Cowboy Angels by Paul McAuley Read Free Book Online

so.’
    ‘You think he used to work for the Company, too. For Special Ops.’
    ‘It’s good to see that farmwork hasn’t softened your brain.’
    ‘It’s an easy reach. He can travel between sheaves. He knows how to hit a target cleanly. He knows how to get in and how to get out. You’ve been trying to catch him for a while, and you’ve come up dry - you have to be desperate or you wouldn’t have come here. When did he start?’
    ‘The first one was killed just two weeks ago. He killed three more before someone finally worked out what was going on.’
    ‘But you’re protecting her now. The Real version and the surviving doppels, I mean.’
    ‘I don’t know the full extent of this operation, but I do know that he managed to make two hits after we started taking measures.’
    ‘You’re watching the gates, you’re watching the doppels, and he’s still taking them out. It must be frustrating.’
    ‘Thousands of soldiers and ancillary personnel move through the gates every day. Not to mention relief and reconstruction supplies, diplomatic parties, trade parties, businessmen, journalists, all those humanitarian workers Carter is so fond of . . . The whole system would grind to a halt if we had to check everyone on every train.’
    Stone shuffled through the photographs. He was beginning to be interested. He was wondering where this was leading. ‘This guy is moving between sheaves, he made his last two hits while the targets were under protection, he used to work for the Company. Does he have inside help?’
    ‘Not that we know of.’ Welch dropped his cigarette butt and stepped on it. ‘Let’s cut to the chase. After he killed the last one, he got clean away from the scene, but he didn’t get out of the sheaf. The locals locked down their version of Brookhaven interchange within thirty minutes, and at the moment it’s the only way in and out. The other gate in the sheaf, at San Diego, was blown up a couple of weeks ago by a suicide bomber driving a truck stuffed with ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel. We know he didn’t get out, Adam. We know he’s still there. I’ve been sent to ask you to help find him.’
    ‘He’s someone I know, isn’t he?’
    ‘It’s Tom Waverly.’
    Stone felt as if someone had sapped him. ‘No way. Tom’s MIA, presumed dead.’
    Tom Waverly had resigned from the Company directly after the SWIFT SWORD debacle. When he’d recovered from his gunshot wound, he’d joined a private security company and gone to work in the American Bund sheaf; two months later, he’d disappeared, and an obscure insurgent group had released video footage of him, claiming to have kidnapped and executed him.
    Welch pulled a photograph from inside his jacket, handed it to Stone. ‘They got that off a surveillance camera in the Brookhaven interchange after he killed her the fourth time.’
    ‘It’s pretty grainy.’
    But the man in army uniform, cap pulled low over his face as he walked past a crowd of aid workers, looked a lot like Stone’s old friend and comrade-in-arms.
    Welch said, ‘PHOTINT had to blow it up and enhance it to hell and back, but it hit twenty-one of the twenty-eight points of the face-recognition system. And crime-scene techs lifted a partial thumbprint from a fragment of the car bomb’s trigger mechanism, and also found his prints at the scene where he’d garrotted her. It’s Tom, all right.’
    ‘And you think, what? He was captured and brainwashed? He allowed himself to be turned? Come on.’
    ‘We don’t know what happened to him in the past three years, or why he’s surfaced now. We also don’t know why he’s killing Eileen Barrie’s doppels, but there it is.’
    ‘It could be a doppel of Tom that someone’s using to smoke the trail.’
    ‘Tom’s an orphan with no known mother or father, just like you and me and all the other cowboy angels. Who’d know where to find one of his doppels?’
    ‘It would be hard, but not impossible,’ Stone said,