Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (54 page)

Elaine tossed a fat, banded packet of Turkish lire onto Kelly’s lap. They were used bills, bearing, as did all denominations of Turkish currency, the face of Kemal Ataturk, the republic’s founder. “That’s a hundred thousand,” she said, closing the attaché case. Doug, literally and figuratively the odd man out, looked with his hands clasped from Elaine to the sweep team, which was beginning to make its circuit with the tone generator and receiver.

“It’d seem like a lot more,” said Kelly as he stripped off the banding, “if I hadn’t checked the exchange rate in the terminal. Do I sign for it?”

“It’s over a thousand dollars, Kelly,” said the woman, “which ought to be handy—unless you plan to pay your bloody taxi fares with credit cards. There’s more if you need it”—she spun the lock dials of her Halliburton with grim determination—“and if you need large sums, we’ll talk.

“And the answer is no,
I
signed for it,” she concluded with her eyes fierce.

Kelly wondered if she’d shoot him if he asked if she were on the rag just now. Probably not: she wasn’t the type who ever really lost it, any more than Kelly himself did. “I appreciate the way you’re covering for me,” the veteran said calmly as he rose.

He slipped half the lire—pounds, from the Latin, just like the Italian equivalent and the British symbol for currency—into the breast pocket of his jacket, and the other half, folded, into the right side pocket of his slacks. “I suppose I get this way because I figure the best way to be left alone is to make you all”—he smiled around the room—“want to keep clear. But I do understand that you’re keeping your side of the bargain. And that it can’t be easy for somebody in your position.”

He walked toward the door. Behind him, Doug called, “The coffee hasn’t come yet.”

“No,” agreed Kelly as he stepped out into the hallway, “but Peter left, which was all I had in mind.”

Room 725 had a pleasant feeling for Kelly as he shot the deadbolt lock behind him; not home, but a bunker. Bunkers were a lot more useful than homes.

A glance out the window at the sun told him that he had time to put his gear in order and still catch Ahmed Ayyubi at work. Before starting to unpack, he sat his little Sony radio up on the window ledge and scanned the FM band until he found a station—probably Greek, but that didn’t matter one way or the other—playing music. There was a good deal of static, and the red diode that indicated tuning strength fluctuated feebly—which mattered even less to ears trained like Kelly’s in the hard school of communications intercept.

He had not brought a great deal of clothing, and his choices emphasized variety rather than several versions of the same garb. He stripped off the sportcoat, hung it up with the slacks he had taken from the suitcase, and tossed the long-sleeved polyester shirt he was wearing on the bed. In its place he donned a checked wool shirt and a nylon windbreaker, both of them well-worn and of Turkish manufacture, as was the short-brimmed cloth cap he put on. He’d look a little strange to the lobby personnel at the Sheraton, but that was a cheap trade-off for avoiding comment when he talked to Ayyubi. The money in the sportcoat could stay there for the time being.

The last thing Kelly did before leaving his room was to walk over to the Sony receiver and poke number seven of the ten station preset buttons. The apparent effect was the same as if he had pushed the Off button: the sound clicked off, the LED went dark, and the liquid crystal display of the tuning readout went completely blank as if the power were off also.

What actually happened to the receiver, which a stateside acquaintance of Kelly’s had hastily modified, was a good deal more complex. Preset seven tuned the unit to 88.35 megahertz, squarely in the midst of the upper sidelobe of Istanbul’s sixty-kilowatt commercial FM station. The hump which a spectrum analyzer would show there was exactly what was to be expected, and a separate transmitter would have to be very powerful indeed to affect the appearance of the band on the display.

The Sony’s output when operating on that preset was not to the speaker as an audible signal but rather through a shunt into the case intended for an external battery pack holding four C cells. It now contained a miniature tape recorder with a voice-activated switch. The false battery pack could be exposed by anyone who cared to open it; but Kelly had deliberately left an unmodified Sony and its accoutrements unattended at his apartment in Arlington during the week he was preparing for the mission, giving anyone who was curious ample opportunity to be reassured about its innocence.

It would be nice to learn that he didn’t have to spy on the folks with whom he was working just now. But given Pierrard, he was going to be very surprised if Elaine and her friends were playing straight.

The breeze from the Bosphorus was cool enough to be bracing now. A few hours after sundown it was going to be damned cold, but that itself would be a help in returning Kelly’s mind to operational status, like the process of scaling rust from armor plate. Working for Carlo Bianci, he had been able to stay warm enough all the time. That wasn’t something you counted on in the field.

The lead taxi in the rank was a Fiat, older than the driver, who cheerfully haggled in Turkish on a price to the Mosque of Sinan. It made a reasonable destination for Kelly, due east of the Sheraton and close to the Bosphorus—as well as being within two narrow, winding blocks of the agent’s real destination, a neighborhood mosque in an alley off Maskular Street.

The neighborhood mosque was named for Sidi Iskender—Saint Alexander—and Kelly wondered fleetingly whether Alexander the Great himself might not have been sanctified in the myths of Turkish tribesmen riding westward through the land which the Macedonian had conquered centuries before. The west side of the courtyard looked as if it had sustained battle damage, but that was the result of ongoing refurbishment: the wall had been knocked down and was in early stages of replacement by a portico of four column-supported barrel vaults.

Precast concrete arches leaned against the side of the neighboring commercial building, but the stones of the square pillars were being fitted on-site from the pile of rough limestone ashlars delivered from the quarry. Two stonecutters and the half dozen short-haired boys kibitzing sat in a waste of rock-chips and yellow dust from the stone.

The older of the stonecutters stood straddling the column which he was forming into a hexagonal pilaster. His partner wore a cloth cap like Kelly’s, a tan sweater pulled over a dark blue shirt, and baggy black trousers almost hidden by rock dust and the one-by-one-by-two-foot stone prism behind which he squatted with an adze. He was in his late thirties, clearly the elder Ayyubi brother, for his broad, dark face was a near double of that Kelly had last seen videotaped on a rainswept street in Diyarbakir.

Ahmed Ayyubi glanced up at the man approaching and struck the stone again with a blow deceptively light. Rock exploded, and the adze stopped half an inch beyond the point of impact.

“You,” said Ahmed Ayyubi as he rose. The arm holding the adze fell to his side, but the tendons of the hand on the haft stood out with the fierceness of the Kurd’s grip.

“We need to talk, Ahmed,” Kelly said as he walked closer. He was trying to appear calm, but he stumbled on the rock chips—some of them the size of a clenched fist—covering the ground. Danger had made a tunnel of his viewpoint, and the peripheral vision that guides the feet had vanished under stress. The boys continued to chatter for a moment, but the other stonecutter paused with his own tool resting on the work face.

“Get out of here,” Ayyubi said in Kurdish, and in a voice so guttural that Kelly could not have understood the words had they not been the ones he expected.

One more step put the American agent as close to the workplace as Ayyubi was, well within reach of the adze. “We
need
to talk,” Kelly said. Tiny bits of stone floated in the sweat that sprang out suddenly from Ayyubi’s brow. “Otherwise Mohammed’s killing will be unavenged.”

“
You’re
responsible for his death, you know,” the Kurd snarled.

Kelly reached out and touched the back of the stonecutter’s right hand while he held eye contact. “Whatever responsibility I have for Mohammed’s death, I will wash away in the blood of his killers. But you must help me find them.”

And only when he felt Ayyubi’s hand relax on the adze helve did Kelly realize that he had succeeded.

The stonecutter grimaced and set his tool on the work-piece. “Come,” he said, gesturing beyond a pile of finished blocks toward the street. A couple of the boys jumped up to follow. “You go away!” Ayyubi said. “This is man’s business.” Though there was love in his gruffness, the hand he batted at the nearest lad would have flung the boy across the rubble if the blow had landed.

Traffic noise on Maskular and the adjoining streets was a white ambiance that may have been what Ayyubi was seeking. More probably the Kurd had needed time and the movement to clear his thoughts of limestone and his sudden fury at seeing Kelly again.

“I don’t know what Mohammed was doing,” Ayyubi said abruptly. Standing, he was three inches shorter than Kelly, but his neck and shoulders made even the stocky American look slight by contrast. “I wanted him to get into decent work, come in with me and Gulersoy”—his calloused thumb indicated the older stonecutter—”but he’d gotten the taste for being a hero, for getting rich without working.
You
did that to him.”

“Yes, easy money,” Kelly murmured. His right hand caressed the jacket over his left elbow. There was a four-inch scar there, where the skin had been laid open by the same bomb blast which had knocked him silly. Mohammed Ayyubi had carried him to safety a hundred and fifty feet up the sides of a ravine that a goat would have thought was sheer.

But soldier ants probably can’t explain what they do to the workers in the colony, either. It was that sort of world, is all.

“This I know, and all I know is this,” the stonecutter continued, prodding toward Kelly’s chest with a thumb-thick finger. “He met a blond whore, a dancer, and let her get him into this. As you got him into the other.”

“I didn’t get Mohammed into anything I didn’t get him out of,” Kelly said softly, with his eyes on the middle distance and his mind on memories that had nothing to do with the business at hand. His body shuddered, and his eyes focused on Ayyubi again. “Tell me about the dancer. Is she a Turk?”

“No, a foreigner,” the other man said. Something in Kelly’s expression a moment before caused Ayyubi to frown, not in fear but with a different awareness of the situation and the man who questioned him. “I know nothing about her, only the name—Gee-soo-lah. A belly dancer, very expensive. Dances at the best clubs and parties of the very rich because she’s blond, you see, and foreign.”

“Right . . .” Kelly said. “Know where she’s at just now?”

Ayyubi shook his head emphatically. “Sometimes here, sometimes she travels. Not with Mohammed, I think, but I know she was responsible.” He paused and added, “Mohammed showed me a billboard once, but that was months ago. I never saw her, and I never let him talk to me about freeing Kurdistan and the big money he was making.”

The stonecutter spat into the street. Some of the cars had their lights on by now. “Big money. It helped the family bury him.”

“I’ll let you know how things work out,” Kelly said, wondering if anybody was watching him just now. Pierrard’s people or others, not necessarily people. “Thank you, Ahmed.”

“Wait,” the Kurd said, touching Kelly’s arm as the agent started to turn away. When their eyes met again in the dusk, Ayyubi said, “I thought it was friends of yours who killed him. Americans. They came to talk with me the week before Mohammed was shot, and I didn’t know where he was to warn him. My
brother
.”

Kelly clasped the other man’s hand against him. “Ahmed,” he said, “nobody who kills one of my people is a friend of mine.” He squeezed the Kurd fiercely, then strode back toward the Mosque of Sinan and the hope of finding another taxi.

There was nothing particularly difficult about what came next, but the first three hours of it were simply preparation. He had to lose whoever might be tagging him on Pierrard’s behalf or Elaine’s—if there was a difference.

A properly trained team of at least a dozen agents could keep tabs on just about anybody in an urban environment, but that was a lot of personnel for anyone but the local security forces. Among US intelligence organizations in Istanbul, the Drug Enforcement Administration could probably put together such a team, and very possibly CIA could as well.

Pierrard, whoever he was and whatever funds he could disburse on special operations, had an insolubly different problem. You can’t bring a tracking unit into a city where the street patterns and the language are both unfamiliar, not and expect the team to function. Money alone won’t do it. And the most practical answer, to borrow trained personnel from friendly intelligence organizations, was also the least probable. There
were
no friendly intelligence services to people like Pierrard, least of all the other services employed by the US government.

Pierrard’s attitude, of course, was fully supported by that of his CIA and DEA colleagues, who would have been delighted to get their fingers into a rival’s turf.

For the moment, Kelly could be pretty sure that he could be being followed by only Doug and the three foreign nationals he had met at the Sheraton, perhaps with an equal number of Turkish drivers and the like. The Covered Bazaar—the Kapali Carsi in the center of the Old City—was the perfect place to dump any such tail.

There were eighteen entrances to the Bazaar and sixty-five separate streets within it, all covered by plastered brick arches with internal iron bracing. Kelly entered the three-acre maze of shops and pedestrians on Fuad Pasha Street across from the campus of the University of Istanbul. He ducked out again fifteen minutes later on Yeniceri Boulevard, spending no longer in the streetlights than he needed to hop into a brightly-painted Skoda taxi.

The trip back across the Golden Horn to the apartment on Carik Street in the Beyoglu District, not far from Taksim Square, was complicated by the fact that Kelly changed cabs twice more. The friend who was arranging this pickup owed Kelly less than he was risking by going up against Pierrard. The least Kelly intended to do was to prevent fallout in that direction.