Conquistador (12 page)

“Sorry about you and your parents, though,” he said sincerely.
You appreciate having a solid family in childhood more when you get to know people who didn't.

“Oh, we get along well enough now. When Aunt Chloe died—”

“I
am
sorry,” he said, and meant it. Impulsively, he put his hand on hers.

She returned the grip for an instant; he felt the touch of her fingers for minutes after their hands parted.

“—she died, and she left me Seven Oaks, asking me to take care of the estate.
That
shocked me silly. I'd taken her for granted, and assumed that she'd just go on and on like the mountains and the seasons and the Old Man. You know how it is, the first time you realize death is
real,
that someone you loved is
gone,
you'll never get the chance to say the things you were planning on . . . and you realize that you're going to die someday too?”

“Yes,” he said somberly. “I remember it when my mother died. As if you're hatching from an egg, and you don't much like what you've found outside.”

“Exactly. There I was, eighteen—it was nine years ago next May twenty-first—and I suddenly realized that the people I'd spent all my adolescence rebelling against would be
gone
someday. So I decided to buckle down and make some use of the circumstances I'd been handed.”

“Like your work with the Pacific Open Landscapes League?” he said.

She smiled. “Yes, that and other things to do with the family business. Here I had an opportunity not one in a hundred million of the human race had, to do something
significant
for my family and my . . . country, my people, and why was I wasting time—time that I suddenly realized I'd never get back? Aunt Chloe thought I was competent to look after her things, and the contessa had told me someone of good blood shouldn't care what the smelly peasants thought. I decided to go out and do something with the talents and the chances I'd been handed.”

“Bravo,” Tom said softly.

“I even manage to get on well with my parents now, except that they keep nagging me to get married and produce grandchildren; at least, Mother does.”

“Don't your brothers and sisters have any?”

“Every one, three or more each,” Adrienne said. “But evidently there's never enough.”

Tom shook his head. “My family sounds a lot duller than yours,” he said.

She cocked her head to one side. “Restful, not dull. Incidentally, fair warning: What I've told you is all true, but it's incomplete. But as we native-born Californios say, enough about me. Let's talk about you. How do
you
feel about me?”

She laughed at his sudden alarm, and went on: “No, really, what I'd like to know is why you went into the Fish and Game Department after you left the army.”

“Well, I'd gotten to like California while I was stationed here. Yes, it's been mucked up beyond belief, but even what's left of it is the most beautiful place I've ever seen. So . . .”

And the whole rest of the evening we talked about
my
family and
my
work,
he realized, coming back to himself and the present with a slight wince. She'd been very interested in the details of this bizarre poaching-smuggling case and the disaster in LA; he hadn't mentioned anything about the SOU's sources, or the Bureau's, of course. RM&M wouldn't need that to do their own internal housekeeping.

He hoped he hadn't been the stereotypical male after all.

Roy was grinning sardonically, and Tom realized that he'd drifted off into a reminiscent daydream for a good minute by the clock.

“So, you talked family?” Roy asked. “
That
gave you the dazed look and the sappy grin? Or the sheer careerist joy of finding a good source for this little investigation of ours?”

“And we talked about things we've done or would like to do,” he went on aloud. “She says she makes a good venison ragout—and she actually likes hunting.”

“Bambi? She shot
Bambi?
” Roy said. “And
ate
the poor little fucker?”

“I didn't notice you turning down those venison chops last Christmas.”

“It doesn't count if it comes in boxes. Everyone born in civilized urban surroundings knows that there are magical warehouses where neatly wrapped steaks and chops and roasts appear, probably through some miracle of super-science. Better watch it; remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience.”

Tom shrugged. “Maybe I need to work on my divorce technique. I haven't had as much practice at them as you,” he said, with malice aforethought.

Roy winced. He was currently in the middle of his very messy second.

“Anyway, we're scarcely engaged yet. A date to go running is not part of the wedding ceremony. She's on the side of the angels. RM and M has put a lot of money into conservation. She's just a nice, smart”—very rich, very sophisticated, very beautiful—“girl, Roy.”

“OK, I'll leave your love life out of things . . . for now. Anything on the LA bust from the city cops or Fart, Barf and Itch? I want to hear how the forensics turned out.”

“I'm expecting something from the San Diego Zoo—”

The phone rang, and Roy left for his own cubicle with a wave. Whistling quietly under his breath, Tom reached for the telephone.

“Yes, this is Mr. Christiansen . . . Hi, Manuel? Anything yet on the bird?”

There was a long silence, which wasn't like Manuel Carminez; he loved explaining things about his specialty. With a lurch of fear, Tom went on: “Look, it didn't
die
or anything, did it? Not smoke inhalation, or stress shock?”

“No,” the voice on the other end said; it belonged to a biologist at the San Diego Zoo's captive-breeding program. “The problem is that bird is
too
healthy. Among other things.”

“How so?” Tom said, pulling a pad towards him and poising a pen.

“To begin with, it isn't a condor from California.”

The pen hung fire. “I could have sworn—”

“Oh, it's a
Gymnogyps californianus,
all right—young adult male. The thing is, Tom . . . you know how you find a California condor in the wild?”

“I'll bite.”

“It's the bird with the four ornithologists standing around it in a circle. We captured the last wild one for the breeding program back in 'eighty-seven, at which point there were exactly twenty-seven in the entire world. There are barely two hundred twenty total today, with eighty in the wild. Not only is every single one accounted for, but we have tissue samples and DNA of every single one alive and every single one that's died in the last thirty years.”

“So how did the poachers get one without the four ornithologists noticing?” Tom asked. “It's not as if they were ripping off abalone—the seabed is a lot less closely watched.”

“They
didn't
get one of ours. They're all accounted for—I checked. And that's where things get
really
interesting. All the California condors alive today are descended from the same twenty-seven individuals. That makes them all pretty closely related; it's what we call a ‘near-extinction event' or a ‘genetic bottleneck'—”

“Manuel, you
do
remember who I work for, don't you?” Tom said gently.

“Oh, sorry. Anyway, they're all pretty closely related. We can trace their relationships easily. So we did; took a sample, put it through one of those handy-dandy new gene-fingerprint machines, the one with the nanoscale gold electrodes, to see which pair of wild birds had a chick we somehow didn't notice.”

“Wait a minute,” Tom whispered. “You mean it's
not
related to the known condors?”

“Not even remotely. It's as unrelated to them as it can be and still be a member of the same species. There's more genetic variation between that bird's DNA and the others than there is among all the other condors left. Which will make it tremendously useful to the breeding program,
amigo.
But it still leaves the question of where the son of a whore
came
from.”

“You mean it's as if it came from an entirely different population?”

“Right in one. And there is one, repeat one, breeding population of Californian condors.”

Now I wish I'd gotten more samples from that chamber of horrors at the warehouse,
Tom thought.
Oh, how I wish I'd gotten more samples!

“Anything else?”

“Yes. We also did every other test we could on the damn overgrown vulture. You know the main cause of death for wild condors?”

“Lead poisoning, from shot.”

“Right in one again. Hunter shoots something, something runs away and dies, condor eats thing, condor also eats buckshot, and then it's ‘Go walk with God, condor.' Well,
this
condor never met a lead buckshot pellet. There's no lead in its feathers or tissues
at all,
much less dangerous amounts. But wait, there's more. This condor never ingested any pesticides, or herbicides—none, not even trace amounts—or any of a dozen other things that a bird in the modern world eats . . .
por Dios,
things that we all
breathe
every day.”

Manuel paused. “If you can find out the valley this condor lived in, I would like to move there! Because that place . . . it is like nowhere on earth for this hundred years and more.”

“Where could it have come from, then?”

“Well . . . possibly . . . a very isolated group somewhere up in the Sierras? I don't see how the hell we could have not found them, given their flying range, but it's the only thing that occurs to me, frankly. And it's a pretty lame explanation; there aren't any places in California that pristine, and condors scavenge open lowland areas by choice. It would take a whole series of fantastically unlikely coincidences for the past hundred years. Or some mad scientist has been cloning them, using frozen tissue that's been around for sixty, seventy years, to get any possibility of an unrelated bird . . . take your pick.”

“Thanks, Manuel.”

“Thank
you, amigo.
This bird improves our chances of succeeding with this program by more than a bit. I just can't figure out where in the name of
todos santos
it comes from. But if you find any more—send them along!”

“Yah, you betcha I will,” Tom said.

He paused and looked thoughtfully down at his notes.
Well, here's a pretty how-de-doo,
he mused.
Apparently we not only have poachers who are ruthless enough to trade in a species on the brink of extinction, but smart enough to find members of it where the California DFG and all the biologists in the state can't.

“Thanks, and—Wait a minute,” Tom said. He didn't know precisely why he asked, but extra information never hurt. “To change the subject, do you know anything about the Pacific Open Landscapes League?”

Manuel was silent for a moment. “That rings a faint bell . . . could you hold?”

Tom made affirmative noises, and waited while a faint clicking of keys came over the line.

God, but computers make it hard to hide anything,
he thought.
Nothing ever goes away, if you know where to look.

“I'd heard of them vaguely myself,” Manuel said a moment later, in the peculiar half-strangled tones of a man who is holding a telephone between his jaw and shoulder while working at a computer.

“
Sí,
got it. They're a contributor to the zoo's fund; an annual hundred and fifty thousand. But they've been dealing with us for quite a while—since the late 1940s—only then they had a different name. Let's see . . . Zoological Studies and Research. They had an arrangement with us on captured animals—they'd fund the expedition, and we'd split the beasts with them. They wanted the animals for experimentation, I'd guess, from the name. Mostly standard African animals: rhino, giraffe, lions, cheetahs; some Asian varieties as well—tigers, Siberians and Bengals. That sort of thing was more common then; we had exchange operations with zoos and even circuses all over the world—we got our first stock from a circus, you know, back a century ago. The arrangement seems to run for about six years, 1949 to 1955; then they shifted over to a straight donation and doing research through us and people we recommended, a lot of projects on historical ecology—how the early colonization affected California by bringing in new grasses and so forth—and then in 1970 they changed the name. Odd, eh? Why do you ask?”