Cowboy Angels (15 page)

The guerrillas riding in front of Stone whooped and spurred their ponies, standing up in their stirrups as their mounts cantered away up the narrow path. Stone and the rest of his captors went in single file around a stack of adobe houses to the shelter of the ledge. Following the lead of his captors, Stone swung down from the saddle and stood holding the reins of his horse, his feet pinched and throbbing with incipient frostbite inside his wet boots and the cold smoking off his clothes. A little crowd of men and women and children crept up to him, parting to allow two people to step through.

One was an old woman wrapped in layers of drab and tattered clothes, her face horribly scarred, a twist of cloth tied over her eyeless sockets. A tame crow stood on her shoulder, cocking its sleek head this way and that. The other was a tall young man with a sharp blue gaze, long black hair, and a casually imperious bearing. Stone knew at once that here was the man that he and Tom Waverly had come to kill: the leader of the guerrillas, Jack Walker.

 

Stone found it hard to describe the impact of Jack Walker’s presence. He said to Linda Waverly, ‘Have you ever met anyone with real charisma?’

‘I met President Davis once, at the ceremony where my father was awarded the Intelligence Star. We were sitting in this little room with a podium up front, waiting with a bunch of other recipients and their families, and when the President walked in everyone stood up and started to applaud. You could feel the excitement in the air. It was as if the lights had been turned up. Afterward, the President worked the room. He exchanged a few words with my father, and my father introduced me to him. He had this way of grasping your wrist instead of your hand and sort of hanging on, looking you right in your eyes while he talked to you. For those few seconds he made you feel that, as far as he was concerned, you were the only person in the world,’ Linda said, smiling at the memory.

‘That’s how it was with this guy, Jack Walker. He was just a kid, but he was a natural leader. He commanded attention.’

‘The only time I ever saw my father blush was when the President handed him that medal.’

‘He got a kick out of it, huh?’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘I was awarded the Exceptional Service Medallion about the same time. They give it for injury or death resulting from service in an area of hazard. Some middle-ranking staffer dropped it off while I was in hospital - I guess that’s the difference between being rescued and being the rescuer.’

Linda glanced over at him and said, ‘I do believe you’re a cynic, Mr Stone.’

They were four hours beyond New York now. They had skirted around Albany and were still driving north. Stone had his cell phone in his lap. He’d been checking its signal every ten minutes. Now he checked it again, and said, ‘We need to pull over for a moment.’

Linda looked at him.

‘See that fire road up ahead? Pull over there.’

There was no other traffic on the road, but Linda looked in the rearview mirror and put on the car’s blinkers before she brought it to a stop. When Stone took out his Colt .45 and told her to drive a little way down the fire road, she set her jaw and said, ‘I don’t think so.’

‘This is a necessary precaution, Linda. Nothing will happen to you, I swear. Drive nice and easy down into the trees. It looks pretty dry in there, so you shouldn’t have any trouble.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘Then I guess this is where you get out.’

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.

Stone drove slowly out of the parking lot, turned left at the four-way and drove uphill past clapboard houses, past an automobile cemetery in the woods at the edge of town. A junkyard dog chased the car’s red lights a little way, stood in the middle of the road and barked defiantly as they vanished over the top of the ridge.

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.’