Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (8 page)

This caller did. Even before he spoke, the background wail identified a trunk line from the North. “Minh, good morning,” squeaked the voice of the head of the Army Intelligence Bureau. “How would you like to take a little trip?”

Nguyen tensed. “General,” he said, “I will be pleased to serve the State in whatever capacity she needs me, of course.” For fifteen years, during the War of Liberation, Nguyen had spent more nights in the open than he had under a roof. After the victory, the Northerners had continued to load him with the dog work—including six months of shepherding gas rockets around Kampuchea. “Whatever capacity,” the colonel repeated, “but matters here in Dalat are at a—critical stage. Surely there is someone besides my own unworthy self who can deal with whatever problem you are having in Kampuchea?”

“No, no,” interrupted General Ve. “You don’t understand. This is a sort of vacation, a reward for you, Minh.”

“That’s what you said about this job,” the colonel retorted more bitterly than was politic. “‘Beautiful scenery, no danger—just a few administrative problems. . . .’ Do you
know
who that idiot Bao hired for plant security?”

“If you’ll listen for a moment, Colonel,” the distant voice said harshly, “you’ll be better able to judge your orders, won’t you?”

“Right, sorry, General,” Nguyen said. He forced himself to relax. His service during the War of Liberation had been second to no one’s; but Nguyen was a Southerner by birth, a member of the Viet Cong and the National Liberation Front—not the Hanoi establishment. Hanoi was in firm control since its armies had pushed home their invasion and achieved what twenty years of guerrilla warfare had failed to do. It behooved Nguyen to remember his place—or find himself commanding a garrison battalion in Kampuchea, an even worse job than that of the chemical warfare detachment to which he had already been assigned.

“You know this conference in Algiers that your Doctor Hoang will be attending?” said the general. The momentary asperity seemed forgotten.

“Yes, of course,” Nguyen said. “I understand that he’ll be escorted by a team from the central office.” Of
course
a plum assignment like that would go to toadies from the Hanoi office. During the War, Nguyen had suffered in order to end injustice. Now—but if he thought too long about such things, the result would be a blast of homicidal fury which would serve no one, least of all the State.

“That was the original intention, yes,” General Ve agreed. “It appears, however—despite my personal intervention—that the Treasury will not release enough hard currency to permit more than one person from this office to accompany the Doctor.”

“Yes?” prompted Nguyen. He held his breath in a hope that he would not admit even to himself.

“And I have determined that you are the best suited member of the Bureau for the assignment as it has developed, Minh,” the general went on. “To act as sole escort, that is.”

The colonel was afraid to ask the obvious question, but it had to be asked if he were to know what he was getting into. “Ah, General,” he said, “I’m flattered, very flattered . . . but why me?”

General Ve coughed, a bark of sound over the bad connection. “Well, you see, Colonel,” he said, “I took another look at the list of attendees and . . . the size of the Chinese delegation concerns me. They have, I’m sure, a notion of our purpose in reactivating the Dalat Reactor. And they surely know of Doctor Hoang’s importance to the program. Frankly, I tried to quash the whole trip, but Hoang seems to have convinced—certain officials—that his presence at the Conference will be valuable to his work. And also, the head of the Russian delegation has expressed a desire to see Hoang again. . . . Their Professor Vlasov, the one who visited last month. So Hoang is going, and well. . . .”

“General, I’m very flattered,” Nguyen repeated. He was waving his free hand in the air in silent joy.

“Well, Colonel,” Ve said. “I wouldn’t want you to think that we in Hanoi were unaware of your . . . ability. Not that I really
think
the Chinese would try something at an international conference, but—” He paused.

“As well to be sure,” Nguyen completed.

“Exactly,” agreed the general, “exactly. We’re working in liaison with our Russian friends. I’m sure you’ll be able to share the duties with their contingent. You’ve worked with them before, I believe?”

“The technicians with the poison gas equipment,” Nguyen agreed. “Yes, their manpower should be very helpful.”

“Well, the written orders will be along in due course,” General Ve said. “I just wanted to make sure you had time to take care of any arrangements in Dalat before you left. Good day, Colonel.”

“Good day,” Nguyen said to a dead line. He cradled the phone.

Arrangements. Well, somebody had to vette the entire guard staff, it appeared. Truong could handle that. Truong damned well
better
be able to handle that. As for trip preparations. . . .

Nguyen opened the top drawer of his desk. He took out the pistol, removing the magazine before he locked back the slide. The round in the chamber spun out onto the pile of paperwork. It was an old weapon, a Tokarev TT-33, thirty years obsolete in Soviet service.

Nguyen had killed sixty-two men with it when he headed an assassination team during the War. The Colonel worked the slide several times, studying its action with a critical eye. He had better get in some range time before he went to Algiers. Just in case.

VI

“Can’t say I’m in much of a hurry this time, Specialist Phillips,” Tom Kelly remarked as he got in through the door the driver insisted on holding open for him.

Phillips was grinning as he walked back around the hood and settled himself behind the steering wheel. “I’m glad to hear that, sir,” he said, putting the Concord in gear, “because I scared the crap out of myself the last time.” He chuckled. “Not as bad as I scared the lieutenant, though.”

The gate guard saluted as the sedan passed him sedately. Anybody picked up at the front of the embassy was worth a salute. It was a lot cheaper than explaining to the Gunny why you’d ignored the CinC Med, who happened to have been in civvies that afternoon. . . .

“Ah, look, sir,” the driver went on, watching traffic and not his passenger, “I, ah, heard about what you did for me. And well, if there’s ever something you need and I’ve got—well, look me up, huh?”

Kelly grinned back. “Hell,” he said, “you just did what you were told to do. I only made sure that if anything happened because you followed a damned fool’s orders, that the USG knew it could whistle for any help it was going to need from me.” Kelly paused, watching the buildings past Phillips’ face. Traffic in the left lane was sweeping around them, but the sedan’s tires were riding the rough pavement with only a modicum of discomfort. “Where did you happen to hear about that, anyway?” Kelly added, as if the answer did not matter to him.

“Oh, a buddy of mine drives most nights for the Adjutant,” Phillips said. “You know, when he’s going off to a reception and doesn’t want the flics to stop him driving home plotzed. He was talking to the Assistant Air Attaché. . . .” The driver shot a look over at his passenger. “We’re machines, you know. Typewriters and telephones and drivers . . . but you know.”

“Sure,” said the civilian. “I know how it is.” His skin was flashing hot and dry in pulses that came and went as his heart beat. “What do they say about my chances of getting the job done?” he asked, wondering if his voice sounded as odd to the driver as it seemed to his own ears.

“Look, sir,” Phillips said in sudden concern. “I didn’t mean they were talking about—whatever you and the general have on.” The driver was frowning, dividing his attention between his passenger and the traffic. “General Pedler’s been playing that one real close, I think. That is—I’ve heard a lot about you in the past couple days, Mr. Kelly, but it’s all been about what a mean SOB you are. Not whatever you’re doing.”

Kelly laughed in a combination of relief and irony. “Yeah, I’ve been acting ill as a denned bear,” he agreed. “Could just be that’s the way I am, too.” Phillips had turned down the narrow Faubourg St. Jacques, between the massive and ancient hospital complexes of Port Royal and Cochin. Either the pedestrians had a somber look or Kelly’s mind gave them one. He wouldn’t have been alive himself without a damn good surgeon and all the help that science and centuries of other surgeons trying to improve on past practice could give. Even so, hospitals always reminded Kelly more of death than salvation. These, with their 17th Century stonework blackened and corroded by soot, gave him the creeps even worse than most such places did.

“But it could also be . . .” Kelly continued. He was looking out his window at the domes and colonnades of the Paris Observatory, not toward the man to whom he was speaking. “It could also be that I’m scared, and if I’m a big enough bastard, then nobody else may notice how scared I am. Could just be.”

“Everybody gets scared,” the driver said, relaxing a little over the wheel. “You aren’t the sort to lock up when you get scared, are you? So what’s it matter?”

“Sure,” Kelly agreed, “sure. The matter is that they want me to do something I’ve never done before. I’m not sure
anybody
could handle the job, and I swear to God I don’t see how I can. I’m over my head and I don’t mean a little bit.”

They were waiting to turn on the Boulevard St. Jacques, their view of the Place blocked by the closed deuce and a half van ahead of them. The driver turned and looked steadily at Kelly. “If you really thought that,” he said, “you’d have told them to stuff the job, wouldn’t you? You’ll be all right, Mr. Kelly.”

Traffic and the sedan began moving again. Kelly laughed, as pleased to be flattered as the next man. After a moment, though, he said with whimsey in only the overtones, “But you know why I didn’t? Because they fired me five years ago, booted my ass out of the—well, it’s no secret, the NSA. They couldn’t give me a damned thing that mattered after that, not a damned thing . . . except a chance to ram that termination back down their throats. And that’s what they offered me, that chance. Can’t lose, after all. If I pull it off, they were dopes to fire me. And if I screw up, well, I don’t have to worry about that or any other goddam thing ever again.”

Phillips did not speak as he took the sedan around the fountain of the traffic circle and south at increasing speed down the Avenue d’ltalia. He genuinely was not in a hurry. None the less, the mass of traffic jostling for position demanded the driver’s skills and awoke the aggressiveness that honed those skills. “Were you,” he said at last as he tucked behind the bumper of a Jaguar, “hitting the sauce a little heavier than they liked?”

Kelly glanced up at him sharply. “They do talk, don’t they?” he said with something like a smile. Then, “No, then I—I wasn’t very much of a drinker, to tell the truth. It was. . . . Well, I met a girl in Venice when I was back in port, pretty and she, she seemed to like me. I liked her, I—well.” Kelly cleared his throat, his eyes on the Jag’s British license plate again. “Smart as a whip, that’s God’s truth. Very sharp, she was.”

They were in the congestion of the Boulevard Peripherique, slowing with the car ahead, then slipping sideways as a motorcyclist accelerated up a ramp and opened a gap. The Boulevard was a gapped concrete roof overhead, tire noise echoing from its pillars in a deep-throated rumble. Phillips was taut at the wheel, his hands at ten o’clock and two, making the tiny motions necessary to keep the sedan tracking down what had become the Avenue de Fountainebleau. He seemed oblivious of his passenger as Kelly continued, “She was an American, Polish background but born in Chicago, I checked her passport. You get antsy, you know, when they keep telling you the Russkies are out to learn everything you’ve got to tell. So I checked her purse when she was asleep, but it wasn’t like I was worried, not really. And the passport was fine. Only. . . .”

Kelly wished he could forget they were on the Avenue de Stalingrad now. He didn’t need to think of Russians, and he assuredly didn’t need to say what he was about to say. But the words were finding their own way out, directed not at the stolid driver but perhaps at the self-righteous man who had been Tom Kelly one day five years ago when. . . . “Languages are my business, though. They were then. And there was something about her English . . . So I put in a query through channels, insisted they get me a picture from the file at State, no big deal . . . and I still didn’t
think
there was anything wrong, just a feeling. Funny. She knew something was up, but I didn’t, almost till—” He cleared his throat again.

To the left was the Thinis Cemetery, green shade and an occasional flash of stone past the vehicles in the northbound lanes. Hospitals and cemeteries, take them away and there would be a lot less of Paris. A lot less of the world, but you could have death and corpses without either, and all the canals of Venice flow to the sea. . . .

“The picture was wrong,” Kelly said to no one present. “She was a girl, a college student who’d gone to visit grandparents in Poland, her parents had died in a car crash. And one of her friends got a postcard from Greece, but that was all, she never was seen again. And now somebody with her passport and a new picture was living with an NSA field man. Oh, the CI boys loved it, they’d play her like a fish and see who she reported to. Only—” Kelly’s lips were very dry and the tendons on his neck were standing out “—some girl was gone, gone from the world so that they could play their games, all of their games. You kill enemies, sure, but some kid who just wanted to find her roots and didn’t dream a government would have her greased to get a US passport. . . . I—it bothered me. And I let something drop.

“It hadn’t been Janna’s doing . . . the kid, I mean,” the agent continued. “But she was wired, she’d been living with me long enough to—worry what might happen if I learned she’d set me up. So she made a bad move, went for a gun as if she could point it and I’d freeze. Me! And . . . well, some of the old reflexes were there. Reflexes don’t care, Phillips. Reflexes don’t love anybody.”

They were within the airport precincts now. The airliner taking off on a parallel course was an Aeroflot 11-62, carrying civilized diplomats and vacationers to Warsaw and beyond. “When she disappeared,” Kelly said softly, “my Janna who wasn’t Janna, they figured at first she’d been tipped off. Only they learned that people in the Russian Embassy—she was being handled from Rome, not the consulate in Venice—they were panicked too, thought she’d defected. And then they decided that they’d talk to me about it under pentathol . . . and I told them to go screw themselves . . . and they told me I’d just resigned for the good of the service.” Kelly managed a smile. “There were four of them in the room with me at the last, and I swear to God they were wearing bulletproof vests. Four of them and they were afraid of me.” He paused. “Well, I’m back,” he said. “Tom Kelly is back.”