All but the auditory center of his brain was concerned with what he had just heard, anyway.
It wasn’t quite as bad as he’d feared; they weren’t setting him up for a long drop, not yet anyway. But they wanted to make sure they had him on a leash, even if that meant identifying him to a gang of Nazi criminals without his say-so.
. . . they can talk politics without getting into arguments. Christ! didn’t anybody realize that ideology, religious or political, didn’t matter a damn to Tom Kelly? The only things worth killing for – or dying for – were personal . . . and if Kelly had personally kicked the whole state of Israel in the balls, that didn’t make him a Nazi. Given cause and opportunity, he would have done the same to Britain or any political group in the US of A.
And the other thing they didn’t seem to realize is that you don’t own ideologues just because they take your money. Intelligence operatives, effective ones, cannot make decisions on political bases any more than they can for personal reasons. They tend, as a result, to devalue both. Perhaps Gisela Romer was simply venal, in which case she would take anyone else’s money as quickly as she did Pierrard’s. The personality Kelly had gleaned from the file, however, was that of a woman who would take US money for the same reason that she gave head to the KGB resident in Istanbul: the Dienst, the Service, required it.
In neither case was she going to jump through a hoop simply because Elaine Tuttle told her to.
Kelly sighed. The tape wound through several seconds of silence after recording the door closing as he left 727 for his own room. He reached for the Rewind switch, planning to reset the unit to record. A clear voice where there should have been only blank tape said, “Mr. Kelly, we must speak with you. You need fear no harm. We need you to save yourselves.”
There was no click or other recording artifact before or after the voice. Its volume level was higher than that of the recording previously, and there was no background of white noise as had clung to the sounds broadcast by the cavity resonator.
Kelly backed the tape and listened again. The end of his conversation with Elaine, the door closing, and nothing. Nothing again.
The voice he had heard was gone, except for what now stuck in his mind like a drug-induced nightmare.
He rerigged the camouflaged recorder by rote. Kelly’s hands could do that or strip a firearm with almost no support from his conscious mind; and just now, there was very little support available in that quarter. As he let himself down on the bed, he remembered the shower was running. It took an effort of will to get him to his feet again to turn off the tap, and that only because he had spent too long in arid landscapes to let water waste itself down the sewers now.
Short men in dark overcoats lurked at the corners of his eyes as he moved, but there was no one with him in the room and no light to have seen them by in any case.
Kelly dreamed while he slept, and his body flushed itself of the residues of tension and fatigue. There were no creatures with multijointed limbs, only men in tunics building and battling over a city on a river. Other rivers might have the sharp bank the swift-moving Tigris had cut through the soil of Mesopotamia, but there could be no doubt about the black basalt fortification: he was dreaming of Diyarbakir, or rather, of Amida – the city’s name when it was part of the Roman and Byzantine Empires.
The walls rose and were ringed by Persian armies in glittering armor, a dream montage drawn from guidebook scraps Kelly had assimilated out of curiosity when he trained guerrillas nearby … but more than that as well, banners and equipment that he did not know, that very likely nobody knew at this distance from the event.
The besiegers raised a mound of earth and fascines, stripping the countryside of timber for miles. “No . . . ,” Kelly muttered in his sleep, because he knew what came next, and he had himself soldiered through in the wreck of other people’s disastrously bad ideas. The wall of Amida rose regardless, propped and piled and jury-rigged to overmatch the encircling threat.