The palm of Kelly’s right hand stung where he had gouged it, partly from his sweat and partly from the aura of burned pepper and phenolic resin which emanated from the thing in the cooler. “You can’t be too close to miss what you’re aiming at,” Kelly said. “Take my word for it, honey.”
He walked back into the larger room, again facing the men whom he’d never wanted to see and who didn’t see him even now that he stood in front of them. Except for maybe Redstone, Kelly was no more human to the eyes sliding over him like water over a statue than was the dead thing in the cooler behind him. Not officer material, that was god damned sure, and both sides would feel thankful for that. . . .
“Where’s his clothes?” Kelly asked Pierrard in a harsh, hectoring tone. “And the necklace he had on? Was that all?”
Pierrard took a deep pull on his pipe. Its bowl was discolored almost to the shade and patterning of briar.
The youngest Suit said, “The clothes were probably of Turkish manufacture – handwork, no labels, but local manufacture. The shoes were Turkish, made in Ankara. The legs must have twisted to form an ankle joint, the sockets in the leg and arm columns are offset enough to do that.”
Kelly stepped closer to Pierrard, so that he was wrapped in coils of pipe smoke whose bitterness underlay the cloying surface odor. “Where’s the hardware, Pierrard?” he demanded. “If this isn’t all phony, then that damned thing had a gadget to make him look like a man, not a lamprey. Where is it?”
Pierrard’s lips quirked as he lowered his pipestem. He blew a careful smoke ring toward the low ceiling.
“There were six items of equipment which couldn’t be identified,” said the young Suit, who was too beefy to be really aristocratic and whose forehead now glistened with sweat. Redstone knuckled his jaw and grimaced, but nobody else Kelly could see appeared to be breathing.
“None of them were larger than a cigarette case, and none of them did anything noticeable when they were tested. We think that when – ” The young Suit glanced up and beyond Kelly. ” – We think that when the medallion was first touched, all of the equipment shut down. The units we’ve sectioned after testing appear to have melted internally, but we can’t be sure what they looked like before they came into our hands.”
“Shit!” Kelly said, and turned abruptly. He slapped the doorjamb, shaking the partition wall and making the overhead light jounce. Doug jumped aside, though this time the veteran’s anger was directed against the situation rather than any human.
Any human except himself and the fact that he didn’t seem able to walk away – that he had buttons that cynical bastards in suits could still push.
“Kelly,” said General Redstone from the far side of the room, “we need you on this one. It’s no time to fuck around.”
“Yessir,” said Kelly, slowly facing around and taking a breath that lifted his eyes back into contact with those of the others in the room. “What did you think you could get me to do? Give you names?”
“Because members or at least a member of the Kurdish separatist community had contact with the aliens,” said Pierrard, “we need a knowledgeable person in place in that community at the earliest possible moment.” His lengthened vowels had probably been natural for him before they were popularized by the Kennedy and Culver presidencies.
“You’ve got other Kurdish speakers.” Kelly walked over to a window and stared out at the lighted fence with his hands on the sash. “Hell, you’ve got agents, CIA’s got agents, every damn body in the world’s got Kurdish agents.”
“We’ve had no reports regarding – alien presences,” said a voice Kelly hadn’t heard before, a Suit of his own age with more gut and less hair. “It may be that depending on foreign nationals in this venue cannot guarantee satisfactory results.”
“We aren’t looking for a translator, Kelly,” said General Redstone as the veteran turned to face them again. “We don’t need somebody to man an intercept receiver. To get on this as fast as we’ve got to, there’s got to be somebody the sources’ll trust – and somebody who can go to them. There’s some other training officers – paramilitary types – but they don’t speak Kurdish, not really. You were the only real NSA staffer in Birdlike, the only one with a real language specialty. Otherwise the operation was slotted there just to keep clear of the Freedom of Information Act.”