An ninth extract from COWBOY ANGELS

3. (continued)

Stone crossed the street and stepped into the park. Trees sloped down toward the river. His new, thin-soled shoes slipped on leaf mulch. He could hear the warm wind moving through the trees, the hum of traffic on the Hudson Parkway.

Twenty minutes before the bomb had gone off, Tom Waverly had knifed one of the uniformed cops who had been patrolling the park, the mayor's nephew, and dragged his body under a laurel bush. And then he'd taken up his position in a tall oak that was now ringed off by police tape, whiling away the time before his napalm bomb went off by whittling a message into the bark of the tree.

I'll talk to Stone.

The undergrowth around the tree had been trampled flat. Tom Waverly had taken the machine pistol with him, but the bolt-action Winchester .308 had been found at the foot of the tree, and the rope he'd used to slide to the ground after the hit was still in place.

Stone hooked his suit jacket on a branch and used the rope to climb as high as he could. Splintered rips in the tree trunk suggested that Tom Waverly had worn spiked overshoes to help him climb through the canopy, almost to the top of the tree. Stone couldn't get that high, but thirty feet up he had a pretty good view of the brownstone. The yellow taxi was parked right in front, Linda Waverly dimly visible through the side window, sitting there like a target. Stone realised that he should have asked her if she was carrying a pistol before he left her there, just in case Tom Waverly took the bait -- but even if she was armed, she was hardly likely to draw down on her own father.

He straddled a branch and thought about angles, figured that if he climbed another twenty feet he would have been able to look over the top of the moving truck Nathan Tate had used to screen the front door of the brownstone from the street. Tom Waverly must have scoped out the scene some time before he made the hit. He'd brought rope and spiked overshoes because he'd known that he would have had to climb this high to make the hit. And he'd known that there was a way out through the back yard, so he'd set the fire in the kitchen to force everyone in the house out the front door. Stone smiled. Tom might have gone crazy, but he could still set up a hit with meticulous precision. Leave anything to chance, he used to say, and you'll most likely end up in a box like Schr dinger's cat, wondering when you're going to start smelling almonds.

Dick Knightly's cowboy angels had learnt about the fundamental principles of the Many Worlds theory during their training. Their physics instructor, Fred Lehman, introduced the concept with Schrodinger's 'ridiculous case', a thought experiment designed to challenge the assertion that measurement forced a quantum system to adopt a specific state, and any observer making measurements could not be isolated from the system he observed. In Schrodinger's thought experiment, a cat was placed in a box equipped with a flask of cyanide gas, a mechanism that would break the flask if a detector was triggered by the random decay of an atom, and a source of radioactivity so weak that there was only a fifty per cent chance that a single atom would decay in any given hour. The cat and the mechanism were sealed inside the box, and the experiment ended after exactly an hour, when the box was opened again.

'Schrodinger's question was this,' Fred Lehman said. 'With a fifty per cent chance that an atom has decayed and triggered the mechanism that releases the cyanide, what's the state of the cat immediately before the box is opened?'

Tom Waverly raised his hand, saying that he had a question of his own. What, he wanted to know, did this guy have against cats?

This was in the lecture theatre at Brookhaven. Fifteen young men and one young woman were scattered across tiers of seats, some assiduously taking notes, some hopelessly lost, all of them feeling the same electric thrill of participating in something tremendously secret and important. Tom Waverly was sprawled in a seat in the front row, his arms stretched across the backs of the seats to either side, smiling while he waited for Fred Lehman's answer.

'We're not talking about a real cat in a real experiment,' the physicist said. 'The cat is a metaphor Schrodinger used to ridicule the suggestion that quantum theory could be used to make a complete description of physical reality. He claimed that before the box is opened, the cat must be in some indeterminate state, half-dead, half-alive. Since no living creature can be alive and dead at the same time, there must be something wrong with quantum theory.'

'Of course it can't be a real experiment,' Tom Waverly said. Looking around, taking his time, building to his punchline. 'I mean, have you ever tried to get a cat inside a box?'

In the warm dark, high above the ground in the branches of the oak tree, Stone smiled, remembering that Fred Lehman had waited out the laughter before explaining that the premise on which the thought experiment had been based was wrong, that the cat in the unopened box did not exist an indeterminate state, neither wholly alive nor wholly dead, as Schr dinger asserted. Instead, the experiment caused the state of the observer to split into two -- and it didn't matter if the observer was the experimenter, the cat, or the radiation detector, as long as something or someone took a measurement that forced the quantum system of cat and box and cyanide apparatus to adopt a definite state. In one universe the observer opened the box and discovered a live cat; in the other, the box contained a corpse.

And this happened with every choice we ever make, Fred Lehman had told his class. In most cases the split was trivial and the two sibling universes quickly recombined. But if the observation caused a change big enough to affect other observers, recombination was delayed, and more and more differences accumulated in the states of the sibling universes until the split became permanent. A single probability sheaf split into two; history went in two different directions. In one the cat was alive; in the other, it was dead. In one, Khrushchev was assassinated and the Soviet generals ordered an atomic strike against the United States; in another, the assassination attempt failed or was stillborn, and Khrushchev withdrew the Soviet missiles and battlefield atomic weapons from Cuba. Each sheaf was woven from billions of closely related microhistories that branched and recombined and branched again as billions of observers made their trivial choices. But although most microhistories recombined almost immediately, a significant number did not, and in a few of those the split eventually became permanent.

Tom Waverly had loved the weirdness of quantum theory, but on a job he'd always done everything he could to avoid the dichotomous fate of Schrodinger's cat, planning his hits to the last detail. It was pure bad luck that the cop had stumbled across him when he was moving into position. If he had shot only Eileen Barrie and Nathan Tate, the locals would have requested that a couple of NYPD murder detectives liaise with the Company team, purely as a formality, and left it at that. But Tom had killed a cop, the cop had been the mayor's nephew, and now every one of New York's finest was looking for him. Because one of their own had been murdered, they had permission to shoot on sight, and they were ready and willing to take care of business.

I'll talk to Stone. But where, and when? Stone knew that he would have to think hard and fast, and hope for a lot of good luck, if he was going to catch up with Tom before the locals did.

He slid down the rope, put on his jacket, and walked back to the edge of the park and stood there for a few moments, looking at Eileen Barrie's brownstone and the identical brownstones on either side, their bow windows, the balustrades that ran along the edges of their flat roofs. He slapped a lone, late mosquito and walked across the street. When he reached the taxi Linda cranked down her window and asked if he had found anything.

'The report said that he got onto the roof of the house from one of the neighbouring brownstones.'

'The one on the right. He got in through the back, picked the lock of the fire door in the basement, then picked the lock of the access door to the roof. The forensic team found fresh scratches on both of them. You think they missed something?'

'I'm wondering why he didn't stay up on the roof after he planted the napalm. He had an easy shot of the front door from across the street, but he had to evade police patrols to get into position. And in fact he didn't evade them -- he ran into that cop. If he'd stayed up on the roof, the shot would have been harder, but he wouldn't have had to take the risk of moving into the park.'

'He couldn't stay up there because there were men posted on the roof of Dr Barrie's brownstone.'

'There were? How many?'

It hadn't been in the report.

'Two sharpshooters. They were watching the back yards and the roofs on either side.'

'Were they in position all the time?'

'Only when Dr Barrie was at home. When she went to work, a couple of officers stayed behind in her apartment, but the rest of the protection squad went with her. When she wanted to go home, the squad moved into position and checked everything out before they let her come back.'

'She came home at around half-eight in the evening,' Stone said. 'So Tom had plenty of time to get up on the roof and plant the bomb and get out. But how did he know when she'd be coming home?'

'He didn't have to know the exact time. She always worked late.'

'Are you sure?'

'I tracked down one of the guys who'd been part of the protection squad and had a little chat with him. He said that the assignment was a nightmare because Dr Barrie kept crazy hours. Where are you going?'

'I'm following a train of thought. Wait there. It won't take long.'

Tom Waverly had left a message at his sniper's position. He'd also spent some time on the roof of Eileen Barrie's house, so he might well have left a message there, too. Stone unlocked the padlock and stripped away police tape, switched on the borrowed flashlight and stepped into the dark hallway. The ceiling had come down and there was a strong smell of smoke and burnt paint and charred wood. He picked his way through fallen plaster and puddles of water to the staircase and climbed all the way to the top, where the door to the building's flat roof hung on a single hinge.

The cluster of brick chimneys had been collapsed by the explosion and the roof had caved in around them, exposing blackened beams. Stone skirted the hole, played the beam of the flashlight over the waist-high brickwork at the front of the roof but found nothing of interest, then clambered onto the roof of the neighbouring brownstone, the one that Tom Waverly had broken into.

Stone paced the perimeter of the roof, shoes crunching on gravel, flicked the beam of the flashlight this way and that. There were fresh cigarette butts and a crumpled soft-drink can by the dividing wall, probably dropped by the police sharpshooters. There was a junked air conditioner. And there was an aluminium lawn chair set beside the balustrade at the front of the roof.

Although there could be a perfectly ordinary reason why there was a chair up here -- perhaps someone liked to sit on the roof on fine summer days, taking in the view across the river to New Jersey and catching some rays -- Stone got a little chill when he saw it. He walked over to the balustrade and looked down at the road, the chain of streetlights, the sawhorses blocking off the sidewalk in front of the brownstone, the taxi parked in front, its roof the colour of an old bruise in the sodium light. He sat in the chair, looked at the trees in the long narrow park, the streetlights of the Hudson Parkway, the New Jersey shore twinkling across the river . . . And remembered Tom Waverly sitting in a similar chair on his lawn at one or another of his barbecues, a drunkenly benevolent potentate watching his daughter search on her hands and knees for the coins he'd hidden in the grass. The chair set in what Tom claimed to be his favourite spot on Earth, where he liked to drink beer while watching the sun go down beyond the little lake; the search for coins scattered around it a little game that he and Linda loved to play.

A treasure hunt.

Stone trailed his fingers in the gravel either side of the chair, then dug deeper, his fingertips scraping tar paper beneath the gravel, finding nothing. But Tom had hidden coins under his chair too. Stone set the chair to one side and started to sift through the patch of gravel. Almost immediately, he found a scrap of thin card: the cover torn off a book of matches. It must have been placed there recently, because it was unwrinkled by time and weather. Chills chased up and down Stone's spine when he held it in the beam of the flashlight and saw what was written there.

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