Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  ‘You think?’ Walter said. ‘The West Coast to New York, that’s a long way to travel if you’re on the run for murder. It would be easier to go through the mirror at White Sands.’

  ‘People would have been watching out for Tom at White Sands and at Brookhaven, just like they’re right now watching out for me and Linda. The gate at Grand Central Station was his only chance of making a clean exit.’

  ‘And you think I helped him?’

  ‘It crossed my mind.’

  ‘Especially when I admitted to using it just now. Well, I didn’t help Tom. Maybe he didn’t need anyone’s help to get away, did you think of that? As long as you know the guys running it, and you have the cash, they’ll send you through no questions asked.’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘He always was a lone bird. Remember, Adam, how he would take off for days at a time when he was supposed to be working with you?’

  ‘Did you ever hear from him, after he disappeared?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘You didn’t hear anything at all? I find that hard to believe, Walter, given all your connections.’

  ‘He didn’t call, he didn’t leave anything at any of the old drops, he didn’t even send a postcard. First time I knew he’d been here was a couple of days ago, when Saul Stein sent a squad of officers around. Here, to my apartment, where my wife and children live,’ Lipscombe said with sudden anger, leaning forward in his chair, punctuating his words with sharp jabs of his cigar. ‘They tossed the place and then they arrested me. Saul Stein himself questioned me, and then they threw me in a cell and left me to sweat until my lawyer discovered where I was, filed a complaint, and sprang me. Technically, I’m out on bail, so I hope you appreciate the risk I took, harbouring a couple of fugitives from the law.’

  Walter Lipscombe could lie with the best of them, but Stone was pretty sure that he was telling the truth. ‘What kind of questions did Stein ask?’

  ‘He showed me pictures of what was left of that woman. He told me I would go to the chair for accessory to murder if I didn’t tell him how I’d helped Tom get away. I told him he was talking bullshit. He threatened to hand me over to the Company, said they’d take me to the Real, disappear me off the face of this Earth. Said there were plenty of old crimes outstanding that would put me in a special facility buried in some wild sheaf for the rest of my days.’ Lipscombe drew on his cigar, contemplated the smoke he exhaled. ‘I’m working a couple of favours right now. I intend to get the motherfucker replaced.’

  ‘The guy was doing his job, Walter. Don’t take it personally.’

  ‘He sent his gorillas to my home,’ Lipscombe said. ‘They arrested me right in front of my wife and my children. You don’t get any more personal than that. Mr Saul Stein, he doesn’t know it yet, but he’s in a world of shit.’

  ‘How about our former associates? Do you still keep up with any of them? Do you think any of them could have been in contact with Tom?’

  ‘The woman who acted as a cutout between you and me, Kay Francis? She killed herself a couple of years ago over a soldier boyfriend who died in some sandpit in Mexico. We got problems there with Commie-sponsored nationalists. Johnny Claassen had two heart attacks, one straight after the other, and is now semi-retired, running a sports book down in Miami. Harry Hendricks, he’s a general now, can you believe it? Four stars, very high up in the Pentagon. Even Saul Stein wouldn’t think he had anything to do with this. Joe Mitchell, Tommy Kochiss and Bobby Boyle work for me. If Tom had ever been in touch with them, I would know all about it.’

  ‘What about Freddy Layne?’ Stone said, as casually as he knew how. ‘Is he still living here?’

  Freddy Layne, one of the original cowboy angels, had worked undercover in the American Bund sheaf for three years, recruiting men and women to the cause, networking between dissident groups, setting up caches of weapons and munitions. He’d been captured at the beginning of the revolution and tortured at the FBI’s maximum security facility at Buzzard’s Point. Two weeks later, the First Armoured Brigade had gone over to the rebels, Washington, DC, had fallen, and Freddy and the rest of the prisoners had been freed. He’d never really recovered. After he’d been invalided out of the Company, Freddy had returned to the American Bund sheaf and married the woman he’d been using as part of his legend.

  ‘There’s another guy who doesn’t stay in touch, even though he’s living right here in New York City,’ Walter Lipscombe said thoughtfully. ‘When he first came back, I offered him a job, a good one. He said he wanted to put it all behind him, and I respected that. You think Freddy and Tom might have been getting together? You do, don’t you?’

  ‘What is Freddy doing these days?’

  ‘He has a club on the West Side, a strip joint with upstairs rooms, if you know what I mean. Last I heard, he’d split up with his wife and he was drinking most of the profits. If you’re going to pay him a visit, do me a favour, don’t mention my name.’

  ‘You have my word. What about Eileen Barrie? She was a mathematician, and she worked at Livermore. Do you happen to know what was she working on?’

  The files David Welch had given Stone had contained only scant details about the six murdered doppels.

  Lipscombe smiled. ‘That’s classified information, Adam. How would someone like me get access to information like that?’

  ‘Amaze me.’

  ‘Well, I did hear a rumour she was the leader of one of the teams working on Ultimate Shield.’

  ‘I’ve been out of the loop, Walter. You’ll have to enlighten me.’

  ‘It’s the antiballistic missile project, a very big deal for us. The government has about two thousand physicists and mathematicians and engineers at Livermore, maybe another ten thousand in other places, not to mention the companies that are building the hardware - the radar systems and the missiles and the lasers.’

  ‘Jesus, Walter. Are you expecting to go to war against the Russians?’

  ‘Things have gotten worse in the last couple of years. The Commies, Russians and UCE both, think that we’re a pushover because your President Carter wants to make peace with them at any price. He refused to give us aid for our nuclear programme, so we’re doing it ourselves. We’re in a race to build an effective antiballistic missile defence shield so we can make a first strike against the Commies if we have to, and survive their retaliation. At least, that’s what the government says. My take on it is, I have a hardened bunker forty feet under the basement of this building, I’ll watch the fireworks from there.’

  Stone, remembering the McBride sheaf, said, ‘If you want my advice, you need to dig deeper.’

  3

  Freddy Layne’s club was on Eleventh Avenue, two blocks north of a park that had once been the grounds of a palace owned by the Dear Leader’s oldest son. After riding out of the basement of the Woolworth Building in the back of a laundry truck, Stone and Linda Waverly took an elaborately evasive route to reach it. Stone didn’t entirely trust Walter Lipscombe and couldn’t be sure that the elementary tradecraft of his goons had kept them from the gaze of the people watching the apartment. So he and Linda rode the A-line subway to the enormous and tremendously busy Romanesque amphitheatre that stood where Madison Square Gardens stood in the Real, took a turn around the block to make sure they weren’t being followed, walked north down a deep canyon between monolithic government buildings to the soulless expanse of Times Square, caught the subway to West 96th Street, and rode a bus twenty blocks south.

  When they strolled past Freddy’s club, nine-thirty in the morning, the place was closed. They took up a position in a diner on the corner of the block, a booth with a view of the street through a yellowing lace curtain and the dusty window. Stone drank thin, bitter coffee; Linda sipped a Coke, which surprised her by tasting of cinnamon.

  ‘That’s how they do it here,’ Stone said. He felt alert but slightly transparent, not quite properly aligned with the world. He’d had a restless night and had taken a couple of aspiri
n with his breakfast to deal with the residue of Lipscombe’s hundred-year-old brandy.

  ‘I thought that Coke was a constant, like gravity, or Elvis,’ Linda said. She wore a dull green army uniform and had black hair now, a wig falling straight down her back.

  ‘I guess fifty years of National Socialism can just about change anything.’

  Stone was wearing an army uniform too, with a colonel’s braid on his sleeve. His hair had been given a severe crew cut by an eighty-year-old Italian barber Lipscombe had brought up to the apartment, and he squinted through eyeglasses with thick black rims as he leafed through a New York Times someone had left behind.

  The lead story extolled the patriotism of a ‘hero volunteer’ who’d been killed in a skirmish between American and Russian patrol boats in the Bering Strait. There was extensive coverage of the rich and famous at charity balls, charity dinners, and charity auctions, and plenty of garish, full-colour ads for consumer goods, legal services, and various euphemisms for bodyguards and home security. Car ads emphasised armour ratings, bulletproof glass, lethal shock and gas spray anti-theft devices. There were ads selling military-grade weaponry for use in ‘home defence’, everything from shotguns that fired weighted bags to pop-up mines. There was a full-page ad for what looked like an electrified mantrap, boasting 30,000 volts for ‘surestop certainty’ and ‘hi-power venting’, presumably to remove the smoke and stink of charred meat.

  Linda sipped her Coke. She watched the street. She said at last, ‘We can’t sit here all day. Either we do this or we walk away.’

  Stone looked up from the newspaper. ‘I guess you’ve figured out that someone is watching Freddy’s place.’

  She nodded, cool and businesslike. ‘The white panel truck parked opposite. Someone got in back just now, carrying two cups of coffee and a bag of doughnuts.’

  ‘They’re confident sons of bitches, aren’t they?’

  ‘Are they locals or Company?’

  ‘Whoever they are, they’re sitting out there in plain sight to remind Freddy where his best interests lie.’

  ‘How are we going to get past them?’

  ‘We’ll wait a little while and see if an opportunity presents itself. If we miss our appointment with the gate this afternoon, Walter can arrange something else.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it make things a lot easier if he arranged a meeting with Freddy Layne, too?’

  Stone shook his head. ‘Walter agreed to arrange transport out of here because we were friends once upon a time, and because he owes me and he always honours his debts. But with men like him there’s always a point where friendship stops and business begins.’

  Linda thought about that. She said, ‘Anna Lipscombe told me about this company her husband gave her as a wedding present. It seems that there are always food shortages here because so many people moved to the cities after the revolution, so anyone who volunteers to try their hand at farming gets a grant from the government. And there’s also a big problem with homeless people. Mrs Lipscombe’s company, it recruits homeless people for the farm resettlement programme, it gets a cut of their grants, and it also rents them twenty-acre parcels of what was once state-owned farmland. They have to buy their seed and their tools and fertiliser from company stores, and sell their crops to the company, too. Everything they do, the company makes a profit from it. I told Mrs Lipscombe that it sounded like sharecropping by another name, asked her if she was worried about exploiting people. She said it gave them a chance to earn a living. She actually used the phrase “by the sweat of their own brows”. And she told me that the rent on the farmland is subsidised by the government to ensure that landowners get a twenty per cent return on their investment no matter how badly the tenants do, and that it doesn’t matter how many of them fail at being farmers, because there’s an endless supply of homeless people willing, as she put it, to try to turn their lives around. She didn’t see that her company was exploiting people who’d fallen to the bottom, Mr Stone. She really thought she was helping them.’

  ‘You can call me Adam, Linda. We’re partners in crime and fugitives from justice, so we may as well be on first-name terms.’

  ‘Do you think things are better here, now that people like Walter Lipscombe are in charge? Do you think you helped make a difference?’

  ‘Things aren’t ideal, but they were a whole lot worse before the revolution. The country was run by a military dictatorship led by a man who had killed his own father to get to power. The first winter I was here, the harvest had failed across most of the wheat belt. The government cut the rations of workers in the cities, and they let tens of thousands of people starve to death in the countryside. Tens of thousands more, mostly political prisoners, died every year in the mines and prisons in Alaska. Whole families were shipped out and worked to death inside six months. And if the bosses needed to increase the productivity of their factories or mines or steel mills, they had the local cops arrest a bunch of people and put them to work.’

  Stone remembered streets empty of traffic except for the armoured limos of bosses and apparatus men, and the personnel carriers and light tanks of the FBI. He remembered long lines of scarecrow people waiting to receive a daily ration of two ounces of mystery meat and a loaf of black bread that had the texture of ground glass bound by wallpaper paste. The show trials on TV, mass hangings of traitors and saboteurs. The hopeless gazes of starving children begging on the streets while posters everywhere boasted of record harvests. The military parades in Times Square, phalanxes of soldiers saluting the Dear Leader and his idiot son in their armoured-glass podium, missile carriers and tanks creeping between monumental buildings under a blizzard of ticker tape, accompanied by military bands and phalanxes of blonde, blue-eyed cheerleaders. He remembered the slave farms, and the vast death camp he and Tom Waverly had found in South Dakota: a discovery that had been instrumental in convincing President Davis, at the beginning of his first term, to approve LOOKING GLASS, the covert action that had led to the revolution.

  Linda said, ‘And now people like Anna Lipscombe swan around charity balls in furs and diamonds bought with stolen art, writing cheques on money swindled from the aid programme.’

  ‘There are people like the Lipscombes in the Real, Linda. I think that this is one of the sheaves where we did some real good.’

  ‘We won the war, and we installed a kind of democracy. Good for us. Trouble is, we didn’t follow through. We let this America be taken over by a kind of gangster capitalism that only benefits people on the make.’

  Stone smiled. ‘Is that what they teach you in the Company these days? I guess things have moved on a lot since I quit.’

  ‘And I guess you think I’m young and naive and idealistic.’

  ‘I think you want to make a difference, just like I did when I first joined the Company. And back then, we didn’t know what we were getting into. We thought it would be easy to step into the middle of a mess of local politics and take over and make things right. We thought that war was the hard part of the job, not reconstruction and reconciliation. We did some good here, but in too many sheaves we made things worse. Young and naive and idealistic? That was us.’

  ‘Is that why you quit?’

  ‘I thought I quit,’ Stone said. ‘But here I am again, back on the inside.’

  After a little while, a truck pulled up outside Freddy Layne’s joint. A burly man came out and talked to the truck driver while a third man unloaded boxes of booze.

  Stone said, ‘There’s my way in.’

  Linda said, ‘How are we going to get past the detail watching the place?’

  ‘We’re not; I am. You’re going to stay right here and watch my back, like we agreed,’ Stone said. Walter Lipscombe had given him Freddy Layne’s private phone number. He wrote it on a strip torn from the newspaper. ‘If there’s any sign of trouble, use the pay phone over there. And if it’s serious trouble, something I can’t get out of, you should take off, and don’t look back. You could risk going back to Walter and aski
ng him to help you, but I think you’d be better off returning to the Real. If you cooperate and tell Kohler everything you know, he’ll probably go easy on you.’

  ‘It isn’t as simple as that.’

  ‘If there’s something you want to tell me, this is probably as good a time as any.’

  Linda shook her head. She had that stubborn look Stone was getting to know very well. ‘How are you going to get past the surveillance?’

  Stone patted the braid on the sleeve of his tunic. ‘I’m going to make this uniform work for me.’

  In the hour that he and Linda had spent in the coffee shop, Stone had seen five military police patrols drive by. He didn’t have to wait long, standing on the street corner, before he spotted one of their white Jeeps. He flagged it down, showed his fake ID, and pointed to the panel truck parked up the street and told the four MPs that he was pretty sure the people inside it were selling drugs to soldiers.

  ‘Men walk right up to it, they rap on the back, the door opens, and some kind of transaction takes place. I think you boys should do something about it.’

  When the MPs began to whale on the side of the van with their yard-long billysticks, Stone strolled across the street and followed a man carrying a case of whiskey down a short corridor into a big room where gold-painted chairs and little tables crowded around the canvas-floored stage. It smelled of old cigarette smoke and stale booze. On one side, a bartender in a white shirt and black waistcoat was setting up behind the mahogany counter; on the other, the burly man who’d stepped outside to talk with the liquor-truck crew sat in one of the plush booths along the rear wall, working through papers. He looked up when Stone walked over, said that the place was closed right now but he’d see plenty of action if he came back after noon.