Conquistador (29 page)

She leaped up and hugged him enthusiastically.

“Spare my antique bones!” he said. “I'll tell Colonel Throckham tomorrow. But”—he extended a finger—“you get a
chance
at field operative work.
If
you can handle the training and the discipline; I know you're smart enough, I think you're strong enough, and you're not squeamish, but I have my doubts about your ability to take orders. I'm not going to put a finger on the scales where it'll get you killed, or endanger other Gate Security personnel.
Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mora,
but not
pro
wellborn idiot
mora.
Not while I'm in charge. Understand?”

“Of course, Granddad.” She glowed at him. “And I'll make you proud of me. I swear I will.”

“I don't doubt you will, my dear,” he said. “We Rolfes get things done.”

He glanced back at the great house, obviously lost in his memories. Adrienne smiled indulgently; it was only natural in a man of his years, to live as much in the past as the present day.

And what he has to remember!
she thought.

Adrienne Rolfe pulled the knit woolen cap off and rubbed at her face with one hand as she drove. She was tired to the marrow of her bones, after the nightmare of getting the condors through the Gate and out of Oakland. She'd dozed a little as they drove across the Valley and into the mountains, but once off the Interstate and onto the little country roads she took the wheel herself. You couldn't get lost here anyway, with a GPS unit tied into a map screen on the dashboard. They didn't have that in the Commonwealth; the cost of bringing in equipment to put satellites in orbit would have been too much, even for the Commission. Night pressed against the windscreen behind the cones of the lights, moonless-dark, and she drove carefully, feeling the bump and rumble of the van's wheels on the rough dirt of the roadway—just two lines of dirt across pasture and around sagebrush, bitterbush, scattered pinion pine, and twisted juniper. The roadway curved and jinked to avoid the bigger rocks and trees, the ruts worn only by infrequent use.

The windows were open to cut the thick stink of the birds in the back of the van, and the air that came through was thin but clean, cutting like crystal knives. At last she saw the lights of the waiting cars and pulled up, turning off the engine. Deep silence fell, broken only by the ticking of cooling metal and the birds shifting in their cages; it was something she always missed on FirstSide. Most places were never free of the drone of machines in the background, even those FirstSiders thought of as rural.

The vehicles waiting were Jeep Cherokees, with a small roadster in attendance. The men who waited were dark-clad like her, black jeans and boots and jackets and gloves. One of them thumbed on a lantern, and she put up a hand to shield her eyes from the light.

“Put that out, you idiot,” she said—quietly, but not whispering.

As far as they knew, there was nobody within miles, but far to the east and below this mountain meadow she could see the occasional set of headlights crawling through the benighted vastness. Light traveled far in this thin clear air, across these distances.

“Hey, Cuz—”

“Don't ‘Cuz' me, you brainless pudding,
turn it off.
”

Joseph Filmer probably flushed—she couldn't see his face much, since he also obeyed, and the lamp had turned off her night sight for a while. She knew he was a slightly plump brown-haired man of twenty-one, and more dangerous than he looked.

There was anger in his voice as he replied: “You don't take that tone with me, Rolfe,” he said. “I've been doing my end—”

“And a piss-poor job of it,” she said, her voice low but cutting like a whip. “I'll take any tone I please, fool; I'm your superior officer and you've been screwing up—badly. If we weren't so shorthanded I'd have you broken and denied Gate privileges right now! You had a simple in-and-out, and you ended up with FirstSider police right on your flabby butt; they may have made your face, God damn it, in which case there'll be a warrant out on you for murder—you'll never be any use on this side of the Gate again.”

“I made the hit,” he said huffily. “In, killed him, planted the incendiaries, and out in less than ten minutes.”

“And the FirstSider police went in
exactly
at the end of the very
long
period you set the timers for.”

“You didn't do any better in LA,” he said sullenly.

“
I
didn't have two days' warning, which
you
did because
I
got the information out of the FirstSiders.”

“Well,” he said maliciously, “
I
don't have all your . . . talents.”

The silence seemed to come closer. Adrienne stepped closer to the young man herself, until their faces were nearly touching, and spoke very quietly: “Well, if you want to make it a personal matter, Filmer, there are several ways we could discuss it, once we're back in the Commonwealth.”

Dueling among the Thirty was legal in New Virginia, but very rare; the Old Man could resurrect laws a hundred years dead, but even he couldn't erase what that century had done to the minds and ways of men. Not all at once, at least. It did happen every now and then—her grandfather said that there should be an ultimate restraint on discourtesy, a limit past which you could go only at risk of life and limb. Filmer would never have been able to challenge her himself—he'd be a hissing and a byword for calling out a woman, given the Commonwealth's mores, even a woman with her rather anomalous standing. For variations on the same factors, he couldn't possibly refuse a challenge from
her,
which was an advantage to throw in with all the trouble her gender had caused her over the years—the
tsouris,
as Uncle Sol had put it.

And he knew full well that if he did accept the challenge, she'd kill him before his pistol was halfway to its aiming point.

He stepped back, and she was in the near-silent night again, cold air against the rough cloth she wore, and somewhere the doglike barking
hooohooo-hooo-hoooah-
of a spotted owl.

“Sorry. No offense meant,” he said, his voice rusty. “There . . . the target wasn't alone until just then.”

“All right,” she said. “Let's get on with the mission, and pray God it's sufficient to throw the hounds off the scent. This smuggling ring is the worst danger to Gate Security since the founding.”

He nodded. “Damned right,” he said.

She could feel the indignation in it. Endangering the Gate's secret was the worst sort of treason, and there was the shame of knowing that the betrayers were of the Thirty, the lords of the Commonwealth.

“Damned right,” she agreed. “And if I never see another condor, it'll be too soon,” she added lightly; he chuckled, accepting the peace offering.

They released the last of them at dawn, on a little slope that ran down to the edge of a cliff, above a steep valley carved into a deep U-shape by glaciers gone ten thousand years ago. It waddled out of its cage, striking at the stick that prodded it, looking about suspiciously. Then it turned into the wind and waddle-hopped forward. . . .

And then it flew, catching the winds of the upper air with the great ten-foot spread of its wings, the long feathers of their tips splaying out like a wizard's hands to caress and master the breeze. Then for a moment, as it soared and the rising sun across the gorge caught and gilded those wings, she forgot the nightmare dangers of catching the condors, terror and grief, even the disgust at their stink.

“Ahhh,” she said, watching it rise. “I take it back. It'll be too soon if I ever have to
smell
a condor again. Seeing them I can take.”

“I know what you mean,” Filmer said. “I just feel guilty for trapping the poor bastard birds here on FirstSide.”

“Got the Chinese,” Roy Tully said, jiggling the tray of cardboard containers. “And a newspaper.”

Despite himself, Tom felt his stomach grumble at the smell of shrimp won-tons and mushu; he'd been too busy to eat much for most of the past couple of days, and his stomach too tight with anger. He scooped the newspaper off as Tully pushed piles of documents aside to make room on the low table in front of his living room couch, and snagged a container of hot-and-sour soup, stripping the lid off with his teeth and sipping as he read.

The headline screamed: LOST BREEDING POPULATION OF CALIFORNIA CONDORS FOUND!

Tom swore softly and skimmed the article before he tossed the paper onto the table. It was
USA Today,
which meant everything was aimed at an eighth-grade level of comprehension; that also meant it was fairly succinct.

“North of Death Valley,” he said. “Just over the state line in Nevada, not far from Beatty. Jesus Christ,
ten
of them identified!”

Tully took the paper out of his hands. “Yeah, the Rolfes don't do things by halves, eh?”

“Bet this was Adrienne in person,” Tom said, an edge of bitterness in his voice—bitterness tinged with respect. “Smart, quick and decisive. And I'll bet you these are genetically related to the one I got in LA. And that they show
some
signs of modern life, like a lead pellet or two in the gizzard, but not much and not all of them. What an
amazing
coincidence.”

“Yeah, and the fact that they're all adults will be put down to a lack of breeding success,” Tully said. “What else could it be?”

“That's what we're supposed to prove,” Tom said grimly. “Let's get back to work.”

Every flat surface in his apartment—including the kitchen table and the counters—was piled thick with hardcopy; the walls of the living room were covered in printouts from the disk and from files they'd accessed via his computer. Most police work was done this way, in offices—it was only when you had the framework that you could use shoe leather and start talking to people.

“OK, Kemosabe, we've got another problem,” Tully said an hour later, speaking around the pencil gripped in his teeth.

Tom sipped lukewarm weak coffee—he still brewed it the way they did in North Dakota, made so you could drink endless cups through a winter's night—and looked up from an article on the history of Rolfe Mining and Minerals.

“Great. Another problem. That'll make six hundred and thirty-two,” he said. “Lay on.”

“The more we keep looking, the more money we find,” his partner said. “It's not just gold; it's everything else they've been shipping out: silver, diamonds, you name it—there's that seagoing diamond-dredging stuff and marine diesels they bought back in the sixties; give you odds they've been working coastal deposits all over the world, picking the richest pockets, laundering through those mines in Africa they own here and now. And all the proceeds out at compound interest. We've got better than sixty years of compound interest working here, and it looks like they invested it carefully, good solid annual profits on all the holdings they bought. Something like”—he paused to consult a list—“thirty to forty
billion
in assets, all up. Assuming we're estimating the stuff held offshore accurately. It could be twice that, easy, or maybe more.”

“Yah, you betcha, they're filthy rich,” Tom said, moodily scraping the last of the fried rice out of a carton with a spoon.

“You're doing that aw-shucks farm-boy thing again, Tom,” Tully said wearily. “Money that big gets cozy with politicians. It has to. Which means—”

“Which means any case against them has to be solid-gold plated,” Tom said.

“It means we have to get a signed confession
and
solid evidence, and even that may not get us a warrant to look at their facilities,” Tully said. “They can laugh any accusation of crazy stuff off—and even if it were conventional crime, no
way
any state agency would touch this, not with the contributions these guys have been making to both parties—and to half a dozen good causes, too. That'll bring all of them down on anyone who tries to upset the applecart. Did you see how much they spent on that new library and the hospital in Oakland?”