Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  ‘My little girl wouldn’t turn me in.’

  The siren was growing louder, getting closer.

  ‘Come with me, Tom. I can get you out of this.’

  ‘I wish you could.’

  Stone knew with sudden cold certainty what Tom Waverly was planning. ‘Let me help you. We’ll talk everything through, figure out what to do.’

  ‘It isn’t any big thing. A couple of gates, a clandestine research facility, a question of delivering a few good men and a few megatons to the right place at the right time . . . You don’t believe me. You think I’m crazy. You want to know more, ask Welch about Operation GYPSY. Ask Kohler.’

  ‘I’m not here to pass judgement on you, Tom.’

  Blue lights whirled beyond the trees at the edge of the cemetery.

  ‘We did some good work together, Adam. That’s really why I wanted you to come out here. Because here at the end I’ve become a sentimental son of a bitch. Because I know you’re a good, capable operator. Because I know you’ll help Linda.’

  Stone shifted his stance, lifting onto the balls of his feet. Sweat pricked his palms. ‘Don’t do this to me, Tom.’

  ‘Listen to her. Trust her. Help her.’

  ‘I won’t let you do this to me.’

  ‘I wish I could have told you everything. I wish I could have told Linda everything. But I’m pretty sure this is the way it has to be,’ Tom said.

  Stone made his move, but although Tom was sick and drunk, and much slower and weaker than he’d been in the good old days when he’d trained the rest of the cowboy angels in hand-to-hand combat, he was still a formidable opponent. He pivoted as Stone crashed into him, used Stone’s momentum to swing him around and send him sprawling, and gave him a love tap on the back of his head with the grip of the .38 as he went down. Stone rolled, came up in a crouch, dizzy and dazed, his head ringing from the blow. He saw Tom stick the .38 under his chin, saw an orange spark and heard the shot. Something spattered across the grass and Tom collapsed across the grave of his doppel.

  As Stone lifted his friend’s wrist, trying and failing to find a pulse, a spotlight ignited in the dark beyond the cemetery. Its beam swept across rows of headstones, flared in his eyes. He let go of Tom Waverly’s wrist and stood up slowly, raising his hands above his head.

  11

  By the time David Welch arrived, in the first of two Company helicopters that touched down on the green in front of the church, the scene had turned into a circus. Police vehicles, a pair of ambulances, and the town’s fire truck were parked nose-to-tail alongside the cemetery. State troopers and sheriff’s deputies were holding back a crowd of rubbernecking citizens in dressing gowns and overcoats. The county sheriff had arrived, his uniform buttoned over pyjamas, and was threatening to arrest Stone for refusing to cooperate.

  Welch turned his charm on the sheriff and shook hands with the town constable. As far as the locals were concerned, the man was the hero of the hour. Despite being handcuffed, he’d managed to break down the door of the cupboard in which he’d been locked by Stone and Tom Waverly, and put out a call on his radio that had sent every available police officer racing to his aid. Welch listened to his story, shook his hand again and said something that made him smile, then took Stone aside and asked for his version of events.

  When Stone was done, Welch said, ‘We didn’t want it to go down like this, but I guess we’ll have to play it as it lays.’

  ‘Meaning I screwed the pooch, so I’ll be blamed for any blowback,’ Stone said.

  ‘You’re upset. It’s completely understandable.’

  ‘Tom shot himself right in front of me. Of course I’m upset. But that doesn’t mean I can’t think straight or see what’s going on.’

  A white sedan drew up and Linda Waverly and a woman in a black skirt suit climbed out. When she spotted Stone, Linda broke away from her escort and ran to him and started to hit him, hard shots to his ribs and breastbone.

  ‘Tell me the locals shot him! Tell me it was some fucking Company sharpshooter!’

  Stone caught her wrists and told her how sorry he was.

  Her hot gaze searched his face for a moment. Then she let him gather her into his arms and said in a fierce whisper, ‘You have to make sure we leave this sheaf together.’

  ‘It’s over, Linda. I did what I could, and I’m sorrier than I can say that it wasn’t good enough, but there it is. It’s over.’

  ‘It isn’t over. Not yet. Promise you’ll come with me, Mr Stone. Please. Help me help my father.’

  ‘What did he ask you to do, Linda? Back at the motel, after he asked me to leave the room, what kind of story did he spin?’

  Linda had been convinced that the only way to save her father’s life was to turn him over to the Company. That was why she’d told Welch about Stone’s plan. That was why she’d worn a bug. And now, after she’d spent a few minutes alone with Tom, she was asking Stone to go on the run with her.

  ‘I can’t explain everything, Mr Stone,’ she said. ‘Not yet. But if you come with me, if you trust me, you can help me make things right.’

  ‘Whatever it was, you should give it up. It can’t hurt him now. It can only hurt you.’

  Linda shook her head and pulled free, saying loudly, ‘You let him die, you son of a bitch!’

  Right behind Stone, Welch said, ‘I’m truly sorry to have to ask this, Linda, but the local ME wants you to identify your father’s body.’

  Stone told Welch to give them a few minutes, but Linda said she wanted to get it over with. Her gaze met Stone’s for a moment, cool and determined and unforgiving, and then she allowed Welch to lead her toward the floodlit corner of the cemetery where her father’s body sprawled aslant the grave of his doppel.

  One helicopter took away Linda Waverly and her father’s body; the other flew Stone and David Welch to New York. As it cut through the night, Stone tried his best to make sense of everything and work out all the angles. Assume that for whatever reason - coercion, blackmail, misplaced idealism - Tom had been recruited into a black op run by a circle of plotters inside the Company. He’d been unhappy, he’d been looking for a way out, and then he’d fallen terminally ill, decided that he had nothing to lose, and gone on the run. Okay, but why had he been killing Eileen Barrie’s doppels? Maybe he’d wanted to draw attention to the conspiracy in which they had both been involved, or maybe he’d been killing them simply for revenge, because of something the Real version of Eileen Barrie had done to him, but neither explanation seemed quite right. If Tom had wanted revenge, why hadn’t he simply killed the Real Eileen Barrie? And if he’d wanted to expose the conspiracy, why hadn’t he turned himself in and started talking?

  Perhaps Tom had found out that the Company already knew about the conspiracy, Stone thought. Perhaps he didn’t want to spend what little time he had left being interrogated by a debriefing team. Or perhaps it had something to do with whatever it was Tom had refused to tell him.

  I wish I could tell you everything, Adam, but if I do it might not work out the way it’s supposed to.

  Tom Waverly had let Stone know that he hadn’t told him the whole story, he’d had a private conversation with his daughter . . . Chills chased each other up and down Stone’s spine. Chains of tiny cold lightnings. Suppose Linda was a cutout? Suppose Tom had given her a vital piece of information that only Stone could understand?

  By now, Stone was having trouble connecting one thought to the next. He was bone tired, recent memories he didn’t want to look at crowded the edges of his mind like shadows around an unsteady candle flame, and in any case he wasn’t sure how much of Tom Waverly’s story was true. Well, if Tom had been trying to set something up, it didn’t matter now. Tom had killed himself, and Stone was bitterly sorry for it, but he wasn’t going to let himself be drawn into his old friend’s paranoid games. He would give up everything at the debriefing interview, try to protect Linda as best he could from the consequences of her father’s last throw of the dice, and then he’d go home a
nd try to put it all behind him.

  At last, the heaped lights of New York rose out of the dark. The helicopter followed the black curve of the East River, flew over the Triborough Bridge and the Queensboro Bridge, and stooped toward the spotlit helipad on top of the Pan-American Alliance Assembly Building, a glass and steel skyscraper that stood on what had once been the United Nations Plaza.

  Ralph Kohler was waiting for Stone on the windy rooftop. A tall man wearing gold-rimmed bifocals and an immaculate grey suit, he stepped out of a knot of aides and shook Stone’s hand and said he hoped that Stone would be able to make a preliminary statement right away.

  ‘I’m ready to talk, Mr Kohler,’ Stone said. ‘I’m ready to talk about everything. Especially Operation GYPSY.’

  Kohler’s face gave away nothing. ‘I expect full candour,’ he said, and several large men closed around Stone and escorted him to the elevator.

  They rode down to a sub-basement where a pair of officers, Carol Dvorak and Joseph Carella, were waiting in an interview room. Stone made only a token protest when it became clear that neither Kohler nor Welch were going to sit in on the debriefing; he was certain that they would be watching from the other side of the mirrored window in one of the green cinder-block walls.

  Carella set a cup of coffee in front of Stone and switched on the video camera, Dvorak studied her palmtop computer for a moment, and then they were off. It quickly became clear that the two officers weren’t interested in why Stone had fled the scene in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, why he’d taken Linda Waverly with him and changed cars to lose the people tailing them, or what Linda had whispered to him in that final clinch outside the cemetery where her father had killed himself. They were interested only in what Tom Waverly had told him during their brief reunion. Stone took them through it slowly and carefully, giving them everything he could remember, but he ran out of patience after he finished his story and Dvorak insisted on going over it again.

  ‘I’ve told you everything Tom told me. Unless you want to read me my rights and turn this into a formal interrogation, I believe we’re done.’

  ‘We need to make sure we have everything squared away,’ Dvorak said. ‘Mr Waverly told you that Dr Barrie was part of this mysterious black op.’

  ‘Operation GYPSY,’ Stone said. ‘And he didn’t exactly say she was involved. I asked him if she was part of it, and he said, what do you think?’

  Dvorak made a mark on the screen of her palmtop, as if crossing off an item on a shopping list. She was generically attractive but prim and self-contained, completely lacking any sexual presence. One of those people who look exactly like their ID photograph. Her light brown hair was done up in a French braid and Stone could see an earpiece in her left ear, with a coiled wire running inside the collar of her blouse. He was certain that Kohler was watching the interview behind the two-way mirror and feeding her questions.

  ‘Did Mr Waverly say anything about Dr Barrie’s role in this so-called black op?’ she said.

  ‘No, he didn’t.’

  ‘Did he tell you where he first met her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he tell you how long he had known her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he know her before he disappeared and allegedly joined the black op?’

  ‘I don’t recall that he ever mentioned her name before today,’ Stone said, and suppressed a yawn. His exhaustion had taken on a voluptuous weight, and the air in the little room was stale and stuffy. ‘I really want to help, but I think we’ve pretty much wrung the juice out of this.’

  ‘Bear with us for just a little longer, Mr Stone,’ Carella said. He was in his thirties, with a relaxed manner and sharp blue eyes and black hair brushed straight back from his forehead.

  Dvorak said, ‘Mr Waverly told you that he was killing Dr Barrie’s doppels because he wanted to make a difference. Do you have any idea what he meant by that?

  ‘No, I don’t. I do know that this black op, GYPSY, has something to do with a couple of gates and a research facility. And Tom mentioned something about delivering a few megatons somewhere, so a nuclear weapon may be involved . . . But you already know all about this, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s not a question of what we do or do not know, Mr Stone,’ Dvorak said. ‘It’s a question of reconstructing your conversation with Mr Waverly.’

  ‘Tom told me he killed Nathan Tate because Tate was part of GYPSY. What about the rest of Knightly’s cowboy angels? Some of them could be involved too. Have you checked them out?’

  ‘You can bet we’ll be checking out every angle,’ Carella said.

  ‘I’m not interested in flattery,’ Stone said, speaking to the mirrored window behind the two agents. ‘But I am interested in how much you already know about this thing. How much you already knew when you sent me after Tom. How much you kept back from me.’

  Dvorak glanced at her watch and said briskly, ‘You’ve had a hard day, Mr Stone, and we’ve kept you up for far too long. We’ll have to go over this again, of course, and work up a formal statement. But I think we’re done for now.’

  ‘You did a good job,’ Carella said. ‘We really do appreciate your cooperation.’

  ‘I came here to help out an old friend, and now he’s dead. What exactly do you mean by a good job?’

  Stone wasn’t angry with the two officers. He was angry with himself.

  ‘You need to get some rest, Mr Stone,’ Dvorak said, and with a stab of her stylus switched off her palmtop. ‘We’ll escort you back to the Real tomorrow. You’ll complete your debriefing at Langley, and then you’ll be able to return to the First Foot sheaf. If you have any questions, I’m sure that the debriefing team will do their best to answer them.’

  ‘If your boss is behind that two-way mirror, I’d like to ask him a few questions right now. I’d like to talk to him about Linda Waverly.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll have an opportunity to speak with him before you leave for Langley,’ Dvorak said.

  ‘I’m sure he appreciates your help,’ Carella said.

  ‘Linda Waverly is young, she doesn’t have much field experience, and her father just now killed himself,’ Stone said. ‘If she’s holding out on you, it’s either because she’s in shock, or it’s because she feels that she can still help him. Help redeem his honour, help finish what he started, whatever. Tom Waverly told her that I’d help her. If you let me talk to her—’

  ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ Dvorak said.

  The two officers stood up, and Stone did too. He had a sense of things closing around him, shutting him out. He said, ‘I do have one more question.’

  Dvorak raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Tom Waverly was seriously ill. He more or less told me he was dying. What was wrong with him? And don’t tell me you don’t know. Your pathologist will have autopsied him by now.’

  Dvorak looked past Stone for a moment, listening to her earpiece. She said, ‘Apparently, Mr Waverly was suffering from some kind of advanced cancer.’

  ‘Some kind of cancer? What kind?’

  ‘That’s all I can tell you, Mr Stone.’

  ‘Right. Why is it I keep hearing that?’

  12

  Stone was driven to the Plaza Hotel and escorted to his room by three officers. One of them, a lantern-jawed veteran with a salt-and-pepper crew cut, told him that they would be posted right outside the door.

  ‘Your phone has been disconnected so you won’t be bothered by locals. If you need anything from room service, give your order to one of us. We’ll pass it right along.’

  ‘Am I under arrest?’

  ‘We have orders to confine you to your room for security reasons,’ the officer said, returning Stone’s hard stare.

  ‘“Confine”,’ Stone said. ‘You want to tell me the difference between “confine” and “imprison”?’

  ‘It’s for your own safety, Mr Stone.’

  ‘Is there a specific threat? Does it have a name?’

  ‘We�
��re not at liberty to say. But don’t worry, we’ll take good care of you.’

  Stone took a shower and put on the towelling robe hung on the back of the bathroom door and sat at the window, staring at the dark trees beyond the streetlights along Central Park South. His thoughts moved in slow, futile circles. He still didn’t know how much the Company knew about GYPSY, or what GYPSY was, or how Dick Knightly had been involved. He didn’t know if it was still running or if it had been busted and Tom Waverly had been a loose end. He didn’t much care. His part in this was nearly over. All he wanted to do before he went home was speak to Linda Waverly, persuade her to give up whatever it was her father had told her back in the motel room, convince her that it was in her own best interest to let the Company deal with it . . .

  He dozed off in the chair and was woken a few hours later by one of his guards. The man laid out a white shirt and a black suit on the bed, brought in a breakfast tray, and told Stone that he would be leaving in thirty minutes.

  It was seven in the morning. Crows were busy around the corpses hung on the row of gallows. Traffic was beginning to build up, horns and distant sirens muffled by the room’s triple glazing. Stone did several sets of sit-ups and squat-thrusts, took a shower, hot then cold, and shaved and dressed. He was nibbling a piece of dry toast and sipping a cup of black coffee when someone knocked at the door.

  It was David Welch, uncharacteristically rumpled. He closed the door and stood with his back to it and said, ‘I have some bad news.’

  Stone’s first thought was that something had happened to Linda Waverly.

  Welch said, ‘There’s been an incident at New Amsterdam. Susan Nichols was shot.’

  Stone jumped to his feet and Welch braced himself and said quickly, ‘It was two days ago. The news took a while to get through to us via the Real. I came over as soon as I heard.’

  Stone’s body was flooded with adrenalin. His fists were raised. He was ready to defend himself from something he couldn’t fight. ‘She was shot. What does that mean?’