Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (17 page)

He wasn’t sure which was worse—having premonitions or going nuts. Kelly had wondered the same thing toward the end, there, with the girl in Venice whose name was not Janna. He had not reached a solid conclusion that time either.

“No problems with the radio gear at your end, then?” Kelly asked to break his own train of thought.

Posner stubbed his cigarette out into the ashtray and tried to get another one-handed from the pack in his pocket. “No, no, it appears to be quite in order, once we found that fuse this morning,” he said. He looked at the agent more fully. “Once you found the fuse, I should say.”

“Sometimes they’re blown right out of the box,” Kelly agreed mildly. “There’s people pretty much that way too, so I guess we ought to figure it for fuses.” The Attaché was trying to pull a disposable lighter from between the cellophane and the liner of his cigarette pack. The Peugeot did not have a resistance lighter. “Here,” said Kelly, taking the pack. “I’ll do it.”

Commander Posner was not a natural driver; he constantly overcorrected with jerky movements of the wheel, brakes, and gas. Still, he relaxed a trifle with the fresh cigarette between his lips and said, “I’m surprised there’s no scrambler in the system. Of course, it’s possible that no one will be monitoring the frequencies—but quite frankly, I can’t conceive of Washington authorizing you to give operational directives this sensitive in clear.”

“Yeah, there’s people who’d have conniptions if they knew,” agreed the agent with a wry smile. He cranked his window down an inch but found as he expected that it simply drew more smoke past him instead of clearing the air. “Thing is, there’s no way to fit a scrambler/unscrambler to hardware as small as what we’ve got to use in the Aurassi. Our contact’ll almost certainly be sharing the room with a security man. We can’t just stick a PRC-77 in the closet for him to use . . . or phone him.”

“I should have thought that a risk of the sort you intend to . . . put us all through would have had to be cleared at very high level,” Posner said distantly. The car wheels thumped on the right curb and rubbed for several yards. The commander continued on, apparently unaware of the scraping.

Kelly wiped his chin with the back of his hand. His whiskers bit at the skin. “Look,” he said, “we do what we can. Nobody’ll be talking on the system but me and the contact—and we’ll be using Vietnamese. Sure, it can be recorded; but unless we’re completely SOL, it’ll be days before anybody here’ll have time to figure out what the language was, much less translate it. There are risks; but that’s a fact of life.”

The Defense Attaché snorted in what turned out to be an unexpected outburst of humor. He looked at Kelly despite the fact that a boxy, green bus was stopping in their lane. “There
was
a Vietnamese community in Algiers during the last years of the French, you know,” he said. He looked up just in time to jam on the brakes. Algerian passengers, loaded like cattle in a truck, peered down from the back window.

“Yes, secret police—refugees after Dien Bien Phu,” Posner continued. “The French brought them here to deal with the FLN. Torturers, of course. . . . The FLN blew up a barracks full of them, killed over fifty. And after Independence, well—I don’t think we need worry about local Vietnamese speakers, you’re correct.”

The two-stroke Fiat diesel of the bus whined. After a moment, the commander realized that the lane was no longer blocked and drove off himself. “I think it’s— Yes, we turn here.”

They were far to the south of the Casbah, in one of the small connecting streets near the Boulevard Victor Hugo. The buildings lining the street were two-story. They had flat roots with iron railings around the upper-floor balconies. At street level, most of the buildings were shops. Plaster, originally painted white or light gray, flaked in patches from the masonry beneath. Save for the ironwork, the block could have passed for an aging downtown anywhere in the United States.

Posner pulled up behind a panel truck. The shop directly beside them had no sign, but the metalwork displayed on faded velvet in the windows was an adequate description. Kelly got out quickly, scanning the street in both directions as unobtrusively as haste permitted. There was nothing untoward. The parked cars were the usual mixture of small European makes, with light colors predominating. The Defense Attaché was slow locking his door. Kelly waited for him, needs must, but he felt a helpless fury at the delay that kept them in the open. It was like the moment your chopper hovers, just before dropping to insert you in somebody else’s jungle.

Brusquely, concerned only about political and not physical danger, Commander Posner strode past Kelly and into the shop. A string of bells rang. Within, the unassisted light through the display windows was barely adequate. It would have given the advantage—should the need arise—to the teenager seated in the corner to the left of the door. “Ah—good afternoon,” the Attaché said in his stilted French. “My American friend here is looking for brass of exceptional quality.”

Instead of answering, the boy gestured toward the back with his left thumb. His right hand was in his lap, under a copy of
El Moudjahid,
the French-language official newspaper. Not lazy or disinterested, Kelly realized. The kid was so hyper that he was afraid to attempt anything as complex as speaking.

The center of the shop was a large, cloth-covered table which supplemented the broad shelves around all four sides of the room. The wares were a medley of work, ranging from obvious antiques to the glisteningly recent. A copper cous-cous steamer, decorated with curves of hand-applied stippling, lay beneath a 20-inch bayonet. The weapon itself was French, of the narrow-bladed Gras pattern of the 1870s. The scabbard, however, was of brass lacework, almost a filigree—weeks or months of work for some craftsman in a Kabyle village. Elsewhere, the eye met lamps and trays and an incredible variety of bowls; brass and copper predominantly, but with an admixture of silver, gold, and even aluminum. Even at this juncture, their craftsmanship impressed Kelly. If Kabyles could execute Skyripper with the same meticulous ability, things were going to be fine.

The two Americans walked past the guard, feeling his eyes on their backs and hearing the paper in his lap rustle. In the shop’s rear wall were a curtained stairwell and a door. Posner hesitated at the door. Kelly wondered whether or not the Attaché had ever been through it before. With only the brief delay, however, the commander pulled the panel open. The agent followed him in to join the five men and two women already there.

This time the gun—one of them, at least—was quite openly displayed. A Mauser 98 was aimed squarely at the center of Kelly’s breastbone. The agent smiled, wondering what that implied about his status relative to that of Posner. “God be with you,” he said in French as he pushed the door closed.

The waiting group was varied. One man wore a suit as good as any of those Kelly owned, while another was the man the agent remembered as the late-shift guard at the Chancery. He was still in his khakis. Most of the Kabyles, including the women, were smoking. The odor of their tobacco was harsh and thick in the small office. The middle-aged man with the rifle bore a strong facial resemblance to the youth in the shop proper. He sat on the only chair in the room and supported the Mauser along the slanted top of an old writing desk. Even if he were the shop owner, however, his eyes glanced deference to the patriarch wearing a flowing white djellaba.

The old man nodded severely to Kelly. His moustache was huge and as white as his outer garment. Looking at the agent, he spoke briefly in a non-European language. His eyes were fierce.

Kelly glared back. He could make an educated guess as to what the Kabyle demanded. There was nothing to lose by trying—and perhaps a great deal to gain. Standing at a rigid parade rest, the agent retorted in French, “No sir, I cannot speak your own language—nor can I speak the Arabic of those who would demean you. I come to you as a man needing help—but as a strong man ready as well to help you and help your nation. If we can speak together as men in a tongue foreign to all of us”—he nodded around the circle—“so be it. If not, we each will fight our enemies alone.”

“I am Ali ben Boulaid,” said the old man in French. His face broke into an enveloping smile. The Mauser clicked on the desk as the hand of the man holding it relaxed minusculy. “Ramdan, coffee for your guests!”

The shop owner stuck his head back into the shop and shouted instructions. His Mauser disappeared behind a section of wall paneling and he brought out a rug for the office floor. There was no room for more chairs, even if they might have been available. Kelly joined the Kabyles, sitting with crossed ankles and no particular discomfort. Posner attempted to squat with his back against the shop door. He had to move when a woman bustled in with a beaten silver coffee set carried from the living quarters above the shop. The Attaché slid his balancing act into the corner by the desk. The unfamiliar posture cut off his circulation. At intervals during the discussion he had to hop up embarrassingly and massage his calves. A few years before, the Kabyle movement had been little more than demonstrations—often spontaneous—against the tendencies of the government. Every such attempt at public protest had been put down with riot sticks backed with machine guns. Arrests were ineffective against a movement without leaders. Mass beatings by the police were seen as more likely to get results.

The results they got were the creation of Kabyle leaders all over the country.

The old networks still existed among the survivors of the War of Independence. After the victory, leadership of the Front of National Liberation and of the new state had been taken by those who had spent the war in French prisons, planning their memoirs. Those who had done the fighting, though, were still in the rural areas and the Casbah. If a new need to fight arose, well . . . it mattered little, after all, if the enemies of freedom spoke French or Arabic.

As generally happens, the government itself had been the dissidents’—now rebels’—strongest recruiting agent. Now there were nodes around which could coalesce those dissatisfied with any aspect of autocracy, any aspect of rule: tribal chauvinists, goat-herds disgruntled by reforestation projects intended to block the advance of the Sahara; squatters evicted from public housing so that the proper applicants could move in. . . . The sufficiency of the reasons for which people will fight is determined by the individual fighters alone.

The coffee was thick and sweet, cloying on Kelly’s empty stomach. He continued to drink it anyway as he argued quietly and listened to the others wrangling among themselves. The agent had expected to meet a single leader. What he got instead was democracy with a vengeance. It was possible that Ali ben Boulaid could have made and enforced the decision himself, but the old man showed no sign of wishing to do so. There had been no decision on whether the group—they did not use any formal name in Kelly’s hearing—would go through with the operation.

Finally the agent opened his attaché case of 8x10 glossies of the Casbah. That killed theoretical discussions about whether an office in Rabat outweighed the risks of a gunfight in the center of Algiers. The arguments slid at once into the practical questions of who and where, how many and by which route. Kelly sipped his coffee. He made small comments when he had something useful to add . . . and he kept his smile inside, knowing that he had just begged a question that was likely to get a number of people killed.

After the initial discussion had burned out, Kelly took charge. He used both the map and the corresponding photographs. “Here,” he said, pointing with a blunt forefinger, then stirring the glossies to find the same location, “a truck blocks the complex of streets from the south by sliding across the intersections just west of the Institute. On the other end, the motorcade will be coming and we won’t be able to insert a blocking vehicle into it. We need to cut the intersection of the Boulevard de la Victoire and the, whatever, Boulevard Abderrazak. Can you handle that?” He looked challengingly around the circle of Kabyles.

A young man with sideburns and a black turtleneck sweater glanced at his companions. When no one else spoke, he shrugged and said, “There must be a drain there from the Institute . . . the main sewer’s on the east side of the boulevard. Twenty pounds of
plastique
in that and—” he gestured with his hands and lips. “Sure, we can cut the street.”

Kelly felt Posner beside him shiver. “Right,” the agent said, “and that’ll make the perfect signal for our boy to run. He’ll have plenty of company when pieces of the pavement start raining down—it won’t get him shot by his own people.” Kelly cleared his throat, hoarse and dizzy from the layering smoke. “Next,” he said, “we need to cut off visibility on the ground. We can fill the truck with oily rags and set them afire, that may help, but the wind’s going to be straight uphill from the sea unless we’re lucky. I’ve got a case of smoke grenades. If you’ve got a few people to volley them from upper floors at that end of the street, they’ll do the job for as long as we need it done.”

“The roof will be best,” said the man in the three-piece. He had a nervous trick of inserting a finger under his collar-facing, but to Kelly’s surprise he had been one of the hawks of the earlier discussion.

Now the agent shook his head in violent disagreement. “There’ll be troops on the wall and towers of the Institute,” he said. “Will be or should be. And look, this is dangerous, maybe the most dangerous part of the whole deal. Those smoke grenades’ll leave a track back to where they come from as broad as a highway. The guards across the street won’t shoot down maybe because they won’t know what’s going on down there with so many of their own people. But they’ll damn well open up on the windows things’re being thrown from. We’ll tie the grenades in bundles of six. There’ll be plenty of range from a third floor window.”

“They won’t shoot if we’ve shot them first,” said the younger of the two women. “They made their choice when they put on the uniforms of the oppressors.” She mimed a throat-cutting with her index finger.