He kept his eyes on the fender before him, bent up at a sharp angle like a foresight where it should have been curved smoothly over the headlight. If he looked at her while he spoke, it would imply that he was pressing for the information. He did want to know, but pushing her was a damned bad way to learn anything.
She looked at him, the planes of her face a pattern of reflections moving at the corner of his eye. When she did not speak for a moment further, he went on, “Look, this car’s going to be pretty conspicuous. I’ve got an address’r two where we might find something a little less so.” He turned squarely toward her and smiled. “Isn’t going to be as nice, but maybe for a couple days . . . ?”
“First, we’re going to Asia, Tommy,” Gisela said, beginning to smile herself as her eyes returned to the traffic.
“For Chrissake, don’t call me that,” Kelly protested with a laugh. Fine, it was a friendly conversation and not an interrogation session. “Call me Tom – hell, call me muledick if you want . . . but not Tommy, huh?”
“Puh,” the woman said, a plosive sound rather than an attempt at words. Her smile toward the bumper of the leading car, a late forties Mercury, of all things, broadened. “We go to Asia, Tom, where you will meet people with whom you will discuss, not so? And if we choose to proceed, as I think we will, then this car will remain at the place of meeting, yes.”
Asia. Well, he’d known they were headed toward either the Bosphorus Bridge or the Black Sea, and the latter was a hell of a long way north. Kelly wasn’t in control, hadn’t been in control since the moment he agreed to meet Gisela Romer. His alternative had been to disappear, to hunt up acquaintances in Diyarbakir and hope that they’d lead him closer to the aliens.
Which might have worked. But gathering information was a lot like deer hunting: people who stomp around making noise are less likely to nail what they’re after than are the folks who settle themselves in a suitable location and let targets step into range.
“It . . .” Gisela looked over at her passenger again before continuing. “The crabs may appear again and you will be ready.” She was speaking in the didactic certainty of a teacher coaxing a student into proper behavior. “But usually they do not twice so soon between. And you must not threaten my colleagues. That would be worse for you and for your country than you imagine.”
“No problem,” said Kelly. “I don’t generally threaten people anyhow.”
He’d pulled the Walther from his pocket as they drove away from the Sheraton and lowered it between his seat and the door panel, where he held it now.
Pierrard’s gang had given Kelly credentials with the Dienst so solid that, it crossed the agent’s mind, perhaps it had all been part of the plan. That seemed unlikely, upon reflection. Even if they had been willing to write off six figures worth of cars and every operative within gunshot of Tom Kelly, both of those possible decisions by the Suits, there was simply no way to be sure that Kelly and the dancer wouldn’t be added to the butcher’s bill. That had been live ammo being fired from the Audis.
Perhaps they didn’t know the extent to which these German exiles were involved with the aliens. But there was no reason to have Kelly penetrate the group. They already had adequate access to it through Gisela. Who seemed to have played her American ’employers’ for right fools, feeding them information on illegal activities they would wink at – and hiding the very fact of the aliens, and of the Plan . . . which wasn’t Kelly’s job tonight either.
“We’ll need the toll,” Gisela said. “Do you – ? My purse is in the back.”
Kelly nodded and took a five hundred-lire bill from his breast pocket, left-handed. Gisela had tossed her purse behind the seat, into the coupe’s luggage compartment, with a thump almost as solid as that which the Sony radio in Kelly’s attache case had made. He assumed she had another gun there, the standard place for a woman to carry her hardware, though it was a lousy choice unless she walked around with one hand under the flap the way Elaine Tuttle had done the night Kelly met her.