“I don’t doubt you will, my dear,” he said. “We Rolfes get things done.”
He glanced back at the great house, obviously lost in his memories. Adrienne smiled indulgently; it was only natural in a man of his years, to live as much in the past as the present day.
And what he has to remember! she thought.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Adrienne Rolfe pulled the knit woolen cap off and rubbed at her face with one hand as she drove. She was tired to the marrow of her bones, after the nightmare of getting the condors through the Gate and out of Oakland. She’d dozed a little as they drove across the Valley and into the mountains, but once off the Interstate and onto the little country roads she took the wheel herself. You couldn’t get lost here anyway, with a GPS unit tied into a map screen on the dashboard. They didn’t have that in the Commonwealth; the cost of bringing in equipment to put satellites in orbit would have been too much, even for the Commission. Night pressed against the windscreen behind the cones of the lights, moonless-dark, and she drove carefully, feeling the bump and rumble of the van’s wheels on the rough dirt of the roadway—just two lines of dirt across pasture and around sagebrush, bitterbush, scattered pinion pine, and twisted juniper. The roadway curved and jinked to avoid the bigger rocks and trees, the ruts worn only by infrequent use.
The windows were open to cut the thick stink of the birds in the back of the van, and the air that came through was thin but clean, cutting like crystal knives. At last she saw the lights of the waiting cars and pulled up, turning off the engine. Deep silence fell, broken only by the ticking of cooling metal and the birds shifting in their cages; it was something she always missed on FirstSide. Most places were never free of the drone of machines in the background, even those FirstSiders thought of as rural.
The vehicles waiting were Jeep Cherokees, with a small roadster in attendance. The men who waited were dark-clad like her, black jeans and boots and jackets and gloves. One of them thumbed on a lantern, and she put up a hand to shield her eyes from the light.
“Put that out, you idiot,” she said—quietly, but not whispering.
As far as they knew, there was nobody within miles, but far to the east and below this mountain meadow she could see the occasional set of headlights crawling through the benighted vastness. Light traveled far in this thin clear air, across these distances.
“Hey, Cuz—”
“Don’t ‘Cuz’ me, you brainless pudding, turn it off.”
Joseph Filmer probably flushed—she couldn’t see his face much, since he also obeyed, and the lamp had turned off her night sight for a while. She knew he was a slightly plump brown-haired man of twenty-one, and more dangerous than he looked.
There was anger in his voice as he replied: “You don’t take that tone with me, Rolfe,” he said. “I’ve been doing my end—”
“And a piss-poor job of it,” she said, her voice low but cutting like a whip. “I’ll take any tone I please, fool; I’m your superior officer and you’ve been screwing up—badly. If we weren’t so shorthanded I’d have you broken and denied Gate privileges right now! You had a simple in-and-out, and you ended up with FirstSider police right on your flabby butt; they may have made your face, God damn it, in which case there’ll be a warrant out on you for murder—you’ll never be any use on this side of the Gate again.”
“I made the hit,” he said huffily. “In, killed him, planted the incendiaries, and out in less than ten minutes.”
“And the FirstSider police went in exactly at the end of the very long period you set the timers for.”
“You didn’t do any better in LA,” he said sullenly.
“I didn’t have two days’ warning, which you did because I got the information out of the FirstSiders.”
“Well,” he said maliciously, “I don’t have all your… talents.”
The silence seemed to come closer. Adrienne stepped closer to the young man herself, until their faces were nearly touching, and spoke very quietly: “Well, if you want to make it a personal matter, Filmer, there are several ways we could discuss it, once we’re back in the Commonwealth.”
Dueling among the Thirty was legal in New Virginia, but very rare; the Old Man could resurrect laws a hundred years dead, but even he couldn’t erase what that century had done to the minds and ways of men. Not all at once, at least. It did happen every now and then—her grandfather said that there should be an ultimate restraint on discourtesy, a limit past which you could go only at risk of life and limb. Filmer would never have been able to challenge her himself—he’d be a hissing and a byword for calling out a woman, given the Commonwealth’s mores, even a woman with her rather anomalous standing. For variations on the same factors, he couldn’t possibly refuse a challenge from her, which was an advantage to throw in with all the trouble her gender had caused her over the years—the tsouris, as Uncle Sol had put it.
And he knew full well that if he did accept the challenge, she’d kill him before his pistol was halfway to its aiming point.
He stepped back, and she was in the near-silent night again, cold air against the rough cloth she wore, and somewhere the doglike barking hooohooo-hooo-hoooah- of a spotted owl.
“Sorry. No offense meant,” he said, his voice rusty. “There… the target wasn’t alone until just then.”
“All right,” she said. “Let’s get on with the mission, and pray God it’s sufficient to throw the hounds off the scent. This smuggling ring is the worst danger to Gate Security since the founding.”
He nodded. “Damned right,” he said.
She could feel the indignation in it. Endangering the Gate’s secret was the worst sort of treason, and there was the shame of knowing that the betrayers were of the Thirty, the lords of the Commonwealth.
“Damned right,” she agreed. “And if I never see another condor, it’ll be too soon,” she added lightly; he chuckled, accepting the peace offering.
They released the last of them at dawn, on a little slope that ran down to the edge of a cliff, above a steep valley carved into a deep U-shape by glaciers gone ten thousand years ago. It waddled out of its cage, striking at the stick that prodded it, looking about suspiciously. Then it turned into the wind and waddle-hopped forward….
And then it flew, catching the winds of the upper air with the great ten-foot spread of its wings, the long feathers of their tips splaying out like a wizard’s hands to caress and master the breeze. Then for a moment, as it soared and the rising sun across the gorge caught and gilded those wings, she forgot the nightmare dangers of catching the condors, terror and grief, even the disgust at their stink.
“Ahhh,” she said, watching it rise. “I take it back. It’ll be too soon if I ever have to smell a condor again. Seeing them I can take.”
“I know what you mean,” Filmer said. “I just feel guilty for trapping the poor bastard birds here on FirstSide.”
“Got the Chinese,” Roy Tully said, jiggling the tray of cardboard containers. “And a newspaper.”
Despite himself, Tom felt his stomach grumble at the smell of shrimp won-tons and mushu; he’d been too busy to eat much for most of the past couple of days, and his stomach too tight with anger. He scooped the newspaper off as Tully pushed piles of documents aside to make room on the low table in front of his living room couch, and snagged a container of hot-and-sour soup, stripping the lid off with his teeth and sipping as he read.