“They buried Danny at Arlington,” said the veteran inconsequently. “Seemed to make his widow happy enough. Me, I always figured that I’d want something besides a stone if it happened to me. …”
There were a lot of folks in both governments and, less formally, in Shin Bet – the Israeli department of security – who weren’t in the least pleased with Tom Kelly since copies of the tape showed up in newsrooms across the US and Western Europe. There’d been one in the hands of TASS besides, just in case somebody got the idea of trying a really grandiose coverup. For sure, nothing Doug Blakeley had to say was official policy above a certain level – but the big blond wasn’t a good enough actor to be lying about his mission, his and Elaine’s.
The woman took from the Halliburton what looked like a small alien wrench and stuck it into a curved slot on the underside of the tape she had just ejected. The narrow slot didn’t, when Kelly thought about it, look like anything he’d seen on a tape cassette before. Neither did it look particularly remarkable, however, even when Elaine clicked something clearly nonstandard into a detent at the farther end of the arc, then removed the wrench.
“Now it explodes?” the veteran asked, making it a joke instead of a flat question so that the pair of them wouldn’t gain points if they chose to ignore him.
“There’s a magnet inside the cassette,” Elaine said as she reinserted the tape in the VCR. “The tape pauses at the end of the news segment. If anybody tried to play it beyond that point without locking the magnet out of the way, they’d get hash.” She poked Play, picked up the remote control which still lay on the carpet, and stepped back close to Kelly as the tape advanced with a hiss and diagonals of white static across the screen.
“Look, you ought to understand,” said Kelly with his eyes on the television, “the people in Israeli service who – got that tape to the guy who released it. It wasn’t just personal payoffs, and it wasn’t in-house politics alone, either. There were some people who thought shooting allies in lifeboats was a bad idea . . . and thought getting away with it once was an even worse one.”
“That really doesn’t concern us, Mr. Kelly,” Elaine said flatly, and the murmur of empty tape gave way to a segment recorded without an audio track.
“Sonoabitch,” muttered Kelly, for the location was unmistakable to him despite the poor quality of the picture. The segment had been shot with a hand-held minicam, like the footage of the White Plains before, but the earlier portion had at least been exposed in the bright sunlight of a Mediterranean afternoon. This scene had been recorded at night in the angle of massive walls illuminated by car headlights, while drizzle flicked the beams and wobbled across the lens itself.
But there was no other stretch of fortification comparable to that on the screen save for the Great Wall of China. Kelly had trained Kurds for two years at Diyarbakir. He could recognize the walls of the great Roman fortress even at a glance.
“Corner by where the Turistik meets Gazi Street,” the veteran said aloud, a guess rather than an identification – the sort of thing he did to keep people off-balance about what he knew or might know; the sort of thing he did when he was nervous and off-balance himself.
The walls of black basalt were gleaming and lightstruck where their wet lower surfaces were illuminated; the twenty feet above the quivering headlights was only a dark mass indistinguishable from the rain-sodden sky as the cameraman walked forward and jiggled the point of view.
Close to the wall was a clump of figures in dark overcoats, who shifted away abruptly, backs turned to the approaching camera.
“Who filmed this?” asked Kelly, looking up at the woman who watched him while her companion seemed mesmerized by the television itself. “And when?”
“It was taken three days ago,” Elaine said, nodding toward the screen to return the subject’s attention to where it belonged. “And officially, everyone at the site is a member of Turkish Military Intelligence.”