Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (19 page)

“It is not according to the pattern,” the machine replied.

“Civitavecchia to Port Hueneme?” Stockhausen countered, sounding just a bit exasperated. “By the Suez Canal and Malacca Strait, rather than Gibraltar and Panama? That’s suspicious, too.”

“Marginally less so,” the cold voice insisted.

“What do you want me to do about all this?” Callie asked.

“Be informed,” the Eagle-Badge intoned.

“Understand that we’re watching,” the Junior G-Girl said, with a smile that aged her by about ten years. “If you’ve got your ducks in a row, then no problem. But if you have some sort of deal going, then I suggest you take action, voluntarily, before we have to step in, officially.”

“Thank you for the warning,” Callie said.

“It’s been our pleasure,” from Stockhausen.

“Our duty to inform,” from Officer 23891AI.

* * *

Rafaella was on her way to see her mother at the Praxis Engineering headquarters. Rather than sign in at the desk in the lobby, however, she used her courtesy card key, made a trip up two flights of back stairway, and detoured across one of the lower floors to the elevator, so that she could avoid being officially logged in, announced, and placed somewhere down the list on her mother’s morning schedule. As she walked by one of the workstations on that floor—a group that had something to do with planning and logistics—she caught a sudden movement out of the corner of her eye. A head poked out from behind the monitor screen. It was a man’s head with a big grin and a full shock of blond hair.

“
Ciao, bellissima!
” he called out as she passed.

She turned, and the man was still grinning at her.

“Excuse me,” Rafaella said, “but do I know you?”

“No, but you want to. You must trust me on this.”

“
Tu sei italiano?
” she asked dismissively.

“
Sì, io sono più italiano!
” he cried.

Rafaella laughed, because a simple nationality, such as “Italian,” didn’t rate a superlative like “most.” Then she lingered. Her mother wasn’t expecting her. She had nowhere else she particularly had to be for the next few minutes. And here was a handsome man from her native country who was willing to pay court to her—the first man to do so in a long time.

“What’s your name, Mr.
Italiano?
”

“Gustavo Reiter,” he replied.

“But that’s only
half
Italian!”

“
Sì,
but it’s the
best
half.”

“Do you work here because you speak Italian?”

“I work here because I can speak to the computers.” He paused. “But I’d much rather talk to a pretty girl. Oh, any day!”

“You don’t even know who I am.”

“Sure, you are pretty girl, yes? What floor you work on?”

“Oh, but I don’t—I was just passing through.”

“Then our meeting was in the stars. Tell me your name, before you disappear.”

She considered, then made a choice. “Rafaella,” she said. Then she added, “Di Rienzi.”

“Di Rienzi … di Rienzi,” he said the name as if trying to remember something. “I have a cousin di Rienzi. He was my godfather—rest his soul. So we must be related.”

“There are a lot of di Rienzis in the world,” she said cautiously.

“But you were born in Torino. Your father was the Count Cesco di Rienzi. And he died when you were a little girl. You see? I know you!”

“And you ended up working here? That’s amazing!”

“So amazing!” he agreed. “Invite me to dinner, and I tell you all about it.”

Before she could think better of the notion, Rafaella did just that.

* * *

Because Rafaella had a date for the evening, Callie had agreed to go over to her apartment and take her three daughters out to dinner. It was a grandmotherly duty she was glad to perform, although she was miffed that Rafaella hadn’t mentioned anything about the man she was seeing. Callie didn’t like mysteries where the family was concerned.

The doorbell rang while Rafaella was still getting ready, and Callie answered it. “Gustavo!” she exclaimed in surprise.

“Contessa!” he replied, smiling.

“And are you here to—?” she began.

“To take Rafaella out dancing, then maybe to late dinner.”

“Is that what—I mean, how do you—?” She faltered.

“We met only two days ago. She came by my desk.”

“I see.” Callie’s radar flared. “So, is this a
date?
”

“
Sì,
it is for today, April twelfth, we do dinner.”

“No, I mean, are you
seeing
my daughter?”

“Yes, I see her. Not right now, of course.”

“No, is it, uh,
assegnazione romantica?
”

“Oh! Do we
fuck?
Oh, no! Or not yet.”

“Or not
ever,
young man,” she said coldly.

“Why is this? Doesn’t Rafaella like men?”

“Of course she likes—wait a minute! Don’t you understand? She’s
family.
You two are related. It’s improper,
l’errata … il peccato.
”

“Not so close related.” Gustavo spread his hands. “And not by blood. Where is the
danno
—the harm—if we have dinner and get to know one another?”

“The harm is that I don’t like it,” Callie said. “And you work for me.”

“I see, Contessa.”

“I’m glad you do.”

“You are not so American after all.”

“I think you’d better leave now, Gustavo.”

“But what will I tell Rafaella?”

“That you were indisposed by work.”

As she said this, Callie started pushing him out the door and finally closed it in his face. When she turned around, her three granddaughters stood in the middle of the living room, gazing at her with eyes as round as those of little owls.

“Who was that?” asked Jennifer.

“Someone who shouldn’t have come.”

“Is that mama’s lover?” asked Jessica.

“He was handsome,” said little Jane.

“Be quiet, all of you,” Callie said.

At that moment, Rafaella swept into the room. She was wearing a sheath dress of red silk that was too tight at every point and too short at both ends. That and a pair of red stiletto heels and ruby earrings. “Who was that?” she asked.

“That was Gustavo,” Callie said evenly.

“Well, ask him in,” her daughter said.

“I couldn’t. He had to leave suddenly.”

“Mother … Did you send him away?”

“It was for your own good, Raffi!”

“Mother, I’m almost forty years old.”

“That man is not someone you should know.”

“Is that because he’s from our Italian family?”

“It’s because he’s—” And there she paused.

Processes which had been at work deep in Callie’s subconscious came together in that instant. They had nothing to do with Gustavo’s being the grandson of an aunt by marriage. They had no bearing on his being one of the di Rienzis and an Italian. They had much to do with the fact that after all these years a man in his mid-thirties had come to Callie, his godmother, looking for a job. That he was perfect for a job related to heavy materials handling and international shipping. That not many months after this, she had received a disturbing call from the F.R. Customs & Border Protection Service. And that, yes, finally, he was a di Rienzi.

“—not the person he says he is,” Callie concluded. She eyed her granddaughters. “Raffi, we will talk about this later, in private, you and I.”

* * *

After a long winter, in which she spent part of the time at a friend’s apartment in Bozeman, Gillian Barnes was once again installed in her cabin near Yellowstone National Park. She spent her days reading, fishing, and walking around in the woods. And every week or so she drove into the park to enjoy watching the geysers and hot springs and to catch up on her field geology.

On a day late in April she came across a pair of trucks with markings of the F.R. Geological Survey. Barnes pulled in behind them, got out, and introduced herself to the four men working with a computer set up on a camp table at the edge of a field. The men—Jim Smith, Peter Gillette, Alan Bosley, and someone named Williams, first name Bob?—were all attached to the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. The computer held an intelligence they called “Godgy”—perhaps an acronym related to the geodetic function it performed, perhaps a wordplay on the godlike nature of the analyses it produced.

“What’s going on?” Barnes asked the group.

“We’re taking some elevation readings,” Bosley said, “now that the snow has cleared.” The snow was still inches deep in most places across the field, Barnes saw, and a crust of frozen ice edged the road.

Smith saw the direction of her stare. “Well, cleared enough that our GPS nodes can catch a signal,” he explained. “They tend to get confused when they sit under five, six feet of the fluffy stuff.”

“Oh, and has the elevation changed?” she asked soberly.

“Just getting a view of that now,” Gillette said. “Godgy’s triangulating.”

The computer screen showed a contour map of the park’s central basin and lake, with mountains around them on three sides. Scattered across this surface like sugar sprinkles on a frosted cupcake were dozens, hundreds actually, of variously colored points. Most were still blinking, but some had settled down to a steady state and single color. The map gradually started to look like a bull’s eye, with blues and greens around the mountainous edges, yellows in the foothills, and oranges and reds across the valley floor. Some of the red points even extended a blush to the surrounding landscape, as if the dots couldn’t hold the intensity of their color.

“Blue low, red high?” Barnes guessed.

“No,” Gillette said. “Blue unchanged, red
very
high.”

“That looks bad,” she said, “with the caldera bulging up like that.”

“What do you think, Godgy?” Smith asked the machine.

“The situation is … fluid,” Godgy said dreamily.

“Should I be worried?” Barnes asked.

“We’ve seen worse,” Smith said.

“Every couple of years the ground plumps up like this,” Gillette said.

“It’s a natural cycle,” said Bosley. “The caldera fills, then relaxes.”

“But this is higher than we’ve seen before,” Williams put in.

“Yet it’s still within the trend line,” Bosley insisted.

“But the trend is heading upward?” she asked.

“Yeah, something like that,” Smith said.

* * *

Three days after shooing Gustavo Reiter out of her daughter’s apartment, Callie received another late-afternoon call from Agent Belle Stockhausen and Officer 23891AI. She was almost expecting it.

“We have further information on the warning we issued last time,” the machine said. The female agent just sat on her side of the screen and watched Callie for her reaction.

“Oh,” Callie said. “Well, I hope it’s good news.”

“We have reason to believe someone in your logistics department is using these shipments to mask the smuggling of heavy metal into the Federated Republic.”

“You mean … they’re smuggling in
rock bands?
” Callie asked, remembering the music craze of her youth.

Agent Stockhausen and Officer Two-Three showed confusion and glanced involuntarily toward opposite sides of their respective screens. “We mean enriched uranium and plutonium,” the machine said. “For terrorist purposes.”

“Ah,” Callie said. “Then I’ll have to look into that—though, frankly, I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“We start at the head end,” the intelligence said blandly. For a moment, Callie thought he meant her. “Working from the European side of the investigation,” the machine continued, “we have correlated a number of possible suspects. We hope you will be able to identify one or more of them.”

Without waiting for her agreement, the AI’s side of the screen immediately sectioned itself into quadrants and began displaying faces, some with the blank look of police mug shots, others at odd angles and with the hurried expressions of stills taken from outdoor surveillance cameras, whose locations were noted in the corner of the image. Callie glanced at each one, an eye scan of perhaps ten seconds apiece, and nodded when she was done with each group of four. She dreaded seeing Gustavo Reiter’s smiling face come up in any quadrant.

In the third frame of four, she paused over a particular woman’s face. The name stenciled underneath the image was “Deirdre Falconer” and that meant nothing to Callie. The face was older, with an obvious bit of skin tightening, and the body, from the angle of the camera, was small and compact. The hair was dyed an appalling red-bronze. But something about the eyes—almost almond-shaped, like a Eurasian’s or an Eskimo’s eyes—caught her attention. And then, peeking up from the edge of the woman’s turtleneck collar, two angular lines of black ink came clearly into view. They might have been shadows, or defects in the pixels comprising the picture, but Callie recognized them. Mariene Kunstler—or whatever she was calling herself now—had not bothered to have that spider tattoo removed.

Callie had given that frame perhaps twelve seconds of attention. Then she nodded for the next set. And after three more groupings, the Customs & Border Protection Service’s pool of suspects ran out. Gustavo’s face and name never showed.

“Sorry,” she told the pair. “None of them seems familiar.”

She wondered if Officer Two-Three, or the Stockhausen woman, who had seemed terribly alert all this time, could read a subject’s pupillary reaction. Feed from the comm walls was supposed to be detailed, but perhaps not
that
detailed. On the other hand, who knew what enhancements the police agencies might have developed?

In either case, neither of the agents said anything about her hesitation before signing off themselves.

* * *

Brandon Praxis wasn’t surprised to be called into Aunt Callie’s office, because he met with her every week or so to discuss both new and ongoing projects and their various security requirements. But he was surprised when she got up from her desk, closed the door behind him, turned off the communications wall, pointed its video pickup toward the floor, looked around the room, then went over to the windows and darkened them.

“Should I turn off my phone?” he asked jokingly.