Conquistador (8 page)

“Ms. Sorenson?” Tom said.

The house was in the lower part of Nob Hill, part of a row of beautifully restored Edwardian residences with Tiffany stained-glass fanlights over the doors—not quite the sort of home the silver kings and railroad barons had built from the plunder of the Comstock Lode and the Union Pacific, but certainly the upper management of a century or so ago. Then he realized this particular one wasn't restored: it had just been well kept all that time.

“I am Susan Sorenson,” the owner said. “Mr. Christiansen?”

She was in her late seventies, but slender and what they used to call well preserved, with a burnished overall sheen, quietly expensive clothes, and a rope of thick silver hair falling down her back. Her eyes were pale blue and very clear; the Persian cat sitting at her feet was almost eerily similar. . . . When she invited him in, the house was similar too—perfectly polished antiques, some contemporary pieces, Isfahan carpets and a faint smell of lavender sachet. He perched uneasily on a settee, and accepted a Sevres china cup of extremely good coffee from a Filipino maid. There were a couple of family portraits on the sideboard: his hostess at various ages—she'd been quite a red-haired fox—and herself with friends, and a man who was probably her father. No husband or children, he noted.

Her smile was charming. “Now, Mr. Christiansen, you said you were interested in the history of my father's company, Sierra Consultants?”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said. “There's surprisingly little in the public record. In fact, most of what I could find was in the course of looking into another firm—Rolfe Mining and Minerals.”

The older woman's lips tightened slightly; in anger, he was pretty sure, although she was so achingly well-bred that reading her expression was difficult.
Roughly equivalent to throwing things and using the F-word in an ordinary person, I think.

“Them”,
she said. “Perhaps it's unjust, but I blame them for the way Sierra went downhill.”

“I understand your father did a number of contracts for Rolfe in the 1950s,” he said.

“After a while, we did scarcely anything else!” she said. “I was working as my father's executive assistant about then, you understand. Beginning in about 1950.”

“Ah,” Tom said, thinking furiously. “They gave your father's firm a great deal of business, then?”

“Yes. By the mid-1950s it was most of the cash flow, and almost all of it before the end in 1962.”

“And this damaged the company?”

The woman sighed. “I know that it sounds strange . . . but the work Rolfe had my father do wasn't . . . wasn't
real
somehow.”

She stood and walked to an ebony sideboard, handing Tom a picture. “This was my father.”

The man in the faded photograph was in his mid-thirties, ruggedly handsome, dressed in riding boots and jodhpurs and an open-necked shirt, a broad-brimmed hat in one hand and a .45 holstered at his waist. The background showed sun-faded rocky slopes and brush; it might have been anywhere in the tropics, or even one of the 'Stans.

Sort of like Indiana Jones,
he thought, as she resumed her place in the chair across the table. Roy Tully had a taste for old movies and TV series; Tom occasionally sampled his vast collection.

No,
he realized suddenly,
it's the kind of guy Indiana Jones was modeled on. Civil engineer, archaeologist, someone who went out to the hot-and-dangerous places.

“My father was . . . he traveled everywhere as a young man. The Caribbean, China, South America—that picture was taken in Bolivia in the 1930s, only a year after I was born, Mr. Christiansen. He
built
things. Bridges, dams, irrigation projects, support structures for mining operations. Sometimes he had to fight off bandits—Jivaro headhunters, once, in Peru. He was in the army engineers in Europe in 1918, and during the war—World War Two, that is—he was all over the Pacific.”

“What did he do for RM and M?” Tom asked softly.

Living history,
he thought: He was talking to someone whose father had fought in
both
the world wars, something he'd grown up thinking of as dusty antiquity.

“Nothing
serious,
” she said. “Nothing
real.
”

Tom leaned forward in the chair, his elbows on his knees and his eyebrows arched. There was an art to questioning, and a large part of it was encouraging without interrupting. Most people vastly preferred talking to listening, and a sympathetic and interested ear made them pour out surprising revelations.

“Consulting—after the war, he did feasibility studies for a great many projects here in California, and abroad. Then Rolfe came—oh, he was a charmer when he wanted to be, and he thought women should fall all over him. Which,” she added with a sniff, “many did. And he . . . he wanted feasibility studies too. He was willing to pay for them, pay extravagantly and in cash. But none of them were ever actually
built.
None of them were for his overseas operations, the gold mines and alluvial diamond projects we heard about. They were
fantasies.
”

“Fantasies?” Tom prompted gently.

“Fantasies about projects here in California! About waterworks that had already been built, or . . . or geothermal generators in hot springs north of the Napa Valley, or mines in places where all the ore had been taken out a century ago! Replicas of the Palace of Fine Arts, of all foolish things. Or flood control in areas like Sacramento, where all the work was already done when my
grandfather
arrived in California from Sweden! My father was used to doing real work, and seeing what came of it. I'm convinced that the . . . the
futility
of it all drove him to retirement, and to dying before his time.”

The elderly woman was a little flushed, and sat down. Tom made soothing noises and poured her another cup of the coffee, admiring the graceful way she picked up her cup and saucer; he was an ignore-the-handle-and-grab-the-mug type himself.

“Could you give me any details?” he said.
Something extremely odd is going on here.

Sighing, she shook her head. “That was another thing. Rolfe always required—ordered—that
every
scrap of paper be handed over when a study was completed, with nothing for our records but the bare minimum of financial data for the tax people. But I remember. . . .”

The chief engineer of Sierra Consultants was a little surprised when the chairman of Rolfe Mining and Minerals was shown into his office. Pearlmutter, RM&M's company lawyer, had been pure New York; bright, pushy, abrasive without even realizing it, and painfully young. Rolfe himself was . . .

Also too young, for starters,
he thought. Then on a second look:
Or perhaps not, in experience if not years.

He was sixty himself, but he remembered the godlike sense of immortality and infallibility he'd had four decades ago, before the Great War.
He'd
left it behind amid the stink of death in the shattered forests of the Argonne. Rolfe had a very slight limp in the left leg. Probably from a war wound; his eyes had the set of someone who'd seen the elephant, and encountered mortality firsthand. Rumor had it that RM&M had been started by a bunch of veterans clubbing together with their buddies . . .

Rolfe stood about five-ten, lean and athletic, with short-cut bronze-colored hair and level leaf-green eyes, a straight-nosed, fine-boned face with that planes-and-angles look they called “chiseled,” and was probably quite a success with the ladies. No more than thirty at the outside, maybe a bit younger; hard to tell with that weathered outdoorsman's tan.

Very expensive but conservative suit: Saville Row, the sort few Englishmen could afford in these days of shabby austerity in London. It contrasted with the hand that shook his, long pianist's fingers that were also callused and very strong, with a Virginia Military Institute class ring. Southern accent but not “hush-mah-mouf”; he'd have placed it somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line but within fifty miles of the Chesapeake. Overall, this John Rolfe VI had a sheen like antique beechwood furniture.

Old money, or at least a family that had had money once.
Not at all the type you expected to see at the head of a hungry young firm still clawing its way up the greasy pole in a notoriously rough-and-ready business like mining.

But RM&M
was
a new outfit, based out of the East Bay, specializing in buying up and refurbishing minerals properties in the Far East wrecked during the war, with sidelines in Persia, Angola and the Belgian Congo. That was risky with the political turmoil in Asia, but they'd been doing extremely well. He'd heard about some substantial purchases of dredging equipment for riverbed mining, some hard-rock gear, and great job lots of the sort of stuff you'd need for operating in the wilder and hairier parts of the world: bulldozers, heavy trucks, riverboat engines, drilling rigs, generators, fuel storage, construction machinery and prefab housing.

They'd been holding their cards extremely close to their chests, too, which was only to be expected; the engineer had started out as a roving mining consultant in some of the odder corners of the Earth, and he knew how the game was played. Apparently they didn't need to go to market for expansion capital, either, which argued that their returns were quick and rich.

But
this . . .

He tapped the thick folder in front of him. “Mr. Rolfe, this proposal of yours is simply . . .
bizarre.
”

Rolfe nodded politely, reaching into his jacket and producing a silver cigarette case. He turned to Susan and raised a brow with old-fashioned good manners . . . and also revealed that he probably knew that she was his daughter, as well as his confidential secretary. A bit of an eccentric arrangement, but she'd worn him down, and he had to admit she was extremely competent.

Susan nodded frostily. “By all means, Mr. Rolfe,” she said. “Mr. Sorenson smokes. I do not.”

Rolfe gave a charming smile and flicked the case open with an elegant snap of his wrist; not cigarettes, but cigarillos.

“I assure you that our check for your firm's work will be entirely regular, though, Mr. Sorenson,” he said, offering the case.

The engineer accepted one with a nod of thanks; they were Punch Claritos , about the best there were, and he'd acquired a taste for them a long time ago in Cuba, working on a project in Oriente province. He didn't let that distract him as he clipped the end, lit, and blew a cloud of fragrant smoke. The young man's tone had been perfectly polite . . . but there was an underlying amusement to it, as of a secret joke Rolfe didn't intend to share.

“Surveying and plans for a reservoir and hydroelectric project in, of all places, the Berkeley hills? Mr. Rolfe, you don't own that land; most of it is government property and not for sale. Such a project there would make no economic sense whatsoever and would stand no chance of approval by Sacramento . . . which I'm sure you know. Hell, a lot of that area's already occupied by the San Pablo and Briones reservoirs!”

“I'm fully aware of it,” Rolfe said cheerfully; his smile didn't reach the cool green eyes. “Consider it . . . a trial run for a very similar project in an area not under the jurisdiction of the U.S., or the state of California.”

“That doesn't make any sense either,” the engineer said, baffled. “You
must
know that plans like that are extremely site-specific.”

Rolfe's voice stayed level, but took on an edge of steel. “Then consider it a rich young fool's whim, sir,” he said. “Consider it anything you wish. The question is, will you do this survey for us, or shall I walk over to one of your competitors?”

He waved a hand toward the window, and the harsh bustle of California Street below. The engineer ground his teeth.
On the one hand . . .

The money was good—even in boom times, a project so close to home would be low-cost. He could get most of the data he needed out of the library, and most of the rest by taking the ferry and driving about; the ground check would be a matter of a couple of afternoons' hike for his subordinates. The fee, on the other hand, would be nearly as big as something requiring real work—core drillings and seismic soundings, for instance. It was simply too juicy a peach to pass up, even if it did taste a little off.

“We'll take it,” he said aloud.

Rolfe smiled and drew on his Punch Clarito. “I'm sure you won't regret it,” he said.