Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  Whistling, Tom Kelly locked the door and the purring transmitter behind him. He figured he’d walk back to the Sheraton, but by the long way around the park.

  He felt pretty good. He had his ass covered from his own side, more or less, and he could now get on with the job they had asked him to do.

  Kelly expected somebody to be waiting for him in the lobby, but George was instead at the further end of the first-floor coffee shop where he was less obtrusive and had a full, if narrow, view of the front door. The American nodded to him cheerfully. No problem. He needed to get some information through Elaine, and he’d just as soon that she was expecting him.

  With his own key in his pocket, Kelly tapped on the door of 727—“shave” with his index finger, “and a haircut” with the middle finger, he was feeling good—and the door opened before the veteran could rap “two bits” with both fingers together. Elaine, alone in the room as she gestured him inside, was wearing a beige dress that could have been silk-look polyester but probably was not.

  “Glad to have you back, Tom,” the woman said without emphasis. “Learn anything useful?”

  “Learned I could get my watch wound with no help from the USG,” Kelly replied with a chuckle, flopping down on the loveseat and spreading his arms as he had before when he set the cavity resonator. Somewhere up there beyond the curtains was a microwave transmitter aimed right at his breastbone, God willing.

  Elaine grimaced involuntarily, but there was no sign that she wasn’t taking the lie at face value. Not that it was a lie, exactly: Tom Kelly damned well could get laid without government assistance. The statement covered both the time he’d been gone and the new buoyance with which he returned. The hair on his chest tickled, but that was psychosomatic rather than a real effect of the microwaves. If, worst come to worst, his visit to Miss Ozel was traced, it explained that too.

  “Perhaps we can get to business sometime soon,” the woman said, with no more emotional loading than was necessary.

  “Had dinner?” Kelly asked brightly. “We can call room service.” The grimace, a momentary tic, was back. Maybe she thought he was drunk too. He hadn’t drunk alcohol since that boilermaker in the Madison. . . .

  “Get me full poop on a blond belly dancer named—and this is phonetic, through Kurdish—Gee-soo-lah,” Kelly said. “Claimed to be a foreign national, claimed to be a top act. Probably in somebody’s files even if the computer doesn’t kick her up for some other reason.”

  Elaine raised an eyebrow. “Excellent,” she said, “but it’ll take some time.”

  “Right,” agreed Kelly as he stood with the smooth caution of a powerful man with too many scars to move unrestrained except at need. “And I don’t guess you’ll be burning off copies of the file yourself, will you?”

  “I don’t suppose so, no,” the woman said guardedly.

  “So why don’t I,” Kelly said with a grin as he walked past her to the door, “go take a shower while you make the arrangements? And then we’ll go to dinner.”

  He paused with his hand on the knob. “For which you’re rather overdressed, m’lady, but that’s your business.”

  “Oh-kay,” Elaine was saying as the door closed behind Kelly, her voice as quizzical as the expression on her face.

  Istanbul had the nighttime beauty of any large city, its dirt and dilapidation cloaked by darkness and only shapes and the jewels of its illumination to be seen. The view from Kelly’s window had the additional exoticism of an eastern city in which street lighting was too sparse to overwhelm the varicolored richness of neon shop-signs. The minarets of a large mosque in the distance were illuminated from within their parapets, so the shafts stood out around the dome like rockets being prepared for night lift-off.

  Kelly sighed and walked into the bathroom to shower as he had said. He undressed carefully and set his trousers on the seat of the toilet. He would wear the same outfit for the rest of the evening . . . and that arrangement put the snubbie near his hand in the shower without displaying it to the unlikely possibility of optical surveillance devices planted within the hotel room. It was as easy to be careful, that was all.

  When Elaine tapped on the door of 725 a few minutes after he had gotten dressed, Kelly had a twinge of concern that his comment regarding clothing would cause her to change into slacks. Istanbul was as cosmopolitan as London, in one sense, but the underlying culture was Sunni Muslim. Smart visitors to London didn’t slaughter sheep in the street there, and women didn’t go around in pants here without insulting a proportion of the people who saw them. That would be true even if she were a foreigner wearing some $200 Paris equivalent of blue jeans with a couturier’s tag on the fly.

  He needn’t have worried. Elaine wore a high-throated black dress with a long-sleeved cotton jacket over it. Hell, she was smarter than he was and at least as well-traveled. Kelly nodded approvingly and joined her in the hall instead of inviting her into the room.

  “Want to tell me what comes next?” Elaine asked as they strode toward the elevators, “or is the surprise an important part?”

  “Well, you know . . .” Kelly said, poking the call button. Damn! but she seemed tiny when she stood beside him; the full cheeks were so deceptive. . . . “You can get any kind of food in the world in Istanbul—though if you’re big on pork, you’re limited to places like this one.”

  He circled his hand in a gesture that indicated the Sheraton itself and its five-star equivalents on Taksim Square. “But I thought we’d be exotic and eat at a Turkish diner. You can find that too in the tourist hotels, with tables and the waitresses tricked out like they were on loan from the Arabian Nights . . . but I don’t much feel like that.”

  The elevator arrived, empty. “Lead on, faithful guide,” Elaine said as she stepped into the cage. When the door shut she added in a voice barely audible over the whine of the hydraulics, “The dancer is Gisela Romer, a Turkish citizen but part of an expatriate German community that settled here after World War II. There should be an extensive file in Ankara. I’ve put a first priority on it, so something ought to be delivered by courier as soon as it’s printed out here.”

  “Nice work,” said Kelly.

  “I’m glad you’re giving us a chance to help you, Tom,” Elaine said seriously. “That’s all that we’re here for.”

  “I wonder if—” he started to say, timing the words carefully so that the elevator chugged to a stop at the lobby before he could complete the sentence. Elaine’s face blanked, and she said nothing more until they had dropped off their keys and left the hotel.

  Kelly did not see George or any other of her subordinates.

  “I think we’ll walk,” he said, with a wave to the doorman and the leading cab of the rank beneath the hotel’s bright facade. As they walked beyond the band of light, Kelly went on in a low voice, “You know, I wonder if you could find me a pistol if I needed one. I don’t mean I do, I mean if.”

  “I’d have thought you had sources of your own, Tom,” Elaine said. Her smile asked more than the words themselves did.

  “Yeah, needs must,” agreed the veteran with false frustration. “I mean, it wasn’t a turndown. But things’re tight now, real tight, with Ecevit trying to get a grip on things. Somebody could take a real hard fall if, you know, something went wrong and the piece got traced back.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I don’t want anything,” Kelly insisted, “but you know—if I do, something standard, a forty-five auto, a nine millimeter. And it’ll just be a security blanket, if I turn out not to have enough guts to stay on an even keel without something to wrap my hand around.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a problem,” the woman said, nonchalance adding weight to the words. “Doesn’t seem to me either that you need to feel you’re going off the deep end if you choose to carry a personal sidearm under the—present circumstances.”

  They were walking down Independence Boulevard, which was flooded with traffic noise and the sound of music, mostly Turkish, from the ope
n doors of many of the shops. A triple-tier Philips sign over an electronics store threw golden highlights over Elaine’s short hair, Kelly bent closer to her to say, “I used to carry a piece all the time I was in uniform, a snubbie that wasn’t good for a damn thing but to blow my brains out if things got too tough. Just as soon not get into that headset again, you know?”

  Elaine nodded; and Kelly, his task of misinforming his case officer complete, focused on finding a place to eat.

  A few doors down a sidestreet shone the internal lighting of a red and blue Pepsi-Cola sign with, lettered below, the name Doner California. “There we go,” Kelly said, pointing with his offside arm to direct Elaine.

  “Authentic Turkish, right,” the woman said in mock scorn as she obeyed. “Do they have a quartet lip-synching the Beach Boys?”

  “I’ll eat every surfboard on the walls,” Kelly promised as he pushed open the glass-paneled door and handed her within. “Watch the little step.”

  The floor of the diner was of ceramic tiles with a coarse brown glaze. There were half a dozen white-enameled tables, several of them occupied by men or groups of men dressed much as Kelly was. The sides and top of the counter were covered with green tile, similar to that of the floor in everything but color; but there was a decorative band just below the countertop, tiles mixing the brown and green glazes in an eight-pointed rosette against a white background.

  Elaine was the only woman in the restaurant.

  Though the evening was beginning to chill fog from air saturated by the Bosphorus, warmth puffed aggressively from the diner, heated as it was by a vertical gas grill behind the counter. A large piece of meat rotated on a spit before the mesh-fronted grill that glowed orange and blue as it hissed.

  All eyes turned to the newcomers—particularly to Elaine—as they entered. The owner, behind the counter in an apron, made a guess at what variety of Europeans they were, and called, “Wilkommen!”

  “God be with you,” Kelly responded, in Turkish rather than German.

  Elaine slid onto a stool at the counter instead of a hoop-backed chair at one of the empty tables. “If we’re going to do this,” she replied to the veteran’s quizzical glance, “we may as well do it right. And you were right about the surfboards.”

  A ten-year-old boy with the owner’s features and the skull-cap haircut universal among prepubescent Turkish males set out two glasses of water with a big smile.

  “You hungry?” Kelly asked.

  Elaine set her palm across the top of Kelly’s glass and held his eyes. “The water’s almost certainly okay,” she said. “Worst case is you’ll do anything we need you for before you’re disabled by amoebiasis. Your choice.” She slid the glass toward him and removed her hand.

  Kelly hesitated. “Look,” he said, “I’ve drunk—”

  “And if you were in the field,” Elaine interrupted calmly, “you might have to now. Your choice.”

  “Two Pepsis,” Kelly said, smiling back at the boy. “And two dinners with double helpings of doner kebab, please,” he added to the father.

  “Turkish for shish kebab?” Elaine asked as the boy opened small bottles with the familiar logo.

  “Shish kebab is Turkish,” said Kelly, “and you can get it anywhere in the world. Doner’s pretty localized by contrast, so I’m making you a better person by offering you a new experience. Not necessarily better than the familiar, but different.”

  The woman’s body tensed into her “neutral” status while she attempted to follow the ramifications of what Kelly had just said. Her legs crossed instinctively, then uncrossed and anchored themselves firmly to the footrail of the stool when she realized what she was doing.

  Kelly, grinning broadly, turned to watch the owner slice doner while his son readied the plates with cooked carrots, cooked greens, and ladlesful of rice.

  The meat rotating before the gas flame was not the roast or boned leg of mutton it at first appeared. It was in fact a large loaf of ground mutton, recompressed into a slab in the ovine equivalent of hamburger, homogenous and broiling evenly on the vertical spit.

  As the Americans watched, the man behind the counter swung out the spit and the integral driptray onto which juices spluttered with a sound that would have started Kelly’s saliva flowing even if he had not gone most of a day without food. With a knife the length of his forearm, the Turk sliced away a strip of mutton so thin that it was translucent as it fell onto his cooking fork. The man pretended that he was not aware of the foreigners watching him, but his boy chortled with glee at the excellence of the job.

  Rotating the spit with his fork—the motor drive shut off when the spit was removed from the fire—the owner stripped another portion of the loaf’s surface.

  “Aren’t many useful things you can do with a knife sharp enough to shave with,” said Kelly approvingly, “but this is sure one of them.”

  “You don’t believe in sharp knives?” Elaine asked in surprise.

  “I don’t believe in—work knives,” Kelly replied with a grin, “so sharp that the edge turns when you hit, let’s say, a bone.”

  The meal was everything Kelly had hoped, hot and good and profoundly real in an existence that was increasingly removed from what he had known and done in the past. If incongruity were the essence of humor, then what Tom Kelly was doing with and to Pierrard’s little playmates ought to be the laugh of a lifetime.

  He sipped his Pepsi, put on a serious expression, and said, “I can never remember: should I have ordered lemon sodas instead with mutton?”

  Elaine laughed, relaxed again. “We could ask the maitre d’, I suppose,” she said with a nod toward the owner beaming beside his grill.

  “Who would tell us,” Kelly said, slumping a little, “Efes Pilsen—like everybody else.” His eyes swept the tables of other customers, crowded with the fat brown bottles of Pilsner beer. “And he’d be right, it’s great stuff, but I don’t suppose . . .”

  Elaine touched the back of his fingers. “Tom,” she said, “you’ve got more balls than anybody I ever met in my life. And it isn’t because you act like you could tell the world to take a flying leap.”

  “Which it damned well can,” Kelly grumbled. He was pleased nonetheless at the flattery, even though he knew that the woman was a professional and would have said the equivalent no matter what she really thought.

  “I’m so very glad you’re using me the way I’m here to be used,” Elaine continued without taking her hand away from Kelly’s. “We both want the same thing.”

  Except that one of us would really like Tom Kelly to survive the next couple weeks, the veteran thought as he turned over his hand and briefly squeezed her fingers. And the other cares more about what the weather in Washington’ll be like when she gets back. But nobody was holding a gun to his head just now.

  “Let’s go see,” he said, rising with a broad smile for the owner and everyone else in the restaurant, “just how efficient a team we’re all gonna be.”

  Elaine checked the clasp of her little purse as they approached the door of 727. Kelly caught the angry red wink of a light emitting diode and the woman stutter-stepped, not quite a stumble, before halting.

  “Problems?” the veteran said, unaware of the growling catch in his voice as he stepped to the hinge side of the door.

  “No, we were expecting a courier, weren’t we?” Elaine mumbled back, but she tapped on the door panel instead of inserting her key.

  Doug opened the door. The LED warning went off. “I’ve been waiting here with the file,” the blond man said.

  “Very tricky,” said Kelly with an approving nod toward the intrusion indicator.

  “Not in the goddam hallway,” snapped Elaine, using the purse as a pointer to thrust her big subordinate back in the room.

  Kelly closed the door behind them. “The light wouldn’t come on if somebody hadn’t opened the door?” he asked.

  “Amber if the door hadn’t been breached, no light at all if the transmitter had been tampered with,” s
aid Elaine absently. She kicked off her shoes. “Doug, thank you for bringing the file. You can leave us to it now.”

  She looked at Kelly. “Unless you want to be alone with this, Tom?” she asked, gesturing with the red-bordered folder Doug had just handed her from his Halliburton.

  “We’ll take a look together,” the veteran said, seating himself at the desk. He felt momentarily dizzy and, squeezing his temples with both hands, brought the world he saw back into color and focus.

  “Are you all right?” the woman asked. “Doug, wait a minute.”

  “No problem,” said Kelly. “Haven’t slept in, you know, the whole flight. And with food in my belly, the brain isn’t getting all the blood supply it’d like to have. But no sweat, we’ll run through this and get a jump on what we need.”

  “Blow?” Doug offered.

  “You wouldn’t like me on coke,” Kelly said with a grin that widened like that of a wolf launching itself toward prey. “I wouldn’t like me on coke.”

  He opened the folder and let his face smooth. “Quicker we get to work,” he said, speaking into the frozen silence, “the quicker I get to sleep.”

  Elaine gestured Doug through the door, but he was already moving that way of his own accord.

  “Well, what’ve we got here,” Kelly murmured, not a question, as Elaine set a straight-backed chair against the doorknob to jam the panel if anyone tried to power through it from the hallway. She damned well was more paranoid than the agent she was running. . . .

  What they had was a sheaf of gatefold paper, the sheets still articulated, printed on a teletype or something with an equally unattractive typeface. Each page was headed with an alphanumeric folio line, but beneath that the first page was headed: Romer, Gisela Marie Hroswith. Good enough.

  Kelly began to read, tearing each sheet off when he finished with it and laying it facedown on the desk. The woman, sitting on the bed, leaned forward and took the pages as Kelly laid them down. Neither spoke.