Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (45 page)

“We’re
not
here to trick you into an admission,” said the woman in a sharper tone than any she had used earlier this night. “I’ve told you, it doesn’t
matter
.”

“Bullshit,” said the veteran, the word soft and savage. He was as wired as he had been the moment he walked into the room.

They were lying to him the way they had lied so often in the past, and through the flashes and roar of that past in his memory Tom Kelly shouted, “I told ‘em I’d leave ‘em alone if they’d do the same! I wasn’t gonna talk to anybody, I wasn’t gonna claim a fucking pension, and if they thought the answer was a chemical debriefing, then the team they sent to take me better be ready to play for keeps. Are you ready?
Are you ready, sonny?
”

“The material at the head of that tape,” said the other man in confusion and bureaucratic concern, a turnabout so unexpected that it penetrated Kelly’s fury as the woman’s voice could not have done at this moment, “was simply to explain to third parties why we were bringing it to you, Mr. Kelly. If something happened on the way, that is. The real information’s further back on the tape.”

“Jesus,” said Tom Kelly, the rage draining from him like blood from a ruptured spleen and leaving him flaccid. “Jesus.”

“We understand that your fuse is short, Mr. Kelly,” said Elaine. “We have no intention of lighting it, none whatever.” She snapped her purse closed and set it deliberately on a bookshelf before she stepped over to the VCR.

“Nobody cares about the—incident, do they?” said Kelly, slumping back against the door and almost wishing there were a chair in arm’s reach for him to sit on. “Well, that’s a relief.”

He looked around the office, taking stock as the VCR whirred to eject the tape into Elaine’s hand. The only thing that didn’t belong was the attaché case lying on Bianci’s otherwise orderly desk. Dull black and unremarkable at first glance, the case was in fact a Halliburton—forged from T-6061 aluminum like the plating of an armored personnel carrier. The three-rotor combination lock hidden under the carrying handle was not impossible to defeat, and the sides could be opened with a cutting torch or the right saw—but anything of that sort would take time, and you could park a car on the case without even disturbing the watertight seal.

“It’s old news,” Doug was saying. “Do you care that somebody blew away the secretary of defense in Dallas in ‘63? It’s like that.”

“Like I say, glad to hear it,” the veteran said. It wasn’t that he believed Doug in any absolute sense. Public release of the
White Plains
footage had squeezed the US government to take action against the State of Israel in ways that the highest levels had no wish to do once immediate tempers had cooled. A matter that had subsided into legal wrangling and the bland lies of politicians on both sides exploded into popular anger, spearheaded by members of Congress and the Senate to whom the massacre of American servicemen was not to be ignored as a matter of Middle Eastern policy.

There had been an immediate cutoff of aid to Israel—the munitions which fed the war in Lebanon to which US policy had abandoned Israeli troops, and the hard currency which alone kept afloat an economy which could not support its own welfare state, much less a protracted war. The aid had been resumed only after the Israeli minister of defense had resigned and thirty-seven serving members of the armed forces were given prison sentences ranging from two years to life after a public trial humiliating to the State which tried them.

“They buried Danny at Arlington,” said the veteran inconsequently. “Seemed to make his widow happy enough. Me, I always figured that I’d want something besides a stone if it happened to me. . . .”

There were a lot of folks in both governments and, less formally, in Shin Bet—the Israeli department of security—who weren’t in the least pleased with Tom Kelly since copies of the tape showed up in newsrooms across the US and Western Europe. There’d been one in the hands of TASS besides, just in case somebody got the idea of trying a really grandiose coverup. For sure, nothing Doug Blakeley had to say was official policy above a certain level—but the big blond wasn’t a good enough actor to be lying about
his
mission, his and Elaine’s.

The woman took from the Halliburton what looked like a small alien wrench and stuck it into a curved slot on the underside of the tape she had just ejected. The narrow slot didn’t, when Kelly thought about it, look like anything he’d seen on a tape cassette before. Neither did it look particularly remarkable, however, even when Elaine clicked something clearly nonstandard into a detent at the farther end of the arc, then removed the wrench.

“Now it explodes?” the veteran asked, making it a joke instead of a flat question so that the pair of them wouldn’t gain points if they chose to ignore him.

“There’s a magnet inside the cassette,” Elaine said as she reinserted the tape in the VCR. “The tape pauses at the end of the news segment. If anybody tried to play it beyond that point without locking the magnet out of the way, they’d get hash.” She poked Play, picked up the remote control which still lay on the carpet, and stepped back close to Kelly as the tape advanced with a hiss and diagonals of white static across the screen.

“Look, you ought to understand,” said Kelly with his eyes on the television, “the people in Israeli service who—got that tape to the guy who released it. It wasn’t just personal payoffs, and it wasn’t in-house politics alone, either. There were some people who thought shooting allies in lifeboats was a bad idea . . . and thought getting away with it once was an even worse one.”

“That really doesn’t concern us, Mr. Kelly,” Elaine said flatly, and the murmur of empty tape gave way to a segment recorded without an audio track.

“Sonofabitch,” muttered Kelly, for the location was unmistakable to him despite the poor quality of the picture. The segment had been shot with a hand-held minicam, like the footage of the
White Plains
before, but the earlier portion had at least been exposed in the bright sunlight of a Mediterranean afternoon. This scene had been recorded at night in the angle of massive walls illuminated by car headlights, while drizzle flicked the beams and wobbled across the lens itself.

But there was no other stretch of fortification comparable to that on the screen save for the Great Wall of China. Kelly had trained Kurds for two years at Diyarbakir. He could recognize the walls of the great Roman fortress even at a glance.

“Corner by where the Turistik meets Gazi Street,” the veteran said aloud, a guess rather than an identification—the sort of thing he did to keep people off-balance about what he knew or might know; the sort of thing he did when he was nervous and off-balance himself.

The walls of black basalt were gleaming and lightstruck where their wet lower surfaces were illuminated; the twenty feet above the quivering headlights was only a dark mass indistinguishable from the rain-sodden sky as the cameraman walked forward and jiggled the point of view.

Close to the wall was a clump of figures in dark overcoats, who shifted away abruptly, backs turned to the approaching camera.

“Who filmed this?” asked Kelly, looking up at the woman who watched him while her companion seemed mesmerized by the television itself. “And when?”

“It was taken three days ago,” Elaine said, nodding toward the screen to return the subject’s attention to where it belonged. “And officially, everyone at the site is a member of Turkish Military Intelligence.”

There were two bodies on the ground near where the men in overcoats had been standing. The wall sloped upward at a noticeable angle, providing a broad base of support for the eight-foot thick battlements at the top.

“Didn’t think relations between us and MIT had been so close since Ecevit was elected Prime Minister,” the veteran said, pumping them because it had always been his job to gather information.

“Watch the screen, please,” the woman said as Doug snorted and said, “No problem. Third Army Command, old buddy. No problem at all.”

Elaine paused the tape and gave her companion a hard look. Kelly faced the television and grinned, amused at the two others and amused at himself—for gathering data on a situation that didn’t concern him and which he wouldn’t
allow
to concern him, no matter what.

The tape resumed. One of the cars must have been driven forward as the cameraman walked up to the bodies, because his shadow and those of some others who had scurried out of the scene were thrown crazily across the basalt wall. The point of view moved even closer, shifting out of focus, then sharpening again as the cameraman adjusted.

The screen steadied on a head-and-torso view of a man facedown in a puddle with one arm flung forward. He wore a dark blue coat and a leather cap which had skewed when he hit the ground. A gloved hand on an arm in a black trenchcoat reached from out of frame, removing the cap and lifting the dripping, bearded face into full view of the camera.

“Son of a bitch,” Kelly repeated, softly but very distinctly this time. “Mohammed Ayyubi. He was one of my section leaders back, back when I was workin’ there and points south. . . . He was from the district himself.”

“Ayyubi has been living in Istanbul for the past three years,” Elaine said coolly, watching the screen to keep Kelly’s attention on it. “Recently he began to travel extensively in Central Europe.”

The hand holding the Kurd to the camera dropped him, letting his face splash back onto the puddled stone. It didn’t matter to Mohammed, whose eyes would never blink again until somebody thumbed the lids down over the glazed pupils; but Kelly’s own body grew very still for an instant.

“He had a brother in Istanbul,” the veteran said softly. “Think I met him there once. . . .” When the brother came to see Mohammed in a base hospital so expertly staffed that all but one of the Kurd’s fingers had been saved despite the ten days since they were mangled.

“Ahmed, yes,” said the woman as the cameraman walked his point of view over to the other body. The same hand and arm reached into the frame to angle the victim’s face toward the headlights.

Kelly glanced from the arm’s wristwatch, a momentary black smear on the screen before the cuff of the overcoat hid it again, to the Omega which Doug wore. The quality of the data proved nothing but possibility, and the possibilities were endless. . . . don’t know that one,” said Kelly to the television.

“No, you sure don’t,” said Doug, and there was more in his voice than mere agreement.

The cameraman had panned the second body only incidentally in maneuvering for a head shot. The figure appeared to be of average height, perhaps a little shorter if American rather than Anatolian males were the standard of comparison. Its clothing was ordinary, trousers of a shade darker than the coat—both of them brown or taupe—and a cloth cap that lay beside the head. The features were regular and unusual only in having no facial hair. In Turkey, where a moustache was as much a part of a man’s accoutrements as a pack of cigarettes, that was mildly remarkable.

There was a silvery chain and a medallion of some sort high up on the figure’s neck. The hand and overcoat sleeve entered the field of view to touch the bauble.

The camera jumped a moment later, the lens panning a crazy arc of the walls and night sky as the cameraman’s heels slipped on the pavement. Doug’s right hand gripped his left as fiercely as if it belonged to someone else and was holding a weapon. Elaine was taut, watching Kelly until the veteran glanced at her.

Kelly was affected only at a conscious level, touched by wonderment at the emotional reaction of the others to what was, after all, a fraud. TV trickery, makeup, and muddy camerawork to make the gimmickry less instantly patent. But it couldn’t frighten an adult, not somebody like Tom Kelly who knew that the real face of horror was human. . . .

The camera steadied again, though it was six feet farther from the subject than before, and it was some moments before the cameraman thought to adjust his focus. Not makeup at all, thought Kelly, squinting. The “head” above the necklace was smaller than that of any human beyond the age of six, so whoever was responsible had used a dummy. . . . “Roll back and freeze it where he touches the necklace,” Kelly said.

He expected the woman either to make excuses or ignore him. To his surprise, she reached over with the remote-control unit and said, “Go ahead, Mr. Kelly. Freeze any part of the film you choose to.”

The veteran cued the tape back in three jerky stages, angry that he had not been paying enough attention to get to the point he wanted in two tries at worst. Neither Elaine’s stillness nor Doug’s outthrust chin disguised the fact that the pair was nervous; and this time the cause was not the very real one of Tom Kelly’s anger.

The bland, human face, only partly hidden by the gloved hand reaching for the medallion. Then the hand jerked back and, in the instant before the startled cameraman jumped away also, Kelly was able to pause the VCR into as close an equivalent of freeze-frame as a television’s raster scanning could achieve.

Somebody was pretty good. Kelly couldn’t see any sign of the transition, but what filled the screen now was nothing close to human.

Not only was the head the size of a grapefruit, it had no apparent eyes. There was a mouth, though, a blue-lipped circular pit lined with teeth hooked like blackberry thorns. The nose was a gash like that of a man Kelly had met in a village near Erzerum, his limbs and appendages eaten away by the final stages of leprosy. Either water droplets were creating an odd effect, or the surface of the dummy was scaly, and the scales divided at the midline of the face in a row of bony scutes.

Kelly thumbed the Pause button and let the tape roll forward. When the camera achieved focus and steadiness again there was a somewhat clearer view of the alien visage, but nothing beyond what Kelly had already seen. “All right,” he said, “what happens next? The mothership comes down and vaporizes Diyarbakir? You know, I’d miss the place.”

“There’s nothing more on the tape,” Elaine said shortly. The screen dissolved into diagonal static again as if it were ruled by her voice.