Cowboy Angels (43 page)

‘And then you’ll let me go?’

‘I’ll hand you over to the Company. I’m sure they’ll want to know everything you can tell them about GYPSY. I’m sure you’ll be able to cut a deal with them.’

‘Very well.’

‘Just like that, huh? What guarantees can you give me?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How will I know you’re telling the truth?’

‘You have made it clear that I have no choice in the matter, Mr Stone.’

Stone realised then what he’d walked in on, why she’d killed the bodyguards, why she’d decided to bail. He said, ‘I guess it helps that you’ve already decided to run out on Tom Waverly.’

She hesitated, then gave a tight little nod.

‘He talked to you tonight. What did he say?’

‘I have a cell phone that no one in GYPSY knows about. He sent me a text message an hour ago. I knew at once something had gone wrong because he was not supposed to be in this sheaf and we weren’t supposed to contact each other until it was all over. He sent me a telephone number and asked me to call it at once. We talked. He told me that he’d lost the time key, but he wouldn’t explain how. He said that I wasn’t in any danger and he had a backup plan. I was to go to work tomorrow as if nothing had happened, and download certain files.’

‘About GYPSY.’

‘About the operation inside Operation GYPSY. He said that he would intercept me on my way home and kill my guards. We’d go into hiding, and we’d offer the files to the Company in exchange for an exemption from prosecution.’

‘But you already had those files, didn’t you? You had your own backup plan all along. And after he contacted you, you decided to make a run for it.’

‘I couldn’t trust him, Mr Stone. He sounded . . . agitated. Agitated, drunk, and not at all like the man I knew. I decided that his so-called plan was too risky.’

‘So you decided to betray him before he could betray you.’

‘I decided to take action of my own,’ Eileen Barrie said primly.

‘But you did trust him, once upon a time. You helped him to steal the time key.’

‘That’s what Tom calls it. I prefer a simpler, less specific term: the device.’

‘Why did you help him?’

‘It was my idea, Mr Stone, not his. I wanted to put an end to GYPSY. I found that I no longer agreed with its aims.’

‘That’s the same bullshit Tom fed me. He also told me that he couldn’t take it to the Company because he’d been on the run for three years, he’d done too many bad things, and no one would believe him. Maybe that’s true, maybe not. But you’re a respectable scientist, Dr Barrie. If you really wanted to put a stop to GYPSY, you could have gone straight to the Office of the Director of Central Intelligence. You could have blown the whistle any time. But you didn’t, did you? So why did you and Tom steal the time key?’

Eileen Barrie looked past Stone for a moment, then said, ‘Money.’

‘Money?’

‘Money.’

‘You and Tom stole the time key because you wanted money?’

‘We wanted a life together. We wanted out of GYPSY. We needed a good deal of money to accomplish those aims.’

Stone made a connection he should have made a long time ago. ‘You were lovers.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you cooked up a scheme to steal the time key and blackmail the people who run GYPSY for its return.’

‘Tom took care of the blackmail. I gave him the information he needed to steal the device. He took it and went into hiding, and a third party was going to make the arrangements for the exchange.’

‘A third party by the name of Freddy Layne.’

‘I’m unfamiliar with the name,’ Eileen Barrie said, as unblinking as an owl in the beam of the flashlight.

‘Freddy Layne was Tom’s business partner in another sheaf. Why didn’t you go with Tom?’

‘We agreed that it would be best if I stayed behind. That way they wouldn’t know who had stolen it.’

‘But they suspected you had something to do with it, didn’t they? That’s why you were under guard.’

Eileen Barrie didn’t deny it.

Stone said, ‘I think you stayed behind because if things went wrong it would be Tom and not you who’d take the fall.’

She didn’t deny that, either.

‘You’re quite a piece of work, Dr Barrie.’

‘After the device went missing, I was interrogated and I was put under guard, but so was everyone who had access to it. They knew Tom had something to do with it because he had disappeared, but they didn’t know about us. About our . . . connection. And I was quite sure that, if he was caught, Tom would not tell them about me. He loved me, you see.’

‘Don’t kid yourself, Dr Barrie. If you and Tom were indulging in extracurricular activity, you can bet your colleagues in GYPSY knew about it. They didn’t do anything to you because they were using you as bait. They were waiting for you to make a move. Waiting for Tom to get in touch.’

She thought about that for a moment. ‘He wasn’t supposed to get in touch with me. I didn’t even know where he went after we liberated the device. He was supposed to make all the arrangements for the exchange, and then I was going to join him.’

‘But he turned up here instead. He told you that he’d lost the time key, but he had this nifty, brand-new plan, and he needed your help. You didn’t like it, so you decided to make a run for it before he found you. When did he steal the time key, by the way?’

‘A week ago.’ Eileen Barrie hesitated, then said, ‘Tom told me that he has been hiding out for three weeks. He told me that he had used the time key to travel two weeks into his past. Is that true?’

‘He was aiming for three weeks, Dr Barrie, but the time key didn’t cooperate.’

‘He wasn’t supposed to use it at all. Without the proper precautions it can be . . . dangerous. You said that he was aiming for three weeks. Did he tell you why?’

‘He said he was going to put a stop to everything before it began. He didn’t explain how.’

‘Unless the device is used in exactly the right way, Mr Stone, it tends to go its own way. We know that it’s highly intelligent, and we have good evidence that it is self-aware. We believe that it has free will. It makes choices that can affect the direction of history. So when it is necessary to make use of it, it must be forced to make the correct choice.’

‘You have “good evidence”? You “believe”? I thought you built this thing.’

‘It’s very flattering that you should think so, Mr Stone, but I’m afraid that I didn’t.’

‘If you didn’t build it, who did?’

‘Time travellers.’

Stone laughed. He couldn’t help himself.

‘If you found a spaceship sitting in the desert, Mr Stone, you’d think at once that it had been built by space travellers. You have had a practical demonstration of what the device can do, so why is it so hard for you to believe that what is in effect a time machine was built by time travellers - by people who travelled back in time into their past, our present?’

Stone thought about this for a moment, then said, ‘Where did these time travellers come from? What were they doing?’

‘From somewhere in the future - we’re not sure how long. There were three of them. They were shadowing some field officers in the Nixon sheaf. When our people realised that they were being watched, they set a trap. Perhaps the time travellers were no more than observers, perhaps they were engaged in their own version of a covert operation; unfortunately, we have no way of knowing, because they died in custody. Not under so-called hot questioning, nor from injuries received when they were caught. They simply died.’

‘They killed themselves?’

‘Their hearts stopped. We believe that they willed themselves to die.’

‘They were carrying this thing, the time key.’

‘The device.’

‘You were given the task of finding out how to make it work. That’s what GYPSY is all about.’

Eileen Barrie nodded.

‘And it did a number on your head while you were examining it, which is why you don’t even want to look at it.’

‘We had to devise a way of interrogating it. Like any self-aware entity, it tried to defend itself.’

‘But you found a way around its defences. You know how to make it do its little trick with time and the Turing gates.’

‘I found out how to operate it. Or at least, how to make it cooperate. And I was part of the team that discovered the principles of its operation. ’

‘If you’ve duplicated it, why is the original so valuable to GYPSY? Why would they pay you and Tom to get it back?’

‘We have some understanding of what the device can do, Mr Stone, but we do not yet completely understand how it works. Our best guess is that it is the physical manifestation of a highly complex emergent phenomenon distributed within the General Quantum Field of the universe.’

‘The thing that makes the universe intelligent.’

‘We’re what makes the universe self-aware, Mr Stone. Our brains are physical constructs that are sufficiently complex to be able to interact with the General Quantum Field, and that interaction generates consciousness. That’s why the choices we make can affect the quantum state of the entire universe and cause one sheaf to split into two. The device is at least as complicated as the human brain, but it is merely the interface for operations that take place within the General Quantum Field itself.’

Eileen Barrie was growing animated, getting into her explanation.

‘The multiverse contains a vast number of alternate histories. We can travel between some of them using Turing gates. What’s not so well known is that for each alternate history, each sheaf, there is a very large number of different states. Our minds read these states in a sequence that establishes time’s arrow, like the pages of a book, or the sentences on a page. In one state, I’m saying this sentence. In the next, I’m saying
this
sentence, and we both have an extra moment of memory about the first sentence. We experience the so-called passage of time because we move from one state to the next in an unbroken sequence, but in fact, all possible states exist at every moment. The time key not only allows movement between different sheaves, but also between different moments in those sheaves.’

‘Turing gates link different sheaves. But the time key does something to a Turing gate that enables it to link different states - different times - within a single sheaf.’

‘You’re a quick study, Mr Stone.’

‘I guess it helps that I’ve had first-hand experience. So this thing is very complicated. It’s self-aware. How did you make it give up its secrets? Did you torture it?’

‘I did some reverse engineering. GYPSY needs the device, Mr Stone. With my help, you could sell it back to them. You could make a great deal of money.’

‘You want me to be your partner, huh?’

‘Why not?’

‘Who would I be selling it to, Dr Barrie? Who is in charge of GYPSY? I know that Dick Knightly had something to do with it before he was sent to prison and had his stroke. He recruited Tom and at least two other people I served with in Special Ops. Who else?’

‘If I tell you, I won’t have anything to bargain with when you turn me over to the authorities.’

‘You burned your boats with GYPSY when you killed your guards and went on the run. Right now, I’m the only person who can get you out of this safely. I’m the only person you can trust. If you want me to help you, you’re going to have to help me.’ Stone let the woman think about this. When she focused on him again, he said, ‘The people in charge of GYPSY, Dr Barrie. Who are they? Give me some names.’

‘Mr Knightly put Victor Moore in charge of the day-to-day running of GYPSY.’

Stone knew the name. Victor Moore hadn’t been one of the original cowboy angels, but had been recruited from the Science and Technology Directorate to take charge of a programme that assessed technology brought back from other sheaves.

‘Is he in charge of the cover, or the real operation?’

‘Mr Knightly is in overall command. Victor Moore is his deputy.’

‘But Knightly is stroked out, a vegetable, so I guess that makes Moore number one. He’d be the guy who’d give the order to kill someone if GYPSY was in danger of being compromised.’

‘I wouldn’t know, Mr Stone. I was in charge of the research programme. I had little to do with the operational side of things.’

‘Who else?’

Eileen Barrie named names. Stone recognised a few from the good old days, not many. She said that they were loyal to the Company and wanted to restore it to its former glory. She more or less confirmed Tom’s story about travelling back in time and starting nuclear wars in pre-contact sheaves to create client states that needed the Real’s help, expanding the Real’s hegemony, making the military and the Company too powerful for any president to control.

‘Nuclear war has the greatest effect on the greatest number of people, the biggest resonance in the General Quantum Field. If you want to shake things up, if you really want to change history, the best thing to do is to start a nuclear war,’ she said, but claimed that she didn’t know which sheaf GYPSY’s operational team had targeted.

They went around and around, but Stone couldn’t break her. Perhaps she was telling the truth, perhaps she was holding back information that she hoped would help her to escape prosecution after Stone turned her over to the Company. It didn’t really matter. He had a name now. Victor Moore. He had the beginning of a thread that, when pulled, would unravel GYPSY and save Susan from her fate.

While Eileen Barrie drove, taking a route north and then west back toward Alamogordo, Stone gave her an abbreviated version of how he had become involved in Tom Waverly’s plan. He described meeting him in Pottersville, told her that Tom had been dying of radiation poisoning and had shot himself when the local cops had moved in to arrest him. Eileen Barrie listened without showing a trace of emotion. When she said that she didn’t know how Tom could have suffered a lethal dose of radiation, Stone believed her - after all, as far as she was concerned, it hadn’t happened yet. And if Stone had his way, it wouldn’t ever happen. Tom wouldn’t receive his lethal dose, he wouldn’t set off on his rampage through sheaves, murdering Eileen Barrie’s doppels and killing himself in Pottersville, and Susan wouldn’t be murdered. She would be saved, and would live out the rest of her life without ever learning what might have happened.