Cowboy Angels (34 page)

‘I didn’t steal anything from Eileen Barrie.’

‘Yeah, and you didn’t kill her doppels either.’

‘You know, I did hear something about that. But I’ve been hiding out here all the time it was going down, Adam. It wasn’t anything to do with me.’

Stone was very familiar with his old friend’s light, sly, amused tone of voice: Tom Waverly was holding all the cards, giving teasing hints, playing with him, making him work hard for every scrap of information.

‘I’ve been beaten silly and I’m out of patience. You brought me here for a reason. If you don’t have the decency to explain it, I think I should walk away.’

‘I really did get that phone call, Adam. And there’s a plausible explanation for it, too.’

‘Tell me you didn’t know Walter’s goons were following me.’

‘If I’d known about them, I wouldn’t have spent most of the night talking with Linda. As it was, we had a lot of catching up to do. We talked and talked, and when we were about talked out, we both kind of dozed off. I wake up, I head toward your room, and this big guy I’ve never before seen in my life comes out in his underwear, gets a can of Coke from the machine, and goes back inside. I tippy-toe up to the door, thinking Linda gave me the wrong room number. I press my ear to the wood and hear you talking, hear someone else talking. I hear some unpleasant sounds too, and I figure the big guy I saw isn’t there to look after your health. So I pulled the old fire-alarm stunt. Worked pretty well, didn’t it?’

They came out of the alley into the middle of a crowd of hotel staff, guests in overcoats or robes over nightwear and rubberneckers penned behind a police barrier. Fire trucks and police cruisers blocked the street in front of the hotel.

‘There she is, my brave girl,’ Tom Waverly said, and Stone followed him through the crowd toward the end of the block, where Linda was leaning against the hood of a brown station wagon.

While Linda drove the station wagon across town toward the Holland Tunnel, her father told her how he had come to Stone’s rescue. When he had finished, she told Stone that she hadn’t known it was going to happen, really and truly she hadn’t, and asked her father, ‘Did you know?’

‘Swear to God I didn’t. All I know is what I was told, honey. Just like you.’

‘You better be telling the truth,’ Linda said, and glanced in the rearview mirror. ‘You hold on, Mr Stone. We’ll stop somewhere and get you fixed up.’

Stone was sprawled on the capacious back seat in a litter of old newspapers and fast-food cartons. He coughed, tasted blood, and said, ‘Linda? You think this guy really is your father?’

‘Of course he is.’

‘Jesus Christ had his Doubting Thomas; I have you. Check it out,’ Tom said, and pulled down the neck of his T-shirt, revealing a pale oval scar just below his right collarbone. ‘Remember when I got this? Want to put your finger on it, reassure yourself it’s real?’

Stone ignored him and said to Linda, ‘How about before, in Pottersville? Was that your father too?’

‘I know it’s hard to take in, Mr Stone,’ Linda said.

‘It
was
me,’ Tom said, ‘but there’s no way I’m going to end up there now. The circle is broken. We’re making a split, right here. I can feel it. I bet you can feel it too, can’t you, Adam?’

‘I feel as if I’m tuned to the wrong channel,’ Stone said. ‘As if I shouldn’t really be here.’

The effort of getting out of the hotel had exhausted him, and he was still coming down from the cocktail of drugs he’d been given. He kept losing focus on the world, drifting into a state of disconnected, not unpleasant lassitude where nothing much seemed to matter.

‘You’re here, all right,’ Tom said. ‘And so I am, so you’d better get used to it. You and me - and Linda too, of course - we’re going to split history and forge a new universe.’

‘We have a long way to go,’ Linda said.

‘We’re on the road, honey, that’s the important thing. We’re on the road, and we’re operating under our own free will. So with that general principle in mind, Adam, if you want to go your own way, I won’t stop you.’

‘Maybe I will when I’ve rested up,’ Stone said, and zoned out for a little while.

When he came around, they were driving along an elevated section of turnpike. Across the sun-silvered sweep of the Hudson River, the spiky skyline of Manhattan stood against a clean blue sky.

When he saw that Stone was awake, Tom said, ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, old buddy, you look like shit. But you hang in there, we’ll stop soon and get you fixed up.’

‘A couple of painkillers might help.’

‘Anything you want,’ Tom said, and beat a rhythm on his thighs with his palms, sang a couple of lines about cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, all come to look for America. ‘Everything’s falling into place. We did what we had to do to get to this point, and now we’re free to do what we need to do. Everything’s going to work out.’

‘It better,’ Linda said.

‘We have to have a little faith in the dead guy,’ Tom said. ‘But right now we’re off the page. We’re free.’ He lowered the window and stuck his head out into the rush of air. ‘Free at last! Great God Almighty, free at last! Man, does it ever feel good!’

 

They stopped in a shopping mall and purchased three different brands of painkiller and tubes of burn ointment and liniment. Stone stripped off his suit and shirt in a restroom stall and anointed his wounds, dressed again, and washed down two Tylenol with a palmful of tap water and splashed cold water on his face. Every square inch of his skin hurt, a general ache enlivened by spots of specific pain - the itchy sting of the cigarette burns in his scalp and on his ear, the hot throb of a swollen eyelid that flared every time he blinked, the bone-deep bruise in his thigh where Al had injected his special cocktail. When he limped back to the car, Tom Waverly offered him a bag of White Castle burgers, and the smell of onions and cooked meat almost made him throw up.

Tom was still in an exuberant and playful mood. He’d bought a tape cassette of one of Bob Dylan’s old albums at the service station where Linda had pumped fifteen gallons of expensive gasoline into the station wagon’s tank, had been singing snatches of the songs and beating time to the music as he watched traffic moving in the sunlight. Linda was quieter, her face masked by the amber sunglasses her father had purchased with the cassettes.

Stone sat quietly in the back seat. He was still having trouble putting his thoughts together, but he decided that the first thing he needed to do was find out if this version of Tom Waverly could fill in the gaps in the story that the other version of Tom Waverly had told him in the Pottersville cemetery. The one who had been dying of radiation poisoning; the one who had shot himself.

‘You were working for this thing of Dick Knightly’s,’ Stone said. ‘For Operation GYPSY. Want to tell me exactly what you were doing for him?’

‘You have to get into this now, Adam? It’s a complicated story, and after all you’ve been through I’m not sure if you’ll be able to appreciate it properly.’

‘After all I’ve been through, I deserve to know what’s going on,’ Stone said. ‘Let’s start at the beginning. Knightly recruited you after SWIFT SWORD. What happened next?’

‘He tried to recruit me
during
SWIFT SWORD, which is why I wanted to try for a last chance at guts and glory, and we both know how that worked out. When the dust from that had settled, right after the Conduct Board had slapped my wrist, Knightly came back to me with his offer. He said that if I didn’t go work for him, he’d ring the gong, tell the Company how I’d neutralised General E. Everett McBride, and also tell them about the various little scams I had going to supplement my pension fund. The man knew just about everything, Adam. I had no choice.’

‘So you faked your own death and went to work for GYPSY.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Which kept going after Knightly was jailed, and suffered his stroke.’

‘Yeah,’ Tom said again, and laughed.

‘Marsha Mason and Nathan Tate were working for it too. You were all working together.’

‘But I got out,’ Tom Waverly said.

‘And you stole something. What were you planning to do with it, before you got that phone call?’

‘Oh, you believe I got that phone call now?’

Linda said, ‘He was told more or less what I was told in Pottersville, Mr Stone. He knew we were coming here, and he knew how to find us.’

‘You stole something that could change history,’ Stone said to Tom. ‘What is it? What does it do?’

Tom Waverly turned in his seat and looked at Stone over the top of his sunglasses. ‘I call it the time key. It lets you use gates to travel into the past.’

‘Cut the bullshit, Tom. If you can’t give me straight answers, don’t expect me to help you.’

‘He’s telling the truth, Mr Stone,’ Linda said. ‘This is what GYPSY is all about. This is what Dr Barrie was working on. Officially, GYPSY is a clandestine research facility that’s developing portable Turing gates. Gates you can put on the back of a pickup truck and move anywhere. But that’s just a front for a black op. For Dr Barrie’s real research.’

‘Dr Barrie is working for GYPSY,’ Stone said. That much he could understand. ‘Is that why you were killing her doppels, Tom? Were you trying to draw attention to her?’

‘It won’t come to that, Adam. Not now.’

Another evasion. Stone wondered if the man who’d shot and killed himself in Pottersville had been a doppel of Tom Waverly tutored in every aspect of the real Tom Waverly’s life. Or maybe Tom hadn’t killed himself in Pottersville after all. Maybe the whole thing had been a charade, a piece of live-action disinformation involving blood-filled squibs and a gun loaded with blanks, just like the movies. But that meant Freddy Layne, with his story about a lethal dose of radiation, had to be in on it, too . . .

He said, ‘Let’s say I believe you stole something crucial to GYPSY, that possession of it gives you a way out of this thing you were blackmailed into working for. Why didn’t you take it to the Company, Tom? Why didn’t you turn yourself in? Why go to all this trouble to involve Linda and me?’

‘The Company believed that I was dead. And now I’m dead all over again, and I’d kind of like to keep it that way.’

‘You need a middleman - is that what this is about? Did you kill Dr Barrie’s doppels just to bring me into this?’

‘That’s a good question. I wish I knew the answer, I really do.’

‘If you want me to help you out, Tom, you’re going to have to be straight with me.’

‘I’m not playing any kind of game. I don’t know why Eileen Barrie’s doppels were killed because it wasn’t anything to with me. I haven’t harmed a hair on any one of their heads, swear to God.’

‘It won’t happen,’ Linda said.

‘Not in this universe, honey. Not if we can help it, eh?’

‘Not anywhere, if I can help it.’

There was a space of silence. The last song on the tape, a lament for lost love, played out. Tom popped out the cassette and put it back in its case, then read a couple of sentences from the liner notes.

‘Listen to this, Adam. He could be speaking directly to us. “Dylan’s Redemption Songs! If he can do it we can do it. America can do it.” Think we can do it, Adam?’

‘That depends on what we’re trying to do. And who we’re doing it for.’

‘You don’t trust me. I understand that. But you’re going to have to learn to trust me before this thing is through. Listen: “To live outside the law you must be honest.” Also, “A new world is only a new mind.” Ain’t it the truth? If you make enough of a difference, affect enough observers, make enough resonance in the General Quantum Field, you definitely get a whole new universe.’

‘Are you doing it for yourself, Tom, or for America?’

‘I’m a patriot. Always have been, always will be. Do you doubt that as well?’

‘You’re talking about time travel and looking for messages in found text, Tom. And after all that’s gone down in the past couple of days, you can’t blame me for harbouring one or two doubts.’

‘Someone once said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. But I reckon they’re the
unconscious
legislators, tapping into the background hum of the General Quantum Field, what used to be called the group unconsciousness. They don’t know where their babble comes from, and as long as they can grab a few lines that echo in eternity they don’t care. This guy who wrote the liner notes - Allen Ginsberg. You remember him, Adam? That crazy mission of yours right here in this very sheaf, back in 1973?’

‘I remember that I was a lot younger than I am now, and also a lot more arrogant.’

‘Adam is partial to this particular sheaf, honey,’ Tom told his daughter. ‘It was one of the first the Company infiltrated. We both worked undercover here in 1969, and he came back a few years later. The President was in all kinds of political trouble, there was an energy crisis and a good chance that nuclear war could have broken out over a situation in the Middle East, and the Cluster decided that it was a hinge-point. Adam was in charge of a team that was working toward starting up a civil war.’

‘But in the end it didn’t work out,’ Stone said. ‘And I’m glad that it didn’t, because the locals resolved everything for themselves.’

‘We had a seminar about it during the trainee programme,’ Linda said.

‘And doesn’t that make you feel old?’ Tom Waverly said. ‘Plenty of people in the Company think we missed a chance, back then.’

‘This version of America doesn’t need our help now, and it didn’t need our help back in 1973 either,’ Stone said. ‘It was already a power in the world, on its way to becoming
the
power, but the Cluster came up with a plan to bring it under our influence anyway, and we were so full of ourselves we tried to carry it through.’

He and Tom hadn’t seen each other for more than three years, he thought, and they were picking up right where they’d left off.