by Paul McAuley
‘He said it was in New York, and that you would be able to find it.’
Stone thought for a moment. ‘I know someone who may be able to help us. If he isn’t dead, or in jail, that is. It’s been a long time since I was last in the American Bund sheaf. The son of a bitch. He really set us up, didn’t he?’
‘He didn’t tell me everything in case I was compromised,’ Linda said. She was limping slightly as she followed Stone through the tall grass, stubborn and indefatigable. ‘I know you’re angry with him for dragging you into this. But this is about a lot more than clearing his name. You’ll see.’
‘If you mean Operation GYPSY, I have my own reasons for wanting to bring it down,’ Stone said.
This wasn’t the right time to tell Linda about Susan; maybe there’d never be a right time.
Far across the maze of railroad tracks, the train that had brought them through the mirror had come to a halt in front of the huge station. Stone pointed to the little black helicopter that was settling toward it. ‘Either its crew are part of the black op, or Kohler’s people are about to discover just how badly things have gone wrong. In any case, we need to find a ride right away.’
This side of the interchange had been the site of the original Special Operations facility, back when Brookhaven had been a research campus of white buildings scattered amongst grassy lawns and mature stands of pines. All that was gone now, but the pair of Turing gates that had once stood in a hangar-sized laboratory were still there, housed now in a square bunker of raw concrete slabs and served by two tracks that ran past a transformer farm caged by chain-link fencing and razor wire. Power lines slung overhead in every direction filled the crackling air with a bone-deep hum. In the distance, beyond stacks of freight containers and runs of big pipes leaking feathers of steam, was the giant block of one of Brookhaven’s nuclear power plants.
Linda followed Stone as he jogged through stands of grass and fireweed toward trains waiting in dispatch loops. Off in the distance, the helicopter had come to rest beside the locomotive and its single passenger car, but it was too far away to make out what was happening.
Rusty rails began to sing as a diesel locomotive began to move, hauling a string of boxcars toward one of the Turing gates in the bunker. Stone put on speed, running hard with Linda right behind him. The helicopter was lifting away from the train halted in front of the station.
The locomotive sounded its horn as it went past. Stone grabbed hold of the handrail of the steps at its rear, swung up, hooked a foot through a rung and clung there. Linda had missed her chance and was running alongside the train, falling behind as it moved faster and faster. The helicopter skimmed over the train with a clattering roar, so low that its downdraught flattened Stone’s suit against his skin. He saw Linda clambering into one of boxcars near the end of the train, saw the helicopter make a wide turn against the low grey sky. The train was still accelerating, but the helicopter quickly caught up with it, hunting along its length. Clinging to the steps at the rear of the locomotive, Stone could see three people inside its bubble canopy, could see the mini-guns slung either side - and then the helicopter stood on its nose and sheered away as the locomotive sounded its horn again and plunged into the bunker, and the Turing gate took everything somewhere else.
2
Adam Stone and Linda Waverly got out of the Brookhaven station as fast as they could, stole a car, and drove west, toward New York. When they were certain that they weren’t being followed, they stopped at a gas station in Deer Park and Stone phoned an old friend, a former gangster by the name of Walter Lipscombe. Less than an hour later, he and Linda had been picked up and transported to a flophouse deep in the unreconstructed slums of the Bronx. It seemed that Walter Lipscombe was being investigated by several agencies, and it would take a while to organise a safe route to his apartment.
While they kicked their heels in the mean little room, with its sagging bed and unsprung armchair and faded cabbage-rose wallpaper, Linda insisted that Stone tell her everything he could remember about her father’s last hour in Pottersville. He found that he couldn’t sit still while he talked; thinking about Tom Waverly’s suicide was too close to the great wound ripped out of him by Susan’s murder. So while Linda sat on the edge of the bed, he paced up and down and tried to give an accurate summary of what had happened outside the abandoned house and in the cemetery. There was a silence when he was finished. Then Linda thanked him in a small, choked voice and went into the bathroom and shut the door. Stone heard her sobbing, heard something smash, glass on ceramic, and broke the lock of the door and gathered her up.
‘It was only the tooth-glass,’ she said into his chest. ‘I’m not going to do anything dumb.’
They held each other for a moment more; then Linda pushed away and said she was okay, she just had to wash her face. Stone knew that her brittle composure might crack again at any moment, but she was a lot stronger than he’d thought. He hoped she would be strong enough to be able to face up to Walter Lipscombe’s rude energy.
Before the Real had irrupted into his sheaf and kick-started a revolution, Lipscombe had been a middle-ranking soldier in one of the gangs of self-styled wise guys who, with the connivance of corrupt officers and civil servants, had bootlegged booze and merchandise across the Canadian border. He’d been responsible for organising storage space in government warehouses for clandestine loads carried by the trucks and trains of the Office of Interstate Transport, and with more than a hundred minor officials in his pocket, he’d been one of the most useful of Adam Stone’s contacts during the run-up to the putsch that had toppled the American Bund. Quick-witted, capable, and street-smart, Lipscombe had refused a position in the new, democratically elected government. Instead, taking advantage of the chaotic free market that had sprung up after the revolution, he’d parlayed his political influence into a business empire that ran the docks and airport in New York City, and included four radio stations, the Metropolitan Museum, a newspaper, and a brewery. The last time Stone had seen him, he’d owned a private helicopter and an ocean-going yacht, had been maintaining two mistresses in suites at two different hotels, and had just bought the leases of the five storeys above the first set-back of the Woolworth Building, one of the few New York skyscrapers to have survived the massive rebuilding programme masterminded by the Dear Leader.
That was where Adam Stone and Linda Waverly were taken, five hours after arriving in the American Bund sheaf. They rode in the back of a laundry van from the flophouse in the Bronx to the basement of a hotel in midtown New York, where they were transferred to a truck owned by an elevator servicing company. The truck took them into the garage of the Woolworth building, and after a guard insisted that Stone hand over his Colt .45 and the shock device he’d taken from Carol Dvorak, they rode a service elevator to the atrium of Walter Lipscombe’s mansion apartment.
The atrium was two storeys high, glass and gold and Carrera marble spotlessly white as fresh-fallen snow. Monstrous arrangements of ferns and red and orange lilies exploded from stone urns. Water streamed down a slab of raw slate thirty feet high into a pool where a shoal of Koi carp fat as sheep endlessly patrolled. A butler in a morning suit greeted Stone and Linda, and they followed him up the sumptuous curve of the six-foot-wide white marble staircase and down a long deep-carpeted corridor to a drawing room where huge oil paintings of classical and pastoral scenes loomed over a clutter of Louis Quinze furniture. A smaller painting with a lot of gold and blue in it stood on an easel by the gleaming grand piano. Linda took three steps sideways to look at it, caught up with Stone as the butler announced them at French doors that opened onto a glassed-in terrace.
Up there, it was a world away from the queues at food stores, the concrete barriers outside government buildings, the defiant graffiti across sheets of hardboard patching broken windows, soldiers sweeping the muzzles of their .50-cal machine guns back and forth on top of patrolling half-tracks. Up there, with the top of the Empire State Building lit in patriotic strip
es of red, white and blue, the grid of lighted streets and buildings stretching away north and east and west under the black sky, it was like being at the bridge of a Zeppelin moored above a fairyland.
Walter Lipscombe was at the far end of the terrace, talking into a cell phone, a squat bullfrog of a man dressed in a green silk gown trimmed with gold thread and green silk slippers with upturned toes. The sleeves of his gown were rolled back, showing a bleeding-heart tattoo on his left forearm. His scalp shone through the scant cornsilk of his failing hair transplant. When Stone stepped through the French doors, Lipscombe flipped up his free hand in a salute and swung away to face the splendid view, jabbing at the air with his forefinger as he made an emphatic point to whoever was on the other end of the phone. A pair of wolfhounds sprawled nearby, watching their master squint through his reflection in the thick glass that wrapped the terrace as he told the phone that he wanted it fucking well shipped tomorrow, he didn’t care if it took all fucking night to crate it up, slipping the phone into a pocket of his gown and walking toward his guests, holding out his arms, saying to Stone, ‘My man! How long has it been?’
‘About seven years,’ Stone said. He stood uneasily at the threshold, worried about possible watchers on nearby rooftops.
‘Seven years? Get out of here!’
Stone stooped into Lipscombe’s bear hug, his pungent odour of cologne and stale cigar smoke, then introduced Linda Waverly.
Lipscombe held Linda’s hand after he had shaken it, looked her up and down. ‘I was so very sorry to hear about your old man. He was a dear friend of mine.’
‘Thank you.’ Linda had a pinched, nervous look. She was running on anger and nerves. She was running close to empty.
‘It looks like you got scuffed up some. How did that happen?’
‘I jumped from a train. It isn’t anything.’
‘I bet there’s a good story to that.’ Lipscombe turned to the butler and said, ‘When Miss Waverly goes upstairs to dress for dinner, Phil, make sure to have one of the maids lay out a first-aid kit.’
‘It really isn’t anything,’ Linda said. ‘A Band-Aid will fix it.’
‘Whatever you need, just ask. You’re in the same kind of business as Adam, I hear. If you’re half as good as you look, you’ll be twice as good as this broke-down old man you’re partnered up with. No offence, Adam, I’m kidding around. Adam and me, Miss Waverly, we go a long ways back. I hope I live up to whatever lies he told about me. I hope you like my apartment, too. I’m sorry I had to stash you away in that fleapit rather than bring you here direct, but at the best of times this place is a bitch to get into without being spotted. The lobby is permanently occupied by a crowd of government watchdogs, tabloid journalists, gumshoes working for my enemies, all kinds of scum. But once you’re inside, it’s absolutely safe. I have people check the roofs of the surrounding buildings on a regular basis, the glass is armoured, it looks like a mirror from the outside, it’s even vibrated so no one can bounce lasers off it and listen in. Which is just as well, because in addition to the usual teams of government goons dogging my every footstep, someone came looking for you guys.’
Stone said, ‘Was it David Welch?’
‘Welch? Jesus, is he in on this too? No, as a matter of fact, it was a fucker name of Saul Stein. You know him?’
‘I’ve been out of the loop for a while, but I guess he’s something to do with security, working out of the Pan-American Alliance Assembly Building.’
‘You have been out of the loop, my man,’ Walter said. ‘We’re no longer a client state, thanks to your President Carter. We’re fully autonomous. Independent. Anyone working for your government wants to take a shit in this sheaf - excuse me, Linda, I’m forgetting my manners in my excitement - they have to ask permission of the COILE. Saul Stein is head of the New York bureau.’
Linda said, ‘The COILE?’
‘The Central Office of Intelligence and Law Enforcement,’ Stone said. ‘It replaced the FBI after the revolution.’
‘Whatever they call themselves, feds are still feds,’ Lipscombe said. ‘Mr Saul Stein sent a squad of his biggest and ugliest agents to hassle me a couple of days ago. That was when I found out Tom was still alive, and in all kinds of trouble. It seems he assassinated some woman out in California. I guess that’s why you and Ms Waverly are here, huh?’
‘Something like that,’ Stone said.
Lipscombe let that go. ‘I was told it was nothing personal, they were checking out all of Tom’s associates from the good old days. Ever since, these gorillas have been following me everywhere I go, plus, I believe, a couple of your guys. The Real can’t throw its weight around like it used to, but it still gets cooperation from the COILE when it needs it. So that was one thing, them looking for Tom, but now they’re looking for you, too. Stein called by in person just an hour ago, asked had I seen you. I told him the truth, told him I hadn’t seen you for a dog’s age. This was after you made contact with me, so if he’d asked me had I spoken to you, that would have been another matter, I would have had to perjure myself. Anyway, that’s how I heard about what happened to Tom. Stein told me himself. He wanted to see my reaction, the son of a bitch. So, now you understand why my guys had to be extra careful bringing you in. Did they treat you okay? Think the old switcheroo was good enough to fool Stein’s gorillas and the Company guys?’
‘It wasn’t bad, for an amateur operation,’ Stone said.
‘I see you haven’t lost the sense of humour that was always a comfort to me in those dark days before the revolution. Let’s pretend I know what I’m doing, which is why you came to see me. Which is why you need my help. No, don’t tell me why you’re here, not yet. You don’t mind me saying so, you both look pretty ragged. You need to freshen up, have a drink or two, kick back and relax. Phil will take you upstairs, find you a couple of bedrooms—’ Walter Lipscombe raised a shaggy eyebrow ‘- if you need separate bedrooms, that is. Make yourselves at home. Meanwhile, I have some people I need to shout at, make them buck up their ideas. When I’m finished, we’ll catch up over dinner.’
Stone soaked in a marble bath so large it had three steps down into it. He floated in an acre of eucalyptus-scented foam and tried to relax, but pictures of Susan kept crowding in whenever he closed his eyes, glimpses of happier times mixed up with scenes from the funeral. The way Petey had looked at him down the length of the church; Nora Ellison folding the little boy into herself when he’d started to cry. Stone tried to push the memories away. He didn’t have the time to mourn properly, not yet. He had a job to do. He had to keep frosty. He had to stay sharp. He tried to organise a story he could tell Walter Lipscombe. He flipped through news channels on the imported plasma TV, but gleaned precious little hard information from the brief talking-head segments squeezed between five-minute-long blocks of ads.
When he emerged from the steamy bathroom, he found a tuxedo and starched white shirt laid out on the king-size bed. As he was trying to work out how to fasten his bow tie - he hadn’t worn one since he’d taken Suzy Segler to the high school prom - the butler knocked on the door and told him that dinner would be served in ten minutes. Stone held out the strip of black cloth and asked the man if he knew what to do with it; asked, while the butler expertly fixed up a neat bow under his chin, what it was like, working for Walter Lipscombe.
‘He’s a very considerate employer, sir.’
‘You’re a Brit, right? I heard you guys make the best butlers, and I guess Walter demands the very best these days.’
‘Technically, sir, I am Canadian. My parents came over as refugees in 1948 because my father was in service with the King. I had the honour of being a footman in service to the present Queen before I took up employment with Mr Lipscombe.’
‘Like I said, nothing but the best for Walter.’ Stone was trying to remember how history here had diverged from history in the Real. There’d been a Second World War against fascism in Germany and Italy, but the American Bund had kept out of it, and the fascists had b
een defeated by an alliance between the Soviet Union and the British Empire. And after the war, there’d been a popular uprising in Britain, it had some kind of grim, utilitarian social democracy . . . He said, ‘Last time I was here, wasn’t America at war with the Brits?’
‘If you mean the United Community of Europe, sir, the war ended two years ago, after your President Carter presided over negotiations in Iceland.’ The butler gave the bow tie a final tug and said, ‘I believe that does it, sir. Would you care to look in the mirror?’
Stone rattled off the names of Walter Lipscombe’s bosses from before the revolution, asked if any of them ever came visiting. The butler, his bland expression giving away absolutely nothing, said that Mr Lipscombe had many acquaintances, but he couldn’t recall those particular gentlemen. Stone supposed that even if Walter Lipscombe and his old gangster pals frolicked in the blood of slaughtered virgins each and every night, his manservant would remain the epitome of tight-lipped British discretion.
He said, ‘Walter has gone up in the world.’
‘He aspires to the position of gentleman, sir. I believe that your companion is waiting next door. Perhaps you would allow me to escort both of you to the dining room.’
Linda Waverly was a vision in a low-cut gown of watered green silk, her mass of red curls piled up and threaded with black ribbons, a few strands artfully dangling at her forehead. She said that she felt like a floozy in a cheap spy novel, gave Stone a shaky grin when he assured her that she was a show-stopper.
As they followed the butler down the corridor, Stone said quietly, ‘Walter is a generous host, but bear in mind that he’s also an operator, and never passes up the chance to gather information.’
‘I haven’t forgotten.’
While they’d been waiting for Walter Lipscombe’s men to pick them up, Stone had told Linda that they’d need Walter’s help when they had to leave the sheaf, but he could only be trusted up to a point. If he found out that they were looking for her father’s apartment, for something valuable that might have been hidden there, he’d want a piece of the action.