Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  ‘Don’t shoot anyone else,’ Stone said and threw the denim jacket onto the platform.

  ‘Is the time key in there?’ Knightly said.

  ‘And its bridle.’

  ‘Put down your weapons.’

  ‘Have one of your men come get it. Do you think I’ll shoot him and risk the life of an innocent hostage?’

  ‘I’ll have her shot if you don’t lay down your weapons right now,’ Knightly said, and the man in the blue sport coat stepped out of the open door of the car and shot the man holding the black woman. He fell down and the woman fell down too, wrapping her arms around her head. Knightly turned, lifting his shotgun, and Stone stepped out of the embrasure and took his shot, saw paint chips fly from the girder, corrected his aim a fraction and shot again. Knightly stumbled forward and Stone’s third shot took him down. Linda’s pistol went off behind him, dropping the third man.

  Stone started toward Knightly’s body, and Tom Waverly slammed into him and pinned him to the wall. One of Tom’s hands caught Stone’s chin and smashed his head against sooty tiles; the other snatched away his pistol, swung its grip against his temple. Stone fell to his knees and Tom scooped up the denim jacket and pulled out the time key and switched it on.

  Pain thumped in Stone’s skull. Its black pulse beat in his sight and locked his muscles. He felt Tom’s hands on him, felt him pluck the set of keys from his pocket. Linda was down too, clutching her head. Stone saw Tom pull her up, pull her close, heard him shout to the man in the sport coat that he’d kill this woman, he’d kill her if he didn’t put his gun down right now. The man hesitated, then dropped his pistol and raised his hands. As Stone levered himself to his feet, Tom unlocked the door at the end of the platform and shoved Linda away, stepped through the door and slammed it behind him.

  Most of the pain in Stone’s head lifted at once. He stumbled down the platform as Linda braced and shot up the door’s lock. Stone pushed her out of the way and kicked the door just beneath the shattered lock, a good solid kick that made it shiver in its frame, then stepped back and shoulder-charged it, but it wouldn’t give way. Tom Waverly had jammed or bolted it from the inside.

  The man in the sport coat jogged down the platform toward them, saying breathlessly, ‘I’m Harvey Shiel, Mr Stone. Your contact.’

  ‘Follow me,’ Stone said, and ran for the exit, pausing to scoop up a pistol dropped by one of the dead men. Linda and Harvey Shiel chased after him as he ran up the steps, straight into the arms of two cops who were descending toward the platform with their guns drawn. One spun Stone around and pressed him against the wall; the other covered Linda and Harvey Shiel with his revolver.

  ‘I’m a Secret Service agent,’ Stone said, as calmly as he could. ‘Look in my jacket, the inside pocket.’

  The cop was a brawny veteran. He held Stone’s hands at the back of his neck in a good thumb-lock and wanted to know if Stone had anything to do with a report of shots fired in the subway.

  ‘I’m chasing fugitives,’ Stone said. ‘Three are down. One got away. Check my ID, officer.’

  ‘Take it out nice and slow,’ the cop said, and stepped back and aimed his revolver at Stone as he took out the badge case he’d been given back in the Real. The cop studied the photograph on the card and the embossed gold shield, showed it to his partner, asked Stone what was going on.

  ‘It’s a matter of national security. I want you to secure the area and call up ambulances - there are civilian casualties. My partners and I have to go get backup,’ Stone said, and turned and ran up the rest of the steps before the cop could think to ask why Stone’s partners didn’t show their ID.

  Stone ran two blocks down Lexington Avenue, turned left onto 49th Street. His nose was bleeding and he snorted blood into his hand and wiped it on the leg of his trousers without breaking stride. As in the American Bund, as in the Real, the north side of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel took up the whole block. The brass-faced double doors of the freight elevator and the door to the service stairs were set next to the entrance to the hotel’s underground parking lot. Stone shot out the lock of the door to the stairs and kicked it open. Linda was running toward him, her face flushed, her hair like a banner. At the far end of the block, Harvey Shiel turned the corner, labouring mightily.

  Stone went down the spiral stairs two at a time; Linda’s footsteps clattered somewhere above him as he unbolted the grated door at the bottom. As he hauled it open, he heard another shot echo far down the white-tiled passageway and ran toward it.

  Pain suddenly thumped in his head, growing sharper as it knocked through his skull.

  He was getting close to the time key.

  A sooty bulb burned above the iron door that stood open in the side of the passageway and two dead men lay on their backs just inside. When Stone stepped over the bodies, the pain in his head doubled, doubled again. Shock waves of hard sharp pain hammering through his skull, pain so bad it didn’t seem possible he could survive it. He stumbled forward, crashed into the edge of the doorway, and clung there like a drowning sailor. Saw through a kind of black pulse the tarnished glow of the gate filling the meter cupboard on the other side of the small, sooty room; saw someone silhouetted against it.

  The mild-faced man in a business suit, the time key glowing in his left hand, looked straight at Stone, then reached inside his jacket. Tom Waverly’s body was sprawled at his feet. Another man sat against the wall next to the silvery mirror of the gate, his face shot away. The man in the suit pulled out a pistol and Stone tried to lift his own weapon, but it seemed to weigh about a thousand pounds. Then something exploded right by his head.

  Stone fell down, convinced he’d been shot. Linda stepped past him, shot the man as he crawled toward the gate on hands and knees, shot him as he collapsed and shot him again, the hard noise pounding the nail through Stone’s skull.

  The man fell on his face and stayed down. Linda dropped to her knees beside her father’s body. Stone found his gun and began to crawl forward. The time key lay on the floor next to the body of the man in the business suit. Stone’s sight was full of black rags that pulsed with the pulse of the pain in his head. All he could see was the time key, a faint green rectangle that suddenly inverted, opening into a vast void in which baleful stars rushed at him like angry hornets. He felt its full force drive through him and with a convulsive effort lifted his pistol and set it against the time key and squeezed the trigger. The pain in his head blew out and the gate vanished like a burst soap bubble.

  WHITE SANDS, OCTOBER 1977

  Harvey Shiel and his partner had been sent all the way back to 1969, the year when the gate had first been opened onto the Nixon sheaf. Shiel’s partner had been killed in a traffic accident four years ago, but Shiel had continued to live in deep cover, scrupulously maintaining the radio receiver, keeping it charged and carrying it with him wherever he went out of habit so deeply ingrained he’d almost forgotten the reason for it. He told Stone that when the receiver had begun to vibrate it had taken him a while to remember what he was supposed to do.

  ‘I tracked the signal to a back road in New Jersey,’ he said. ‘North of Secaucus. I found two cars there all shot up, three bodies dumped in the reeds, and the transmitter lying in the dirt. I knew something had happened, but I didn’t know what. I couldn’t think of anything else but to hang out near the gate and hope I spotted you. It was pure dumb luck that I did.’

  They were driving out of New York in the van. They’d had to leave Tom Waverly’s body and the bodies of the other men in the squalid room where the gate to the Real opened. It had been an awful thing to do, but there had been no choice: they’d only just got out ahead of the local cops.

  Stone still wasn’t quite sure what had happened. He was certain that the three dead men had been Dick Knightly’s, left there in case the ambush in the subway station failed. And he was also certain that Tom Waverly had killed them, because he’d heard only a single shot as he’d been running down the tunnel toward the gate - the shot that ha
d killed Tom, fired by the man in the business suit.

  He imagined Tom standing in the little room with the time key alive in his hands, waiting for the gate to open. And when it had opened, the man in the business suit had stepped through the mirror and shot him. But where had the man come from? He’d carried no identification, no money, nothing but a spare clip for his pistol. Was he a Company assassin, sent back in time from 1984 to deal with Stone and Tom Waverly after the Company had managed to build a time gate from the plans left by Eileen Barrie? Or had he come from much further in the future?

  Maybe he would be able to figure it out later, Stone thought. Right now, he still had to dispose of the nuclear bomb and deal with the rest of Knightly’s men.

  Harvey Shiel said that taking care of the bomb wouldn’t be a problem. He had a converted fishing boat, a forty-footer with twin GM marine diesels that he rented to deep-sea fishing parties.

  ‘We can take her out and dump the thing in ten thousand feet of water if that’s what you want. You’re absolutely sure you don’t want to make contact with the Real, bring in specialists to deal with it?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Stone said.

  ‘Then we can load it up tonight,’ Shiel said, ‘and go out at first light. What are you going to do after that?’

  Linda stirred and said, ‘Some of Knightly’s people are still alive.’

  She was possessed by a brittle calm that Stone found more unsettling than raw, unreasoning grief. He felt as if he was sitting next to a bomb with a mercury-tilt trigger that was liable to go off at the slightest disturbance.

  He asked Shiel how much cash he was carrying.

  ‘A couple of thousand dollars. I emptied my checking account after I got the signal, thought it might come in handy. I can get more, but it’ll take a little time.’

  Stone was grateful that he had this competent, good-hearted man on his side. He said, ‘I’ll need all of it. Think you can handle the disposal of the nuclear device by yourself?’

  ‘No problem. Who are you chasing? Can I help you with that, too?’

  ‘I have to go after Knightly’s people. They want to take three vans full of equipment through the mirror, back to the Real. It’s too much to smuggle through the gate in New York, and in any case the area’s swarming with local cops. That means there’s only one place they can go. I reckon I’ll have a couple of days to get ready if I fly out there, as long as I leave right now.’

  ‘It doesn’t stop,’ Linda said.

  ‘This one last thing,’ Stone said, ‘and then it’s done.’

  She took a breath, let it out. ‘All right. What do we have to do?’

  ‘You’re going to stay with Harvey. You can give him a hand with the bomb, if you’re up to it.’

  ‘I’ll come with you—’

  ‘You’re in shock, Linda. You don’t know it, but you are.’

  ‘They killed my father. I want to come with you and kill them. Kill them all . . .’ Her face twisted, and then tears came. She swiped at them with the heel of her hand, but they kept coming. She said in a tight voice, ‘He didn’t want to be saved, did he? He’d gone all the way over. He would have gone through and left us behind, he would have gone after Dr Barrie’s doppels, he would have started the whole thing over, just to save himself . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Stone said. After a moment put his arm around her shoulders. She leant against him and wept silently, angrily. He said, ‘He’s still alive, Linda. Right now, in the Real, in 1977, he’s still alive.’

  ‘You think that makes it any better?’

  Stone thought of Susan. ‘I guess not.’

  Harvey Shiel looked straight ahead as he drove, giving Stone and Linda the space they needed. After a little while he said, ‘I have a cabin on the shore. You can stay there as long as you like.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ Linda said.

  ‘It’s pretty basic, but it’s peaceful.’ Shiel hesitated, then said, ‘What about me? Will the Company want me back, now I’ve completed my mission?’

  Stone said, ‘You want to go back?’

  ‘I’ve been here eight years. I’ve made a life for myself here. I’m married, I have kids, a business . . . You think they’ll want me to return to active service?’

  ‘I can’t see any way for you to return to active service without waiting for 1984 to swing by,’ Stone said. ‘You can ask them then, if you feel the need, but don’t ask me. They reactivated me for this, but as soon as it’s done I’m going back into retirement.’

  ‘I’m not going back either,’ Linda said. ‘I’ll help Mr Shiel get rid of the evidence, and that’ll be the last thing I do for the Company.’

  ‘This is a good place to live,’ Shiel said. ‘It has its problems, sure. There’s a nuclear stand-off with the Soviets, and just now we have an energy crisis, rolling power cuts and gas shortages. But on the whole it’s one of the better Americas. If you work at it, you can make a life here, any kind you want.’

  ‘I look forward to finding out about that,’ Stone said. ‘They have New Jersey airport here?’

  ‘They call it Newark.’

  ‘Take me to Newark, Harvey. I have an appointment to keep at White Sands.’

  Stone flew ahead of the sunset and landed at Albuquerque a little after five p.m. local time. He stole a car from the long-term parking lot, claimed he’d lost his ticket at the exit, paid the fine, and drove south along the I-25 to Las Cruces, riding a floating sense of déjà vu. He reached the little town after sunset. After checking into a motel, he ate a beef burrito at a truck stop and in the pungent restroom bought a dozen uppers from a fat biker with wreaths of jailhouse tattoos on his arms.

  The gun shop was more or less exactly as Stone remembered it from just a few subjective days ago. He waited until after midnight before short-circuiting the alarm and using the jack from the car to lever a security grille from the back window. He was in and out in five minutes. He stashed the stolen goods in a Dumpster behind the motel, slept exactly six hours, showered, ate breakfast in the diner across the street, and bought beef jerky and plastic jugs of water in the general store where in seven years he would shop for provisions with Tom and Linda Waverly - no, that was in another time-line of this sheaf. Things would be different now.

  Stone retrieved his stolen booty from the Dumpster and hid it amongst the clubs in the golf bag in the trunk and headed out of town. Two black-and-white cruisers were angle-parked outside the gun shop. A deputy leaning against the wing of his vehicle and drinking coffee from a foam cup gave Stone the eye as he went past, but when Stone checked his rearview mirror the deputy was ambling toward the open door of the gun shop.

  Through the dry mountains, then, into the heat-haze and burning light of the desert. Stone drove past the turnout where the track to the cabin met the road, parked the car behind a billboard advertising a place that sold Indian jewellery, and hiked up a stony slope. He circled wide, coming at the cabin from the west, holing up in a circle of creosote bush, and scoping it out through the twenty-power binoculars he’d stolen from the gun shop.

  A pickup truck was parked in front of the cabin, but for a long time nothing moved but heat shimmer. It was so hot sweat evaporated straight from Stone’s skin as he lay on sand and gravel under dry brush with a T-shirt tied like a scarf over his head. Apart from chewing strips of jerky and taking sips of warm water from a plastic jug, he kept so quiet and still that a jack rabbit loped within a yard of him.

  He had plenty of time to think about what he needed to do, and think about everything that had happened in the past few days. He remembered saying goodbye to Linda Waverly at the airport. Linda, still possessed by that cold calm, had told him to come back to New York when he had done what needed to be done.

  ‘Promise me you won’t go through the mirror.’

  ‘No promises, Linda.’

  ‘You’re thinking of the woman you left behind. The one that was murdered.’

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘Right n
ow her son isn’t even born, Adam. Her husband isn’t dead.’

  She had never before used his first name.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of trying to find her, but I was wondering about trying to save her husband, when the time comes. He was a good friend to me, Linda. The least I can do is warn him off the duck-hunting trip that killed him.’

  ‘When did it happen? Will it happen?’

  ‘In a little over six years. Right now he hasn’t even moved to First Foot. He’s still in the army.’

  ‘You have plenty of time,’ Linda had said. ‘And so do I, if I’m going to try to save my father from himself all over again. We could both wait it out here. It’s as good a place as anywhere else.’

  Remembering this and everything else, Stone felt a growing sense of freedom, as if gravity was loosening its hold on him. After this one last task he would be released from the wheel of fate. After this, he would be able to do anything. Send covert messages to the DCI, rat out Knightly and GYPSY early. Help Linda save her father. Warn Jake about the wolves, when the time came. Anything was possible, anything at all.

  Close to six o’clock, with the sun westering toward the mountains, two men came out of the cabin and drove the pickup to the rocks where the gate was located. A little later, they drove back down again. Knightly’s men, no doubt about it, left behind to guard the gate after the crew had escaped from 1984, checking it out when it opened each day. Stone wondered about the caretaker.

  The temperature dropped quickly after the sun set. The cloudless desert sky was full of stars. The luminous smoke of the Milky Way, sky-spanning constellations. In every sheaf that Stone had ever visited the stars were always the same, but elsewhere it was entirely possible that sentient bears or wolves or creatures outside any human experience or dream had built strange civilisations under different stars. So many different Americas. An infinite variety, for all practical purposes. In all that unimaginably vast array, did the Real and the few sheaves stitched to its time-line by Turing gates really count for all that much? Would it really make any difference if a few of those sheaves vanished, or were changed so radically and violently that they forced all the others connected to them to change too? Maybe not. After all, in the infinite array of Americas, there must to be any number of versions of this particular story. In some, Tom Waverly’s blackmail scheme succeeded and he escaped with Eileen Barrie; in others, Knightly’s black op failed to take the nuclear bomb back in time, or Tom was in prison and his daughter was safe and Stone had returned to the farm and Susan and Petey, or he had never left in the first place. How did he, one of so many different versions of one person, count in all this?