Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  The last thing Kelly did before leaving his room was to walk over to the Sony receiver and poke number seven of the ten station preset buttons. The apparent effect was the same as if he had pushed the Off button: the sound clicked off, the LED went dark, and the liquid crystal display of the tuning readout went completely blank as if the power were off also.

  What actually happened to the receiver, which a stateside acquaintance of Kelly’s had hastily modified, was a good deal more complex. Preset seven tuned the unit to 88.35 megahertz, squarely in the midst of the upper sidelobe of Istanbul’s sixty-kilowatt commercial FM station. The hump which a spectrum analyzer would show there was exactly what was to be expected, and a separate transmitter would have to be very powerful indeed to affect the appearance of the band on the display.

  The Sony’s output when operating on that preset was not to the speaker as an audible signal but rather through a shunt into the case intended for an external battery pack holding four C cells. It now contained a miniature tape recorder with a voice-activated switch. The false battery pack could be exposed by anyone who cared to open it; but Kelly had deliberately left an unmodified Sony and its accoutrements unattended at his apartment in Arlington during the week he was preparing for the mission, giving anyone who was curious ample opportunity to be reassured about its innocence.

  It would be nice to learn that he didn’t have to spy on the folks with whom he was working just now. But given Pierrard, he was going to be very surprised if Elaine and her friends were playing straight.

  The breeze from the Bosphorus was cool enough to be bracing now. A few hours after sundown it was going to be damned cold, but that itself would be a help in returning Kelly’s mind to operational status, like the process of scaling rust from armor plate. Working for Carlo Bianci, he had been able to stay warm enough all the time. That wasn’t something you counted on in the field.

  The lead taxi in the rank was a Fiat, older than the driver, who cheerfully haggled in Turkish on a price to the Mosque of Sinan. It made a reasonable destination for Kelly, due east of the Sheraton and close to the Bosphorus—as well as being within two narrow, winding blocks of the agent’s real destination, a neighborhood mosque in an alley off Maskular Street.

  The neighborhood mosque was named for Sidi Iskender—Saint Alexander—and Kelly wondered fleetingly whether Alexander the Great himself might not have been sanctified in the myths of Turkish tribesmen riding westward through the land which the Macedonian had conquered centuries before. The west side of the courtyard looked as if it had sustained battle damage, but that was the result of ongoing refurbishment: the wall had been knocked down and was in early stages of replacement by a portico of four column-supported barrel vaults.

  Precast concrete arches leaned against the side of the neighboring commercial building, but the stones of the square pillars were being fitted on-site from the pile of rough limestone ashlars delivered from the quarry. Two stonecutters and the half dozen short-haired boys kibitzing sat in a waste of rock-chips and yellow dust from the stone.

  The older of the stonecutters stood straddling the column which he was forming into a hexagonal pilaster. His partner wore a cloth cap like Kelly’s, a tan sweater pulled over a dark blue shirt, and baggy black trousers almost hidden by rock dust and the one-by-one-by-two-foot stone prism behind which he squatted with an adze. He was in his late thirties, clearly the elder Ayyubi brother, for his broad, dark face was a near double of that Kelly had last seen videotaped on a rainswept street in Diyarbakir.

  Ahmed Ayyubi glanced up at the man approaching and struck the stone again with a blow deceptively light. Rock exploded, and the adze stopped half an inch beyond the point of impact.

  “You,” said Ahmed Ayyubi as he rose. The arm holding the adze fell to his side, but the tendons of the hand on the haft stood out with the fierceness of the Kurd’s grip.

  “We need to talk, Ahmed,” Kelly said as he walked closer. He was trying to appear calm, but he stumbled on the rock chips—some of them the size of a clenched fist—covering the ground. Danger had made a tunnel of his viewpoint, and the peripheral vision that guides the feet had vanished under stress. The boys continued to chatter for a moment, but the other stonecutter paused with his own tool resting on the work face.

  “Get out of here,” Ayyubi said in Kurdish, and in a voice so guttural that Kelly could not have understood the words had they not been the ones he expected.

  One more step put the American agent as close to the workplace as Ayyubi was, well within reach of the adze. “We need to talk,” Kelly said. Tiny bits of stone floated in the sweat that sprang out suddenly from Ayyubi’s brow. “Otherwise Mohammed’s killing will be unavenged.”

  “You’re responsible for his death, you know,” the Kurd snarled.

  Kelly reached out and touched the back of the stonecutter’s right hand while he held eye contact. “Whatever responsibility I have for Mohammed’s death, I will wash away in the blood of his killers. But you must help me find them.”

  And only when he felt Ayyubi’s hand relax on the adze helve did Kelly realize that he had succeeded.

  The stonecutter grimaced and set his tool on the work-piece. “Come,” he said, gesturing beyond a pile of finished blocks toward the street. A couple of the boys jumped up to follow. “You go away!” Ayyubi said. “This is man’s business.” Though there was love in his gruffness, the hand he batted at the nearest lad would have flung the boy across the rubble if the blow had landed.

  Traffic noise on Maskular and the adjoining streets was a white ambiance that may have been what Ayyubi was seeking. More probably the Kurd had needed time and the movement to clear his thoughts of limestone and his sudden fury at seeing Kelly again.

  “I don’t know what Mohammed was doing,” Ayyubi said abruptly. Standing, he was three inches shorter than Kelly, but his neck and shoulders made even the stocky American look slight by contrast. “I wanted him to get into decent work, come in with me and Gulersoy”—his calloused thumb indicated the older stonecutter—”but he’d gotten the taste for being a hero, for getting rich without working. You did that to him.”

  “Yes, easy money,” Kelly murmured. His right hand caressed the jacket over his left elbow. There was a four-inch scar there, where the skin had been laid open by the same bomb blast which had knocked him silly. Mohammed Ayyubi had carried him to safety a hundred and fifty feet up the sides of a ravine that a goat would have thought was sheer.

  But soldier ants probably can’t explain what they do to the workers in the colony, either. It was that sort of world, is all.

  “This I know, and all I know is this,” the stonecutter continued, prodding toward Kelly’s chest with a thumb-thick finger. “He met a blond whore, a dancer, and let her get him into this. As you got him into the other.”

  “I didn’t get Mohammed into anything I didn’t get him out of,” Kelly said softly, with his eyes on the middle distance and his mind on memories that had nothing to do with the business at hand. His body shuddered, and his eyes focused on Ayyubi again. “Tell me about the dancer. Is she a Turk?”

  “No, a foreigner,” the other man said. Something in Kelly’s expression a moment before caused Ayyubi to frown, not in fear but with a different awareness of the situation and the man who questioned him. “I know nothing about her, only the name—Gee-soo-lah. A belly dancer, very expensive. Dances at the best clubs and parties of the very rich because she’s blond, you see, and foreign.”

  “Right . . .” Kelly said. “Know where she’s at just now?”

  Ayyubi shook his head emphatically. “Sometimes here, sometimes she travels. Not with Mohammed, I think, but I know she was responsible.” He paused and added, “Mohammed showed me a billboard once, but that was months ago. I never saw her, and I never let him talk to me about freeing Kurdistan and the big money he was making.”

  The stonecutter spat into the street. Some of the cars had their lights on by now. “Big money. It helped the family bury h
im.”

  “I’ll let you know how things work out,” Kelly said, wondering if anybody was watching him just now. Pierrard’s people or others, not necessarily people. “Thank you, Ahmed.”

  “Wait,” the Kurd said, touching Kelly’s arm as the agent started to turn away. When their eyes met again in the dusk, Ayyubi said, “I thought it was friends of yours who killed him. Americans. They came to talk with me the week before Mohammed was shot, and I didn’t know where he was to warn him. My brother.”

  Kelly clasped the other man’s hand against him. “Ahmed,” he said, “nobody who kills one of my people is a friend of mine.” He squeezed the Kurd fiercely, then strode back toward the Mosque of Sinan and the hope of finding another taxi.

  There was nothing particularly difficult about what came next, but the first three hours of it were simply preparation. He had to lose whoever might be tagging him on Pierrard’s behalf or Elaine’s—if there was a difference.

  A properly trained team of at least a dozen agents could keep tabs on just about anybody in an urban environment, but that was a lot of personnel for anyone but the local security forces. Among US intelligence organizations in Istanbul, the Drug Enforcement Administration could probably put together such a team, and very possibly CIA could as well.

  Pierrard, whoever he was and whatever funds he could disburse on special operations, had an insolubly different problem. You can’t bring a tracking unit into a city where the street patterns and the language are both unfamiliar, not and expect the team to function. Money alone won’t do it. And the most practical answer, to borrow trained personnel from friendly intelligence organizations, was also the least probable. There were no friendly intelligence services to people like Pierrard, least of all the other services employed by the US government.

  Pierrard’s attitude, of course, was fully supported by that of his CIA and DEA colleagues, who would have been delighted to get their fingers into a rival’s turf.

  For the moment, Kelly could be pretty sure that he could be being followed by only Doug and the three foreign nationals he had met at the Sheraton, perhaps with an equal number of Turkish drivers and the like. The Covered Bazaar—the Kapali Carsi in the center of the Old City—was the perfect place to dump any such tail.

  There were eighteen entrances to the Bazaar and sixty-five separate streets within it, all covered by plastered brick arches with internal iron bracing. Kelly entered the three-acre maze of shops and pedestrians on Fuad Pasha Street across from the campus of the University of Istanbul. He ducked out again fifteen minutes later on Yeniceri Boulevard, spending no longer in the streetlights than he needed to hop into a brightly-painted Skoda taxi.

  The trip back across the Golden Horn to the apartment on Carik Street in the Beyoglu District, not far from Taksim Square, was complicated by the fact that Kelly changed cabs twice more. The friend who was arranging this pickup owed Kelly less than he was risking by going up against Pierrard. The least Kelly intended to do was to prevent fallout in that direction.

  The apartment was one of a series of six-to-ten-story new constructions filling the block. The street level held a branch bank whose steel grating had been rolled down for the night, a jewelry store, and a rug shop with a silken Herike on display beneath concealed spotlights. There was a guard in the small elevator lobby, chatting with a policeman who probably found it worth his time to spend his entire shift right there.

  Both men shifted to their feet with interest and hostile concern when Kelly stepped into the lobby. “I’m to pick up a case from Miss Ozel on the sixth floor,” Kelly said in Turkish. “For Nureddin.”

  Mollified but still cautious, the civilian guard pressed buzzer six on the wall beneath the intercom grating while the policeman studied the taxi waiting outside.

  “Yes?” a voice responded, its sex uncertain due to the distortion of the intercom.

  “Lady, a man to pick up a package for Nureddin,” the guard explained.

  “Oh—thank you. Could you send him up yourself, as a favor to me?”

  The guard nodded obsequiously to the speaker grating, causing the policeman to laugh and wink at Kelly.

  “Of course, lady,” the civilian said. He unlocked the elevator call button and gestured Kelly into the cage. Theoretically, someone from the apartment itself should have come down to accompany the visitor to the proper floor; but those who could pay for security like this could be expected to circumvent those aspects which caused inconvenience to themselves.

  The sixth floor was a single suite. Its door was already ajar when the elevator stopped, and the woman waiting in the opening motioned Kelly within. “Robert—could not be here,” she said in fair English. “He say—he say that this is what you look for.”

  What Kelly could see of the apartment was opulent with brassware and wall hangings, but a little overdone for his taste. The same could be said for the woman in a house-dress of multilayered red gauze over an opaque base. She had a fleshy Turkish beauty, with lustrous hair to her waist and breasts that would have been impressive on a much heavier woman . . . but there are no absolutes of taste, and only her smile was greatly to the taste of Tom Kelly.

  “Thank you,” the American said, stepping to the travel-trunk set in the entranceway to await him. “And more than thanks to Bob. It—it’s just as well he’s not here now, but—tell him I’ll see him again. And I won’t forget.”

  Kelly had met Bob’s wife, a slim blond of aristocratic beauty whose ancestry went back several centuries in Virginia. Very cool, very intelligent, very nearly perfect . . . and thinking of that as he reached for the case, Kelly could understand Miss Ozel more easily.

  “It’s heavy,” warned the woman. “I can get—”

  “Thank you,” Kelly repeated, lifting the trunk by the central strap as if it were an ordinary suitcase. Bob could be depended on to make sure the load was balanced.

  Danny Pacheco, who had died below decks on the White Plains, had been a friend of his as of Kelly.

  “I guess I need a key to get down, too,” the American said apologetically. The weight of the case forced him into a counter lean as if he were thrusting against a gale.

  The room beyond the entrance hall was furnished like that of a wealthy Kurdish chieftain of the past century: the floor not carpeted but overlaid by runners a meter wide and five meters long. Little but the edge of any single carpet showed beyond the edge of the next above; and so on, across the room, while stacked pillows turned the juncture of floor and walls into a continuous couch.

  Ozel glanced toward the inner room, then took an elevator key from a pocket hidden in her housedress. Unexpectedly she gripped Kelly’s free arm and, staring fiercely into his eyes, said, “This won’t hurt Robert. Will it?”

  She shouldn’t know there was anything different about this one than there was about anything Bob did for his employer, NSA. He certainly hadn’t told her. Kelly blinked, reassessing the mind behind those cowlike eyes. She would have gotten physical signals from Bob, but she had to be able to think to process the data.

  “No,” Kelly said in Kurdish. “Not if I’m alive to keep it from hurting him.” He squeezed her hand in reassurance and led her by it to the elevator switch.

  Bob had done a rather better job the second time around, Kelly thought as the cage descended. Or maybe he really needed both women, needed the balance.

  And what did Tom Kelly need? Nothing he’d found in forty years, that was sure. And not some of the things he’d never had; the love of a good woman, for a major instance.

  Though the love of the right bad woman might be just the sort of stress a fellow like him needed to keep out of the really life-threatening forms of excitement.

  Like the current one.

  The ETAP Marmar was the tallest building in Istanbul, and from his sixteenth-floor room in that hotel, Kelly could easily look down on the room Elaine had booked for him in the Sheraton.

  More to the point, his ETAP window looked down on Elaine’s own room and pe
rmitted him to aim the microwave transmitter he had picked up from Ozel toward the cavity resonator he had earlier planted in the loveseat. The fact that the woman’s rubber-backed drapes were drawn did not affect the microwaves with which Kelly now painted 727.

  The trunk acted as both carrying case for the transmitter and the camouflage necessary for an unattended installation like this one in a room that would be entered for daily cleaning. Five sides of the Turkish-made trunk were standard sheet metal over light wood, with corner reinforcements, but the metal sheathing had been removed from one end and replaced by dull black paint. The change was noticeable but unremarkable and it was through that end that the parabolic antenna spewed a tight beam of microwaves.

  Kelly rested his elbows on the ledge of the window and scanned the south face of the Sheraton with binoculars, a tiny pair of Zeiss roof-prism 10x20s. He had left his own drapes open in the Sheraton, and the Sony radio on the ledge there provided the certainty of location which he could not have achieved simply by counting windows. The window to the left of his own was the target. . . .

  This room in the ETAP Marmar had been booked for Kelly by a woman who had left Bianci’s staff a year before to join an Atlanta travel agency. The only question she had asked about the false name and the cash payment was how it affected Carlo. Kelly’s word that it didn’t had been good enough for her. A north-facing room high on the ETAP was certain to overlook a room in the Sheraton with a view of Taksim Square. While there had been no certainty that Elaine would book her own room beside the one Kelly had demanded, there had been a high probability of it.

  And after all, there was no certainty in life.

  The veteran gave final touches to the antenna alignment, switched on the power, and closed and locked the case sitting on the coffee table beside the window. The unit ran on wall current, so it was possible that a maid would unplug it despite the note in Turkish: Air Freshener Within—Please Do Not Unplug—left with a thousand lire bill atop the trunk. Its weight, primarily that of the transformers, made it unlikely that anyone would move it. Short of hiring someone to watch the room, there was no better way to set things up.