Conquistador (32 page)

“This is recorded movements of your Ms. Rolfe,” the black woman said. “Back as far as we go—some of the early data predates the system; it was collated later.”

“Aha!”

“The early stuff might just be an artifact,” Perkins said, pointing and flipping. “Back then our surveillance net was skimpy—there weren't nearly so many biometric ID scanners, or face-recognition systems, and they weren't tied into the national grid the way we set it up in the last part of the war. But the stuff for the later period is good; we've had the Bay Area tied up tight as a drum for a while now. Here's the pattern.”

The dots showed unmistakable clusters. There was a tight grouping around the HQ of the Pacific Open Landscapes League in Berkeley . . . but only a few near Adrienne Rolfe's putative address in that city. A massive cluster, dots blurring into black blobs, near the RM&M warehouse complex in south Oakland.

“But now, look at them sorted for time.”

Tom's breath hissed out between his teeth.
Yeah.

Perkins went on: “Ms. Rolfe evidently goes into that warehouse area and
stays
there. For months at a time. Then she comes out of the warehouses, spends time at the POLL HQ and the Rolfe corporation in San Francisco, travels around the Bay Area—and beyond, of course—stays an occasional night at what's supposed to be her main address, and then goes back to the warehouses. In fact, she spends considerably more than half her time inside that complex.”

Slender black fingers flipped at the printout. “OK, here's a specific instance, the day of the LA bust. She comes out of the warehouses, after a two-month stay, and scoots her pink ass over to San Francisco, picks up two guys, and drives a rented van—registered to RM and M—to LA. Gets there three hours before we go in.”

This time the printout map was a long strip, showing the California coast and then Los Angeles.

“She blitzes down 101 to LA, gets into the area—no scans for a while, probably off the area under surveillance—and then, here! On a couple of the pickups on the LAPD and our vehicles, right after the explosion. Leaves LA, goes back in the warehouse for a couple of days . . .”

She produced a final, less detailed schematic. “Now this is something that occurred to me . . . does anyone else fit this pattern? Spending long periods of time in these warehouses, that is. According to this and the Bureau's brand-spanking-new computers, which were one good thing we got out of the war, plenty of people do. Couple of hundred people. Most of them spend a lot
more
time in the warehouses. A lot of them appear outside only every couple of years. And some people who should show up—this mysterious grandfather, for example—don't register at all. What we have here is a secret society of extremely rich people who like to live in an industrial storage area.”

“Or an industrial storage area that's a gateway to another world,” Tom said.

Perkins winced, touching her fingertips to either side of her head. “Please,” she said. “Let me get used to the idea. My mind accepts it, but my gut hurts every time the mind says yes.”

She showed out two last printouts. “Incidentally, these are the badasses Ms. Rolfe drove down to LA with. They show up fairly frequently, same pattern, and often with her over the past six months.”

Tom took the pictures; they were black-and-white, evidently reproductions of passport photographs; those were all stored digitally these days. One man in his thirties and lean, with a washed-out fairness, and a dark one in his forties with a square, scarred, brutal face and an expression like a clenched fist. Serious badasses, or he missed his bet; he knew the look. And . . .

Yes, I saw them. That day in LA. Just a glimpse, but it was them. Which means it must have been Adrienne too. Of course, she
told
me she'd been in LA. . . .

“Schalk van der Merwe and Piet Botha,” she said. “South Africans, and not the most savory types, both with early ties to the AWB—extremist group over there, sort of like the Aryan Brotherhood but for real. Employees of Central African Minerals since 1996; CAM is, surprise, an RM and M subsidiary. Legal residents here, with green cards. And
they
spend a lot of time in the warehouses as well. Oddly enough, Botha's family came through San Jose airport in 1996 . . . and there's no record of them anywhere ever again.”

“Yah, you betcha, it's a pattern,” Tom said. “The question is, what can we do with it?”

“Well, we can't go to management with it,” Perkins said decisively. “So far all we've got is screwy travel and residence patterns. In these days of peace and freedom, all we'd get for reporting them is trouble.”

Tom nodded somberly. “We need real proof,” he said.

“A smoking gun,” Tully said meditatively.

Perkins smiled. “Well, in for a penny . . . there was something I was going to tell you. We know about another meeting of the perps we've been tracking in this animal-products smuggling ring. It's not due for a bust, because we're hoping to plant a bug on one of the Vietnamese; I don't think that'll work, myself. The other side's electronic security has been very good in this whole investigation. But we also know that the Russians and the Vietnamese aren't going to be the only people there; someone else, the ultimate suppliers, the money-men, are going to be attending as well. Trying to patch things up after the recent misunderstandings.”

Tully grinned and let his toothpick roll to the other side of his mouth. “The mystery men. Who are probably the ones the beauteous Ms. Rolfe and her Boer Banditos are trying to suppress. She'd be
very
interested in trying to get her hands on them. The way they led us right to their precious secret, she and her pa and grandpa are probably
very
unhappy with them.”

“Aha,” Tom said. “Not a bad idea, Sarah. You want to poison the well.”

That was a standard covert-ops trick. If you found out someone had a double agent in your operation, you could use the fink to feed the enemy disinformation, making him an unwitting triple agent. In this case, Tom had been the leak; and now he could give Adrienne Rolfe information she'd probably take at face value.

Making me a very witting triple agent,
Tom thought. He still felt a hot flush of anger every time he remembered how she'd played him for a fool.

“There's only one problem,” Tully said. “Well, a lot of problems, but they all start at the same place. If we try to catch her red-handed—not to mention the mysterious dissident from RM and M—we'll have to do it by ourselves. Just the three of us. No backup. Luckily, Ms. Rolfe and her opponents both seem to prefer to work quiet, but this time we'll be on the same scale. If we screw the pooch, we're rogues and we all get cashiered and probably do time. Anyone want to bet RM and M hasn't got enough political pull to see that done?”

“Unless we can blow this open and bring them down.” Tom shrugged. “We'll just have to be very careful.”

“Sorry,” Tom Christiansen said into the phone. “But I can't make it tonight.”

“Is something wrong, Tom?” Adrienne's voice said. “You sound odd.”

Because I'm trying not to scream and jump around,
he thought tightly.
Undercover work is not my thing. And I really
liked
you, God damn it.

“Work,” he said. “Another bust, believe it or not.”

“Ah,” she replied—and was it his imagination that heard a sharper interest? “You're really making progress! Where would that be?”

When he'd finished sweat beaded his brow, and he could feel it cold and clammy in his armpits.
She
had
to suspect something fishy. God, that was lame!

To his surprise, Tully gave him a grin and a thumbs-up. He looked at Perkins and raised his brows.

“Not bad,” she said—which was her equivalent of Tully's gestures. “That should have worked. After all, the last time you told her we were going on a bust it worked like clockwork for her.”

“Yeah,” Tully said, spitting his gum into a wastebasket and crackling his knuckles with glee. “Only this time, we're going to be there first.”

“I wish we had more backup,” Tully said.

“Then we'd have to convince 'em we weren't crazy,” Perkins pointed out.

Maybe we
are
crazy,
Tom thought.

The three of them pulled the dark knit hoods down from their foreheads to cover their faces; the night-sight glasses were a lot less conspicuous that way, too. Perkins had gotten them Bureau-issue, better than the SOU could afford, and better than the military ones he'd used in the Rangers—of course, that was years ago now, too. These were the latest model, not much bulkier than sunglasses, and there was less of the green glow he remembered unfondly from the 'Stans and Iraqi Kurdistan. He took a last look at the copy of the building diagram before stuffing it back into his pocket; in, upper left-hand gallery, fourth entrance from the far end.

The glasses revealed the deserted nighttime street in all its seediness, down to the piece of newspaper blowing along the sidewalk with a tiny
scritch . . . scritch . . . scritch
of crumpled newsprint on concrete. They said Oakland had boomed since the nineties, but you couldn't tell that from this neighborhood; the only other car in sight was resting on flat rims and probably hadn't moved in years. A couple of failed attempts at renovation punctuated the decay of the buildings. Even the air seemed to have a stale smell, far from the living stinks of the bay.

“All right,” Tom said quietly, racking a round of double-aught into his shotgun; he'd have preferred a machine pistol or an automatic carbine, but they couldn't go to the armory and draw as needed in this operation. “Everyone receiving clearly?”

The other's murmurs came through the button microphone in his left ear. “We go in, collar the perps and then wait until Ms. Rolfe and/or minions arrive, at the time I gave her.” A grin. “I do hope
your
information was good, Sarah.”

She shrugged. “The Russians are bringing their Viet contacts to meet their source, so they can all kiss and make up,” she said. “Or at least that's what our source said. Knowing what we know, that means at least two people from . . . ah . . . you-know-where.” Perkins had been avoiding the phrase “alternate universe.” “We grab everyone, call in the good guys, and break the news on an unsuspecting world. . . . Let's go.”

They did, walking across the street with their weapons down by their sides, unnoticeable to a casual passerby in case one came through this rundown part of West Oakland. A few of the buildings were sealed, windows shuttered and marked with FOR RENT signs; not far away traffic hummed along the Nelson Mandela Parkway, and nearer the water to their south a diesel locomotive blatted mournfully as it drew a load of containers up from the docks. Tom checked the street number twice, because the building looked as shuttered and deserted as anything here. He was surprised at how nervous he felt, until he realized it was mostly a peculiar form of institutional loneliness.

I've been a team player too long,
he thought.
First in the army, then with Fish and Game.

It wasn't just a matter of having backup in the physical sense; operating on his own was nothing new. But he was used to being on the side of the angels, or at least on the side of the duly authorized, licensed and officially approved. If things went messily wrong here he'd be filed under
rogue cop,
and so would his friends. The sensation made him a little queasy, and it was unfamiliar. Somehow the thought of being killed wasn't nearly as nerve-racking as the thought of being classified with the villains afterward.

I may be nervous,
he thought, suppressing the sensation with an effort of will.
But I'll be goddamned if I'll be scared.