Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (22 page)

The modern city of Tipasa stretched somewhat farther south than had the ancient one, but its total occupied area appeared to be much smaller. Much of the area enclosed by the fallen walls was now meadow. Sergeant Rowe drove carefully back to the highway from the parking area east of the city.

They were paralleling the foundations of the Roman wall. Kelly noticed that the grassy slope was littered with hollowed stone blocks. Each was more than five feet long and a foot in width and height. A few of the blocks still had their stone lids in place. “What the hell are they?” the agent asked. “They look like coffins.”

“Right, sarcophagi,” the sergeant agreed as he turned onto the highway. “Nothing fancy, just the local stone squared and hollowed. Once in a while you’ll find a Chi-Rho cut on one end, but usually not even that. And they weren’t buried, just placed on the hillside outside the walls.”

Kelly licked his lips. He did not reply. It would have made no difference to his plans if he
had
known the extraction point would be in the center of an arc of ancient graves.

It did not make him like the situation any better, however.

Just inside the ancient walls, the marked highway branched left and away from the bay. Rowe continued straight, toward the row of buildings that looked like a business district. The hundred yards of ground between the street and the sea was broken and overgrown. “Shall I drive all the way to the harbor?” the sergeant asked. “Or
do you want me to park on the street for now? It’s not far to walk.”

“No point in calling attention to ourselves,” Kelly decided. “Let’s walk.”

Two blocks away, near the entrance to the excavated portion of ancient Tipasa, was a group of boys. One of them broke away and began running toward the two men. Rowe locked up the car and the men walked seaward. The breeze was mild.

There was no chop to speak of here to mark the brilliant, ultramarine water. Nonetheless, frequent tongues of foam reminded Kelly that there were rocks near enough to surface to gnaw the bottom out of his boat. He leaned forward. “Christ,” he said. There was a beach of sorts after all. It was narrow and of pebbles rather than sand, but it would do . . . except that it was a good ten feet below the sharp lip of the corniche.

The boy came running up to the Americans. “Watch your car,” he panted in English. American cars were identifiable and virtually unique to the national community here, it seemed.

“No,” said the sergeant harshly.

“A dinar,” said Kelly. He flipped the aluminum coin high in the air, then repocketed it with a smile.

“
Two
dinars,” said the boy in pleased surprise.

Kelly pointed to the car. “Watch it well,” he said. After only a moment’s hesitation, the boy began to saunter back to the Volare.

Looking out over the crystalline sea, the agent said, “First, we can’t afford even the
tiny
chance that he’d let the air out of our tires. Second, it gets him away from us quicker than trying to ignore him. And third”—he looked at Rowe and grinned—“I sort of like kids. But don’t let word of that get out or I’ll lose my all-star bastard rating.”

Rowe cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “well. Where we want to go is back to the east. We’ll drive it when we put the boat in the water, but for now. . . .”

The ground just beyond the corniche was driveable, though it was not in any sense a proper road. Absinthe bushes—wormwood—must have been planted ornamentally at some time, perhaps millennia in the past. The bushes grew profusely, their white-dusted leaves shading the rust-red native stone. Ahead, foam and rocks shared a deep cavity which the sea washed but did not hold. Closer yet, there was a trench cut in the—

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Kelly said. “It’s a staircase cut down to the beach!”

“As requested,” the sergeant agreed. “One beach, with access. And as open as all this is”—he waved his arm in a southerly arc, taking in the blocks of stone and scrub to the nearest buildings—“nobody can see you launch the boat. The cliff hides you to anyone on the road until you’re out beyond the breakwater. Okay?”

Kelly clapped the younger man on the shoulder. “You’re the best damn travel agent
I’ve
ever met,” he said. “You know, I was worried that the local support I’d get would . . . leave a lot to be desired. But I was wrong, at least about you. . . . I’ll tell the world!”

The sergeant blushed and looked away. “Well,” he said, “glad it’s okay. We’d better take a quick look at the safe house now and stash the gear. Hope it does as well as the sea did for you.”

Their car was visible around the edge of the nearest building. It would have been half a block shorter to cut straight to the vehicle, but the waste area was a tangle of uncertain footing. They retraced their steps along the sea front instead.

Kelly noticed a simple shaft monument. He had ignored it before when his mind was on other things. “Just a second,” he said. There was a small bronze plaque set in the concrete face of the shaft. Translating its French inscription aloud for the sergeantbenefit, the agent read, “‘Sacred to the memory of six sailors, their names and nationalities unknown, who washed ashore here on March 6, 1942. Rest in peace.’”

There was a small cross incised beneath the inscription. Someone had made repeated efforts to gouge away the relic of Christianity. The message had been scarred as well.

They walked on. “Interesting,” Kelly said in a neutral voice. “There’s a political statement made with a chisel. Made by somebody who was probably illiterate, at least in French; but he knew that defacing crosses was a patriotic thing to do. . . . It doesn’t give me a lot of hope for world peace and understanding.”

After a moment he added, “A guy in Paris convinced me I wasn’t going to be doing the same goddam thing myself. He’d better have been right.”

The house Commander Posner had managed to rent on short notice was several blocks south of the harbor, near the present edge of town. It had a courtyard wall and a wooden gate which Kelly unlocked to pass the station wagon.

The building was not prepossessing. The plaster had cracked from much of the facade and lay scattered in the courtyard. Patches of discoloration beneath the windows, and the areas of bare concrete elsewhere, combined to give the house the look of something in wartime camouflage. It would serve though.

“The phone’s connected and the electricity,” Rowe said as the two men wrestled the boat out of the back of the wagon. “Other than that, it’s pretty much what you see. Concrete and dirt.” He kicked at the baked ground. It was as bare and as refractory as the walls of the building.

Kelly shrugged. “That’s fine,” he said, staggering a little with the weight of the collapsed MARS boat. “Just so long as we can stash the boat and radio here, and we can lay up until dark tomorrow ourselves.” He laughed. “I have simple tastes,” he added. “I want to get this whole thing over so bad I can simply taste it.”

The men grunted simultaneously as they set the package down in the hall. “We should have brought the other five men this damned thing’s built to hold,” Kelly grumbled. “Though I swear, it’ll look small enough tomorrow when I get to take it out to sea. Well, one more load.”

“Ah,” the sergeant said. “We thought—my wife and me, Tom. Maybe you’d like to have dinner tonight with us?”

The agent stopped in the doorway. “Doug, that’s—well, I really appreciate it. I—I’ve got something else that I”—and his tongue stumbled, but he got the next word out anyway—“need to do tonight. But I really appreciate it.”

“Well, let’s shift the other stuff,” Rowe said. He smiled cheerfully. “And good luck tonight.”

XXIV

The upper lot by the DCM’s house was already crowded when Kelly arrived. Mercedes predominated, but there were a fair number of top-quality Citröens and Renaults as well as more exotic makes. At least one of the Citröens bore cream-colored Presidency license plates with a damned low prefix: either the Minister of Foreign Affairs himself or someone high-ranking from his shop. The agent smiled and shook his head as he eased past. His VW was going to feel lonely.

Loneliness was the wrong subject for a joke, even to himself . . . especially to himself. Kelly’s stomach knotted around the liquor he had drunk in his hotel room to nerve him for the evening. Scowling, the agent pulled into a space between the GSO Annex and the line of brown-painted Conexes. The building was a metal temporary, and the Conexes were shed-sized shipping containers that doubled here—as in Nam—as lockable storage for the General Services Officer. In sum, the scene was as romantic and Eastern as downtown Milwaukee.

Kelly got out of his car, locked it, and checked his pockets. The invitation was in the breast pocket; and the grenade fuse made an unsightly bulge on the right side. Kelly removed the fuse to check it. He had put thirty wraps of plastic electrician’s tape around the charge tube and the arming spoon. Henri, the Chancery receptionist, had found him the tape without asking questions. Doug could have gotten it, but Kelly did not want to involve the sergeant.

Working by the light outside the GSO building, the stocky American pulled the cotter pin that locked the spoon in place. The tape wrappings still kept the spoon from flying up to hit the striker and ignite the fuse. The plastic tape was amply strong to hold for the foreseeable future.

With the doctored fuse concealed in his hand, the agent began to stroll up the long drive toward the gate to the Annex grounds. Under his breath he was mouthing a phrase from the folk song “Sam Hall”:

“. . . you’re a bunch a’ bastards all,

Goddamn your eyes.”

There were cars parked solidly for a block either way from the Residence on both sides of the street. Most of the vehicles had green Diplomatic plates. Those which did not were of a luxury which conferred equal immunity. Pairs of Civil Police stood at the limits of sight in either direction, directing traffic with yellow light-wands on the ends of flashlights. Another pair of blue-suited patrolmen lounged against the wall outside the open Residence gate. They were laughing and talking to one another unconcernedly, but their pistols were real and they each carried a walkie-talkie—unusual for the regular police. It was not a gate that anyone smart would try to crash.

The Fiat was right where Kelly had spotted it when he drove in, fifty yards from the DCM’s entrance and on the same side of the street. A little farther than the Zulus normally had to park from their lady friend’s front door, but not much. Kelly had not expected the car to be there, not tonight, maybe never again . . . but he had been prepared just in case. The agent’s lips were dry, his right palm sweating on the fuse assembly. He sauntered toward the car, his mind tumbling over the last stanza of the song though his mouth was too stiff to pass even the shadow of the words:

“Now up the rope I go, now up I go. . . .”

Kelly’s suit was of a wool-silk blend, well-cut as befitted a man who sold big-ticket items to conservative businessmen. It was also charcoal gray. Even if any of the policemen had made the effort, they would have seen only one more shadow gliding between the parked cars and the courtyard walls. The Fiat’s gas cap was not of the locking type, though Kelly would scarcely have been delayed if it had been. He twisted it open, using only the tips of his left fingers on the knurled rim. He dropped in the taped fuse, then replaced the cap when the splash assured him that the fuse had slid into the tank proper. He gave an extra twist after the gas cap had seated, smearing his prints illegibly instead of wiping the metal with a rag. Whistling under his breath, Kelly walked back to the Annex gate before stepping into the street and the view of the policemen at the entrance. The blue-suited men straightened slightly as they saw Kelly approach through a gap in the traffic. Cars were being fed in alternate directions by the police with wands. There was not room for them to pass both ways at once with the parking as it was. The agent tipped his invitation toward the men in a mock salute, smiling. They smiled back and relaxed again, young men in long, boring duty. They were not westernized enough to appreciate the jazz from beyond the wall as music, and they were not affected enough to succumb to its snob appeal.

At the Residence entrance proper, a tuxedoed servant checked Kelly’s invitation with no more than the usual care. He gestured ceremoniously within, saying, “Refreshments are being served to the right, by the pool, sir.”

The Residence grounds were lighted by yellow paper lanterns spiked to the lawn on iron bases. Couples and small groups—mostly men—strolled on the grass among the cedars, in separate, low-voiced conversations. A sidewalk curved to the entrance and across the front of the house. At the right end of the rambling building was a blaze of electric light. The guest house was lighted also. Kelly noted with amusement that there was no reggae tonight from behind the closed, curtained windows. He walked along the sidewalk without haste, his eyes open for anyone he knew—and for anything he needed to learn.

The social area proper was a flood-lit patio to the right rear of the building. It was a full story lower than the front entrance. The swimming pool was near the courtyard wall, a lighted jewel dazzlingly brighter than the moonlit Mediterranean visible over the wall coping. A temporary stage had been constructed against one wing of the Residence, but it held only instruments and a pair of large speakers at the moment. Either Kelly had arrived between sets, or the entertainment was over for the evening.

Commander Posner was resplendent in dress whites for the occasion, talking with animation to the Station Chief near a tiled wall fountain. Kelly started toward them, hesitated, and walked to the bar instead. Three tuxedoed Algerians were decanting wine, mineral water, and a variety of fruit juices. There was no hard liquor in evidence, perhaps in deference to the fact that more than half the guests were locals. Kelly snagged one of the glasses of red wine and sipped. After a quick glance around, he slugged down the rest of the glass. Reaching around a portly, bearded man in a fez, the agent traded his empty glass for a full one. Annamaria had been right: the local vintages did have a bite.