by Paul McAuley
‘One of the doctors looking after Mr Waverly is a psychologist,’ Echols said. ‘He will be doing his best to trick him into letting something slip.’
‘Tom will know you’ll try something like that,’ Stone said. ‘If he does let something slip, you can bet it will send you in the wrong direction.’
Cramer gave him a sour look. ‘You old-school guys always did think you were hot shit.’
‘We’ve been around the block,’ Stone said. ‘Tom won’t talk because he knows he doesn’t have to talk. He’ll play you all the way to the wire.’
12
The plane was cleared straight in at Brookhaven, and taxied to a hangar where an ambulance, a black limo, and a small fleet of NYPD squad cars and motorcycle cops were waiting. Tom Waverly and his doctors were escorted off the plane by a squad of soldiers and put in the back of the ambulance; Cramer and Echols led Stone to the limo. Echols carried a briefcase and Cramer was using his cell phone, listening to someone at the other end, saying ‘yes, sir’ several times, folding the phone shut as he climbed into the limo, telling his partner that everyone was scrambling to redeploy. A helicopter went up as the column of vehicles moved off with motorcycle outriders front and rear. Cramer, hunched on the fold-down seat across from Stone, said, ‘Just before he came off the plane Waverly told us to head into Manhattan instead of Brookhaven. The son of a bitch is playing games with us.’
‘He wants to use the Grand Central Station facility,’ Stone said.
‘We think so too,’ Echols said. He sat next to Stone, his briefcase in his lap.
‘Right now the Attorney General is writing a search-and-seizure warrant that will give us complete control,’ Cramer said. ‘It’s going to cause an almighty stink, but we have no choice.’
‘At least it narrows it down to just five gates,’ Echols said. ‘Five sheaves, three of them pre-contact.’
‘It’s the Nixon sheaf,’ Stone said. ‘Tom and I worked undercover there, and he told me that he’d been working there for Knightly after he disappeared. Also, that’s where he was hiding out after he stole the time key.’
Cramer said, ‘Why would he hide in a sheaf whose history GYPSY wants to change?’
‘Because it’s always a good idea to hide in the place you know best,’ Stone said. ‘You have contacts there, you’ve probably established several different identities and hidden caches of money and documents, you know how to blend in . . . And if GYPSY manages to do what it plans to do, it won’t just change their target sheaf. It’ll change everything.’
‘He has a point,’ Echols said, ‘and I believe that the Nixon sheaf was one of the favourites of our advisers. It’s a good tip. We should pass it on.’
Cramer took out his cell phone, punched a number, immediately got into an argument with the person who answered. Echols opened his briefcase and took out a set of keys and handed them to Stone, telling him that they were for the doors between the gate and the subway station, then gave him a steel ballpoint pen that was a little heavier than a pen should be.
Stone weighed it in his hand. ‘This is what? Plastic explosive?’
‘Click it once and it works like a normal pen,’ Echols said. ‘Click it three times in a row and it will fire a needle tipped with nerve toxin. It has five needles and has a range of a couple of feet, but it works best if you hold it against the target’s skin.’
‘A sidearm will do just fine.’
‘You’ll get a sidearm at the gate. This,’ Echols said, handing Stone what looked like a watch battery strung on a fine chain, ‘contains a radio transmitter with a fractally folded aerial. Squeeze it like so, the top pops up, and you twist it ninety degrees to the left to activate it. It’ll send an encrypted signal every five minutes. The people we’re sending through ahead of you, the embeds, will have receivers that can pick up the signal from up to twenty miles away.’
‘As long as they’re still alive, or haven’t lost their receivers,’ Cramer said, folding away his cell phone. ‘And as long as they’ve been sent to the right sheaf.’
‘They’re both good men,’ Echols said. ‘They’ll be there for you if you need them, Mr Stone.’
‘Let’s hope you don’t need them,’ Cramer said. He reached into the briefcase on his partner’s lap and handed Stone a waterproof capsule the size of his thumb. ‘You can hide this where the sun don’t shine. It contains diamond-tipped wire cutters that can deal with the links in standard police handcuffs. There’s a set of lock picks, too.’
‘Very thoughtful,’ Stone said, taking the suppository. ‘What else have you got? A gun that looks like a toothpaste tube? A trick comb? Exploding cigars?’
‘Your suit will have a sewn-in lapel dagger,’ Echols said. ‘You’ll also get official ID for the three different pre-contact sheaves. Anything else you think you might need, you better ask now. We don’t have much time.’
Cramer leaned forward, all business. ‘Listen up, here’s what we want you to do. As soon as Waverly divulges the location of the nuclear device, you’ll neutralise him, you’ll make your way back—’
‘Hold on. What’s this about killing Tom Waverly?’
‘He’s as deeply involved in this conspiracy as anyone else,’ Cramer said with exaggerated patience. ‘He’s only divulging information because he’s trying to play us. So let’s be clear. Once you’ve learned the location of the nuke, you must neutralise him. Terminate him if necessary, but at the bare minimum you have to make sure that he can’t interfere with the rest of the operation. It’s a shitty thing to spring on you, but it has to be done. He’s an outlaw. He can’t be trusted.’
‘He’s gone over to the dark side,’ Echols said.
‘If you don’t do it, the people shadowing you will,’ Cramer said. ‘After that, you’ll make your way back to the insertion point, and we’ll get you out and take it from there.’
‘Tom’s doing this to get his daughter back. What about her?’
‘We’ll do our very best to trace her,’ Echols said.
‘They have a whole sheaf to hide in,’ Stone said. ‘And they’ll probably kill Linda as soon as they realise their plan’s been blown.’
‘She’s one of our own,’ Echols said. ‘We’ll find her.’
Cramer said, ‘I have the authority to shut this down if I think you’re not going to follow the script.’
‘I’ll do what I have to do,’ Stone said.
‘I need to tell you how to set the time key so that you can return to the present if things don’t go quite as planned,’ Echols said. ‘It’s very simple. And I have some paperwork. We can work through it now, and then you’ll be good to go.’
They were racing along the red-surfaced government lane of the twenty-lane expressway, squad cars and motorcycle outriders fore and aft of the limo and the ambulance, lights and sirens on, speeding past civilian traffic as they swept toward the Williamsburg Bridge. The towers and tents and domes of Manhattan glittered in late afternoon sunlight and dirigibles moved above them like fish drifting over an exotic reef.
The towers of the Pan-American Trade Center rose twice as high as any other skyscraper, straddling the tip of Manhattan like a mountain, parks spilling dabs of greenery down its lower slopes, the spiky cluster of television and microwave masts that crowned its tallest peak raised half a mile above the city. It generated its own electricity from thermal shafts drilled two thousand feet into the bedrock. Vaults in its thirty floors of basements and sub-basements contained gold reserves, libraries of government and commercial confidential documents, fleets of antique cars, and several museums’ worth of loot from client sheaves. It was serviced by a railroad station, three subway lines, a heliport, and a docking point for dirigibles, and housed offices where half a million people worked, cre‘ches and schools for their children, shopping malls, apartment complexes, a hospital, and a police station.
As the limo sped across the Williamsburg Bridge, Stone recalled visiting the Company’s suite of offices up on the two hundred and twen
tieth floor of Tower Four, above a domed preserve where mountain goats and ibex grazed amongst crags planted with forty species of conifer. The elevator he’d taken from the cathedral-sized lobby had at one point travelled through a transparent tube at the edge of a void that cut a rectangle out of fifty storeys and framed a view clear across New Jersey. He thought of Susan and Petey, alive at this very moment, the little farmhouse amongst the trees on the rise above the empty sweep of the Hudson, the stony fields. Its site somewhere beneath the enormous footprint of the Pan-American Trade Center, its reality as remote from him now as Babylon, or Troy.
The limo followed the ambulance and the squad cars and motorcycle cops down the off-ramp onto Delancey Street and sped past apartment blocks. Cramer’s cell phone rang. He answered it, told Stone, ‘Waverly just told his handlers to head toward 49th Street and warm up the Nixon-sheaf gate. You guessed right.’
Stone said, ‘So we know where. Do we know when?’
‘Not yet. Like you said, he’s playing us all the way to the wire.’
Stone changed in the restroom of the Grand Central Station facility. He shrugged the shoulder holster over his white shirt and put on the black suit jacket, then picked up the brand-new Colt .45 he’d been given, checked its action, and slid it into the holster under his left armpit. He opened the suppository and pocketed the wire cutters and lock pick and dropped the capsule in a trash basket. He studied his reflection in the speckled mirror above the sinks but it had nothing to tell him.
In the main room, technicians were busy at their desks and old-fashioned computers. There was no sign of the saturnine gate chief. The officer in charge of the operation, Lewis Meloy, was a burly former marine with salt-and-pepper hair and a bone-crushing handshake. Stone had met him years ago, when he had been in charge of field operations in the post-revolutionary American Bund sheaf, and knew that he was a tough old boy with a brisk no-nonsense attitude. As Meloy introduced Stone to the Special Operations officers who would be going through the mirror with him, Tom Waverly was escorted through the room by a press of soldiers and officers.
Stone followed the little party to the platform in front of the active gate; the same gate he’d gone through the last time he’d been here, two weeks in the future.
Tom smiled and said, ‘Ain’t this just like the good old days?’
He was wearing his usual uniform of denim jacket and blue jeans. There was a hectic flush in his cheeks and his eyes were reddened by broken blood vessels, but otherwise he was his old self.
A deep hum started up. Stone could feel it through the soles of his polished black shoes, in his bones. In his heart. The gate was about to open. He said, ‘Those days are long gone.’
Tom’s smile widened into a grin. ‘Maybe so, but we’re headed right back to them.’
Cramer stepped up and said, ‘You two will be handcuffed together for the transition. That acceptable to you, Mr Stone?’
‘I don’t have a problem,’ Stone said.
‘I’m not going to try to make a run for it,’ Tom said. ‘I have more than enough motivation to make sure everything happens the way you guys want it to happen.’
Cramer ignored the remark and deployed the handcuffs. Echols told Stone that returning should be straightforward as long as they used the same gate and didn’t alter the settings on the time key. ‘All you have to do is switch it on, and it will reel you back.’
‘You mean that’s all your technician has to do,’ Stone said. He had no intention of ever using the time key. Even the thought of touching it made his scalp tighten.
‘You need to know this in the remote event that things go bad,’ Echols said. He explained that the gate would be closed as soon as it had inserted them into the past; after that, they wouldn’t be able to return to the present until it was opened by contemporary operators in the Real.
‘We pulled the records,’ he said, and gave Stone a laminated card with dates and times printed on it. ‘In some years it was open every day; in others just once a month, or even less. Let’s hope you don’t have too long a wait.’
Tom said, ‘Hey, Adam, why don’t you let me have a sight of that?’
‘I’ll hang on to it. If you want to come back, you better stay right with me.’
‘Wouldn’t have it any other way, old buddy.’
The circular mirror of the gate flicked on, reflecting the room and everyone in it. Cramer gave a signal and a small, scared-looking man in an orange jumpsuit - the turncoat technician from Operation GYPSY - was brought forward. An army captain opened a steel attaché case and took out a sleeve of black plastic. The time key’s jade tablet was fitted inside, so that only its face showed. There was a microswitch in one corner of the sleeve, a red pinlight shining next to it.
Although the time key was locked in its electronic bridle, although it wasn’t even switched on, Stone felt as if he had suddenly come face to face with a venomous snake.
Cramer said to Tom, ‘What date do we program into it?’
Tom smiled at him. ‘You realise that the date by itself won’t help you find where the bad guys have hidden the bomb.’
‘We have a deal,’ Cramer said, ‘and we’re gonna stick to our side of it. You and Stone will have your chance to play cowboy.’
‘I’m not playing any kind of game,’ Tom said. ‘I only want to make sure that I can save my daughter.’
‘You already have our word,’ Echols said.
‘You won’t get that chance unless you tell us what to program into the time key,’ Cramer said.
‘October fifth, 1977,’ Tom said, and winked at Stone. ‘Let’s say about half past seven in the morning. Should give us plenty of time.’
The technician took out a notepad and scribbled on it, tore off the page and held it out. ‘This will get us there. It’s a simple alpha numeric code, and I’ll make sure whoever’s going to input it gets it right.’
Cramer said, ‘You said you’d do it.’
‘I said I’d give you the code,’ the technician said. ‘Look, I’ve been around that thing for too long. It knows me. The bridle will force it to do what it’s supposed to do, but it won’t stop it putting the hurt on me if I use it.’
‘Man,’ Tom said, ‘aren’t you all a bunch of pussies? Give it me. I’ll do the deed.’
Stone said, ‘You’re enjoying this too much, Tom. I hope you’re not going to try anything stupid.’
‘And risk Linda’s life? Not me.’
His cheerful insouciance deepened Stone’s foreboding.
‘All right,’ Cramer told the tech. ‘Show one of our guys how to do it.’
‘As long as I don’t have to touch it,’ the technician said. ‘It’s going to be bad enough as it is without me touching it.’
Stone watched as the technician and one of the officers bent over the time key. The technician had sweated through the back of his orange jumpsuit and sweat beaded his pink scalp.
The face of the time key lit up inside the bridle.
The hot black nail slammed into Stone’s head with tremendous force: he would have fallen down if Tom hadn’t caught him. Everyone around them - everyone in the room - had collapsed where they stood or were clutching their heads and howling. The technician was hitching and jerking on the floor, eyes rolled back to show their white undersides, slobber seething out from between clenched teeth. The time key lay beside him. Tom snatched it up, and hauled Stone through the gate.
13
Linked by handcuffs, they stumbled into a bare, sooty room lit by a couple of shielded bulbs and the lunar glow of the Turing gate. As Tom Waverly aimed the ensleeved time key at the gate and the gate’s mirror slipped sideways and vanished, Stone fell to his knees, clutching his head with his free hand as if to protect himself from the nail driven through his skull into the agonised jelly of his brain. He could scarcely see around the pain, but when he felt a hand moving inside his jacket he caught Tom’s wrist and hauled himself up and smacked Tom square in the chin with his forehead. Fresh p
ain slammed through his head like a stick of dynamite exploding in a sump of pressurised oil. Tom swung a wild uppercut that connected above Stone’s ear, and then they were waltzing around each other, linked wrist to wrist by the handcuffs, trading swift blows.
Stone tried to stamp on Tom’s instep, and Tom pushed him off balance and drove him backward. Stone went with it, slamming into a wall and swinging Tom around and planting a solid uppercut under his ribs. Tom grunted and pulled Stone close and loosed a volley of punches, reigniting pain in old bruises, driving air from Stone’s lungs, rattling his heart. When he fell down, Tom came with him, snatching the Colt .45 from Stone’s shoulder holster and firing a single shot that lit up the room for an instant.
Stone’s left arm flopped free: the shot had severed the handcuff chain. He rolled over and tried to catch his breath. His ribs ached. The nail thump-thump-thumped through his skull, and then Tom switched off the time key and most of the pain went away.
When Stone stood up, Tom stepped back and raised the pistol. He spat something thick and black and said, ‘Son of a bitch. I think you cracked one of my teeth.’
‘Well, I think you cracked a couple of my ribs.’
They stood like two old, exhausted prizefighters, breathing hard, heads hung low. Stone started to laugh, and Tom laughed too, both of them howling, raising echoes in the sooty concrete box.
‘This doesn’t change anything,’ Stone said.
Laughing hurt. His chest yielded a creaking pang with every breath and his right elbow throbbed with vivid heat - he’d bruised it when he’d fallen down.
Tom spat again, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘I could shoot you right here, take the time key to the bad guys, get Linda back and vanish into America. That would very definitely change things, don’t you think?’
‘I hate like hell to bring it up, but you won’t have long to enjoy your freedom.’
Tom’s smile showed the blood on his teeth. ‘Good point. I want to save my daughter, you want to save your woman, and we don’t have long to do it. Let’s agree that we’re in this together, and get going.’
