Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  ‘Why I’m here,’ Welch said, ‘I happen to be working for the Directorate of Diplomatic Support in the sheaf where Tom made his last hit, where he’s locked in right now. The guy in charge of the investigation, Ralph Kohler, asked me to reach out to you because one of his men found a note at the scene.’

  ‘Tom left a note?’

  ‘Carved in the bark of the tree he used as a sniper’s position: I’ll talk to Stone.’

  ‘That’s it? You came all the way out here because someone who may or may not be Tom Waverly carved my name on a tree?’

  ‘I came here because Tom Waverly wants to talk to you, Adam. I know you and Tom had a bad falling-out over SWIFT SWORD, but I also know that he saved your life, once upon a time. Are you willing to try to save his?’

  Susan said, ‘After I sent Petey to find you, I asked Colonel Welch point blank why he was here, but the slippery son of a gun wouldn’t give a straight answer.’

  Stone said, ‘It’s how he is. Don’t take it personally.’

  ‘One minute you’re ploughing, the next you’re packing. So forgive me for being kind of curious.’

  Susan, slender and tousled in jeans and one of her dead husband’s shirts, its tails tied in a knot above her navel, had just climbed the ladder into Stone’s temporary living quarters in the barn’s hayloft. There was a single bed and a kitchen chair and a raw pine chest, an unglazed window that looked out across treetops toward the broad sweep of the Hudson and the Jersey shore. It was warm under the slanting ribs of the rough-hewn roof beams and smelled pleasantly of the straw stacked below. Stone had washed up and put on his Sunday chinos and his best checked shirt. He’d been packing, folding T-shirts into neat squares, when Susan had climbed into the loft. Now he smiled at her and said, ‘Are you mad at me?’

  ‘I understand why you couldn’t talk about this in front of your friend. And I’ll try to understand if you can’t tell me everything, but how about a hint or two?’

  ‘It really isn’t anything. They want me to help find someone.’

  ‘Someone ...’

  ‘An old friend who’s gotten himself into a little trouble. I want to help him, if I can. Not because I want to help David Welch.’

  Stone felt bad because he couldn’t tell Susan about the woman who had been murdered six different ways, about Nathan Tate and the policeman who’d been the nephew of the mayor of New York, about the manhunt. Less than an hour after David Welch had turned up, he was back inside the old world of evasion and half-truths, legends and lies.

  ‘And you’re going, just like that,’ Susan said. ‘He must be a very good friend.’

  ‘Actually, I’m not sure if we’re still friends. The last time we saw each other, we had a falling-out.’

  ‘Over some femme fatale, I hope.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, it was over foreign policy.’

  ‘Not quite as romantic.’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint. But we were good friends once upon a time, and I sort of owe him a favour.’

  ‘Is it going to be dangerous?’

  ‘He wants to talk to me. That’s all I’m going to do.’

  ‘This is what Welch told you?’

  ‘Your Mr Welch is definitely a slippery son of a gun, but I think he told me the truth, as far as it goes.’

  Susan pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. She’d cut it short at the beginning of summer, but now the dirty-blonde curls cascaded around her shoulders. ‘I’ve never asked about what you were doing when you met Jake, Adam, and I’m not going to start now. But I can’t help worrying that this is a lot more dangerous than making sure aid packages get to the right place, or whatever it was you did back then.’

  ‘This friend of mine wants to talk to me. That’s all it is.’

  A silence stretched between them, heavy with evasions and things unspoken, while Stone swiftly packed folded clothes, a wash-bag, and his Colt .45 automatic and shoulder rig inside his kitbag. As he was stuffing socks into nooks and crannies, Blackie, the farm’s Border collie, started to bark out in the yard. A few moments later, Stone heard the roar of the Jeep’s engine. David Welch was back from taking Petey for a ride.

  Susan said, ‘How long is this going to take?’

  ‘I don’t know. A couple of days if I’m lucky.’

  ‘Mr Wallace and his son are due Saturday.’

  ‘They want to bag a sabre-toothed cat. I haven’t forgotten, and I promise I’ll be back in time.’

  Susan narrowed her eyes, put her hands on her hips, and said in a playful, mock-tough voice, ‘You’d better be back, mister, or I’m going to have to find myself another partner.’

  ‘I’ll come back as soon as I can.’

  ‘Take care of yourself around that slippery Colonel Welch.’

  ‘You can bet that I’ll be watching my back every second.’

  Petey was making a lot of noise below, calling to Susan, telling her that the Jeep had gone as fast as anything.

  Susan told her son that she’d be right down, and smiled at Stone. ‘I guess we can manage without you for a little while.’

  Stone smiled back. ‘I know you can.’

  David Welch pretended not to watch when Susan hugged Stone and told him again to take care. Stone slung his kitbag into the back of the Jeep and climbed into the shotgun seat beside Welch, and the Jeep drove off down Broadway, laying white dust over the goldenrod and tall grasses that grew on either side.

  Stone didn’t look back. He believed that it would be bad luck if he did.

  2

  A streamlined, aluminium-skinned railcar coupled to a flatbed wagon was waiting at the little terminus on the far side of the East River ferry crossing. Stone helped David Welch lash the Jeep to the wagon, and the railcar rattled along the ninety-odd miles of single-track railroad that cut through the woods and bogs of Brooklyn and Long Island, past the settlements of Jamaica Bay, Rockville, Wantagh, Bay Shore and New Patchogue, to First Foot and the Turing gate. Stone had plenty of time to work through the file Welch had given him. He ate the packed lunch Susan had provided - home-baked biscuits, home-cured ham and pickles, hard-boiled eggs and an apple, one of the season’s first - and read reports by field officers and local police, studied photographs and forensic documentation. He wanted to have all the facts at his fingertips. If he was going to talk to Tom Waverly, he wanted to know everything the man had done.

  The first four assassinations had been staged to look like street robberies or home invasions gone bad. Eileen Barrie had been killed by shots to the head from a small-calibre handgun, by a knife-thrust to the heart, by garrotting: murders that were up close and personal. Then, after someone in the Company had put two and two together and every surviving version of Eileen Barrie had been given protection, the subsequent murders had been textbook examples of executive actions. The car bomb that had killed her outright but left the officer sitting next to her unharmed except for superficial burns and burst eardrums. And the latest killing which, with its combination of careful planning, patience and split-second action, had Tom Waverly’s fingerprints all over it.

  When he’d been working for the Company, Tom had specialised in assassination. He’d once hiked through a forest and set up a position in a tree and for three days had focused on the window of a house, waiting for his target to show for just a second. He’d once lain all day on the flat roof of an office building in the August heat of Miami, still as a basking snake under the ghillie blanket that hid him from police helicopters while he’d watched the front of the court-house, killing his target with a single shot as a phalanx of bodyguards hustled the man across the sidewalk toward his limo. Stone wondered if Tom had turned freelance and was killing Eileen Barrie’s doppels to order, or if he was working off some kind of massive personal grudge. But although the file contained comprehensive summaries of the circumstances and methodology of each murder, there was nothing, not so much as a single speculative sentence, about possible motivations for attempting to eliminate Eileen Barrie from ev
ery known sheaf.

  The railcar sounded its horn. Stone glanced out of the window and saw a familiar cluster of wind generators standing proud on a low hill, their sixty-foot triple-bladed props lazily revolving, glimpsed the roofs of the little town of First Foot through a scrim of pine trees. The railcar rattled past the station’s single platform, entered the long loop that led to the Turing gate, and began to pick up speed: trains always ran through gates as fast as possible, to minimise the power expenditure needed to keep them open. Two white horses in a field briefly chased after it, heads down, manes rippling, and it left them behind and sped past a coal-black locomotive with a flared chimney and cowcatcher that stood on a spur, rushed down a steep grade in a cutting and plunged into the tunnel at the far end.

  Although Stone braced for it, the black flash that pounded in his head, the knockout punch of collapsing probability functions, was every bit as bad as he remembered. Then the railcar emerged into daylight, drawing away from a row of two dozen artificial mounds, each mound turfed over and pierced with a short tunnel, each tunnel the entrance to a Turing gate, each gate a portal to a different sheaf, a different alternate history.

  There were bigger interchanges at Chicago, San Diego and White Sands, but the Brookhaven interchange was the oldest. It was where the Many Worlds theory had been experimentally validated when the first Turing gate, a mere hundred nanometers across, had been forced open in the high-energy physics laboratory in 1963, where the first man to travel to another sheaf had taken his momentous step in 1966, and where the first cloned gate had been produced in 1969.

  Cloning gates using symmetry-breaking technology based on the Feynman-Schwinger-Dyson n-manifold manipulation was the only way of providing multiple points of entry into any sheaf. The physicists and mathematicians who developed the first Turing gates had quickly discovered that each time a gate accessed a new sheaf, a stochastic energy-horizon phenomenon created a unique quantum state or signature that no other gate could ever reproduce. This so-called quantum censorship principle meant that only one gate could link the Real with a particular sheaf, and that link would be lost forever if the gate was shut down. Although it was theoretically possible to produce secondary links via an intermediate sheaf - to travel from the Real to the First Foot sheaf via the Nixon sheaf, for instance - it was impossible in practise, because locating a particular sheaf in a multiverse of possible sheaves was, as Murray Gell-Mann, one of the leaders of the original Brookhaven Project, had put it, like finding a needle in a haystack the size of the Universe. Before cloning technology had been developed, there had been only a single, fragile link between the Real and any other sheaf. Afterward, primary gates were locked away in a facility more secure than Fort Knox, cloned copies were deployed in large interchanges and clandestine facilities, colonies were established in a dozen wild sheafs, and the Real was able to take control of the destiny of other, less fortunate Americas and establish the Pan-American Alliance.

  There were more than a hundred cloned gates in the Brookhaven interchange, linking twenty-two different sheaves to the Real. Stone saw a long freight train drawing out of a grassy mound like a chain of scarves from a magician’s sleeve, saw other trains waiting in sidings or on loop roads or loading bays of the marshalling yard. Strings of passenger cars and strings of freight cars, well wagons loaded with shrouded tanks and helicopters and APCs, reefers, grain hoppers, tank cars.

  AH-6 ‘Little Bird’ helicopters, quick and manoeuvrable as humming birds and armed with rockets and .50-calibre machine guns, swooped and hovered overhead, checking each arriving train. More than three years after President Carter had put an end to empire-building and declared that the business of the Pan-American Alliance was not war but reconciliation and reconstruction, the Real was still vulnerable to terrorist attacks by misguided patriots and militias and fanatics loyal to former regimes in client sheaves.

  The railcar rocked over a gleaming web of rails under signal catenaries, gaining speed as it headed toward a tunnel set in the grassy mound covering another gate. Again the sudden plunge, the sharp judder, the momentary black headache, and then the railcar was slowing under a sky sheeted with low clouds, sliding into a station under a geodesic dome of grimy white Teflon.

  The air under the dome was hot and wet, and tasted of diesel smoke. Crowds moved everywhere beneath banners hung from scaffold towers.

  BROOKHAVEN: GATEWAY FOR RECONSTRUCTION

  AND RECONCILIATION.

  DEMOCRACY AND SOVEREIGNTY FOR ALL AMERICANS.

  ONE NATION UNDER MANY SKIES.

  STILL WINNING THE WAR.

  Soldiers in all kinds of uniforms (Stone wondered if most were recruits from post-nuclear-war sheaves, as in the old days) were outnumbered by gaggles of fresh-faced Reconstruction and Reconciliation Corps volunteers in jeans and Planning For Peace T-shirts. A team of wise-cracking construction engineers sat on their tool boxes, watching the human parade. A column of troops in black coveralls and what looked like silver motorcycle helmets marched past at double time. Soldiers and civilians milled around kiosks where girls in Stars-and-Stripes T-shirts were handing out free cigarettes and coffee and sandwiches. As he followed Welch toward a turnstile checkpoint tucked under the dome’s white curved flank, Stone thought that the noise under the dome was like the cackling of the sky-blotting flocks of geese that flew down the Hudson ahead of the first winter blizzards.

  At the checkpoint’s steel and glass booth, Welch pushed the sheaf of travel order papers into a slot. The marine inside the booth checked the papers and returned them through the slot with two square white plastic badges - dosimeters. A light overhead turned from red to green, the turnstile unlocked with a heavy clunk, and Stone and Welch walked out into grey light, warm gritty air, and the smell of recent rain. Aid workers were climbing into a long line of yellow school buses. In the distance, the superstructures of troop ships and cargo ships rose above cranes and warehouses.

  A black stretch Cadillac equipped with smoked bulletproof glass and anti-mine flooring drove them down the Long Island Expressway toward Manhattan. Welch handed one of the dosimeters to Stone. ‘We’ve done a lot of rebuilding, but we can’t do much about the radiation.’

  ‘What happened here?’

  The file hadn’t given Stone much information about the Johnson sheaf’s pre-contact history.

  ‘They had themselves a Second World War in the middle of the century,’ Welch said. ‘The US, Britain, and Soviet Russia defeated Nazi Germany and Japan, a cold war developed between the free world and the Soviets. In 1962, the Soviets stationed missiles in Cuba, which was part of the Communist bloc. After a standoff, their premier, a fellow by the name of Khrushchev, agreed to withdraw the missiles, but a bunch of high-ranking military officers assassinated him and staged a coup. The Soviet Navy tried to break a shipping blockade around Cuba and the President, one of the Kennedys, responded by sinking several of their ships and threatening to invade. The Soviets took out Guantánamo Bay and Miami with tactical nukes, and it stepped up from there.’ Welch was examining the cut-glass decanters in the little drinks cabinet. ‘We have generic whiskey, generic brandy, generic gin, but no ice, and no mixers. I guess we’ll have to rough it.’

  ‘Nothing for me.’

  ‘It helps sluice the radiation out of you,’ Welch said, and slopped an inch of amber whiskey into a tumbler.

  ‘I guess New York got hit,’ Stone said.

  ‘Plenty of places got hit. The Soviets threw everything they could from Cuba before the US nuked it down to bedrock. Short-range missiles took out most of Florida, New Orleans and Atlanta; sub-launched missiles hit Washington, DC , and most of the West Coast. And a fair number of long-range bombers got through a defensive line above the Arctic Circle, too. They hit Detroit and Chicago, they hit Boston, and two of them hit New York. One dropped its load on the Brooklyn Naval Yard, but the bomb didn’t go off. The second was shot up by a fighter plane, blew itself up over the Hudson, and took out most of downtown. The bomb it was
carrying wasn’t big, twelve kilotons or so, but it was dirty, jacketed with iodine-125 and cobalt- 60. And that’s why we’re wearing dosimeters more than twenty years later.’

  The limo overtook a column of army trucks. It sped past a gang of shaven-headed men in orange coveralls lengthening a trench alongside the Expressway under the watchful gaze of soldiers with assault rifles.

  Stone said, ‘It looks like they’re still at war here.’

  ‘A little local difficulty with the European Economic Community, and Australia and Japan. The Soviets came off worst in WW3. A good deal of Russia is still uninhabitable, and the rest is a bunch of outlaw states run by criminals and warlords. But America is in pretty bad shape too. The Europeans and Japanese provided aid, but it came with all kinds of strings, and we arrived in the middle of a resurgence of isolationist politics and some serious sabre-rattling on both sides. The locals were as grateful as hell to get help from fellow Americans, but the Europeans took serious exception, especially when we set up trade barriers and seized their assets in the States. Right now, we’re fighting a nasty little war for control of Texas and the Gulf. Canada’s staying out of it, and so is China - we’re feeding China a little technology in exchange for neutrality - but despite our best diplomatic efforts, the Europeans aren’t backing down. There’s some internal opposition against us, too. Secessionists in the South, Midwest survivalists . . . In short, the usual set of grudges.’ Welch took a sip of whiskey, made a face, and said, ‘I guess I should tell you about rules of procedure. The guy in charge of our side of the investigation, Ralph Kohler, told me to make sure you got anything you want. I assume you have no problem with that. As for the locals, we had to inform Ed Lar, the local FBI officer in charge of the manhunt, that you were being brought in. These days, protocol demands full and frank cooperation with the locals.’