Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  ‘If anything was hidden in there, Freddy’s men would have found it.’

  Linda pressed sideways against the wall as she reached as far as she could into the duct behind the register. ‘When I was a little kid, I used to hide treasure around the house. And Dad used to hide treasure for me to find, too.’

  ‘I remember. That’s how I found the message he left for me.’

  ‘We got pretty good at hiding things,’ Linda said. ‘I learned all kinds of tricks.’

  She jumped down and took a wire hanger from the closet and straightened it out, then climbed onto the chair again and used the length of wire to fish inside the duct. Stone perched on the edge of the upturned couch while she worked. Her face pressed against broken plaster, her arm buried up to the shoulder, the only sound in the room the murmur of the neighbour’s TV and the tap and scrape of the wire. At last she tensed, then gently pulled something out and showed it to Stone: a plastic bag, wrapped tight with grey duct tape that made a loop at one end.

  ‘He pushed it around the corner, cleaned out the dust to get rid of the track it left,’ Linda said. ‘He did something like this one time in one of our treasure hunts.’

  They emptied the bag onto the kitchenette counter. High denomination bills from the Real and the Nixon sheaf were mixed up with the big, colourful bills of the American Bund. There was a laminated army ID card with a grainy black-and-white photograph of Tom Waverly, giving his name as Philip Kindred, his rank as Captain, 10th Airborne. There were two New York State driver’s licences, both with the same colour photograph of Tom Waverly, both with fake names. Laumer. Leinster. The second name chimed in Stone’s memory. There was a folding knife with a six-inch blade. There was a set of house keys on a metal ring. There was a small key wrapped in a scrap of paper, its grooves fresh-cut, its round tag embossed with a number: 48.

  Stone got chills, picked up the key. ‘A long time ago, when your father and I were working in the Nixon sheaf, we used a proprietary company called Leinster Imports, an off-the-shelf deal set up in Delaware, to rent boxes in different cities. We used the boxes as dead drops.’

  Linda had a strange look on her face, as if she had just seen a ghost. ‘He said that it would take both of us to find what he’d hidden.’

  Stone smiled. ‘He was right.’

  6

  They threw the house keys into the garbage pile outside the apartment and tore up the fake IDs and posted the pieces down two separate sewer gratings. They kept the cash, and Linda kept the folding knife, too, as a memento. She believed that everything was falling into place, that they were just a step away from her father’s vindication.

  Stone used a pay phone to call the cutout number Walter Lipscombe had given him, got an answer machine and gave it the pay phone’s number, hung up. Someone rang back less than a minute later, told them to stay where they were, a car would pick them up, and hung up before Stone could reply.

  A little less than ten minutes later, a low-slung black sedan pulled up beside the pay phone. Stone suspected that it was the visible tip of a vast surveillance network that had been keeping tabs on him and Linda ever since they had left Lipscombe’s apartment. With a red light flashing in the nearside corner of its dash, it sped along the express lanes reserved for the vehicles of the police, army brass, politicians, and citizens rich enough to be able to afford permits for themselves and their employees.

  ‘Isn’t this a little conspicuous?’ Stone said.

  ‘Maybe you don’t know it,’ the goon sitting next to the driver said, ‘but you did yourself a big favour when you went toe-to-toe with those people. It seems they neglected to tell anyone that they were staking out the premises of an honest citizen, and the little gun battle that left two of them dead and one seriously wounded caused quite a stink. The upshot is, the COILE wants you out of town as quickly as possible, and its boss, Mr Saul Stein, has let it be known that if you happen to be given some help in that department, he will look the other way.’

  ‘I hope this hasn’t caused Mr Lipscombe any trouble.’

  The goon’s grin showed several gold teeth. ‘Far from it. First, there is no evidence that he gave you shelter, so that is not a problem. Second, he is doing Mr Stein a big favour by showing you the door, and you can bet that one day he will call that favour in. He asked me to tell you, by the way, that he had been hoping to see you off, but he has been unavoidably detained.’

  ‘Nothing serious, I hope,’ Stone said.

  ‘According to Mr Lipscombe, it’s nothing his lawyers can’t take care of. He also asked me to pass on his best wishes.’

  ‘Tell him from me that I hope he has all the luck he deserves.’

  By now the sedan was speeding down the middle of Park Avenue toward Grand Central Station. Although Turing gates had been developed in Brookhaven, the Company had decided to site its first clandestine interchange in New York City because it was the financial and cultural centre of most versions of America, and the Company’s field officers could move unremarked through its teeming, multicultural population, and do most of their research in its libraries and universities. But finding a site where a gate could be opened in several different versions of the city hadn’t been easy: an unused basement in a building in one sheaf might be a busy office in another, or there might be a completely different building in that location, or no building at all.

  A proposed open-air facility in Central Park had been written off because of the security risk; so had a plan to drop field officers in wet suits through a gate on a raft on the East River. Finally, the Company’s planners had settled on Grand Central Station. The terminus had been built before the Real’s history had diverged from that of all other known, inhabited sheaves, and in almost every sheaf, as in the Real, the station’s powerhouse at 49th Street had been demolished when the railroad switched its supply of steam and electrical power to Con Edison in the late 1920s, leading to the disuse of a loading platform and ancillary spaces in the two levels beneath it.

  That was where a clandestine interchange with gates to five different sheafs had been built in the Real. In the American Bund sheaf, the gate was accessed by a freight elevator in the 49th Street side of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, which before the revolution had housed the New York offices of the FBI. The sedan drove straight into the elevator, which clankingly descended to a loading platform one level underground where a posse of men in colourful suits was waiting.

  After checking their IDs, two of the men led Stone and Linda down a spiral stair that descended to a trucking subway that had once run between the loading platform of a freight company to the express platform of the lower level of the terminal. A steel-clad door near the end of the subway led into a low-ceilinged concrete bunker that had been much extended since Stone had first used it. Wooden packing cases of various sizes were stacked at either end; in the middle, where there had once been a wall and a cupboard full of disused electrical switching gear, was a perfect silver mirror two yards across, framed by a steel collar and reflecting a neat little electric forklift and a man in a canary-yellow suit and red shirt, who told Stone and Linda to go straight through.

  ‘We sent Mr Lipscombe’s shipment through ten minutes ago, and our friends on the other side of the mirror do not like to keep it open long,’ he said. ‘I would suppose they dislike clocking up a fortune in power bills.’

  Stone stepped through first. Reflex clamped his eyes shut when he met his own reflection in the Turing gate’s mirror; then black light exploded in his head and he opened his eyes and saw that he was standing on a metal platform raised in the middle of the big, brightly lit vault of the interchange in the Real.

  It resembled a thirty-year-old mock-up of how the control room of a fusion power station or a space station might look in 2001. Racks of fluorescent tubes bounced harsh light off white-tiled walls two storeys high. Steel-mesh walkways and platforms were hung at different heights where technicians were tending control panels that sported acorn-sized red and yellow and green li
ghts, dials, chunky throw switches, and cathode-ray monitors filled with lines of chunky orange script. There were metal desks, black Bakelite telephones with rotary dials. There was a row of teletype printers hooded with plastic covers turned yellow and brittle.

  All of this was dominated by the hulking machines that generated the Turing gates. Only a couple of steps up from the famous prototype that, in a laboratory shed in Brookhaven on January 5, 1963, had opened the first, microscopic portal to another history in another universe, the gates were massive steel-framed rectangles packed with racks of primitive electronics and skull-sized condensers, looms of wiring, and piping swaddled in silvery insulation, and were pierced by circular apertures six feet across. They stood in a miniature switching yard of narrow-gauge track in a pit that took up half the vault, two standing one behind the other to the left, two to the right, the gate from which Stone had just emerged locked down in the centre. Now Linda stepped through its silvery mirror, blinking in the bright light, grinning at Stone.

  They were back in the Real. The Nixon sheaf was just a step away.

  The bone-deep hum of the active gate cut off. The mirror blinked out, its aperture shrunken to a single Planck length, held open by a trickle charge equivalent to the output of a couple of automobile batteries. Stone looked around and said, ‘Who’s in charge here? We need to buy another ride.’

  Stone and Linda paid for their transit to the Nixon sheaf with the cash Tom Waverly had left behind: fifty thousand dollars. While technicians moved the gate through which he and Linda had just stepped, and lined up the gate to the Nixon sheaf on the identical universal coordinates, Stone asked the gate chief who he was working for now.

  ‘The interchange was sold off to a cartel after the trouble with the Church Committee. We work for the cartel.’

  ‘Who owns the cartel?’

  Stone was wondering what conspiracies and bribes were involved to keep this antique facility running, how the massive power requirements of active gates were finessed.

  ‘Best not to ask,’ the gate chief said.

  Linda described her father, asked if he’d recently come through. The gate chief shrugged and said that all kinds of people came through, all the time.

  ‘Anyone who can afford to pay the fee. Business people, journalists, university professors, celebrities . . . And Company people, of course, such as yourselves.’

  ‘Who said we were with the Company?’ Stone said.

  ‘It would be pretty obvious, even if I didn’t remember sending you through the mirror a couple of dozen times.’ The gate chief was tall and cadaverous, with thick black hair brushed back in a wave from his pock-marked face, tinted glasses, and the sour, fatalistic air of someone who has learnt from bitter experience always to expect lemons rather than lemonade. ‘One thing I discovered during my long, illustrious career is that when you know where all the bodies are buried, you really don’t want to remember anything,’ he said. ‘Another is that you glamorous field-operative types never take any notice of the people who really run the show. That’s how we get by. We’re invisible, and we have the memories of goldfish.’

  ‘Maybe our friend here owns this place,’ Stone said to Linda. ‘That’s why he’s being so secretive.’

  ‘If I owned this place,’ the gate chief said, ‘do you really think I’d be down here getting my genes fried by virtual photons while I fielded your dumb questions? If I was the owner, I’d be living it up in a castle in some wild sheaf. Me, and thirty of California’s most nubile cheerleaders.’

  Linda, watching the technicians who were making the final, finicky alignment of the gate, wondered why it was taking so long.

  ‘It’s taking so long because we take pride in our work,’ the gate chief said. ‘People today take Turing gates for granted, but old-school guys like your partner know they’re tremendously dangerous. Right now, my people are making sure that the gate will be centred on a certain doorway on the other side of the mirror, so that the edges of its aperture will be contained within the frame of that doorway. Know why that is, young lady? Because of quantum shear. The aperture of a gate may be vanishingly thin, thinner than a hydrogen atom, but the quantum shear at its circumference is enormously powerful. Strong enough to cut diamond; easily strong enough to slice and dice you if you hit it at the wrong angle. The very first gates, we simply let the apertures hang in the air on the other side of the mirror and sent through people like your partner strapped to stretchers that ran on tracks, to make sure they didn’t touch any place near the edge. But these days we make sure that every gate exits through a pipe or a door, a hole in a wall, anything with a frame that’s smaller than the diameter of the gate’s aperture.’

  ‘Listen to the man,’ Stone told Linda. ‘He’s one of the original wizards.’

  ‘You know, I really resent that term,’ the gate chief said. ‘It’s derogatory. It implies that what we do here is magic, that we don’t really understand it. Although, of course, only three people in the world ever really understood the quantum theory, and two of them are crazy and one is dead. Have you been in the Nixon sheaf before?’

  ‘Once or twice,’ Stone said.

  ‘Then you’ll know to leave through the electrical service shaft that connects the old trucking subway with the platform of the 51st Street subway station.’ The gate chief dug in his pocket and handed Stone four keys strung on a steel ring. ‘These open the doors along the route. Don’t use the Waldorf-Astoria exit. That platform is occasionally used by VIPs in the Nixon sheaf, so the local Secret Service checks it out at unpredictable intervals, and the elevator is run at least once a day. But if you go through the subway station, you shouldn’t have any trouble. You have any kind of flashlight? Here, take this. We’ll reopen the gate at noon tomorrow. Make sure you’re there, or you’ll have a long trip to White Sands, which is where the only other gate is located.’

  The deep hum started up again and a circle of silver light suddenly blanked the maw of the gate that had been painstakingly cranked into alignment. Stone and Linda climbed back onto the platform. After a technician used a fibre-optic probe to check out the scene on the other side of the mirror, Stone stepped through.

  He emerged from the frame of a large cupboard into a small, sooty room lit only by the glow of the gate’s silvery circle, this feeble light dimming as Linda emerged from it. Stone switched on the penlight that the gate chief had given him. A few moments later, the gate’s mirror popped like a two-dimensional bubble, revealing thick cables and meter boxes bolted to concrete at the back of the cupboard.

  It would open again at noon tomorrow. They had less than twenty-four hours to complete Tom Waverly’s treasure hunt.

  7

  ‘How much longer are we going to wait?’ Linda said.

  ‘Give it ten minutes more,’ Stone said. ‘I want to be absolutely certain that Walter Lipscombe hasn’t put anyone on our tail.’

  He and Linda were standing on the steps of the Holy Cross Church on 42nd Street, hanging back, watching the street parade of commuters, hustlers, panhandlers and bewildered tourists, the snarled tides of traffic, the plate-glass windows of the post office on the other side of the street. Linda was excited and impatient, drinking everything in with an eager, uncritical gaze. She reminded Stone of the way he’d felt on his first few trips through the mirror, of the peculiar, dreamlike dislocation of finding himself on streets at once familiar and utterly different, as if some crazy set-designer had snuck in behind his back, redressed the city, and populated it with costumed strangers acting out parts in a drama in which he was the central character but whose plot he didn’t understand.

  Linda had changed out of her army uniform into a pearl-grey pantsuit and a pale yellow blouse with a frilly collar she’d bought with her father’s dollars in Sak’s Fifth Avenue. Her hair was scraped back from her face and done up in a French braid. Stone, dressed in a dark blue business suit and crisp white sea-cotton shirt and club tie, a briefcase containing his pistol and the shock gizmo set
between his feet, was leafing through a late edition of the New York Times, looking over the top of it every now and then to check for standouts. There was one guy who’d been hanging around a magazine stand, but now a woman in a red dress walked up to him and they hugged, kissed, and walked off arm in arm through the heedless crowds into the rest of their lives. Stone was reminded of what he had lost and felt a desolate pang.

  Linda nudged him and said, ‘See that man? Is that a phone or a radio?’

  Stone shook out the newspaper, turned a page. ‘They don’t have cell phones. At least, they didn’t last time I was here.’

  ‘Maybe it’s some kind of walkie-talkie,’ Linda said. ‘The thing’s the size of a shoe.’

  Stone spotted the guy she meant. He was standing beside a traffic signal at the northeast corner of the block: slicked-back hair and a deep tan, a sharp black suit with lapels so wide you could land a jet fighter on them, talking with considerable animation into a big box he was holding against the side of his head. Cell phones. Jesus. What next, quantum computers? Turing gates? Another American empire expanding across the infinity of sheaves? It was a weary thought.

  Richard Nixon had been President in this sheaf’s version of America when the Real had first opened a gate into it and Stone and Tom Waverly had spent six months there, doing basic research. America had been caught up in an unpopular war in Vietnam and there’d been an air of revolution in the streets of major cities, the National Guard had been deployed on university campuses across the country, and men had just landed on the Moon, an amazing feat the Real had not yet bothered to duplicate, caught up as it was in imposing its idea of freedom in countries across the globe and in different Americas in different sheaves. When Stone had returned for a second time, some four years later, the Vietnam War had ended, but the Nixon sheaf had been embroiled in a full-blown crisis in the Middle East and (according to the game theories of the Cluster) a rapidly growing risk of nuclear war. Now Ronald Reagan, the same ex-movie actor who in the Real had served a single term before Floyd Davis and had encouraged the expansion of the Company in the early days of exploring other sheaves, was in his second term as President, fighting a not-so-clandestine war in Central America against armies of Communist peasants that according to him were threatening to sweep through Mexico and topple the US.