Kelly started to say, “Wait,” although waiting was the last thing he really wanted to do in this confusion with its chance of fire and explosion and its certainty of heavily-armed patrols descending at any moment. Instead, as Gisela negotiated the acute turn onto Tesfikige Street, bumping over the curb again to clear the van stalled in the intersection, Kelly said, “Gisela, run me back to the Sheraton. There’s something I need in my room there.”
“Are you sick in the head?” she demanded, sparing him a glance.
“Didn’t say it was a great idea,” the American said as he met her eyes. “But I’ve never volunteered for a suicide mission, and that’s what tonight’ll have been if I don’t have some way to cover my ass.” He grimaced and looked away. “Yeah, and get a change of clothes, too. These” – he felt the back of his coat with his free left hand – “haven’t come through the night much better than I have.”
“But you’ll come,” the woman said. She was driving normally. The traffic now was Istanbul’s normal dense matrix, and there was no reason to call attention to themselves by attempting to break out of it. There was no particularly good way to get from one place to another in the ancient streets laid out by donkey-drivers, so their present course was not a bad one from Kelly’s standpoint.
“I’m with you as soon as we’re outa my hotel,” the agent agreed, sliding forward in his seat so that he could replace the little revolver at the back of his waistband. He didn’t want it to clank against the Walther he intended to carry in his trouser pocket, screened by the coattail, when he got out of the car. “I go up to the room, grab my stuff like I’m just changing clothes to parry some more, and I think anybody listening’s going to leave me alone until they’ve got a better notion of what’s going on tonight. Better’n I do, anyway.”
Why in the hell had they shot at him, George and whoever had been with George or at least issuing his orders? Confusion rather than deliberate purpose, perhaps, but you don’t issue somebody a gun in a civilized venue unless you trust him not to shoot first and ask questions later.
Except that to Doug and his ilk in their English suits and Italian shoes, Turkey wasn’t civilized; it was part of the great brown mass of Wog-land, where a white man could do anything he pleased if he had money and the US government behind him.
So they might have thought there were – use the word – aliens in the Mercedes, and they might have thought it was Kelly about to pull something unstructured on his own. Either way, somebody had made the decision to stop the car at any cost.
They just hadn’t realized who would be paying most of that cost.
“Got another magazine for this?” Kelly asked, tapping the slide of the P-38. His eyes searched traffic for anything his trigger reflexes needed to know.
“No,” said Gisela. She had switched back to English, but the shake of her head was a bit too abrupt to have been without emotional undertones. “It was … it was my father’s before they killed him. The crabs. They took even his body away.”
“It’ll do,” said Kelly, unwilling to remove the magazine and check the load on the off chance that he’d need the weapon fully functional during those few seconds. “Why did they murder your father?”
Nothing in the files Elaine had showed him said anything about direct contact between the aliens and the Dienst. More important, nothing in the conversation Kelly had bugged suggested that his case officer and her chief subordinate had any inkling of the connection. Maybe there was more in Kelly’s meeting with Gisela Romer than a way of gaming his employers. . . .
“I don’t know,” she said miserably, reacting to the concern in her passenger’s voice. It was genuine enough, concern that a human being had been killed by monsters; but Kelly displayed his feeling because it was politic to do so, the way it would have been politic to display affection if he were trying to get into the woman’s pants . . . which might come yet, the aftermath of the adrenaline rush of the firefight accentuating his lust.