A seventh extract from COWBOY ANGELS

2. (continued)

Was he?

Stone thought about that he walked toward his rendezvous. Like all of Dick Knightly's cowboy angels, he'd been trained to work in deep cover in pre-contact sheaves, to blend in, to live as invisibly as possible while accumulating data for historical, political and economic profiles. Once, in the early days of Special Ops, before the first overt contact with the government of an alternate America, a woman at a party in Washington, DC, had walked up to Stone and said that she'd just bet fifty dollars with a girlfriend that he was a spy, and Stone had told her, no lie, that he spent most of his time in libraries. That was exactly what he'd done, back in the day. He'd gone through the mirror and ransacked libraries for all kinds of data -- the failure rate of start-up companies, price and wage inflation, the ratio of the highest and lowest salaries in key companies, unemployment rates amongst white males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, the annual yields of cotton crops, winter wheat, soy beans. He'd tabulated prison terms for a variety of crimes, compared school-leaving ages of urban and rural whites and blacks, used fake academic or journalistic credentials to obtain interviews with CEOs and Ivy League professors about the state of the economy, identified prominent lawyers and preachers and political commentators. That was what all the cowboy angels in Special Ops had done in the early days, before the Real made its first overtures to governments in other sheaves. Before the covert actions, before the wars and revolutions, before the insurrections and terrorist reprisals.

Stone had always preferred to work alone, but he'd always worked by the rules of the game.

'You like to watch,' Susan had said, a few months ago. They'd been walking home from a church social, Petey trailing a little way behind, singing one of his nonsense songs, cutting at weeds with a stick he'd picked up somewhere. 'When you're around other people, you like to watch what's going on, don't you?'

'If you've been watching me, who is it that likes to watch?'

'I've been taking notice of you,' Susan said. 'Noticing how you behave when you hang out with the other guys.'

'Yeah? How do I behave?'

'On the whole, you're pretty quiet. Self-contained. The other guys whoop it up, they like to show off to each other, they always have an opinion about whatever it is they're talking about. But you don't say anything unless you have something to say. I don't mean you're afflicted with Allan King's famous Yankee taciturnity, the man thinks every word costs him a dime. I mean you don't bullshit.'

'Mommy swore,' Petey said.

'And Mommy's sorry for it, sweetie. She spent far too much of the afternoon talking with Nora Partridge, who has a kind heart but can never quite get to the point of what she's trying to say. Adam isn't like that, is he? When he says something, he says what he means, no more and no less.'

'He likes to think about things,' Petey said, and swiped the head off a milk-weed plant.

Stone said, 'Is this criticism or observation?'

Susan smiled. 'If I said you were aloof, maybe it would be a criticism. But you're not. You're watchful.'

'I don't know about that. Maybe I like to be aloof, but I don't like to be watchful.'

'The way you like trees, but not bushes?'

'I like grass too. Flowers I can live without.'

'Mom! You're doing it again,' Petey said. All summer he'd been driven to distraction by this word game, an open secret he wanted desperately to share, a code he couldn't quite crack. That evening, Susan and Stone had teased and tantalised him all the way home with their preference for books over magazines, bulls over cows, hills over mountains.

Watchful -- Stone could live with that. Tom Waverly, though, was the poster boy for the cowboy angels. He preferred overt action to undercover research, flamboyance to restraint. He liked to push regulations and convention as far as they would go, and then push them a little further.

'You're a deep man pretending to be shallow,' Marsha Mason had once told him, and he'd laughed, not at all offended. This had been at one of the infamous barbecues at the little house in the Maryland woods where Tom had lived with his wife and daughter. Its back yard had run down to a lake. One night, Tom had rowed out into the middle of the lake and let off fireworks while the 'Nessun dorma!' aria from Turandot played on speakers he'd set up amongst the trees. He'd stood up in the little boat with rockets and Roman candles exploding from his hands, whooping with glee.

At age thirteen, Tom had spent a year in juvenile prison in California for stealing a car; at sixteen he had enlisted in the army, training as a sniper and taking courses in parachuting, martial arts and cryptography; at twenty-six he had been recruited by Dick Knightly into the CIA's brand-new Directorate of Special Operations. He liked to play up his reputation as a hellraiser. He wore blue jeans and biker boots and a leather jacket with the sleeves ripped off. He rode a motorbike everywhere, a Norton Commando he'd restored himself. He did handstands on the backs of chairs, once did a backflip from a motel balcony into the swimming pool two storeys below. He read Rilke and Thoreau and Barth, sang along with tuneless gusto to opera and the folk music he'd discovered in the Nixon sheaf, the very same sheaf in which, a few years later, Stone had been supposed to kill a novelist in the middle of a popular uprising against an unpopular war in Southeast Asia.

It had been one of twenty hits that had targeted counterculture lawyers, liberal politicians, journalists, and radical civil-rights workers . . . and this novelist, who'd once run for Mayor of New York, a sometime journalist and rabble-rouser with powerfully expressed opinions, but still, Stone had wondered at the time, what could be so important about a man who wrote books for a living? But the Cluster crunched the data and constructed its probability models, the Company set up its covert actions, and its cowboy angels went to work without questioning their orders. In the end, Stone hadn't made the hit after all; the whole operation had unravelled after one of the locals they were running, a bomb-maker, had managed to blow up a house in Greenwich Village. Six months later, work toward contact in that sheaf had been suspended indefinitely. The Nixon sheaf's version of America had been well on its way to becoming the world's only superpower, and the Cluster had calculated that the advantages of contact would be either negligible or negative.

All officers in Special Ops had been trained to take the initiative, but Tom Waverly had possessed a bravura recklessness that had set him apart. And he still had it, Stone thought. Even though he must have known that the game was up when he saw that Nathan Tate was guarding the target, he'd gone right ahead with his plan. He'd shot and killed the doppel of Eileen Barrie, and he'd shot and killed Nathan Tate, and he'd got clean away from the scene. He still had it. Tracking him down wasn't going to be easy, especially as the locals were going balls-out to find him first. The only edge Stone had was that Tom wanted to talk to him.

A yellow taxi was parked where David Welch had said it would be. Stone walked around the block, moving with the flow of the crowd, looking in shop windows and using his peripheral vision to try to spot likely tails, seeing only civilians with pinched faces and shuttered expressions, rowdy little groups of soldiers and sailors. He was conscious of the weight of the Colt .45 in the holster under his left armpit. He passed a beggar being hassled by a pair of cops -- the ragged guy, shiny burn scars disfiguring his face and scalp, kept trying to sidle away from the cops and they kept pushing him back against the wall with their nightsticks. People stepped past, eyes fixed elsewhere. A team of skeletal, shaven-headed men in orange coveralls hauled a wagon amongst the stop-and-go rush of military trucks, buses, taxis, bicycles. A lot of people were riding bicycles. Stone, grown used to a pace of life based on unmediated animal and human muscle, felt that everything was slightly speeded up, like one of those old hand-cranked silent movies.

He crossed the street, doubled back the way he'd come. Although he hadn't seen anyone dogging him, he was pretty sure that he was being followed. Probably by a tag team, almost impossible to spot. He walked to where the taxi was parked and climbed into the back. The driver, a young woman with a pale face and a mass of curly red hair turned to look at him through the scratched plastic divider.

Stone hadn't seen her for more than ten years, but he recognised her at once.

Linda Waverly, Tom's daughter.

>
>This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Buy the hardback or trade paperback.

Read more here.

Index