“What do you have?” Kelly asked, stretching himself out on his back on the carpet between the bed and the window. He set the can of water down beside him and cupped his hands beneath his skull as a pillow.
“Reports of men going off for military training,” the woman said. “Many of them men we’d had on the payroll ourselves during Birdlike.”
“Mohammed Ayyubi one of them?” Kelly asked from the floor. Rather than relaxing, he was bearing his weight on shoulders and heels with his belly muscles tensed in a flat arch. Elaine could not tell whether his eyes were closed or just slitted, watching her, and the effect was similar to that of being stalked in the darkness.
“No,” she said, “but he’d been closely associated with some of the people who disappeared. He was living in Istanbul, living well and without a job, you know? He’d make trips east and we think probably to Europe, though we were never able to trace him out of Turkey. Or even far in-country, except after the fact. Somebody would tell us that somebody’s wife had a lot of money, now, and her husband had gone off with Mohammed Ayyubi, in a new struggle for Free Kurdistan. That sort of thing.”
Kelly rolled onto his side, facing Elaine, and took a deep draft of water from his can. “Haven’t found much use for hotel glasses but to stick your toothbrush in,” he said with a disarming grin. “The .22 Shorts of the container world.” Without changing expression, he went on, “What do they say when they come back, Elaine? Who’s training them?”
“Russia, we thought,” the woman said. She shifted on her chair, crossing her right thigh over the left and angrily aware that there was no normal etiquette for discussions with a man who lay at one’s feet. “Now, of course, we’re not sure. And none of the – recruits we’ve targeted seem to have come back, on leave or whatever, though their families get sizable remittances in hard currency, not lire.”
“You’ve tried to get people close to Mohammed before now,” Kelly said, his flat tone begging the question. “I don’t think money’d do much to turn his head if he’s – he was – convinced somebody was offering a real chance for Kurdish independence … but you people’d think money was the ticket, wouldn’t you? What’d he say?”
There was nothing lithe about the man sprawled on the carpet, Elaine thought. He was as close-coupled as a brick, built like a male lion – and with all the arrogance of the male lion’s strength and willingness to kill his own kind.
“We don’t know,” she said carefully. “There was a car bomb explosion – in Diyarbakir – the day before the shooting. Three people were killed, two of them as they came out of the hotel in which they were to have met Ayyubi. We don’t know whether they did or not, or what was said.”
“Hardball, aren’t we?” said the veteran in a very soft voice to the beer can. He held it between thumb and middle finger, at the top where the braced crimp in the cylinder would have made it impossible for even Godzilla to crush the can with two fingers. The mottled skin and the way the tendons stood out proved that Kelly was trying, though, or at least spending in isometrics an emotional charge that would otherwise have broken something. “Amcits, I suppose?”
“Our personnel were American citizens, yes,” Elaine said. “They were assigned TDY to the missile tracking station at Pirinclik, just out of town.”
“NSA’s being cooperative after all.” Kelly put the can down again. His eyes, as calm as they ever had been, were back on hers. Elaine had read enough between the lines of the psych profiles in the veteran’s file to know that he really didn’t have as short a fuse as he projected under stress. The anger was there, but there was a level of control that could handle almost anything.
The flip side of that, and the thing that made him so much more dangerous than a man who simply lost his temper, was that Kelly did not go out of control when he chose to act.