Drivers stood by their limousines, one of them polishing a fender with his chamois, as they watched the newcomers. Instead of parking along the fenceline with the other cars, Doug pulled up to an entrance at one end of the low building and shut off the engine. Kelly reached across his own body to open his door left-handed. The latch snicked normally, permitting Kelly to step out of the car while he tried both to observe everything around him and to look relaxed.
Neither attempt was possible under the circumstances. When Kelly met Elaine’s eyes across the roof of the Volvo he laughed as he would have done at sight of his own face in a mirror.
“Hell,” he said to the woman, “when I was a kid there was a lotta people thought I’d be hanged before I was old enough to vote. I beat that by just about twenty years, didn’t I?” He followed them inside.
There were no guards within the building, no women besides Elaine, and only one uniform – Major Redstone when Kelly served under him in the Shuf, and now, from the star on each shoulder, a brigadier general. He was one of the six men waiting in what had been the orderly room, the east half of the structure. The others wore not uniforms but suits, and suits – in this sort of setting – tended to blur together in Kelly’s mind. Fight-or-flight reflexes pumped hormones into his bloodstream. It wasn’t the sort of situation he handled very well.
“Hey, Red,” the veteran said with a nod. “Hadn’t heard you were gonna be here.”
“Hi, Kelly,” said the general. “Glad you could make it.” Even as he spoke, Redstone’s eyes were checking the faces of the men to either side of him. Any intention he might have had to say more was lost in whatever he saw in those faces.
They had prepared for this business by moving into the orderly room a massive wooden table, scarred and as old as the building, and a complement of armchairs whose varnish was ribbed and blackened by long storage. No one was seated when Kelly entered the room, and if they expected him to lock himself between a heavy chair and a heavy table, they were out of their collective mind.
The men, the Suits, ranged in age from one in his late twenties – younger than Doug – to another who could have been anywhere from sixty to eighty and with eyes much older than that. That one’s motions were smooth enough to put him on the lower end of the age range, but the liver spots on his gnarled hands were almost the same color as the fabric of his three-piece suit. “Tuttle?” he said with a glance at the woman.
“Mr. Kelly has agreed to look at the physical evidence, Mr. Pierrard,” Elaine said in her most careful voice. “He has his own life to live, and he certainly won’t become involved in the present matter unless he’s convinced it is of the – highest order of significance.”
“Well, does he think we’d be here?” Pierrard snapped. He stared up and down Kelly with a look not of contempt but superiority – the look a breeder gives to someone else’s thoroughbred. “Do you, Kelly?”
The veteran had instinctively frozen into a formal ‘at ease’ posture: feet spread to shoulder width and angled 45° from midline; shoulders back, spine straight, hands clasped behind his back – and the hard feel of the weapon there was no comfort now. He was furious with himself and with everyone around him because the simple answer hadn’t been right: they hadn’t brought him here to arrest him.
Reflex wanted to say, “No sir.” Very distinctly, Tom Kelly said, “Why don’t you get to fucking business and show me this thing?”
“Take him in,” Pierrard said curtly, with an upward lift of the chin which Doug and Elaine took as a direction to them.
“This way, Mr. Kelly,” Elaine said without looking back at him. She walked toward the room to the side, which had been an office for either the company commander or the first sergeant. She took a deep breath, and Doug echoed the sound hissingly as he followed the others. Perhaps it was the smell in the smaller room, but Kelly did not think so.