“And that’s why the sailing ships,” Tom said. Tully looked at him, and Tom continued: “Those were too big for yachts, some of them. They must have fuel sources near the Bay Area, but not some of the places they’re sending ships to.”
“Slick.” Tully nodded. “San Francisco, you can sail anywhere in the Pacific Basin from there… anywhere in the world, I suppose, eventually.”
“And Adrienne must be a… hell, maybe they think of it as cops,” Tom said bitterly. “Or spooks. Company security, just like she told me. Trying to plug this leak, this group who’re scamming the bosses… her family. She needed to get information out of me, so they could get to the smugglers before we did. And I fell for it hook, line and sinker!”
Roy Tully sent him a look of sympathy that stung like acid. “Wait a minute,” he said, pulling a chair close. “Look, could you give me the details? Everything she said and did, and the order she did it in?”
The big man did, forcing his voice to steadiness; he knew the value of a second viewpoint, one more objective—free of infatuation, or the rage of betrayal. When he was finished Tully was sitting back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling with his hands linked behind his head.
“Look, Kemosabe, for what it’s worth, I don’t think she was just playing you for a sucker,” he said gently.
“How do you figure that?” Tom replied roughly.
“Because she got all the information she needed before you did the wild thing with her. And let’s be honest, Kemosabe: She could have gotten everything she needed to know with a little cock-teasing, right? No need to go all the way.”
Tom flushed. “Right,” he admitted. “I sang like a canary.”
“And all that stuff she told you… hell, she even said it herself, right?”
“‘Everything I’ve told you is true,’” Tom said, quoting. “‘But it isn’t complete.’” He snarled. “I’ll say it wasn’t fucking complete! She didn’t mention knocking people off, for starters.”
“Hey, hey, Kemosabe, control the emotions, right? Easy for me to say, but we need your head working now, not other parts of your anatomy. You’re not the first man to find a woman had some ulterior motives, my friend, or the first one to fall for a honey trap.”
“OK,” Tom said, filing it for future reference.
“Now fit that stuff she told you about her family and her relations in with what we know now.”
“Right,” Tom said, nodding decisively. “That was a rundown on the setup they have over there. It must have seemed like a real side-splitter of a joke for her to tell me all about it.”
He frowned. “You know, from what she let slip, they’ve got a whole country over there, pretty well. All run by her family and their friends and relations. I thought it sounded a bit screwy, the whole landed-gentry thing. I know a lot of wine-country types like to play those games, but this was very old-fashioned.”
“Not a surprise,” Tully said. “Hey, didn’t you tell me that this John Rolfe was one of those old-money, big-brick-mansion types in Virginia?”
“His grandfather, not him. The family lost their money in the Civil War.”
“All the more reason he’d go for that sort of thing if he had the chance. Anyway, we need to get some research done,” Tully said. “Going to be tough, doing this and our regular jobs. I hope I’ve talked you out of going to the boss with this.”
“You’re right; we can’t take this to Yasujiru or anyone else without a lot more proof. I doubt Special Agent Perkins would believe me, even.”
“That’s not the only thing. Yasujiru might be one of the leaks.”
Tom grunted. “Hope not. I always thought he was an honest pain in the ass. OK… how much vacation time do you have coming?”
“Two weeks,” Roy said. He smiled, and then let it grow into a broad white grin. “Yeah, now you’re talking. Christ, can you imagine what it’ll be like if we can prove this? Hell, imagine if we can find whatever the hell it is that lets Mr. X… this Rolfe bastard… pull his magic trick? We could write our own tickets.”
A fresh thought swept some of the intent anger out of Tom. “Jesus Christ, Roy, think about being able to go there! Go to that place on the disk.”
He reached out and rapped his knuckles on the PDA. They looked at each other again, a simultaneous wild longing in their eyes. Nobody went into Fish and Game without loving the wilderness; it wasn’t an easy job, you never got rich, and much of the work was frustrating beyond belief. That millions-strong herd of bison, that vision of Carquinez Strait nearly solid with salmon…
“I’d give a lot to see that, ah, that world with my own eyes,” Tom said.
“Yeah! Especially before Exxon and Archer Daniels Midland get their mitts on it,” Tully enthused. “If we pull this off, I figure we can get some sort of deal on that.”
A slight chill ran up Tom’s back; he shook it off, and concentrated on what needed to be done. “Come on. We need to tell Yasujiru we’re on vacation.”
“How are we going to do that?” Tully said.
“Well, I’m recovering from a brush with death,” Tom said, a fierce hunter’s grin lighting his normally calm square features. “And as for you… the honorable Yasujiru never wanted in on this investigation anyway, for one reason or another. Tell him we haven’t spotted any more probably-Californian animal stuff, which is true. That’ll put you at loose ends as well. He’ll reassign you after you get back from your vacation time. We’ll say we’re going on a hiking trip together—we’ve done it before, amigo.”
Tully slapped him on the shoulder. “And afterward, nobody can say we didn’t turn in all the evidence. That is classic cover-your-ass, my friend. You’re developing a bureaucrat’s reflexes after all!”
“Now you’re getting nasty.” Tom laughed. “But I have been a civil servant for a while.” He stood. A slight dizziness passed almost immediately. “Let’s go grab a steak and start making some notes.”
INTERLUDE
“How was the safari?” John Rolfe asked his favorite granddaughter.
“Fun,” she said with a laugh, wrinkling her nose as he lit his pipe. “It was fun.”
Looks a bit like her grandmother, he thought, with a twinge of well-worn grief; Louisa had been dead thirty years now, and he still missed her despite a happy second marriage. And she looks even more like me. The torrent of bronze-colored hair was the exact shade his had been, and the leaf-green eyes, and the cast of the long regular face. She was five-nine now that she’d gotten her full growth, though: taller for a woman than he’d been for a man, and fuller-figured. Athletic with it, though.
One of the housemaids set a pitcher of lemonade between them, with a tinkle of ice; they were seated in loungers on either side of a table beneath a pergola covered in climbing roses, part of a patio in the gardens behind the manor. Those were more informal than the ones the great house presented to the outside world, and this stretch looked over a swimming pool edged in marble, with a bronze Triton statue spouting water in its center and a view of the forested slopes of Mount Saint Helena to the north. A round dozen youngsters—his great-grandchildren and their friends and children of the house staff—were shouting and splashing and swimming, apparently doing their pre-pubescent best to drown each other. John Rolfe smiled at the sight, then winced slightly as he reached for the handle of the blown-glass vessel. The elderly mastiff lying beside his lounger on the sun-warmed pavement raised its gray-flecked muzzle in concern.