Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (4 page)

The lieutenant did not respond. The pink enamel of his Military Intelligence lapel insignia clashed with the green uniform. The insignia was a dagger, covered by a rose to “symbolize the
sub rosa
mission of the organization.” Christ, if brains were dynamite, there still wouldn’t be any need to tiptoe in the Military Heraldry Office.

Or in any MI unit Tom Kelly had ever been around. “Do you know what you were seeing in the airport?” he said aloud, leaning his back against the door to be able to watch Morley’s expression. “The KGB types and all?”

“What?”
the lieutenant said, sitting up abruptly enough to skew his saucer hat on the car’s headliner.

Kelly rocked also as the sedan shifted to the right, around a wheezing stake-bed truck. For as long as it took to pass the truck, they were in a slot between a pair of buses who were moving as fast as traffic on the A6 permitted. Kelly could see no higher than the bumper of the second bus when he glanced into the rear-view mirror. “Right, KGB,” he continued. “Four of them, big fellows guarding those other”—the car snapped left again, barely clearing the truck’s radiator, but without danger since they were accelerating away—“Russians.”

“Phillips, my God!” Morley said to the driver. Then he swallowed angrily and took off his hat. “I didn’t . . .” he said to the civilian. “That is—I saw them, but I didn’t know that’s who they were. Good God, do you mean those hunched up little men were prisoners? What
was
that?”

Kelly smiled, leaning a trifle away from the door. The sedan was riding hard, transmitting the road shocks through the frame unpleasantly. “Oh, no,” he said, “they were all free citizens of Mother Russia. Thing is, they were the embassy’s code and communications staff, the folks who’ve been handling and encrypting all the message traffic for the past couple years.”

The sedan braked heavily in the congestion of the approaching Boulevard Peripherique. Kelly braced his foot on the firewall and laid his left hand on the top of his radio to anchor it. “They come in the same way, under escort from the moment they leave the plane to the time the embassy gate shuts behind them. They spend the next two years in the embassy compound, working shift and shift—and generally stay in the same building that whole time besides. And when their tour’s up, they’re guarded back to the door of the plane. What they see of Paris is right out there—” he waved at the building fronts of the Citie Internationale they were passing. The sedan was accelerating at its sluggish best.

“You don’t have to kill us, you know, Phillips,” the lieutenant protested.

“No sir,” agreed the driver. He crossed the Boulevard Brune on what the cross traffic thought was a green light for them. Brakes and horns protested.

Morley swallowed again but did not comment. The green shade of the Pare de Monsouris swept past the windows at speed. “You know,” the lieutenant said at last, “that’s really what sets the Free World off from the Reds. It’s not economics, the way they like to pretend; it’s the way each side treats human beings. What you’ve just described is quite simply inhuman.”

Kelly shrugged. “Well, you do what you’ve got to do,” he said. “They don’t have many code clerks defect, for damn sure.” He paused. The tires were drumming heavily over the pavement of the Boulevard Raspail. “Besides,” he continued, “I saw a lot of Cambodia about the same way. Something short of a leisurely tour, you might say. And Laos, for that matter.”

“You were in Laos?” Morley asked. He was keeping his eyes fixed on the civilian, apparently so that he would not have to be visually aware of what the sedan was doing.

“Off and on,” Kelly agreed. “Hunting elephants, of all things.”

“Oh,”
the lieutenant said. “Oh.” He laughed awkwardly. “You see, I thought you meant while you were, ah, in service.”

The civilian smiled back. “Right the first time,” he said. “We were machine-gunning them from slicks—ah, from UH1 helicopters—”

“I know what a slick is,” Morley objected stiffly.

“Good, good—shooting them from slicks at night, using starlight scopes. Somebody’d decided that the dinks were using the elephants to pack supplies down the Ho Chi Minh trail. We were supposed to be destroying hostile transport by blasting Dumbos.”

The lieutenant’s lips worked. “That’s—that’s. . . . I mean, elephants are an endangered species, and to just massacre them from the air. . . .”

“Don’t expect
me
to argue with you,” Kelly said with another shrug. “But we were getting some secondary explosions when we hit the beggars, too. So I suppose the folks in Washington were right, at least on the Intelligence side.”

As they swung from the Quai Anatole France onto the approaches of the Pont de la Concorde, the sedan took the line in front of a Mercedes. Metal rang as the cars stopped. Traffic began to move again, and Phillips eased the sedan along with it. A plump man in a three-piece suit rolled down the passenger window of the Mercedes and began shouting curses in French. Kelly rolled down his own window and leaned out. He did not speak. The Mercedes window closed again. Its liveried chauffeur braked to permit a Fiat to slip between the two bigger cars.

Morley scowled into his clenched hands, but he said nothing aloud.

Kelly, on the outside of the sedan as it rounded the Place de la Concorde, could see only the base of the obelisk in the center. Perversely, he watched that nonetheless, rather than the Neoclassical magnificence of Louix XV’s own time for which the obelisk was to be only the neutral hub. 220 tons of polished and incised granite, 75 feet high even without its 18th Century base, the obelisk was Kelly’s own answer to Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” Indeed, look on that work and despair. Like its slightly smaller sister—Cleopatra’s Needle—and the both of them well over a millennium old before Cleopatra was conceived—it had remained effectively unchanged as empire followed empire, as monarchs and nations fought and built and died. The stone remained, though no one knew the name of the men who had fashioned it, and few enough that of the Pharaoh—Thutmose III—who had commissioned its erection. Men, even men whom their age thought great, would pass utterly away. But with determination, a man might leave behind him an achievement that could be his personal—though anonymous—beacon to history.

In front of the American Embassy on the Rue Gabriel strolled a pair of French police carrying submachine guns. Kelly touched his tongue to his lips, a sign of momentary tension to anyone who knew him well enough. He had carried a gun like that, an MAT 49, in the field for several months, after he took it from an NVA officer killed by Claymore mines. In the field, in War Zone C . . . Khu Vuc C . . . and that gun had been rebarreled to chamber East Bloc 7.62-mm ammo, but the sight of the gendarmes took him back regardless.

And it seemed that the Pentagon wanted him back in those jungles of his mind. It was the only reason he could imagine for a terse summons five years after they had decided Tom Kelly was too erratic to keep on the government payroll.

At the embassy gate, the driver brought his sedan to a halt that did not squeal the tires but did rock both passengers forward from deceleration stresses. A uniformed Marine saluted from the guard post to the right. The gate slid back, allowing the sedan to accelerate through. Across the driveway, the statue of Franklin scowled. Kelly wondered whether his own expression mimicked the statue’s—and the thought broke his heavy face into a genuine smile.

The car stopped in front of the entrance. “As ordered, sir,” Phillips said. He opened his door.

Kelly got out without waiting for the driver to walk around the car. They met at the front fender while Lieutenant Morley straggled out of the back seat. The civilian kicked the tire and smiled. “Keep about forty pounds in there?” he asked.

The driver smiled back. “Thirty-six all round, sir,” he said. “She’s still a cow, but it helps a bit on the corners.”

“Mr. Kelly, if you’ll come with me,” the lieutenant said at Kelly’s elbow.

“Sure I will—if you’ll get off my back for a minute,” the civilian said. He pointed toward the building’s steps. “There—go stand there for a minute, will you, Lieutenant?”

“But—” Morley began. He thought better of whatever he had planned to say. Nodding, he stepped a few paces away from the other men.

“Look,” Kelly said quietly, “I apologize for what I said. I was wrong, and there wasn’t any call to say it anyway.” He consciously raised his eyes to meet the driver’s.

The driver grinned. “No sweat, sir,” he said. “Just remember there’s a few of us around who still give a shit about the way our work gets done.” The grin faded, then flashed back again full strength. “You know, he’ll probably have my stripes for that—but I’d do it again.”

Kelly stuck out his left hand—he held the radio in his right—and shook awkwardly with the enlisted man. “Maybe so, maybe not,” he said. After ducking back into the sedan to get the AWOL bag which Morley had left on the seat, Kelly rejoined the lieutenant.

II

“Do you have any notion of what they want me for?” Kelly asked as they strode down a linoleum hallway. His crepe soles squelched in marked contrast to the clack of the soldier’s low quarters.

“Not here!” the lieutenant muttered.

“I didn’t ask
what
,”
Kelly said. “I asked
whether
.”

“Here we are,” Morley said, turning into the suite at the end of the hallway. “Oanh,” he said to the Oriental secretary at the front desk, “General Pedler wants to see Mr. Kelly here as soon as possible.”

The secretary nodded and touched an intercom button, speaking softly. In Vietnamese, Kelly said, “Good morning, Madame Oanh. Is it well with you?”

“Oh my God!” said the girl, jumping upright in her seat. Her accent was distinctly Northern. Though she was too young to have been part of the original resettlement in 1954, Oanh could of course have been born in a village of such refugees. They had tended to stay aloof from the original population of what became South Vietnam. At any rate, she was clutching at a crucifix. “Oh, I’m so sorry, you startled me,” she rattled on. “It’s so good to—I mean, my husband doesn’t speak Vietnamese, and he—we’re afraid of how it would look, with his job, you know, if I spent time with. . . .” Her voice trailed off. The intercom was answering her.

“I suppose there are a lot of members of the community here in Paris who aren’t—exiles the way you are,” Kelly sympathized. “Your husband is—”

The intercom crackled again. The woman stood up. “Oh, you must go in now, sir. Perhaps when you come back . . .” She scurried over to the inner door, clad in a prim white blouse and a navy skirt. How much more attractive she would have been in an
ao dai
, thought Tom Kelly; though as a well brought up Catholic girl, she might never have worn the flowing, paneled dress in her life.

An Air Force major general was standing behind a desk of massive teak. It clashed with the curves and delicacy, both real and reproduction, with which most of the embassy was furnished. On the other hand, the desk looked a great deal more comfortable under its mass of strewn papers than its Directoire equivalent would have been; and it matched Wallace Pedler’s own bearlike solidity very well.

“Kelly?” the Defense Attaché demanded. “Come on in. Oanh, where the hell is Mark, I told you to buzz him, didn’t I?” The secretary bobbed her head twice and disappeared back to her console. “And what in hell are those?” Pedler continued, staring at the bag and radio Kelly was carrying.

“My clothes,” said the squat civilian, sitting down carefully on a cushioned chair, “and my radio. Want to listen to Radio Moscow? Take me a moment to rig the antenna. . . .” He took a coil of light wire, perhaps fifteen feet of it, from a coat pocket and began unwinding it as if oblivious of the general’s burgeoning amazement.

There was a bustle at the door. A naval captain, no doubt the Naval Attaché and the second-ranking officer in a post this size, stepped past Lieutenant Morley. He was carrying a set of file folders, their contents attachéd to the manila covers by hole clips. “Glad you could make it, Mark,” General Pedler said caustically. “Mr. Kelly, Captain Laidlaw. Morley, what the hell are you doing here? Close the door behind you.”

Kelly had clipped one end of the antenna wire onto the receiver—length for length, a piece of supple copper worked just as well as a steel whip, and it was easier to transport without poking anything. Now the civilian took the six-foot power cord out of the other coat pocket and began looking for a wall socket.

“What is that?” asked Captain Laidlaw, poised over a chair at the corner of the general’s desk. “Some sort of debugging device?”

“No, just a radio,” said Kelly. “The general wanted to hear”— there was a socket directly behind his own chair—“Radio Moscow.”

“Put that goddamned thing down!” the Defense Attaché snapped. “Mark, sit down.” Pedler seated himself, breathing heavily and looking at his hands. The uncurtained window behind him looked along the Boissy d’Anglais. One of the roofs, a block or so away, might be that of the ETAP, one of the finest luxury hotels in Paris. Presumably Kelly would be put up in one of the block of rooms there which the embassy kept rented at all times for Temporary Duty personnel and high-ranking transients.

Kelly would be put up there if he decided to stay, at least.

“We—ah,” General Pedler began. “Ah, Captain Laidlaw here will brief you on the situation.”

Laidlaw smiled brightly over his crossed knees. “Well, Mr. Kelly,” he said, “what have you been doing since you left the Army?”

The civilian took out a multi-blade jackknife and began cleaning his nails with the awl. Without looking up from his fingers he said, “That’s my file there, isn’t it?”

“Ah—”

“Isn’t it current? Doesn’t it say I’ve been selling office equipment for Olivetti?” Kelly glared at Laidlaw. The captain’s eyes seemed focused on the glittering stainless steel of the knife.

“Well, it . . .” Laidlaw temporized.

“Look,” said Kelly, “that’s your quota of stupid questions for the day. You know about me or I wouldn’t be here. I don’t know a goddamned thing about what you want of me. You want to talk about that, I’ll listen. Otherwise, I’ll go back to Basel where at least I get paid to talk to turkeys.”