Conquistador Read online

  “Yes, sir. But it’s also getting more suspicious when people disappear over on FirstSide, too. The crime rate’s down there, and they tightened up on security a lot during the war, with identity cards and biometric scanners all over the place.

  “Sirs,” she went on earnestly, glancing from her father to her grandfather and back, “we have to tighten up too. We’ve got to put anything illegal—or just rare and unusual—on FirstSide on the prohibited list, and we’ve got to be more careful about bringing the American authorities down on us.”

  “We’re not in the business of enforcing United States laws,” her father said.

  John Rolfe’s upraised hand cut short her reply. He spoke instead: “We are when it’s to our advantage, Charles,” he said mildly. “The agent has a point. You and I can discuss it later. Now, back to the matter at hand: investigating the investigation on FirstSide. I agree that it has potential, albeit also risks.”

  “I don’t like it,” Charles said slowly.

  “Neither do I, very much,” his father said. “Is there anyone other than Agent Rolfe in a position to do the legwork? Or can you get the Commission to act quickly and decisively here in the Commonwealth, so that we need not move on FirstSide?”

  “Not easily,” Charles said, rubbing the fingertips of his right hand over his forehead. “Not without definite proof the Collettas are up to something. Not only would creating a stink be a godsend to the Imperialist faction, but I’d have to step on the corns of a lot of influential Settler business interests, restrict their trans-Gate exports and capacity to earn FirstSide dollars—and the Commission’s monopolies are unpopular enough as it is. That would bring in the Families they’re affiliated with—you know they can’t afford to ignore their clients’ complaints. Not if they don’t want them looking for new patrons.” There was a hint of frustrated anger in his voice.

  His father grinned, not unsympathetically. “Well, I did set this place up with a more decentralized power structure than I might have if I’d had perfect precognition,” he said. “Though efficiency isn’t everything… but I think that does reinforce Adrienne’s point.”

  Adrienne kept her face expressionless. She wouldn’t have let the Commonwealth’s government drift into the sort of sloppy, amorphous neofeudalism that had evolved here over the past couple of generations, but it suited the Old Man fine most of the time.

  Keeps life interesting and colorful, was the way he put it: or mildly chaotic and dangerous, from another point of view. The Old Man was an inveterate romantic, when he thought he could afford it.

  “Very well,” Charles Rolfe said. “Sir, we’ll discuss the whole matter when I return to Rolfe Manor this weekend, if that’s agreeable.” His eyes went back to his youngest daughter. “And I’m giving you an unrestricted authorization for FirstSide,” he said. “Get results, Agent; get them quickly. I don’t care how, within the Regulations.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, coming to her feet and saluting.

  Handsomely done, Dad, she added to herself, as her father rose to see her out. The Regulations for FirstSide operations boiled down to “Don’t get caught.” He may be a lot more ponderous than the Old Man, but he does have a certain style when he decides to do something.

  She took the hand he extended. “Baciamo le mani,” she said, bowing and kissing it.

  “Be careful,” he said gruffly, and rested the palm on her shoulder for an instant.

  “I will,” she said, and added with an urchin grin, “And I intend to have a good time doing it, too, Dad.”

  San Francisco, California

  June 2009

  FirstSide

  “Well, it’s not much,” Tully said, handing over a medium-thick folder of printout. “Just the public stuff.”

  “More than I’ve got so far,” Tom said. “Bosco Holdings is a ghost, as far as the U.S. is concerned. They’ve got a bank account, and another in the Caymans; I couldn’t get anything out of them; they’d never heard of California Fish and Game. That would take Perkins; she’d get results fast enough, but…”

  “But they’d be her results.”

  Offshore banks were a lot less secretive these days, at least as far as U.S. government “requests” were concerned; there had been a couple of spectacular cases of strong-arming during the later mopping-up years of the war, and none of the little countries that specialized in no-questions-asked wanted a repeat while memories of Uncle Sam’s heavy hand remained fresh.

  “Let me take a look,” the big man went on.

  He skimmed the results of his partner’s research; they were sitting on a bench outside the Civic Center, which was still the best area in San Francisco to do digging of this type—the big central library was nearby, and the morgue files of the newspapers. For a wonder it was neither foggy nor uncomfortably cool nor too windy, and the Civic Plaza area was a pleasant place to sit, especially since the area wasn’t swarming with bums anymore, what they’d called “homeless” back in the twentieth century. The great Beaux-Arts pile of the city hall reared at their backs, a dome higher than the Capitol in Washington as solitary reminder of the plans made and discarded after the quake of 1906; before them were espaliered trees flanking a strip of grass, green with an intensity that only San Francisco and Ireland seemed able to produce.

  “Rolfe” had produced a couple of historical articles dealing with early Virginia—he turned out to be the guy who’d married Pocahontas. Funny, I always thought it was John Smith. They’d had two sons before being killed in the Indian massacre of 1622; the children married into the ramifying families of the Virginian aristocracy and apparently did nothing much of note besides grow tobacco and breed like bunnies, thus making George Washington and Jimmy Carter descendants of the Powhatan chieftains; a politician or general here and there, declining into middle-class mediocrity after the Civil War.

  The next reference was to a business-history site. Tully had printed that article out in full.

  “This is strange,” Tom said. “The mining business is too legit. There’s nothing in these shell companies but mailboxes and bank accounts—most of them—but RM and M looks like a genuine business. Solid. Lots of assets, lots of employees. Lots of profits, too—according to this, their costs per ounce are half the industry average.”

  “No reason they couldn’t be bent and have a legit side,” Tully said dubiously.

  Tom grunted and read, skimming with the ease of someone who’d been flipping through reports most of his adult life. Rolfe Mining and Minerals Inc. Founded by John Rolfe in 1946, and he’d been born in Virginia in 1922; apparently a real connection to the Pocahontas people. He scanned quickly down the article, but found no picture of the man.

  “No visuals?” he said, looking up at Tully.

  “Nothing,” his partner replied. “Not in the back files of the newspapers, not in the society magazines, and not anywhere on the Web. Interesting, isn’t it, for someone with that much money? I’ve got a request pending with the Pentagon—there might be something from WWII.”

  “It is interesting,” Tom said cautiously: Tully had a tendency to leap to convictions. “But it’s not illegal. By lots of money, you mean lots of money, I presume?”

  “Read on, Kemosabe. Tonto think it maybe too quiet there.”

  Rolfe had a fairly impressive service record; commissioned out of VMI at twenty in ’42, service with the Ninety-sixth Infantry in the Pacific, Purple Heart and field promotion on Letye, another Purple, a Silver Star and a serious wound on Okinawa, which was why he hadn’t ended the war as a major at least.

  Then the move to San Francisco, like so many veterans who’d shipped out through the Bay Area during the Great Unpleasantness. His company had gotten big fast in the postwar boom, diversifying in the sixties into real estate, banking and insurance, but staying a closely held private corporation; no more than the minimum SEC information. That meant no real idea of what they were worth, but it had to be immense, just from the publicly acknowledged holdings—a corporate he
adquarters in the San Francisco financial district, and a huge warehouse complex in Oakland. There were also offshore operations, theoretically independent: the Caymans, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bermuda, which hinted at massive assets moved out of country for tax purposes, plus mining properties in Africa and Asia and odd corners of South America. And those odd subsidiaries, which didn’t fit at all.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Tom said, crossing an ankle over his knee and considering the documents in his lap. “A bad feeling that our promising lead is evaporating.”

  “Yeah, it smells funny,” Tully said, fishing for cigarettes inside his jacket and then popping a stick of gum into his mouth instead. “There was what, maybe ten, fifteen million worth of stuff in that warehouse?”

  “ ’Bout that.” Tom nodded.

  “Which is petite larceny to this crowd,” Tully replied. “Cappuccino money.”

  “Yeah. People that rich don’t do crime—not below the bribe-the-dictator-of-Corruptistan level when they need a pipeline concession. Hell, even the Italians went respectable when they made their pile. That’s the way it works; you get into organized crime, make a bundle, and your kids or grandkids invest it and get out. Hell on a stick, RM and M is old money now by Californian standards. I’d expect them to be living off capital gains and making donations to worthy causes, maybe the third generation becoming art collectors or painters or living in cabins in the north woods.”

  “The Bad Things could be happening at a lower level,” Tully said. “Someone in this ratfuck of corporations, rather than the top management themselves. But the condor did pass through Oakland, RM and M does have that big facility there, and we did find the Bosco Holdings stationary in the cage.”

  Tom flipped back to the beginning and looked at who RM&M had done business with in its early days.

  He transferred some data into his PDA. “All right, we’ll split up and tackle it from both ends. I’ll take this angle; we could use some firsthand background on RM and M in its early days. You go sniff around that complex of theirs in Oakland. It’s a little odd, a company this big still doing the physical with warehouses and such rather than outsourcing.”

  “Will do, Kemosabe,” Tully said. “Be careful.”

  “Aren’t I always?”

  “No,” Tully answered bluntly. “You forget that stepping on toes can get you kicked in the balls. We’re talking a really big, well-established California firm here. They’re bound to have pull. Enough to get an investigation quashed, unless it’s damn well grounded. I’d want to have something pretty solid before we go see our esteemed boss, and rock-solid before he goes public. Otherwise we’re likely to end up in California’s Siberia.”

  Tom watched him head for the BART station, then thought silently for a half hour or so; intently motionless, so much so that a couple of pigeons walked over his shoes, and a beat cop almost rousted him for sleeping on the benches—the SFPD were fanatics about that, since the big cleanups.

  “Time to spend some shoe leather,” he said to himself. “See how the facts jibe with the speculation.”

  “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….”

  INTERLUDE

  June 7th, 1950

  San Francisco

  FirstSide

  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…