Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  “Captain!” the big redhead yelped. “I’m working my ass off getting the machine shop back in shape after the fire! And I’m no shyster, by God.”

  Rolfe grinned; Pearlmutter had given a stifled groan of resignation and an appealing glace. He’d figured out what the head of the committee had in mind immediately, and wasn’t looking forward to paring things down enough that O’Brien didn’t object. Andy wasn’t stupid by any means, but he wasn’t an intellectual either.

  “That’s the reason, Andy,” he said. “Sol’s smart as a whip, but he does love splitting a split hair until the remnant violates the laws of physics. You don’t have fifteen generations of Talmudic scholars in your blood. I want something straightforward.”

  “I make sure what Sol produces is simple enough for a dumb mick to understand, eh, Captain?” O’Brien said, laughing. “Well, when you put it like that…”

  “Any objections?” Rolfe said, looking down the table at the twelve men who sat on the Central Committee of the Gate Control Commission. “All right, both measures passed by acclamation. Next item…”

  When the meeting broke up, Pearlmutter lingered for a moment. Rolfe gave the window a longing look—he had a sweet little ketch docked, just begging for singlehanding on a day like this—but business was business. A leader’s business was mostly managing his subordinates and knowing how to delegate and how to keep them working together; that was turning out as true here as it had been running Baker company.

  “What’s bothering you, Sol?”

  “Captain… you mentioned it.” The Jew’s face took on a twist of distaste. “Did you have to recruit those fucking Nazi mamzers? Please, no more of them!”

  Rolfe sighed. “Sol, we’ve been over this ground before. We needed skilled labor—and best of all, they really, really wanted, needed, to jump into a hole and pull it in after them. They’re not going to complain about staying in New Virginia, not if they were too hot for Brazil or Paraguay to hold. The supply of Americans who fit the ticket is limited.”

  “Yeah, I recognize the logic. I still want to puke every time I see one of those SS fucks. Puke on his dead body after I shove my bayonet into his guts and twist it.”

  “Well, look at it this way, Sol. They’re taking orders from you. Can you imagine how happy that makes them?”

  That brought a snort of unwilling laughter. “There is that; if they weren’t here, I’d never get to kick a Nazi’s tokhus, would I? Which, I grant you, is some satisfaction; so is the way they have to smile and pretend they like it. A kholereye on them all anyway. But they could be dangerous, Captain. Don’t think they’ve given up dreaming of a little Aryan kingdom all their own.”

  Rolfe grinned. “Sol, do you think I’m idiot enough to trust them?”

  The smaller man blushed. “Sorry, Captain.”

  “Sane, sensible people aren’t likely to be desperate enough to want to come here—not to live, at least. Sane, sensible people stay home in their stalls and chew their cuds; what we get, are going to get, are desperate broken men, mad dreamers, or both. I’m not going to let enough of any one kind in to have any chance of taking over, and I’m not going to let too many of them settle in a group. Spread around, von Traupitz and his cohorts’ll eventually vanish into the New Virginian majority, the good old melting pot. Besides, that well’s about dry. The ones left FirstSide have either found good hiding places or been caught.”

  “Where do we go next for manpower?” Pearlmutter said. “Labor’s our big bottleneck, now that we have enough FirstSide mining properties to cover our output. We’re too big to get all our supplies through the Gate, which means as we expand, a higher share of each new input of labor has to go to support functions here, everything from schools to power plants. Now, if you’d let us use hydraulic mining—that’s a labor-saving method.”

  “And it chews up the landscape even worse than dredging,” Rolfe said. “What’s that saying you told me? ‘We don’t crap where we eat’? From now on, I’m only going back FirstSide for business and visits to a gallery or two. Let them dine in the latrine.”

  “Then we need more workers,” Pearlmutter said.

  “I made some contacts in Africa FirstSide last year. They may be very useful; it wasn’t just a safari. That area could be valuable for recruiting settlers as well as covering our gold output.”

  Pearlmutter’s eyes went up. “I didn’t think you were that keen on the schwartzers, Captain.”

  Rolfe made a dismissive gesture. “I’ve no problems with well-behaved Negroes, in their place; I’ve known plenty who were better citizens than a lot of poor whites—it’s just simpler not to bring them here. I meant colonists of various sorts, like those Dutchmen we got from the East Indies. We’re already getting a few French from North Africa, and that’s going to be a major source. From what I saw and heard and what I’ve read since, the African pot is starting to boil and it’ll get hotter fast. A pity; I enjoyed Kenya, but it’ll give us opportunities. And I think we may be able to get more people more from the U.S. over the next decade; from the South, particularly, for much the same reasons. The war—both the world wars—cracked the foundations of the white man’s empires, and the dust will be a long time settling. ”

  Pearlmutter rolled his eyes. “Oh, wonderful. The KKK, yet,” he muttered.

  “Not very likely,” Rolfe said, his lip curling in a slight sneer. “The scum who call themselves the KKK in modern times are nothing but dim-witted sadists and white-trash Negro haters, led by confidence men out to make a buck. I wouldn’t hire them to shovel out a stable, not least because they’d be too drunk to do a good job.”

  He relaxed. “Sorry. The original Klan after the Civil War was a gentleman’s outfit, Confederate officers fighting against Northern occupation—Forrest himself disbanded it when things got out of hand. What I mean is that there will be a fair number of respectable people unhappy that their right of community self-government’s being trampled, and ready to move.”

  “Well, you’d know, Captain. Until I joined the army, I’d never been farther from New York than the Catskills,” Pearlmutter said.

  “Rebecca and you on for dinner Sunday? She and Louisa can talk about that Schools Council business afterward, and we can play chess.”

  “I don’t know, Captain,” the Jew said mock dubiously. “You’re learning too quickly.”

  Rolfe laughed and clapped the other man on the shoulder. He enjoyed Sol’s company, in reasonable doses; he played a wickedly challenging game of chess, and he shared some of the Virginian’s taste in books, and he really knew classical music with a passionate zeal, enough to work hard at getting a chamber group started. Andy was more fun for a drink and a night out on the town, Salvo had taken to yachting with surprising enthusiasm, and his own relatives were the men for a horse-and-hounds meeting or a hunting safari.

  All in all, the Commonwealth of New Virginia was shaping up to be a very pleasant place to live, as well as to make money.

  I’ve just got to see that it develops in the right way, he thought. Having children changes a man’s perspective; I’ve got my sons’ legacies to think about now.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sacramento, California

  June 2009

  FirstSide

  “You were holding out on us,” Sarah Perkins said.

  “Yeah,” Tom answered, looking her straight in the eye. “And on our own chain of command as well. After you’ve listened to what we have to tell, so will you. Or,” he went on with a wry smile, “you’ll talk soothingly as you steer us to the rubber room.”

  Tom watched the black woman’s thin eyebrows go up a little, then further as she looked about her at the documents and printouts heaped around the apartment. They’d cleaned out the empty Chinese food cartons and pizza boxes, and made a quick-and-dirty attempt to get things into order. It still looked pretty messy.

  “This had better be good,” she warned. “I don’t get enough weekends at home with my family as it is.”

&n
bsp; Tully snorted. “This is better than good. This is X-Files come true.”

  Bad move, Tully. Bad move, Tom thought, watching her face.

  “Let’s start with that condor,” he said hurriedly.

  Four hours later she sat back; for the first time in the months he’d known her, Special Agent Perkins’s face looked slightly slack.

  “You have got to be shitting me,” she said slowly. Then she looked from one man to the other. “No, Tully could do it, but you’re too much of an Eagle Scout. You really believe this, don’t you?”

  Tom nodded. “It’s not that I want to believe it,” he said and held up his hand with two fingers upraised and the thumb crossed over the others. “I actually was an Eagle Scout. So… Scout’s honor.”

  The FBI agent looked at him for half a minute by the clock, steady and silent, a slight frown bending her thin brows. At last she sighed, a half-angry sound.

  “All right,” she said. “I’m not going to call for the rubber-room division just yet. This is the craziest story I’ve heard since I started with the Bureau, and we hear some fine varieties of paranoia. I don’t—didn’t—peg you two for woo-woos, though.”

  “I admit it sounds crazy,” Tom said earnestly, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his big hands knotted together. “And a lot of it depends on evidence we’re asking you to take on faith. So what we want you to do is check yourself, in a way only the Bureau can do. Check Adrienne’s… Adrienne Rolfe’s movements. Look for patterns. If we’re right, there’ll be some unmistakable evidence.”

  Perkins looked at them. The FBI system could do that: another legacy of the war. It wasn’t supposed to be used for domestic surveillance except in situations where terrorists were involved, or an extremely unambiguous threat to innocent life. Even then, under very careful safeguards. Doing so without authorization would be a career-wrecking move, and could possibly put Perkins in jail, unless they were retroactively blessed by success.

  Then she sighed again. “You two boys go for a walk and come back in fifteen minutes—I’ll be in enough trouble without letting anyone outside the Bureau see exactly how I’m going to do this. Congress would shut the whole system down in a minute if there was a hint of outsiders getting their hands on it. The ACLU is raising its head again, you know.”

  Tom nodded, carefully not smiling—the last thing he wanted to do was disturb a fragile equilibrium of belief. Outside the door, Tully extended a palm and they gave a silent high five, the smaller man grinning like a shark.

  “You nearly queered the pitch with that X-Files remark,” Tom said, turning down a stick of Tully’s gum. “God damn you and your hobby.”

  “Sorry,” Tully said. “Couldn’t resist. My sense of humor’s gonna be the death of me, someday.”

  “All right, you sons of bitches,” Perkins said in a growl as she opened the door and beckoned them back inside. “You know what you’ve gone and done now?”

  They looked a question at her, and she went on: “You’ve put me in the same goddamned position you were in—believing something I can’t prove. What the hell are we supposed to do, convince the world one friend at a time?”

  Tully shrugged. “Sort of slow,” he agreed. “Even for those of you who do have friends.”

  “You I wouldn’t have believed if you told me shit stinks,” she said. “I’ve got enough to convince me, now, but—”

  “What did you get?” Tom asked eagerly.

  “I used the identification net,” Perkins said.

  She nodded toward her PDA. The FBI had set up the system during the war; computers collating input from retina scanners, fingerprint and voiceprint scanners, and public surveillance cameras running face recognition software and reading things like license plate numbers. It had been extremely useful, but it had also never been popular—there were already calls for dismantling the whole system.

  I’ve wished that myself, Tom thought. But it is so damn useful.

  “I turned the information into hardcopy and then erased everything I could,” she said. “I’ve got clearance for remote-accessing it, although they’re probably going to restrict that soon. I will catch hell in a month or so, when they review requests and ask for a justification report.”

  Her PDA was securely fastened; the printout had been routed through Tom’s machine. And I’m willing to bet several of my favorite organs there’s no data trace back, he thought. Perkins’s name will be recorded at Bureau HQ, but she’s kept us out of it.

  “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 f
ist. 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.”