‘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 New 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.
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.