Free Cowboy Angels by Paul McAuley

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