Kelly unplugged the television set next to the refrigerator and then wiggled loose the bayonet connector of the coax to the hotel’s common antenna. Lord! how people worried about bugging – some of them with more reason than others – and how rarely any of them hesitated to have cable TV installed. There is a perfect reciprocity in many aspects of electricity and magnetism: if you reverse cause and effect, the system still works. As a practical matter here, that meant that the television speaker also acted as a microphone monitoring every sound in the hotel room – and that the data was available for pick-off through the antenna connection or, with more difficulty, through the hotel’s power circuitry.
“If they want to know what I’m doing, they can damn well ask me,” the veteran said as he straightened.
The key ring clinked against the face of the refrigerator as his knee bumped it. Kelly looked down. For a moment, the unobtrusive appliance was the only thing in his mind or in the universe. It had been a long time since the whiskey, a bloody long time.
“You’re too goddam smart for your own good, woman,” Kelly muttered; his palms were sweating. “Too smart for mine for sure.”
The hell of it was, she didn’t think he couldn’t stop drinking, she thought he could. She was right, of course; Tom Kelly could do any goddam thing he set his mind to … but why he cared about disappointing some bitch he’d just met, some hard-edged pro who’d spend him like a bullet, that part of his mind was beyond his own understanding.
Coffee’d do for now.
Kelly tossed his jacket on the bed, then went over to his own zippered, limp-leather briefcase to remove the small jar of instant coffee and the immersion heater. He looked at the beer can and grimaced. He could cut the top off to insert the heater, but that would leave a jagged edge, and a thin aluminum can wasn’t a sensible man’s choice for drinking hot liquids.
A few ounces of coffee at a time was better than none. He needed fluids to sip while he worked, and if coffee was the choice this time – there were four glasses in the bathroom; he filled them all, brought them to the writing desk where he dusted them with instant coffee, and inserted the immersion heater in the first.
Next, from his briefcase, Kelly took a radio rather smaller than a hardcover book. It was an off-the-shelf Sony 2002, and for less than $300 it would pick up AM, FM, and short wave signals with an efficiency NSA would have spent $15,000 a copy to duplicate a few years before.
Hell, governments being what they are, NSA was probably still paying fifteen grand for similar packages.
The little world-band radio ran either from batteries or from an AC/DC converter; but the latter caused a hum on shortwave, and batteries – unlike public power grids – were the same voltage worldwide. Sound in the background, even if it was no more than the hiss of static, was as necessary to Kelly’s study habits as something beside him to drink. He used the scanner to pick up an FM station, classical music, something he had last heard on Radio Sophia when he was a long fucking way from the United States.
Funny. Music cared less about time and nationalities than just about anything except stones. Of course, politicians were pretty similar worldwide, too. As were spies.
Tom Kelly unplugged the immersion heater. There was one final preliminary to getting comfortable. He drew the snub-nosed revolver nestled at the small of his back and set it on the desk beside the bubbling glass of coffee.
The exposed metal of the weapon had been sandblasted and anodized an unattractive dull gray about the color of phosphate-protected steel. There was a line of wear around the cylinder where the registration lug rubbed, but the weapon had actually been fired only a handful of times in the thirty-five years since its manufacture.
A patch of Velcro – hook-side – had been epoxied to the right side of the barrel just ahead of the five-shot cylinder, and there was a corresponding patch of Velcro fuzz sewn at the back of the waistband of every pair of pants Kelly owned. There were a lot of circumstances in which a holster was slower to ditch than the gun itself. The Velcro was unobtrusive, added neither bulk nor weight, and was actually more secure than the usual belt-clip holster.