But maybe nothing like that would be necessary. Maybe he’d waltz into his room, change clothes – pick up the radio and tape recorder – and waltz out again. By now, Elaine or whoever had survived the mess in the parking lot and afterwards would know that something had blown wide open . . . but in the darkness, with at least four sets of participants involved, nobody might be absolutely sure of Kelly’s own role in the business. Not even George, who, at best, saw not Kelly but a dark suit and a pistol aiming at him. They’d want to talk to him, but to brace Kelly now – with his target, if they recognized Gisela, or with an innocent bystander if they didn’t – would be breaking too many rules.
Unless they knew already what their agent had done to the teams in the Audis.
There was no one in the seventh-floor hallway.
“Well, I tell you, honey,” Kelly said as he slipped his left hand around Gisela’s waist, “you give me a few minutes to change, and then you can show me how to show you the best time in Istanbul.” He shifted Gisela to his other side and drew the Walther from his pocket, using the bulk of both their bodies to shield it from sight of anything but the door of 725.
Left-handed, he inserted the room key, which he had cut from its brass tag to make more portable. Kelly had not expected to reenter the Sheraton looking like something the cat dragged in, but he had considered the possibility that he would.
There was no sound from 727, the next door down, and there was no tense aura of someone waiting within Kelly’s room. Electronics weren’t the most trustworthy indicators available to a trained human.
He closed the door and bolted it before turning and taking a deep breath with his palms flat against the panel. That was as close to collapse as Kelly could permit himself to come for a good long time yet.
Moving again with deliberate speed, Kelly strode to the window and closed the mechanical slide-switch of the Sony 2002, shutting off the recorder hidden in the battery pack as well. He telescoped the antenna and locked it in place, then put the units, still linked so that no one would open the pack simply because of ignorance as to its outward purpose, in his limp attache case.
“Say, honey,” he called over his shoulder as he straightened, shrugging off his abraded jacket and turning instinctively so that the butt of the snubbie would remain concealed from his companion, “you wanna use the john, go ahead, it’s – ” Kelly’s tongue missed a syllable, two syllables, as he looked at the woman for the first time since they entered the room, “just like America,” he concluded.
The light between the twin beds had gone on when Kelly flicked the switch in the short hallway. Its shade was the color of old parchment and the wallpaper was cream. Between them they enriched the sheen of Gisela’s hair, of her beige knit dress, and of the breast which she had lifted above the scooped-out neck of that dress.
“I want a good time right now,” she said.
Kelly scowled angrily. He would ignore her, dammit! He started to bend to unlace his shoes since their thick soles would catch in his trouser legs if he tried to change pants without taking the shoes off first. The P-38 jabbed his thigh with its front sight and safety lever, it was a terrible gun to carry unholstered, and he drew it from his pocket to toss it on the bed next to the dancer’s overcoat.
The Walther wasn’t perfect but it did its job; so what was he bitching about?
“Come on, honey, that’s right,” the woman said, leaning her shoulders against the wall where the hallway broadened into the room proper and thrusting her hips out toward Kelly. There was a smile in her voice, but her face was as neutral as Kelly’s own and the laugh with which she followed the words was brittle. She was tight, the American realized, tight as a cocked mainspring, but she was too accomplished a professional to let that show to the audience on the other end of the possible listening devices.