“And then you Americans started to build your nuclear Fortress, and we knew that fate was on our side, despite the disasters of the war and the hardships that we underwent while the Service huddled in Antarctica and – and after.”
There was a tendency, in Kelly as surely as in other people, to assume that what somebody did in the course of his job – or her job – was what he liked to do. It made him mad every time somebody read his file and looked at him with face muscles stiffening as if that would armor the person against the monster calling itself Tom Kelly.
But he did the same thing, even knowing better; even knowing that there were worse things in the life of Gisela Romer than years spent on the Antarctic ice, but you did what had to be done. . . .
There had been a pitiable attempt to landscape the approach to the Urfa Gate with trees. Those which still survived at twenty-meter intervals along the boulevard were trees like those found throughout the inhabited Middle East: stunted, the major branches a yard or so long from the point they forked, and a burst of first-year twigs splaying from the cut ends like the hair of a drowned woman. Firewood was at a premium, and each year these trees would be pruned back secretly by those whose only choice was to freeze.
And sometimes the long-term choices people made for themselves and for mankind weren’t a whole lot prettier; that was all.
Pedestrians hurried along the sidewalk within the circumferential, bent and squinting as though they could shut themselves off from the battering rain. The hooped iron barrier which separated them from the vehicular way gleamed silver in the lights of cars turning into the Old City, providing a touch of fairyland for a scene otherwise harsh and squalid. The girdered tower holding a transformer substation just within the walls could as well have been the guard post of a concentration camp. Life is not exotic while it is being lived. The walls which made Diyarbakir an archeological treasure were proof of a past reality as cruel as anything that put Fortress in orbit above the Earth today.
Kelly knew now why he had been dreaming about ancient Amida and her walls, past which he now drove a pickup truck, turned against their builders. He had a pretty good idea of who – of what – had caused him to have those dreams.
But he was damned if he knew what he’d been supposed to do about the situation.
“What was the message you sent out from Istanbul?” Gisela asked unexpectedly. She had talked her way through her shock at being left behind at the crucial juncture. She had reason to ask the question, and Kelly had no reason at all to lie in his answer.
“I was set up last night,” he said, leaning forward for a better angle through the windshield. At least it had been raining hard enough to wash the dust from the glass. Presumably he would get further directions when it was time for them.
“We were set up,” Kelly went on, amending his initial words. “I got a tape of it, back at my room. What we picked up before heading for the airport, too late for it to do us any good right then.”
The woman grinned as the same memory struck both of them simultaneously. She ran her fingertips up Kelly’s right thigh, then cupped his groin firmly. “There will be more of that, you and I,” she promised with a wink.
Kelly laughed. “There isn’t a bad time to think about sex,” he said. But there were more important things to think about which were very bad indeed.
“Set up by my own people,” the American continued because Gisela expected him to. “I – ” He paused, then went on, “Assuming I get through this in one piece, I’m going to be deep in shit for blowing away the people I did.”
The woman nodded. “Yes,” she said seriously, “we know how closely your country works with the Jews. That is why it was so, of so much importance to us to find someone like you who had access to your intelligence community but who could be trusted not to be a puppet of the Jews.”