Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  ‘He knows I’m the guy Tom Waverly wants to talk to.’

  Welch nodded.

  ‘Does he know that I’m working for the Company?’

  ‘A lot of things have changed since you quit, but we still maintain cover for all operatives. We told Mr Lar that you’re a forensic psychologist employed by our FBI, and you and Tom have history from working together on serious crimes in the Real. I doubt that Ed Lar believes it for a second, but he can’t question it publicly without causing a diplomatic incident.’

  ‘We have to pretend to be something we’re not, and the locals have to pretend that they don’t know we’re pretending.’

  ‘It’s a wicked old world.’

  ‘Do I need to talk to Ralph Kohler? Or to this local guy, Ed Lar?’

  Welch shook his head. ‘Ralph’s an attorney, a political guy. He’s done a lot of good work toward preventing this thing turning into a full-blown diplomatic crisis, but he’d be the first to admit that he doesn’t know anything about pounding the bricks. As for Mr Lar, we promised to keep him informed about the progress of your investigation and share any hot leads.’

  ‘And has he promised not to interfere?’

  ‘Not in so many words, but we made it clear that you’re an independent operator, and in any case he’s already badly overstretched by the manhunt. The locals are eager to catch Tom before we do. It’s not just the political fallout because Tom shot the mayor’s nephew; it’s also a matter of pride. They’ve set up running roadblocks, and checkpoints at train and bus stations. They’re making random stops in public places, they’re searching every hotel and rooming house in the area, and empty apartments and business places . . . They’ve even sent squads of Port Authority police to help us check every piece of luggage and freight due to go through the Turing gate.’

  ‘Even so, Mr Lar knows that Tom wants to talk to me. That makes me a hot lead, and he’d be a fool if he didn’t put a tail on me.’

  ‘Let’s worry about that when you need to get close to Tom.’

  ‘I want to work this as I see fit.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘And you’re, what? My partner, my line manager?’

  ‘My job is to deliver you safe and sound, and see that you get what you need to do the job. Other than that, I’m happy to keep out of your way. I gave up active service a while back.’

  ‘So did I,’ Stone said.

  Welch had booked him into the Plaza Hotel, a corner room on the fifth floor that overlooked the trees of Central Park. The horse-drawn carriages were plying their immemorial trade here as in all the other versions of New York that Stone had visited. A gallows - this was something he hadn’t seen before - stood in front of the Grand Army Plaza. He counted fifteen corpses, barefoot in grey pyjamas, placards with block printing he couldn’t quite read hung around their necks. Shaved heads, swollen faces black with congested blood. Two sailors posed while a third took their photograph.

  ‘The locals’ idea of justice,’ Welch said. He’d brought his tumbler of whiskey with him, and a cigarette drooped from the corner of his mouth as he sat on the edge of the bed and used his handkerchief to remove dried mud from his combat boots. ‘Spies and black-marketeers, mostly. They hang ’em on the Great Lawn in the park. Night rallies with flaring torches, speeches, loyalty pledges, marching bands, Girl Scouts selling cookies . . . the whole nine yards. Afterward, they display the bodies pour encourager les autres. They’ll hang Tom Waverly there if they get the chance. Why don’t you try on the suit, get rid of that hick-from-the-sticks look.’

  A black suit and a white shirt were laid out on the king-size bed, alongside black lace-up shoes, black socks, a cell phone, a billfold containing two thousand local dollars, ID and documentation that backed up Stone’s FBI cover story, a local driver’s licence, and an NYC Military Zone pass.

  Stone checked that the cell phone worked, asked if he could use it to contact the local office if he needed information.

  ‘My cell number is on speed-dial.’ Welch said. ‘Call me if you need to know anything.’

  ‘You aren’t coming with me?’

  ‘I have a meeting with General Grover, the local who’s in charge of security in the New York Military Zone. Ralph Kohler wants me to smooth his feathers, feed him bullshit about cooperation and full and frank exchange of information. As I said, this isn’t like the old days when we could do whatever the hell we wanted and make up some story to tell the locals afterward. We don’t coerce, we cooperate. Anyhow, you won’t be on your own. I’ve arranged a driver for you.’

  ‘I can drive myself.’

  ‘You think you can handle Manhattan traffic after three years in that back-to-nature sheaf? And if Ed Lar does have people dogging your tail, you’ll need someone with local knowledge to shake them if you want to go somewhere you don’t want them to know about.’ Welch watched Stone take his Colt .45 and shoulder rig out of the kitbag and added, ‘Are you seriously going to carry that?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘Jesus. Try to remember that you’re not working for Special Ops now, Adam. You have diplomatic cover, but you don’t have carte blanche. If you start shooting at people, I won’t be able to keep Ed Lar off your back.’

  Stone shrugged out of his checked shirt. ‘Back when you were working for Special Ops, I remember that you liked to boast that the only time you fired your weapon was on the ranges.’

  ‘I’m proud to say that’s still the case.’

  ‘I guess you don’t need to carry a piece into an embassy reception or a courtesy meeting with some local general, but I’ll be moving in different circles. Don’t worry, I promise I won’t shoot at anyone unless they start shooting at me.’ Stone buttoned up the white shirt. ‘Your file didn’t have anything about the Real version of Eileen Barrie. About whether or not Tom tried to make a hit on her.’

  ‘I haven’t been told everything about this operation, Adam. You know how it is - compartmentalisation and all the rest of that horse-shit. ’

  ‘Tom seems to be trying to kill off every doppel of the woman. So why wouldn’t he go after the Real version too? If he had any sense, he would have hit her first.’ Stone pulled on the suit trousers, sat down on the bed beside Welch to lace up his shoes. ‘Unless, that is, he’s trying to intimidate her. Or draw attention to her. Does he know her? Have they ever worked together on the same project?’

  Welch sighed theatrically. ‘You read everything in the file?’

  ‘Cover to cover.’

  ‘Then you know as much about that as me. And all I know is that the Company has decided that we don’t need to know. Maybe her work is classified, and we aren’t on the bigot list. Maybe the DCI’s office is trying to limit blowback. The point is, Tom is hiding out somewhere in this sheaf. You’re here to help find him. To help bring him in alive. Don’t get sidetracked by trying to figure out his motivation, or every angle of the operation.’

  ‘His motivation might lead him to me. She’s a scientist. A mathematician, ’ Stone said, shrugging into his shoulder rig. ‘In the Real, and in all the sheaves where she was killed. That has to have something to do with why Tom has been doing this.’

  ‘I guess that’s one of the first things they’ll want to ask him after you find him.’

  Stone stood up and pulled on the suit jacket. ‘Maybe it’s one of the first things I should ask him.’

  ‘That’s the spirit. How’s the fit?’

  ‘A little tight around the shoulders, but otherwise not bad. I’ve never met Ralph Kohler, but he has to be a confident son of a bitch, setting this up before he knew I’d agree to help.’

  ‘Was there any question you wouldn’t?’

  ‘How do I get to the murder scene? Can I use the limo?’

  Welch mashed his cigarette in the empty whiskey glass. ‘If you’re ready to go, I’ll ride down with you to the lobby.’

  In the elevator, Welch examined the knot of his tie in a mirror and said, ‘While I head off to cooperate with General
Grover, you can go find the ride I arranged for you. Walk over to Madison Avenue and go a block north to the corner of East 60th Street. There’ll be a yellow taxi parked with its sign unlit, a woman driver. Climb in, she’ll take you where you want to go.’

  ‘A taxi? That’s cute, David.’

  ‘Wait until you see the driver,’ Welch said, and blew into his cupped hand and sniffed his palm to check his breath.

  ‘As long as she keeps out of my way while I check the scene.’

  ‘She’ll do whatever you ask her to do. It goes without saying, by the way, that if you do find anything the locals missed, I want to hear about it before the locals do.’

  The elevator stopped and its door slid open to reveal the marble-floored lobby.

  Stone said, ‘Why would I want to tell the locals anything?’

  ‘I think I’m going to enjoy working with you again, Adam. You’re still a cowboy at heart, aren’t you?’

  Was he?

  Stone thought about that he walked toward his rendezvous. Like all of Dick Knightly’s cowboy angels, he’d been trained to work in deep cover in pre-contact sheaves, to blend in, to live as invisibly as possible while accumulating data for historical, political and economic profiles. Once, in the early days of Special Ops, before the first overt contact with the government of an alternate America, a woman at a party in Washington, DC, had walked up to Stone and said that she’d just bet fifty dollars with a girlfriend that he was a spy, and Stone had told her, no lie, that he spent most of his time in libraries. That was exactly what he’d done, back in the day. He’d gone through the mirror and ransacked libraries for all kinds of data - the failure rate of start-up companies, price and wage inflation, the ratio of the highest and lowest salaries in key companies, unemployment rates amongst white males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, the annual yields of cotton crops, winter wheat, soy beans. He’d tabulated prison terms for a variety of crimes, compared school-leaving ages of urban and rural whites and blacks, used fake academic or journalistic credentials to obtain interviews with CEOs and Ivy League professors about the state of the economy, identified prominent lawyers and preachers and political commentators. That was what all the cowboy angels in Special Ops had done in the early days, before the Real made its first overtures to governments in other sheaves. Before the covert actions, before the wars and revolutions, before the insurrections and terrorist reprisals.

  Stone had always preferred to work alone, but he’d always worked by the rules of the game.

  ‘You like to watch,’ Susan had said, a few months ago. They’d been walking home from a church social, Petey trailing a little way behind, singing one of his nonsense songs, cutting at weeds with a stick he’d picked up somewhere. ‘When you’re around other people, you like to watch what’s going on, don’t you?’

  ‘If you’ve been watching me, who is it that likes to watch?’

  ‘I’ve been taking notice of you,’ Susan said. ‘Noticing how you behave when you hang out with the other guys.’

  ‘Yeah? How do I behave?’

  ‘On the whole, you’re pretty quiet. Self-contained. The other guys whoop it up, they like to show off to each other, they always have an opinion about whatever it is they’re talking about. But you don’t say anything unless you have something to say. I don’t mean you’re afflicted with Allan King’s famous Yankee taciturnity, the man thinks every word costs him a dime. I mean you don’t bullshit.’

  ‘Mommy swore,’ Petey said.

  ‘And Mommy’s sorry for it, sweetie. She spent far too much of the afternoon talking with Nora Partridge, who has a kind heart but can never quite get to the point of what she’s trying to say. Adam isn’t like that, is he? When he says something, he says what he means, no more and no less.’

  ‘He likes to think about things,’ Petey said, and swiped the head off a milk-weed plant.

  Stone said, ‘Is this criticism or observation?’

  Susan smiled. ‘If I said you were aloof, maybe it would be a criticism. But you’re not. You’re watchful.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. Maybe I like to be aloof, but I don’t like to be watchful.’

  ‘The way you like trees, but not bushes?’

  ‘I like grass too. Flowers I can live without.’

  ‘Mom! You’re doing it again,’ Petey said. All summer he’d been driven to distraction by this word game, an open secret he wanted desperately to share, a code he couldn’t quite crack. That evening, Susan and Stone had teased and tantalised him all the way home with their preference for books over magazines, bulls over cows, hills over mountains.

  Watchful - Stone could live with that. Tom Waverly, though, was the poster boy for the cowboy angels. He preferred overt action to undercover research, flamboyance to restraint. He liked to push regulations and convention as far as they would go, and then push them a little further.

  ‘You’re a deep man pretending to be shallow,’ Marsha Mason had once told him, and he’d laughed, not at all offended. This had been at one of the infamous barbecues at the little house in the Maryland woods where Tom had lived with his wife and daughter. Its back yard had run down to a lake. One night, Tom had rowed out into the middle of the lake and let off fireworks while the ‘Nessun dorma!’ aria from Turandot played on speakers he’d set up amongst the trees. He’d stood up in the little boat with rockets and Roman candles exploding from his hands, whooping with glee.

  At age thirteen, Tom had spent a year in juvenile prison in California for stealing a car; at sixteen he had enlisted in the army, training as a sniper and taking courses in parachuting, martial arts and cryptography; at twenty-six he had been recruited by Dick Knightly into the CIA’s brand-new Directorate of Special Operations. He liked to play up his reputation as a hellraiser. He wore blue jeans and biker boots and a leather jacket with the sleeves ripped off. He rode a motorbike everywhere, a Norton Commando he’d restored himself. He did handstands on the backs of chairs, once did a backflip from a motel balcony into the swimming pool two storeys below. He read Rilke and Thoreau and Barth, sang along with tuneless gusto to opera and the folk music he’d discovered in the Nixon sheaf, the very same sheaf in which, a few years later, Stone had been supposed to kill a novelist in the middle of a popular uprising against an unpopular war in Southeast Asia.

  It had been one of twenty hits that had targeted counterculture lawyers, liberal politicians, journalists, and radical civil-rights workers ... and this novelist, who’d once run for Mayor of New York, a sometime journalist and rabble-rouser with powerfully expressed opinions, but still, Stone had wondered at the time, what could be so important about a man who wrote books for a living? But the Cluster crunched the data and constructed its probability models, the Company set up its covert actions, and its cowboy angels went to work without questioning their orders. In the end, Stone hadn’t made the hit after all; the whole operation had unravelled after one of the locals they were running, a bomb-maker, had managed to blow up a house in Greenwich Village. Six months later, work toward contact in that sheaf had been suspended indefinitely. The Nixon sheaf’s version of America had been well on its way to becoming the world’s only superpower, and the Cluster had calculated that the advantages of contact would be either negligible or negative.

  All officers in Special Ops had been trained to take the initiative, but Tom Waverly had possessed a bravura recklessness that had set him apart. And he still had it, Stone thought. Even though he must have known that the game was up when he saw that Nathan Tate was guarding the target, he’d gone right ahead with his plan. He’d shot and killed the doppel of Eileen Barrie, and he’d shot and killed Nathan Tate, and he’d got clean away from the scene. He still had it. Tracking him down wasn’t going to be easy, especially as the locals were going balls-out to find him first. The only edge Stone had was that Tom wanted to talk to him.

  A yellow taxi was parked where David Welch had said it would be. Stone walked around the block, moving with the flow of the crow
d, looking in shop windows and using his peripheral vision to try to spot likely tails, seeing only civilians with pinched faces and shuttered expressions, rowdy little groups of soldiers and sailors. He was concious of the weight of the Colt .45 in the holster under his left armpit. He passed a beggar being hassled by a pair of cops - the ragged guy, shiny burn scars disfiguring his face and scalp, kept trying to sidle away from the cops and they kept pushing him back against the wall with their nightsticks. People stepped past, eyes fixed elsewhere. A team of skeletal, shaven-headed men in orange coveralls hauled a wagon amongst the stop-and-go rush of military trucks, buses, taxis, bicycles. A lot of people were riding bicycles. Stone, grown used to a pace of life based on unmediated animal and human muscle, felt that everything was slightly speeded up, like one of those old hand-cranked silent movies.

  He crossed the street, doubled back the way he’d come. Although he hadn’t seen anyone dogging him, he was pretty sure that he was being followed. Probably by a tag team, almost impossible to spot. He walked to where the taxi was parked and climbed into the back. The driver, a young woman with a pale face and a mass of curly red hair turned to look at him through the scratched plastic divider.

  Stone hadn’t seen her for more than ten years, but he recognised her at once.

  Linda Waverly, Tom’s daughter.

  3

  ‘Welch put you up to this, didn’t he?’ Stone said. ‘The slick son of a bitch brought you through the mirror because he thought you might flush out your father.’

  ‘It isn’t like that at all,’ Linda Waverly said, and started the taxi and pulled away from the kerb. ‘When my father shot that woman, I was already working here. In this sheaf, in New York. I was taken off my job and grilled by Ralph Kohler’s people for six hours straight. They were going to send me home, but David Welch persuaded them to let me help out.’