Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  As in so many other sheaves, the political strategy of this version of America was shaped by fear. When Stone and Tom Waverly had been doing research there, back in 1969, Americans had been fighting in Vietnam because they’d been afraid that Communists would topple countries in Southeast Asia like a series of dominoes, and they’d been fighting their own children at home because their children, grown strange and discontented, had refused to buy into the American Dream. From Stone’s quick study of the Times it seemed that little had changed. The silent majority was still brimful of patriotic sentiment, proud of the powerful presence its country had in the world, deeply indignant if anyone dared point out that other countries might feel nervous in its shadow, utterly convinced that its way of life was the only right way to live, and that the rest of the world, driven by hate and envy, was conspiring to destroy everything it stood for. In 1969, ordinary Americans had been frightened of Ho Chi Minh and his Asiatic hordes; now they were scared silly by a handful of barefoot guerrillas, and as always, they were in mortal dread of the Soviet Union, their nemesis, their shadow self. Here was an op-ed piece quoting Reagan, who called it the Evil Empire . . .

  ‘That’s your ten minutes,’ Linda said. ‘If there were any lurkers, we would have spotted them by now. So please, can we go check out that box?’

  Stone folded up his newspaper. ‘Before we do anything, I want you to listen carefully to what I have to say. If for any reason we have to split up, don’t go back to Grand Central Station. The people who run the interchange aren’t trustworthy, Freddy Layne wants to get hold of this thing your father stole, and I’m worried that Walter Lipscombe does too. If there’s any trouble, get out of the city and head for New Mexico. There’s a gate at White Sands, mostly used by comparative-culture teams en route to LA or the Midwest. You know where to find it?’

  ‘Tell me later. Right now, I want to get this done.’

  ‘This might be the last chance we get to talk,’ Stone said. He gave Linda directions to the White Sands gate, told her about the caretaker who would help her go through. He made her repeat the directions until she had them word-perfect, then handed her the post office box key and said, ‘Let’s do it.’

  He watched from across the street as Linda walked into the post office, remembering the times he’d come here back in ’73, to pick up orders and situation reports. His hair had been long then, loose around his face or tied back in a ponytail. He’d had a beard. He’d worn blue jeans and a denim jacket with a peace symbol scrawled on its back in black Magic Marker, or a suede jacket with long fringes . . .

  Linda came out of the post office with something tucked under her arm and walked away up 42nd Street, toward Times Square. Stone shadowed her at a distance all the way to their agreed rendezvous point, a kind of diner called Choc Full O’Nuts. When he came in, she was waiting for him at a table with two cups of coffee, two glasses of iced water, and a padded envelope, eight by ten, the top ripped open.

  ‘There’s nothing in it,’ she said, as Stone sat down across from her. She looked angry and afraid.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Not even a note.’

  Stone picked up the envelope by its edges. There were no stamps, and no address: it must have been delivered by hand. He looked inside the envelope, felt the padding. ‘You should have let me check it out first. It could have been booby-trapped. An explosive charge, nerve gas, contact poison . . .’

  ‘It was like that when I found it,’ Linda said. ‘Someone else knew about it, Mr Stone. They must have broken into the box or had a copy of the key. They took whatever was inside the envelope and left it behind.’

  ‘It’s possible. It’s also possible that we’re the victims of a practical joke. Maybe Kohler was right. Maybe your father didn’t steal anything from GYPSY after all.’

  ‘He took something they want back, Mr Stone. That’s why they tried to kidnap us. He took something, and he told me he’d hidden it somewhere where you and I could find it if we worked together.’ Linda had the pinched look of a child kept up too late. All the bounce had gone out of her. ‘What are we going to do now?’

  ‘I was hoping we’d know what to do after we recovered whatever it was your father stashed away here. Didn’t he give you any kind of clue, back when you had your cosy little talk in the motel?’

  ‘I was wondering if you’d start in on that again.’

  ‘If you’re holding something back, Linda, I can’t think of a better time to tell me. If your father explained why he was on the run, why he was killing Dr Barrie’s doppels . . .’

  Linda shook her head, looking very unhappy. Stone was certain that Tom had told her a lot more than she was letting on, but he didn’t know how to reach out to her.

  ‘We need a new plan,’ he said. ‘I think we should go find Dr Barrie. The real Dr Barrie. If your father stole something, maybe she can tell us what it is, and why it’s so important.’

  ‘If she’s involved in this conspiracy, she’ll have been arrested,’ Linda said. ‘And even if she isn’t involved, she’ll be under heavy protection. We won’t be able to get within a mile of her. When it comes down to it, Mr Stone, we both work for the Company. Maybe we should go back to Mr Kohler—’

  ‘I didn’t come back just to help you clear your father’s name,’ Stone said. ‘I came back because a woman was murdered. The wife of my best friend was shot dead because of this, because someone wanted to get to me.’

  His pulse beat in his head. Linda was staring at him across the table, and people at other tables and the two teenagers behind the counter were all staring at him too.

  Linda said quietly, ‘I really, truly thought that we’d find something here.’

  ‘Tell me, Linda. Tell me everything. It’ll help us work out our next move. It’ll help us clear your father’s name and take down the people responsible for Susan’s murder.’

  Linda shook her head. ‘You’ll think I’m crazy. Actually, I think I am a little crazy, for even believing it. But it doesn’t matter now.’

  After a long pause, Stone said, ‘It’s possible there’s a microdot hidden under the label, or inside the padding. We need to find a place where we can pull it apart and examine every square inch.’

  ‘And if it’s just an empty envelope?’

  ‘Then we’ll definitely need a new plan. I’m not giving up on this, Linda. I’m going on, with you or without you.’

  ‘With me, then,’ she said. ‘With me.’

  They took rooms on different floors of the Roosevelt Hotel and spent three hours taking the envelope apart. They cut open its outer layer, pulled out the grey fluff strand by strand. They opened the seam at the bottom edge. They heated its surfaces over the bedside lamps in case Tom Waverly had left a message in one of the common-or-garden varieties of heat-sensitive invisible ink. They didn’t find anything.

  They ordered sandwiches from room service, agreed that there was no point staying in New York, that they would make an early start tomorrow, hire a car and head for White Sands and decide what they were going to do along the way. After Linda had retired to her own room, Stone ordered a bottle of Wild Turkey. After it arrived, he sat on the bed, drinking from the plastic tumbler he’d found in the bathroom, watching the TV fixed on a wall bracket under the plaster ceiling.

  He felt comfortably numb after a few belts of bourbon, and the garish, in-your-face simplicity of the TV ads began to seem amusing. Susan’s doppel was probably living out her life right here in the Nixon sheaf, he thought; it wasn’t so hard to imagine that she was also alive and well in a sheaf where she’d shot Marsha Mason dead before Marsha Mason could shoot her. It would be too close to known history to be reached by any Turing gate, but perhaps there was some other road he could take, like that highway in the song sung by the pair of strange, out-of-time musicians. A highway he could find in his dreams, a highway like a winding ribbon, a winding ribbon with a band of gold. A highway back to you . . .

  At some point Stone could no longer keep his eyes
open and he fell asleep, propped up against the padded headboard. When he woke, the TV was still flickering and mumbling high in the corner of the room and two men were standing at the foot of the bed.

  8

  Stone stayed very still, locking gazes with the larger of the men, a heavy-set guy in a sport coat and blue jeans who looked like a backwoods farmer turned fairground prizefighter. He had a nose like a squashed beet, protruding ears with a touch of cauliflower, and black hair greased back in a fat wave, and he was aiming a large revolver at Stone’s chest, its hammer cocked, his finger rock-steady on the trigger, his dark eyes calm and unblinking. Stone’s Colt .45 lay on the briefcase, on the bedside table. He’d have to distract this klutz somehow, snatch up the pistol . . .

  ‘Don’t even think of trying anything,’ the other man said. ‘Calvin looks dumb, but he ain’t.’

  ‘Kindly reach back and take hold of those two lamps either side of the headboard,’ Calvin said. ‘Hold them good and tight.’

  ‘Looks like Christ on the cross, don’t he?’ the smaller man said. Sleek and plump as a cemetery rat, dressed in an electric-green suit and a bright red silk shirt, he stepped around the end of the bed with the caution of a technician approaching an unexploded bomb, one hand inside his jacket.

  ‘Don’t move a muscle,’ Calvin told Stone.

  His partner brought his hand out of his jacket. He was holding a fat glass-barrelled syringe with finger-grip loops, the kind of thing a veterinarian might use on a horse, and with a sudden flourish rammed its spike into Stone’s left thigh and injected about half a pint of pink goo into the big muscle there.

  Stone yelled more from surprise than pain, but managed to keep hold of the lamps and keep his gaze fixed on Calvin’s face, asking him if they’d been sent by Ralph Kohler, if they were taking him back, suddenly finding it difficult to work the muscles of his throat and mouth, feeling as if he was pinned to the bed by centrifugal force as the room began to slide past.

  ‘My own special mix,’ the small man said. ‘It can make a deaf-mute sing like a canary.’

  Calvin studied Stone for a moment, then said to his partner, ‘That shit works fast, don’t it? Well, let’s get this thing done.’

  ‘I still don’t see why we can’t take him through the mirror,’ the small man said. He had a nasal accent from somewhere in New England, a way of cocking his head this way and that like a bird. ‘We’re asking for trouble, working here.’

  ‘It’s not ideal, but we have our orders.’

  ‘I was just expressing an opinion.’

  ‘It’s no good expressing it to me.’

  ‘Or to anyone else, no doubt,’ the small man said. ‘We’re cogs in the machine, Calvin, cogs in the machine. I’ll do my best, but in my humble opinion this is not the place to carry out this kind of work. If we attract the attention of the local law enforcement agencies, things could get messy.’

  The room was moving sideways with a stately slide and Stone was having trouble focusing on things. He squinted at the big man, said, ‘Who sent you?’

  ‘We’re just a couple of guys who happen to be very good at what they do,’ Calvin said, allowing a sliver of amusement to show in his battered face. He stepped around the bed and picked up the Colt .45, weighing it in his hand before slipping it into a pocket of his sport coat, then unlatching the briefcase and taking out the shock gizmo. ‘Word of advice. Next time you leave your stuff with someone, you should take a good look at it when you get it back. This thing, it had two big batteries inside it. We took out one and put in a transponder.’

  ‘You led us a pretty good chase after you came through the mirror,’ Calvin’s partner said. ‘We’ve been driving around in fucking circles for hours trying to pick up the signal. But as you’re about to find out, we’re the kind of guys who don’t easily give up.’

  ‘He looks about ready,’ Calvin said.

  ‘Give him a few minutes,’ his partner said, and went into the bathroom.

  Stone tried to keep Calvin’s face fixed in the centre of the whirling room. He had the horrible feeling that if he let go of the lamps he’d fall into the magic light of the TV that all this time had been muttering to itself up by the ceiling. He said, ‘People are watching me. You’re going to be in a world of trouble.’

  Calvin’s grin showed a mouthful of small brown teeth. ‘You’re a pisser, aren’t you? You hear that, Al? We’re in a world of trouble.’

  ‘Company guys, they’re all the same,’ the small man, Al, sang out from the bathroom, over the sound of running water. ‘I’ve never met one who wasn’t an arrogant son of bitch. But even Company guys will talk. You just have to work that little bit harder.’

  ‘Listen to my good friend,’ Calvin told Stone. ‘He’s done a lot of this kind of thing. He’s very good at it. So don’t you fret, my friend, you’re in safe hands. He’ll see you right.’

  ‘We’ve both had plenty of experience with people like you,’ Al said, as he came out of the bathroom. He’d taken off his suit trousers and his shirt, wore only a white vest and white undershorts, black socks with suspenders, and shiny black shoes. There was a tattoo on his right arm: a red heart dripping blood and crowned with thorns. He stood on tiptoe and turned up the volume of the TV, studied Stone for a moment, then told Calvin, ‘He looks nicely cooked. We’ll start in when the bath’s full.’

  ‘People might well complain about the TV,’ Calvin said.

  ‘It’s either that, or we’ll have to gag him. And if we gag him, how is he going to answer our questions?’

  ‘Point,’ Calvin said, and started to take off his sport coat.

  ‘Hang it in the bathroom with my stuff,’ Al told him. ‘This is going to be one of the messy ones.’

  They handcuffed Stone’s arms behind his back and softened him up with the shock gizmo, which gave him an all-over cramp each time it was applied. Whenever he was able to catch his breath, he told the two men about the key and the post office box and the empty envelope, told them about a cache of gold, about uncut diamonds, about weird drugs, about blueprints, told them anything that came into his head.

  Calvin and Al didn’t take any notice of his babbling, and Al’s cocktail of drugs and the exquisitely knotted agony of the cramps were making it harder and harder for Stone to think about anything but the truth. The two men hauled him into the bathroom and set him on his knees in front of the brimful bath, Calvin holding him by his hair while Al told him that they knew that Tom Waverly had left something here, something they believed to be very valuable. They wanted to know what it was. They wanted to know where it was.

  Stone started to tell them about the post office box and Calvin shoved his head under water, held it there in a rigid lock while Stone thrashed and a fire grew in his lungs and black spots crowded out the glare of the tub’s white bottom, swarming in faster and faster. Then he was lying on his back on wet tiles, staring up at the bathroom ceiling, chest heaving.

  ‘Good to go,’ Al said, and Calvin hauled Stone up and shoved his head under the water again.

  When Stone came around for the second time, Al leaned over him and caressed his chest with the prongs of the gizmo and asked where Linda Waverly had gone. Stone told them that she’d run off, the bitch, and got the bath again.

  On his back, coughing up water, unable to get his breath, Al in his face, saying, ‘I know she’s somewhere in this hotel. Which room?’

  ‘She ran out on me, the silly little bitch. Said she was going to San Francisco. Or Los Angeles. Somewhere on the West Coast.’

  Calvin said, ‘She’s been, what? A year on the job?’

  ‘Eighteen months,’ Al said.

  ‘And she gives this veteran the slip. You believe it?’

  ‘I’m getting old,’ Stone said. ‘Careless.’

  ‘First true thing I’ve heard,’ Al said.

  He jabbed the gizmo in the tender spot behind the angle of Stone’s jaw and white fire took everything away. When Stone came back, he was on the bed. He’d b
itten his tongue and his mouth was full of blood. The TV was jovial and loud; ceiling and walls threatened to swap places.

  Calvin said, ‘Don’t think you can hold out in case we don’t find her. Because we will find her, my friend, and it won’t matter if you start talking then, because we’ll hurt her anyway.’

  ‘Because we’ll be pissed off,’ Al said, and described some of the things they’d do to her.

  Stone coughed blood over his chin and chest and told Al that he was a sick puppy.

  ‘He’s a craftsman,’ Calvin said. ‘I should know, I seen enough of it. Only way you can save her is to talk right now.’

  ‘What was in the post office box?’ Al said. ‘You told us about the post office box, let’s say we believe that part. What was in it?’

  ‘A bad joke.’

  Al sighed theatrically and got up and went into the bathroom.

  ‘Now you’ve made him mad,’ Calvin said. ‘It can get ugly, when he’s mad. I were you, Mr Stone, I’d stop with the dumb stories and start on telling the truth.’

  Al came back holding a lighted cigarette.

  Stone said, ‘If that’s for me, I don’t smoke.’

  ‘He’s a pisser, ain’t he,’ Calvin said, watching as Al clamped a finger and thumb over Stone’s left eye and peeled back the eyelid and held the tip of the lighted cigarette close.

  The glowing ash filled Stone’s vision. He felt its withering heat drying his cornea; felt the sizzle as it briefly touched his eyelashes. He desperately wanted to blink.

  ‘First one eye,’ Al said, wiggling the tip of the cigarette a little, ‘and then the other.’