“I’ll make a deal with you,” Kelly said to Elaine. “You call me Tom from here on out, I call you Elaine.”
“With a proviso.” The dark-haired woman met his eyes with enough of a smile to indicate her amusement at the operational necessity of ignoring Pierrard for the moment. “If you ever ‘honey’ me again, you can expect to be ‘Sergeant Kelly’ for the duration. I think I’d prefer the honesty of being called ‘you dumb twat’ if you can’t remember my name.”
“We’ll work on it,” Kelly muttered with an embarrassment he had not thought he was still capable of feeling. To the old man in the doorway, he said, “Can she brief me?”
Pierrard rotated his pipestem in a short arc. “If you wish.” Kelly could see others in the orderly room staring at the old man rather than the couple in the office beyond.
“Okay, that’ll work,” the veteran said, half his mind already considering the people to whom he was going to have to excuse himself if this went the way it looked to. Meetings to cancel, phone messages to be taken and ranked for action. . . . “Some place that isn’t here to sit down at – ”
Pierrard gestured. “Of course,” he murmured.
” – and Dougie goes home or to his kennel’r whatever. I don’t need the aggravation, I really don’t.”
“All right,” said Pierrard with no more expression than before, and Elaine looked down at her fingers, which had begun to fold a pleat in her skirt.
“Sir, I don’t think – ” came Doug’s voice from behind the partition wall, out of Kelly’s sight. Pierrard turned his head just enough that Blakeley would have been in the corner of his vision. Doug’s words stopped.
“Let’s roll.” Kelly took a shudderingly deep breath before stepping toward the doorway. “Elaine?”
Nobody came out of the building after them. Kelly reached for the driver’s side door to open it for the dark-haired woman. The door was locked, and Elaine brushed Kelly’s hand away from the latch before she inserted the key into a slot in the doorpost, then unlocked the door itself.
“Very gallant, M – Tom,” she said with a smile to dull the sting of the words and the situation. “But on this car, the alarm is set automatically when it’s locked, and the last thing we need right now is for everybody in three blocks to lock and load before they come looking for the problem.” She smiled brightly at the nearest of the uniformed gunmen. Dazzled, the soldier smiled back.
Kelly walked around to his side of the car. The lock button had risen when the key was turned on the driver’s side. Well, the world had never had much real use for chivalry.
He sat down again, finding the seat a great deal more comfortable now than it had been before. Heading toward the meeting, his body had been a collection of bits and pieces as rigid as the parts of a marionette. He could bend at all the normal joints, but tension had kept the muscles taut as guy wires except when they were being consciously relaxed. “Bad as an insertion,” Kelly muttered to himself, knowing that the back deck of a tank would have given him as good a ride as the leather upholstery had on the way to Meade.
Elaine was still struggling with her seat, repositioning it from where the long-legged Doug had left it. “It adjusts on four axes,” she snapped, knowing that Kelly was smiling, “which gives you the theoretical possibility of finding the perfect solution, and the high likelihood that every acceptable solution’ll be lost in the maze of other alternatives.”
She sat back, grimaced, and started the car anyway. “It’s a lot like the information business, isn’t it?” she added, and her wry smile mirrored Kelly’s.
It had stopped raining, and the overcast had broken patchily to let a few stars glitter down. The air was so clear that lights reflected like jewels from all the wet surfaces around them. “The Buick going to be tagging along again?” Kelly asked, nodding at the follow-car as the inner gate opened. The bigger vehicle’s engine was running and its park lights were on while it waited outside the enclosure.