“So how did the poachers get one without the four ornithologists noticing?” Tom asked. “It’s not as if they were ripping off abalone—the seabed is a lot less closely watched.”
“They didn’t get one of ours. They’re all accounted for—I checked. And that’s where things get really interesting. All the California condors alive today are descended from the same twenty-seven individuals. That makes them all pretty closely related; it’s what we call a ‘near-extinction event’ or a ‘genetic bottleneck’—”
“Manuel, you do remember who I work for, don’t you?” Tom said gently.
“Oh, sorry. Anyway, they’re all pretty closely related. We can trace their relationships easily. So we did; took a sample, put it through one of those handy-dandy new gene-fingerprint machines, the one with the nanoscale gold electrodes, to see which pair of wild birds had a chick we somehow didn’t notice.”
“Wait a minute,” Tom whispered. “You mean it’s not related to the known condors?”
“Not even remotely. It’s as unrelated to them as it can be and still be a member of the same species. There’s more genetic variation between that bird’s DNA and the others than there is among all the other condors left. Which will make it tremendously useful to the breeding program, amigo. But it still leaves the question of where the son of a whore came from.”
“You mean it’s as if it came from an entirely different population?”
“Right in one. And there is one, repeat one, breeding population of Californian condors.”
Now I wish I’d gotten more samples from that chamber of horrors at the warehouse, Tom thought. Oh, how I wish I’d gotten more samples!
“Anything else?”
“Yes. We also did every other test we could on the damn overgrown vulture. You know the main cause of death for wild condors?”
“Lead poisoning, from shot.”
“Right in one again. Hunter shoots something, something runs away and dies, condor eats thing, condor also eats buckshot, and then it’s ‘Go walk with God, condor.’ Well, this condor never met a lead buckshot pellet. There’s no lead in its feathers or tissues at all, much less dangerous amounts. But wait, there’s more. This condor never ingested any pesticides, or herbicides—none, not even trace amounts—or any of a dozen other things that a bird in the modern world eats… por Dios, things that we all breathe every day.”
Manuel paused. “If you can find out the valley this condor lived in, I would like to move there! Because that place… it is like nowhere on earth for this hundred years and more.”
“Where could it have come from, then?”
“Well… possibly… a very isolated group somewhere up in the Sierras? I don’t see how the hell we could have not found them, given their flying range, but it’s the only thing that occurs to me, frankly. And it’s a pretty lame explanation; there aren’t any places in California that pristine, and condors scavenge open lowland areas by choice. It would take a whole series of fantastically unlikely coincidences for the past hundred years. Or some mad scientist has been cloning them, using frozen tissue that’s been around for sixty, seventy years, to get any possibility of an unrelated bird… take your pick.”
“Thanks, Manuel.”
“Thank you, amigo. This bird improves our chances of succeeding with this program by more than a bit. I just can’t figure out where in the name of todos santos it comes from. But if you find any more—send them along!”
“Yah, you betcha I will,” Tom said.
He paused and looked thoughtfully down at his notes. Well, here’s a pretty how-de-doo, he mused. Apparently we not only have poachers who are ruthless enough to trade in a species on the brink of extinction, but smart enough to find members of it where the California DFG and all the biologists in the state can’t.
“Thanks, and—Wait a minute,” Tom said. He didn’t know precisely why he asked, but extra information never hurt. “To change the subject, do you know anything about the Pacific Open Landscapes League?”
Manuel was silent for a moment. “That rings a faint bell… could you hold?”
Tom made affirmative noises, and waited while a faint clicking of keys came over the line.
God, but computers make it hard to hide anything, he thought. Nothing ever goes away, if you know where to look.
“I’d heard of them vaguely myself,” Manuel said a moment later, in the peculiar half-strangled tones of a man who is holding a telephone between his jaw and shoulder while working at a computer.
“Sí, got it. They’re a contributor to the zoo’s fund; an annual hundred and fifty thousand. But they’ve been dealing with us for quite a while—since the late 1940s—only then they had a different name. Let’s see… Zoological Studies and Research. They had an arrangement with us on captured animals—they’d fund the expedition, and we’d split the beasts with them. They wanted the animals for experimentation, I’d guess, from the name. Mostly standard African animals: rhino, giraffe, lions, cheetahs; some Asian varieties as well—tigers, Siberians and Bengals. That sort of thing was more common then; we had exchange operations with zoos and even circuses all over the world—we got our first stock from a circus, you know, back a century ago. The arrangement seems to run for about six years, 1949 to 1955; then they shifted over to a straight donation and doing research through us and people we recommended, a lot of projects on historical ecology—how the early colonization affected California by bringing in new grasses and so forth—and then in 1970 they changed the name. Odd, eh? Why do you ask?”
“Just a feeling I should,” Tom said, uncertain himself. “Talk to you later.”
He hung up the phone and stared down at his notes again. They were clearly organized; the only problem was that they were nonsense. His father had once told him that if you couldn’t solve a problem at one end, the trick was to start at the other.
“All right, let’s move on,” he murmured, and reached for the telephone again; the number he wanted was on the frequently-used list. “One ringie dingie… two ringie dingie… This is Warden Thomas Christiansen from the DFG… that’s the Department of Fish and Game… Special Agent Perkins, please… Hi, Sarah. Any news for me?”
“Hi, Tom. We have gotten some new leads.” His pen poised again. She went on: “It turns out the buyers for that stuff were… upset… when it all got burned up. They’d already paid for a good bit of it. They think—”
“They being?”
“A Vietnamese group, we’re pretty sure. Not as good citizens as most of their community, to put it mildly. They’d have the Asian connections for marketing.”
Tom nodded, then remembered to produce an audible “uh-huh. Yes, DFG has been having plenty of problems with that. Now that the war’s over and the Asian part of the Pacific Rim is booming harder than ever, the market for animal parts has heated up again. Bear paws, rhino horns, tiger glands, exotic furs, ivory, you name it, and the prices make cocaine look like bottled water.”
And that would fit in with RM&M’s Pacific Rim operations, if it’s a rogue group within the company the way Adrienne suspects, he added silently to himself, before going on: “Who were the ones selling it in the first place?”