‘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.’
‘If people can’t choose freedom for themselves it isn’t freedom, it’s just another form of tyranny,’ Stone said. ‘And what you want to do here in the name of freedom is a thousand times worse than any of the terrorists who’ve attacked the Real.’
‘The terrorists are wrong,’ Knightly said, ‘and I’m right. It makes all the difference. I know you’ll probably prefer to die under questioning than give up the device - I trained my cowboy angels well. But I happen to know that under your tough exterior beats the bleeding heart of a liberal. Perhaps you won’t mind paying the price for your silence, but I think you’ll mind it very much if someone else has to.’ Knightly looked past Stone at the burly man behind him. ‘Take him away, Mr Fitzgerald. Prep him. And prep Linda Waverly too.’
16
Fitzgerald and a guard in combat fatigues marched Stone into the house, through a door under the stairs, and down wooden steps into a root cellar walled with rough stone and lit by three floodlights on metal stands. A tin bath brimful of water stood in front of a scarred table on which various domestic items were laid out like surgical instruments. A car battery with starter cables clamped to its terminals, and an assortment of knives. Pliers, a claw hammer, an aluminium baseball bat, an electric drill. A roll of plastic wrap. Folded sheets of white plastic.
Linda Waverly sat in a kitchen chair to one side of these sinister props, bound by many loops of thin cord wound around her body, her arms caught behind her back. Her eyes were wide and unblinking above the duct tape over her mouth as she watched the two men shove Stone forward so violently that he missed the last few steps and fell to his hands and knees on the clay floor.
Fitzgerald stepped around him and the guard stood near the bottom of the stairs, pointing his rifle at him. ‘Stand up and lose your clothes,’ Fitzgerald said.
Stone climbed to his feet slowly and warily. The burly man was aiming a stainless-steel semi-automatic pistol at him, standing with his back to the table, six o’clock to Stone’s twelve. Stone took a couple of steps forward, not quite toward him, and said, ‘Suppose I want to talk right now?’
Fitzgerald moved sideways out of reflex conditioned by rigorous training, maintaining a good distance, the pistol aimed steadily at Stone’s chest. He said, ‘You can say what you like. But we still have to make sure that what you tell us is the truth.’
‘Do what you want with me but leave her out of this,’ Stone said. He heard the creak of stressed wood as the guard took a step down the stairs behind him.
‘It’s not up to me, pal,’ Fitzgerald said, moving two steps sideways as Stone moved forward again. The man was a professional. He was used to pointing guns at people and making them do what he wanted them to do. He thought that he was in control. He didn’t seem to realise that he was part of a dance, that he was being forced into a vulnerable position. He said, ‘Stop right there and lose the clothes.’
Stone looked up at the black oak beam that ran under the rough board ceiling. He took another step, as if to get a better view of the butcher’s hook screwed into it, and said, ‘You’re going to hang me from that? What is this, amateur night?’
Fitzgerald stepped sideways again, moving on the balls of his feet, moving with surprising delicacy for a big man. He was standing in front of Linda now. He said, ‘Goddamn right we’re going to hang you up. Get undressed right now or I’ll shoot you in the knee.’
Stone took off his jacket, folded it and laid it carefully on the floor, slowly took off his tie, and began to unbutton his shirt.
‘I’ll work you over to get you in the mood, then Mr Knightly will go to work on your girlfriend,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I’m pretty good, but the Old Man, he’s amazing. Very inventive. It’ll be a very instructive session.’
‘Everything’s going to be all right, Linda,’ Stone said.
‘Don’t talk to her,’ Fitzgerald said.
‘What are you going to do?’ Stone said. ‘Hurt me?’
He was looking at Linda, trying to convey with his gaze what he needed her to do.
‘I’m going to hurt you bad,’ Fitzgerald said, watching as Stone knelt to untie the laces of his shoes. His eyes were dark and flat above his thin smile. ‘I’m going to fuck you up. And then I’ll staple your eyelids open so can you watch every single thing Mr Knightly does—’
The sound came from upstairs, a percussive noise followed by the pop and crackle of gunshots. Without taking his gaze from Stone, Fitzgerald told the guard, ‘Find out what the fuck’s going on, Mike.’
After the guard had turned and started up the stairs, Stone threw a shoe at Fitzgerald, hard and fast. The burly man warded it off with his arm, his pistol moving off Stone for a second, and Linda jacked up one leg and kicked him in the back of the knee. She went over backward, still strapped to the chair, as Fitzgerald fell against the table, scattering knives and tools. Stone was on him before he could recover his balance, butting him hard under the chin and grabbing his gun hand and slamming it against the edge of the table. The pistol went off when Stone ripped it from Fitzgerald’s hand, discharging harmlessly into the clay floor, and Stone hammered its grip into the man’s face and felt the cheekbone snap. Fitzgerald dropped to his knees and Stone reversed the pistol and shot him in the head. The guard was coming back down the stairs in a hurry. Stone shot at him and missed and shot him as he raised his rifle and shot him again as he fell forward and tumbled to the foot of the stairs and lay still, head twisted at a sharp angle, feet tangled in the steps.