Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (18 page)

“Look,” said Kelly, “the less shooting, the better off we all are. Bullets’ll ricochet like a bitch between those walls and the pavement. Even if you know what you’re doing with a gun you don’t have any notion where the slug’s going to wind up. I’ve got some gas grenades which we can use as soon as the, ah, the target’s clear—”

“Tear gas?” interrupted the older woman. Her hair was black save for a thin white zig-zag that marked old scarring as surely as an X-ray could have.

Kelly met her fierce eyes. “CS,” he said with a nod of agreement. “The kind of ‘tear gas’ that makes people puke their guts up if they get a good whiff of it. Toss that into the smoke and you don’t have to worry about anybody on the ground chasing you.”

“Toss satchel charges into the cars,” said the woman, “and nobody chases you either.”

Posner was swearing or praying under his breath. Kelly shrugged and turned his palms up. “Look, what you do
after
my man clears the area is your business. But you might keep in mind that it’s not just troops and cops and security people going to be down there. There’ll be scientists from maybe fifty countries. I don’t know and you won’t know just who it is in the line of fire. Start throwing bombs and you’ll be able to read the body count in just about every paper in the world, right on the front pages. That won’t bother me a bit . . . but I’m not about to start a government in exile.”

“We will consider that among ourselves,” said ben Boulaid, his cracked voice sweeping through the others’ miscellaneous chatter like a horseman through wheat. “There is still the matter of price. Qadafi paid
ten
million dollars to have the Jewish athletes killed in Munich.”

“Did Qadafi stand with his gunmen or did he send them off alone to die?” the American agent snapped back. “
I
offer a million dollars and recognition that you would not be able to buy at any price, not even from the enemies of the government you oppose.
And
I stand with you, a warrior among warriors.”

“Good God, man!” blurted Commander Posner in English. “You
know
that’s against your orders. It
must
be!”

“If I must stand alone,” Kelly continued, ignoring the Attaché, “so be it. I do not need the help of those who can be bought for cash alone.” He was light-headed, had been for what seemed like hours. He almost burst out laughing at the image of himself charging the motorcade alone, hurling CS grenades with both hands. Might be better than going home and trying to explain to folks how he’d blown the deal before it even got off the ground, though. . . .

“I did not say that
we
were merely terrorists seeking dollars,” the old man said stiffly. “We will consider the offer among ourselves.”

“How are we to know the person you want?” asked the man who knew about the street drains. “You say ‘when he’s clear’—but who?”

Kelly took a thick 9x12 envelope from the lid of his case. Commander Posner was already saying, “Obviously, that has to wait until you have decided if you are going to—”

The agent opened the envelope and began handing fuzzy enlargements around the circle of Kabyles. “We are warriors,” he repeated. “Will we betray each other, even if we cannot agree? This one is Vlasov, a professor, a scientist. He wishes to escape to freedom. We wish to help him because that is our way.”

Ben Boulaid stared at the photograph and nodded solemnly. “We will reach you soon—through bou Djema, as usual.” The Chancery guard bobbed his head enthusiastically. The old man rose, his compatriots to either side braced to help him. They were unneeded.

Kelly quickly swept the photographs of the Casbah back into his case. The locals could study the site on their own, he could not. “Peace be on you,” he said, bowing first to Ben Boulaid and then to each of the other Kabyles in turn.

“The peace of God be on you,” replied the patriarch, bowing back to Kelly. “If it pleases God, we will speak again soon.” The agent tugged the weak-kneed Attaché erect and opened the door. The still, cool air of the shop washed his face like a shower.

The Americans had barely closed the door when they heard the voices behind them resume. The words were indistinguishable, but the tones were not those of peace and moderation. “Hooked them,” whispered Kelly in English as they passed the guard again. “Hooked them, by God, as sure as I got hooked myself!”

Posner turned the car in the street, heading back toward the embassy complex. As they cornered onto the Boulevard Victor Hugo again, Kelly caught a glimpse of something in the rearview mirror. He spun to look over the back of his seat, but the Attaché had already pulled through the intersection. If there had been a black sedan turning toward the shop from the direction of the Rue Boukhalfa, it did not follow them to the embassy. Kelly was quite certain of that, because he kept looking back the whole way.

XIX

Commander Posner had not spoken on the trip back, even to ask what his passenger expected to see out the window. Any hopes the Defense Attaché may have had that the operation would be bloodless—or better, would not even be attempted—had evaporated during the meeting with the Kabyles. There would be blood in the streets, and the leader on the ground would be an American working for the DIA, just as Posner himself did. . . .

The car stopped in the lane between the Chancery and the Villa Inshallah, the building in which Admiral Darlan had been assassinated in 1942. Posner set the emergency brake. He looked at Kelly and said with a deliberate absence of inflection, “I—am told that his Excellency received a cable regarding you this morning.”

The agent regarded the naval officer levelly. “I presume,” he said, “I would have been notified if I’d been booted out. So I presume further it wasn’t that. Shall we play ‘Twenty Questions,’ or are you going to tell me what it really was?”

Posner scowled. “I could only speculate about the contents, and I have no doubt that you can do that with at least equivalent accuracy yourself, Mr. Kelly, The—the DCM is a friend of mine. He was, I think, warning me. . . . Ambassador Gordon is very angry about what he sees as the situation. And while you will no doubt be going home, the rest of us may have an unpleasant aftermath to deal with.”

The commander paused. Kelly put his hand on the Peugeot’s door handle, but before he opened it the Attaché went on, “Mr. Kelly, I have no reason to doubt your abilities, since obviously they are held in high regard by my superiors . . . and of course, what you said earlier about a soldier following orders is quite correct. But I think there may come a time soon when I will take the second option you suggested and resign my commission. I only hope that if I do make that choice, I will make it soon enough.”

Posner got out and began walking rather quickly toward the Chancery. Quickly enough that the agent would have had to run to keep up with him. Kelly did not do that. The sea was already dark with the shadow of the mountains. After waiting long enough to permit the commander to get inside, Kelly strolled toward the Chancery himself. He needed to run a cable out to Paris. It was better to hold one of the Communicators over than to call one back as the Ambassador had done the night before.

Kelly still needed to clear out of the Aurassi and pick up his VW from the hotel lot. The place would be tight as a tick from midnight on; and Kelly had seen and heard enough about Algerian thoroughness to know that they would damn well clear things out themselves if he did not do it in time. When the Pan-African Games had been held in Algiers, the government had decided as an aesthetic measure to clear the balconies of the high-rise apartments fronting the parade route. Clearance had been effected by squads of troops who marched from room to room. Everything found on a balcony was pitched over the rail. Not infrequently that meant the sheep which recently-rural families stabled on the balconies in anticipation of the Feast of Muharram. The pictures of sheep flung twelve stories onto concrete looked like nothing Kelly had seen since the days VC prisoners were transported by helicopter.

The Algerian employee at the reception desk admitted the agent before he had time to ask through the speaker. Kelly gave the local a V-sign and trotted up the stairs to Rowe’s windowless office next to the Attaché’s. There was no light on in the latter—Posner must have been with one of his friends elsewhere in the building. Sergeant Rowe was just setting down the intercom, however. His door was open and he gestured to Kelly happily when he saw him. “Say, that was for you,” he said. “Anna. Do you want me to buzz her back?”

“Business first,” the agent said, trying to manage a smile. He had not thought about drinking since he got up and started to install the communications rig in his room. Mention of Anna reminded him that he had meant to pick up a bottle in the Aurassi that morning. “I need a desk to draft a cable on,” he said. “Then you or I are going to have to encrypt it on the computer.” He smiled ruefully. “And we’re going to have to hold somebody to shoot it off, it won’t wait till morning. See if you can get DeVoe’ve got some other stuff to talk to him about. . . . Oh—and I want to sweeten the pot a little on that one, too. How do I get a bottle of booze around here?”

“Well, from the top,” Rowe said, smiling back, “you can have my desk while I go see that the computer’ll be free.” He frowned. “You know, the Code Room’s down in the basement with a lead lining on all sides and cushioned floors. There’s no way anybody could eavesdrop while they’re encrypting. The computer, that’s in one corner of a hallway with movable partitions around it—that was the only place there was room. It’s not exactly the most secure spot in the mission, you know.”

Kelly waved a hand. “Sure, the Company boys may record the click of the keys and fire them off to Langley—or Meade, for all I know—and they can read them out in clear. But by the time they get that back”—his grin was a wolf’s grin—“I’ll be long gone and they’ll have a better notion of what we were up to than the cable could give them anyway. That’s the name of the game on this one, you see—the main enemy’s the guy in the next office.”

The sergeant shrugged. “Ours not to reason why,” he said. He picked up the intercom and punched 121 on its pad. “Say, Pete,” he said after a moment, “we’ve got a TDY officer”—he winked at Kelly —“here who needs a bottle of. . . .” He paused.

“Johnny Walker Red, I guess,” the agent supplied. “Say—there wouldn’t be some Jack Daniels around, would there?”

“Walker Red and Jack Daniels,” Rowe relayed. “Yeah, the Black, I suppose.” Kelly nodded vigorously. “And 750s—” Another nod. “Sure, Pete, I’ll be over in a minute or two—I know
you
want to close up and get home. . . . Yeah, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger.”

The sergeant hung up. “I’m going to get over to the Annex and pick that up right now,” he said. “The GSO’s a friend of mine, but you don’t stay friends if you keep people around this place after hours.” He smiled broadly. “Meaning nothing personal, you know. . . . Oh—I’ll get Charlie on the way. Better see him than ringing down to the Code Room, I suppose.”

Kelly sat at the sergeant’s vacated desk and began composing, using a single sheet of typing paper and a soft pencil. He had deliberately left the office door open, so that he could hear any movement in the corridor. The footsteps a moment later were not precisely surreptitious, but neither did they call unnecessary attention to themselves.

Kelly folded the draft with three quick motions and thrust it in the breast pocket of his coat. Then he stepped to the door. Harry Warner, the CIA Chief, was coming down the hall very slowly. The agent grinned at him. “Good evening,” he said.

Warner nodded abruptly. “Wanted to see Bill,” he said.

Kelly stepped sideways and rapped on the door of the Attaché’s dark office. “Sorry,” he said to Warner. “I’ll tell him you’re looking if he comes by.”

“Funny as hell, isn’t it?” the Station Chief snapped. He turned on his heel, repeating, “Just funny as hell!”

“Want to buy a copy machine?” Kelly called to the man’s back.

He had scarcely begun writing again when another set of heels began slapping down the hall—wooden-soled sandals and a long leggy stride. Kelly sighed and refolded the draft. Perhaps he should have done the work at his hotel, where the door locked and CW traffic on the Kenwood would blur even the sound of knocking. But that would also mean driving back to the Chancery with the draft cable in his pocket. Most security precautions were silly on a realistic level, but carrying that cable in clear would have been a violation of common sense as well as tradecraft.

“Anna,” the agent said as he stepped to the door. “Look, I’m sorry but I’m busy like you wouldn’t believe right now. If you really need something, I’ll give you a ring when I’m clear—whenever that is.”

Annamaria smiled. She was back to Western Informal, blue slacks and a red and blue pull-over which read “Sun Walley”—local manufacture, obviously. “You still have to move and pick up your car, don’t you?” she asked.

That was no secret, but it made Kelly uneasy all the same—for reasons that had nothing to do with business. “Yeah,” he said nodding, “that’s part of it. Look, Mrs. Gord—”

“Doug and I can take care of that, then—I caught him as he was going past the snack bar,” the woman said. “You don’t have to do that in person, and the car will take two to get it anyway. Give me the keys and we’ll leave you to your work.”

Kelly brought out the Passat’s keys. He was unable to argue with the logic and unwilling to argue with the rest. As he held out the chain, however, he hesitated and instinctively closed his fingers back over the keys again. “Oh, look, Anna,” he said, his eyes frowning at the chain and his mind somewhere else. “Have Doug give my car a quick once-over before he drives it back, will you? I mean, just so there’s no extra wires from the distributor, that sort of thing. I’m getting screwier as I get older, that’s all. But”—he raised his eyes—“carry him over in your car, OK? And he drives back in mine.”

The woman’s fingers touched Kelly’s as she took the keys. “We’ll see you soon,” she said, “so work hard.”

The basic preparations for the extraction had been made before Kelly left France. The MARS boat had preceded him by diplomatic pouch in the same shipment that brought the base unit transmitter and receiver to be used for Skyripper. The timing had to be adjusted to circumstances as Kelly found them on the ground, however; and the method put enough other people at risk that the agent had directed that it not be executed until he had given a specific go-ahead himself.