He felt pretty good. He had his ass covered from his own side, more or less, and he could now get on with the job they had asked him to do.
Kelly expected somebody to be waiting for him in the lobby, but George was instead at the further end of the first-floor coffee shop where he was less obtrusive and had a full, if narrow, view of the front door. The American nodded to him cheerfully. No problem. He needed to get some information through Elaine, and he’d just as soon that she was expecting him.
With his own key in his pocket, Kelly tapped on the door of 727 – ‘shave’ with his index finger, ‘and a haircut’ with the middle finger, he was feeling good – and the door opened before the veteran could rap ‘two bits’ with both fingers together. Elaine, alone in the room as she gestured him inside, was wearing a beige dress that could have been silk-look polyester but probably was not.
“Glad to have you back, Tom,” the woman said without emphasis. “Learn anything useful?”
“Learned I could get my watch wound with no help from the USG,” Kelly replied with a chuckle, flopping down on the love seat and spreading his arms as he had before when he set the cavity resonator. Somewhere up there beyond the curtains was a microwave transmitter aimed right at his breastbone, god willing.
Elaine grimaced involuntarily, but there was no sign that she wasn’t taking the lie at face value. Not that it was a lie, exactly: Tom Kelly damned well could get laid without government assistance. The statement covered both the time he’d been gone and the new buoyance with which he returned. The hair on his chest tickled, but that was psychosomatic rather than a real effect of the microwaves. If, worst come to worst, his visit to Miss Ozel was traced, it explained that too.
“Perhaps we can get to business some time soon,” the woman said, with no more emotional loading than was necessary.
“Had dinner?” Kelly asked brightly.
“We can call room service.” The grimace, a momentary tic, was back. Maybe she thought he was drunk too.
He hadn’t drunk alcohol since that boilermaker in the Madison. . . .
“Get me full poop on a blond belly dancer named – and this is phonetic, through Kurdish – Gee-soo-lah,” Kelly said. “Claimed to be a foreign national, claimed to be a top act. Probably in somebody’s files even if the computer doesn’t kick her up for some other reason.”
Elaine raised an eyebrow. “Excellent,” she said, “but it’ll take some time.”
“Right,” agreed Kelly as he stood with the smooth caution of a powerful man with too many scars to move unrestrained except at need. “And I don’t guess you’ll be burning off copies of the file yourself, will you?”
“I don’t suppose so, no,” the woman said guardedly.
“So why don’t I,” Kelly said with a grin as he walked past her to the door, “go take a shower while you make the arrangements? And then we’ll go to dinner.”
He paused with his hand on the knob. “For which you’re rather overdressed, m’lady, but that’s your business.”
“Oh-kay,” Elaine was saying as the door closed behind Kelly, her voice as quizzical as the expression on her face.
Istanbul had the nighttime beauty of any large city, its dirt and dilapidation cloaked by darkness and only shapes and the jewels of its illumination to be seen. The view from Kelly’s window had the additional exoticism of an eastern city in which street lighting was too sparse to overwhelm the varicolored richness of neon shop-signs. The minarets of a large mosque in the distance were illuminated from within their parapets, so the shafts stood out around the dome like rockets being prepared for night lift-off.
Kelly sighed and walked into the bathroom to shower as he had said. He undressed carefully and set his trousers on the seat of the toilet. He would wear the same outfit for the rest of the evening . . . and that arrangement put the snubbie near his hand in the shower without displaying it to the unlikely possibility of optical surveillance devices planted within the hotel room. It was as easy to be careful, that was all.