Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  ‘If we’re in this together, maybe you won’t mind giving back the pistol.’

  ‘I reckon I’ll keep it, just in case your friends in the black suits asked you to kill me after I led you to GYPSY’s nuclear surprise,’ Tom said, and stuck the .45 in the waistband of his jeans, under his denim jacket.

  ‘As a matter of fact, they did ask me to neutralise you, but I didn’t say I’d do it.’ Stone found the handcuff key in one of his pockets and unlocked the bracelet around his left wrist. His hands were shaking badly. He tossed the key to Tom and said, ‘Now you have the advantage, maybe you won’t mind telling me where the bad guys are planning to plant their bomb.’

  ‘They’ve already planted it, right here in New York. Take a look at that card they gave you, Adam. Tell me when the gate is due to open again.’

  Stone took out the laminated card, held it up in the yellow light of one of the caged bulbs. ‘If that technician got the settings right, we’re in luck. It should open every day at six p.m.’

  ‘If we’re in the right place, if it’s the morning of October fifth, 1977, the bomb is set to blow a little before noon,’ Tom said. ‘There’s no way back before then, so I think we should get going, don’t you?’

  They followed a trucking subway and a service shaft to the 51st Street subway station, climbed to street level in a tide of commuters and walked south along Third Avenue, Stone in his black suit, Tom Waverly in his denim jacket and jeans, his grey hair loose down his back. It was a crisp, clear morning. Sunlight bathed the upper storeys of tall buildings rooted deep in shadow, slanted low across intersections, glittered from the windshields and roofs of cars and vans and yellow taxis. According to the papers on the news-stand next to the entrance to the subway station, it really was October 5, 1977. The time key had lashed out at everyone in the interchange except for Tom Waverly, but it had also done exactly what it had been programmed to do.

  The sidewalk was crowded with office workers heading toward their offices. Traffic was jammed nose-to-tail, horns playing impatient arpeggios. Stone saw blue-and-white squad cars at each intersection, police patrolling on foot, police on horseback. The east side of the 46th Street intersection was barricaded; the empty street sloped toward the steel-and-glass skyscraper of what they called the United Nations Building here. Flags of all nations fluttered in front of it.

  Stone asked Tom if the UN was the target.

  ‘The President is the target.’

  ‘Carter? They’re going to assassinate Jimmy Carter?’

  ‘They’re going to assassinate his doppel, although you’d be hard pressed to tell them apart. He’s a peacenik and appeaser in the Real, and he’s a peacenik and appeaser here. Right now he’s finishing his breakfast, getting ready to meet the mayor and take a tour of the South Bronx, show how sympathetic he is about urban poverty. After that he’ll visit the UN, sign a human-rights document, and make a brief speech about it. When he steps up to the lectern at 11.35 a.m., downtown Manhattan will vanish in a mushroom cloud.’

  ‘Christ, Tom. You’re playing it close.’

  ‘I know exactly what I’m doing. I worked here, grooming some fall guys. The people in charge of GYPSY think they had everything compartmented, but I made it my business to find out about the big picture.’ Tom was pumped up, walking and talking quickly, his face shining with sweat. ‘They plan to take out the President, the UN, and any number of foreign heads of state, and then they’ll expose the fall guys: a gang of radical Communist Arabs with a fierce set of grievances we’ve been carefully nurturing over the past couple of years. I guess you know what that signifies, seeing as you helped set up a black op in this very sheaf in the early seventies. Matter of fact, they used some of your research when they war-gamed this scenario. Kind of ironic, don’t you think?’

  Stone had a good working knowledge of the Nixon sheaf’s recent history. After its version of World War Two and a holocaust as bad as anything in any known version of history, an independent Jewish nation had been set up in British Palestine. It had been a potential flashpoint ever since, the focus of Arab resentment and geopolitical rivalry between America and the Soviets. If Carter’s doppel was assassinated by a nuclear device that destroyed most of New York, and the blame was pinned on an Arab Communist faction, the American government would have no option but to strike at the Soviets. The beginning of World War Three was only a few hours away.

  ‘If you have a plan, you better tell me now,’ he said to Tom.

  ‘Getting hold of the nuke isn’t the problem. I know where it is, and I know that only a handful of crazy wannabe martyrs will be guarding it until it goes off. For a couple of hard cases like us, relieving them of the nuke won’t be much more difficult than taking candy from a baby. What happens afterward, that’s gonna be kinda tricky.’

  ‘One thing at a time. Where’s the nuke?’

  They were standing at the edge of a crowd of people waiting for the light to change, at the intersection of Second Avenue and 45th Street. Tom said, ‘See the office building, more or less mid-block? The one advertising all-day parking?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘GYPSY has a proprietary company in there,’ Tom said. ‘It’s an import/export shoe company, A&A International Services, Inc, Suite 409. I’m telling you where to go if I get into trouble. You ready to do a stroll-by, partner?’

  They walked past the building on the other side of the street. Stone spotted a man smoking a cigarette near the lobby entrance.

  ‘I see him,’ Tom said.

  ‘What about the cop in front of the parking garage ramp?’

  ‘You still got it, don’t you? He’s Khudora Ghanem, a Palestinian I happen to know.’

  ‘You recruited him?’

  ‘He’s a nice young guy, an engineer who studied in Egypt, which is where he got radicalised. He believes me to be a double agent working for the Soviets, helping him and his friends strike a blow against the Yankees.’

  ‘He knows you. Will that get us inside?’

  ‘He’ll wonder what the hell I’m doing here, and then he’ll reach for his gun. Let’s go find a set of wheels.’

  Stone stole a van parked outside a building site. The ignition was pre-electronic; all he had to do was rip out the wires and spark the engine. He drove the van around the corner and picked up Tom, who sat in the back amongst a litter of paint cans and ladders as they drove down Lexington and back up Third Avenue. It took fifteen minutes in the bad-tempered, bumper-to-bumper traffic; Stone had sweated through his shirt by the time he reached the office building. The fake cop, Khudora Ghanem, was posted by the pole barrier at the top of the ramp to the basement parking garage. When Stone stopped the van he stepped up and asked Stone for his ID.

  Stone gave the man his best blank stare. ‘What’s the problem, officer?’

  ‘Extra security for the President,’ Khudora Ghanem said.

  He was very young, with a dark complexion and a nick on his chin where he’d recently shaved. He started to turn when Tom appeared behind him, and Tom shot him in the face and caught his dead weight as he folded forward.

  ‘Give me a hand,’ Tom said. ‘I don’t want to get blood all over the uniform.’

  They slung the dead man into the van, raised the pole, and drove the van into the basement. It had taken less than two minutes.

  They rode the service elevator up five floors. Stone was wearing the heavy blue serge tunic and cap they’d taken off Khudora Ghanem’s body, and was carrying his service revolver. The tunic’s collar was soaked with blood and the cap had a hole in its crown where the bullet had exited, but Tom said it would pass muster.

  The fourth floor’s narrow corridor was quiet and cool. Tom hugged the wall beside the door of Suite 409, and Stone pulled the bill of the cap down over his eyes, knocked on the door, and looked down at his shoes when he saw a shadow pass behind the spyhole. After a moment, the door opened on its chain. Stone fired a single shot through the gap and kicked the door open as the man behind it went down a
nd shot him again, the noise loud in the small ante-room, where display shelves along one wall held rows of women’s shoes. A man in his undershirt ducked away through a door to the left; Stone fired a shot that splintered the frame, chased after him into a room stacked with cardboard cartons, saw him scoop up a submachine gun from a camp bed and blew his brains across the wall.

  ‘Not bad,’ Tom said from the doorway.

  Stone turned, looked at the Colt aimed squarely at him, looked at Tom. ‘What are you going to do? Shoot me?’

  ‘I will if you don’t drop that gun.’

  Stone saw that he was serious. He let the revolver slip from his grasp, stepped back when Tom Waverly told him to step back.

  Tom kicked the revolver across the room and said, ‘Let’s take a look at what these two heroes died for.’

  The bomb was housed in an aluminium case four feet long, a foot and a half across, and a foot deep. The case’s hinged lid revealed square and oblong steel panels neatly fitted together inside. No protruding sheaves of multicoloured wires, no LED timer usefully ticking away the hours and minutes and seconds, just an electronic circuit buried somewhere inside mindlessly counting down toward 11.35 a.m. and its own end.

  ‘The yield is a fraction under a kiloton,’ Tom said. ‘More than enough to take out the UN Building and everything else for half a mile around.’

  Stone felt his heart thump against his chest. ‘Do you know how to defuse it?’

  ‘Didn’t the boys from the DCI’s office tell you?’

  ‘I was supposed to kill you after we found the bomb, go back through the mirror, and bring in a team of specialists,’ Stone said.

  Tom shut the lid and latched it. ‘If we let them have this bomb, they’ll kill me, and they’ll almost certainly kill Linda too, when they go after the bad guys. And what about Susan Nichols?’

  ‘I know how to save Susan.’

  ‘Do you really think they’d let you save her when her death led to the downfall of GYPSY?’

  ‘You smart-ass son of a bitch.’

  ‘You know I’m right.’

  They stared at each other across the aluminium case. Stone said, ‘You want to find these guys? Okay, let’s go find them.’

  ‘Give me a hand with this thing,’ Tom said. ‘We can’t hardly leave it here.’

  They lugged the heavy case to the elevator, rode down to the basement, and set it in the back of the stolen van, next to Khudora Ghanem’s body. Stone took the wheel, keenly aware of the bomb’s presence every time the van bounced over a pothole. It took over an hour to reach the Lincoln Tunnel. After they passed through the toll plaza on the New Jersey side, Tom told Stone to take the next exit, hit the surface streets, and find a phone.

  ‘Better hurry, partner. We have less than two hours before our little treasure chest is due to blow.’

  ‘Don’t I know it,’ Stone said.

  He turned off the main highway at the next junction and stopped at a gas station. The pay phone outside the gas station’s convenience store was an old-fashioned mechanical model: no screen or credit-card reader, just a coin slot, push-buttons, and a greasy plastic handset. Before he could use it, Stone had to buy an odd-looking can of Coke to break a dollar bill peeled from the slim roll of low-denomination notes he’d been given back in the Real. The quarters were thicker and heavier than quarters in the Real, but had the same profile of George Washington on one side, the same eagle on the other. Tom gave him the number to dial. The phone at the other end picked up on the first ring, emitting a staticky crackle; Tom told Stone what to say.

  Stone recited the brief set of directions, hung up, and said, ‘That was a cutout, wasn’t it?’

  ‘A tape recorder in an empty apartment, with a relay that rings another number after it receives a call. I used it when I worked for these fuckers.’

  ‘Will they be listening?’

  ‘If they aren’t, there’s going to be a perfectly circular and highly radioactive lake where the Hackensack River used to be.’ Tom Waverly sniffed, wiped his nose on his forefinger and examined the streak of blood on it, then gave Stone a sombre look. ‘Do you trust me, partner?’

  ‘You’re not the kind of man anyone in their right mind would trust.’

  ‘I believe my ex-wife said exactly that, once upon a time. And it’s true, I never was what you’d call responsible. Yet here I am, responsible for just about everything in the Real, and a couple of dozen other sheafs besides, and I won’t even get to live to enjoy the fruits of my labours. If there is a God, he’s either the worst kind of practical joker, or He’s pretty fucking pissed with me. What do you think?’

  ‘I think we should bring in that team and let them deal with the bomb. I also think you’re in no condition to go through with whatever it is you’re planning.’

  ‘Don’t fret, partner. I have a couple of weeks left. You should know.’

  ‘We still have time to drive back into Manhattan, get to the gate—’

  ‘Two weeks isn’t what I’d call a whole lot of time any way you cut it,’ Tom said, ‘but I’ll have a whole lot less if I let you call in those boys, and so will Linda. I guess it doesn’t matter if you trust me or not. This is the only dance in town. Like it or not, you’re my partner until it ends.’

  14

  They drove past the outskirts of Union City and Meadowlands Stadium and turned off the highway onto a service road, passing desolate parking lots and abandoned factories and pulling up at a crossroads with cat-tail reeds on every side. This was where Stone, following Tom Waverly’s instructions, had told the tape recorder he’d be waiting with the bomb.

  They climbed out of the van into bright sunlight. A warm wind blew through the tall reeds and their brown tassels bent and swayed with a dry whispering.

  ‘What if they don’t come?’ Stone said. He was thinking of the circuit in the bomb counting down to oblivion, and was finding it hard to suppress the urge to start running for the horizon.

  ‘They’ll come,’ Tom said. ‘If they’re going to change history, they need the bomb to kick-start a nuclear war, and they need the time key, too, so that they can get back to 1984. Don’t sweat it, partner. They’ll come after us, all right. And when they do come, you have to trust me to do the right thing.’

  ‘You know where they are, don’t you? You know it’s within an hour or so of where we are now.’

  ‘Yeah, but it isn’t the kind of place you can drive into unannounced, even if you are packing a nuclear weapon. That’s why you have to let them take you in.’

  ‘You mean let them take us in.’

  Tom smiled and struck his forehead with the heel of his palm in mock chagrin. ‘Man, did I forget to tell you about this part? You’re going to surrender to them and explain that you’re working on your own. They’ll take you in to find out what you have to say, and while they’re listening to you spin some bullshit tale I’ll sneak in behind you and set up a diversion. When that kicks off, I’ll take down the man in charge and bring you and Linda out.’

  ‘What kind of diversion?’

  ‘Whatever’s to hand. Preferably something big and noisy, so you’ll know what it is when it happens. Basically, it’ll be a rerun of that little action in the McBride sheaf. I got you out then, and I’ll get you out now. Only this time, try not to get shot.’

  ‘If you know the layout of the place, you better show me.’

  ‘It’s an old farm GYPSY bought last year,’ Tom said, and drew a rough diagram on the van’s dusty windshield. A house and a barn and a few small outbuildings, a fallout shelter in woods behind the property, and a track running through the woods to a highway.

  Stone studied the layout, remembering that David Welch had wanted to lure Tom to an old farm the Company had used for covert entry into the Johnson sheaf, and wondering if this could be its counterpart. He and Tom agreed on a rendezvous point, and Tom erased the diagram with his sleeve.

  ‘What about the bomb?’ Stone said. ‘What’s to stop them driving it back to Ne
w York?’

  ‘They’ll have to reset the detonation mechanism first. Don’t worry about the bomb, or anything else. All you have to do is keep them interested in your story. I’ll do all the hard work.’

  Stone thought about how satisfying it would be to sock Tom Waverly right in the middle of his silly smile. ‘You planned this all along, didn’t you? You knew the time key would knock out everyone in the interchange, you knew where the bomb was, and you knew you could use me as a sacrificial pawn.’

  ‘I never did get the hang of chess - checkers is about my speed. Listen, partner, I’m taking a big risk, letting them take you in. You might shoot off your mouth, tell them about me, and put Linda in danger. So what you have to do right now is promise you won’t do that. You have to tell me that you trust me.’

  ‘You know I can’t do that,’ Stone said, ‘and you know why, too.’

  Tom studied him for a moment, then shrugged. ‘I guess it doesn’t matter. I know you want to end this here so that you can save your sweetheart. We may not be on the same team, but we’re pulling in the same direction.’ He looked at his watch and said it wouldn’t be long until they had company, then took out the Colt .45, checked its clip, and asked Stone if he had a spare.

  Stone shook his head. ‘You have just five rounds left. Is that going to be a problem?’

  ‘I guess I’ll have to make them count.’

  ‘It isn’t too late to come up with something better.’

  ‘I thought long and hard on how to do this. There isn’t any other way,’ Tom said, and started to walk away.

  Stone called after him. ‘What do you want me to tell them? What’s my story?’

  ‘You can tell them anything you like as long as you don’t tell them I’m here,’ Tom said, and parted the tall reeds like a curtain and disappeared into them.

  Stone walked around to the far side of the van and lifted the little signalling device from inside his shirt and twisted the button until it popped up. The two men who’d been sent into this sheaf’s past as his backup had been here for more than eight years, and he knew that he couldn’t rely on their help. They could have gone crazy and killed themselves, or their covers could have taken over their lives, they could have settled down and forgotten all about the call they were supposed to be waiting for, but they were about the only shot left in Stone’s armoury, and he figured that it wouldn’t hurt to reach out.