Cowboy Angels (30 page)

When he had finished telling her about Freddy, she said, ‘He didn’t know how my father had been exposed to radiation?’

‘I don’t suppose Tom told Freddy any more than he told me,’ Stone said.

‘It must have had something to do with GYPSY.’

‘I think so.’

‘My father said something about an atomic bomb.’

‘My first thought, too.’

‘Maybe he stole a bomb, a suitcase nuke. Maybe it wasn’t properly shielded.’

‘Or maybe he was downwind of a bomb when it went off.’

‘The Company would know if a bomb had gone off.’

‘Maybe not. Not if it was in a wild sheaf, a long way from any civilisation.’

Linda thought about that. ‘This is something really big, isn’t it?’

‘Your father claimed to have stolen something that could change history. It could be a suitcase nuke, it could be documentation about GYPSY’s plans, it could be anything.’

‘He didn’t tell me what it was, Mr Stone.’ Linda brushed her hair back from her pale face, held it in a fist by the side of her neck. They were sitting side by side on orange plastic seats at one end of the passenger car, no one near them, the train rocking smoothly as it sped through the dark. ‘That woman mentioned a boy, said her friends would go after him,’ she said. ‘Is it your son?’

‘The son of an old friend of mine, Jake Nichols. Jake died in an accident last winter.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

‘Jake’s wife . . . Susan . . . Two of Carol Dvorak’s friends tried to kidnap her a couple of days ago. They planned to exchange her for me. Susan shot and killed one of them, wounded the other. And then the one she’d wounded shot and killed her.’

After a moment, Linda said, ‘This is why you wanted to come with me.’

Stone nodded. After everything that had just happened, she deserved to know the truth. ‘I don’t owe the Company anything, Linda. Not after I found your father. Not after what happened to Susan. I came with you because I wanted to put an end to this. And Kohler let me do it because he thinks your father lied about stealing something from GYPSY, and doesn’t want to waste manpower on some kind of diversion or distraction.’

‘He didn’t lie.’

‘I’m pretty sure he didn’t. Linda, listen to me. There will be more people like Dvorak coming after us. And I can’t guarantee that we’ll be so lucky the next time.’

Linda’s expression was as serious as a heart attack. ‘You have a good reason to go after this. So do I. We’ll do it together, just like my father wanted.’

 

They got off the subway at Amsterdam Avenue and walked three blocks north, past a bookshop with stacks of sun-bleached paperbacks crowding its dusty window, past a butcher’s shop where a stout housewife in a shawl and threadbare floral dress watched a man chop a chicken carcass into four pieces on a wooden block, past shacks built from scrap wood and cardboard boxes amongst fire-blackened ruins. A woman soaped a toddler who stood naked and shivering in a red plastic bowl. Battered taxis and pickup trucks swerved past horse-drawn wagons. An armoured personnel carrier was parked at the corner of one block, its engine idling, its snorkel exhaust emitting puffs of black smoke.

‘We were right around here just a couple of days ago,’ Linda said.

‘That was that,’ Stone said. ‘This is this.’

He was walking quickly, couldn’t shake the feeling that at any moment a convoy of police cars and black limos would roar up Amsterdam Avenue in hot pursuit or a helicopter would descend from the sky, loudhailer yammering, ordering him to surrender.

The address Freddy Layne had given him was an apartment building on a quiet cross-street, one of a dozen square, four-storey blocks built of yellow brick. Stone and Linda showed their fake army IDs to the fat, sour-faced old woman who sat behind a card table just inside the front door, and Stone asked her when she had last seen Mr Anderson, if he ever had any visitors, how long he’d been living here. She gave monosyllabic answers that more or less confirmed Freddy Layne’s story, adding that two men had come to see him yesterday.

Stone touched his left eye. ‘Was one of them wearing an eyepatch?’

The woman nodded. ‘I told them Mr Anderson has gone away, but they insisted on seeing for themselves.’

‘The local law is leaning on Freddy. He came looking for something he could use to make a deal,’ Stone said to Linda, and asked the woman how much she had been paid to let the men into Mr Anderson’s apartment.

‘I don’t get what you mean, mister.’

Stone took out Dvorak’s wallet, counted off five ten-dollar bills and spread them on the card table. ‘Either you can take this and loan me your pass key, or I’ll kick in the door. Do you get that?’

‘Mr Anderson’s’ apartment was at the far end of a gallery walkway, overlooking a courtyard where a handful of small kids were chasing each other between mounds of garbage. A sweet rotten reek packed the humid air. A fat brown rat burrowed into a burst trash bag. The wired-glass window beside the apartment’s plywood door was cracked top to bottom and lined by aluminium foil. Linda used the pass key and Stone hustled in, leading with his pistol, aiming at different corners of the stale, dim room.

Freddy Layne had done a good job of tossing the place. A pull-out couch lay on its back, its brown vinyl gashed in a dozen places. Its cushions had been slashed and chunks of foam-rubber stuffing were scattered across the greasy carpet. A sleeping bag ripped from top to bottom curled in a froth of feathers. A coffee table was split in two. Science-fiction paperbacks lay everywhere like dead birds. The door of the closet hung by a single bent hinge. Holes had been punched in the dividing wall of the little kitchenette in the corner. The grille of the heating register over the bathroom door had been levered away and the plasterwork around it kicked out. The toilet in the tiny bathroom was cracked and the ceramic lid of the tank lay in two pieces on the flooded tiled floor.

Linda was searching through the cupboards in the kitchenette. She told Stone that all she’d found were a couple of cans of soup and the biggest roach she’d ever seen.

‘Probably a survivor from the good old days,’ Stone said. ‘They had the biggest and best of everything before the revolution.’

He was standing in the middle of the little room, trying to imagine Tom Waverly camped out there, cleaning his gun, meticulously plotting his hit. He could hear the mutter of a TV through the wall, the shrieks of the children playing outside in the garbage.

‘It smells of him,’ Linda said.

She had an odd expression on her face. Stone realised that she was trying not to cry, and got busy checking out the rest of the apartment.

He shook out the paperbacks, ripped flapping sheets of vinyl from the frame of the couch, looked in the kitchen cupboards that Linda had already searched and found nothing but the roach flattened in one corner of a cupboard, its antennae twitching as it tested the air. It was a monster, all right. A hero roach. There ought to be a mural dedicated to it in one of the subway stations. He found a can opener and opened the soup cans, tipped chicken soup and vegetable soup into the sink. One coffee mug, one plate, one dish, a cheap aluminium saucepan, and a spoon and a knife, all neatly rinsed, sat in the plate rack.

Linda was standing on a kitchen chair and peering inside the broken heating register. ‘Someone swept this clean,’ she said.

‘If anything was hidden in there, Freddy’s men would have found it.’

Linda pressed sideways against the wall as she reached as far as she could into the duct behind the register. ‘When I was a little kid, I used to hide treasure around the house. And Dad used to hide treasure for me to find, too.’

‘I remember. That’s how I found the message he left for me.’

‘We got pretty good at hiding things,’ Linda said. ‘I learned all kinds of tricks.’

She jumped down and took a wire hanger from the closet and straightened it out, then climbed onto the chair again and used the length of wire to fish inside the duct. Stone perched on the edge of the upturned couch while she worked. Her face pressed against broken plaster, her arm buried up to the shoulder, the only sound in the room the murmur of the neighbour’s TV and the tap and scrape of the wire. At last she tensed, then gently pulled something out and showed it to Stone: a plastic bag, wrapped tight with grey duct tape that made a loop at one end.

‘He pushed it around the corner, cleaned out the dust to get rid of the track it left,’ Linda said. ‘He did something like this one time in one of our treasure hunts.’

They emptied the bag onto the kitchenette counter. High denomination bills from the Real and the Nixon sheaf were mixed up with the big, colourful bills of the American Bund. There was a laminated army ID card with a grainy black-and-white photograph of Tom Waverly, giving his name as Philip Kindred, his rank as Captain, 10th Airborne. There were two New York State driver’s licences, both with the same colour photograph of Tom Waverly, both with fake names. Laumer. Leinster. The second name chimed in Stone’s memory. There was a folding knife with a six-inch blade. There was a set of house keys on a metal ring. There was a small key wrapped in a scrap of paper, its grooves fresh-cut, its round tag embossed with a number:
48
.

Stone got chills, picked up the key. ‘A long time ago, when your father and I were working in the Nixon sheaf, we used a proprietary company called Leinster Imports, an off-the-shelf deal set up in Delaware, to rent boxes in different cities. We used the boxes as dead drops.’

Linda had a strange look on her face, as if she had just seen a ghost. ‘He said that it would take both of us to find what he’d hidden.’

Stone smiled. ‘He was right.’

They threw the house keys into the garbage pile outside the apartment and tore up the fake IDs and posted the pieces down two separate sewer gratings. They kept the cash, and Linda kept the folding knife, too, as a memento. She believed that everything was falling into place, that they were just a step away from her father’s vindication.

Stone used a pay phone to call the cutout number Walter Lipscombe had given him, got an answer machine and gave it the pay phone’s number, hung up. Someone rang back less than a minute later, told them to stay where they were, a car would pick them up, and hung up before Stone could reply.

A little less than ten minutes later, a low-slung black sedan pulled up beside the pay phone. Stone suspected that it was the visible tip of a vast surveillance network that had been keeping tabs on him and Linda ever since they had left Lipscombe’s apartment. With a red light flashing in the nearside corner of its dash, it sped along the express lanes reserved for the vehicles of the police, army brass, politicians, and citizens rich enough to be able to afford permits for themselves and their employees.

‘Isn’t this a little conspicuous?’ Stone said.

‘Maybe you don’t know it,’ the goon sitting next to the driver said, ‘but you did yourself a big favour when you went toe-to-toe with those people. It seems they neglected to tell anyone that they were staking out the premises of an honest citizen, and the little gun battle that left two of them dead and one seriously wounded caused quite a stink. The upshot is, the COILE wants you out of town as quickly as possible, and its boss, Mr Saul Stein, has let it be known that if you happen to be given some help in that department, he will look the other way.’

‘I hope this hasn’t caused Mr Lipscombe any trouble.’

The goon’s grin showed several gold teeth. ‘Far from it. First, there is no evidence that he gave you shelter, so that is not a problem. Second, he is doing Mr Stein a big favour by showing you the door, and you can bet that one day he will call that favour in. He asked me to tell you, by the way, that he had been hoping to see you off, but he has been unavoidably detained.’

‘Nothing serious, I hope,’ Stone said.

‘According to Mr Lipscombe, it’s nothing his lawyers can’t take care of. He also asked me to pass on his best wishes.’

‘Tell him from me that I hope he has all the luck he deserves.’

By now the sedan was speeding down the middle of Park Avenue toward Grand Central Station. Although Turing gates had been developed in Brookhaven, the Company had decided to site its first clandestine interchange in New York City because it was the financial and cultural centre of most versions of America, and the Company’s field officers could move unremarked through its teeming, multicultural population, and do most of their research in its libraries and universities. But finding a site where a gate could be opened in several different versions of the city hadn’t been easy: an unused basement in a building in one sheaf might be a busy office in another, or there might be a completely different building in that location, or no building at all.

A proposed open-air facility in Central Park had been written off because of the security risk; so had a plan to drop field officers in wet suits through a gate on a raft on the East River. Finally, the Company’s planners had settled on Grand Central Station. The terminus had been built before the Real’s history had diverged from that of all other known, inhabited sheaves, and in almost every sheaf, as in the Real, the station’s powerhouse at 49th Street had been demolished when the railroad switched its supply of steam and electrical power to Con Edison in the late 1920s, leading to the disuse of a loading platform and ancillary spaces in the two levels beneath it.

That was where a clandestine interchange with gates to five different sheafs had been built in the Real. In the American Bund sheaf, the gate was accessed by a freight elevator in the 49th Street side of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, which before the revolution had housed the New York offices of the FBI. The sedan drove straight into the elevator, which clankingly descended to a loading platform one level underground where a posse of men in colourful suits was waiting.