Yep, thought Kelly, that’s exactly why they handed me to you, Elaine and her bosses. Tom Kelly’s a fuckin’ Nazi, he’ll get along just fine with these other Nazis, and maybe we’ll learn what kinda games the Service’s been playin’ with the funny-looking gray guys in the flying saucers.
The hell of it was, things had worked out just about the way Pierrard would’ve wanted them to – except maybe in detail, though Suits didn’t like being bothered with details about who’d been killed and where and how many. The thing Pierrard really wouldn’t like was the fact that he’d been so slow off the mark that the information was probably getting to him through the evening news.
Knowing the type, the delay was going to turn out to be the fault of some subordinate – very possibly the fault of Tom Kelly. Officers called that “delegation of responsibility.”
“So,” the veteran continued, “I figured that the tape of that conversation sent clear text so there’s no way in hell they could be sure who’d heard it, all over the world – that’d give ’em another bone to gnaw instead of me.”
His tongue touched his lips again. “Besides,” he added so softly that his passenger could not have been sure of the words, “they gotta learn: If they stick it to me, I stick it right back. Whoever they are.”
“We can either park here,” Gisela said, “or you can go left at Gazi Boulevard and left again at once in the alley, unless somebody’s blocking it.”
She had the same trick he did, Kelly noticed, of giving directions without raising her voice unless they were very goddam important. Him driving around in the rain because he was too dumb to listen to a normal voice wouldn’t have been that important; and he wasn’t too dumb to listen.
“Here” was an area within an angle of the walls, set off from the occupied portion of the city by law and the circumferential road. The big circular tower at the apex of the angle was a famous one, the Married Tower, though Kelly couldn’t remember the reason for that name if he ever had known. The clear area would have been a park if it were landscaped. At the moment, it was a wasteland whose dust had been wetted to mud by the rain – too unusual a circumstance for grass to have secured a foothold.
There were bushes planted at the edge of the circumferential, but the hard conditions had opened several gaps in the attempted hedge through which the truck could drive without doing further damage. The truck with US Air Force plates could sit undisturbed there, and, in this downpour, more or less unnoticed. The buildings across the circumferential were raised on common walls, and the alley behind them would have been laid out when donkeys were the sole form of transportation.
Kelly shifted down into the granny gear, standing on the brake pedal as he did so to warn the driver behind him. He pulled hard right, and the truck bumped over the curb with less commotion than it had negotiated the road to the han where Dora hid.
The shock of recognition which Kelly felt was real enough to send a tingle up his arm from the finger which was switching off the headlights. He swore softly as the rain-streaked glow faded in his memory.
Not that it should have been a surprise.
“This is where Mohammed Ayyubi bought it,” Kelly said, gesturing with his chin toward the walls thirty feet away. The rain paused, then sent a fierce lash of droplets across the hood and windshield. The stark battlements were hidden beyond the rain and glass, but Kelly’s mind superimposed the videotaped scene in Congressman Bianci’s office on the image his headlights had just shown: the same wall, the same dripping illumination. . . . Bodies only in what the camera had recorded; at least so far.
“Yes, Mohammed made the initial approach and screening for the Kurds we recruited for the Field Force,” Gisela agreed. “We couldn’t recruit in Europe, not safely. And besides, Europeans – even the Aryans – have grown soft.”
The woman shrugged; the act gave her the look of a person rising from catastrophe. “He was coming to meet me at the office here. There were the shots and many vehicles. We scattered, of course, though there was no attempt to make arrests . . . and afterwards, who can say? The crabs, we thought once, but they do not use guns – though one was killed there. A colonel of police was full of tales of the thing that the Americans had bundled away from the site.”