Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  ‘You’re going to kill Eileen Barrie, aren’t you? The Real version, that is.’

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  Tom was smiling that sly, infuriating smile of his. Stone wondered if he could knock the pistol out of his hand without getting shot. Probably not, even though the man was half-drunk.

  ‘Why did you kill six of her doppels?’ Stone said.

  ‘That wasn’t me.’

  ‘I forgot: it was one of your doppels who murdered all those women.’

  ‘Yes it was. Tom Waverly Two. I know it’s hard for you to understand this, Adam, but we really have travelled back three weeks. None of that bad stuff has happened yet, and I intend to make sure that it never does.’

  ‘By killing Eileen Barrie.’

  ‘No one has to get killed if everything works out.’

  Linda came out of the convenience store. She was carrying a paper bag and a newspaper, and looked worried. Tom glanced at her, and Stone used the moment of inattention to palm the screwdriver he’d taken from the desk in the bunker. When Linda reached the Jeep she tossed the newspaper onto the driver’s seat and said, ‘Look at this.’

  ‘What is it, honey?’

  ‘Look at the date.’

  Tom studied Stone for a moment, then picked up the newspaper and squinted at it in the orange glow of a nearby streetlight, saying, ‘Jesus Christ.’

  Stone made his move. He reared up and clamped his right forearm around Tom’s throat, locked his wrist in the elbow of his left arm and hauled back with all the strength he’d earned from working on the railroad and the farm. Tom clawed at the choke-hold and tried and failed to get his hands under Stone’s forearm, then tried to jab his elbows in Stone’s face, but Stone ducked down and held on. Linda tried to climb into the Jeep and get between the two men as they bucked and reared, but one of Tom’s elbows caught her in the temple and knocked her to the ground. Stone jammed his knees into Tom’s spine through the back of the seat and tightened his grip. Tom kicked a diminishing tattoo against the Jeep’s dash and went limp and dropped his pistol into the footwell, and Linda snatched it up and rolled away and stood up, holding it in a two-handed grip. Stone pressed the blade of the screwdriver against the corner of Tom’s eye and looked straight at her and told her that if she didn’t drop her weapon he’d punch the screwdriver into her father’s brain.

  ‘How about you let him go and we forget this?’ Linda said.

  She was staring straight at Stone, but the muzzle of the pistol was trembling. She was clever, brave, and resourceful, but she hadn’t been trained as a killer. Stone believed that she wouldn’t be able to shoot someone she knew. He was betting his life on it.

  ‘I can’t do that, Linda,’ he said. ‘Put the pistol on the driver’s seat. Do it now, or I swear I’ll kill him.’

  Linda did as she was told. Tom was a dead weight now, completely out of it. Stone eased his grip and let Tom slump forward, then snatched up the pistol and pulled Tom’s knife from the sheath sewn inside his denim jacket.

  ‘What now?’ Linda said.

  ‘The time key is in your father’s pocket. I want you to take it out for me.’

  When she offered it to Stone, he shrugged out of his jacket and told her to wrap it up.

  ‘You’re being used, Mr Stone,’ she said. ‘The time key got inside your head. It’s using you.’

  ‘All that thing did was give me a headache.’

  ‘Why don’t you read the newspaper?’ Linda said, and held it up, folded to the headline. ‘Take a good look, and see that I wasn’t lying.’

  It was the late edition of the Los Angeles Times. The date on the masthead was August 31, 1984.

  Stone imagined and instantly dismissed some impossibly elaborate plan involving an officer working undercover in the convenience store, fake newspapers. We really did it, he thought. We really travelled into the past - but only a shade over two weeks into the past, not the three weeks that Tom had claimed. We’re at the beginning of the road that runs right to Tom’s suicide. To Susan’s murder.

  Linda was saying, ‘We’re in the right place but at the wrong time. We haven’t gone back far enough. We have to go back to White Sands, and try again. We have to go back another week.’

  ‘And let your father do whatever it is he wants to do? I don’t think so.’

  ‘He wants to break the circle, Mr Stone.’

  ‘So do I.’ Stone felt calm and cold. The initial shock had passed. He was in unknown territory, but he’d been in all kinds of unknown territory before. He could deal with it. And for the first time since Tom had burst into the hotel room and killed the two goons, he felt that he had the advantage.

  ‘That’s good,’ Linda said. ‘Because if we stay here, there’s a strong chance that my father will end up murdering half a dozen different versions of the same woman, get a fatal dose of radiation, and shoot himself to death in Pottersville. And your friend, Mr Stone, she’ll die too. We have to go back to White Sands.’

  ‘How can you be sure the time key will to do the right thing the second time around?’

  ‘Maybe we didn’t get the code quite right. This time we can make absolutely sure we do.’

  ‘We can’t be certain it will cooperate,’ Stone said. ‘According to your father, it has a mind of its own. No, the only way to stop this is to take out the people in charge of GYPSY. I know your father has said that’s what he wants to do, but frankly, Linda, I don’t trust him. I think he has his own agenda. I think he’s been playing both of us. He wouldn’t give up the names of any of the people involved in GYPSY, but I know someone who will. What we’re going to do right now is go find her.’

  He told Linda to get behind the wheel, said that if she tried anything funny he’d shoot her father, and sat right behind her while she drove, figuring out his next move. In the shotgun seat, Tom coughed and gurgled, started to pluck at the safety belt Stone had buckled around him. He stiffened when Stone put the muzzle of the pistol in the tender spot at the base of his skull and told him to behave.

  ‘You’re making the biggest mistake of your life,’ Tom said.

  ‘Just keep quiet,’ Stone said. ‘No more bullshit.’

  Tom massaged his throat, then said to his daughter, ‘Did you show him the newspaper, honey?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I did.’

  ‘You think that’s bullshit, Adam?’

  ‘I think I need a second opinion. Linda, you keep driving. Take the next right. We need to get off the main drag. Tom, you shut the fuck up, or I swear I’ll do you some permanent damage.’

  They were waiting in the turn lane when Stone heard a siren. He glanced around and saw a military police cruiser a couple of blocks down the street, its light bar flashing as it bulled its way through nose-to-tail traffic. A scenario flashed across his mind: someone at the chemical plant making a call to the military police after discovering that their Jeep had been stolen, the MPs checking security camera footage, finding that the Jeep had passed through one of the security gates, heading for Alamogordo . . .

  Tom must have had the same idea. He said, ‘If they take us in, we’ll never get to fix this.’

  Stone saw the light change and told Linda to make that turn now.

  She pulled out of the turn lane and swerved across the intersection just as a pickup truck ran the red light in the opposite direction. Stone saw headlights heading straight toward him and managed to grab the roll bar and brace himself. The impact was as loud as a bomb and sprang the Jeep’s hood and shattered its windshield and spun it around. As soon as it stopped moving, its engine stalled, steam spitting from under its buckled hood, Stone swung down to the street and tucked his rolled-up jacket under his arm. He had to kick the door on the driver’s side to spring it open, and grabbed Linda’s wrist and dragged her out.

  She was limping badly. Grains of safety glass glittered in her hair. She came with him docilely enough at first, but when they reached the crowded sidewalk she began to scream for help. Three soldiers st
epped toward them, froze when Stone showed them the pistol. Linda tried to pull away, shouting that this man was going to kill her, saying, when Stone put the pistol to her head, ‘You’re going to kill us all, so why don’t you go ahead?’

  People backed away on every side; Stone and Linda stood at the centre of a clear wide spot like a pair of street performers. The hard noise of the impact was still ringing in Stone’s ears, but he could hear the siren of the military police cruiser growing closer. The Jeep sat alongside the pickup in the intersection, lit by streetlights and the headlights of stalled traffic. Tom Waverly was gone.

  ‘Make sure your father doesn’t do anything stupid,’ Stone said, and shoved Linda away, fired two shots into the air to discourage anyone thinking of trying to intervene, and ran straight across the street. He dodged through the stalled traffic, ran under a marquee announcing in flashing red LIVE ELVIS LIVE into a plush foyer. A teenage usher shrank away as Stone slammed through double doors into some kind of club. Subdued lighting, couples at little round tables with shaded lamps, and Elvis Presley kneeling at the front of the stage in a white jumpsuit and tinted aviator’s shades, crooning ‘Love Me Tender’ in a husky, slightly off-key baritone while a ten-piece orchestra sawed away behind him.

  Elvis stood up as Stone barged through the tables, stepping forward when Stone clambered onto the stage, saying, ‘Hold on there, fella,’ and going down hard when Stone kicked him in the knee. The orchestra trailed off in discord. Stone dodged around Elvis, pushed past a gaggle of chorus girls in spangles and feathers standing in the wings, crashed through a fire door, and ran through the parking lot at the back of the theatre, into the unknown.

  2

  The Company’s field office in Alamogordo was in a mini-mall off the northern end of the Strip, disguised as an information technology consultancy. Stone took off his brand-new Stetson and leaned on the buzzer and held his army ID up to the camera on the bracket above the door. After a long minute, a tall man wearing black suit pants and a white shirt with its sleeves rolled high on his biceps let him into a cramped reception area, saying as he relocked the door, ‘I bet you don’t remember me, Mr Stone.’

  Stone stepped on a jolt of alarm. ‘I don’t believe I do.’

  He’d taken a risk coming here - if the military police had passed the data from the fake army ID to the Company, they’d know who he was by now - but he needed to find Eileen Barrie as quickly as possible, and this was his best bet. He’d stopped at a shopping mall and purchased a change of clothing - a pale silver John B. Stetson hat, a blue shirt with pearl snaps, jeans, Tony Lama cowboy boots - as a rough-and-ready disguise. He was carrying a Macy’s bag in which he’d stuffed his suit, the time key, and the pistol he’d taken from Tom Waverly.

  The man’s smile showed a lot of white teeth. His skin was matt black and his head clean-shaven. ‘Back in ’73 I had hair - a lot of hair - and I guess I was shy fifty pounds,’ he said. ‘Not to mention I was wearing some pretty wild clothes. Stuff like bell-bottom jeans, tie-dyed T-shirts, and what they called love beads.’

  Stone took a few seconds to get the reference. ‘You were working on the Nixon sheaf operation.’

  ‘Richard Garvey,’ the man said, and held out his hand.

  Stone shook it. ‘It’s been a while.’

  ‘Meaning you still don’t recall me. That’s okay. It was eleven years ago, and we met just the once, when you briefed us.’

  ‘You were in the Washington team.’

  ‘Yes, sir. We were supposed to provide backup for the people who were going to make the hits, but the op got cancelled in the last minute of the eleventh hour on account of that bomb-factory going up. I did get to see some action later on—’

  ‘Richard, I need to use a computer with a connection to the Company net. You have one here?’

  ‘We have four in back. Excuse me for asking, but I heard you retired. Did they reactivate you?’

  ‘I’m kind of passing through on a job.’

  ‘The old need-to-know. Say no more.’

  ‘Exactly. It would help,’ Stone said, ‘if you logged in for me.’

  ‘Because you’re not really here.’

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘Step this way, Mr Stone. I’ll fix you right up.’

  Garvey led Stone around the receptionist’s desk into a square windowless room with a row of workstations down one side and storage racks and filing cabinets and two steel desks down the other. He fired up a computer, logged in, and told Stone to take as long as he needed - the other two guys on the night shift were staking out a bar where soldiers were rumoured to be selling museum-quality artifacts stolen from a war zone.

  ‘We kind of slip between the cracks here. The FBI thinks it’s in charge of policing the Strip because it’s on American soil, the army thinks it’s in charge because ninety per cent of the people who use the Strip are military personnel, there’s the Sheriff’s office, state troopers ... The Company likes to maintain a presence, too, but we don’t advertise. You want coffee? The day-shift guys are cheapskates who drink generic supermarket crap. I buy Colombian beans and grind them myself.’

  ‘Coffee sounds good.’

  It was strong and black, in a chipped mug printed with an old Company joke: E Unum Pluribus. Out of one, many. Stone stirred three packets of sugar into the coffee and sucked it down while he used the computer. Across the room, Garvey sat sideways to one of the desks, reading a fat paperback with his feet crossed on the lower drawer. Either he was the world’s best actor, or Stone’s luck was holding and no one had yet thought to alert the field office about three fugitives in a stolen Jeep.

  Linda Waverly had told Stone that GYPSY’s real work was disguised as a research programme developing portable Turing gates, and he was pretty sure that, like most Company employees assigned to clandestine projects, Eileen Barrie would be working under some kind of cover. He didn’t have clearance to access the Science and Technology Directorate’s blue book, but after ten minutes’ work with the computer’s powerful search engine he turned up an obscure reference to a security briefing that identified Dr Eileen Barrie as director of research in an army laboratory engaged in development of Turing gates with low energy requirements, close enough to Linda’s story to make no difference. He spent several futile minutes searching for the location of the laboratory and at last turned up a contact number with the Alamogordo area code.

  The number wasn’t listed in the phone directory of the White Sands interchange or in the business pages of the Alamogordo phone directory, and there wasn’t a listing for Eileen Barrie in the white pages, but Stone knew that she had to be somewhere close by. Despite the office’s fierce air-conditioning, there were saddles of sweat under his arms, and sweat stuck his shirt to his back. He was running on adrenalin and caffeine, unable to shake the stupid idea that at any moment a posse of military police and Company officers would break down the door in hot pursuit. He studied the original reference again. E. L. Barrie, Ph.D. It didn’t give her rank, but maybe that was because she didn’t have one. Maybe, like many Company operatives who disguised the true nature of their work with army credentials and documentation, she was a civilian employee. He asked Garvey if there was a directory of home addresses for civilians working at White Sands, and Garvey told him to hit F3 on his keyboard and type in the day code.

  ‘You’ll have to give me the code,’ Stone said.

  Garvey looked at him over the top of his paperback, no particular expression on his face.

  ‘I’ve been working all night. I didn’t have time to phone in for the update,’ Stone said, hoping he wouldn’t have to pull the pistol to get what he wanted.

  ‘Sinaloa cowboy,’ Garvey said, and went back to his book.

  That got Stone to a menu; two levels down were the residential listings of all the civilian employees of the White Sands division of the army’s Development and Engineering Office. He committed Eileen Barrie’s address to memory, searched the rosters of military personnel servi
ng at White Sands and memorised a telephone number, then shut down the terminal and set his Stetson on his head and asked Garvey if he had a spare pair of handcuffs.

  The tall man rummaged inside a drawer, found a pair of steel cuffs and tossed them across the room to Stone. ‘You need any help bringing in your bad guy, I’d be happy to ride along.’

  ‘You have a key for these?’

  ‘Take mine. I’m serious about the offer of help. We don’t get too much action here.’

  ‘If I need any help, I know where to call.’

  ‘It was a good op,’ Richard Garvey said, ‘but I’m kind of glad it didn’t work out. We had no business subverting that sheaf, or any like it.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Stone said, startled.

  ‘You’re a stand-up guy, Mr Stone. I thought so back in ’73, and I thought so when you went up before the Church Committee and said what you had to say. Good luck with your work.’

  Stone had stolen a Ford compact from the parking structure of the shopping mall where he had bought his change of clothes. Its under-powered engine pulled badly on uphill grades as he drove through suburban tracts that extended into the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains above Alamogordo. Dingbat apartment buildings, ranch houses with two-car garages, gas stations, mini-malls. The close proximity of the time key, wrapped in his suit jacket inside the Macy’s bag on the passenger seat, gave him the spooky feeling that someone intent on doing him serious harm was sitting beside him.

  It was one-thirty in the morning. The winding streets were quiet and empty. Stone left the suburban developments behind, drove past executive houses set in big, landscaped lots separated by stands of pine trees. Every third or fourth curve revealed the lights of the White Sands facility, a complex grid that stretched away to the horizon like a UFO landing strip.