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.”
Piet frowned. “Yes, miss, that means we have to be quick.”
“That means we have to find out what they know,” she said. “Beyond what our usual pipelines can tell us. They don’t know what we really are, and we don’t want to give them ideas, either. Sometimes the questions you ask tell more than answers would.”
Schalk looked a little baffled. Piet gave her a glance of surprised respect; she kept her own reaction to that politely concealed. He should have been smart enough to realize that the Commission wouldn’t send a complete figurehead along on a field operation, even one with her bloodline. The Old Man was ready enough to indulge a grandchild’s whim, but not where it could have a serious impact on business.
“And I’ve got the inkling of an idea about how,” she said thoughtfully. “I need to do some research first. If things are the way I think… we’ll still need permission to use it—authorization from the Committee, possibly from the Old Man.”
Schalk muttered something in his native tongue. She didn’t really speak Afrikaans—she had fluent Spanish, which was much more useful here FirstSide, plus French and Italian and a little German, which were sometimes handy in the Commonwealth of New Virginia. She had picked up a fair smattering of vocabulary in the past eighteen months, since these two were assigned to her as a combination of bodyguards, gofers and muscle.
“Yes, Operative van der Merwe, he is my grandfather,” she said sweetly. Schalk flushed. “But that’s going to make talking him into what I have in mind harder, not easier.”
INTERLUDE
The flicker of the campfire cast unrestful red light on the faces of the five men who sat about it; a battered camp coffeepot bubbled away on three stones in the midst of the coals and low red flames, sending its good smell drifting along with the clean hot scent of burning oak wood, the tule elk steaks they’d grilled, and the briny smell of the bay not far to the west. An occasional pop sent red sparks drifting slowly skyward, up toward the shimmer of firelight on the leaves of the big coast live oak whose massive branches writhed above them, and toward the stars that frosted the sky in an arch above. Their simple campsite stood on the fringe of the circle of light, three army-surplus tents and a few bales and boxes; horses snorted nearby, stamping and pulling at their tethers as something big grunted and pushed its way through a thicket. Faint and far beyond that was the chanting of the Ohlone Indians in their village, where a shaman held a ceremony to decide the meaning of the strangers with their wonderful gifts and terrible weapons.
Closer to the fire was a neat stack of small tough canvas sacks, crimped tightly shut. There were ten of them, and each held an even hundred pounds of gold in nuggets and dust.
“Now, would any of you have believed a word of it before you saw it with your own eyes?” John Rolfe said.
He looked around as they shook their heads. His cousins Robert and Alan, Aunt Antonia’s sons, alike as two peas in a pod, tall, lean young men just turned twenty-one, their long faces much like his but with the dirty-blond hair and blue eyes showing the Fitzmorton coloring of their father. They were just out of the service too. Rob had been running a tank-destroyer company in Italy, and Alan had been a B-17 pilot based out of England; they’d just finished picking flak shrapnel out of his butt. Then there was Andy O’Brien, the big beefy freckle-faced Boston Irishman who’d been top sergeant in Rolfe’s unit—not to mention a notable shot even in a division known as the Deadeyes; and Salvatore Colletta, small and smart and with the best poker face Rolfe had ever come across. He’d been Rolfe’s personal radioman, as well as an artist with a Thompson. He had a tommy gun lying against the log at his back, and his dark, thin features were utterly expressionless as he leaned forward to light his cigarette from a splinter. His cheeks hollowed as he inhaled, showing blue-black stubble; Salvatore was in his early twenties too, but the big black eyes were ancient in the thin Sicilian face.
“But are you sure this isn’t our California, a long time ago?” O’Brien asked uneasily. “And we could all go… pop, like a soap bubble, if we changed the things that made us.”
Rolfe shook his head. “The first time I came through, I carved numbers on rocks in places I could locate on both sides—boulders, cliff faces—carved them deep enough to last for thousands of years. There’s no trace of them back on our side of the Gate, where we know it’s 1946. I’m still going to get some astronomers to look at pictures of the night sky—the stars change with time, you know—but I’m pretty certain this is the same time as back there in California, the spring of 1946. It’s just a world where somehow white men never showed up. A different past, a different history, but the moon and sun are exactly the same, and the shape of the land, and the plants and animals—everything except what men have done.”
“That gives us a monopoly, then,” Rob Fitzmorton said, and went on with a dreamy smile: “There’s an awful lot of gold in them thar hills. Francesca is going to be pretty damned happy.”
“We can’t just go back and turn the gold into money,” Rolfe went on. “Salvo? Fill them in.”
“Yeah, you got that right, Cap’n,” Colletta said; it sounded more like youse got dat roit, in a hard nasal big-city accent straight from the corner of Hester and Baxter in Manhattan. “For starters, that figghi’e’bottana Roosevelt, he made it against the law to own gold, back before the war.”
O’Brien blinked in surprise. “What can we do with it, then?”
His voice was South Boston; not unlike the Italian’s, but with a hint of a brogue in it now and then, and the odd stretched New England-style vowel.
Colletta chuckled and shrugged. “Nah, maybe—just maybe—I might know some guys who’ve got, like, a flexible attitude about that sort of stupid rule, for a reasonable little cut. Guys who got relatives in Los Angeles. Maybe the cap’n was thinking of that when he invites me on this little hunting trip.”
His eye caught his ex-commander’s, and they gave an imperceptible nod of perfect mutual understanding.
“Risky, though,” Rob Fitzmorton said. “Not that I’ve got any objection to getting rich, and y’all can take that to the bank. Jail I could do without.”
Rolfe reached out with a bandanna around his hand and poured more of the strong black coffee into his mug. There was something chill in his eyes, and his smile showed an edge of teeth.
“You’re thinking small,” he said. “All of you.”
A snatch of poetry came to him: breathless upon a peak in Darien. And hadn’t Francis Drake touched land near here, as he took the Golden Hind around the world? The thought went down like a jolt of fine bourbon, and the heat in his gut was better than that. They’d filled his dreams as a boy, the conquistadors and sea dogs, the buccaneers like Morgan, the frontiersmen and adventurers like Andy Jackson and Crockett and Boone who’d carved states out of wilderness…. And no stingy monarch in Madrid or London to take the plunder and the glory, not this time. No Washington to answer to, either.