Well, he was still on the payroll, thought Tom Kelly as he nodded and said, “Yeah, like transferring ground-support aviation from the Army that needs it to the Air Force that isn’t interested in anything yucky like mud and Russian tanks.”
The veteran stretched, figuring that tomorrow was time aplenty for him to write up the report since he’d given Carlo the core of it verbally. “Well, boss,” he said –
And Representative Bianci said, toward a far corner of the room, “There are two people who said they’d like to talk to you today, Tom.”
“My goodness, two of ’em?” Kelly straightened deliberately from his back-arched posture and swept the room with his eyes: nobody but the two of them. He’d have heard breathing or motion if a team were hidden behind filing cabinets and privacy panels. . . . “What’d they want to talk about, Carlo?”
Bianci was not deceived by his aide’s voice, though it was as smooth as the lockwork of a fine revolver slipping to full cock. For all that, nothing in the congressman’s own background permitted him to translate data from Kelly’s file into the shock and flame of reality. “Not Fortress, I believe, Tom,” said Bianci. “Not – ” He looked up with the appearance of candor, a politician’s look, but possibly real this time. “This appears to be a new development of some sort on which they think you can be of some help.”
Everything Tom Kelly saw or heard stood out from its background for the length of time he focused on it. Representative Bianci was a figure with only a blur behind him – unless something should have moved in the periphery of Kelly’s vision – as he licked his lips and continued, “This isn’t in the purview of your employment with me, Tom. But it would be a personal favor to me if you agreed to talk to them.”
“Sure, boss, I understand,” said Kelly, and he did understand. Bianci had been too smart to give him an order regarding a subject on which Kelly took orders from no one; and the kind of pressure that could be exerted on an elected official, even a powerful one, even an honorable man like Carlo Bianci, whose eyes had been pretty well open when he hired a man who’d been training Kurdish guerrillas for the National Security Agency before he separated on very bad terms indeed. . . . “Where do they want to see me? Langley? Meade?”
“I told them,” said the congressman with the stumbling ennuciation of a man thinking of the result of what he was saying rather than the specific words his tongue tried to form, “that I’d relay their message, and that they were welcome to wait in my private office, though I had no reason to expect you in tonight.” Bianci smiled. “I gather they had a better notion of your schedule than I did.”
“Better’n both of us, I guess,” Kelly said, unbuttoning his sportcoat and stretching again, bending forward at the waist and raising his hands locked behind his back. It was the position of a man being lifted to the ceiling in the cheap medieval substitute for the rack. The position loosened the great muscles of his shoulders – tension had locked them as tight as the cables winching in a whale for flensing.
If you watch a man carefully over a period of time, you do know him better than he knows himself, because the habitual activities that never reach his conscious mind stand out as statistical peaks in the summary of his behavior. Of course Tom Kelly would check in at Bianci’s office, because he always did after a tour – though there was no necessity to do so, and though Kelly himself thought he was flipping a mental coin in the airport to determine whether he went to his Arlington apartment or the office in the Longworth Building.
“Well,” said Kelly, massaging first his left hand with his right, then reversing the activity, “if they’ve been waiting this long, I guess it’s only polite to look in on ’em.”
“You don’t have to, you know.” The congressman stood up faster than he had intended, his muscles reacting sharply to the charged atmosphere. “Believe me, Tom, that wasn’t an order.”