Cowboy Angels (40 page)

Out through the square doorway, into simmering desert night.

The bunker was one of more than a dozen dug into the top of a low ridge. Beyond the edge of the service road, the lights of the White Sands interchange stretched for miles across the desert basin. It contained the largest concentration of Turing gates on the planet, more than two hundred, serviced by three railroad marshalling yards and a dozen freight depots and passenger stations. There was an airport, two solar power plants, three nuclear power stations, and six wind farms. There were hotels and military barracks, hangars and factories. Water was supplied through a dozen pipeway gates that accessed lakes in wild sheaves where the climate was warmer and wetter. There were eight hospitals, with a combined capacity of six thousand beds. Canteens with a total floor area of two square miles served more than a hundred thousand meals each day to troops and support and aid-agency personnel passing through the gates, as well as feeding the technicians, railroad workers, and ancillary staff who operated the interchange, and the soldiers responsible for its security.

All of this was laid out in nets and chains and deltas of lights beneath a sodium-orange sky where attack helicopters constantly shuttled back and forth as they monitored the trains passing in and out of the gates. Traffic flowed in opposing streams of red taillights and white headlights along broad highways that linked the marshalling yards and their service areas.

Stone was having trouble thinking around the steady pulse of his headache, but he knew that his sense of time was out of joint. Every sheaf shared the same clock time, but although the sun had been setting when he’d stepped out of the Nixon sheaf, it was long past sunset here, in the Real. Maybe I passed out, he thought, as he followed Linda and Tom Waverly past shuttered bunkers and a reef of shipping containers. I passed out, and Tom shot the guy who went through ahead of us, chased off the gate technicians, hid the guy’s body . . .

Tom said, ‘How are you holding up, Adam? Don’t you go dying on me.’

‘I don’t plan to,’ Stone said.

‘Good man. You believe me now?’

‘Go easy, Dad,’ Linda said. ‘That thing really hurt him.’

‘He has to get with the programme,’ Tom said.

‘Maybe you should tell me what the programme is,’ Stone said.

‘I already told you. I’m going to put a stop to everything before it has a chance to begin. I’m going to take down GYPSY and make sure no one involved in it escapes justice. I’m going to avenge my own death by making sure it doesn’t happen.’

Tom Waverly was pumped up, manically exuberant; Stone knew that there was no point arguing with him when he got like this. Look at him now, swaggering down the middle of the road, making extravagant gestures as he told Linda that they were definitely off the map, that they had freed themselves from the inevitable, that anything was possible. It was as if he really believed his bullshit story.

The road switchbacked down the flank of the ridge and passed through a small chemical depot: a cluster of silvery tanks with insulated pipelines running between them, a skinny aluminium chimney pumping white vapour high into floodlit air, a prefabricated office building with a Jeep parked to one side.

Tom took the shotgun from Linda, saying that he didn’t want to have to explain it to perimeter security, and tossed it in a Dumpster and dropped Stone’s Colt in after it.

‘What about your pistol?’ Stone said. He didn’t like the way that Tom had more or less bushwhacked him and taken charge of the situation.

‘We need some insurance. Think you can hot-wire that Jeep, honey?’

Linda didn’t need to; the keys were in the ignition. As they drove away downhill, Tom rapped the dashboard clock with his knuckles, told Stone with a sly grin that everything was looking good.

According to the clock, it was twenty after eleven. Stone had lost five hours somewhere.

They drove past a railroad yard where long rakes of passenger cars stood side by side, and took an on-ramp onto a busy eight-lane highway. Tom fiddled with the Jeep’s radio, surfing through civilian and military stations, through snatches of rock, country and gospel music, then switched it off and told Linda to take the next exit. The off-ramp looped under the highway to a road that ran between trenches and fields of concertina wire and tank traps, past spotlit billboards that warned of minefields and the use of terminal force against intruders, to a plaza where soldiers with lightsticks directed traffic toward a dozen brilliantly lit checkpoints. Snipers were posted in watchtowers above each checkpoint and armed soldiers patrolled the lines of vehicles waiting to go through. Atop a hundred-foot flagpole, a big Stars and Stripes fluttered in the electric glow of crossing spotlights.

Tom told Linda to stay calm, it was only a routine security check. ‘It’s three weeks before you and Adam were brought into this, and I have good cover - a security adviser who passes through here all the time. But just to be on the safe side, you two should use those fake army IDs Walter Lipscombe gave you,’ he said, and turned to look at Stone, asked him if he was going to behave.

‘I want to see where you’re going with this,’ Stone said.

‘I expect you do,’ Tom Waverly said, and tucked his pistol under his thigh.

When they reached the checkpoint, a sergeant in combat fatigues downloaded data from their ID cards to his palmtop while another soldier used a mirror mounted on a pole to scrutinise the underside of the Jeep.

Tom said, ‘I’d appreciate it if you could move us right through. I need to get these two debriefed, and my friend in back is in need of some medical attention.’

‘You might want to turn around,’ the sergeant said. ‘There’s a clinic a couple of miles along the east perimeter highway where the colonel can get himself fixed up.’

‘Thanks for the advice, but I prefer to use my own people.’

For a moment, the sergeant looked as if he might say something else, but then he handed over the IDs and the steel barrier dropped into its slot. Linda drove the Jeep through the checkpoint, and Tom told her to take the highway toward downtown Alamogordo.

‘Where exactly are we going?’

‘To see a friend of mine. Everything will become clear when we get there. Meanwhile, you’ll just have to trust your father. Will you do that for me?’

‘I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust you.’

‘We’re almost there, honey. I promise. How about you, Adam? Tell me that you’re not going to give me any trouble. Tell me that you’re going to trust me to do the right thing.’

Stone was feeling a lot better now - his nausea had passed and the rush of warm dry air was blowing away his headache - but he figured that it wouldn’t hurt to let Tom think that he was still woozy, and said that as far as he was concerned finding a doctor wasn’t a bad idea.

‘We don’t have time,’ Tom Waverly said. ‘You’ll just have to hang in there, old buddy.’

‘You could at least stop some place and get me a bottle of painkillers, ’ Stone said. ‘I lost all my stuff when the station wagon went up.’

Despite Tom Waverly’s bragging, despite the clock on the Jeep’s dash, Stone didn’t believe that the so-called time key had taken them back three minutes, much less three weeks. He knew that perimeter security at White Sands had a hot link with the Company’s network, knew that the scan of the biometrics encoded in his fake ID would sooner or later ring bells with Ralph Kohler’s people. It was possible that Kohler would order local agents to put a moving tail on them to begin with, to see where they were heading and if they were going to meet up with anyone from GYPSY. But it was also possible that Kohler would have them arrested straight away, and if that happened Stone would lose his chance to track down the people who had ordered Susan’s murder. And besides, he was tired of jumping when Tom Waverly said jump. He was tired of being drip-fed information that was ninety per cent bullshit. It was time to break free of Tom and Linda Waverly’s
folie à deux
, and make some moves of his own.

They drove down the Strip, the long six-lane street that ran through the heart of Alamogordo, where different histories and pop cultures collided in a flood of neon signs and the clashing pulses of music pumped from car stereos and the open doors of bars and casinos. Stone counted three places advertising floor shows featuring the genuine Elvis - all of them no doubt doppels, press-ganged into imitating the original. Although it was close to midnight, pedestrians crowded the wide sidewalks. Most of them were in uniform. Half a dozen teenage girls were crammed in the front and back seats of a convertible, hands waving in the air as they yelled along to music booming from the radio. Two bare-chested men stood in the open sunroof of a white Cadillac, taking heroic swigs from cans of beer. In the parking lot of a burger joint shaped like a flying saucer, a pickup with a garish pink paint-job shudderingly jacked itself up on hydraulic shocks. There were bars and fast-food restaurants, strip clubs and dance clubs. An electronics bazaar took up an entire block. Motels advertised rooms for rent by the hour, cable TV, waterbeds, Jacuzzis. A wedding chapel boasted that notaries were available twenty-four hours a day. A bar offered genuine apemen death matches.

Stone pointed to a convenience store up ahead. ‘A lousy bottle of painkillers. That’s all I ask.’

‘You better not be faking,’ Tom said, and told Linda to pull over. When she’d bumped the Jeep into the parking lot beside the store, he asked her to buy a newspaper while she was at it. ‘It won’t hurt to check the date.’

‘I’ll go with you,’ Stone said as Linda swung out of the Jeep, but when he grabbed hold of the roll bar and hauled himself up, Tom drew his pistol and advised him to sit right there and take it easy.

‘I wouldn’t like to have to shoot you because I thought you were trying to get the jump on me.’

‘The way I feel, I couldn’t jump your grandmother,’ Stone said. He fell back heavily on the rear seat and slumped down, shaking his head when Tom Waverly asked him if he was going to barf.

‘Next time through, you should follow my example,’ Tom Waverly said. ‘If you get a half-pint of booze inside you, the time key won’t be able to do a number on your head.’

‘It didn’t seem to affect Linda.’

‘Some people are more sensitive than others. If I’d’ve known how hard it was going to hit you, I would have insisted you share my Jack.’

‘Maybe you could share your plans with me instead.’

Tom laughed. ‘Man, you don’t give up, do you? Trying your lame-o segues even though you’re sick as a dog.’

‘You could at least tell me who we’re going to meet.’

‘Try to be patient. We’re going to blow GYPSY wide open, but it has to be done my way because I have to make sure I don’t get caught up in what’s going down. That’s why I need your help, partner. Linda’s too.’

‘Bullshit.’ Stone spoke softly, trying to put a little quaver in his voice, trying to sound sick and at the end of his strength. ‘If you really wanted to give up GYPSY, you would have done it already.’

Tom shook his head. He was resting his .38 in the crook of his left arm, aiming it at Stone’s midsection, his finger lightly curled around the trigger. ‘I’ve been on the run for too long. No one would believe a word I said. And even if they did, I don’t have time for hearings and trials and the rest of that crap. I have a life to live, and plans that don’t include the faintest possibility of ever going to jail. But you’re an honest broker, Adam. You’re Mr Clean. You stood up in front of the Church Committee and told the truth. Anything
you
say, they’ll take seriously, especially if you have some hard evidence. You can help me change things around, Adam. You can save my life, and save the life of your woman, too. But you have to trust me. You have to stick with my plan.’

‘You’re going to kill Eileen Barrie, aren’t you? The Real version, that is.’

‘Why would I want to do that?’

Tom was smiling that sly, infuriating smile of his. Stone wondered if he could knock the pistol out of his hand without getting shot. Probably not, even though the man was half-drunk.

‘Why did you kill six of her doppels?’ Stone said.

‘That wasn’t me.’

‘I forgot: it was one of your doppels who murdered all those women.’

‘Yes it was. Tom Waverly Two. I know it’s hard for you to understand this, Adam, but we really have travelled back three weeks. None of that bad stuff has happened yet, and I intend to make sure that it never does.’

‘By killing Eileen Barrie.’

‘No one has to get killed if everything works out.’

Linda came out of the convenience store. She was carrying a paper bag and a newspaper, and looked worried. Tom glanced at her, and Stone used the moment of inattention to palm the screwdriver he’d taken from the desk in the bunker. When Linda reached the Jeep she tossed the newspaper onto the driver’s seat and said, ‘Look at this.’

‘What is it, honey?’

‘Look at the date.’

Tom studied Stone for a moment, then picked up the newspaper and squinted at it in the orange glow of a nearby streetlight, saying, ‘Jesus Christ.’

Stone made his move. He reared up and clamped his right forearm around Tom’s throat, locked his wrist in the elbow of his left arm and hauled back with all the strength he’d earned from working on the railroad and the farm. Tom clawed at the choke-hold and tried and failed to get his hands under Stone’s forearm, then tried to jab his elbows in Stone’s face, but Stone ducked down and held on. Linda tried to climb into the Jeep and get between the two men as they bucked and reared, but one of Tom’s elbows caught her in the temple and knocked her to the ground. Stone jammed his knees into Tom’s spine through the back of the seat and tightened his grip. Tom kicked a diminishing tattoo against the Jeep’s dash and went limp and dropped his pistol into the footwell, and Linda snatched it up and rolled away and stood up, holding it in a two-handed grip. Stone pressed the blade of the screwdriver against the corner of Tom’s eye and looked straight at her and told her that if she didn’t drop her weapon he’d punch the screwdriver into her father’s brain.