Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  He paced up and down the road and thought about what he needed to do, always aware that Tom Waverly was watching him, always aware that the bomb in the van was ticking off the last hour of its life. That was, if Tom had been telling the truth about the time it was set to go off. On every side, reeds swayed and whispered. Traffic twinkled along a raised highway a couple of miles away, its bumble-bee drone coming and going on the warm wind. Stone thought about making a break for it, hitching a lift that would take him out of the blast zone, vanishing into America and letting history take care of itself, forgetting all about Susan. Yeah, right. He drank the Coke he’d bought at the service station. It was warm and too sweet, and sat heavily in his stomach.

  With thirty minutes left until the bomb was due to detonate, Stone heard vehicles approaching. He walked out past the rear of the van, shaded his eyes against the sun’s sharp glare, and saw three of the big boats they drove here heading toward him at speed, moving ahead of a rolling dust storm. The lead car blew straight past him, so close that its side mirror clipped the pocket of his jacket. The second skidded to a halt with the shark’s grin of its radiator grille just inches from his knees, its doors flying open and three knuckledraggers in black suits pitching out and levelling their pistols. The third car had drawn up at a distance, parked sideways across the road. A man stood behind it, leaning a short-barrelled assault rifle on its roof, aiming it straight at Stone.

  He was told to kneel and lock his hands behind his head. One man pointed his pistol at Stone while a second patted him down, tossing the lock pick and cutting tool and lapel knife into the dirt, ripping the signalling device from his neck and tossing that away, too. The third man opened the back doors of the van and looked inside and reported that the bomb was there.

  ‘At least, it looks like the bomb. There’s a dead guy too.’

  The man who’d patted Stone down, a burly man with a black crew cut, told him to stand up, asked him who the dead guy was.

  ‘One of your patsies.’

  ‘Did you kill the others?’

  ‘Two of them.’

  ‘Did you touch the device, try to do anything to it?’

  ‘It’s still armed, if that’s what you mean. Are we going to stand around talking, or are you going to do something about it?’

  The man slapped him in the face with his open palm. ‘Who are you working for? Who else came through with you?’

  Stone rode the blow, spat blood, and said, ‘I want to talk to Victor Moore.’

  That got him another slap, and a repeat of the question.

  ‘My name is Adam Stone. I was one of the original Special Operations field officers. Ask Victor Moore about me. And while you’re at it, tell him I have what he needs to get back to 1984.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  It hurt when Stone smiled; his cheek was swelling. ‘You think I’m going to tell a bunch of apes? I know you have orders to take me in, so why don’t you carry them out instead of playing silly games in plain sight?’

  The burly man stared at Stone for a moment, then went back to his car and talked on a radio handset. An overweight, balding man got out of the third car, pulled a tool box from the trunk, and carried it to the van and clambered inside. Stone watched as he opened the top of the bomb’s aluminium case and took an Allen wrench from the tool box and started to work on an access panel; then the burly man called to him and told him to get in the car.

  ‘Sit on your hands in the middle of the back seat and don’t give me so much as a funny look.’

  Stone did as he was told. Two men got in on either side of him, the burly man swung into the shotgun seat, and the driver did a three-point turn and blasted away from the scene. Framed in the rearview mirror, the van dwindled between banks of reeds, and then the car swung around a turn and it was gone.

  15

  The burly man hitched around in his seat, told Stone to lean forward, and pulled a canvas hood over his head. It smelled of someone else’s sweat and clung heavily to his bruised face, but it gave him a small measure of reassurance. His captors didn’t want him to know where they were taking him, which meant that they weren’t planning to kill him. At least, not right away. There was a chance that he might survive this.

  He wondered if Tom knew where he was being taken.

  He wondered if Linda was still alive.

  He wondered if Tom really was going to follow through, or if he was going to kill the technician and the other bad guys and let the bomb go off in a final grand gesture.

  He counted off seconds. He counted off minutes. The men around him were quiet; another good sign. Amateurs were nervous and unpredictable. They talked too much and brutalised or killed their hostages at the slightest provocation. Professionals were careful and calmly lethal, but they were also methodical in their habits, which meant they were easier to manipulate. Stone constructed and discarded various scenarios, realised that he wouldn’t know what to do until he faced whoever was waiting for him at the end of this ride, and tried to relax.

  He had counted past the time when the bomb was due to go off, a little over forty-three minutes, when the car made a sharp turn and jostled uphill along a rough track, bushes or tree branches scratching at its sides. The track levelled out and the car slowed and stopped, easing on its springs as the two men either side of Stone got out. Stone sat where he was until someone dragged him out of the car and pulled off the hood.

  The car was parked in front of a house with clapboard walls and a front porch enclosed by screens. Every window was blinded by sheets of hardboard. Trees clad in the vivid colours of fall crowded up a hillside behind the house toward a distant ridge; in front, an unkempt lawn studded with clumps of wild garlic sloped down to a small, rock-strewn river. Stone saw a man armed with an assault rifle walking amongst the trees on the far bank. A short track led to a large barn and a paddock with a split-rail fence where vans and cars were parked in a row, the layout exactly as Tom had diagrammed it.

  The burly man shoved Stone forward and followed close behind him as he mounted the steps into the shade of the porch, where two men sat in high-backed cane chairs. One of them, about fifty pounds heavier than Stone remembered, his sandy hair receding from an island of freckled scalp, was Victor Moore. The other was the former Deputy Director for Special Operations, the Old Man, Dick Knightly.

  ‘You led me a merry dance, Adam,’ Knightly said. ‘But now that you have delivered yourself into my hands, perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell me what kind of game you’re playing.’

  ‘He had the bomb,’ Moore said. ‘He also claims to have the device. It’s pretty clear he’s playing the same kind of game as Tom Waverly.’

  Knightly hushed his deputy with a fly-brushing flap of his mutilated hand. He looked exactly as he had the last time Stone had seen him, when he’d been answering with considerable style and wit questions shouted at him by a pack of reporters on the steps of the Capitol: lean and vital, his silvery hair trimmed in a military brush cut, his seamed face ageless as an Egyptian mummy. He was dressed in one of his trademark tweed suits and a primrose-yellow waistcoat, a matching handkerchief folded into his breast pocket. He smiled at Stone and said, ‘No doubt you’re wondering how I come to be here when I am supposed to be languishing in jail.’

  ‘Not really,’ Stone said. The shock of seeing his former boss was still fizzing in his blood, but he felt calm and clear-headed. ‘It’s pretty obvious you substituted a doppel.’

  ‘I’m pleased to see that you still have your edge, Adam. The unfortunate locked up in Lompac is indeed a ringer. We plucked him from a sheaf where he won’t ever be missed - I was very disappointed by how that particular version of my private history turned out - and removed two of his fingers and gave him a stroke and made a simple switch. I know that standards have fallen badly since the appeasers took over the Company, but I’m surprised no one ever spotted it. Or perhaps they did, and decided it would be best to cover up the inconvenient fact that they’d been duped.’


  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘That’s right - you retired.’

  ‘After ratting out his colleagues to the Church Committee,’ Moore said, glaring at Stone. He wore a safari suit and had the puffy eyes and broken veins of a dedicated drinker.

  ‘No doubt he did what he thought he should do,’ Knightly said. ‘Personally, I admire a man who sticks to his principles, even if he is horribly misguided. I believe you went off to live in some rural retreat, Adam, and the Company reactivated you to help find our mutual friend Tom Waverly. Do I have it right?’

  ‘I’m not here to talk about Tom. He’s out of the picture.’

  ‘You’ll talk about whatever I want you to talk about,’ Knightly said. His pleasant expression didn’t change, but his voice and his gaze suddenly sharpened. ‘You knew where to find the nuclear device, so I must suppose you also know our intentions, but you were kind enough to leave us time to carry the day. The President of this pissant version of America will have made his speech by now, but he’s still at the UN, lunching with . . . Who’s he lunching with, Victor?’

  ‘A bunch of Asian Foreign Ministers and Heads of Delegation to the UN. And then he has meetings with foreign heads of state all afternoon.’

  ‘We were able to take a look at Carter’s daily diary,’ Knightly told Stone. ‘We know his every move. He doesn’t leave New York until after seven this evening, so we still have plenty of time to nail him. That’s why I’ve given you the chance to speak up for yourself, instead of shooting you in the fucking head.’

  ‘Which is what you deserve,’ Moore said.

  ‘Which is all you deserve if you don’t tell me right now what game you’re playing,’ Knightly said. ‘Are you here on your own, Adam, or did you bring Tom Waverly with you? Don’t waste my time by denying that you’ve been working with him. I know all about it.’

  Stone stepped on the impulse to ask about Linda. ‘Tom made himself known to the Company, and I was brought in to find him. And that’s what I did, but there were complications - frankly, he got the better of me for a little while. Until a couple of days ago, I was his hostage.’

  ‘And he brought his daughter along for the ride, too. Is she working with him, or is she the loyal Company drone she claims to be?’

  ‘She wanted Tom to turn himself in. He had other ideas.’

  ‘He had both of you prisoner, he was forcing you to travel with him from sheaf to sheaf . . . I find that very hard to believe, Adam.’

  ‘I went with him because I wanted to know what he was up to. And, like Linda, I spent a lot of the time trying to convince him to do the right thing.’

  ‘You knew all along what he was up to,’ Moore said. ‘You and Waverly are in cahoots.’

  Knightly made the fly-shooing gesture again and said to Stone, ‘You certainly know about the device.’

  ‘He told me what it was and what it could do, but I didn’t believe him until he used it.’

  Knightly steepled his index fingers and touched them to his lips. ‘Mmm. It is rather unbelievable, isn’t it? Where is it, by the way?’

  ‘It’s safe,’ Stone said. He wondered for a moment just where Tom was, and hoped that no trace of the thought had shown in his face.

  ‘It better be,’ Knightly said. ‘It’s one of a kind, and I wouldn’t like to lose it.’

  ‘Especially not now,’ Stone said, seizing the opportunity to change gear, to try to put Knightly on the back foot. ‘Not when you’re stuck in the past, with no quick way back to where you came from.’

  ‘Now we’re getting down to the reason why you delivered yourself to me, aren’t we? How did it come into your possession?’

  ‘I took it from Tom. At gunpoint.’

  Knightly’s stare was compelling.

  Stone said, ‘It was after we came through the mirror at White Sands. I saw my chance to get the drop on him, I took the time key, and I got away.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then I went to see Eileen Barrie. I knew she was partnered up with Tom, and I forced her to confirm everything he’d told me, and made her show me how the time key worked. What I didn’t know was that she’ already tried to save herself by selling Tom to you.’

  ‘I suppose you helped her get away from her guards,’ Knightly said. ‘What happened after that?’

  ‘She turned herself in to the Company, and by now I guess she must have given up everything she knows about GYPSY,’ Stone said.

  He wasn’t about to tell Knightly that Tom Waverly had killed her. Let the bastard sweat a little. Let him wonder about all the secrets Eileen Barrie might have spilled.

  ‘You handed Dr Barrie to the Company, but you didn’t give up the device.’

  ‘She turned herself in,’ Stone said. ‘She was scared that your people would find her. I had my own agenda. I used it to come here because I want to make a deal.’

  ‘Did you, now? But why did you come to me? Why didn’t you take it to the Company, like the good little errand boy I know you are?’

  ‘Maybe I’m working for myself,’ Stone said.

  ‘You’re suited and booted, son, and when you surrendered you were carrying several items of Company kit. Also, if you don’t mind me saying so, you always were mindlessly loyal to the government of the day.’

  ‘I’m loyal to my country, Mr Knightly.’

  ‘Good for you, ’ Knightly said, and patted his hands together in mock applause. ‘That’s exactly why I don’t see you going over to the dark side. I don’t see you falling in with an outlaw like Tom Waverly.’

  ‘I learned a lot from my time with Tom. I learned all about the time key, what it does and how to use it. And I learned that it is very valuable to you, which is why I’m here.’

  ‘You’re a fucking liar,’ Dick Knightly said, quite without venom or rancour, as if making a casual observation about the weather. He looked at Victor Moore and said, ‘Am I right?’

  ‘No question,’ Moore said.

  ‘I think you took the device from Tom Waverly, Adam, and I think you confronted Dr Barrie,’ Knightly said. ‘That much may be true. But I think that you arrested her yourself, you turned her in, and then you came storming into my private facility with a bunch of soldiers.’

  ‘We saw you just before we quit the place,’ Moore said. ‘We had video feeds from our apemen. You staged that raid, you son of a bitch, and Waverly was with you.’

  Stone ignored him, telling Knightly, ‘The Company caught up with Tom after you snatched his daughter. That’s why I had to go in with Dr Barrie - I knew Tom would tell them about me sooner or later. But I hid the time key before I did, and if you saw Tom and me with those soldiers, you must know that we were under guard, and you must have seen us make a break for it.’

  Knightly allowed himself to look amused. ‘And where is Tom Waverly now?’

  ‘He caught a bad dose of radiation when he went into the nuclear reactor and reinserted the control rods,’ Stone said.

  ‘Lethal?’

  ‘Very. He was trying to shut down the power. Trying to stop you escaping with his daughter.’

  ‘And now you turn up here,’ Knightly said. ‘You tell me that you have the device, that you’re working for no one but yourself, and you want to cut a deal.’

  Stone looked straight into Knightly’s X-ray stare. ‘Why else would I be here?’

  He was beginning to believe that Tom had screwed up, that he’d been shot dead or taken prisoner when he had tried to deal with the technician and Knightly’s foot soldiers, that Knightly knew it and was cat-and-mousing him, trying to tease out exactly how much the Company knew.

  ‘What kind of deal?’ Knightly said.

  ‘You have Tom Waverly’s daughter. If you let her go, I’ll tell you where the time key is.’

  ‘That’s all you want?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You came here to save her. No other reason.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Knightly said. ‘You came
here because you’re working for the chicken-hearted sons of bitches who closed down the best hope of a thousand Americas, and all this talk about changing your mind and wanting to dicker with me over the return of the device is so much bullshit. You were a disappointment to me when you testified against everything I built, and you’re a disappointment to me now. You can’t even work up a decent cover story. I don’t doubt you used the device to come after me, but my best guess is that you were brought here by some government flunky who has charge of it and is waiting somewhere to take you back. I intend to find out where you’re supposed to rendezvous with him, and it isn’t going to be pleasant.’

  A board creaked as the burly man who all this time had been standing behind Stone took a step forward. Stone kept his gaze locked on his old boss and said, ‘Where did it go wrong?’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, the Real took a wrong turning and headed down the wrong road three years ago, when Carter was elected,’ Knightly said. ‘But we’re keepers of the flame, son. We’re going to bring history back on track. When we’ve finished our work here, we’ll have created a brand-new sheaf, and in the process we will have remade the Real. The old version of the Real, the one that took the wrong turning, the one that caught the disease of appeasement and insularity, will wither like a vine whose roots have been cut away. And a new vine will thrive in its place and send up many new tendrils into the sunlight. Out of one, many: there’s some truth in that old joke. We’ll raise up the weak and make them strong. We’ll liberate every American who labours under the yoke of tyranny. We’ll spread democracy like the wise farmer in the parable. I came to you once upon a time because I wanted to give you the chance to help us, to come over to the right side. Because this is right. This is right, and you are wrong.’