshield toward the future added, “Can’t say I much wanted to.”
Kelly hadn’t intended to draw a reaction from Doug, but the driver half-turned—realized that the woman was sitting directly behind him, out of his sight no matter how sharply he craned his neck—and then tried to catch her eye in the rearview mirror.
“Mr. Kelly,” Elaine said, and Kelly surmised that she was speaking with greater circumspection than usual, “I don’t want you to be startled by something you misunderstood. We won’t be going to NSA headquarters or any portion of Fort Meade dedicated to the National Security Agency. Some disused barracks within the reservation were—taken over for present purposes. You shouldn’t be concerned that we enter at a gate different from the one you may have expected.”
Kelly laughed. “Well, that explains the big question I still had.”
Doug glanced at him, but the veteran had been pausing for breath, not a response, “Couldn’t figure,” he went on, “how you’d gotten NSA to cooperate with any damn body else—which you are, even though I don’t much care who, not really.”
Headlights picked out a tiny smile at the corners of Elaine’s lips as she said, “We’re government employees, Mr. Kelly. As you were, and as you are now—through Congressman Bianci.”
The Volvo and the Buick behind it had cloverleafed from the Baltimore-Washington Turnpike onto the cracked pavement of Highway 1. Dingy motels and businesses lined both sides of its four undivided lanes. There was very little traffic in comparison to the turnpike, and Doug made only rolling stops at the signal lights, presumably counting on his ID to get him past a late-cruising Maryland cop.
“If you’ve got it, flaunt it” had always been the motto of the intelligence community. It wasn’t a great way to do business, but it attracted to the profession bright, aggressive people who might otherwise have done something socially useful with their lives.
Christ, Kelly thought, he was too tired for this crap. Too tired in every way.
The gates in the chain link fence encircling Fort Meade were open, but there was a guard post and a red and white crossbar, which a GI lifted after a glance at Doug’s identification. As the car accelerated again, Kelly got a glimpse of the unit patch on the left shoulder of the trooper’s fatigues: a horse and bend dexter worked in gold embroidery on a shield-shaped blue field.
“Goddam,” the veteran muttered as the car swept by, “Twelfth Cav, wasn’t it?”
“You were assigned to them, weren’t you?” said the woman, finding in a mis-memory of Kelly’s file a safe topic for an interval of increasing tension. “During operations in the Anti-Lebanon?”
Kelly laughed, glad himself of the release. He got antsy nowadays around uniforms, even when he was just mixing with brass at a Washington cocktail party or visiting a research installation far too sensitive to be compromised by an attempt to hold Thomas James Kelly for questioning. The only sensible explanation for tonight’s affair was t
hat it was an operation intended for just that end: to close the doors around Tom Kelly unless and until folks in DC and Jerusalem decided they should be opened again. But he was going along with it, he’d said he would, and he was in favor of anything that took his mind off the barracks they drove past and their insulation from what civilians thought was the real world.
“That was a different armored cavalry regiment,” Kelly said, lifting himself by his left shoulder and feet so that he could hitch up his trousers. The Volvo had leather upholstery, and he was sweating enough to stick slightly to the seat cushion. “Close, but no cigar. These guys—” They were coming to another checkpoint, and this time the gates were shut. The fencing gleamed in the headlights as the car paused for a soldier with a small flashlight to check Doug’s ID. The earth raked smooth around the postholes had a raw, unweathered look.
“These guys are a public relations unit,” Kelly said, trying to control his voice the way he would clean a bad signal on tape—trimming out everything but what communicated data, as if there were no such things as static, bleed-over, or fear. “The President needs troops for a parade, visiting brass wants to review something—you know the drill—the Twelfth takes care of it. Nicely painted tanks and APCs, troops in strack uniforms—you know. They even paint the roadwheels of the tanks. Rots the rubber, but it sho’ do look black from the reviewing stands.”
“You may pass, sir,” said the guard, and as the gate opened he saluted.
There was a second chain link barrier twelve feet within the first, with its gate inset further to permit a car to stand between the checkpoints while both gates were closed. The inner fencing was covered with taupe fiberglass panels, translucent and sufficient protection against anyone trying to observe the compound from ground level. The soldiers manning the inner guard post wore fatigues and carried automatic rifles with a degree of assurance very different from that of the Twelfth Cav guards with pistols in patent leather holsters.
The man who examined the credentials this time stooped to look at all three occupants of the car. He wore neither a unit patch nor rank insignia, but there were chevrons and rockers in his eyes when he met Kelly’s.
There but for the grace of God, the veteran thought, if his gift for languages was really a manifestation of grace rather than a curse. Being able .to process intercept data in real time had put Tom Kelly farther up the sharp end than he ever would have gone if he knew only how to sight a cal fifty and handle twenty-ounce blocks of plastique. He’d spent a lot of years in places where discipline was something you had yourself because there was nobody around to impose it on you.
When the people who thought in hierarchies realized that Platoon Sergeant Thomas J. Kelly was both willing and able to make a major policy decision for the United States government, it made him very frightening.
“Christ, I’m scared,” Kelly said with a lilt and a bright smile to make a joke of it as the guard stepped away.
The woman in the back seat smiled with the precision of a gunlock. “I’ve read your file, Mr. Kelly,” she said as the gate squealed open. “If I had any doubt about the purpose of this exercise, I promise I wouldn’t be the person nearest by when you learned the truth.”
Doug glanced up at the rearview mirror again as he drove forward, his expression unreadable.
Within the second enclosure were four frame buildings, a number of cars—Continentals and a Mercedes, all with opera windows—and more armed men in unmarked fatigues. Incandescent area lights were placed within the fencing on temporary poles, throwing hard shadows and displaying every flaw in the peeling, mustard-colored paint on the buildings. They had probably been constructed during the Second World War as temporary barracks, and had survived simply because military bureaucracy misfiled a great deal more than it discarded.
Well, Kelly had once been very glad for a case of Sten guns hidden against need, decades before, in a warehouse in Homs. It wasn’t the sort of waste that bothered him.
Three of the buildings were two-story, but the fourth was one floor with a crawl space, like the shotgun houses built in rural areas at about the same period. It would have been a company headquarters and orderly room; now it was the prize which the troops billeted in the other three buildings were guarding.
Drivers stood by their limousines, one of them polishing a fender with his chamois, as they watched the newcomers. Instead of parking along the fenceline with the other cars, Doug pulled up to an entrance at one end of the low building and shut off the engine. Kelly reached across his own body to open his door left-handed. The latch snicked normally, permitting Kelly to step out of the car while he tried both to observe everything around him and to look relaxed.
Neither attempt was possible under the circumstances. When Kelly met Elaine’s eyes across the roof of the Volvo he laughed as he would have done at sight of his own face in a mirror.
“Hell,” he said to the woman, “when I was a kid there was a lotta people thought I’d be hanged before I was old enough to vote. I beat that by just about twenty years, didn’t I?” He followed them inside.
There were no guards within the building, no women besides Elaine, and only one uniform—Major Redstone when Kelly served under him in the Shuf, and now, from the star on each shoulder, a brigadier general. He was one of the six men waiting in what had been the orderly room, the east half of the structure. The others wore not uniforms but suits, and suits—in this sort of setting—tended to blur together in Kelly’s mind. Fight-or-flight reflexes pumped hormones into his bloodstream. It wasn’t the sort of situation he handled very well.
“Hey, Red,” the veteran said with a nod. “Hadn’t heard you were gonna be here.”
“Hi, Kelly,” said the general. “Glad you could make it.” Even as he spoke, Redstone’s eyes were checking the faces of the men to either side of him. Any intention he might have had to say more was lost in whatever he saw in those faces.
They had prepared for this business by moving into the orderly room a massive wooden table, scarred and as old as the building, and a complement of armchairs whose varnish was ribbed and blackened by long storage. No one was seated when Kelly entered the room, and if they expected him to lock himself between a heavy chair and a heavy table, they were out of their collective mind.
The men, the Suits, ranged in age from one in his late twenties—younger than Doug—to another who could have been anywhere from sixty to eighty and with eyes much older than that. That one’s motions were smooth enough to put him on the lower end of the age range, but the liver spots on his gnarled hands were almost the same color as the fabric of his three-piece suit. “Tuttle?” he said with a glance at the woman.
“Mr. Kelly has agreed to look at the physical evidence, Mr. Pierrard,” Elaine said in her most careful voice. “He has his own life to live, and he certainly won’t become involved in the present matter unless he’s convinced it is of the—highest order of significance.”
“Well, does he think we’d be here?” Pierrard snapped. He stared up and down Kelly with a look not of contempt but superiority—the look a breeder gives to someone else’s thoroughbred. “Do you, Kelly?”
The veteran had instinctively frozen into a formal “at ease” posture: feet spread to shoulder width and angled 45° from midline; shoulders back, spine straight, hands clasped behind his back—and the hard feel of the weapon there was no comfort now. He was furious with himself and with everyone around him because the simple answer hadn’t been right: they hadn’t brought him here to arrest him.
Reflex wanted to say, “No sir.” Very distinctly, Tom Kelly said, “Why don’t you get to fucking business and show me this thing?”
“Take him in,” Pierrard said curtly, with an upward lift of the chin which Doug and Elaine took as a direction to them.
“This way, Mr. Kelly,” Elaine said without looking back at him. She walked toward the room to the side, which had been an office for either the company commander or the first sergeant. She took a deep breath, and
Doug echoed the sound hissingly as he followed the others. Perhaps it was the smell in the smaller room, but Kelly did not think so.
There was a white-enameled cooling case in the office, purring with a normality belied only by its present location. Condensate on the slanted glass-and-chrome top hid the contents until Doug threw a switch. Floodlights mounted on the ceiling illuminated the case starkly, and the odor which had been present even through the tobacco smoke in the orderly room became so overpowering now that its source could not be denied.
The creature under glass was the same as whatever Kelly had seen on tape, and it stank like the aftermath of an electrical fire in a spice warehouse. Neither the chemical nor the organic components of the odor were particularly unpleasant, and even the combination could have been accepted in another context. Somebody in the other room swore.
“Didn’t look this big,” said Kelly as he walked over to the case and the flaccid gray thing within. “This tall.”
Without clothes, the creature—or construct—but the men in the other room wouldn’t be playing games with a little scut like Tom Kelly—looked very frail; but the height should have been more than six feet. When the veteran bent over the case his shadow cut the direct reflection from the glass and gave him an even clearer vision of the creature. The arrangement of torso and appendages was that of a human being, but the limbs had the appearance of flat-wire antenna lead rather than the more nearly circular cross section of a man’s.
Of the limbs of an animal that belonged on Earth.
Elaine lifted the center section of glass; the cooler really was an ordinary grocery case. “It’s a refrigerator, not a freezer,” she said while Doug muttered something unintelligible in the background. “Freezing would have broken down the cell walls. Of course, it can’t be kept this way forever. When they’ve completed the autopsy, they’ll . . .”
The torso had been laid open in a long curving incision, but the flap of fine-scaled integument had been pinned back in place when the pathologists paused in their examination. Doctors tended to be self-ruled men in whom arrogance was a certain concomitant of ability if not proof of that ability. Kelly wondered who was handling the autopsy, whether the men in the other room had chosen to go with the best pathologists available or rather to use doctors whom they knew they could control.