Conquistador (28 page)

“And Adrienne must be a . . . hell, maybe they think of it as cops,” Tom said bitterly. “Or spooks. Company security, just like she told me. Trying to plug this leak, this group who're scamming the bosses . . . her family. She needed to get information out of
me,
so they could get to the smugglers before we did. And I fell for it hook, line and sinker!”

Roy Tully sent him a look of sympathy that stung like acid. “Wait a minute,” he said, pulling a chair close. “Look, could you give me the details? Everything she said and did, and the order she did it in?”

The big man did, forcing his voice to steadiness; he knew the value of a second viewpoint, one more objective—free of infatuation, or the rage of betrayal. When he was finished Tully was sitting back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling with his hands linked behind his head.

“Look, Kemosabe, for what it's worth, I don't think she was
just
playing you for a sucker,” he said gently.

“How do you figure that?” Tom replied roughly.

“Because she got all the information she needed
before
you did the wild thing with her. And let's be honest, Kemosabe: She could have gotten everything she needed to know with a little cock-teasing, right? No need to go all the way.”

Tom flushed. “Right,” he admitted. “I sang like a canary.”

“And all that stuff she told you . . . hell, she even said it herself, right?”

“ ‘Everything I've told you is true,' ” Tom said, quoting. “ ‘But it isn't
complete.
' ” He snarled. “I'll say it wasn't fucking complete! She didn't mention knocking people off, for starters.”

“Hey, hey, Kemosabe, control the emotions, right? Easy for me to say, but we need your head working now, not other parts of your anatomy. You're not the first man to find a woman had some ulterior motives, my friend, or the first one to fall for a honey trap.”

“OK,” Tom said, filing it for future reference.

“Now fit that stuff she told you about her family and her relations in with what we know now.”

“Right,” Tom said, nodding decisively. “That was a rundown on the setup they have over there. It must have seemed like a real side-splitter of a joke for her to tell me all about it.”

He frowned. “You know, from what she let slip, they've got a whole
country
over there, pretty well. All run by her family and their friends and relations. I
thought
it sounded a bit screwy, the whole landed-gentry thing. I know a lot of wine-country types like to play those games, but this was
very
old-fashioned.”

“Not a surprise,” Tully said. “Hey, didn't you tell me that this John Rolfe was one of those old-money, big-brick-mansion types in Virginia?”

“His grandfather, not him. The family lost their money in the Civil War.”

“All the more reason he'd go for that sort of thing if he had the chance. Anyway, we need to get some research done,” Tully said. “Going to be tough, doing this and our regular jobs. I hope I've talked you out of going to the boss with this.”

“You're right; we can't take this to Yasujiru or anyone else without a lot more proof. I doubt Special Agent Perkins would believe me, even.”

“That's not the only thing. Yasujiru might be one of the leaks.”

Tom grunted. “Hope not. I always thought he was an
honest
pain in the ass. OK . . . how much vacation time do you have coming?”

“Two weeks,” Roy said. He smiled, and then let it grow into a broad white grin. “Yeah, now you're talking. Christ, can you imagine what it'll be like if we
can
prove this? Hell, imagine if we can find whatever the hell it is that lets Mr. X . . . this Rolfe bastard . . . pull his magic trick? We could write our own tickets.”

A fresh thought swept some of the intent anger out of Tom. “Jesus Christ, Roy, think about being able to
go
there! Go to that place on the disk.”

He reached out and rapped his knuckles on the PDA. They looked at each other again, a simultaneous wild longing in their eyes. Nobody went into Fish and Game without loving the wilderness; it wasn't an easy job, you never got rich, and much of the work was frustrating beyond belief. That millions-strong herd of bison, that vision of Carquinez Strait nearly solid with salmon . . .

“I'd give a lot to see that, ah, that
world
with my own eyes,” Tom said.

“Yeah! Especially before Exxon and Archer Daniels Midland get their mitts on it,” Tully enthused. “If we pull this off, I figure we can get some sort of deal on that.”

A slight chill ran up Tom's back; he shook it off, and concentrated on what needed to be done. “Come on. We need to tell Yasujiru we're on vacation.”

“How are we going to do that?” Tully said.

“Well, I'm recovering from a brush with death,” Tom said, a fierce hunter's grin lighting his normally calm square features. “And as for you . . . the honorable Yasujiru never wanted in on this investigation anyway, for one reason or another. Tell him we haven't spotted any more probably-Californian animal stuff, which is true. That'll put you at loose ends as well. He'll reassign you after you get back from your vacation time. We'll say we're going on a hiking trip together—we've done it before,
amigo.
”

Tully slapped him on the shoulder. “And afterward, nobody can say we didn't turn in all the evidence. That is
classic
cover-your-ass, my friend. You're developing a bureaucrat's reflexes after all!”

“Now you're getting nasty.” Tom laughed. “But I have been a civil servant for a while.” He stood. A slight dizziness passed almost immediately. “Let's go grab a steak and start making some notes.”

“How was the safari?” John Rolfe asked his favorite granddaughter.

“Fun,” she said with a laugh, wrinkling her nose as he lit his pipe. “It was fun.”

Looks a bit like her grandmother,
he thought, with a twinge of well-worn grief; Louisa had been dead thirty years now, and he still missed her despite a happy second marriage.
And she looks even more like me.
The torrent of bronze-colored hair was the exact shade his had been, and the leaf-green eyes, and the cast of the long regular face. She was five-nine now that she'd gotten her full growth, though: taller for a woman than he'd been for a man, and fuller-figured.
Athletic with it, though.

One of the housemaids set a pitcher of lemonade between them, with a tinkle of ice; they were seated in loungers on either side of a table beneath a pergola covered in climbing roses, part of a patio in the gardens behind the manor. Those were more informal than the ones the great house presented to the outside world, and this stretch looked over a swimming pool edged in marble, with a bronze Triton statue spouting water in its center and a view of the forested slopes of Mount Saint Helena to the north. A round dozen youngsters—his great-grandchildren and their friends and children of the house staff—were shouting and splashing and swimming, apparently doing their pre-pubescent best to drown each other. John Rolfe smiled at the sight, then winced slightly as he reached for the handle of the blown-glass vessel. The elderly mastiff lying beside his lounger on the sun-warmed pavement raised its gray-flecked muzzle in concern.

“Are you all right, Granddad?” Adrienne Rolfe said.

“I'm nearly eighty years old; of course I'm not all right,” her elder said, mock grumbling. “All right, you do it.”

She tilted the frosted pitcher, pouring for him first, and offered him the plate of pastries.

Girl has good manners, when she's not being deliberately provocative,
he thought.
And even at her worst, she usually doesn't do that to
me.

That was one of the advantages of being a grandparent as opposed to fatherhood.
Although . . . come to think of it, my kids didn't sass me much either. Possibly I was too hard on them?

The tart-sweet taste of the fresh-squeezed lemons went well with the strong scent of the roses that hung in tight red clusters above, and he sipped again as he looked at the statue of Diana and her hunting dogs that stood on a plinth between him and the water. It was ancient, a little time-blurred, but the bronze was whole—a bright graceful thing of elongated limbs and prancing greyhounds and a lovely face whose smile was utterly enigmatic. New Virginian ships had brought it back from an Athens where the Parthenon was still whole and whose temples still saw sacrifices to the Olympian gods—albeit they included the deified Alexander, identified with Zeus. He'd never been able to get away long enough to visit himself, but he'd seen photographs and films and digital video.

And if I keep rationing myself, the scrolls will last my lifetime.
Classical literature survived here intact, not the few shards and fragments that FirstSide history had. Cities had burned here in this world's history as states rose and fell, but never to the point of a real dark age.

For one thing, the Hellenes just got too big for every copy of anything important to vanish. For another, they did invent printing and paper, at least, if not gunpowder or positional arithmetic.
It had been worth the effort of relearning a command of ancient Greek worn to rusty fragments, worth it a thousand times over.

“Thank you,” he said to the young woman. “Now some details on the trip, if you please, miss.”

“Well, the trip from Virginia City to Fort Chumley was pretty routine,” she said.

That was the easternmost outpost of New Virginia, roughly on the site of Denver. It was still a tiny struggling thing, useful mostly as a trading post with the Indians and for hunting trips of the type his granddaughter had just taken. Eventually much more: It would be the jumping-off point for Breckenridge and Victor, Cripple Creek and Leadville. In time a city and the center of a new zone of settlement along the Front Range and eastward along the rivers; but that was for his grandchildren's children.

He bent his attention back to the girl's account, enjoying her bubbling good spirits.

“Spectacular scenery along the way, of course; we stopped at the Great Salt Lake, and I bagged a near-record bighorn head in the mountains. We went south along the foothills from there, and I got a really nice lion in the San Luis valley—ten feet if it was an inch. They're thick as fleas there by now—that book was right; there
was
an open ecological niche for something big enough to tackle an adult bison. Then we spent some time around the Pueblo country. They weren't what you'd call very friendly, but it was fascinating, and they wanted our trade goods very badly. We saw some of the dances, and I collected some interesting handicraft work. No problem getting more horses there, either. Jim Simmons did an excellent job of ramrodding the outfit, too, even if you did think he was young for it.”

“Ah.” He nodded in satisfaction. “I knew his grandfather and father, and the lad shapes well.”

“Cute, too,” Adrienne said.

“I wouldn't notice,” her grandfather said dryly, then went on seriously: “Good to see the Scouts keeping up their standards. They're a big reason the wild tribes usually know better than to attack New Virginians passing through, even that far east. Then?”

“Then we moved on down the Rio Grande. The farming villages there collapsed after the plagues, just a scattering of wild hunters left, and they are
really
wild—we didn't see much of them, though, just a couple of tries at our horse lines. What we did see was nearly a dozen rhino.”

They're spreading fast,
he thought.
Well, my hobby is going to affect this world for a long time to come.

“Wish I could go on a safari of my own, but there's nothing more ridiculous than an old man playing youngster.”

“You'll last forever,” she said, and sounded as if she meant it.

Rolfe harrumphed.
Flattering, my dear, but not likely.
The old wound in his leg ached more every year, along with everything else. His hair was still thick, but snow white now; he had the same belt measurement that he'd had the first time through the Gate, and thank God his mind was clear as ever, but he could feel the teeth gnawing in every joint pain and his shortness of breath and the way he tired so quickly, and in the way his early memories seemed more solid and real than yesterday. Another decade at most, if he was
very
lucky.

“Or maybe not forever,” she went on, her leaf-green eyes innocent. “Which is why I'm going to nag you about getting into Gate Security again, so Dad can't tell me it's unsuitable and make it stick. I owe the Commonwealth two years, and that's where I think I could do the most good, not doing data entry for the Commission.”

“And Gate Security would mean you could spend more time FirstSide, and take university courses there—”

“Stanford. UNV just doesn't have all the facilities that the best FirstSide schools do yet.”

“—and avoid your mother's nagging you to get married right away. After that embarrassing little incident particularly.”

“She can relax. I want children eventually,” she said defensively. “I just don't want to settle down and start making babies right away. I want to
see
things and do something
important.
”

“Reproduction is generally considered of some significance,” he said dryly, and then raised a hand. “I see your point, my dear. It's scarcely women's work, though.”

“FirstSide—”

“This isn't FirstSide, thank God,” he said, and waited out her expostulations. An evil grin split his seamed, ancient-eagle countenance. “But on the other hand, what's the point of setting up a system of hereditary privilege if you can't get special favors for your grandchildren? All right.”