Stone was flattened in the embrasure, pointing his pistol toward Knightly. Beside him, Linda aimed her pistol at the two men, moving it back and forth in quick but steady hitches. Tom knelt behind a steel trash basket fifty feet away.
‘If you wanted to beat us to the gate,’ Knightly said, ‘you should have taken the George Washington Bridge. But I suppose you had to stop off and pick up the bomb.’
‘Where are the rest of your men?’ Stone said. ‘On their way to New Mexico?’
‘If you throw down your weapons and surrender, I promise that I’ll let Ms Waverly live.’
‘Put down your gun, Mr Knightly, or none of us will get out of this alive.’
‘Do it now,’ Knightly said, and turned and shot a long-haired young man who crouched in one of the open doors of the train, shot him in the chest and knocked him down. People inside the passenger car screamed. At the far end of the platform, people were fighting to escape through the turnstiles.
‘You think I care about these people?’ Knightly said. ‘They’re nothing, Adam. They’re dust in the wind. They’re the walking dead.’
Tom rose to his feet and stepped forward. ‘You want the bomb? I’ll take you to the bomb.’
Stone saw a man wearing a blue sport coat push through the panicky crowd at the turnstiles and cross the platform in three quick strides and disappear into the train.
‘I’ll take you right to the bomb,’ Tom said. ‘After that, you can kill me or you can let me go, I really don’t care. All you have to do is promise you’ll let my daughter live. Let her walk away now. Let her go back through the mirror.’
‘I won’t do it,’ Linda said loudly, right by Stone’s ear.
‘Adam Stone has the device,’ Tom said, ‘and I can show you where the bomb is. Let Linda go - she doesn’t have anything to do with this.’
Stone could see the man in the sport coat moving through one of the cars of the train, appearing and disappearing behind graffiti scrawled across window-glass. He touched Linda’s hand and said quietly, ‘There’s a guy just got on the train. I think he’s our backup. When he makes a move, so do we.’
She gave a tight nod.
‘If you do have the device, Adam, I suggest that you give it up now,’ Knightly said. ‘Or would you rather see more innocent people die? Their lives, such as they are, are in your hands.’
‘Don’t shoot anyone else,’ Stone said and threw the denim jacket onto the platform.
‘Is the time key in there?’ Knightly said.
‘And its bridle.’
‘Put down your weapons.’
‘Have one of your men come get it. Do you think I’ll shoot him and risk the life of an innocent hostage?’
‘I’ll have her shot if you don’t lay down your weapons right now,’ Knightly said, and the man in the blue sport coat stepped out of the open door of the car and shot the man holding the black woman. He fell down and the woman fell down too, wrapping her arms around her head. Knightly turned, lifting his shotgun, and Stone stepped out of the embrasure and took his shot, saw paint chips fly from the girder, corrected his aim a fraction and shot again. Knightly stumbled forward and Stone’s third shot took him down. Linda’s pistol went off behind him, dropping the third man.
Stone started toward Knightly’s body, and Tom Waverly slammed into him and pinned him to the wall. One of Tom’s hands caught Stone’s chin and smashed his head against sooty tiles; the other snatched away his pistol, swung its grip against his temple. Stone fell to his knees and Tom scooped up the denim jacket and pulled out the time key and switched it on.
Pain thumped in Stone’s skull. Its black pulse beat in his sight and locked his muscles. He felt Tom’s hands on him, felt him pluck the set of keys from his pocket. Linda was down too, clutching her head. Stone saw Tom pull her up, pull her close, heard him shout to the man in the sport coat that he’d kill this woman, he’d kill her if he didn’t put his gun down right now. The man hesitated, then dropped his pistol and raised his hands. As Stone levered himself to his feet, Tom unlocked the door at the end of the platform and shoved Linda away, stepped through the door and slammed it behind him.
Most of the pain in Stone’s head lifted at once. He stumbled down the platform as Linda braced and shot up the door’s lock. Stone pushed her out of the way and kicked the door just beneath the shattered lock, a good solid kick that made it shiver in its frame, then stepped back and shoulder-charged it, but it wouldn’t give way. Tom Waverly had jammed or bolted it from the inside.
The man in the sport coat jogged down the platform toward them, saying breathlessly, ‘I’m Harvey Shiel, Mr Stone. Your contact.’
‘Follow me,’ Stone said, and ran for the exit, pausing to scoop up a pistol dropped by one of the dead men. Linda and Harvey Shiel chased after him as he ran up the steps, straight into the arms of two cops who were descending toward the platform with their guns drawn. One spun Stone around and pressed him against the wall; the other covered Linda and Harvey Shiel with his revolver.
‘I’m a Secret Service agent,’ Stone said, as calmly as he could. ‘Look in my jacket, the inside pocket.’
The cop was a brawny veteran. He held Stone’s hands at the back of his neck in a good thumb-lock and wanted to know if Stone had anything to do with a report of shots fired in the subway.
‘I’m chasing fugitives,’ Stone said. ‘Three are down. One got away. Check my ID, officer.’
‘Take it out nice and slow,’ the cop said, and stepped back and aimed his revolver at Stone as he took out the badge case he’d been given back in the Real. The cop studied the photograph on the card and the embossed gold shield, showed it to his partner, asked Stone what was going on.
‘It’s a matter of national security. I want you to secure the area and call up ambulances - there are civilian casualties. My partners and I have to go get backup,’ Stone said, and turned and ran up the rest of the steps before the cop could think to ask why Stone’s partners didn’t show their ID.
Stone ran two blocks down Lexington Avenue, turned left onto 49th Street. His nose was bleeding and he snorted blood into his hand and wiped it on the leg of his trousers without breaking stride. As in the American Bund, as in the Real, the north side of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel took up the whole block. The brass-faced double doors of the freight elevator and the door to the service stairs were set next to the entrance to the hotel’s underground parking lot. Stone shot out the lock of the door to the stairs and kicked it open. Linda was running toward him, her face flushed, her hair like a banner. At the far end of the block, Harvey Shiel turned the corner, labouring mightily.
Stone went down the spiral stairs two at a time; Linda’s footsteps clattered somewhere above him as he unbolted the grated door at the bottom. As he hauled it open, he heard another shot echo far down the white-tiled passageway and ran toward it.
Pain suddenly thumped in his head, growing sharper as it knocked through his skull.
He was getting close to the time key.
A sooty bulb burned above the iron door that stood open in the side of the passageway and two dead men lay on their backs just inside. When Stone stepped over the bodies, the pain in his head doubled, doubled again. Shock waves of hard sharp pain hammering through his skull, pain so bad it didn’t seem possible he could survive it. He stumbled forward, crashed into the edge of the doorway, and clung there like a drowning sailor. Saw through a kind of black pulse the tarnished glow of the gate filling the meter cupboard on the other side of the small, sooty room; saw someone silhouetted against it.
The mild-faced man in a business suit, the time key glowing in his left hand, looked straight at Stone, then reached inside his jacket. Tom Waverly’s body was sprawled at his feet. Another man sat against the wall next to the silvery mirror of the gate, his face shot away. The man in the suit pulled out a pistol and Stone tried to lift his own weapon, but it seemed to weigh about a thousand pounds. Then something exploded right by his head.
Stone fell down, convinced he’d been shot. Linda stepped past him, shot the man as he crawled toward the gate on hands and knees, shot him as he collapsed and shot him again, the hard noise pounding the nail through Stone’s skull.
The man fell on his face and stayed down. Linda dropped to her knees beside her father’s body. Stone found his gun and began to crawl forward. The time key lay on the floor next to the body of the man in the business suit. Stone’s sight was full of black rags that pulsed with the pulse of the pain in his head. All he could see was the time key, a faint green rectangle that suddenly inverted, opening into a vast void in which baleful stars rushed at him like angry hornets. He felt its full force drive through him and with a convulsive effort lifted his pistol and set it against the time key and squeezed the trigger. The pain in his head blew out and the gate vanished like a burst soap bubble.
WHITE SANDS, OCTOBER 1977
Harvey Shiel and his partner had been sent all the way back to 1969, the year when the gate had first been opened onto the Nixon sheaf. Shiel’s partner had been killed in a traffic accident four years ago, but Shiel had continued to live in deep cover, scrupulously maintaining the radio receiver, keeping it charged and carrying it with him wherever he went out of habit so deeply ingrained he’d almost forgotten the reason for it. He told Stone that when the receiver had begun to vibrate it had taken him a while to remember what he was supposed to do.
‘I tracked the signal to a back road in New Jersey,’ he said. ‘North of Secaucus. I found two cars there all shot up, three bodies dumped in the reeds, and the transmitter lying in the dirt. I knew something had happened, but I didn’t know what. I couldn’t think of anything else but to hang out near the gate and hope I spotted you. It was pure dumb luck that I did.’
They were driving out of New York in the van. They’d had to leave Tom Waverly’s body and the bodies of the other men in the squalid room where the gate to the Real opened. It had been an awful thing to do, but there had been no choice: they’d only just got out ahead of the local cops.
Stone still wasn’t quite sure what had happened. He was certain that the three dead men had been Dick Knightly’s, left there in case the ambush in the subway station failed. And he was also certain that Tom Waverly had killed them, because he’d heard only a single shot as he’d been running down the tunnel toward the gate - the shot that had killed Tom, fired by the man in the business suit.
He imagined Tom standing in the little room with the time key alive in his hands, waiting for the gate to open. And when it had opened, the man in the business suit had stepped through the mirror and shot him. But where had the man come from? He’d carried no identification, no money, nothing but a spare clip for his pistol. Was he a Company assassin, sent back in time from 1984 to deal with Stone and Tom Waverly after the Company had managed to build a time gate from the plans left by Eileen Barrie? Or had he come from much further in the future?
Maybe he would be able to figure it out later, Stone thought. Right now, he still had to dispose of the nuclear bomb and deal with the rest of Knightly’s men.
Harvey Shiel said that taking care of the bomb wouldn’t be a problem. He had a converted fishing boat, a forty-footer with twin GM marine diesels that he rented to deep-sea fishing parties.
‘We can take her out and dump the thing in ten thousand feet of water if that’s what you want. You’re absolutely sure you don’t want to make contact with the Real, bring in specialists to deal with it?’
‘Absolutely,’ Stone said.
‘Then we can load it up tonight,’ Shiel said, ‘and go out at first light. What are you going to do after that?’
Linda stirred and said, ‘Some of Knightly’s people are still alive.’
She was possessed by a brittle calm that Stone found more unsettling than raw, unreasoning grief. He felt as if he was sitting next to a bomb with a mercury-tilt trigger that was liable to go off at the slightest disturbance.
He asked Shiel how much cash he was carrying.
‘A couple of thousand dollars. I emptied my checking account after I got the signal, thought it might come in handy. I can get more, but it’ll take a little time.’
Stone was grateful that he had this competent, good-hearted man on his side. He said, ‘I’ll need all of it. Think you can handle the disposal of the nuclear device by yourself?’
‘No problem. Who are you chasing? Can I help you with that, too?’
‘I have to go after Knightly’s people. They want to take three vans full of equipment through the mirror, back to the Real. It’s too much to smuggle through the gate in New York, and in any case the area’s swarming with local cops. That means there’s only one place they can go. I reckon I’ll have a couple of days to get ready if I fly out there, as long as I leave right now.’
‘It doesn’t stop,’ Linda said.
‘This one last thing,’ Stone said, ‘and then it’s done.’
She took a breath, let it out. ‘All right. What do we have to do?’
‘You’re going to stay with Harvey. You can give him a hand with the bomb, if you’re up to it.’
‘I’ll come with you—’
‘You’re in shock, Linda. You don’t know it, but you are.’
‘They killed my father. I want to come with you and kill them. Kill them all . . .’ Her face twisted, and then tears came. She swiped at them with the heel of her hand, but they kept coming. She said in a tight voice, ‘He didn’t want to be saved, did he? He’d gone all the way over. He would have gone through and left us behind, he would have gone after Dr Barrie’s doppels, he would have started the whole thing over, just to save himself . . .’
‘I’m sorry,’ Stone said. After a moment put his arm around her shoulders. She leant against him and wept silently, angrily. He said, ‘He’s still alive, Linda. Right now, in the Real, in 1977, he’s still alive.’
‘You think that makes it any better?’