Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  “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?”

  “Yeah, I did,” Tom admitted. “But that tells me something too.” His long thick fingers—strangler’s hands, his ex-wife had said during a quarrel—sorted papers. “Look at the patterns. Lots of good-cause PR greasing all over, but these guys have been subsidizing Oakland pretty heavy since the early fifties. Donations elsewhere, yeah, but an early and heavy concentration there.”

  “And there’s that big warehouse complex,” Tully said, closing his eyes and chewing on the pencil. “I think I see the drift of your thoughts, Kemosabe.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’ve got a hunch. Let’s hit those land-registry files, if they ever came up. Damn the registry for still using dial-up modems, anyway—why not runners with letters in cleft sticks?”

  The files had finally come up. What followed was work, eye straining and mind numbing. Not to mention butt numbing, he thought. But there it is at last.

  “All right,” he said under his breath. “Get the old map.”

  Tully handed him the map of Oakland, this one dated from the late 1940s. “All right. There’s the house; rundown neighborhood then, but residential. Owner…” Tom blinked in astonishment. “Samuel Yasujiru?”

  “Our esteemed boss’s grandfather,” Tully pointed out. “His until they got sent to the camps—most of those people sold up for cents on the dollar. The compensation later was money, not restitution of title. OK, let’s take it from there. Sold to one George McSwain, resident in San Jose. Let’s look him up…. Yeah, primary residence stays San Jose until he sells this Oakland house in May of 1946 to—aha!—one John Rolfe.”

  “Must have been a rental property during the war and right afterward,” Tom said, riffling through more maps of Oakland through the next decade. “License to print money, from what I’ve heard, especially when rent control came off. Right, sale in May of ’forty-six—that’s a very good price, in ’forty-six dollars. Cash, too, no rollover on the mortgage. Then over the next year, every other property in the area changes hands. Some to Rolfe; some to these other names—Colletta, O’Brien, Pearlmutter, Fitzmorton, Filmer, Latimer—then they all transfer to Rolfe Mining and Minerals. All outr
ight buys, all cash transactions. Then it gets rezoned in ’forty-eight, and they put up the warehouses over the next couple of years… railway siding… that’s it!”

  They looked at the irregular-edged green lozenge in west Oakland, not too far from the water. On an impulse, he checked the original shoreline before reclamation; the complex would be closer to the shore there, with a thick fringe of tule swamp and mudflats.

  “That’s where this all started,” Tom said, sitting back. “Sometime in 1946.”

  “And by the money and attention they’ve spent on it, it’s where it’s going on to this day,” Tully said with satisfaction. “Nothing else they’ve got looks like this; the rest is all paper and data and financial apart from the mining operations offshore. I’d lay five-to-one odds this is their sole and solitary way of getting”—he made a waving gesture—“over there.”

  The little man was chewing a toothpick, a habit he’d picked up when he quit smoking, along with chewing gum. Now he went over to the keyboard of Tom’s computer, tapped in a series of rapid commands, then prodded the frayed end at the screen.

  “And ain’t it another amazing coincidence that there aren’t any Web cams there, or pictures of it on any of the Oakland sites?” he said. “And none of the local police surveillance cams are close. Despite Oakland having a net thick as anywhere outside New York and DC.”

  “Just some warehouses,” Tom said with a gaunt smile. “Why bother?”

  Especially if strong hints get dropped from very civic-minded businesses that the city really had better places to spend redevelopment money, he thought.

  It was late, and warm and still in the apartment’s three rooms. His eyes felt sandy and gritty, and there was a sour taste at the back of his mouth. Haven’t done anything but sit on my ass and look at a screen for two days, he realized.

  “OK, I think we know as much about Rolfe Mining and Minerals as we’re going to from public sources,” he said. “And as much about their real operations as we can figure out from the information. What we need now is a link to this internal struggle they’re having. It’s the weak spot, the only weak spot this operation has.”

  Tully looked at him with sympathy in his eyes, then away—which was consideration too.

  “I’ll have to give Adrienne—Ms. Rolfe—some more bait,” Tom went on. “And it’ll have to be good. Then we move in on her. And then, by Jesus, she’ll start telling us the truth.”

  “One thing we should keep in mind, though,” Tully said thoughtfully. At Tom’s curious look he went on: “These people… if we want to predict the way they’re going to react when we poke ’em, we should remember that we’re not dealing with an American gang.”

  “Not?” Tom said. “Rolfe—”

  “John Rolfe came from a different country, Kemosabe. Put it down to my love of old movies. You soak up enough stuff from the 1930s, 1940s, you realize that that was a different country—forget the hambone plots about Maltese falcons; look at the people in ’em, and the background stuff nobody thought about because it was like water to fish, ways of doing things and looking at things and such everyone accepted as natural. They thought different, they acted different, hell, they even moved different. You can see it in the way they held a cigarette or got into a car. And—”

  Tom snapped his fingers. “Yes. They’ve got to have kept two-way traffic through the Gate tightly controlled. So things would have changed less on the other side.”

  “Yeah. Like my hillbilly ancestors, keeping the old ways goin’ up in the hollers, only more so. Thing is… remember all the crap we went through in the war, keeping civilian casualties down? Even when it meant taking losses ourselves?”

  Tom nodded, and his partner went on: “Well, in the war John Rolfe fought, they burned whole enemy cities to cinders and never thought twice about it; carpet-bombed targets in France, too, and if French civilians got caught in the middle—hard cheese, there’s a war on. And they stuck the honorable Yasujiru’s folks behind wire without a moment’s hesitation.”

  “I see what you’re driving at,” Tom said. “They made people harder-grained back then; respectable people, not just lowlife types. Whole different attitude toward risk, too; they built their first experimental nuclear pile under a football stadium in the middle of Chicago. And remember how for a while they thought there was a chance the first nuke would set the whole atmosphere on fire and burn the planet bare? They just went on ahead anyway.”

  Tully nodded. “And I don’t think, from the way this little caper has been going, that they’ll have ripened into a nice soft banana over there in Frontierland.”

  INTERLUDE

  July 17, 1954

  Rolfeston

  The Commonwealth of New Virginia

  “I don’t get it, Sol,” O’Brien said. “You just said that it wouldn’t pay; then you say it will.”

  “It wouldn’t pay now,” Solomon Pearlmutter said; he restrained himself visibly from adding, you big dumb mick. “But using the Gate’s going to get more and more expensive every year.”

  O’Brien’s thick red brows knitted over blue eyes. “How can it?” he said. “The Gate… all it costs is keeping that radio set of the Old Man’s working. It’s free as air, or nearly.”

  “Wait,” John Rolfe said, lifting a hand; Salvo looked about to speak, and that might cause a quarrel. Andy O’Brien had gotten on better with Sol over the years, but worse with Salvo. “You’re thinking about relative volumes, right, Pearlmutter?”

  “Yes, sir,” the Jew said, nodding.

  Silence fell down the long table; there were a dozen men around it, all of his first partners who could be in Rolfeston today. The big second-story meeting room looked out on an arched colonnade, and that in turn looked over what Rolfe had christened Stonewall Square.

  After the general who got my grandfather’s leg shot off, Rolfe thought with a hint of wry self-mockery. While winning a lot of battles and losing the war. But a man’s entitled to his nostalgia, when he’s making dreams real.

  Beyond the square was a scatter of dirt streets, trucks bumping along in clouds of dust, houses and buildings of brick and adobe fading off into Quonset huts and tents, swarms of men working at everything from laying sewer pipe to planting roadside trees. Beyond that San Francisco Bay reached, whitecaps across deep-purple waves, lovely under a sky of aching blue thick with wings.

  “You explain it, then, Sol,” Rolfe said. “You’ll do it better than I could.”

  Sol Pearlmutter grinned at him, and ran a hand over brown hair already going a little thin in front, although he was still only a few years past thirty. He was a thin, sharp-featured, big-nosed man an inch or two below medium height, no longer quite the deadly weasel-quick young soldier he’d been in the Pacific; prosperity and years had put a slight pot on his skinny frame. His hazel-flecked brown eyes were still disconcertingly sharp.

  “It’s like this,” he said, holding up his thumb and index finger in a ring and then pushing a pen through it. “And shut up with the laugh, Andy, you dirty-minded gonef. OK. That’s the Gate. It’s only twenty-eight feet, six inches by nine feet, two inches, and it’s never getting any bigger. No matter how well we organize the way we push stuff through, only a certain amount can go through in a day. There are, what… nearly twenty thousand people altogether here in the Commonwealth? It’s not just a combination mining camp and weekend country club anymore; it’s turning into a real… well, a place where people live, kids get born, the whole schmear. Including our kids. Someday not too long from now there’ll be fifty, sixty thousand people here, then more—and every new head means more supplies through the Gate. In the long run, we need to keep the Gate for things we can’t get here; like we’re already growing our food, for example, and cutting our own timber and manufacturing cement. Shipping through bulk commodities is dumb.”

  “Yeah, I think I see your point, Solly,” O’Brien said. “If we keep on bringing our fuel through, we’ll need more Gate time every month, until we’ll have n
o space for anything else.”

  “Right,” Pearlmutter said. “And besides—everyone here will still have to buy the oil from our wells and our refinery. Long-term, we’ve got to keep thinking about our economic position here, too. People resent taxes they don’t get anything for. Buying stuff’s different.”

  Salvatore Colletta nodded. “When you’ve got control over what people really got to have, you got a little gold mine.” He snickered. “Every bit as good as a real gold mine, eh?”

  Pearlmutter sighed. “If only we could get some really first-class physicists… can you imagine what Einstein or Oppenheimer would make of the Gate? And what we could do if we could make more Gates—to FirstSide, or to other, hunh, other New Virginias?”

  Rolfe nodded impatiently. “If ifs and buts were candied nuts, the world would be fat,” he said. “I’m keeping an eye open for scientists. The problem is that finding physicists good enough to be worthwhile, inconspicuous enough not to be missed, and willing to work for us—particularly the latter—is…” He shrugged. “But you made a good point there, Sol, about planning for the future. I’ve been thinking about that. Things are sort of… fluid here now. It’s easy to make decisions; but further down the road what we do now will be set in stone. I think we should set up a subcommittee for things like that. First and foremost, we need a legal system; it’s getting just too time-consuming to have everything referred to the committee when some Nazi bashes a good ol’ boy over the head or a Lithuanian knifes a Pole….”

  “Over who should own Vilnus, of all things completely meaningless here,” Pearlmutter said; the case had been a ten-days’ wonder in Rolfeston. “With Poland and Lithuania occupied by the Russians, too. Meshuggeneh!”

  Rolfe nodded. Shipping people to another dimension didn’t necessarily make them forget the feuds they’d left behind, not at first and sometimes not ever. Hopefully their children would. He went on: “For the legal subcommittee I propose… let’s see. You’ll head it up, Sol; under you, hmmm, Dave Howden, Harry Throckham, and Andy O’Brien.”