Conquistador (35 page)

The big Afrikaner had been surprised at how wet this area seemed, after having seen the same places FirstSide; swamps covered a third of it even in the dry summer, not counting salt marsh along the coastline, and vast fields of wild mustard rose higher than a rider's head, thick with game. It didn't rain that much on the low country in either universe, but here all the runoff from the mountains seeped into the great underground reservoirs, and welled to the surface in innumerable springs and damp spots where the lay of the land forced it to the surface. Nobody had pumped the aquifers dry here, or logged off the mountains, or crammed twenty-five million thirsty human beings onto the land.

Piet Botha's wife came out onto the
stoep
and set a tray with coffee and
koeksisters
on the table between the two men. She was a short, slight woman in contrast to her hulking husband, with curling brown hair and blue eyes.

“Dinner will be ready soon,” she said, turning and finishing over her shoulder as she walked back into the house, wiping her hands on her apron, “if I can keep that
nahua
girl from ruining it—she throws chilies into
everything
if you don't watch her like a hawk. Lamb
sosaties
and rice today.”

Piet smacked his lips; that meant cubes of lamb marinated in wine and vinegar, spiced with coriander, pepper, turmeric and tamarind, strung on skewers with apricots and peppers, and grilled over a clear wood fire—chaparral scrub oak did wonders.

He and his companion sipped their coffee, ate the doughnutlike sweet pastries and watched the Botha children playing in the garden; the plantings were three years old and it was already well along, trees sprouting amid the flowers with Californian speed, some of the blue gum eucalyptus already thirty feet high. A grove of native oaks gave an illusion of age offset by the half-built buildings in a clump to the east; storage sheds, stables, barn, garage, all in a litter of beams and planks and stacks of adobe brick. A pump chugged in the background, pulling water from a reservoir fed by mountain springs for the house and the automated-drip irrigation system.

“Much better,” Botha said, after a spell of companionable silence. “Man, talk about luck! I'm glad I listened to
Oom
Versfeld, I'll tell you that! They don't call him
Slim
Hendrik, Clever Hendrik, for nothing.”

Schalk van der Merwe scowled. “He should have held out for the
real
Cape,” he said. “Not just land here. If not for our own land, what were we fighting for?”

“We fought for South Africa,” Botha said, his slow deep voice giving an extra gravity to the guttural sounds of Afrikaans. “We lost. What do Boers do when we lose? We
trek,
man, we go somewhere else.”

The moaning rhythmic grunt of a lion's roar sounded in the distance, as the first stars appeared overhead. A loose scattering of house lights stood miles apart along the foot of the mountains, and a few headlights crawled along the north-south road that ended at San Diego.

Botha chuckled. “This is about as
else
as you can get. Being beaten once was bad enough. I don't want to start the same fight over again right away.”

“Hell,” Schalk said, waving his doughnut; a little syrup dropped onto his khaki shirt. “The bushmen and the blacks in South Africa—on this side of the Gate—they're bare-arsed savages. Just like the ones our ancestors beat at Blood River; and we'd have machine guns and armor and aircraft, not ox-wagons and flintlock
roers.
”

“And just where would we get the armored cars, and the ammunition, and the fuel, if we were on the other side of the world from here?” Botha said.

He pointed southwest, toward Long Beach. “
Kerel,
eighty kilometers that way is the only oil well in the world. And the only refinery.” He pointed over his shoulder, northward toward Rolfeston and the Gate. “And up there's the only place with access to modern weapons or anything else. We'd be back to ox-wagons and flintlocks bliddy soon, if we tried leaving for Africa! Even if the Commission would allow it—which they won't.”

“We could set up our own factories, in time,” Schalk said stubbornly. “We'd have our own country with our own language and customs, where we wouldn't be scattered among damned foreigners the way we are here. A
Boerstaat
for
ons volk.
”

“Oh, all three thousand of us could man the factories, while we were conquering and settling the country?” Botha said. “Or the Commission would allow a mass migration from FirstSide—and explain to the world why all the Boers were leaving, and where they were going?”

He paused, stroked his jaw as if in thought, then spoke: “I have it, man! Even if there are only a few thousand of us, we could use the
kaffirs
in our factories. Of course, we'd have to teach them to read, wouldn't we, to make them useful? Hand out Bibles, hey? And we'd give them modern medicine so all their children survived. . . .”

Botha spoke with heavy sarcasm: “Haven't I seen this film before, someplace,
jong?
You know, it started well, but I didn't like the ending!”

Schalk flushed. “It would be different this time. We could keep the
kaffirs
in order without any outsiders telling us—”

“
Ja,
it would be different—for a while. Maybe a long while. Maybe not. Schalk, if you really want to do something for the
volk,
you should find a girl, get married and have a dozen children.
That
would help.”

The door behind them opened.

“It's ready; come in to dinner,” Botha's wife said, and then called to the children. When they had been sent off to wash their hands, she went on: “And stop talking foolishness about going back, on
either
side of the Gate, Schalk. If I never see one of
them
again, it'll be too soon.”

Perkins went out on a stretcher; the bodies of the dead were dumped unceremoniously into a big metal crate. Men were scrubbing at red stains on the gallery floor outside, presumably where the departing Vietnamese had departed much more permanently than they anticipated. Industrial-strength cleaning machines foamed and whirred—and their users wore overalls with the name of a well-known janitorial company. Others moved about scanning with eyes and instruments for any sign of the firefight. He saw one group extract a bullet from the plaster of a wall and begin repairs immediately, grouting and plaster and quick-drying paint. The heavy smell of the cleansing chemicals overrode the feces-and-blood stinks of violent death; in half an hour, even a forensics team would have trouble proving anything untoward had happened here.

“That's the cleanup squad, I presume?” Tully said. “Impressive.”

Adrienne started slightly, brought out of a brown study. “Yes. We've managed to keep one of the biggest secrets in human history for sixty-three years now. We didn't do it by being incompetent.”

“Impressive,” Tully said again, his voice full of enthusiasm. “Say, you don't really need to keep the cuffs on us—”

Adrienne looked at him, snorted, and walked faster.

Tom whispered to his partner: “Brilliant. Short, but brilliant.”

An ambulance was parked outside, and a Ford Windstar van, as well as a truck with the logo of the cleaning company supposedly at work within—or for all he knew, RM and M actually
did
own the firm. It would certainly be a good way to hide a cleanup squad. As he watched, two men got into Christiansen's own vehicle across the street and drove away. The pseudo-paramedics loaded Perkins into the ambulance and did likewise. The big metal box with the bodies came down on a dolly and went up on a hydraulic lift into the truck with the company name.

Bet all the other evidence goes the same way,
he thought. Then, with a hint of eeriness:
And it'll all also go where we're going—somewhere literally out of this world. Maybe it isn't quite so crazy that they've been able to keep the secret. When you can throw evidence away and know it'll never come back . . .

Adrienne stopped at the rear of the Windstar. “Are you up to handling them, Botha?” she asked sharply.

“Ja,”
he said, and shook himself like a bear. “Yes, miss. It's . . . I didn't think anyone could buy Schalk. He was a good man, not
slim,
not clever, but a good soldier.”

“I don't think anyone could buy him either,” Adrienne said, and put a hand on his shoulder in a moment's odd gentleness. She looked about to make sure that nobody was within earshot. “Not with money. This is political; that's why you've got to keep quiet about how it happened. As far as the official debrief is concerned, he was killed in the firefight. Now let's get going.”

With their hands cuffed behind their backs, Tom and Tully needed help as they climbed awkwardly into the back of the van; the big Afrikaner's hand had the impersonal strength of a mechanical grab. Tom evaluated him objectively as they passed close.

I could take him,
he decided.
He's about my weight and plenty strong, experienced too, or I miss my guess, but I'm a decade younger at least and I'm not carrying any fat.

Of course, that was in anything like a fair fight. Being woozy from a dose of tear-and-puke gas, and having your hands fastened behind your back, did
not
count as “fair” under reasonable definition. As it was, Botha could crush his skull with a couple of blows of his massive fist.

The van had seats around the interior, with storage bins beneath them. It also had two wheelchairs fastened to the floor, facing backward and equipped with restraints on the legs and arms, the sort they used for violent patients in mental hospitals. Adrienne stayed on the road between the doors until they were secured, one hand under her suit jacket. Not many people could draw and shoot accurately in conditions like these; he was willing to bet she was one. Botha put Tully in his chair first, then Tom, working from behind the wheelchair, then took up a position behind them as the doors slammed shut and locked.

“There's redundancy for you,” Tully said, and Tom snorted a bitter chuckle.

“Shut up,” Botha said, and prodded him painfully in the back of the head with the muzzle of his pistol.

There was a spell of mixed boredom and rising tension; they couldn't see much through the small dark-tinted windows in the back of the van. Roads, then alleyways between tall buildings, occasional halts. Then brilliant light. The doors were thrown open and the wheelchairs unfastened and rolled down a ramp by silent armed guards in standard rent-a-cop outfits. They were inside a building's loading dock; then they were pushed down corridors of blank pastel, lit by overhead fluorescents. The place had the cold, deserted, silent feel of a facility where only the night shift was on duty.

Well, it
is
three-fifteen in the morning,
Tom thought.

They stopped in a set of rooms that had the unmistakable cold, astringent smell of a hospital or clinic. A check-in desk was labeled DECON AND CONTAINMENT.

Tom's ears perked up when a nurse in a white coat looked up from the desk and spoke; she had the same accent as Bosco and Adrienne. Rather stronger, if anything, as if she wasn't trying to tone it down. She did not, he was interested to notice, have one of the platinum-and-gold thumb rings on her left hand.

“This clinic is under continual surveillance,” she said, indicating the cameras in the corners. “If you cause any trouble, the guards will be back here in seconds. The exterior doors are locked, and won't open for anyone without the right retina and palmprint. Are you going to make trouble?”

“Ma'am, we wouldn't dream of it,” Tom said.

“Good,” she said, getting up and undoing their restraints. “This is FirstSide Decon. You'll be checked here, and then given sleeping space until the next available transit, which is scheduled for”—she glanced at a computer screen on her desk—“seven tomorrow.”

A shower followed, in hot water that contained some sharp-smelling antiseptic, and a few minutes in a chamber with UV lamps all around. The medical exam was thorough, and used all the latest equipment. They were shown to a small cubicle with a thick locked door, a single toilet and sink, and two bunks; he took the lower and sank into unconsciousness with a swiftness the thin lumpy pallet didn't deserve.