(eng) Paul McAuley by Cowboy Angels

Author:Cowboy Angels [Angels, Cowboy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

The New York subway system was one of the few unalloyed triumphs of the American Bund. The stations were clean, spacious, and air-conditioned, with polished marble floors and pink granite walls decorated with enormous murals. The ones featuring the Dear Leader had been smashed or disfigured, but most of the others were still intact, blazoned with brutalist propaganda: hero workers marching arm in arm with proud soldiers; atomic power stations; fleets of combine harvesters sweeping across wide wheat fields; a parade of tanks and missile carriers stretching to an apocalyptic horizon; a bevy of athletic girls in skimpy shorts and T-shirts pounding over a mountain ridge. Trains arrived every two minutes, clean futuristic designs with bullet noses and unnecessary streamlining.

As they rode uptown, Stone gave Linda a précis of his conversation with Freddy Layne. She listened with her full attention, sitting with her shoulders hunched and her hands clamped between her knees. Every now and then a shiver passed through her entire body, but she was in control, grimly determined to see this through. Doing pretty good, Stone thought, for a back-office number cruncher.

When he had finished telling her about Freddy, she said, ‘He didn’t know how my father had been exposed to radiation?’

‘I don’t suppose Tom told Freddy any more than he told me,’ Stone said.

‘It must have had something to do with GYPSY.’

‘I think so.’

‘My father said something about an atomic bomb.’

‘My first thought, too.’

‘Maybe he stole a bomb, a suitcase nuke. Maybe it wasn’t properly shielded.’

‘Or maybe he was downwind of a bomb when it went off.’

‘The Company would know if a bomb had gone off.’

‘Maybe not. Not if it was in a wild sheaf, a long way from any civilisation.’

Linda thought about that. ‘This is something really big, isn’t it?’

‘Your father claimed to have stolen something that could change history. It could be a suitcase nuke, it could be documentation about GYPSY’s plans, it could be anything.’

‘He didn’t tell me what it was, Mr Stone.’ Linda brushed her hair back from her pale face, held it in a fist by the side of her neck. They were sitting side by side on orange plastic seats at one end of the passenger car, no one near them, the train rocking smoothly as it sped through the dark. ‘That woman mentioned a boy, said her friends would go after him,’ she said. ‘Is it your son?’

‘The son of an old friend of mine, Jake Nichols. Jake died in an accident last winter.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

‘Jake’s wife . . . Susan . . . Two of Carol Dvorak’s friends tried to kidnap her a couple of days ago. They planned to exchange her for me. Susan shot and killed one of them, wounded the other. And then the one she’d wounded shot and killed her.’

After a moment, Linda said, ‘This is why you wanted to come with me.’

Stone nodded. After everything that had just happened, she deserved to know the truth. ‘I don’t owe the Company anything, Linda. Not after I found your father.

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