Cowboy Angels
Page 12
Linda squared her shoulders and released the emergency brake and set the selector to Drive. The big car wallowed like a boat along the corrugated surface of the unmade road, under the dense canopy of the pines. Half a mile in, Stone told Linda to park in a turnout, told her to take out her pistol by its barrel and toss it out the window.
‘All right,’ he said, when she’d thrown the Beretta away. ‘Now I want you to take off any jewellery you have. That watch, does it have sentimental value?’
‘My mother gave it to me the day I graduated from NYU.’
‘Take it off and put it in the glove compartment. Put your cell phone in there too. Don’t worry. I doubt anyone will find the car before our tail does.’
‘Our tail? Don’t you think you’re being a little a paranoid, Mr Stone?’
‘I’ve been wondering if it was David Welch’s idea for you to take a car from the Company motor pool. It has a police radio, we were followed by the same model white Dodge last night . . .’
Linda Waverly looked him in the eye and said, ‘I borrowed it.’
‘I bet you did.’ Stone gestured with the Colt and said, ‘Lose your watch, your jewellery, the phone. You can keep your driver’s licence and ID.’
After Linda had done as she was told, Stone plucked the keys from the ignition and climbed out, told her to step out too. He popped the trunk, hurled the keys into the undergrowth, checked his cell phone again and threw it after the keys, then told Linda, ‘Take the rucksack out of the trunk. We’re going for a little hike.’
He walked Linda at gunpoint away from the road, finding a narrow deer path that cut through thick stands of ferns. The ground began to slope downward and the ferns gave way to a carpet of old needles spread thickly between the pines. Boulders broke through here and there. A bird sang somewhere in the shadows between the pines.
After a little while, Linda said, ‘I don’t see how is this is going to help my father. They’ll set up a grid search when they realise that we’ve gone missing, and when they find us they’ll take us back to New York.’
‘Either they were tracking our cell phones, or they fixed a transponder to the car. In any case, reception is pretty patchy out here. I lost the signal for my cell phone a mile before we turned off the highway, and it was still out when we stopped. If we’re lucky, the signals from anything they planted in the car will have trouble getting through, too. Our friends will probably overshoot and have to back-track. By the time they find the car, we’ll be long gone.’
‘So we become fugitives. How is that going to help my father?’
‘We’ll be able to talk freely with your father when we meet him. We’ll be able to work out how to bring him in on his own terms. We might even find out why he got himself in this jam in the first place. Meanwhile, it’ll make things a lot easier if you don’t take this personally.’
‘That’s getting kind of hard.’
They walked through the heavy silence of the woods until they reached the edge of a steep slope that dropped to a stream running between mossy rocks and banks of ferns. Stone told Linda to set the rucksack down, told her to turn around nice and slow.
Linda did as she was told, her face set tight. She was wearing a black jacket and black trousers, the shades of black not quite matching, a white shirt, and black, flat-heeled shoes. Her hair, loose around her shoulders, was as vivid as freshly spilled blood in the green shadows under the trees. She said, ‘Whatever you want to do, let’s get it over with.’
‘I want you to take off your clothes.’
‘You have got to be kidding.’
Stone raised the Colt. ‘Take everything off. Nice and slowly, in case you’ve got a surprise hidden away somewhere.’
After a moment, Linda said, ‘Okay, you win. There’s a transponder in the heel of my shoe. The left one.’
‘The one you want me to know about.’
‘I swear it’s the only one.’
‘Maybe there’s another bug stuck somewhere in your clothes. Welch or someone else could have planted one on you and you wouldn’t know about it. If you want to come the rest of the way, if you want to see your father, I have to be sure you’re clean.’
‘I remembered you being a nice guy, but you’re really a son of a bitch, aren’t you?’
Linda shrugged off her jacket and started to undo the buttons of her shirt. When she had stripped down to her underwear, she stood looking at Stone with her arms crossed over her breasts, pale and pliant as a wood elf.
Stone said, ‘You’ll have to lose the underwear too.’
‘Will you shoot me if I refuse?’
‘I could leave you here, Linda, let you make your way back to the highway. By the time Welch’s people find you, I’ll be a hundred miles away. And you’ll never find out why your father was killing these women, or why he wants to talk to me.’
‘At least point the gun the other way. Make it look a little less like rape.’
‘Right.’
‘And don’t watch. I promise I won’t try to hit you over the head with a rock.’
Stone looked away, but was aware of Linda bending and straightening in the periphery of his vision. He said, ‘There are clothes in the rucksack. I think I got your size about right, but they’re the kind of clothes that don’t need to fit exactly.’
She pulled on blue jeans and a red checked shirt, cinched the jeans with a brown leather belt. She sat down on a rock, pulled on one of the hiking boots, and said, ‘These are a little too big.’
‘There’s an extra pair of socks.’
She put on the socks, laced the boots, and stood up. ‘I might have a transponder somewhere on my body. Under the skin, or in my stomach. Or in my vagina. Did you think of that, Mr Stone? Want to check it out?’
Stone knew that she could allow herself to be angry now it was over. ‘I’ll live with the risk. Pick up your clothes. We’ll take them down to the stream.’
He made Linda push her jacket and trousers and blouse and underwear under the stream’s clear water. The clothes spread out as they sank. He knocked open the heel of her left shoe against a boulder, extracted the button-sized transponder from its pocket and dropped it into a foamy pool under the exposed roots of a birch tree, then tossed the shoes and Linda’s shoulder holster in after it.
Linda said, ‘This isn’t going to work, Mr Stone. You’ve bought yourself a little time, but if the Company people don’t find you, Ed Lar’s people will. And if the locals find you, you won’t have any backup. You won’t be able to protect Dad from them.’
‘I think your father wants to tell me something, Linda. I want to hear what it is, and I want you to hear it too. Maybe he’s gone crazy and wants to tell us that the Man in the Moon made him do it, but I don’t think so.’
‘I want to talk to him too,’ Linda said, after a moment. ‘I want to know why he’s been . . . doing what he’s been doing.’
‘We’ll find out soon enough.’ Stone took a bearing from the sun. ‘There’s a town about two miles northeast of here. It’ll be dark in a couple of hours, so we better get moving.’
The little town was clustered around the place where a highway and a single-track railroad crossed a river at the bottom of a broad valley. The tall brick chimney of an old mill laid a feathering of white smoke in the clear sky. A neon sign on top of a bar put a radioactive glow in the darkening air.
Linda Waverly looked up at the sign and said, ‘Is this where Dad told you to meet him?’
‘This is where we’re going to pick up some transport,’ Stone said, and told her to choose one of the cars and pickup trucks parked in the dirt lot beside the bar.
She picked a green Chevy with a bumper sticker that declared Work is the curse of the drinking class, and an empty half-pint of Wild Turkey on the back seat. Stone broke the window on the driver’s side with a rock, slid inside and reached across and opened the passenger door. As Linda climbed in beside him, he pulled down the sunvisor, and a spare set of keys slid into his hand.
8
The stolen car’s radio was a predigital fossil. Linda had to turn a knob to dial through Top 40 and sports stations, weather and local news reports, a phone-in about farm subsidies, a preacher promising healing for the faithful and hellfire for everyone else. She finally settled on a station playing bluegrass, but after a few minutes the signal broke up and she switched off the radio and they drove in silence for a while, following a road that switchbacked through hilly forest into Vermont. At last, Linda asked Stone if he would finish his story and explain how her father had rescued him from the guerrillas in the McBride sheaf.
‘It’ll help pass the time, and it’ll help me get to know you a little better, too.’
She was sitting sideways in the roomy front seat, her back against the door and one leg tucked beneath her.
‘I don’t know if I want you to know me.’
Stone had spoken lightly, but Linda took his remark seriously. ‘You’re just like my father. Whenever he came home, it was as if he had shut a door on that part of his life. Not that he came home very often, he was never what you could call a regular father. But we did manage to have a lot of fun together when I was growing up.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘He didn’t like to sit around. He’d do chores around the house or work on one of his bikes, good old Bobby Dylan or some kind of old-time music blasting from the stereo he’d rigged up in the garage. What he most liked to do was tool around in this ’55 Chevy he’d rebuilt, or ride the back roads on his motorcycle. When I was old enough, he’d take me on road trips. He taught me how to fish and shoot. He gave me a hunting crossbow for my sixteenth birthday - he and Mom had a huge fight about it.’
Linda was putting up a good front, but Stone could tell that his move, losing the Company tail and more or less kidnapping her at gunpoint, had shaken her up more than she cared to admit. She was jumpy, and her thoughts were bouncing around like hornets in a jar.
She said, ‘When you were working in other sheaves, were you ever tempted to find out about any of your doppels?’
‘Not once. For one thing, I was ordered not to. For another, I’m an orphan, like your father and every other field officer in Special Ops back in the early days. The idea was that we wouldn’t be tempted to search out our doppels and blow our covers because none of us knew anything about our families, or where we’d come from.’
By now, Stone was fairly certain that Linda didn’t know that her father had discovered where he’d been born - if she did, she would surely have mentioned it by now. But he wasn’t quite ready to tell her where they were heading, not while there was still a chance that she could, with the best of intentions, betray the rendezvous to the Company.
He said, ‘It’s different for civilians, of course. I remember there was this TV show about doppels—’
‘The one about ordinary people, or the one about celebrities?’
‘When I left the Real, there was only the one about ordinary people. This Could Be Your Life.’
It had been a cynical freak show that claimed First Amendment protection while courting cheap sensation by confronting terminal cancer patients with healthy doppels, losers with doppels who were millionaires in some other sheaf, God-fearing ordinary folk with doppels who were prostitutes or dopers.
‘There’s a bunch of them now,’ Linda said. ‘There’s one where people vote on whether the doppel of a movie actor or a pop singer is better than the original, another where minor celebrities are confronted with their John Q. Public doppels. But the show that draws the biggest ratings is the one where the grieving relatives get to meet the doppels of their dead loved ones.’
‘Frankly, I never saw the point. Your doppel is a completely different person who happens to share a bit of common history with you. It’s what you and your doppel don’t share that’s important.’
‘And that’s exactly why people are curious about their doppels. They want to know how much of their life is shaped by who they are, and how much by contingency. They want to know if there’s such a thing as destiny.’
‘I guess it depends on the person. Some swim against the tide, others are content to float along.’
‘Which are you, Mr Stone? A swimmer or a floater?’
‘Lately I’ve been content to live in a place where there aren’t any tides.’
A silence fell. Trees stood close together along one side of the winding road; the other dropped away to a small river barely visible in the blue bloom of the night. Cool night air blew through the broken window. Stone could hear the noise the river made as it ran over and around rocks.
Linda said, ‘This isn’t getting the story told.’
‘What story?’
‘The story about the last time you and Dad worked together. The operation in the McBride sheaf. The time he saved your life.’
Stone smiled. ‘You aren’t going to let it go, are you?’
‘You started to tell me the story, Mr Stone. It’s only fair you finish it. There’d been a nuclear war. Civilisation had collapsed. You were captured by guerrillas, and my father was sent to rescue you. What happened after that? How did he get you out? Did he infiltrate the place where you were being held, and kill your captors one by one? Or did he pull off something highly dangerous and utterly spectacular?’
‘Is that what you think we did? Kill everyone who got in our way?’
‘There are all kinds of stories about you old-school guys.’
‘What I mostly used to do was work in libraries.’
‘Is that what my father used to do, too?’
‘I guess he was a little more proactive.’
‘And he rescued you that time. He saved your life. You were taken prisoner. You were brought before this hugely charismatic guy . . .’
‘Jack Walker.’
‘Right. And then what happened?’
Stone steered the car around a long bend, headlights raking trees that stood up along the edge of the road like soldiers surprised in an ambush. ‘Jack Walker was charismatic, all right. He could talk to a man and convince him to murder his own mother, talk to a crowd and carry everyone with him. But charisma is dangerous because it has no moral dimension. It doesn’t have anything to do with the character of the man who possesses it. Saints and tyrants, they’re equally charismatic.’
‘And what was Jack Walker? Was he a saint or a tyrant?’
‘He was on a crusade,’ Stone said, remembering the way Jack Walker had moved amongst his people, princely and insane. ‘He believed that he was the saviour of America. He had a utopian vision of a world without cities or agriculture, without any technology above the level of the bow and arrow and the stone axe. He wanted to turn the clock back to the Neolithic era, turn America into a pristine wilderness inhabited by small tribes of hunter-gatherers. And he was prepared to slaughter anyone who stood in his way. We became the focus of his crusade after we came through the mirror and started to interfere with local politics, but he’d been waging war against other survivors of the nuclear war long before we arrived. Families trying to settle down and make a new life for themselves would find a patch of unclaimed land and start to farm it, and Jack Walker and his ragtag band of guerrillas would come along and offer them a very simple choice: join his cause, or die. Other warlords took food from the settlers, a little ammunition if they had it, maybe a horse or two, and in return promised protection against other warlords and bandits and gangs of crazy people. But Jack Walker wanted their souls, and he killed everyone who refused to yield to him. One of the settlements had rigged up a truck motor to give themselves electric lighting and run a refrigerator. Jack Walker’s people rode down from the hills and killed them all, e
ven the children and babies. He told me all about it. He was proud of the massacre, claimed that it was a great victory against the evil that had nearly destroyed the land. That’s another thing about people with charisma, by the way. The first person they convince of the incorruptible righteousness of their vision is themselves. They are consumed by their own conviction.’
‘Why didn’t he kill you?’
‘He wanted to use me in a stunt to demonstrate his belief in absolute war. He was going to negotiate my release in exchange for some prisoners, then strap explosives to me and a couple of volunteers, turn us into human bombs that would go off when I was handed over. I think he would have done it, too, if your father hadn’t tracked me down. One of the men who captured me kept my radio because Jack Walker needed it for his negotiations. He didn’t know that it put out a signal even when it wasn’t switched on. It didn’t have much range, but your father got close enough to pick it up. He went against standing orders, he didn’t have any help from the army or the Company, but he found me.’
After Stone was brought into the camp, Jack Walker sat him down and interrogated him for six hours straight. The guerrilla leader wanted to know about the disposition of army forces in and around Las Vegas, the health of the refugees crowded into the camps, the morale of McBride’s men, the general’s health and sanity. Stone stuck to his cover story, claimed that he was a Red Cross worker supervising a vaccination programme amongst outlying settlements, and gave harmless or incomplete answers to every question. Walker listened carefully and attentively, and never seemed to forget anything. He asked the same question a dozen different ways, pursued flaws and inconsistencies and contradictions in Stone’s answers with unflagging zeal. He had the sharpest mind Stone had ever encountered, but he had one crippling flaw: he was stone crazy.
At the end of the session, Stone was shoved into a tiny windowless room with two guards at the door, and given a bowl of thin corn gruel flecked with fatty gristle. Jack Walker came for him soon after daybreak and led him up to the ridge above the caves where his people had made their winter camp. Possessed by the unwavering solipsism of the true tyrant, he believed that he could convince Stone that his cause was true and righteous by the sheer force of his own personality.