Cowboy Angels (49 page)

The two interrogators spent some time questioning the technician about this. He asked for paper and pencil, sketched loops labelled with subscripted
T
s. ‘What happens when you receive something from your future self, let’s say a clock, you end up with two identical clocks. One of them is the original, showing the correct time, T
₁
, and the other is from some future time, T
₂
. Okay? So now you wait until the original clock reaches T
₂
and you send it back into the past, to T
₁
. That means you’ve completed the loop and you’ve stayed on the same time line. But if you
don’t
send the original clock back, if you keep it, it means that the clock you received from the future must have come from an alternate sheaf where the original
was
sent back . . . You understand? By refusing to do what you’re supposed to do, you exercise free will, and that splits the sheaf into two. One sheaf ends up with two clocks, the other with no clocks.

‘We played dozens of variations on that kind of game. For a while, it was like Practical Quantum Mechanics 101. We were having a lot of fun, but we got carried away. We became careless, and left the device switched on for hours at a time. And after a couple of weeks it made its move. We’d been working in shifts, and luckily for me I wasn’t there. It struck down everyone in the lab, blinded them with headaches worse than any migraine or gave them seizures, and then it altered the settings on the gate. Two men came through. We can’t be certain, but we think that the device sent some kind of signal into the future, and the two men were sent to rescue it. What they didn’t know was the lab was being monitored from a remote location. The security people shut down the gate and locked the doors and ordered the two men who’d come through the mirror to surrender. They looked at each other, and they died.’

One of the interrogators asked how the two men had died.

‘Like the others, the ones who were caught with the device in the first place. They willed themselves to die. I heard that the surgeon who autopsied them said it was cardiovascular collapse,’ the small man in the orange jumpsuit said. ‘After that, everyone who worked on the device began to suffer from bad headaches and nightmares. One guy killed himself sleepwalking. Walked straight into the electric fence. Another drank half a pint of liquid nitrogen. We didn’t think too much of it at the time. I mean, we were all pretty stressed. We were working twenty hours a day, eating junk food, drinking gallons of coffee, snatching catnaps. It wasn’t surprising that a few of us went crazy. But then people started to have seizures every time the device was switched on, and we realised that it was somehow getting inside our heads. After that, we didn’t dare switch it on again until Dr Barrie worked out how to control it. She designed a bridle that forces it to do what you tell it to do, but it can still hurt you when it does it. It can still get inside your head.’

Stone thought about that as the plane flew east. He wondered what the time key might have done to him, wondered what it might have done to Tom Waverly after he’d stolen it. He thought about the story about people from the future, and Tom’s claim that TW Two had left the time key switched on in the drop in the 42nd Street post office in the Nixon sheaf, so that it could be retrieved by its owners . . .

But that would only happen if the loop swallowed its own tail and ended up more or less where it had begun, and Stone was determined to stop that happening. He racked his seat back as far as it would go and tried to relax, half-listening to the four advisers argue about the scenarios they had constructed. They were eager young college kids with too much intelligence and not enough experience, wearing short-sleeved shirts or T-shirts, pleated slacks or expensive jeans, penny loafers, high-top baseball boots. One wore a bow tie. Another had a row of pens in his shirt pocket. They wielded palmtops like six-shooters. They scribbled on pads of yellow legal paper. They drank coffee and diet Coke and jabbered back and forth unceasingly, treading on the ends of each other’s sentences, trying to out-think the people who’d fled GYPSY’s black facility and figure out where they had run to, arguing about the reasons to select one sheaf over all the others. They talked about tipping points and esoteric statistical sieving techniques. They talked about emergent properties of history. Then they started over from first principles.

‘We’re still looking at everything.’

‘Because we can’t rule out anything.’

‘We can rule out client sheaves.’

‘We can’t rule out anything.’

‘We can rule out client sheaves because they’re already client sheaves. And we can rule out post-nuclear-war sheaves because they’ve already had a nuclear war. That leaves pre-contact sheaves. There are only a dozen, and we should be gaming all of them intensively. I mean, what’s the point of gaming post-nuclear-war sheaves?’

‘Some of those sheaves had their war thirty years ago.’

‘What are you saying? They’re ready for another?’

‘They’re pretty much reconstructed. Maybe the point is to tear it all down and start over. Maybe the point is to
make it worse
.’

‘We’re talking about the past, not the present. We have to focus on pre-contact sheaves because we have to place these guys
somewhere
, and without hard information to the contrary, pre-contact sheaves are the most likely targets.’

That remark got Stone’s attention. He opened his eyes and said, ‘Place which guys?’

Someone said, ‘Now you’ve done it, Howie.’

Someone else said, ‘You’ll have to tell him. Otherwise he’ll break your fingers one by one until you do.’

‘What do you have to tell me?’ Stone said.

Cramer, who had also been trying to sleep, opened his eyes but otherwise didn’t move. Echols looked up from his palmtop.

Howie had a wet bottom lip and black-framed glasses that kept sliding down his nose. His Adam’s apple bobbed when he said to Stone, ‘I don’t have clearance to tell you.’

Stone felt sorry for the kid. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything, Howie. It’s pretty clear you want to work out which sheaf GYPSY is going to hit because the Company wants to insert undercover officers - people Tom won’t know about. I don’t have a problem with that. I understand why the Company doesn’t trust Tom and me to get the job done on our own. But
where
GYPSY is going to hit is only half the problem. You also have to figure out
when
.’

The four advisers looked at him with a mixture of pity and contempt, as if a chimp had ventured an opinion on experimental brain surgery.

Howie said, ‘I really can’t talk about it.’

‘Too late, Howie,’ someone said.

‘
When
doesn’t matter, because we’re giving you a resource,’ someone else said. ‘Howie will explain.’

‘Quit it, you guys,’ Howie said. ‘This is strictly need-to-know stuff.’

‘I think he needs to know more than most, don’t you?’

Cramer yawned and said to Echols, ‘I guess we’ll have to tell him now.’

Echols said, ‘He’s supposed to be briefed at the gate.’

‘I know. But if these boys try to make him guess, he might get mad and kill them all.’

Stone said, ‘Briefed about what?’

Cramer said, ‘You and Waverly will go through with a technician and officers from Special Operations. The technician and three of the officers will guard the gate and take care of the time key while you and Waverly go look for the bad guys. The other officers will shadow you, and step in if you need any help.’

‘Tom knows about this?’

‘Waverly didn’t want to go through with anyone but you,’ Echols said. ‘But we soon disabused him of that notion.’

Cramer said, ‘We made it plain that we’d rather he didn’t go through at all than trust him with the time key. We told him that if he didn’t agree, he could forget about saving his daughter. He called us all kinds of names, but he gave in.’

Stone said, ‘I guess that means you figured out how to use the time key.’

Echols smiled. ‘Not exactly. One of GYPSY’s technicians decided he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison. He’s going through the mirror with you.’

‘Even if you can trust this technician, the time key isn’t reliable,’ Stone said. ‘It has its own agenda. It didn’t do what Tom wanted it to do, so how do you know it will do what you want it to do?’

‘Because we have Dr Barrie’s bridle,’ Echols said.

‘We found it in a safe in GYPSY’s facility in White Sands,’ Cramer said. ‘Luckily, none of the bozos who were trying to trash the place knew how to get the safe open. Our technicians have done all kinds of tests, and the thing works exactly as advertised.’

‘In laboratory conditions,’ Stone said.

‘We don’t trust it any more than you do, even with the bridle,’ Echols said. ‘That’s why we are providing you with additional backup - a resource that Mr Waverly won’t know about. As soon as we find out which sheaf GYPSY has targeted, we will insert two of our people. Not in the present, but in the past. All the way back to the first week the gate into the sheaf was opened, in fact.’

‘This is in case Waverly or the time key tries some funny move that puts you and him in one time, and the technician and the Special Ops guys in another,’ Cramer said. ‘Our two people will stay under deep cover for as long as it takes, and we’ll give you a way of making contact with them in case you find yourself stranded with Waverly.’

‘We sent the time key on ahead of us, in an Air Force jet,’ Echols said. ‘It’ll get there two hours before we do. As long as these bright young things can work out where you’ll be going, there will be ample time to set this up.’

‘In my opinion, you should place officers in all the pre-contact sheaves,’ one of the advisers said.

‘Spoken like someone who’s never worked in the field,’ Echols said.

‘Maybe we should send
these
guys back,’ Cramer said. ‘See how they cope when they’re cut free from everything they know, and have to build new lives and wait ten or fifteen years in deep cover for a call that might never come.’

Stone said, ‘So my backup depends on these kids making the right guess.’

‘If things work out, you can call in an army division if necessary,’ Cramer said. ‘You’ll only need the deep-cover guys if the time key futzes things up.’

‘Well, that’s exactly what it did the only time I saw it used.’

‘One of the doctors looking after Mr Waverly is a psychologist,’ Echols said. ‘He will be doing his best to trick him into letting something slip.’

‘Tom will know you’ll try something like that,’ Stone said. ‘If he does let something slip, you can bet it will send you in the wrong direction.’

Cramer gave him a sour look. ‘You old-school guys always did think you were hot shit.’

‘We’ve been around the block,’ Stone said. ‘Tom won’t talk because he knows he doesn’t have to talk. He’ll play you all the way to the wire.’

The plane was cleared straight in at Brookhaven, and taxied to a hangar where an ambulance, a black limo, and a small fleet of NYPD squad cars and motorcycle cops were waiting. Tom Waverly and his doctors were escorted off the plane by a squad of soldiers and put in the back of the ambulance; Cramer and Echols led Stone to the limo. Echols carried a briefcase and Cramer was using his cell phone, listening to someone at the other end, saying ‘yes, sir’ several times, folding the phone shut as he climbed into the limo, telling his partner that everyone was scrambling to redeploy. A helicopter went up as the column of vehicles moved off with motorcycle outriders front and rear. Cramer, hunched on the fold-down seat across from Stone, said, ‘Just before he came off the plane Waverly told us to head into Manhattan instead of Brookhaven. The son of a bitch is playing games with us.’

‘He wants to use the Grand Central Station facility,’ Stone said.

‘We think so too,’ Echols said. He sat next to Stone, his briefcase in his lap.

‘Right now the Attorney General is writing a search-and-seizure warrant that will give us complete control,’ Cramer said. ‘It’s going to cause an almighty stink, but we have no choice.’

‘At least it narrows it down to just five gates,’ Echols said. ‘Five sheaves, three of them pre-contact.’

‘It’s the Nixon sheaf,’ Stone said. ‘Tom and I worked undercover there, and he told me that he’d been working there for Knightly after he disappeared. Also, that’s where he was hiding out after he stole the time key.’

Cramer said, ‘Why would he hide in a sheaf whose history GYPSY wants to change?’

‘Because it’s always a good idea to hide in the place you know best,’ Stone said. ‘You have contacts there, you’ve probably established several different identities and hidden caches of money and documents, you know how to blend in . . . And if GYPSY manages to do what it plans to do, it won’t just change their target sheaf. It’ll change everything.’

‘He has a point,’ Echols said, ‘and I believe that the Nixon sheaf was one of the favourites of our advisers. It’s a good tip. We should pass it on.’

Cramer took out his cell phone, punched a number, immediately got into an argument with the person who answered. Echols opened his briefcase and took out a set of keys and handed them to Stone, telling him that they were for the doors between the gate and the subway station, then gave him a steel ballpoint pen that was a little heavier than a pen should be.

Stone weighed it in his hand. ‘This is what? Plastic explosive?’

‘Click it once and it works like a normal pen,’ Echols said. ‘Click it three times in a row and it will fire a needle tipped with nerve toxin. It has five needles and has a range of a couple of feet, but it works best if you hold it against the target’s skin.’

‘A sidearm will do just fine.’

‘You’ll get a sidearm at the gate. This,’ Echols said, handing Stone what looked like a watch battery strung on a fine chain, ‘contains a radio transmitter with a fractally folded aerial. Squeeze it like so, the top pops up, and you twist it ninety degrees to the left to activate it. It’ll send an encrypted signal every five minutes. The people we’re sending through ahead of you, the embeds, will have receivers that can pick up the signal from up to twenty miles away.’