“Sleep,” said the agent. “And probably nothin’ else.”
Which wasn’t very much of a lie.
Kelly locked the door of 725 and turned on the shower.
He was taking a chance by deciding to review the tape as soon as he got back to his room, because the system could not record additional material while he was listening to what it had collected to date. A second tape recorder would have permitted both … but additional gear meant a greater chance of discovery, and anyway – he was Tom Kelly, no longer NSA, and there was only one of him.
So although there was a fair likelihood that Elaine was about to have a conversation Kelly would like to know about, he opened the false battery pack attached to the Sony and rewound the miniature metal tape. The shower was not to cover the sound of the tape – it played back through earphones attached to the radio – but rather as an explanation, if anyone were listening to the noises within his darkened room and wondering at the fact that he was not asleep.
The taping system worked. You never knew, when components had to be arranged separately and not tested until they were in place. And this installation had been trickier than most because the cavity resonator Kelly had planted in his case officer’s room was nothing but a closed metal tube with a short antenna attached. One end of the tube was a thin diaphragm which vibrated with the speech of people in the room. There was no internal power source, no circuitry, nothing but the section of wave guide. The microwaves directed at it from the ETAP were modulated by the diaphragm, and the whole was rebroadcast on the FM band at a frequency determined by the resonance of the microwave signal, the wave guide, and the length of the antenna.
The recorder was voice-activated so the first syllable of any string was clipped, and there was the usual urban trash overlaying a weak signal. Kelly had been trained to gather content from as little as thirty percent of a vocal message, however, and he had no problem following the recording.
The first of it was the phone ringing followed by Elaine’s voice, noncommittal but recognizable, saying, “All right, good. Stay down there.” George reporting from the coffee shop that Kelly had returned to the Sheraton. That, and Kelly’s own discussion with Elaine in her room, were of interest purely as a test of the system.
The next conversation was the case officer’s side of an outbound telephone call which had to have been made while Kelly showered before they went out to dinner.
Click. “All right, he’s eye-deed Gisela Romer and wants her file. We’re going out to dinner, so have it waiting. I don’t think it’ll surprise him. He expects us to be efficient, and there isn’t much time to fuck around.”
Click. “He says he was getting laid. . . . Maybe, maybe. I can’t tell with him, he’s spooky. . . . What – ?”
Click. “No, for god’s sake run off a fresh copy. How are we going to explain photocopies of a dog-eared original? . . . I don’t – . . . God damn it Doug, get somebody there who can run the printer, even if it means dragging the Consul out of bed.”
Click. “All right. Oh – and tell Romer we’ll try to have Kelly at the dinner tomorrow night. She’s to make contact with him there.”
Click. “She’s not paid to like it, she’s paid to take orders. We’ve got to have a check on what Kelly’s doing, and if it works out – he’s perverse enough that he’s just apt to trust her. At any rate, they can talk politics without getting into arguments. . . . Right.”
The clunk of the handset returning to its cradle ended the conversation. There were several identifiable sounds – door opening and closing, someone muttering unintelligibly – probably Doug entering with the requested files. The discussion, the three of them and then the occasional muttered comments of Kelly and the woman as he read and she pretended to read the flimsies. Compression of the silences made the tape jar against Kelly’s memory, but there was nothing really different about the conversation.