Conquistador Read online

  “Not like us Arkies down in dogpatch,” Tully said. “Why, mah daddy tanned the leather fer our shoes! After he wrassled him the bar, ’n’ rendered it down fer candles ’n’ tanned the hide.”

  “Your father was a lawyer,” Tom pointed out. “In Little Rock.”

  “Now that’s a filthy job,” Tully said, peeling back layers of sodden, droppings-laden paper. The acrid stench was heavy. “Hel-lo, what have we here?”

  “Well, well, well!” Tom said. “The Oakland Herald. Looks like our bird wasn’t LA-LA born. Closer to our neck of the woods, yah, you betcha. And what’s this?”

  One of the pungent linings at the bottom of the cage wasn’t newspaper. It was some sort of corporate letterhead.

  “‘Bosco Holdings,’” Tom read out; a white splotch of condor feces obliterated most of the rest, but there was a San Francisco address. “Bay Area. So far we’ve been about as useful as an udder on a billy goat. Here’s our chance.”

  Adrienne Rolfe stood with her hands on her hips and frowned as the fire engines went past her. The warehouse was a bellowing pillar of fire now; the first firemen on the scene were just trying to keep it from spreading rather than trying to put it out. With any luck it would keep burning until nothing was left but ash. Ashes could tell a surprising amount with modern forensic techniques, but they didn’t have the public-relations impact of intact pieces of dead animals—or, worse, living ones that shouldn’t be here. There were limits to what even the Commission could hush up, but the fire had kept a number of headlines unprinted.

  The crowd was growing now, mostly black with a scattering of Hispanics, watching the blinking lights of the police cars. The heat was dense, between the afternoon sun baking back from asphalt and walls and the thick crush, and the smell added to the normal throat-catching vileness of FirstSide city air to put her nerves on edge. That wasn’t all bad; it kept you alert. She still didn’t enjoy being jostled by strangers, or feeling this conspicuous.

  Nor was she the only one. The tall, pale-eyed, lanky man beside her muttered, “Verdonde kaffirs,” under his breath. Then “Varken hond!” at one teenager in low-slung pants whose head was like a shaved black cannonball beneath a yellow bandanna, and who’d casually elbowed him.

  Adrienne shifted, inconspicuously planting the low heel of her sensible leather walking shoe on her assistant’s toe and leaning her weight onto it. She wasn’t a small woman—five-nine and a hundred and thirty-five pounds—and there was a vicious expertise in the swift, painful grinding motion she used.

  “Schalk, remember where you are,” she said in a pleasant undertone as he yelped and staggered, distracted. “I’m not going to tell you again.”

  Freely translated, what he’d said meant goddamned niggers and pig-dog respectively. Those were not tactful expressions around here.

  Schalk van der Merwe scowled, but muttered a brief: “Sorry, miss.”

  Beside him Piet Botha rumbled agreement—with Adrienne. He was as tall as his partner, but older; a dark, bullet-headed, massive man with hands like spades and the beginnings of a kettle belly over solid muscle. One joint of the middle finger was missing from his left hand, and there were white scars running up both hands into the cuffs of his suit. She had her suspicions about how both of them felt working under her on this assignment, she being a she and a good bit younger than either, but she’d been the only member of the Thirty Families available and remotely qualified. Something like this was too important not to have a member of the Commission’s inner circle in charge. She strongly suspected that Piet was a lot calmer than his thinner colleague, which could be helpful in keeping Schalk in line.

  And I know I’m not going to let either of them screw this up, she thought, giving the FirstSider operation one final careful glance.

  Damn.

  The FirstSiders had gotten some stuff out of the offices; reluctantly, she admitted that must have taken guts and presence of mind. Three plainclothes operatives were examining items set out in the back of a van: a black woman, a short white man in high-waisted green pants and suspenders, and a very tall, well-built blond man a few years older than herself. They talked together for a few minutes, laughing at some joke, and then held up a photograph. That would be very bad… except that nobody would believe it. Particularly when digital photography was so easy to modify. Everyone here was used to seeing convincing images of impossible things.

  The Commission would have lost its secret long ago, if it weren’t for the convenient fact that it was simply too wild. People didn’t grasp it until they were shoved through, usually.

  “Another half hour, and the fire would have started before anyone got in,” Piet grumbled. “We should have set the timers shorter.”

  The tip had been so hot they’d come directly down from the San Francisco office without even changing clothes. The result was that they were breaking the first rule of FirstSide operations, sticking out like sore thumbs—standing out even more than they would have in costumes that were tailored for a quasi-slum area of LA, rather than the Commission’s outer-shell offices in the San Francisco financial district. So far no harm had been done, but when the news services began arriving—apart from the helicopter, which had been overhead since a few minutes after the police went in—and the cameras started panning across the crowd, they’d stand out like a Chumash shaman at a polo match. With a little bad luck, someone might stick a microphone in their faces and try to get a person-on-the-street reaction.

  They turned casually and walked back toward where their van was parked. Never get your face on a record if you could avoid it was another rule, and one getting harder and harder to follow, what with surveillance cameras popping up everywhere.

  They walked past more self-storage and then into streets of ordinary shops, seedy and many boarded up; they weren’t far from Sepulveda Boulevard. Knots of men and boys lingered on doorsteps, or leaned against cars; she was conscious of eyes following her, and a palpable mist of hostility toward the affluent white girl. Schalk and Piet stood out too, although not in any way that would attract local predators. In their expensive Armani suits and thousand-dollar shoes, they looked to be exactly what they were—a pair of merciless hulking killers stuffed into Armani suits and thousand-dollar shoes. Anyone who might think of attacking them would also probably recognize that they were armed. She smiled slightly; all three of them actually had valid concealed-carry permits for the Belgian FiveseveN specials under their jackets.

  Although not for the P90 machine pistols in the attaché cases, and some of the stuff in the vehicle would be right out of it. Semtex, timers, detonators, cans of gasoline and thermite bombs, for example. Even if the invoice reads “Cleaning supplies” back at HQ.

  Still, it wasn’t far to the van, and if they hadn’t been along she might have had to hurt somebody, which would be more conspicuous still.

  A couple of youths were lingering around the minivan; it was an inconspicuous Ford Windstar, several years old and externally a bit scuffed-up. That was ironic too. The Families were some of the richest people in the world—two worlds—and here, at least, they didn’t dare show it. Getting your picture in Town and Country or the gossip pages was enough to have your Gate privileges revoked. You could show a certain degree of affluence, but not real status, whether you were working or on vacation; and that was under threat of dire penalty. It was an important reason why so few members of the Thirty Families lived FirstSide anymore.

  Me, I just hate this place, she thought, as she clicked the little device on her key chain that unlocked the doors, turned off the alarms, and started the engine. The stink, the ugliness, the crowding, the swarms of strangers, with the stress that puts on you every moment, the fact that you have to lock everything up… did I mention the stink? Just a small-town girl at heart, I suppose.

  Schalk went over to one of the young men who was standing too close to the driver’s door and looked at him from an inch inside his personal space. After an instant, the would-be gangbanger took
three steps backward, stumbling on the curb. Then the Afrikaner smiled and inclined his head. “Danke, kleine maanetje,” he said sardonically, and held the door open for her.

  “We have a problem,” she said, as they pulled away from the curb.

  She drove conservatively, carefully, and rather slowly until they were northbound on the Harbor Freeway, on their way to the Santa Monica junction; they were staying at a hotel called La Montrose, which was quite tolerable. At midmorning on a Thursday, the traffic wasn’t too bad—open enough for her to enjoy the trip a little. Driving fast on broad limited-access roads was one of the real pleasures of FirstSide, like ballet and professional live theater. Of course, it was best with a sports car and an open stretch of desert, not this clunker in the midst of LA’s hideous sprawl.

  “Ja,” Piet said after a moment; he had checked that they weren’t being tailed. “That was too close. ’N Moerse probleem; we have to wrap this up quickly.”

  She nodded. Schalk was useful—she’d heard he once grabbed a bandit’s neck and left wrist, and then pulled the arm right off at the shoulder—but Piet was actually capable of thought, too. Well, they both earn their corn, each in his own way, she thought, and went on aloud: “But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that we’re working against both someone with Commonwealth connections who’s managed to smuggle goods past Gate Security, and against FirstSide law enforcement, this time. And the FirstSiders have a good lead they’re working on; otherwise they wouldn’t have known about the warehouse.”

  She paused for a moment. “It’s like two birds eating a worm. We have the New Virginia end, they have the FirstSide end; and we’re in far too much danger of meeting in the middle. That would be very bad.”

  Piet frowned. “Yes, miss, that means we have to be quick.”

  “That means we have to find out what they know,” she said. “Beyond what our usual pipelines can tell us. They don’t know what we really are, and we don’t want to give them ideas, either. Sometimes the questions you ask tell more than answers would.”

  Schalk looked a little baffled. Piet gave her a glance of surprised respect; she kept her own reaction to that politely concealed. He should have been smart enough to realize that the Commission wouldn’t send a complete figurehead along on a field operation, even one with her bloodline. The Old Man was ready enough to indulge a grandchild’s whim, but not where it could have a serious impact on business.

  “And I’ve got the inkling of an idea about how,” she said thoughtfully. “I need to do some research first. If things are the way I think… we’ll still need permission to use it—authorization from the Committee, possibly from the Old Man.”

  Schalk muttered something in his native tongue. She didn’t really speak Afrikaans—she had fluent Spanish, which was much more useful here FirstSide, plus French and Italian and a little German, which were sometimes handy in the Commonwealth of New Virginia. She had picked up a fair smattering of vocabulary in the past eighteen months, since these two were assigned to her as a combination of bodyguards, gofers and muscle.

  “Yes, Operative van der Merwe, he is my grandfather,” she said sweetly. Schalk flushed. “But that’s going to make talking him into what I have in mind harder, not easier.”

  INTERLUDE

  May 5, 1946

  The Commonwealth of New Virginia

  The flicker of the campfire cast unrestful red light on the faces of the five men who sat about it; a battered camp coffeepot bubbled away on three stones in the midst of the coals and low red flames, sending its good smell drifting along with the clean hot scent of burning oak wood, the tule elk steaks they’d grilled, and the briny smell of the bay not far to the west. An occasional pop sent red sparks drifting slowly skyward, up toward the shimmer of firelight on the leaves of the big coast live oak whose massive branches writhed above them, and toward the stars that frosted the sky in an arch above. Their simple campsite stood on the fringe of the circle of light, three army-surplus tents and a few bales and boxes; horses snorted nearby, stamping and pulling at their tethers as something big grunted and pushed its way through a thicket. Faint and far beyond that was the chanting of the Ohlone Indians in their village, where a shaman held a ceremony to decide the meaning of the strangers with their wonderful gifts and terrible weapons.

  Closer to the fire was a neat stack of small tough canvas sacks, crimped tightly shut. There were ten of them, and each held an even hundred pounds of gold in nuggets and dust.

  “Now, would any of you have believed a word of it before you saw it with your own eyes?” John Rolfe said.

  He looked around as they shook their heads. His cousins Robert and Alan, Aunt Antonia’s sons, alike as two peas in a pod, tall, lean young men just turned twenty-one, their long faces much like his but with the dirty-blond hair and blue eyes showing the Fitzmorton coloring of their father. They were just out of the service too. Rob had been running a tank-destroyer company in Italy, and Alan had been a B-17 pilot based out of England; they’d just finished picking flak shrapnel out of his butt. Then there was Andy O’Brien, the big beefy freckle-faced Boston Irishman who’d been top sergeant in Rolfe’s unit—not to mention a notable shot even in a division known as the Deadeyes; and Salvatore Colletta, small and smart and with the best poker face Rolfe had ever come across. He’d been Rolfe’s personal radioman, as well as an artist with a Thompson. He had a tommy gun lying against the log at his back, and his dark, thin features were utterly expressionless as he leaned forward to light his cigarette from a splinter. His cheeks hollowed as he inhaled, showing blue-black stubble; Salvatore was in his early twenties too, but the big black eyes were ancient in the thin Sicilian face.

  “But are you sure this isn’t our California, a long time ago?” O’Brien asked uneasily. “And we could all go… pop, like a soap bubble, if we changed the things that made us.”

  Rolfe shook his head. “The first time I came through, I carved numbers on rocks in places I could locate on both sides—boulders, cliff faces—carved them deep enough to last for thousands of years. There’s no trace of them back on our side of the Gate, where we know it’s 1946. I’m still going to get some astronomers to look at pictures of the night sky—the stars change with time, you know—but I’m pretty certain this is the same time as back there in California, the spring of 1946. It’s just a world where somehow white men never showed up. A different past, a different history, but the moon and sun are exactly the same, and the shape of the land, and the plants and animals—everything except what men have done.”

  “That gives us a monopoly, then,” Rob Fitzmorton said, and went on with a dreamy smile: “There’s an awful lot of gold in them thar hills. Francesca is going to be pretty damned happy.”

  “We can’t just go back and turn the gold into money,” Rolfe went on. “Salvo? Fill them in.”

  “Yeah, you got that right, Cap’n,” Colletta said; it sounded more like youse got dat roit, in a hard nasal big-city accent straight from the corner of Hester and Baxter in Manhattan. “For starters, that figghi’e’bottana Roosevelt, he made it against the law to own gold, back before the war.”

  O’Brien blinked in surprise. “What can we do with it, then?”

  His voice was South Boston; not unlike the Italian’s, but with a hint of a brogue in it now and then, and the odd stretched New England-style vowel.

  Colletta chuckled and shrugged. “Nah, maybe—just maybe—I might know some guys who’ve got, like, a flexible attitude about that sort of stupid rule, for a reasonable little cut. Guys who got relatives in Los Angeles. Maybe the cap’n was thinking of that when he invites me on this little hunting trip.”

  His eye caught his ex-commander’s, and they gave an imperceptible nod of perfect mutual understanding.

  “Risky, though,” Rob Fitzmorton said. “Not that I’ve got any objection to getting rich, and y’all can take that to the bank. Jail I could do without.”

  Rolfe reached out with a bandanna around his hand and p
oured more of the strong black coffee into his mug. There was something chill in his eyes, and his smile showed an edge of teeth.

  “You’re thinking small,” he said. “All of you.”

  A snatch of poetry came to him: breathless upon a peak in Darien. And hadn’t Francis Drake touched land near here, as he took the Golden Hind around the world? The thought went down like a jolt of fine bourbon, and the heat in his gut was better than that. They’d filled his dreams as a boy, the conquistadors and sea dogs, the buccaneers like Morgan, the frontiersmen and adventurers like Andy Jackson and Crockett and Boone who’d carved states out of wilderness…. And no stingy monarch in Madrid or London to take the plunder and the glory, not this time. No Washington to answer to, either.

  He indicated the canvas sacks. “That’s a little over half a million there, for a month’s work and travel time. That isn’t rich. That’s seed money; what we need to fit out the next expedition and hire the help. Then there’s no limit to what we could do. Centuries from now, there could be statues of us here, and generations learning our names in school—a new world waiting for us, the way it did for our ancestors.”

  “We’ll be like the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth Rock, then?” O’Brien said, and chuckled at the scowls of the three Virginians. “In a manner of speaking, Captain.”

  Salvatore’s voice kindled. “Yeah! We’re the only people here on… on… what in hell, the Other Side…

  “I’m going to call it New Virginia,” Rolfe cut in. “The Commonwealth of New Virginia.”

  “Right, Cap’n, we’re the only ones in New Virginia who aren’t bare-assed Injuns walking around with bones through their noses and gourds on their ciollas. To hell with just getting rich. This place is our oyster. And we get filthy stinking rich,” Colletta said.

  Rolfe nodded. So did his cousins, which didn’t surprise him; he’d known both the Fitzmorton boys since they were in short pants, and the families had been related since about the time the first John Rolfe discovered Virginia was a good place to grow tobacco. Both were newly married with children on the way, and the family rumor mill said Rob’s war bride was an impoverished Italian aristocrat with expensive tastes, at that.