Cowboy Angels (8 page)

‘I guess that’s one of the first things they’ll want to ask him after you find him.’

Stone stood up and pulled on the suit jacket. ‘Maybe it’s one of the first things
I
should ask him.’

‘That’s the spirit. How’s the fit?’

‘A little tight around the shoulders, but otherwise not bad. I’ve never met Ralph Kohler, but he has to be a confident son of a bitch, setting this up before he knew I’d agree to help.’

‘Was there any question you wouldn’t?’

‘How do I get to the murder scene? Can I use the limo?’

Welch mashed his cigarette in the empty whiskey glass. ‘If you’re ready to go, I’ll ride down with you to the lobby.’

In the elevator, Welch examined the knot of his tie in a mirror and said, ‘While I head off to cooperate with General Grover, you can go find the ride I arranged for you. Walk over to Madison Avenue and go a block north to the corner of East 60th Street. There’ll be a yellow taxi parked with its sign unlit, a woman driver. Climb in, she’ll take you where you want to go.’

‘A taxi? That’s cute, David.’

‘Wait until you see the driver,’ Welch said, and blew into his cupped hand and sniffed his palm to check his breath.

‘As long as she keeps out of my way while I check the scene.’

‘She’ll do whatever you ask her to do. It goes without saying, by the way, that if you do find anything the locals missed, I want to hear about it before the locals do.’

The elevator stopped and its door slid open to reveal the marble-floored lobby.

Stone said, ‘Why would I want to tell the locals anything?’

‘I think I’m going to enjoy working with you again, Adam. You’re still a cowboy at heart, aren’t you?’

 

Was he?

Stone thought about that he walked toward his rendezvous. Like all of Dick Knightly’s cowboy angels, he’d been trained to work in deep cover in pre-contact sheaves, to blend in, to live as invisibly as possible while accumulating data for historical, political and economic profiles. Once, in the early days of Special Ops, before the first overt contact with the government of an alternate America, a woman at a party in Washington, DC, had walked up to Stone and said that she’d just bet fifty dollars with a girlfriend that he was a spy, and Stone had told her, no lie, that he spent most of his time in libraries. That was exactly what he’d done, back in the day. He’d gone through the mirror and ransacked libraries for all kinds of data - the failure rate of start-up companies, price and wage inflation, the ratio of the highest and lowest salaries in key companies, unemployment rates amongst white males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, the annual yields of cotton crops, winter wheat, soy beans. He’d tabulated prison terms for a variety of crimes, compared school-leaving ages of urban and rural whites and blacks, used fake academic or journalistic credentials to obtain interviews with CEOs and Ivy League professors about the state of the economy, identified prominent lawyers and preachers and political commentators. That was what all the cowboy angels in Special Ops had done in the early days, before the Real made its first overtures to governments in other sheaves. Before the covert actions, before the wars and revolutions, before the insurrections and terrorist reprisals.

Stone had always preferred to work alone, but he’d always worked by the rules of the game.

‘You like to watch,’ Susan had said, a few months ago. They’d been walking home from a church social, Petey trailing a little way behind, singing one of his nonsense songs, cutting at weeds with a stick he’d picked up somewhere. ‘When you’re around other people, you like to watch what’s going on, don’t you?’

‘If you’ve been watching me, who is it that likes to watch?’

‘I’ve been taking notice of you,’ Susan said. ‘Noticing how you behave when you hang out with the other guys.’

‘Yeah? How do I behave?’

‘On the whole, you’re pretty quiet. Self-contained. The other guys whoop it up, they like to show off to each other, they always have an opinion about whatever it is they’re talking about. But you don’t say anything unless you have something to say. I don’t mean you’re afflicted with Allan King’s famous Yankee taciturnity, the man thinks every word costs him a dime. I mean you don’t bullshit.’

‘Mommy swore,’ Petey said.

‘And Mommy’s sorry for it, sweetie. She spent far too much of the afternoon talking with Nora Partridge, who has a kind heart but can never quite get to the point of what she’s trying to say. Adam isn’t like that, is he? When he says something, he says what he means, no more and no less.’

‘He likes to think about things,’ Petey said, and swiped the head off a milk-weed plant.

Stone said, ‘Is this criticism or observation?’

Susan smiled. ‘If I said you were aloof, maybe it would be a criticism. But you’re not. You’re watchful.’

‘I don’t know about that. Maybe I like to be aloof, but I don’t like to be watchful.’

‘The way you like trees, but not bushes?’

‘I like grass too. Flowers I can live without.’

‘
Mom!
You’re doing it
again
,’ Petey said. All summer he’d been driven to distraction by this word game, an open secret he wanted desperately to share, a code he couldn’t quite crack. That evening, Susan and Stone had teased and tantalised him all the way home with their preference for books over magazines, bulls over cows, hills over mountains.

Watchful - Stone could live with that. Tom Waverly, though, was the poster boy for the cowboy angels. He preferred overt action to undercover research, flamboyance to restraint. He liked to push regulations and convention as far as they would go, and then push them a little further.

‘You’re a deep man pretending to be shallow,’ Marsha Mason had once told him, and he’d laughed, not at all offended. This had been at one of the infamous barbecues at the little house in the Maryland woods where Tom had lived with his wife and daughter. Its back yard had run down to a lake. One night, Tom had rowed out into the middle of the lake and let off fireworks while the ‘Nessun dorma!’ aria from
Turandot
played on speakers he’d set up amongst the trees. He’d stood up in the little boat with rockets and Roman candles exploding from his hands, whooping with glee.

At age thirteen, Tom had spent a year in juvenile prison in California for stealing a car; at sixteen he had enlisted in the army, training as a sniper and taking courses in parachuting, martial arts and cryptography; at twenty-six he had been recruited by Dick Knightly into the CIA’s brand-new Directorate of Special Operations. He liked to play up his reputation as a hellraiser. He wore blue jeans and biker boots and a leather jacket with the sleeves ripped off. He rode a motorbike everywhere, a Norton Commando he’d restored himself. He did handstands on the backs of chairs, once did a backflip from a motel balcony into the swimming pool two storeys below. He read Rilke and Thoreau and Barth, sang along with tuneless gusto to opera and the folk music he’d discovered in the Nixon sheaf, the very same sheaf in which, a few years later, Stone had been supposed to kill a novelist in the middle of a popular uprising against an unpopular war in Southeast Asia.

It had been one of twenty hits that had targeted counterculture lawyers, liberal politicians, journalists, and radical civil-rights workers ... and this novelist, who’d once run for Mayor of New York, a sometime journalist and rabble-rouser with powerfully expressed opinions, but still, Stone had wondered at the time, what could be so important about a man who wrote books for a living? But the Cluster crunched the data and constructed its probability models, the Company set up its covert actions, and its cowboy angels went to work without questioning their orders. In the end, Stone hadn’t made the hit after all; the whole operation had unravelled after one of the locals they were running, a bomb-maker, had managed to blow up a house in Greenwich Village. Six months later, work toward contact in that sheaf had been suspended indefinitely. The Nixon sheaf’s version of America had been well on its way to becoming the world’s only superpower, and the Cluster had calculated that the advantages of contact would be either negligible or negative.

All officers in Special Ops had been trained to take the initiative, but Tom Waverly had possessed a bravura recklessness that had set him apart. And he still had it, Stone thought. Even though he must have known that the game was up when he saw that Nathan Tate was guarding the target, he’d gone right ahead with his plan. He’d shot and killed the doppel of Eileen Barrie, and he’d shot and killed Nathan Tate, and he’d got clean away from the scene. He still had it. Tracking him down wasn’t going to be easy, especially as the locals were going balls-out to find him first. The only edge Stone had was that Tom wanted to talk to him.

A yellow taxi was parked where David Welch had said it would be. Stone walked around the block, moving with the flow of the crowd, looking in shop windows and using his peripheral vision to try to spot likely tails, seeing only civilians with pinched faces and shuttered expressions, rowdy little groups of soldiers and sailors. He was concious of the weight of the Colt .45 in the holster under his left armpit. He passed a beggar being hassled by a pair of cops - the ragged guy, shiny burn scars disfiguring his face and scalp, kept trying to sidle away from the cops and they kept pushing him back against the wall with their nightsticks. People stepped past, eyes fixed elsewhere. A team of skeletal, shaven-headed men in orange coveralls hauled a wagon amongst the stop-and-go rush of military trucks, buses, taxis, bicycles. A lot of people were riding bicycles. Stone, grown used to a pace of life based on unmediated animal and human muscle, felt that everything was slightly speeded up, like one of those old hand-cranked silent movies.

He crossed the street, doubled back the way he’d come. Although he hadn’t seen anyone dogging him, he was pretty sure that he was being followed. Probably by a tag team, almost impossible to spot. He walked to where the taxi was parked and climbed into the back. The driver, a young woman with a pale face and a mass of curly red hair turned to look at him through the scratched plastic divider.

Stone hadn’t seen her for more than ten years, but he recognised her at once.

Linda Waverly, Tom’s daughter.

‘Welch put you up to this, didn’t he?’ Stone said. ‘The slick son of a bitch brought you through the mirror because he thought you might flush out your father.’

‘It isn’t like that at all,’ Linda Waverly said, and started the taxi and pulled away from the kerb. ‘When my father shot that woman, I was already working here. In this sheaf, in New York. I was taken off my job and grilled by Ralph Kohler’s people for six hours straight. They were going to send me home, but David Welch persuaded them to let me help out.’

‘Welch likes to play games, Linda. He’s using you.’

‘He thinks there’s a good chance my father will try to make contact with me if I’m out on the street in plain view. What’s wrong with that?’

‘You can let me out right here. Then you can turn this taxi around, find David Welch, and tell him that I think he’s crazy.’ Stone tried the door; it was locked. He rapped on the plastic partition and said, ‘That wasn’t a suggestion, by the way. Stop right here.’

Linda looked at him in the rearview mirror with cool defiance. ‘What are you going to do if I don’t? Shoot me?’

Stone felt a little pang of guilt and wondered if Tom had broken one of the golden rules of clandestine service and told his daughter about what had happened when SWIFT SWORD had fallen apart. ‘I came here because your father asked for me, because I’m his friend, and because he saved my life once upon a time, and I still owe him. I don’t know why he’s been doing what he’s doing, but I do know that you don’t want to get caught up in it.’

Linda said, ‘I thought my father died three years ago, Mr Stone. Now I know he didn’t, I want to help find him and bring him in safe and sound.’

‘You’re being used, Linda.’

‘We’re both of us being used, Mr Stone. Maybe we can figure out how to make the best of it.’

Stone had to admit that it was a good point. Linda definitely had a stubborn streak a mile wide, just like her father, but she also appeared to be sensible and level-headed, and she had been working right here. She had local knowledge. Maybe he could turn this around, Stone thought. Pay back Welch in his own coin. He leaned forward and spoke into the cluster of holes drilled in the partition. ‘You can drive me to the scene. When I’ve finished there, we can try to work something out.’

‘You won’t regret it, Mr Stone.’

‘And you can slow down, too. Before we get a ticket.’

‘You don’t like my driving?’

‘I guess it’s been a long time since I was in a New York taxi. A long time since I last saw you, too. What were you doing, before David Welch brought you into this thing? I take it you’re working for the Company now.’

‘I’m part of a team that’s liaising with the local FBI, trying to break up criminal gangs that are smuggling deserters out of the country. The desertion rate amongst our troops is three per cent and rising. A few want to find their doppels, or the doppels of their wives or sweethearts, but most of them want to get to Canada. Canada is neutral in this sheaf. Once they’re over the border, they’re gone. The gangs help them get across, and then squeeze them for interest payments on the fee.’

‘So you’re a field officer, just like your father.’

‘Actually, at the moment, I’m more on the analytical side of things. I was seconded from DI to help run a data-management system - computer work, basically. But I get to sit in on interviews with suspects, and I’ve been on a couple of raids, too.’

‘How do you like it, out in the field?’

‘I was working with the forensic crew both times. I didn’t come in until after the assault teams had taken out the bad guys. But it was still a buzz.’