Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (55 page)

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 permitted 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.

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
.”