The files covered approximately the past year. There was nothing in them regarding aliens, and for all but the past two months they were concerned solely with the normal collection from a nationalist movement: money and arms; smuggling and training camps; foreign contacts in general and the dark suggestions of Russian involvement certain to show up in reports approved by American station chiefs.
Not that the KGB and other Russians paid to meddle in Third World problems were any less likely to be doing so than their US counterparts.
There was a change in March which was so abrupt that it must have resulted from a change in emphasis at client level – the members of the US government who received the information – rather than a watershed in what the agents themselves chose to send in. Suddenly Kurds were making UFO reports which would have been right at home in small-town papers throughout America.
There were no, thank god, conversations with little green men, although one case officer had sent a number of reports of angelic revelations before somebody further up the line had rapped his knuckles. There were airplanes that flew straight up, huge cylinders with lighted windows along their sides, and a score of other shapes and styles. Some reports referred to incidents as much as thirty years in the past, proving to a certainty that the sudden spate of reports was only a result of tasking.
In general, the only similarities between objects sighted occurred when two or more reports were made by the same agent. There was a single exception: disks twenty meters in diameter which lifted silently, wrapped in auroral splendor – from locations separated by a hundred miles, and with no duplication in the chain of data. That could mean something; and certainly there was something to be learned; the dead alien proved that. But even if one or all of the reports were true, they were garbage which did absolutely nothing to indicate what was really going on.
And that was all there was. No wonder Pierrard and his crew were willing to try a card as wild as Tom Kelly.
A thing with a mouth like a lamprey, and a couple dozen – maybe a few hundred – Kurds whose families thought they were going off to be armed and trained in the cause of Kurdish nationalism. Well, the connection would be obvious just as soon as Kelly learned what it was.
When the files were stacked neatly again on the top of the desk, the veteran walked to the bathroom. The toothbrush and toothpaste from his briefcase, and the hot shower that he let play over him helped but could not wholly remove the foulness throughout his system. Fear and anger and fatigue, but most especially fear, leave their hormonal spoor on a man.
Kelly looked at himself in the fogged mirror when he stepped out of the shower, but that was another mistake. His outline was intact, but the condensate on the glass turned his hundred and eighty pounds, tank-solid and scarred with experience, into a wistful ghost. He was crazy to get back into this; aliens or no, none of it would matter when he was dead.
But death would come regardless.
He lay down on the bed, his skin warm with the harsh toweling he had just given it. He’d have them book him into the Sheraton in a room facing the Golden Horn. He’d treat it as a perk – they understood perks, these folk in suits they never saw the bills for, and no eyebrows would lift because Kelly wanted a room in the most expensive hotel in Istanbul. They would understand the implied test, also, the precise instructions which they could either carry out or not – and the implications if they did not or even chose to argue.
And because they understood both those things, they would not foresee their agent’s – ‘their agent’s’ – real reason for wanting a room just there.
He needed to talk to people after he shook free from the box Elaine would try to put around him no matter what she said. There were folks who owed him, though the good ones didn’t keep score any more than Kelly did himself. Individuals, unlike nations, were capable of keeping faith.