Free Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels by David Drake Page B

civilian. “I know how it is.” His skin was flashing hot and dry in pulses that came and went as his heart beat. “What do they say about my chances of getting the job done?” he asked, wondering if his voice sounded as odd to the driver as it seemed to his own ears.
    “Look, sir,” Phillips said in sudden concern. “I didn’t mean they were talking about—whatever you and the general have on.” The driver was frowning, dividing his attention between his passenger and the traffic. “General Pedler’s been playing that one real close, I think. That is—I’ve heard a lot about you in the past couple days, Mr. Kelly, but it’s all been about what a mean SOB you are. Not whatever you’re doing.”
    Kelly laughed in a combination of relief and irony. “Yeah, I’ve been acting ill as a denned bear,” he agreed. “Could just be that’s the way I am, too.” Phillips had turned down the narrow Faubourg St. Jacques, between the massive and ancient hospital complexes of Port Royal and Cochin. Either the pedestrians had a somber look or Kelly’s mind gave them one. He wouldn’t have been alive himself without a damn good surgeon and all the help that science and centuries of other surgeons trying to improve on past practice could give. Even so, hospitals always reminded Kelly more of death than salvation. These, with their 17th Century stonework blackened and corroded by soot, gave him the creeps even worse than most such places did.
    “But it could also be . . .” Kelly continued. He was looking out his window at the domes and colonnades of the Paris Observatory, not toward the man to whom he was speaking. “It could also be that I’m scared, and if I’m a big enough bastard, then nobody else may notice how scared I am. Could just be.”
    “Everybody gets scared,” the driver said, relaxing a little over the wheel. “You aren’t the sort to lock up when you get scared, are you? So what’s it matter?”
    “Sure,” Kelly agreed, “sure. The matter is that they want me to do something I’ve never done before. I’m not sure anybody could handle the job, and I swear to God I don’t see how I can. I’m over my head and I don’t mean a little bit.”
    They were waiting to turn on the Boulevard St. Jacques, their view of the Place blocked by the closed deuce and a half van ahead of them. The driver turned and looked steadily at Kelly. “If you really thought that,” he said, “you’d have told them to stuff the job, wouldn’t you? You’ll be all right, Mr. Kelly.”
    Traffic and the sedan began moving again. Kelly laughed, as pleased to be flattered as the next man. After a moment, though, he said with whimsey in only the overtones, “But you know why I didn’t? Because they fired me five years ago, booted my ass out of the—well, it’s no secret, the NSA. They couldn’t give me a damned thing that mattered after that, not a damned thing . . . except a chance to ram that termination back down their throats. And that’s what they offered me, that chance. Can’t lose, after all. If I pull it off, they were dopes to fire me. And if I screw up, well, I don’t have to worry about that or any other goddam thing ever again.”
    Phillips did not speak as he took the sedan around the fountain of the traffic circle and south at increasing speed down the Avenue d’ltalia. He genuinely was not in a hurry. None the less, the mass of traffic jostling for position demanded the driver’s skills and awoke the aggressiveness that honed those skills. “Were you,” he said at last as he tucked behind the bumper of a Jaguar, “hitting the sauce a little heavier than they liked?”
    Kelly glanced up at him sharply. “They do talk, don’t they?” he said with something like a smile. Then, “No, then I—I wasn’t very much of a drinker, to tell the truth. It was. . . . Well, I met a girl in Venice when I was back in port, pretty and she, she seemed to like me. I liked her, I—well.” Kelly cleared