“Come,” snapped Gisela, motioning Kelly peremptorily within and closing the door behind him, a precaution the American could not understand until the woman switched on a flashlight she had taken from a hook on the wall.
“What – ” began Kelly, unable to see anything worth the exercise in the flickering beam of the light.
‘”Nothing, nothing, nothing!” the dancer said, her inflection rising into spluttering fury. She strode fiercely toward the van, the tight beam of the flashlight bobbling up and down on the windshield like the laser sighting dot of a moving tank. “They could’ve left a note, surely?”
The floor of the warehouse was gravel, marked in unexpected ways. There were the usual lines and blotches of motor oil and other vehicular fluids inevitable in any parking space. The drips, however, were absent from the center of the enclosed structure, so far as Kelly could tell. Why wall so large an area if only the edges were to be used?
Gisela jerked open the van’s door. The courtesy light went on but had to compete with the beam of the flashlight which the dancer had angrily twisted to wide aperture. “Nothing,” she repeated in a voice like Kelly’s the day they told him what had happened to Pacheco and another hundred of the White Plains’ complement.
“This is the one your – ” the American began, touching the side panel of the van.
“Yes, Franz and Dietrich,” Gisela snapped as she straightened to slam the door of the vehicle closed. “They must have come back from the hotel, told them I’d been” – her hands writhed in a gesture that aimed the light skyward until she thumbed it off, plunging them back into darkness – “whatever, killed, captured. And they went off and left me!”
“They could get a job with some of my former employers,” the American said, briefly thinking of his own Kurdish guerrillas. “But look,” he added with a frown, “I saw your people go down. There was a flash and they went over when the whatevers were trading shots with ’em.”
“That doesn’t mean they were dead,” the dancer said bitterly as she walked back toward the door through which they had entered. She couldn’t see any better than Kelly could, but she knew there was nothing in the way. “We’ve had it happen before, people they’ve shot but not taken away as they usually do, the crabs. They’ll come around again, in half an hour or so, and have headaches for a week – but live.”
“It doesn’t sound like your crabs,” Kelly said, frowning, as the woman opened the door and stepped out, “are quite as hard-nosed about what they’re doing as maybe I’d – ”
“Tom,” the woman said.
It was too late to matter because Kelly was half through the doorway already and the hand-held spotlight that switched on was as blinding to him as it was suitable for sighting whatever guns were arrayed behind it. For a moment he thought of the P-38, but a voice from behind the screen of light said, “Try it, fucker.”
It was Doug Blakeley’s voice, and Kelly was in no doubt as to what would happen in a fraction of a second if his pistol didn’t drop on the gravel.
As the Walther slipped from Kelly’s fingers, an automobile engine spun to life with a whine and a rumble. There was nothing sinister in the noise – but every unexpected sound was a blast of gunshots to Kelly’s imagination, and he almost dived after the pistol in an instinctive desire to die with his teeth in a throat.
“Assume the position, Tommy-boy,” called Doug in a hectoring voice. Rectangular headlights replaced the spotlight even more dazzlingly. Doug and whoever he’d brought along had driven through the open gate and poised there, waiting for their quarry to exit. Now they were using the car’s lights for illumination, the way somebody in Diyarbakir had lighted Mustapha and the alien the night they were gunned down.
Kelly turned to the ‘warehouse’ wall and gingerly permitted it to take some of his weight through his arms. The structure was less stable than it appeared – a roof contributed more to strength than any amount of bracing in the plane of the walls could do. To judge from the amount of weathering, however, this construct had survived at least a decade of wind and storms, and the wall only creaked when the veteran leaned against it.