Doug turned with a fierceness which their speed and the turnpike traffic made unwise, snapping, “For somebody who claims he doesn’t intend to talk to anybody, you show a real inability to know when to shut the fuck up!”
Kelly grinned. The woman in the back seat said to his profile, “Would you take a direct order from either one of us, Mr. Kelly?”
The veteran looked at her directly and laughed. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t guess I would.”
“Then our ranks don’t matter,” she said coolly, and Kelly decided that wasn’t much of a lie in comparison to other things he’d heard tonight.
And would hear later.
“Oh, Christ on a crutch,” Kelly muttered, locking his fingers behind his neck and arching his shoulders back as fiercely as he could in the cramped confines. “You know,” he said while he held the position, headlights flicking red patterns of blood to his retinas behind closed eyelids, “This’s going to be a first for me. I worked eighteen years for NSA, more’r less, and I never set foot in the building.”
He opened his eyes, relaxed, and as he stared through the windshield toward the future added, “Can’t say I much wanted to.”
Kelly hadn’t intended to draw a reaction from Doug, but the driver half-turned – realized that the woman was sitting directly behind him, out of his sight no matter how sharply he craned his neck – and then tried to catch her eye in the rearview mirror.
“Mr. Kelly,” Elaine said, and Kelly surmised that she was speaking with greater circumspection than usual, “I don’t want you to be startled by something you misunderstood. We won’t be going to NSA headquarters or any portion of Fort Meade dedicated to the National Security Agency. Some disused barracks within the. reservation were – taken over for present purposes. You shouldn’t be concerned that we enter at a gate different from the one you may have expected.”
Kelly laughed. “Well, that explains the big question I still had.”
Doug glanced at him, but the veteran had been pausing for breath, not a response. “Couldn’t figure,” he went on, “how you’d gotten NSA to cooperate with any damn body else – which you are, even though I don’t much care who, not really.”
Headlights picked out a tiny smile at the corners of Elaine’s lips as she said, “We’re government employees, Mr. Kelly. As you were, and as you are now – through Congressman Bianci.”
The Volvo and the Buick behind it had cloverleafed from the Baltimore-Washington Turnpike onto the cracked pavement of Highway 1. Dingy motels and businesses lined both sides of its four undivided lanes. There was very little traffic in comparison to the turnpike, and Doug made only rolling stops at the signal lights, presumably counting on his ID to get him past a late-cruising Maryland cop.
‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it’ had always been the motto of the intelligence community. It wasn’t a great way to do business, but it attracted to the profession bright, aggressive people who might otherwise have done something socially useful with their lives.
Christ, Kelly thought, he was too tired for this crap. Too tired in every way.
The gates in the chain link fence encircling Fort Meade were open, but there was a guard post and a red and white crossbar, which a GI lifted after a glance at Doug’s identification. As the car accelerated again, Kelly got a glimpse of the unit patch on the left shoulder of the trooper’s fatigues: a horse and bend dexter worked in gold embroidery on a shield-shaped blue field.
“Goddam,” the veteran muttered as the car swept by, “Twelfth Cav, wasn’t it?”
“You were assigned to them, weren’t you?” said the woman, finding in a mis-memory of Kelly’s file a safe topic for an interval of increasing tension. “During operations in the Anti-Lebanon?”
Kelly laughed, glad himself of the release. He got antsy nowadays around uniforms, even when he was just mixing with brass at a Washington cocktail party or visiting a research installation far too sensitive to be compromised by an attempt to hold Thomas James Kelly for questioning.
The only sensible explanation for tonight’s affair was that it was an operation intended for just that end: to close the doors around Tom Kelly unless and until folks in DC and Jerusalem decided they should be opened again. But he was going along with it, he’d said he would, and he was in favor of anything that took his mind off the barracks they drove past and their insulation from what civilians thought was the real world.