Kelly grinned at the woman as he released Doug’s hand. He knew the type well enough, because a reputation like Kelly’s had made him a frequent target for boys of various ages who needed to prove their manhood. Usually there had been constraints on Kelly’s own response: discipline, the mission, or a sheer desire for self-preservation.
This time he’d been pretty sure he had nothing to lose. He had no doubt that the grip in his own right hand, his pistol hand, could have matched any stress Doug put on it. It wouldn’t have stopped there, however, within the civilized norms of the tennis club and the smoking room. It would have stopped when Kelly grabbed a left handful of Doug’s crotch and used the double grip to swing the bigger man face-first against the mahogany door.
Elaine smiled back at Kelly tightly, with the irritation of a woman who knew that boys would be boys but who didn’t in the least like the way such antics screwed up business. She was five four and somewhat fuller in the face than in the trim body beneath it. Her hair was short and as black as Kelly’s own, surprisingly black’unless she dyed it or was much younger than the forty suggested by the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. It was hard to tell with women’s clothing, but Kelly suspected she could buy a pretty solid used car for what she had in her linen blouse, skirt, and sequined jacket.
Not that she’d even have considered buying a used car.
And the lady was smart, smart enough to defuse a situation her companion didn’t recognize and Kelly had been willing to play out just to end the waiting.
“We aren’t here because of a problem with you, Mr. Kelly,” she said in a clear contralto. There was a ring on the third finger of her right hand, a gold wedding band or something with the setting revolved toward her palm.
“Say, I’m really glad to hear that,” said Kelly in a voice louder than he had first intended. There was a catch in his throat that he had to clear with volume inappropriate save as an indicator of how wired he was. Elaine already knew that, that was obvious, and Doug’s concern seemed to be focused solely on striking a properly macho pose now that the woman had startled him out of testing the veteran.
Kelly took the VCR’s controller as the bigger man stepped back. Doug looked surprised, but he did not object as Kelly switched the unit on again and began to rewind the tape.
There was an ordinary television in the lounge area, with the refrigerator and coffeepot, but the set here in Bianci’s office had been unhooked from the building’s cable system after Kelly had come on board. Kelly’d explained how easily the set could be used to monitor conversations within the room; and, when nobody believed him, had hooked an in-line bug to the cable lead outside the office and used the TV speaker itself to pick up sounds in place of a planted microphone. The television had immediately been replaced by a VCR and screen without antenna connections. Nobody in the office questioned Kelly’s judgment about security again.
The videotape clicked to a stop and the screen’s neutral pattern coalesced to a picture as Kelly pushed the Play switch. “You’ve got the ABC version,” he said in a voice so distant in his own mind that he could not be sure he was speaking aloud. “I always thought that was the best one, too, what with the computer enhancement.”
The tape had the stutter and low resolution to be expected from an original made with a hand-held minicam from the deck of a sixty-ton torpedo boat. The ship filling the frame looked to be an ordinary cargo vessel of moderate size, unusual only in lacking the swatches of rust that stain vessels if even inches of their steel sides are flaked open to salt water. The antenna arrays were there if you knew what to look for; but even to an expert, they tended to be disguised by the multiple booms and gantries dating from the period before the USS White Plains had been converted from an attack cargo ship into a technical research ship.