and climbed into the shotgun seat beside Welch, and the Jeep drove off down Broadway, laying white dust over the goldenrod and tall grasses that grew on either side.
Stone didn’t look back. He believed that it would be bad luck if he did.
2
A streamlined, aluminium-skinned railcar coupled to a flatbed wagon was waiting at the little terminus on the far side of the East River ferry crossing. Stone helped David Welch lash the Jeep to the wagon, and the railcar rattled along the ninety-odd miles of single-track railroad that cut through the woods and bogs of Brooklyn and Long Island, past the settlements of Jamaica Bay, Rockville, Wantagh, Bay Shore and New Patchogue, to First Foot and the Turing gate. Stone had plenty of time to work through the file Welch had given him. He ate the packed lunch Susan had provided - home-baked biscuits, home-cured ham and pickles, hard-boiled eggs and an apple, one of the season’s first - and read reports by field officers and local police, studied photographs and forensic documentation. He wanted to have all the facts at his fingertips. If he was going to talk to Tom Waverly, he wanted to know everything the man had done.
The first four assassinations had been staged to look like street robberies or home invasions gone bad. Eileen Barrie had been killed by shots to the head from a small-calibre handgun, by a knife-thrust to the heart, by garrotting: murders that were up close and personal. Then, after someone in the Company had put two and two together and every surviving version of Eileen Barrie had been given protection, the subsequent murders had been textbook examples of executive actions. The car bomb that had killed her outright but left the officer sitting next to her unharmed except for superficial burns and burst eardrums. And the latest killing which, with its combination of careful planning, patience and split-second action, had Tom Waverly’s fingerprints all over it.
When he’d been working for the Company, Tom had specialised in assassination. He’d once hiked through a forest and set up a position in a tree and for three days had focused on the window of a house, waiting for his target to show for just a second. He’d once lain all day on the flat roof of an office building in the August heat of Miami, still as a basking snake under the ghillie blanket that hid him from police helicopters while he’d watched the front of the court-house, killing his target with a single shot as a phalanx of bodyguards hustled the man across the sidewalk toward his limo. Stone wondered if Tom had turned freelance and was killing Eileen Barrie’s doppels to order, or if he was working off some kind of massive personal grudge. But although the file contained comprehensive summaries of the circumstances and methodology of each murder, there was nothing, not so much as a single speculative sentence, about possible motivations for attempting to eliminate Eileen Barrie from every known sheaf.
The railcar sounded its horn. Stone glanced out of the window and saw a familiar cluster of wind generators standing proud on a low hill, their sixty-foot triple-bladed props lazily revolving, glimpsed the roofs of the little town of First Foot through a scrim of pine trees. The railcar rattled past the station’s single platform, entered the long loop that led to the Turing gate, and began to pick up speed: trains always ran through gates as fast as possible, to minimise the power expenditure needed to keep them open. Two white horses in a field briefly chased after it, heads down, manes rippling, and it left them behind and sped past a coal-black locomotive with a flared chimney and cowcatcher that stood on a spur, rushed down a steep grade in a cutting and plunged into the tunnel at the far end.
Although Stone braced for it, the black flash that pounded in his head, the knockout punch of collapsing probability functions, was every bit as bad as he remembered. Then the railcar emerged into
Stone didn’t look back. He believed that it would be bad luck if he did.
2
A streamlined, aluminium-skinned railcar coupled to a flatbed wagon was waiting at the little terminus on the far side of the East River ferry crossing. Stone helped David Welch lash the Jeep to the wagon, and the railcar rattled along the ninety-odd miles of single-track railroad that cut through the woods and bogs of Brooklyn and Long Island, past the settlements of Jamaica Bay, Rockville, Wantagh, Bay Shore and New Patchogue, to First Foot and the Turing gate. Stone had plenty of time to work through the file Welch had given him. He ate the packed lunch Susan had provided - home-baked biscuits, home-cured ham and pickles, hard-boiled eggs and an apple, one of the season’s first - and read reports by field officers and local police, studied photographs and forensic documentation. He wanted to have all the facts at his fingertips. If he was going to talk to Tom Waverly, he wanted to know everything the man had done.
The first four assassinations had been staged to look like street robberies or home invasions gone bad. Eileen Barrie had been killed by shots to the head from a small-calibre handgun, by a knife-thrust to the heart, by garrotting: murders that were up close and personal. Then, after someone in the Company had put two and two together and every surviving version of Eileen Barrie had been given protection, the subsequent murders had been textbook examples of executive actions. The car bomb that had killed her outright but left the officer sitting next to her unharmed except for superficial burns and burst eardrums. And the latest killing which, with its combination of careful planning, patience and split-second action, had Tom Waverly’s fingerprints all over it.
When he’d been working for the Company, Tom had specialised in assassination. He’d once hiked through a forest and set up a position in a tree and for three days had focused on the window of a house, waiting for his target to show for just a second. He’d once lain all day on the flat roof of an office building in the August heat of Miami, still as a basking snake under the ghillie blanket that hid him from police helicopters while he’d watched the front of the court-house, killing his target with a single shot as a phalanx of bodyguards hustled the man across the sidewalk toward his limo. Stone wondered if Tom had turned freelance and was killing Eileen Barrie’s doppels to order, or if he was working off some kind of massive personal grudge. But although the file contained comprehensive summaries of the circumstances and methodology of each murder, there was nothing, not so much as a single speculative sentence, about possible motivations for attempting to eliminate Eileen Barrie from every known sheaf.
The railcar sounded its horn. Stone glanced out of the window and saw a familiar cluster of wind generators standing proud on a low hill, their sixty-foot triple-bladed props lazily revolving, glimpsed the roofs of the little town of First Foot through a scrim of pine trees. The railcar rattled past the station’s single platform, entered the long loop that led to the Turing gate, and began to pick up speed: trains always ran through gates as fast as possible, to minimise the power expenditure needed to keep them open. Two white horses in a field briefly chased after it, heads down, manes rippling, and it left them behind and sped past a coal-black locomotive with a flared chimney and cowcatcher that stood on a spur, rushed down a steep grade in a cutting and plunged into the tunnel at the far end.
Although Stone braced for it, the black flash that pounded in his head, the knockout punch of collapsing probability functions, was every bit as bad as he remembered. Then the railcar emerged into
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