Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (59 page)

The look on the woman’s face had been one of wariness masked by fatigue. Gisela tossed her heavy hair in its blond net and, with a smile as real and wicked as Kelly’s own as he watched her, went into a belly roll that speeded to the point that the movement but not the individual folds were visible.

“Ha!” she shouted after what seemed to have been a minute of frantic motion. She stamped her right foot and shifted back into a gentle hip sway as if a control had been thrown to a lower speed.

Gisela’s pelvis was prominent above the line of her spangled briefs. Kelly reached toward the point of her left hip with the currency and question. Rather than thrusting her flank toward him, Gisela bent and jerked her shoulders back so that the tassles on her left bra-cup flicked out against the bills.

“
There
,”
she directed in a Platt-Deutsch accent, “for the thought. And I can do other things your wife never thought of, too.”

Her breast was warm; but then, so were Kelly’s fingers and everything else in the big room.

There was a louder cheer than expected from local tables, because very few of the Americans had gotten into the spirit of the affair as Kelly seemed to have done. Gisela strode and swayed liquidly to the podium to finish her act there. Kelly had fanned the note briefly to show the dancer it was there, but as she moved away from him he noticed that her fingers brushed the three pieces of paper into a thin sheaf so that the query was not visible amid the currency.

They were both actors, going through motions choreographed by others; neither able to admit to the other what their real purposes and intentions were, or what they knew of the other party’s. It was human society in microcosm, Kelly supposed.

Within moments of the time Gisela sprang from the room with a series of leggy bounds and double-handed kisses toward the guests to either side of her path, chairs and a speaker’s stand were set up on the podium by members of the hotel staff.

“We really ought to stay for the speeches,” Posner said apologetically in response to a whisper from his wife.

“They’ll be in
Turkish
,” Mrs. Posner replied, and in a tone that suggested she had been asked to go mud-wrestling.

Kelly looked at her, amazed. She seemed to think that after-dinner speeches at an affair like this were likely to be more boring in a language you didn’t understand than they would be in one that you did.

A waiter approached, so soon after the dancer had left that Kelly assumed he was changing the defense attaché’s ashtray once again. Instead, the waiter offered a folded note to Kelly himself with a smirk. It was the paper he had slipped between the thousand lire bills, and beneath his own
Later?
was written in a loose, jerky hand,
Why don’t we talk about it at the door to the parking lot?

Well, that was fast. Kelly rose, setting his chair back with one hand while he balanced the weight of his torso over the table with the other. “Mrs. Posner,” he said as he leaned toward the couple, “Commander, I appreciate your company, but I think I’ve found my own ride home.” Or somewhere.

Mrs. Posner nodded distantly. Her husband, frowning, said, “Mr. Bradsheer—take care.”

“Thank you, Commander.” Kelly shook the naval officer’s hand, then walked toward the exit.

The cooler, less smoky air of the hallway as he went to the elevators did not seem at first to clear Kelly’s sinuses. Rather, motion and oxygen brought with them a pounding headache as smoke-constricted capillaries tried to adjust to the new demands.

The parking lot north of the big hotel was actually off the basement rather than on a level with the front entrance to the ground-floor lobby. A hotel here, where almost all the guests would arrive in and use taxis instead of their own cars, had less need for parking than a similar 450-room unit in Washington, but that meant there would probably be a great deal of congestion tonight. Kelly shrugged as he got off the elevator, loosening his coat and his muscles, trying to be prepared for anything at all.

Gisela Romer was, quite literally, waiting at the far end of the hall, beside the glazed outside door. The shorter of her two attendants was visible through the panel, glancing in through the door and out again toward the crowded parking lot with the wariness of a point man on patrol.

The woman wore a long cloth coat, belted and not buttoned. Kelly wondered momentarily whether she had simply thrown it on over her costume, but the beige frill of a blouse showed at the cuff when she waved at him. “Are you the sort of man a girl can trust in a wicked world, Mr. Monaghan?” she called. It was Kelly’s war name from the time he trained Kurds rather than what was on his present ID as a Boeing Services employee.

“Well, you know,” Kelly said as he strolled to her side. The man outside stared at him like a vicious dog which precisely knows the length of its chain. “If you drop a bowling ball, you can trust it to do certain things. You just have to know ahead of time if they’re the things you want.”

Gisela smiled, an expression that made the most of the width of her mouth. “I think I’ll trust you to protect my life, Monaghan. As for my virtue, I’ll decide later if that needs to be protected or not.”

She made a quick, dismissing gesture toward the glass door without bothering to look around to see how it was received. Kelly saw the attendant’s head go back in a nod of acceptance, but the motion might equally have followed a slap. The man strode away from the door, his back straight and his neck no longer swiveling. Christ, you’d think they’d be used to it, whatever the relationships were. . . .

“I’d like to talk, Mr. Monaghan,” Gisela said as she touched the sleeve of his suitcoat and rubbed the fabric approvingly between thumb and forefinger. “I have a comfortable place, if you’re inclined. . . . and we can take your car or mine.”

“Does yours come with a couple kibitzers?” the American asked, feeling his face smile as his mind correlated the two operations: meeting a valuable source who was not trustworthy, and meeting a woman whom he intended at an instinctive level to fuck. The second part of the equation should have been too trivial for present consideration; but, because Tom Kelly was as human as the next guy, it was going to get at least equal billing until he did something about it.

“They’ll go in the van,” said the woman. She had exchanged her pumps for flats, and still only the thick Vibram heels on Kelly’s shoes put his eyes on a level with hers. “I have my own car—and it has only two seats.” Definitely a nice smile.

“Let’s go,” said Kelly, thrusting the door open for his companion, after whom he stepped into the night.

Mercury vapor lights on tall aluminum poles illuminated the Hilton lot well enough for Turkey, but the effect was very sparse by American standards. The lot was overparked tonight, as Kelly had expected. Close to the sidewalk was a British-style delivery truck, with roughly the wheelbase of a full-sized American car but a taller roofline than an American van. The sides were not painted with *GISELA* or a similar legend, but the attendant who had been watching over the dancer was walking toward the passenger side.

The second through tenth floors of the hotel overhung the ground floor and basement so that the glow from lighted guest rooms curtained the wall near the doorway with shadows deeper than they would otherwise have been. Nonetheless, the eyes of Gisela’s attendant had been dark-adapted, and it was inconceivable that someone had been standing close to the door without being seen.

“Thomas Kelly,” said a voice as clear and recognizable as what the agent thought he had heard on the tape in his room. He spun around.

“Do not be afraid because we must speak.”

There were three short men in overcoats and hats with brims, shadows amid shadows against the concrete wall. One of them carried a transistor radio, from whose speaker the voice issued. The figures would not have been there unnoticed earlier, they could not have stepped through the concrete, and Kelly would have caught motion from the corner of his eye had they come running toward him alongside the building. But they were there now, ten feet away, their radio speaking as the attendant just getting into the van shrieked a warning.

Gisela cried out also. A purse dangled from her left wrist, but it was toward the side pocket of her coat instead that her free hand dived.

First things first. The shorter attendant and his companion, who stood up on the driver’s side-step and looked over the van’s cab, were both reaching for hardware. Kelly threw himself sideways, toward the line of yews fringing the thirty-foot walkway to the parking lot. His hundred and eighty pounds meat-axed the dancer ahead of him, out of the line of fire.

It occurred to him as the first shot banged from the cab of the van that he might be getting a personal demonstration of how Mohammed Ayyubi had died: in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Ricochets have a soul-freezing sound that rightly suggests the flattened bullet may rip a hole through you from any direction. This round cracked twice from the concrete, wall and overhang, before thrumming viciously into the night. Ten yards is spitting distance on a lighted pistol range, but shock and darkness made the gunman at the van as great a threat to the world at large as he was to his target.

As they crashed through the prickly branches of the shrubs, Kelly expected to hit the ground on top of the woman he was trying to save. He had not considered the fact that she was his superior as an athlete. She twisted in the air, using Kelly’s own weight as a fulcrum, and hit the hard ground beyond him on braced fingers and toes. The weight of the gun in her right side pocket twisted the tail of the coat around behind her.

“Kelly—” the radio voice in back of him called. There was a snap as the American scrambled to his feet. The sound was not a gunshot like the volley blasting from around the van; it could have been the release of a bowstring.

“Your
car
!” Kelly cried to the woman beside him. Glass shattered from the building, and the man shooting from in front of the van splayed like an electrocuted squirrel as he fell backward.

Crouching, Kelly aware that the woman’s light-colored coat made as good an aiming point as his own dark suit was a bad one, the couple broke for the asphalt lot at an angle which thankfully spread them further from the second attendant, who continued to shoot over the cab of the van. The three figures stood like sandbagged dummies, unaffected by the bullets. One round vanished in a violet flash that lighted the wall of the hotel instead of ricocheting away.

“This one!” Gisela shouted, motioning with her right arm toward a car parked at the edge of the asphalt. It was a Mercedes coupe with the slight rounding of lines that marked it as ten or fifteen years old rather than brand new. The mercury-vapor lamp was reflected as a rich blue pool from the bodywork of metallic silver, a German hallmark which Japanese automakers attempted to match with less success than they showed in matters of pure mechanics.

There was a second
snap!
and the remaining attendant catapulted from the van. Gisela, instead of dodging around the front bumper of the coupe, vaulted the hood which her dangling coattail struck with a clang. Kelly flattened himself on the ground, reaching up for the passenger-side door as he twisted his head back to see what weapons were being aimed. He had not attempted to clear the revolver attachéd to his waistband. All it was going to do under present circumstances was tie up his hand and make a target of him.

A better target.

Two of the figures, the men if they were men, ran toward him while the third’s radio shouted, “Thomas Kelly, for your planet’s sake—”

The long burst of submachine gun fire from a parked Audi sedan drowned the
cough-brap!
of the six-cylinder Mercedes engine catching.

Kelly expected the coupe’s door to be locked. It was not. He threw it open and tossed himself into the passenger seat of the low car, wishing he were half as agile as the woman he was accompanying. The nearer of the two figures running toward the car toppled limply. The second froze and remained standing in a violet blaze as two or three automatic weapons ripped at it.

The Mercedes was accelerating before Kelly got his door closed. Gisela pulled a hard left turn, spinning the little vehicle in about its own length. The 280 SL had not been a dragster even when new, but its engine was in a sharp state of tune and snarled happily as the driver revved it through the powerband. Centrifugal force made the door in Kelly’s hand a weight worthy of his strength as he drew it closed.

“Thomas Kelly!” the radio voice called over the roar of gunfire and exhaust. Shots raked the building in a cloud of pulverized concrete, lighted internally by spluttering arcs from the figure who stood in the midst of the bullets until he disappeared instead of falling.

As the coupe straightened in the aisle, heading in the direction opposite to the way it had been parked, Gisela’s foot blipped the throttle so that the automatic clutch would let her upshift. There was a red and white glare from a second Audi, backing at speed across the head of the aisle to block them. The medley of tail and backup lights was as uncompromising as the muzzle flashes from the other German sedan.

The shriek of the Mercedes’ brakes was louder than the angry whine of the Audi’s gearbox being overrevved in reverse gear. The coupe’s blunt nose slewed thirty degrees to the left as that front disk gripped minutely before its companion. Kelly’s left hand was furiously searching the door panel for a way to roll down the window. Gisela had not switched on her lights, and the parking lot fixtures overhead did nothing to illuminate the car’s interior to eyes dazzled by muzzle flashes and the electric coruscance which bullets had drawn from the three figures.

He poised the revolver in his hand, bumping the coupe’s low roof with it as he readied to smash out the side window with the gun butt. Instead, Gisela flung his unbraced body against her as she downshifted again and cut the wheel right.

Inertia had carried the heavy sedan from its blocking position against the drag of its own brakes. As it lunged back against its springs when the tires got a firm grip, Gisela punched the coupe between the Audi and the rear bumper of the nearest parked car.