Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  ‘Of course I’m right. Ed Lar will have had his psychologists up all night, working out ways to play Tom, writing scripts for different scenarios. But you’re his friend, Adam. You don’t need any scripts or coaching. All you have to do is let him talk. Encourage him, be sympathetic, agree to anything he demands. Above all, convince him that you’re on his side. It shouldn’t be that difficult. After all, he took some trouble to reach out to you. It was unfortunate Ed Lar found out about the matchbook, but the important thing is that you found it in the first place. It’s a bona fide cry for help if ever I saw one.’

  ‘The locals had me under close surveillance,’ Stone said, resenting the way Welch had twisted things around. ‘They knew I’d found something and I wasn’t in a position to deny it.’

  Welch folded another forkful of pancake into his mouth and said around it, ‘Ed Lar will want you to keep Tom on the line long enough to get a trace. He’ll want you to get Tom to agree to a meeting, and he’ll probably suggest a couple of possible venues. Cooperate with him as far as you can, but remember that the locals don’t have Tom’s best interests in mind. They don’t want to bring him in alive. They want to put him in clear view of one of their sharpshooters.’

  Stone was worried that David Welch - or the people for whom Welch was working - didn’t have Tom Waverly’s best interests in mind either. He had already decided that he would meet up with Tom on his own terms, no one else’s. See what his old friend had to say for himself, and take it from there.

  He said, ‘I guess you have a plan to get around the locals.’

  Welch picked up his cigarette and took a drag. His smile so white in his tanned face, so sly. He was in his element, playing one side against another. Stone was sure that he knew a lot more about Tom Waverly’s killing spree than he’d so far let on, but was also sure that, if challenged, Welch would deny everything without altering his smile by so much as a fraction of an inch.

  ‘There’s a farm out in the sticks we used for covert entry into this sheaf before we made ourselves known to the government,’ Welch said. ‘The gate’s no longer there, but we still own the place. Tom knows all about it. When he calls you at this pay phone, you should suggest meeting him there at the old farm. He’ll know exactly what you mean, but the locals won’t have clue one. Tell him you’ll be there for him, alone and unarmed. Tell him you’ll go in bare-ass naked if that’s what he wants. And if he insists on another venue, make sure he understands that you can’t guarantee that it won’t be compromised by the locals.’

  Stone said, because he knew that Welch would be suspicious if he didn’t seem suspicious, ‘Will this old farm be compromised? Will there be Company sharpshooters waiting for Tom to show?’

  ‘Remember what the Old Man used to say about working in the field? That thing he claimed to have borrowed from Kipling?’

  ‘ “Not to trust anyone: that is the whole of the law.” ’

  ‘There you go. I understand why you’re anxious, Adam. I don’t blame you. But you have to believe me when I say that the Company really does want Tom to come in safely.’

  ‘Is that because he knows something about this internal problem that’s causing so much trouble right now?’

  Welch skated right past that. ‘Listen to what Tom has to say. He’ll probably assume the phone line is tapped, but make sure he knows it anyway. Float the idea of meeting at the old farm. And if you have to abort the call for any reason, make sure that Tom knows why. Make sure he knows you’ll be waiting for him to get back in contact.’

  ‘Or I could tell him I’m holding a gun to his daughter’s head. Tell him she’ll get it if he doesn’t surrender himself.’

  ‘I guess you’re still sore about my little surprise. Listen, Adam, if I thought threatening Linda would bring Tom in from the cold, I’d be happy for you to do it, and I’m sure Linda would agree to it, too. But Tom wants to come in, so it isn’t necessary. What we have to do is make sure he can do it safely.’ Welch looked at something behind Stone, then glanced at his Rolex and said, ‘He’s a little early. Anxious to get in his five cents’ worth, I bet.’

  Stone turned and saw Ed Lar bearing down on them, leading a small group of civilians and men in police uniforms through the ranks of empty tables.

  ‘Listen to what they have to say, but don’t take any shit from them,’ Welch said.

  ‘I don’t plan on taking shit from anyone,’ Stone said.

  The number Tom Waverly had written on the matchbook cover was for one of the pay phones that stood in a short row on the triangular traffic island of Duffy Square, at the northern end of Times Square. Stone sat on the plinth of the life-sized statue of George M. Cohan, right in front of the phones, leafing through a copy of the New York Times. He was wearing his black suit, an earpiece and a throat microphone. A radio transmitter was clipped to his belt. As he turned pages, the idle chatter of Ed Lar’s chase team whispered in his earpiece. Traffic shuddered past on either side, a stop-go avalanche of metal and exhaust fumes and braying horns. Yellow taxis, buses, army trucks repainted in the blue-and-white livery of the Reconstruction and Reconciliation Corps, a scattering of private vehicles. Swarms of cyclists blew whistles and rang bells as they wove through stationary lines of vehicles, shot red lights, and skimmed past clots of pedestrians.

  This version of Times Square had an old-fashioned, down-at-heel look. The façades of old theatres were not yet hidden behind video displays, news headlines still chased around the famous zipper sign, and the New York Times still occupied the elegant Italianate building at the southern end. Stone flashed on another time, another sheaf - bodies scattered amongst rubble and craters across a wide plaza fringed by massive Greek-revival buildings, half of them in flames, all of them badly damaged by fire and tank shells, grey air tasting of cordite and rotten meat. Better to think of the birch woods of New Amsterdam. Better to think of Susan. She was probably ploughing that half-acre right now, slim and strong and capable in jeans and one of her dead husband’s shirts . . .

  Stone wanted to believe that in a few days he’d be back in the First Foot sheaf, back with Susan and Petey. That he’d never have to leave again. He didn’t have David Welch’s cockeyed optimism, but he did have Linda waiting for him in a car downtown, and last night in his room he’d worked out three different ways of escaping the locals’ surveillance, their sharpshooters and heavy squads. All he had to do was drop out of sight, arrange a face-to-face with Tom Waverly and, if Welch was right, if Tom was looking for an exit strategy, find a way to bring him in under the radar. There were a lot of holes in the scheme, most especially Tom’s motivation for wanting to contact him in the first place, but Stone had a good feeling about this. He was pumped up and tamped down. He was in his element, doing what he’d been trained to do. A player back in the game.

  From his perch at the feet of Broadway’s Yankee Doodle Dandy, he could see two of Ed Lar’s men dressed as Con-Ed workers busily doing no work whatsoever around a manhole flagged off from the traffic. The jump-out crew were inside a van with Con-Ed decals parked nearby, watching Stone through the two-way glass in the back windows and the periscope hidden in the roof ventilator. The guy selling roasted nuts from a cart on the corner of 45th Street was one of Ed Lar’s men too; so was the panhandler pestering passers-by under the Shubert Theater’s awning. Ed Lar, David Welch, the police psychologist, and two police captains were in the coffee shop of the Edison Hotel, nursing two-way radios and a feed from the phone tap.

  Stone, the focus of all this attention, passed the time by working out this sheaf’s recent history from the newspaper headlines. He didn’t need to read much beyond the front-page leads, which were all about the ongoing war in Texas. A diagram showed the state of the battle lines. Arrows bent toward Austin. Apparently there was a good chance that combined American forces could push the European Community Army into Mexico by Christmas. There were wars in Saudi Arabia and Persia, too. Shah commits tanks, fifty thousand
men to the Northern Front.

  The same old same old. Jimmy Carter was trying to bring peace to Americas in a dozen sheaves, but in most of them he was having a hard time making it stick.

  Although primary Turing gates accessed new sheaves at random, so far they had only opened onto those where history had diverged some time in the last fifty years, or where there were no humans at all, only apemen - so-called wild sheaves, where the ancestors of modern humans had long ago died out, and other primate species had begun to evolve a limited form of intelligence instead. No one had ever come up with a convincing theory to explain why no gate had ever accessed a sheaf where America was still a British colony, or where it had been settled by the Chinese or the Spanish, much less truly exotic sheafs where dinosaurs still ruled the Earth, say, or where intelligent squid gardened the oceans. Some historians suggested that there were no exotic histories because truly global history hadn’t emerged until the twentieth century, and only global history could affect the minds of a majority of the human population and cause change on the scale needed to create a new sheaf. They pointed to the variety of alternate Americas that had suffered atomic war and claimed that it was the effect of history on mass consciousness that mattered, not the actions of any single individual; that so-called great men were shaped by history, not the other way around; that histories accessed by Turing gates were variations on a limited number of themes because their histories were those most likely to happen.

  Physicists disagreed. They said that quantum theory did not distinguish between the path of a photon and the course of an atomic war; that while most divergent histories lasted less than a picosecond, a random few would always survive, accumulating differences until collapse back to their original state was no longer possible. Anything that could happen would happen, somewhere or other, but access to an infinite variety of sheaves was limited by a mapping problem. The multiverse was like a rubber sheet that had been stretched and warped and crumpled into a ball; it wasn’t surprising that all the Turing gates opened so far connected with sheaves that were either similar to the Real or devoid of human occupation, because those two types of sheaf happened to enjoy a close topological relationship with the Real, and so were the easiest to reach. In time, as the volume of computational space explored by quantum computers increased, new Turing gates would be able to connect to more distant and more exotic sheaves.

  Some people believed that this had already happened: there were plenty of rumours of secret facilities where gates opened onto sheaves beyond human imagination or understanding. But this was the stuff of pulp fiction, a pseudoscientific fantasy on a par with the crackpot theories that access to new sheaves was controlled by aliens or by quantum computers that had secretly evolved self-awareness, or that reality was nothing more than a game spun by inhuman hyperintelligences living in the distant future, our children’s children’s children reaching back into their past and manipulating their ancestors, jealously guarding their time line . . .

  Stone checked his watch, turned a page of the newspaper. It seemed that Elvis Presley and his fourth wife were separating.

  Lar’s voice said in his ear, ‘He’s late.’

  ‘Maybe your fake Con-Ed workers scared him off,’ Stone said, and the pay phone rang.

  Lar said, ‘Stations, everyone. Go ahead, Mr Stone. Answer the damn thing.’

  As soon as Stone spoke his name into the receiver, Tom Waverly said, ‘Corner of 44th and Eighth. You have three minutes.’

  Stone ran, dodging through bumper-to-bumper traffic with Lar yelling in his ear and the beggar and two men from the jump-out crew chasing after him. The Con-Ed van sounded its horn, trying to force its way past a column of R&R Corps trucks; 44th Street was one-way, and Stone was running against the direction of the traffic. Lar was still yelling in his ear. Stone ripped out the earpiece and peeled off the throat mike as he rounded the corner and spotted a phone booth. The phone inside was ringing. He snatched it up and took a breath that hurt his throat and said, ‘I’m here.’

  ‘You’re out of condition,’ Tom Waverly said. ‘Do you have friends or are you alone?’

  One of the jump-out guys caught up with Stone, breathing hard. His partner and the fake beggar were some way behind.

  ‘I have a few friends, nothing serious,’ Stone said into the phone.

  ‘Tell them to stay back for the next leg or that’s it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Inside the bus terminal,’ Tom Waverly said. ‘By the men’s restroom on the second floor. It’s only a couple of blocks. A former high-school running-track star like you should be able to make it inside two minutes.’

  ‘Tom—’

  ‘The clock’s started,’ Tom Waverly said, and the line went dead.

  Stone caught the jump-out guy’s arm. ‘He’s playing telephone tag. If you follow me, the deal’s off.’

  The man repeated this into his cell phone, listened for a moment, then shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Stone, I have to—’

  Stone caught him on the side of the jaw with an uppercut. The man fell down and Stone shook the sting from his knuckles and took off along Eighth Avenue, running between slow-moving, nose-to-tail lanes of trucks and cars and taxis. He could feel his shirt sticking and unsticking to his back. The soft tar of the road slapped the thin soles of his shoes. Soldiers packed into the back of a flatbed truck cheered him on. A cyclist swerved to avoid him and slammed into the back of a taxi. Stone jerked the transmitter from his belt and dropped it in a trash basket as he ran through the intersection at 42nd Street and charged into the grimy monolith of the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

  The second-floor concourse was full of buses and lines of soldiers and civilians. Stone, breathing like a broken steam engine, sweat stinging his eyes, saw the sign for the restrooms and bulled his way through the crowd and the noise of buses backing up, the harsh stink of diesel fumes. A young soldier was talking into one of the phones. Stone grabbed the receiver from him, heard only the dial tone. The soldier got in his face, Stone pulled his pistol and told him to get lost, and another phone started to ring. Stone snatched it up and said, ‘It wasn’t anyone. Some soldier.’

  Tom Waverly said, ‘Remember our last job together, in the McBride sheaf?’

  Stone’s blood was thumping in his head. His entire body was slippery with sweat. ‘It’s kind of hard to forget.’

  ‘Remind me of the name of the guy who whispered in Jack Walker’s ear.’

  ‘It was a blind woman, she went by the name of Molly Gee. Listen to me a minute,’ Stone said, speaking quickly because he was scared that Tom would hang up before he got it all out. ‘David Welch wants me to tell you to meet up at the old farm, but I know he’ll have a snatch squad lying in wait there. So I’ve made arrangements to get out from under and blow off any tail. We can arrange to meet anywhere you want, Tom. All you have to do is name a time and place and I’ll be there. No wire, no backup, just you and me for as long as you like.’

  ‘I knew I could rely on you, Adam. You always were an honest soldier.’

  ‘I made you a serious offer, Tom. If this is about having fun, playing me, playing the Company, maybe we should forget about it.’

  Stone had his back to the phone booth with the steel-wrapped cord over his shoulder and the receiver jammed against the side of his face as he scanned the grimy, crowded concourse. Buses idling under the low concrete ceiling. People boarding buses, people climbing off buses, people sitting behind the windows of buses. No sign of Tom Waverly. No sign of any of Lar’s soldiers either, but Stone knew that they wouldn’t stay back for ever.

  Tom Waverly’s voice said in his ear, ‘This is about making sure things come out right. Let’s go back to the McBride sheaf. After I came for you, while we were waiting to be brought out, I told you something I’ve never told anyone else. Remember?’

  Stone blanked for a moment. ‘What is this, Tom, you don’t know who you’re talking to?’

  ‘If you can’t remember what I told y
ou before the helicopters came to extract us, I’ll have to hang up.’

  ‘We talked about a lot of things. I was lying on the ground, bleeding hard, and you were telling me to hold on, that everything was going to be okay. Which worried the hell out of me, because I thought you thought I was dying. Listen, Tom—’

  ‘I told you about the orphanage, and that’s the only clue you’re going to get.’

  A memory surfaced. Stone said, ‘You broke into the orphanage office one time, and looked up your file. You found out who your mother was.’

  ‘I found out where she lived, too. Remember that? Where she lived, where I was born. Don’t say the name of the place, just tell me that you remember.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘In this sheaf, my father did the right thing and married my mother. They still live in that little town. My doppel, too. I want you to go there right now, Adam. There’s a motel, the Crest Inn, just north of the railroad tracks. Wait for me there. If you’re alone, I’ll come talk to you.’

  ‘I’ll be there. One more thing—’

  But Stone was talking to the dial tone, and there was a commotion by the stairs on the far side of the concourse. The fake beggar and a posse of uniformed cops were pushing through the crowds, heading toward him. He dropped the phone and ran in the opposite direction.

  6

  Stone took the A train to Penn Station. The station’s original Belle Époque building, an elaborate reworking of the Roman Baths of Caracalla, had been demolished to make way for an expansion of Madison Square Gardens in the Real, but it was still intact in this sheaf. In the upscale outdoor sports store that anchored one corner of the grand arcade, Stone purchased two sets of clothing, two pairs of hiking boots, and a canvas rucksack, and changed into a brown cord shirt, blue jeans and an imported, eye-wateringly expensive waterproof jacket, then dumped his suit and shoes in a trash basket and rode the subway four stops along Seventh Avenue.