Gisela Romer was, quite literally, waiting at the far end of the hall, beside the glazed outside door. The shorter of her two attendants was visible through the panel, glancing in through the door and out again toward the crowded parking lot with the wariness of a point man on patrol.
The woman wore a long cloth coat, belted and not buttoned. Kelly wondered momentarily whether she had simply thrown it on over her costume, but the beige frill of a blouse showed at the cuff when she waved at him. “Are you the sort of man a girl can trust in a wicked world, Mr. Monaghan?” she called. It was Kelly’s war name from the time he trained Kurds rather than what was on his present ID as a Boeing Services employee.
“Well, you know,” Kelly said as he strolled to her side. The man outside stared at him like a vicious dog which precisely knows the length of its chain. “If you drop a bowling ball, you can trust it to do certain things. You just have to know ahead of time if they’re the things you want.”
Gisela smiled, an expression that made the most of the width of her mouth. “I think I’ll trust you to protect my life, Monaghan. As for my virtue, I’ll decide later if that needs to be protected or not.”
She made a quick, dismissing gesture toward the glass door without bothering to look around to see how it was received. Kelly saw the attendant’s head go back in a nod of acceptance, but the motion might equally have followed a slap. The man strode away from the door, his back straight and his neck no longer swiveling. Christ, you’d think they’d be used to it, whatever the relationships were. . . .
“I’d like to talk, Mr. Monaghan,” Gisela said as she touched the sleeve of his suitcoat and rubbed the fabric approvingly between thumb and forefinger. “I have a comfortable place, if you’re inclined. . . . and we can take your car or mine.”
“Does yours come with a couple kibitzers?” the American asked, feeling his face smile as his mind correlated the two operations: meeting a valuable source who was not trustworthy, and meeting a woman whom he intended at an instinctive level to fuck. The second part of the equation should have been too trivial for present consideration; but, because Tom Kelly was as human as the next guy, it was going to get at least equal billing until he did something about it.
“They’ll go in the van,” said the woman. She had exchanged her pumps for flats, and still only the thick Vibram heels on Kelly’s shoes put his eyes on a level with hers. “I have my own car – and it has only two seats.” Definitely a nice smile.
“Let’s go,” said Kelly, thrusting the door open for his companion, after whom he stepped into the night.
Mercury vapor lights on tall aluminum poles illuminated the Hilton lot well enough for Turkey, but the effect was very sparse by American standards. The lot was overparked tonight, as Kelly had expected. Close to the sidewalk was a British-style delivery truck, with roughly the wheelbase of a full-sized American car but a taller roofline than an American van. The sides were not painted with GISELA or a similar legend, but the attendant who had been watching over the dancer was walking toward the passenger side. The second through tenth floors of the hotel overhung the ground floor and basement so that the glow from lighted guest rooms curtained the wall near the doorway with shadows deeper than they would otherwise have been. Nonetheless, the eyes of Gisela’s attendant had been dark-adapted, and it was inconceivable that someone had been standing close to the door without being seen.
“Thomas Kelly,” said a voice as clear and recognizable as what the agent thought he had heard on the tape in his room. He spun around.
“Do not be afraid because we must speak.” There were three short men in overcoats and hats with brims, shadows amid shadows against the concrete wall. One of them carried a transistor radio, from whose speaker the voice issued. The figures would not have been there unnoticed earlier, they could not have stepped through the concrete, and Kelly would have caught motion from the corner of his eye had they come running toward him alongside the building. But they were there now, ten feet away, their radio speaking as the attendant just getting into the van shrieked a warning.