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 neutraclass="underline" “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.”
INTERLUDE
“Like the country around Stellenbosch, east of Cape Town,” Piet Botha said to the friend beside him.
Winds and shadows fell toward the west, and the mountains stretching toward the Pacific went from purple-green to a dark sawtooth against the northern horizon.
“Like it, but better,” Schalk van der Merwe said grudgingly. “It’s good land; I grant you that.”
The Cape Dutch-style farmhouse behind them was rawly new, a long single-story rectangle with a stoep in front where they sat, two short wings on the back, and a tall gable over the teak doors; it was whitewashed in the traditional style, but the roof was tile rather than black thatch. Ten acres of young orange trees to either side of the house scented the night with their perfume as the western light cast long shadows across the empty vastness to the south. The day had been sunny and mildly warm. That lingered in the stones of the wall behind them, making the veranda pleasant despite a cooling wind from the sea that picked up smells of manzanita and sage.
He’d picked a spot where the land began its climb toward the Santa Monica Mountains, although there was already a request in to the Commission to rename them the Krugerberg. His grant was part of the new home estate of the Commonwealth’s latest addition to the Thirty Families—the Versfelds, who now had their seat at what another world called Santa Monica, and which this one named Hendriksdorp. The location gave Botha’s new home a view across the land that stretched away across the foothills and down to the flat plain of the Los Angeles basin. It was green with the winter rains, flower-starred tall grass with groves of willow and oak, cottonwood and sycamore along the streamsides and about the surprisingly numerous sloughs and swamps. He’d ridden over the countryside enough to get a feel for it: the open land where the soil rose a little higher, and the lower stretches often impassable with clumps of alder, hackberry and shrubs woven together with California rose and wild grapevines, blackberries and brambles.
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.