Free Cowboy Angels by Paul McAuley Page A

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 concious 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.

3
    ‘Welch put you up to this, didn’t he?’ Stone said. ‘The slick son of a bitch brought you through the mirror because he thought you might flush out your father.’
    ‘It isn’t like that at all,’ Linda Waverly said, and started the taxi and pulled away from the kerb. ‘When my father shot that woman, I was