Conquistador by S. M. Stirling Page A

colorful, was the way he put it: or mildly chaotic and dangerous, from another point of view. The Old Man was an inveterate romantic, when he thought he could afford it.
    â€œVery well,” Charles Rolfe said. “Sir, we’ll discuss the whole matter when I return to Rolfe Manor this weekend, if that’s agreeable.” His eyes went back to his youngest daughter. “And I’m giving you an unrestricted authorization for FirstSide,” he said. “Get results, Agent; get them quickly. I don’t care how, within the Regulations.”
    â€œYes, sir,” she said, coming to her feet and saluting.
    Handsomely done, Dad, she added to herself, as her father rose to see her out. The Regulations for FirstSide operations boiled down to “Don’t get caught.” He may be a lot more ponderous than the Old Man, but he does have a certain style when he decides to do something.
    She took the hand he extended. “Baciamo le mani,” she said, bowing and kissing it.
    â€œBe careful,” he said gruffly, and rested the palm on her shoulder for an instant.
    â€œI will,” she said, and added with an urchin grin, “And I intend to have a good time doing it, too, Dad.”

    San Francisco, California
June 2009
    FirstSide
    â€œWell, it’s not much,” Tully said, handing over a medium-thick folder of printout. “Just the public stuff.”
    â€œMore 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 . . .”
    â€œBut 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.
    â€œLet 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.
    â€œRolfe” 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.
    â€œThis is strange,” Tom said. “The mining business is too legit. There’s nothing in these shell companies but mailboxes and bank