Cowboy Angels (6 page)

‘And you think, what? He was captured and brainwashed? He allowed himself to be turned? Come on.’

‘We don’t know what happened to him in the past three years, or why he’s surfaced now. We also don’t know why he’s killing Eileen Barrie’s doppels, but there it is.’

‘It could be a doppel of Tom that someone’s using to smoke the trail.’

‘Tom’s an orphan with no known mother or father, just like you and me and all the other cowboy angels. Who’d know where to find one of his doppels?’

‘It would be hard, but not impossible,’ Stone said, remembering something that Tom Waverly had once told him.

‘It’s easier to believe he was turned or that he’s working on some unsanctioned action of his own,’ Welch said. ‘He always did have a wild streak.’

‘Who is Eileen Barrie? Does she work for the Company?’

‘In the Real she’s a mathematician. And so are her doppels.’

‘Every one of her? That’s pretty stable.’

‘There are a couple of sheaves where she doesn’t exist, or where she died young. But in every other sheaf she’s a mathematician, usually working on some aspect of quantum theory. She’s more stable than Elvis.’

‘Is she working on something important? Something someone might not want her to work on?’

‘Forget the woman, Adam. We want to find Tom and bring him in, safe and well. We think you can help us.’

Stone let that
we
go for the moment. He said, ‘Why me? Nathan Tate worked with Tom on more operations that I did. Jimmy McMahon worked alongside Tom and me in the American Bund sheaf—’

‘Jimmy McMahon retired last year after he suffered a heart attack and had a triple bypass. And Nathan Tate
was
working the case, until yesterday evening. The Cluster used a travelling-salesman program to work out which doppels of Eileen Barrie were most likely to be targeted next. Nathan was working protection for one of the candidates. She was living in New York, the Johnson sheaf. Tom planted an incendiary device in her house. It started a fire that drove everyone outside, and Tom shot and killed Eileen Barrie and Nathan Tate with a .308 rifle from about two hundred yards.’

‘Tom killed Nathan?’

Welch nodded. ‘Yesterday evening, New York City, the Johnson sheaf. Like I said, there’s only one functional gate, and we have it locked up. But there’s a complication. In addition to Eileen Barrie and Nathan Tate, Tom also killed a cop who happened to be the nephew of the mayor of New York. The local police have been authorised to use terminal force against him. I want you to come back with me. I want you to help us find him. If the locals get to him before we do, they’ll shoot him down like a dog.’

‘Who sent you? Was it Knightly?’

‘Not hardly. The Old Man is still wearing a diaper and drooling out of one side of his mouth. He hasn’t even learnt how to talk again.’

After the Church Committee had presented its findings to a closed session of the Senate, Dick Knightly had been tried on charges of conspiracy to conceal the involvement of Special Operations in clandestine activity against governments in other sheaves. He’d suffered a massive stroke after he’d been sentenced, and was serving a twenty-year term in the hospital ward of a minimum security facility in the Florida Everglades.

‘Why I’m here,’ Welch said, ‘I happen to be working for the Directorate of Diplomatic Support in the sheaf where Tom made his last hit, where he’s locked in right now. The guy in charge of the investigation, Ralph Kohler, asked me to reach out to you because one of his men found a note at the scene.’

‘Tom left a note?’

‘Carved in the bark of the tree he used as a sniper’s position:
I’ll talk to Stone
.’

‘That’s it? You came all the way out here because someone who may or may not be Tom Waverly carved my name on a tree?’

‘I came here because Tom Waverly wants to talk to you, Adam. I know you and Tom had a bad falling-out over SWIFT SWORD, but I also know that he saved your life, once upon a time. Are you willing to try to save his?’

Susan said, ‘After I sent Petey to find you, I asked Colonel Welch point blank why he was here, but the slippery son of a gun wouldn’t give a straight answer.’

Stone said, ‘It’s how he is. Don’t take it personally.’

‘One minute you’re ploughing, the next you’re packing. So forgive me for being kind of curious.’

Susan, slender and tousled in jeans and one of her dead husband’s shirts, its tails tied in a knot above her navel, had just climbed the ladder into Stone’s temporary living quarters in the barn’s hayloft. There was a single bed and a kitchen chair and a raw pine chest, an unglazed window that looked out across treetops toward the broad sweep of the Hudson and the Jersey shore. It was warm under the slanting ribs of the rough-hewn roof beams and smelled pleasantly of the straw stacked below. Stone had washed up and put on his Sunday chinos and his best checked shirt. He’d been packing, folding T-shirts into neat squares, when Susan had climbed into the loft. Now he smiled at her and said, ‘Are you mad at me?’

‘I understand why you couldn’t talk about this in front of your friend. And I’ll try to understand if you can’t tell me everything, but how about a hint or two?’

‘It really isn’t anything. They want me to help find someone.’

‘Someone ...’

‘An old friend who’s gotten himself into a little trouble. I want to help him, if I can. Not because I want to help David Welch.’

Stone felt bad because he couldn’t tell Susan about the woman who had been murdered six different ways, about Nathan Tate and the policeman who’d been the nephew of the mayor of New York, about the manhunt. Less than an hour after David Welch had turned up, he was back inside the old world of evasion and half-truths, legends and lies.

‘And you’re going, just like that,’ Susan said. ‘He must be a very good friend.’

‘Actually, I’m not sure if we’re still friends. The last time we saw each other, we had a falling-out.’

‘Over some
femme fatale
, I hope.’

‘As a matter of fact, it was over foreign policy.’

‘Not quite as romantic.’

‘Sorry to disappoint. But we
were
good friends once upon a time, and I sort of owe him a favour.’

‘Is it going to be dangerous?’

‘He wants to talk to me. That’s all I’m going to do.’

‘This is what Welch told you?’

‘Your Mr Welch is definitely a slippery son of a gun, but I think he told me the truth, as far as it goes.’

Susan pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. She’d cut it short at the beginning of summer, but now the dirty-blonde curls cascaded around her shoulders. ‘I’ve never asked about what you were doing when you met Jake, Adam, and I’m not going to start now. But I can’t help worrying that this is a lot more dangerous than making sure aid packages get to the right place, or whatever it was you did back then.’

‘This friend of mine wants to talk to me. That’s all it is.’

A silence stretched between them, heavy with evasions and things unspoken, while Stone swiftly packed folded clothes, a wash-bag, and his Colt .45 automatic and shoulder rig inside his kitbag. As he was stuffing socks into nooks and crannies, Blackie, the farm’s Border collie, started to bark out in the yard. A few moments later, Stone heard the roar of the Jeep’s engine. David Welch was back from taking Petey for a ride.

Susan said, ‘How long is this going to take?’

‘I don’t know. A couple of days if I’m lucky.’

‘Mr Wallace and his son are due Saturday.’

‘They want to bag a sabre-toothed cat. I haven’t forgotten, and I promise I’ll be back in time.’

Susan narrowed her eyes, put her hands on her hips, and said in a playful, mock-tough voice, ‘You’d better be back, mister, or I’m going to have to find myself another partner.’

‘I’ll come back as soon as I can.’

‘Take care of yourself around that slippery Colonel Welch.’

‘You can bet that I’ll be watching my back every second.’

Petey was making a lot of noise below, calling to Susan, telling her that the Jeep had gone as fast as anything.

Susan told her son that she’d be right down, and smiled at Stone. ‘I guess we can manage without you for a little while.’

Stone smiled back. ‘I know you can.’

David Welch pretended not to watch when Susan hugged Stone and told him again to take care. Stone slung his kitbag into the back of the Jeep and climbed into the shotgun seat beside Welch, and the Jeep drove off down Broadway, laying white dust over the goldenrod and tall grasses that grew on either side.

Stone didn’t look back. He believed that it would be bad luck if he did.

A streamlined, aluminium-skinned railcar coupled to a flatbed wagon was waiting at the little terminus on the far side of the East River ferry crossing. Stone helped David Welch lash the Jeep to the wagon, and the railcar rattled along the ninety-odd miles of single-track railroad that cut through the woods and bogs of Brooklyn and Long Island, past the settlements of Jamaica Bay, Rockville, Wantagh, Bay Shore and New Patchogue, to First Foot and the Turing gate. Stone had plenty of time to work through the file Welch had given him. He ate the packed lunch Susan had provided - home-baked biscuits, home-cured ham and pickles, hard-boiled eggs and an apple, one of the season’s first - and read reports by field officers and local police, studied photographs and forensic documentation. He wanted to have all the facts at his fingertips. If he was going to talk to Tom Waverly, he wanted to know everything the man had done.

The first four assassinations had been staged to look like street robberies or home invasions gone bad. Eileen Barrie had been killed by shots to the head from a small-calibre handgun, by a knife-thrust to the heart, by garrotting: murders that were up close and personal. Then, after someone in the Company had put two and two together and every surviving version of Eileen Barrie had been given protection, the subsequent murders had been textbook examples of executive actions. The car bomb that had killed her outright but left the officer sitting next to her unharmed except for superficial burns and burst eardrums. And the latest killing which, with its combination of careful planning, patience and split-second action, had Tom Waverly’s fingerprints all over it.

When he’d been working for the Company, Tom had specialised in assassination. He’d once hiked through a forest and set up a position in a tree and for three days had focused on the window of a house, waiting for his target to show for just a second. He’d once lain all day on the flat roof of an office building in the August heat of Miami, still as a basking snake under the ghillie blanket that hid him from police helicopters while he’d watched the front of the court-house, killing his target with a single shot as a phalanx of bodyguards hustled the man across the sidewalk toward his limo. Stone wondered if Tom had turned freelance and was killing Eileen Barrie’s doppels to order, or if he was working off some kind of massive personal grudge. But although the file contained comprehensive summaries of the circumstances and methodology of each murder, there was nothing, not so much as a single speculative sentence, about possible motivations for attempting to eliminate Eileen Barrie from every known sheaf.

The railcar sounded its horn. Stone glanced out of the window and saw a familiar cluster of wind generators standing proud on a low hill, their sixty-foot triple-bladed props lazily revolving, glimpsed the roofs of the little town of First Foot through a scrim of pine trees. The railcar rattled past the station’s single platform, entered the long loop that led to the Turing gate, and began to pick up speed: trains always ran through gates as fast as possible, to minimise the power expenditure needed to keep them open. Two white horses in a field briefly chased after it, heads down, manes rippling, and it left them behind and sped past a coal-black locomotive with a flared chimney and cowcatcher that stood on a spur, rushed down a steep grade in a cutting and plunged into the tunnel at the far end.

Although Stone braced for it, the black flash that pounded in his head, the knockout punch of collapsing probability functions, was every bit as bad as he remembered. Then the railcar emerged into daylight, drawing away from a row of two dozen artificial mounds, each mound turfed over and pierced with a short tunnel, each tunnel the entrance to a Turing gate, each gate a portal to a different sheaf, a different alternate history.

There were bigger interchanges at Chicago, San Diego and White Sands, but the Brookhaven interchange was the oldest. It was where the Many Worlds theory had been experimentally validated when the first Turing gate, a mere hundred nanometers across, had been forced open in the high-energy physics laboratory in 1963, where the first man to travel to another sheaf had taken his momentous step in 1966, and where the first cloned gate had been produced in 1969.

Cloning gates using symmetry-breaking technology based on the Feynman-Schwinger-Dyson
n
-manifold manipulation was the only way of providing multiple points of entry into any sheaf. The physicists and mathematicians who developed the first Turing gates had quickly discovered that each time a gate accessed a new sheaf, a stochastic energy-horizon phenomenon created a unique quantum state or signature that no other gate could ever reproduce. This so-called quantum censorship principle meant that only one gate could link the Real with a particular sheaf, and that link would be lost forever if the gate was shut down. Although it was theoretically possible to produce secondary links via an intermediate sheaf - to travel from the Real to the First Foot sheaf via the Nixon sheaf, for instance - it was impossible in practise, because locating a particular sheaf in a multiverse of possible sheaves was, as Murray Gell-Mann, one of the leaders of the original Brookhaven Project, had put it, like finding a needle in a haystack the size of the Universe. Before cloning technology had been developed, there had been only a single, fragile link between the Real and any other sheaf. Afterward, primary gates were locked away in a facility more secure than Fort Knox, cloned copies were deployed in large interchanges and clandestine facilities, colonies were established in a dozen wild sheafs, and the Real was able to take control of the destiny of other, less fortunate Americas and establish the Pan-American Alliance.