S. Stirling - Conquistador

She took the hand he extended. “Baciamo le mani,” she said, bowing and kissing it.

“Be careful,” he said gruffly, and rested the palm on her shoulder for an instant.

“I will,” she said, and added with an urchin grin, “And I intend to have a good time doing it, too, Dad.”

“Well, it’s not much,” Tully said, handing over a medium-thick folder of printout. “Just the public stuff.”

“More than I’ve got so far,” Tom said. “Bosco Holdings is a ghost, as far as the U.S. is concerned. They’ve got a bank account, and another in the Caymans; I couldn’t get anything out of them; they’d never heard of California Fish and Game. That would take Perkins; she’d get results fast enough, but…”

“But they’d be her results.”

Offshore banks were a lot less secretive these days, at least as far as U.S. government “requests” were concerned; there had been a couple of spectacular cases of strong-arming during the later mopping-up years of the war, and none of the little countries that specialized in no-questions-asked wanted a repeat while memories of Uncle Sam’s heavy hand remained fresh.

“Let me take a look,” the big man went on.

He skimmed the results of his partner’s research; they were sitting on a bench outside the Civic Center, which was still the best area in San Francisco to do digging of this type—the big central library was nearby, and the morgue files of the newspapers. For a wonder it was neither foggy nor uncomfortably cool nor too windy, and the Civic Plaza area was a pleasant place to sit, especially since the area wasn’t swarming with bums anymore, what they’d called “homeless” back in the twentieth century. The great Beaux-Arts pile of the city hall reared at their backs, a dome higher than the Capitol in Washington as solitary reminder of the plans made and discarded after the quake of 1906; before them were espaliered trees flanking a strip of grass, green with an intensity that only San Francisco and Ireland seemed able to produce.

“Rolfe” had produced a couple of historical articles dealing with early Virginia—he turned out to be the guy who’d married Pocahontas. Funny, I always thought it was John Smith. They’d had two sons before being killed in the Indian massacre of 1622; the children married into the ramifying families of the Virginian aristocracy and apparently did nothing much of note besides grow tobacco and breed like bunnies, thus making George Washington and Jimmy Carter descendants of the Powhatan chieftains; a politician or general here and there, declining into middle-class mediocrity after the Civil War.

The next reference was to a business-history site. Tully had printed that article out in full.

“This is strange,” Tom said. “The mining business is too legit. There’s nothing in these shell companies but mailboxes and bank accounts—most of them—but RM and M looks like a genuine business. Solid. Lots of assets, lots of employees. Lots of profits, too—according to this, their costs per ounce are half the industry average.”

“No reason they couldn’t be bent and have a legit side,” Tully said dubiously.

Tom grunted and read, skimming with the ease of someone who’d been flipping through reports most of his adult life. Rolfe Mining and Minerals Inc. Founded by John Rolfe in 1946, and he’d been born in Virginia in 1922; apparently a real connection to the Pocahontas people. He scanned quickly down the article, but found no picture of the man.

“No visuals?” he said, looking up at Tully.

“Nothing,” his partner replied. “Not in the back files of the newspapers, not in the society magazines, and not anywhere on the Web. Interesting, isn’t it, for someone with that much money? I’ve got a request pending with the Pentagon—there might be something from WWII.”

“It is interesting,” Tom said cautiously: Tully had a tendency to leap to convictions. “But it’s not illegal. By lots of money, you mean lots of money, I presume?”

“Read on, Kemosabe. Tonto think it maybe too quiet there.”

Rolfe had a fairly impressive service record; commissioned out of VMI at twenty in ’42, service with the Ninety-sixth Infantry in the Pacific, Purple Heart and field promotion on Letye, another Purple, a Silver Star and a serious wound on Okinawa, which was why he hadn’t ended the war as a major at least.

Then the move to San Francisco, like so many veterans who’d shipped out through the Bay Area during the Great Unpleasantness. His company had gotten big fast in the postwar boom, diversifying in the sixties into real estate, banking and insurance, but staying a closely held private corporation; no more than the minimum SEC information. That meant no real idea of what they were worth, but it had to be immense, just from the publicly acknowledged holdings—a corporate headquarters in the San Francisco financial district, and a huge warehouse complex in Oakland. There were also offshore operations, theoretically independent: the Caymans, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bermuda, which hinted at massive assets moved out of country for tax purposes, plus mining properties in Africa and Asia and odd corners of South America. And those odd subsidiaries, which didn’t fit at all.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Tom said, crossing an ankle over his knee and considering the documents in his lap. “A bad feeling that our promising lead is evaporating.”

“Yeah, it smells funny,” Tully said, fishing for cigarettes inside his jacket and then popping a stick of gum into his mouth instead. “There was what, maybe ten, fifteen million worth of stuff in that warehouse?”

“ ’Bout that.” Tom nodded.

“Which is petite larceny to this crowd,” Tully replied. “Cappuccino money.”

“Yeah. People that rich don’t do crime—not below the bribe-the-dictator-of-Corruptistan level when they need a pipeline concession. Hell, even the Italians went respectable when they made their pile. That’s the way it works; you get into organized crime, make a bundle, and your kids or grandkids invest it and get out. Hell on a stick, RM and M is old money now by Californian standards. I’d expect them to be living off capital gains and making donations to worthy causes, maybe the third generation becoming art collectors or painters or living in cabins in the north woods.”

“The Bad Things could be happening at a lower level,” Tully said. “Someone in this ratfuck of corporations, rather than the top management themselves. But the condor did pass through Oakland, RM and M does have that big facility there, and we did find the Bosco Holdings stationary in the cage.”

Tom flipped back to the beginning and looked at who RM&M had done business with in its early days.

He transferred some data into his PDA. “All right, we’ll split up and tackle it from both ends. I’ll take this angle; we could use some firsthand background on RM and M in its early days. You go sniff around that complex of theirs in Oakland. It’s a little odd, a company this big still doing the physical with warehouses and such rather than outsourcing.”

“Will do, Kemosabe,” Tully said. “Be careful.”

“Aren’t I always?”

“No,” Tully answered bluntly. “You forget that stepping on toes can get you kicked in the balls. We’re talking a really big, well-established California firm here. They’re bound to have pull. Enough to get an investigation quashed, unless it’s damn well grounded. I’d want to have something pretty solid before we go see our esteemed boss, and rock-solid before he goes public. Otherwise we’re likely to end up in California’s Siberia.”