“If I ask you for something, it’s my lookout,” the veteran said as he sat up and met Elaine’s eyes. “But don’t hold your breath, because, because I’d rather call in favors of my own than trust – ” The woman smiled, and perhaps for that reason Kelly softened the remainder of his sentence to, ” – people who don’t owe me.”
He stood up again, stretched his arms behind him as the woman watched in silence, and went on. “What I want from you people is to be tasked and left the fuck alone. Don’t ask me for sitreps, don’t try to help, and for god’s sake, don’t get in my way.”
“You expect too much,” Elaine said calmly.
“I expect to be fucked around to the point I can’t work,” Kelly answered in a harsh whisper, “and then I expect to pack up and go home. That’s what I expect.”
“You’ll have a case officer,” Elaine replied as if there had been no threat. “Me, unless you prefer otherwise. And there’ll be support available in country. If you don’t need it, that’s fine, but throwing a tantrum doesn’t give you the right to flout common sense. Mine. But nobody’s going to hamper your activities, Tom.”
Kelly smiled broadly and rubbed the heavy black stubble on his chin. “Well, that’s something for the relationship,” he said mildly. “You tell the lies you gotta, but it seems you stop there. Hell, maybe this thing’s going to work.”
He stepped over to the desk and riffled one of the files there. “Look,” he said, “go off to your friends or wherever” – he gestured toward the partition wall behind him – “for however long it takes me to read in. It’ll go quicker if I’m alone in the room.” He didn’t bother to add that he wasn’t going to try to leave.
Elaine nodded, stood up, and walked toward the door. She paused just short of it and said, with her back toward Kelly and the well-stocked refrigerator, “Would you like some coffee from room service before you start?”
“Don’t press your luck, Elaine,” the veteran said in the glass-edged whisper again.
She turned, wearing her professional smile again. “And don’t press yours, Tom,” she said. “Don’t pretend, even to yourself, that you can walk out on this now that you’re in.”
Kelly laughed. “Hey,” he said with a cheerful lilt, “who greased Mohammed?”
“We presume,” Elaine replied in a neutral voice from a neutral face, “that the car bomb and the shootings were the work of the same parties. Either the aliens or their agents made an error, or there are third parties already involved in the matter.
“Good night, Tom.”
The brass bolt and wards clacked with finality as Kelly’s case officer drew the door shut behind her.
It had been a long night. Around the edges of the rubber-backed outer drapes, saffron dawn was heralding what would probably be a long day. The veteran sighed, set the chain bolt behind Elaine Turtle, and got to work.
There was a telephone on the bedside table and another extension, weatherized like a pay phone, on the wall of the bathroom. Kelly unplugged the modular jack from the base unit of each phone. He was too tired to trust his judgment, though his intellect floated in something approaching a dream state, functioning with effortless precision in collating information. By allowing habit to take over, Kelly could for the time avoid the errors of judgment he was sure to make if he tried to think things out.
There were a lot of ways to bug a room. Some of the simplest involved modifying the telephone to act at need as a listening device. A fix for the problem was a small, battery-powered fluorescent light. When it was turned on and set near the phone, the radio-frequency hash which its oscillators made in raising the voltage to necessary levels completely flooded the circuitry of most bugs. Unplugging the phone was even more effective, though no one could call in or out while the unit was disconnected. Kelly didn’t need the phone, so that didn’t matter.
Of course, no sound he was going to make in room 618 mattered either – but it was habit, and it wasn’t going to hurt either.