Cowboy Angels Read Free Page B

don’t know.’
    ‘Does Tom Waverly work for Mr Knightly?’
    ‘Not that I know of.’
    Albert Flynn had a pretty good poker face.
    Stone thought for a moment, told Flynn that he would talk to Knightly once he’d made a couple of phone calls, and walked outside into the cold, floodlit compound.
    He talked to Bruce Ellis first, then made an encrypted call to Bud Goodrich, the special assistant responsible for the disposal of SWIFT SWORD. He told Goodrich that the letter had been delivered, gave a summary of Baines’s response, and said that the general was committed to the execution of SWIFT SWORD.
    ‘You can stand down,’ Goodrich said. ‘I’ll expect a report on my desk oh nine hundred tomorrow, but there’s no need to pad it.’
    ‘There’s something else,’ Stone said. ‘Dick Knightly is here. He was with Baines when I delivered the letter, and I believe he brought four modified helicopters to help the Free American cause.’
    ‘I know. Some gung-ho cattle baron fronted the papers.’
    ‘Do you know what he’s up to? Is he being watched?’
    ‘He’s showboating, making a political point about honouring promises. Don’t worry about it, Stone. It’s none of your business. Your work is done.’
    ‘Right,’ Stone said, although he knew that it wasn’t.
    Albert Flynn was waiting on the porch of the farmhouse. Stone walked up to him and said, ‘Take me to your leader.’
     
    Dick Knightly stood at the edge of a steep drop beyond the farmhouse, hands clasped at his back as he studied the army assembled in front of the Turing gates down in the valley. ‘I’m sorry to see you reduced to running errands for chair-warming bureaucrats like Bud Goodrich, ’ he said. ‘You deserve better.’
    ‘With respect, sir, that’s a cheap shot,’ Stone said.
    ‘It’s my honest opinion. I know you had a hard time of it on your last mission for Special Ops, and I don’t blame you for opting for a nice easy job in the DCI’s office, but frankly, son, you’d be better off in an insurance company. It’s the same kind of work, and at least you’d get a gold clock at the end of it. Speaking of retirement, I hope you’re not too attached to your new job. Stansfield Turner was a classmate of Carter’s at Annapolis, and Carter put him in office for just one reason: to cut us off at the knees. Word is, he’s going to open the Company’s cupboards and ransack the family jewels. Clandestine operations, black ops, executive orders - they’ll smear us with everything we had to do for the good of the Real and all the other Americas. And don’t think that your new position is going to save your lily-white ass from a reckoning for your past sins. If he thinks it expedient, Turner will throw you to the wolves without a second thought.’
    ‘Is that a warning, sir?’
    ‘It’s sound advice,’ Knightly said, and extracted a cigar and a silver penknife from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket and sliced off the end of the cigar and plugged it into his mouth.
    Down in the valley, one of the pair of giant Turing gates blinked on, its circular maw suddenly lit by the reflected light of the setting sun. The familiar deep hum of the gate filled the dark air and sharpened Stone’s anxiety, but he knew it would do no good to ask straight out about Tom Waverly. Knightly would come to that in his own sweet time, or not at all. So Stone stepped on his impatience and waited quietly while his old boss returned the penknife to his pocket and took out a Second Infantry Zippo lighter and snapped it open and bathed the end of the cigar in its flame. The little finger and ring finger of Knightly’s right hand were missing, lost to frostbite during the Battle of Moscow. Like many senior Company men, he was a veteran of the Russian Campaigns.
    ‘I must have seen hundreds of gates open,’ Knightly said, ‘but it still makes my blood race.’
    ‘I thought this wasn’t kicking off until twenty hundred.’
    ‘That’s when the main