Conquistador (4 page)

“Yeah,” Tom said, with an answering chuckle. It was nice to have
some
comic relief in a day like this.

Above their loincloths, the “priests” were all wearing T-shirts, black ones, showing a dancing skeleton with a chaplet of red roses and more blossoms falling around it.

“Isn't that an album cover from one of those sixties rocker groups that kept on performing until they were shuffling around the stage in walkers with oxygen tubes up their noses?” Tom said.

Perkins got it first. “Grateful Dead. I didn't know they were touring Mexico
that
long ago.”

They all laughed at that; it was odd how a picture of carnage that would make you faintly sick if it were real looked ludicrous when you knew it was fake, no matter how good the illusion.

“Well, that seems to be that for now,” the FBI agent said. “Let's get our part of this ratfuck cleared up, at least.”

She shook hands with the SOU wardens, and Tom Christiansen turned to go; he had to arrange to get the condor into the proper hands at the San Diego Zoo's captive-breeding program, and then they had to
catch
these smugglers and put them away for a long, long time. In a way this ratfuck would help—they could add arson and reckless negligence, possibly attempted homicide, to the count of crimes—but it meant that the bad guys were still one step ahead of them.

As he turned, he caught sight of something that stood out from the crowd, enough to stop him for an instant. Two men as tall as or taller than he was, one of them as big, which was rare; they were also white men, not common on the street in this part of South Central, and dressed in conservative narrow-stripe business suits. They were just turning away. Between them was a young woman who must be tall herself; he caught a glimpse of bright hair and then the trio were lost in the crowd.

Well, that's California,
he thought.
Always surprises.

Tully put a hand on his arm as he turned back, with a slight facial twitch that said
Hang around
and
Shhhhh!
Tom waited until the FBI agent had left before he raised a brow.

“Strikes me that there's one place we haven't looked, Kemosabe,” Tully said. “The condor's cage.”

Tom nodded, sighing a little. “It's a dirty job—” he began.

“No worse than shoveling out the chicken house back on the farm,” Tully said, pulling out two pairs of disposable gloves.

“We were wheat farmers,” Tom said, drawing the tight plastic over his fingers and keeping a wary eye on the bird. On the one hand, condors weren't very aggressive. On the other, they were very big, and so were their claws and beaks. “We got our chicken at the A and P, like everyone else.”

“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.

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.”