Conquistador (25 page)

“Twice is happenstance, and the third time proves it was enemy action all along and you were a dummy for not seeing it the first time,” Tom said. “Yup, there's a leak somewhere from police sources. Probably more than one. There's serious money involved.”

“The sort that could get Spider-man to smuggle shit across the border,” Roy said as they wadded up the foil wrappers of the burritos and threw them into a waste container along with the napkins they used to wipe their mouths. “And here we are.”

Indrasul Pan-Pacific Exports occupied a tiny storefront in a twenties-vintage three-story building, flanked on one side by a recycled-clothing store and on the other by a dusty-looking shop window filled with an amazing mixture of junky used furniture and real curios—everything from glass net-floaters to flamboyantly colored Balinese dancers' masks. If he'd been on his own time, he could have spent a couple of enjoyable hours there, and he made a note to come back.

Hell, I could come here with Adrienne,
he thought, and then shoved it aside—a nice notion, but too distracting right now.

Sarah Perkins was across the street from it, leaning her butt against a car and reading a paper with her face away from the target; she was also wearing glasses to conceal an ear mike for feed from various survelliance cameras.

Tom and his partner walked across the street and looked in the shopfront.

“We're go at eleven P.M. exactly,” she said casually, shaking the paper flat and turning a page. “Targets went in at nine this morning and haven't come out; one visitor, unidentified Caucasian male, mid-twenties, left about half an hour ago. We've had full surveillance since a little after that. Everything looks exactly the way the anonymous Vietnamese-American good citizen said it would. Any news on your weird condor?”

“Nada,” Tom said. “He still sits in solitary glory in San Diego, being prepared for life as stud of the captive flock.”

He turned and leaned his own shoulder against the building; from that position he could look across the street without appearing to stare. Sure enough, he could see a man's head and shoulders over the back of an office chair.

“Uh-oh,” Roy said. “Awful crick in the neck there for Mr. Stationary.”

“Oh, yeah,” Tom said under his breath. That position would be extremely painful if you kept it for more than a few seconds. “Sarah?”

“Shit!” she said crisply, throwing down the paper and turning to stare at the window. “Give me a magnification on the subject . . . switch to thermal . . . shit, he's room-temperature. Go!”

All three of them were sprinting across the street with their guns out before Sarah's paper finished hitting the ground. Tom had been a running back in high school—and attracted the notice of several football talent scouts before he decided to join the army; he was halfway across the street and dodging a car that came to a screeching, cursing halt just short of his hips as he twisted aside like a matador. Tully and Perkins were six very long strides behind, and they had to scramble around the automobile. That might have saved them injury when the windows of the second-story office blew out in a spectacular flash of light, blue-white and then orange.

Tom caught the first flicker with a subliminal alertness common to those who'd survived being shelled. He dove forward onto the sidewalk, thankful for the body armor under his T-shirt; an elbow abraded painfully, but the sensation was distant. A quick look over his shoulder showed half a dozen people injured, but none of the wounds looked serious; a lot more were screaming and running—the war had been over for a while, but after those years people in the United States took bombs extremely seriously. Flames were shooting out of the shattered windows above his head, hot enough to instantly darken the stucco around them and with only a little smoke. That meant a fairly small explosive charge—Semtex to kill, and incendiaries to cover up the evidence with a fire hot enough to make steel burn.

He shoved himself off the ground and catapulted forward, through the open door and up the flight of stairs that ran up from it—the ground-floor shop was already empty and the door at its rear still swung. Halfway up the stairs he could feel the heat blasting out through the half-open doors, and he stripped off his shirt as he ran, winding it around his left arm. Tom sheltered his face with that as he kicked the door open, holding a fold of cloth across his mouth with his teeth as he peered squint-eyed into the offices—an outer receptionists', and the inner sanctum whose window he'd seen from the street. They were already an inferno, fire running in sheets up the walls and flaring out along the ceiling and spreading among a chaos of shattered desks and doors, tumbled filing cabinets and their contents and scattered computer components. The paper was smoking, nearing its ignition heat, and so was every piece of wood not actually on fire. Squinting, he could make out a body lying on the floor with its feet still up on the toppled swivel chair; the once-white shirt showed where four bullets had been pumped into the man's chest, grouped rather neatly around the middle of the breastbone.

Nothing to be done about him,
Tom thought, slightly relieved.

The fallen man was probably a poacher and smuggler—almost certainly was. The warden would still have tried to rescue him if he'd been alive, but he was glad that he wasn't; the heat was savage even here at the door and getting worse by the second, with a dull pulsing roar that gathered force like the lungs of some huge angry beast. He stooped to make sure, and snatched up a small silvery recording disk lying on the floor that fell under his hand. Then he froze, even as flaming bits and pieces began to fall from the ceiling.

It wasn't that he didn't recognize the bird in its cage, thrown into a corner by the blast and very dead, its feathers blackening.

The problem was that he
did
recognize it.

It was an ugly roly-poly bird, about the size of a large turkey, with a huge, bulbous, hooked orange beak looking like a swollen excrescence on its bare gray head—it had feathers only on the part above and behind the little yellow eyes, rather like a late-period Elvis haircut. The body was gray-brown with hints of gold as well, apart from the thick bright-yellow feet and white plumes at the ends of the absurd stumpy little wings that gave a final dying quiver as he watched.

It was an ugly, cartoonish creature. And very familiar, although he'd never seen one alive. Nobody had, not since a Dutchman chased down and killed the last one around A.D. 1680, on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. There were plenty of artists' reproductions in books; it was far more famous than many living creatures.

“It's a goddamned dodo, for Christ's sake!” he screamed, and lunged toward it, into a wave of heat like a solid wall.

He didn't hurt much.

That was the first thing he checked on, as the blackness in his head became the blackness behind closed but waking eyes; the first thing, before thinking about where he was. No pain was a good thing; and you usually hurt pretty badly when waking up from a serious concussion. Which he'd done six or seven times in his life, depending on your definition of serious. Not much pain, which meant he could probably count on skipping the blurred vision, nausea, and recurrent headaches that could plague you for months after getting a solid sock to the head that sent your brain surging back and forth like a walnut in a loose shell.

Either he'd slept for a good long while, or he'd gotten off lightly, or both.

The smell told him it was a hospital before he opened his eyes: disinfectant, linoleum, ozone, a faint underlay of something unpleasant, and the odor of utterly inedible food. Memory struggled for a moment, and he thought it was the MASH unit in Tashkent. Then he knew better. That wakening had been far from painless.

His eyes opened. He was in a hospital bed and wearing one of those humiliating gowns that fastened up the back; a privacy screen stood around the enclosure, and there was a scanner hood clipped on the bedstead over his head—the medics had been monitoring his brain activity, then.

Yup, I did get a conk on the head,
he thought.
They wouldn't waste one of those on me if I didn't.

A variant of the same electronic process could produce an artificial analogue of natural sleep to hasten healing these days, and he had a bandage taped over the skin of one elbow, where a drip needle had kept him hydrated and nourished.

An amber light was flashing on the machinery now, so he could expect company. A cautious inventory showed him that there weren't any casts, splints or broken bones either, and everything moved the way it should. He was a little sore and stiff when he tried to move, but it was all functional.

The nurse's aide who came at the machine's call was a heavyset black woman, looking tired with a tiredness that had probably set in for good about fifteen years ago when she turned thirty. She brought him water, which took some of the mummy dust and sourness out of his mouth and throat, and then a doctor—a thin, harried-looking Chinese-American. The name tag on his white coat read
Edgar Chen,
and he looked as if he'd given up luxuries like sleep. Probably a public hospital, then. San Francisco General, which was on Potrero Avenue near the Mission district.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Christiansen. You're quite lucky,” he said. “The falling joist wasn't burning, and your friends got you out quickly. No more than a few scorches and very minor smoke inhalation; you can thank heaven for all that muscle protecting your bones. We kept you under to make sure there was no brain trauma. Breathe deeply, please.”

Tom did, and coughed, as always—there was something about the feel of a stethoscope on the skin of his chest or back that
made
him cough, had since he was a kid. His lungs did have a faint soreness, the way they felt after a cold or a bout of the flu.

“Excellent. OK, let's see if the machinery was telling the truth. Look at this light. Then at my finger. Follow the finger. . . .”

The examination was brisk but thorough; he supposed they'd done the EMR and the rest of the sophisticated stuff while he was unconscious.

“Well, you need more rehydration, and there was a mild concussion, but apart from that you're fine. You can be discharged in a few hours. Take it easy for the next week and drink plenty of water, bouillon or fruit juices. Avoid caffeine or alcohol.”

“Ah . . . how long was I out, Doctor?”

“It's shortly after ten A.M., Sunday.”

The doctor smiled. “We let you get some rest. Believe me, sleep induction is a wonderful tool. Your friends have been in to see you.”

“Friends?” Tom asked.

“A Mr. Tully, and a young lady—”

“Late twenties, gorgeous?” Tom asked with a grin, and grinned wider at the doctor's nod.
Well, well,
he thought.
It wasn't kiss-and-run.

He basked in the glow of that for a second, then let the two help him up and through a small ward—four beds—to a washroom. He felt a little weak, and stiffer than a board, but that faded as he moved. A hot shower made him feel even better, as if the hurt were washing off with the sluicing water and swirling away down the drain in the middle of the little tile floor; he didn't even much mind the crowded feeling that the hospital shower stall gave him—he was used to that.

Roy Tully showed up first, and laughed outright at Tom's poorly concealed disappointment. There was a bandage on his right hand, smelling of some sort of burn lotion. Tom made a note of it—as a sort of mental game, he liked to keep track of the people who'd saved his life, and vice versa. This time put Roy up two to one.

“I ran into your Ms. Rolfe in the lobby yesterday,” the little man said. “Oh, sweet Lord Jesus—”

“I can fill in the details,” Tom said dryly, then coughed and took another drink of water. “Nope, nothing serious,” he went on at his partner's look of concern. “Just need a day or two to get the pipes back in order. What's up?”

“Wait a second,” Tully said, ducking out of the privacy curtain.

The other beds in this room were vacant at the moment. He dropped a rubber wedge under the door and heeled it home, then brought out his PDA and jacked in a set of display glasses that looked like old-fashioned Ray-Bans. Tom cocked an eyebrow at the precautions but put them on and slid the little mikes on the sides into his ears. The world disappeared; he slitted his eyes against the light that would come when the tiny mirrors and lasers began to shine images onto his retinas.

“This is the disk you had in your hip pocket when we dragged you out. I've looked it over, and now you should. It's . . . sort of remarkable, Tom. I haven't let anyone else look at it. Palmed it so Fart, Barf and Itch wouldn't notice.”