Conquistador

CHAPTER EIGHT

“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.”

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 fist. 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.”

“Aha,” Tom said. “Not a bad idea, Sarah. You want to poison the well.”

That was a standard covert-ops trick. If you found out someone had a double agent in your operation, you could use the fink to feed the enemy disinformation, making him an unwitting triple agent. In this case, Tom had been the leak; and now he could give Adrienne Rolfe information she’d probably take at face value.

Making me a very witting triple agent, Tom thought. He still felt a hot flush of anger every time he remembered how she’d played him for a fool.

“There’s only one problem,” Tully said. “Well, a lot of problems, but they all start at the same place. If we try to catch her red-handed—not to mention the mysterious dissident from RM and M—we’ll have to do it by ourselves. Just the three of us. No backup. Luckily, Ms. Rolfe and her opponents both seem to prefer to work quiet, but this time we’ll be on the same scale. If we screw the pooch, we’re rogues and we all get cashiered and probably do time. Anyone want to bet RM and M hasn’t got enough political pull to see that done?”

“Unless we can blow this open and bring them down.” Tom shrugged. “We’ll just have to be very careful.”

“Sorry,” Tom Christiansen said into the phone. “But I can’t make it tonight.”

“Is something wrong, Tom?” Adrienne’s voice said. “You sound odd.”

Because I’m trying not to scream and jump around, he thought tightly. Undercover work is not my thing. And I really liked you, God damn it.

“Work,” he said. “Another bust, believe it or not.”

“Ah,” she replied—and was it his imagination that heard a sharper interest? “You’re really making progress! Where would that be?”

When he’d finished sweat beaded his brow, and he could feel it cold and clammy in his armpits. She had to suspect something fishy. God, that was lame!

To his surprise, Tully gave him a grin and a thumbs-up. He looked at Perkins and raised his brows.

“Not bad,” she said—which was her equivalent of Tully’s gestures. “That should have worked. After all, the last time you told her we were going on a bust it worked like clockwork for her.”

“Yeah,” Tully said, spitting his gum into a wastebasket and crackling his knuckles with glee. “Only this time, we’re going to be there first.”

“I wish we had more backup,” Tully said.

“Then we’d have to convince ’em we weren’t crazy,” Perkins pointed out.

Maybe we are crazy, Tom thought.

The three of them pulled the dark knit hoods down from their foreheads to cover their faces; the night-sight glasses were a lot less conspicuous that way, too. Perkins had gotten them Bureau-issue, better than the SOU could afford, and better than the military ones he’d used in the Rangers—of course, that was years ago now, too. These were the latest model, not much bulkier than sunglasses, and there was less of the green glow he remembered unfondly from the ’Stans and Iraqi Kurdistan. He took a last look at the copy of the building diagram before stuffing it back into his pocket; in, upper left-hand gallery, fourth entrance from the far end.

The glasses revealed the deserted nighttime street in all its seediness, down to the piece of newspaper blowing along the sidewalk with a tiny scritch… scritch… scritch of crumpled newsprint on concrete. They said Oakland had boomed since the nineties, but you couldn’t tell that from this neighborhood; the only other car in sight was resting on flat rims and probably hadn’t moved in years. A couple of failed attempts at renovation punctuated the decay of the buildings. Even the air seemed to have a stale smell, far from the living stinks of the bay.

“All right,” Tom said quietly, racking a round of double-aught into his shotgun; he’d have preferred a machine pistol or an automatic carbine, but they couldn’t go to the armory and draw as needed in this operation. “Everyone receiving clearly?”

The other’s murmurs came through the button microphone in his left ear. “We go in, collar the perps and then wait until Ms. Rolfe and/or minions arrive, at the time I gave her.” A grin. “I do hope your information was good, Sarah.”

She shrugged. “The Russians are bringing their Viet contacts to meet their source, so they can all kiss and make up,” she said. “Or at least that’s what our source said. Knowing what we know, that means at least two people from… ah… you-know-where.” Perkins had been avoiding the phrase “alternate universe.” “We grab everyone, call in the good guys, and break the news on an unsuspecting world…. Let’s go.”

They did, walking across the street with their weapons down by their sides, unnoticeable to a casual passerby in case one came through this rundown part of West Oakland. A few of the buildings were sealed, windows shuttered and marked with FOR RENT signs; not far away traffic hummed along the Nelson Mandela Parkway, and nearer the water to their south a diesel locomotive blatted mournfully as it drew a load of containers up from the docks. Tom checked the street number twice, because the building looked as shuttered and deserted as anything here. He was surprised at how nervous he felt, until he realized it was mostly a peculiar form of institutional loneliness.

I’ve been a team player too long, he thought. First in the army, then with Fish and Game.

It wasn’t just a matter of having backup in the physical sense; operating on his own was nothing new. But he was used to being on the side of the angels, or at least on the side of the duly authorized, licensed and officially approved. If things went messily wrong here he’d be filed under rogue cop, and so would his friends. The sensation made him a little queasy, and it was unfamiliar. Somehow the thought of being killed wasn’t nearly as nerve-racking as the thought of being classified with the villains afterward.

I may be nervous, he thought, suppressing the sensation with an effort of will. But I’ll be goddamned if I’ll be scared.

He drew his foot back for a boot-heel entry—the door was sheet metal around the lock, and didn’t look especially strong.

“Let me,” Perkins said, touching him on the sleeve.

She pulled out what looked like a blank Yale with a miniature doorknob on the handle. It hummed a little as she inserted the key end, then went through a series of barely audible clicks before turning inert.

“Sensors on the key,” she said softly, twisting the knob. “Adjusts it automatically… there! Standard-issue these days.”

“Fart, Barf and Itch get all the cool toys,” Tully said, his jaws working on a wad of gum.

The front doors led into a long two-story hall, part of an old converted warehouse that someone had hoped would become a nest of boutiques, upscale shops and eateries. Spiral staircases on either side led up to two galleries, giving access to shops and offices mostly vacant, like the ones on the ground floor. Most of those that were occupied had signs in various Asian scripts.

Tom brought the shotgun up, eyes flickering back and forth. “Go,” he whispered, hearing his voice in an eerie echo from the ear mike, ready to suppress anyone who shot at them. Hopefully the villains wouldn’t know they were coming, but nobody ever got killed by being too ready for trouble.

Unfortunately, very few operations have ever failed for using too many troops, either.

Tully and Perkins went up the left-hand staircase in a rush, their soft boot soles making quiet rutching noises on the perforated-steel treads. Roy dropped prone, covering the long gallery while Perkins ran halfway down it. Tom kept his stance until she was ready, down on one knee and weapon in firing position; then he went up the stairs himself, no louder than the others despite his greater size, moving like a great dark cat. It was a pleasure to work with people who knew what they were doing, and that was a fact.

He felt the same thing, in a distant abstract way, when an amplified voice bellowed: “Freeze! You’re covered!”

Both his companions did what he did: froze, with their eyes active. Jumping up and shooting at nothing would be highly unprofessional, also fatal.

Then the voice went on in a more conversational tone: “Look at the pretty red dots, motherfuckers.”

He did roll his eyes down. The glasses showed the laser aim point clearly, right on the upper part of his breastbone, right in the “sniper’s triangle.” And whoever was doing the talking had an accent like Adrienne’s, only stronger.

Urk, he thought.

“Throw down!”

“Do it,” Tom said, bending and slowly setting down his shotgun and pulling his Glock out to join it with two fingers.

If they wanted us dead, we’d be dead, he thought.

That was slightly reassuring; criminals rarely killed police officers except in the heat of the moment. Cop killers were unlucky—they tended to be shot while resisting arrest or while attempting to escape, or to commit suicide by throwing themselves downstairs in stir. The mystery men from the other dimension might not think like that, but most of the people here were good, honest terrestrial scumbags.

Men came out of the door that had been their destination, with pistols in their hands. They didn’t make any attempt to cover their faces; that wasn’t reassuring, even slightly, because it meant all three of them could make the perpetrators. Which meant they didn’t care…

A gun tapped him on the back of the head, then withdrew—reminding him it was there, then withdrawing out of range of a sweep if he tried to turn.

“Forward march, asshole,” the voice with the not-quite-Southern accent said. “Hands on your head.”

Their captors were arguing, out in the waiting room beyond this office; all except for one Vietnamese gunsel who was standing with a machine pistol trained on them.

“Just kill them,” someone said; someone with a thick Slavic tinge to his vowels. “Not to get fancy, not to fall on ass.”

“We need to ask them questions,” the voice with the accent like Adrienne’s said. “Then we can kill them.”

“Our money!” said a third party to the dispute. “You give us our money!”

Oh, that is all soooo not good, Tom thought.

The hood and night-sight glasses were gone; he was sitting in a metal-frame chair, with his hands tied behind his back and behind the backrest; his feet were lashed to the legs. Tully and Perkins were to his left and right, along one wall of an industrial-décor office, bare brick and metal strut ceiling, and a discouraged-looking potted plant in one corner. They all exchanged glances.

Well, we knew it was a risk, he thought, swallowing the fear that made sweat trickle like cold grease down his flanks. Sometimes the cat’s alive when you open the box; sometimes it’s dead.

There was a big desk at the other end of the room near the door, and through it came a group of men; they were arguing, with a lot of hand action. Six of them: two East Asians, two white men who looked enough alike to be brothers, squat and broad-faced, and three who looked like something from a Sopranos rerun—right down to the expensive bad taste of their aggressively cut business suits and the bulges under their left armpits.

A youngish man seemed to be the leader of the suits; he was talking, and with that same impossible-to-place, not-quite-Southern accent that Adrienne had, but much stronger: “I told you that we had our own channels into the police,” Young Suit said. “And it worked out, didn’t it?”

He gestured toward the desk. It carried their weapons and ID, the folders open to show their pictures. Young Suit walked over to the prisoners and grinned at them; then he went on: “Your boss, the slope,” he said. “You found out about his father’s house, hey? Didn’t know that the Yasujirus got a big payment from RM and M right after the war… and a nice note saying how sorry the company was to be buying the property they’d been cheated out of, and would they please accept the very generous purchase price… and the help later, the scholarship and suchlike. Always pays to have friends. Friends who can plant a bug on someone’s car, so you know when they’re coming, for example. Easy as salmon in spring.”

Even then, Tom felt a slight surprise at the odd turn of phrase. Then a prickle ran up his back, remembering the videodisk and the enormous, unbelievable weight of fish thrashing their way through Carquinez Strait.

He’s one of them. One of the people from the other side. Also… he couldn’t have gotten a warning about this operation from Yasujiru, or a bug on the car—not unless he was monitoring that continuously. It must have leaked from Adrienne… but how? She’s been chasing this guy.

“Mr. Bosco, the question is what to do with them now,” one of the squat men said. He had an accent as well.

Russian, Tom thought; he recognized it from his years in Central Asia. Then: Aha! Bosco, as in Bosco Holdings. Another piece of the puzzle.

Young Suit—young Mr. Bosco—smiled. “Toni, please, Alexi. I said, we’ll take care of it. Rest assured, no bodies will ever be found.”

The Russian scowled. “Better to make sure of them now—after we find out what they know.”

Toni Bosco spread his hands soothingly. “That’s what we had in mind. But carefully, carefully. The FBI would get very upset if they found one of their special agents in, ah, bad condition. It’ll be a while before we can deal with them.”

Alexi jerked his head westward. “The ocean hides many sins.”

Bosco’s grin was broad, but it reminded Tom of a circus magician’s professional grimace; if he’d been in the Russian’s position, he wouldn’t have trusted it an inch.

“We know a better trick than that, Alexi,” Bosco said.

His words were mild, but the men behind him were stone-faced and alert, their gun hands ready to move. Tom silently willed the others to accept the proposition; whatever Mr. Bosco had in mind, it had to be better than immediate torture and death. Not to mention the prospects of being tied to a chair in the middle of a firefight, if a disagreement broke out among the business associates here. Bosco reached inside his coat—carefully, carefully—and brought out a thick envelope, which he handed to the hitherto-silent Asians.

“Mr. Nguyen,” he said. “I believe this will be full compensation.”

The Vietnamese-American opened the envelope, riffled through the bills, and raised a brow. “More than sufficient,” he said. “However, we are no longer prepared to engage in this animal-products venture. The… difficulties… are more than the profits. Your friends will have to find someone else to market your goods in the East. Good-bye.”

He and his companion turned and walked out the door. Bosco shrugged and turned to the Russians, opening his mouth to speak—

And there was a sound from the gallery outside, muffled through the intervening room but unmistakable to an experienced ear; a sound like a series of large books being slapped closed, very quickly.

Submachine gun, Tom thought. With a sound suppressor. Someone just took out the Viets.

Silencers didn’t silence. A gun going off was going to make a loud noise, whatever you did. The baffles that slowed the muzzle gases down to subsonic speeds did reduce the sound a lot, though; enough that it didn’t carry very far, especially indoors. There were very few neighbors here, and probably none of them would report a firefight.

The Russians went for their pistols. Toni Bosco’s men dove for their attaché cases, which probably held something heavier. Even as they moved, an also-familiar hollow schoonk… schoonk… schoonk rang out.

Grenade launcher. Tom took a deep breath and screwed his eyes shut. That wouldn’t do any good at all if the grenades were loaded with high exposive , but…

Bitter, itching, burning gas exploded up from the shells that went spinning on the hard tile floor of the office. Tom heard screams from his captors, followed closely by retching; that meant military-strength puke gas. He held his breath as long as he could, and then forced himself to breathe shallowly instead of gasping as his lungs craved. The air seemed to be burning lava, an overwhelming itching all down his throat and into his lungs, and tears streamed down his cheeks. After a moment the nausea grew too intense to resist; sour bile filled his mouth, then spilled down the front of his jacket in an uncontrollable racking cough. In the middle of that he could hear similar sounds from Perkins and Tully, and a cold stab of fear shot through his own agony; vomiting was no joke when you were tied up and couldn’t move. You could choke to death on your own puke if you sucked it in.

There was another burst of fire—pistols this time, sharp yapping barks, and more screams, of pain instead of rage. Then someone fired four times, slow-paced shots.

Into the backs of heads, Tom thought queasily. Finishing them off. Well, that rules out an official rescue party.

The gas was mostly out of the air now. He blinked and shook his head, coughing and spitting to clear his mouth. When he could see again, vision blurred but workable, both the Russians and Bosco’s two goons were down, and very dead. His nose twitched at the stink. Bosco himself was standing very still except for retching and smothered coughs, hands on top of his head, and a huge thickset man was patting him down; his face was covered by a pigsnouted breathing mask with a sensor shield over the eyes. Another man was checking the bodies, even taller than the first but lanky, with hair the color of old sun-faded straw spiking up around the straps of the mask. Both wore thin-film gloves on their hands.

Schalk van der Merwe and Piet Botha, Tom thought.

And Adrienne Rolfe, also masked and gloved. She came through the office door, tucking away a pistol—he recognized the make, a Belgian 5.7mm job, expensive, lethal and in theory for police use only. Her face was neutral as she pulled off the mask, took an experimental breath, and coughed.

“Clear,” she said. “More or”—another cough—“less.”

The other two men took off their masks as well, folding them and tucking them into pockets in their dark Banana Republic-style jackets.

She tossed them canvas bags, and they began stuffing things into them—wallets, weapons, the IDs of the three tied to chairs.

The blond man looked over and spoke: “Need someone to finish off the kaffir?”

“Schalk, shut up,” Adrienne said, her face thoughtful as her eyes went back and forth between Bosco and Tom.

“What’s going on?” Tom asked hoarsely.

“Well,” Adrienne said, “you did sound odd. I suspected you were being naughty. So we paid a visit to your place first. Tsk, tsk. All that research! Why did you leave it in place?”

“Too much to move quickly, and we were in a hurry,” he said. “But there are backup duplicates, and it’ll all be—”

Adrienne laughed a little, shaking her head. “Going down swinging, eh, Tom? I’d expect nothing less. But you know as well as I do nobody would believe a word of it without more proof—that’s why you’re here, to get the proof. Lucky you didn’t give me an even later false time, though, or I’m afraid Toni here would have done something really unpleasant to y’all before I arrived.”

Her leaf-green eyes turned to Perkins. “I presume the FBI agent is in it with you—this must be unofficial, or there would have been more of you. From the date on that movement survey on me, you only told her today….” Her tone altered, losing the bantering note. “I’m trying to come up with reasons not to kill anyone, Tom. I really am. So tell me the truth.”

“Yes,” he said bitterly, and spat—clearing his mouth and expressing his opinion at the same time.

Perkins spoke for the first time: “Fuck you!” she snapped with a flat murderous glare. “You’ve killed plenty, and you’ll get the needle for it.”

Adrienne inclined her head. “I don’t think so, Special Agent Perkins. Schalk, one dose of neurotone.”

The man began to complain, and she made a chopping gesture. “Schalk, for the last time, shut up and do as you’re told!”

“What is that stuff?” Tom asked.

He tried to keep the fear out of his voice as she pulled a disposable hypodermic needle out of a case the Afrikaner handed her. Perkins simply glared silently as the injector approached.

“Think of it as a chemical equivalent of electroshock, which mimics the effects of a moderately severe concussion very closely,” Adrienne said, working the plunger with her thumb until a bead of clear liquid appeared on the tip. “Developed for the GSF—the Gate Security Force—here on FirstSide; not that the developer knew who we were or what we wanted it for. Usually the subject wakes up with a splitting headache and no memory of the recent past. The past day or two.”

“Usually?”

“Sometimes the effects are… more drastic.” She looked up at him as she pulled back Perkins’s sleeve. “Good, the bruise here will hide the needle mark….”

The black woman didn’t flinch when the thin steel pierced her skin. A few seconds later she yawned uncontrollably; then her eyes rolled up and her head slumped. Adrienne waited a moment more, then peeled back an eyelid with her thumb and studied the reaction of the pupil.

“Looks good,” she said. “No adverse reaction.” At his glare, she went on: “Tom, the alternative is letting them find her body and making it look like you killed her. We can’t just disappear an FBI agent, not these days; they would keep looking until they found something. They know she’s been working with you, and the cover story we’re using with you wouldn’t wash.”

“Cover story?” he croaked. Damn, I’m turning into the straight man here!

“Well, when they search your hurriedly abandoned apartment, I’m afraid they’re going to find very convincing evidence that you and your short friend here were involved up to your necks in the endangered-species racket. Not to mention a forgotten stash of twenty thousand dollars in cash, and clues that with some work will lead them to offshore accounts with over a million. That will be extremely convincing, since we’ve also removed all trace of what you found. It’ll be assumed you got out of the country and are living in affluent retirement somewhere else.”

She smiled—a little sadly—at his fury. “It was necessary. That dodo, and you clicked faster than I thought you could… none of it will matter where you’re going, Tom.”

“Through your dimensional portal,” he said. “That’s how you dispose of the inconvenient, isn’t it?”

“We usually call it the Gate,” she replied. Her smile grew broader for an instant. “Think of the other side as bizzarro Sunnydale. Or another dimension of time and space.”

She hummed under her breath: du-du-du, du-du-du. Even then, Tully couldn’t control a strangled grunt of laughter as he recognized the theme song. It was his partner’s reaction that prompted Tom’s memory.

And Perkins was still alive, unconscious but twitching. Adrienne’s attention had turned to Anthony Bosco. With the adrenaline of rage still running through his brain, Tom was still grateful that the look wasn’t directed at him. It was an expression he’d never seen on her face before, calm and implacable and colder than the moon.

She tossed a comment over her shoulder, not taking her eyes from Bosco’s face. “This is the man responsible for the warehouse full of skins and the condor,” she said. “And the dodo.” She leaned forward slightly. “Why, Toni?”

Bosco licked his lips, but spoke calmly enough. “Money. I’ve got expensive tastes I can’t satisfy back in New Virginia. All right, you got me; now take me back to the Commonwealth and we’ll have the fucking trial.”

Commonwealth? Tom thought. Not the Commonwealth of Letters, I think. Well, it beats “Hole in the Wall.”

“Toni, don’t insult me,” Adrienne said. “I get very upset when people insult me. You can draw on the Colletta accounts FirstSide and live like a pasha without going to all this trouble and risk. That’s what put me onto this in the first place. And the dodo wasn’t just a risk; it was insane. Unless you weren’t really trying to cream off some extra FirstSide currency. If you were trying to convince some FirstSiders that the Gate was real, seeing as how you can’t actually show it to them… now, then the dodo would make sense.”

Bosco went silent, shaking his head.

“Come on, Toni. We both know that Giovanni Colletta’s behind this somehow. You’re one of his hatchet men and you’ve been carrying water for him for years. What does your Prime get out of this? And don’t say money. This is political.”

Another head shake, but Bosco’s eyes were flicking back and forth in an instinctive search for escape.

“Hold him,” she said.

Piet Botha grinned like a gorilla and seized the smaller man by the back of the neck with a shovel-sized hand.

Bosco gave a grunt of pain and glared at her. “Tell this Settler bastard to get his hands off me, Adrienne,” he said. “You know the law—he can’t touch one of the Thirty!”

Adrienne walked over and stood close to the young man, wrinkling her nose slightly at the smell of vomit from his jacket. She reached out and pulled a ring off his left thumb—Tom could see that it was like hers, gold and platinum braided together.

“I do know the law,” she said. “Since they’re Gate Security operatives, they can touch you, over here on FirstSide. In fact, if I tell them to, they can kill you. Habeas corpus doesn’t apply this side of the Gate. You know that part of the law, don’t you? And the provisions about treason?”

She flipped the ring into the air. “Now talk, Bosco. This isn’t a scam you were running on your own. Your Family Prime is involved. You needed access to Nostradamus’ classified channels to read the message I sent about there being a bust here tonight—that’s why I used Nostradamus this afternoon, instead of a courier. You couldn’t have trapped these FirstSiders otherwise. Give me the details: who, where, when, why. I don’t have time to waste.”

He snarled. “Take me back to the Commonwealth and put me on trial before the committee,” he said. “They’ll have that Gate Security commission off you so fast—Shit!”

At her nod, Botha relaxed his mechanical-grab grip enough that Bosco could take a shuddering breath. She reached into her jacket and took out a small steel rod; at a flick of her wrist it extended into a short truncheon with a knob at the end. Bosco’s eyes went wide, and he began to struggle as Botha grabbed one of his hands, forced it down on the desk and then thrust a painful thumb on its back, making his fingers splay out in uncontrollable reflex.

Adrienne sighed again. “This is going to hurt you a lot more than me, but I’d really rather not have this sort of memory in my head,” she said. “So why don’t you spare us both and talk?”

He shook his head again. She flicked the truncheon up, then down again in a short whipping arc. Bosco screamed and convulsed as the knob smashed down on the little finger of his right hand; there was a distinct crack under the louder, mushier sound of steel hammering flesh against unyielding hardwood.

Jesus, Tom thought, his mouth going dry. He’d done as bad in the field: When you needed information desperately, lives were at stake and some shaheed wasn’t talking, the type who really believed in the seventy-two virgins… those were times when the officer walked around the hill so he didn’t have to officially see what went on and you did what you had to. Watching brought back memories he’d…

Rather not have in my head, just as she said, he thought unwillingly.

When Bosco had drawn himself together somewhat, shuddering, she leaned forward and pushed the knob on the steel whip against his nose.

“Now listen carefully, Bosco,” she said. “There are two hundred and sixteen bones in the human body. That was one.”

She paused for a second, then went on, her face like something carved from ivory, and her voice flat and cool, the tone neutral: “I’m going to break one bone every thirty seconds until you tell me what I want to know. After half an hour, you’ll be like a rag doll. Except that rag dolls don’t feel pain. And you will.”

The knob descended on the broken finger; Botha clamped a hand across the smaller man’s mouth to muffle the scream.

“Now, you’re a scion of the Thirty—you’re a brave man—we can take that for granted. But everybody talks in the end. So why don’t we just skip to the confession? Why take the fall for the Colletta? Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven.”

Bosco’s sweat-slick face worked, as if he were chewing something unpalatable. Tom looked away; he didn’t have to watch, at least.

That meant he saw the tall pale Afrikaner draw his pistol, moving smooth and fast. The American responded without time for thought, some distant-observer part of himself blinking in surprise at what his subconscious had decided to do.

“Look out!” he screamed, and threw himself forward.

That was hard when you were tied arms-and-ankles to a chair. The weight of heavy muscle on his shoulders made it a bit easier, by raising his center of gravity. The chair tipped forward; he caromed off the shooter’s knees and then bounced painfully to the floor. Lying there he could hear the sharp crack of the little weapon, and see the red bloom of an entry wound appear on Bosco’s chest. He could see Adrienne turning as well; he’d never seen anyone move quite as fast. Her hand dropped the metal baton and knocked it out of the way as it swept inside her jacket, up and out and level.

Not Adrienne, he thought, dazed. The guy was shooting for Bosco first. And then: Remind me never to get into a quick-draw contest with her.

Two other pistols barked then; there was a shatter of glass breaking, and a soft heavy grunt from above him. The long form of the Afrikaner gunman dropped over his body, hiding the light and dripping a disgusting salt-and-iron wetness on his face. He spat aside when it was lifted away, knowing his face must be a glistening mask of red.

“Thanks,” Adrienne said, looking down at him. “He would have got me too….” She looked up. “But why?”

Then she turned to the big dark man, who was staring down at his ex-partner with an almost childlike confusion.

“Botha, snap out of it. We need the cleanup team here now.”