Conquistador (18 page)

The older man went on: “Our jurisdiction only extends to material from endangered species secured within California.”

Tom and Roy exchanged the briefest of glances out of the corner of their eyes. They both knew the bureaucratic impulse to avoid getting involved in anything unusual; here it was clashing with the equally powerful urge to get involved in anything remotely related to the organization's mandate.

The mighty demon Cover Your Ass makes war with the evil spirit known as Build Your Empire,
Tom thought.

“The condor is definitely of the Californian type,” Tom said. “And the sea-otter pelts probably came from this state.”

Yasujiru nodded reluctantly. “But what use is our participation if we cannot offer any information of our own?”

“We'll have to find the poachers, after the middlemen are closed down,” Tom said. “And if we aren't engaged with the operations, they may be able to scatter and avoid us—any delay in getting full information would be fatal.”

Another long silence. “Very well, then.”

“Thanks, Chief!” Tom said enthusiastically.

“I'd like to see this again, if I could, Mr. Yasujiru,” Roy added, snaffling the copy of the Aztec Grateful Dead off his senior's desk.

“I hope there will be more . . . substantial results from the San Francisco operation,” Yasujiru said dubiously.

“You can count on us, Chief,” Tully said before the older man could object, shepherding Tom out like a corgi with a mastiff. “The whole thing will be resolved.”

“Phew!” he went on, as they made their exit. “Resolved and tied up with a pretty red-tape bow. Something has put fear in the heart of Fearless Leader.”

“I think he's getting weirded out,” Tom said, as they checked their Berrettas and made sure their SOU identification was at hand. For this trip they were dressed to look nondescript, jeans and T-shirts and loose shirts over that to hide the holsters. Tully's shirt was lime green with little dancing orange sea otters dressed in top hats and bow ties and brandishing walking sticks, Tom's a plaid check worn soft with use.

“He likes everything aboveboard and respectable,” Roy said, and handed Tom the photograph. “This is turning out to be a seriously
un
respectable investigation. Come have a look at this bit of historical reconstruction when you're through with Fart, Barf and Itch.”

Tom looked it over while he phoned Sarah Perkins and finalized the meet with the FBI agent. There was a puzzled frown on his face when he put down the receiver.

“You know, this smells, Kemosabe. I looked it over yesterday and it's just as fucking odd today,” Roy said.

“I know it is; and who are you calling asshole, Tonto?” Which was what
Kemosabe
meant.

“I'll stop when you stop calling me
idiot,
” Tully replied—which was what
tonto
actually meant. “But seriously, asshole, this thing is
strange.
Weirder than you described it in the report.”

“Obviously, idiot.”

“No, in
non
obvious ways,” Tully said. “Here, take a look.” He pulled out a magnifying glass. “Look at Mr. Cardiodectomy Is Part of My Cultural Identity there.”

Tom did; he hadn't looked all that closely before, and Roy had an eye for detail work, as well as a mind that worked slantwise at things where Tom often just bulled ahead.

“Hmmm. Looks pretty ordinary, Mexican guy, middle-aged, except that he had a
really
bad case of acne once.”

“Not acne. You don't get acne on your arms or gut like that. Look closer.”

Hmmm,
Tom thought.

There
was
a scattering of pits across the arms and stomach below the T-shirt, and on the man's muscular, scarred hands as well as on his face, or what you could see of it behind the mask. Which meant . . .

“Smallpox,” he said quietly.

“Yeah. Which has been extinct for what? Thirty years, most places? I saw a couple of old guys with scars like that in Somalia during my spell of humanitarian intervention and Skinny-slaughtering. Wait a minute . . .”

Tully looked at his watch to check that they had the time, then did a quick search—all their computers had the latest Britannica installed. The “Images” section of the article showed several photographs of smallpox scarring; the resemblance was unmistakable.

“Yeah,” Tully said. “Last known active case, Somalia, 1977. Thirty years and change. So what's it doing in this picture? And take a look at the blood pooling on the floor there.”

“Looks like a pretty good imitation. It even has flies.”

“Exactly. Not many get
that
careful, even in these days of universal CGI. And look at the
shit
all over that altar, and around the bodies. Nobody puts that in, even when they're going all hyperrealistic.”

Tom felt a crawling at the back of his head and down between his shoulder blades. He'd seen enough dead bodies to know that was one of the things you remembered, and which didn't get into movies.

“Hell, you're not saying this sacrifice is
real?
”

“I'm not saying a goddamned thing, except that
he
”—Tully stabbed a finger at the high priest holding up knife and heart—“had smallpox, and
they
”he moved it to the tumbled bodies—“look like the real thing, dead-and-disenhearted-wise.”

Tom laid down the magnifying glass. “Poachers I can believe. Poachers with time travel I don't.”

“You're the one who reads that sci-fi stuff,” Tully said. “I'm just pointing out the facts.”

“It's definitely more weird shit, though,” Tom said aloud, thoughtfully. “In a case that's full of it.”

“Like those investigating. Let's get on our way. Got an appointment with F, B and I and hopefully we're going to make arrests this time. Nothing like sweating a suspect to get some real facts.”

I wonder why people have taken to calling them the
Thirty
Families?
John Rolfe thought.
Only twenty-eight, so far.

The first meeting of the Rolfe Hunt every year had become a central part of the Commonwealth's social calendar, and all its brand-new ruling class attended, unless caught beyond the Gate by press of business. This autumn very few had missed the occasion here, not while the empires back on FirstSide snarled at each other in the Caribbean and the city-smashing weapons waited on a hair trigger.

At least “The Commonwealth of New Virginia” took,
he thought with a wry smile as he took a glass of white wine from a tray and murmured thanks to the girl who carried it. Her father farmed part of this land for the Rolfes, and he made a point of being punctiliously polite to the Settlers affiliated with his family. Apart from being the right thing to do—his father had gotten the importance of manners into him early, with a belt when necessary—in this labor-short economy it was also common sense. Not to mention the political benefits.

The first foxhunt came in late October, after the majority of the grape harvest was in, but before you got much really chilly-wet weather. Rain wouldn't stop the hunt later in the year, but better weather made the social aspects easier. The tables had been set out on the lawns of Rolfe Hall, where it stood looking southward down the Napa Valley; the hills showed to either side, and Mount Saint Helena loomed green with oak and Douglas fir and redwood behind the big Georgian manor house. It was just getting on to three o'clock and the sky was blue after yesterday's rain, with a mild pleasant warmth; the hills to either side were turning green, which was a relief after the brown-gold of the Californian summer. Southward past the edge of the ha-ha—a hidden brick-lined dropoff that served to keep livestock off the lawns without a fence to break the view—the leaves in the vineyards were putting on their autumn clothes in fields edged with Lombardy poplar and Italian cypress.

They glowed in every color from pale gold to deep wine red, turning the fields to a dimpled Persian carpet. The Eastern and Rocky Mountain maples he'd planted here back in '47—several years before the house was started—were tall enough now to add to the symphony of color, scarlet and orange and yellow. Beyond that stretched the yellow of harvested grain fields, and pasture studded with great spreading oaks.

Everyone was here, even ones like Sol Pearlmutter and Andy O'Brien who rode like sacks of potatoes and hated the whole business. The whole pink-coated crowd was circulating as the late posthunt luncheon got under way, socializing and deal making and what Sol called schmoozing; Pearlmutter and his affiliation carefully avoiding von Traupitz and his, and vice versa. Servants were bustling up with trays of appetizers and drinks, and the long table glowed with centerpieces of roses and petunias and rhododendrons. The cheeks of the guests were flushed with country air and exercise, and there was a faint but unmistakable smell of horses among the cut grass and flowers, though all the mounts had been led away to the stables tucked out of sight to the west.

His eldest son Charles came toward him, leading a certain guest. John Rolfe hid his smile of pride behind a grave nod. The fifteen-year-old was nearly his father's height, already five-foot-nine. He would be taller when he had his full growth, and a bit broader; his hair was darker, a brown touched with russet, and his eyes hazel. Right now his face was a little stiff with the responsibility—Charles was a good lad, intelligent and hardworking, if anything a little too conscious of his duties as a Rolfe and the eldest son.

A bit shy, I think,
his father thought.
And more serious than I was at his age. Less of a wild streak.

“Thank you for showing Lord Chumley around, Charles,” he said aloud.

“My pleasure, sir,” Charles said.

“And now you're free to seek company younger and prettier,” Rolfe replied with a smile, letting it grow a little at the boy's blush.

“My apologies for not showing you around personally,” he said to the older man when young Charles was lost amid the crowd. “The news about the Cuban crisis has been rather disturbing and I've been keeping close tabs through our contacts on FirstSide. None of the missiles there could reach California . . . but there might be a Soviet submarine off the coast. Or even inside the bay.”

“Too right,” the other man said. “Still, we're safe enough here.”

“Yes. But it's been difficult, keeping our FirstSide operations going while evacuating everyone from the Families here to the Commonwealth. I trust you've not been unduly inconvenienced.”

“It's been interesting. Damnation, it's been fascinating, Mr. Rolfe.”

“John, I think?”

Lord Chumley was a little shorter and plumper than his host. His hair—and a mustache worn in the bushy style the RAF had favored during the Battle of Britain—had turned white, where gray had only begun to streak the temples of the Virginian. His eyes were blue and very direct, and more intelligent than his bluff manner might suggest; his upper-class British speech had a hint of something harder and more nasal beneath it. By hereditary right he was
Baron
Chumley, and could claim a seat in the House of Lords, but his father had come to the equatorial uplands west of Mount Kenya in 1905, and he had been born and reared there. He'd also spent much of the 1950s leading a counter-gang against the Mau Mau in the forests of the Aberdares mountains.

“And Cecil, by all means. But returning to business, John,” Chumley said. “I'm certainly going to accept your offer. My oath, I'd be a bloody fool not to!”

Rolfe nodded. Chumley had been offered a seat on the Central Committee; it would be the
twenty-nine
families then; thirty in truth when Auguste Devereaux arrived, if he managed to dodge both de Gaulle's “bearded ones” and his ex-friends from the OAS. With a committee appointment came a share of the Gate Control Commission's revenues, and a portion of its political power in the Commonwealth.

The Kenyan went on: “It'll make me a very wealthy man, and I've fallen in love with the climate and the game here; it's like Kenya in my father's time, only better. Completely different from FirstSide California, of course: I wouldn't live
there
for all the oil in Arabia. Odd, to think that one man living or dying could make so much difference.”

Rolfe nodded. “Although when that one man is Alexander the Great . . .” He shrugged and smiled.

Here
Alexander the Great hadn't died in Babylon in 323 B.C. Instead he'd lived to a ripe old three score and ten, and handed an undivided inheritance to his son by Roxanne. At its peak a century later, the empire he founded stretched from Spain to Bengal, before sheer size and entropy and Greek fractiousness broke it asunder in civil war and barbarian invasion. From what the Commonwealth's explorers could tell, most of that area still worshiped Zeus-Alexander, and spoke languages descended from ancient Greek—in much the same way as Italian and Romanian and the other Romance tongues came from the Latin spread by Imperial Rome. There hadn't been time or resources to do much more exploration yet, but they
had
found none of the city-states or kingdoms or tribes in the Old World to be much beyond a late medieval level of technology.