Ozel glanced toward the inner room, then took an elevator key from a pocket hidden in her housedress. Unexpectedly she gripped Kelly’s free arm and, staring fiercely into his eyes, said, “This won’t hurt Robert. Will it?”
She shouldn’t know there was anything different about this one than there was about anything Bob did for his employer, NSA. He certainly hadn’t told her. Kelly blinked, reassessing the mind behind those cowlike eyes. She would have gotten physical signals from Bob, but she had to be able to think to process the data.
“No,” Kelly said in Kurdish. “Not if I’m alive to keep it from hurting him.” He squeezed her hand in reassurance and led her by it to the elevator switch.
Bob had done a rather better job the second time around, Kelly thought as the cage descended. Or maybe he really needed both women, needed the balance.
And what did Tom Kelly need? Nothing he’d found in forty years, that was sure. And not some of the things he’d never had; the love of a good woman, for a major instance.
Though the love of the right bad woman might be just the sort of stress a fellow like him needed to keep out of the really life-threatening forms of excitement.
Like the current one.
The ETAP Marmar was the tallest building in Istanbul, and from his sixteenth-floor room in that hotel, Kelly could easily look down on the room Elaine had booked for him in the Sheraton.
More to the point, his ETAP window looked down on Elaine’s own room and permitted him to aim the microwave transmitter he had picked up from Ozel toward the cavity resonator he had earlier planted in the love seat. The fact that the woman’s rubber-backed drapes were drawn did not affect the microwaves with which Kelly now painted 727.
The trunk acted as both carrying case for the transmitter and the camouflage necessary for an unattended installation like this one in a room that would be entered for daily cleaning. Five sides of the Turkish-made trunk were standard sheet metal over light wood, with corner reinforcements, but the metal sheathing had been removed from one end and replaced by dull black paint. The change was noticeable but unremarkable and it was through that end that the parabolic antenna spewed a tight beam of microwaves.
Kelly rested his elbows on the ledge of the window and scanned the south face of the Sheraton with binoculars, a tiny pair of Zeiss roof-prism 10 x 20’s. He had left his own drapes open in the Sheraton, and the Sony radio on the ledge there provided the certainty of location which he could not have achieved simply by counting windows. The window to the left of his own was the target. . . .
This room in the ETAP Mannar had been booked for Kelly by a woman who had left Bianci’s staff a year before to join an Atlanta travel agency. The only question she had asked about the false name and the cash payment was how it affected Carlo. Kelly’s word, that it didn’t, had been good enough for her. A north-facing room high on the ETAP was certain to overlook a room in the Sheraton with a view of Taksim Square. While there had been no certainty that Elaine would book her own room beside the one Kelly had demanded, there had been a high probability of it.
And after all, there was no certainty in life.
The veteran gave final touches to the antenna alignment, switched on the power, and closed and locked the case sitting on the coffee table beside the window. The unit ran on wall current, so it was possible that a maid would unplug it despite the note in Turkish: Air Freshener Within – Please Do Not Unplug – left with a thousand lire bill atop the trunk. Its weight, primarily that of the transformers, made it unlikely that anyone would move it. Short of hiring someone to watch the room, there was no better way to set things up.
Whistling, Tom Kelly locked the door and the purring transmitter behind him. He figured he’d walk back to the Sheraton, but by the long way around the park.