15
‘This way, Mister Warner.’
Ethan followed a middle-aged, primly dressed clerk from the reception desk through a large door that led to the record hall. Towering ranks of shelves held carefully filed boxes dating back decades, perhaps even centuries. It had taken a call from Doug Jarvis to get Ethan immediate access to the records, much to the chagrin of the clerk. Most public requests for records could take weeks to disseminate, time that Ethan could ill afford to waste.
The building itself was a large modern construction, allied to the births and deaths office further down South St Francis Drive.
‘The census runs back to the 1790s,’ the clerk informed him, slightly less frosty now. ‘Birth and death certificates are much less complete however, owing to the turbulent and transient nature of our citizens over the earliest centuries of arrival here.’
Ethan looked up at the shelves and cabinets as they walked through the silent hall.
‘I’ve got a birth certificate here, which corresponds to a man by the name of Conley, but we’re trying to trace the line further back.’
‘Births are over there,’ the clerk pointed, to where two rows of cabinets stretched wall to wall. ‘They’re alphabetically arranged.’
Ethan thanked the clerk, and was about to walk across to the shelves when his cell phone rang in his pocket, echoing loudly across the hall. Ethan grabbed it, setting it to ‘silent’ before answering.
‘Warner.’
‘It’s Zamora,’ came the reply, his accent heavy over the line. ‘Picked up something interesting for you regarding the attack on the center in Los Alamos.’
‘Go for your life.’
‘The woman who led the attack, who you chased in the laboratory — Saffron? Turns out that she’s the granddaughter of none other than Jeb Oppenheimer. You ever heard of him?’
‘Should I?’ Ethan asked as he walked slowly between the towering shelves.
‘He’s the sole owner and operator of SkinGen, a global pharmaceutical company that’s headquartered in Santa Fe. It’s one of New Mexico’s biggest employers, and this Oppenheimer fella has his fingers into every government pie going, from local right up to the White House some say.’
Ethan stopped walking.
‘What’s Saffron Oppenheimer’s angle on all of that?’
‘She’s his only living relative and heir to the SkinGen empire, but she wants none of it. Her parents died in a tragic automobile accident over a decade ago, as did Jeb’s wife. She’s alienated from him, refuses to have any part in the company and has actively denounced all vivisection operations states wide. In short, they’re sworn enemies.’
Ethan blinked. He’d heard of SkinGen, if not its owner, and he knew that it was worth billions of dollars. Saffron Oppenheimer’s motivation, or confusion, must be almost superhuman.
‘Thanks, Enrico, I’ll get back to you as soon as we learn anything more.’
Ethan rang off and grabbed a nearby rolling stepladder, pulling it along behind him until he found a section of shelves marked CO. He stood on the step, reaching up and tracing the letters on the shelf edges until he reached CONL. He found a single box, thick with dust and sagging slightly at the edges, beneath another marked CONN. Ethan levered the box carefully out, carried it to a study table and sat down. He opened the box and began sifting through the reams of papers that became increasingly faded and yellowed the deeper he delved.
The truth was he wasn’t entirely sure what he was looking for, but beside him on the table was the document given him by Doug Jarvis back in Chicago. The birth certificate for Hiram Conley, born Las Cruces in New Mexico, 1940. Judging by the documents Ethan was pulling from the box, the layout and style of the certificate indeed most closely matched those dated around 1940. The birth details could still have been forged, but what interested Ethan was that, forged or not, it looked every bit as old as it claimed to be.
‘So far, so normal,’ Ethan murmured to himself, turning his attention to the second name Jarvis had given him, Abner Conley.
According to the paperwork, Hiram had sometimes used the name Abner, with occasional receipts signed as evidence. Ethan couldn’t be sure if that meant that Hiram was deliberately using another name or was perhaps suffering from some kind of age-related amnesia or confusion.
A document appeared as he flicked through a dense wad of papers, the name at the top corner catching his eye. Abner Conley. Ethan gently pulled the aged sheaf of paper from the pile and felt a twinge of intrigue as he read: Abner Conley, born Las Cruces, New Mexico: March 9th, 1880.
He stared at the document for a moment longer, and then began shuffling through the ever older and more fragile scraps of paper, some of them so worn that he feared they would crumble beneath his fingertips. Reaching out, he took a pair of fine rubber gloves from a box on the edge of the study table and slipped them on before continuing, until another document, this one ragged at the edges and soft to the touch, caught his eye.
Hiram Conley, born Las Cruces, New Mexico: March 9th, 1807.
‘I’ll be damned,’ he murmured, and set the documents alongside each other.
It was not unusual for sons to be named after their father, and in fact in states like New Mexico it was commonplace. What was more unusual was that none of the names gave any clue that they were inherited. Hiram Conley III or similar would have been more credible. Not to mention the fact that all three of the supposed births occurred on the same date in the records, March 9th, something that Hiram may have done to ease recall when required.
Ethan looked up at the shelves around him, and then down toward the front of the hall where a computer terminal and copier occupied a sturdy table. Ethan made copies of all of the documents before carefully replacing them in the box and putting it back on the shelves. Then, he sat down behind the computer terminal. The server was dedicated to the county clerk’s office, and contained digitized images of all records and photographs going back hundreds of years.
Ethan began typing search commands into the computer, scanning through dozens of records, newspaper stories and photographs relating to the name Hiram Conley. Lists flashed up one by one, older and more vague as he searched.
‘Come on, damn it,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Just one, that’s all I need.’
After an hour, he had gone back to the 1880s, finding numerous mentions of both Hiram and Abner Conley, but no images. Given the scarcity of cameras at the time he considered that only to be expected. Those that did exist used albumen print photography that produced images from large glass negatives. Fatigue began to pull at his eyes, and his arm ached as he scrolled dutifully down through endless slides and plates, yellowing images of old frontier towns, families in archaic clothes and tall hats standing in front of colonial-style houses. Paintings of notable figures from history such as Abraham Lincoln, or brave women who had served alongside their husbands, fathers or brothers in the Union army during the Civil War popped out at him and were passed by as he diligently continued his search. An ancient newspaper scrap, torn along the bottom edge but photographed for posterity, caught his eye. A group of seven men in Union uniforms stood shoulder to shoulder beside some kind of old wagon, a tall officer in their midst staring down at the camera with cold, hard eyes above a broad moustache.
Ethan froze, staring at the image.
There, third from left, stood a man with a beard and a huge musket, the butt standing on the floor at his feet and the bayonet resting against his shoulder. The face leapt out at Ethan, and he fumbled in his pocket and produced a photograph of Hiram Conley, taken just days before by Enrico Zamora in Glorietta Pass. He held the image up to the screen.