The Dragon Factory

by Jonathan Maberry

  He recognized four of the seven faces, though Veder glanced at them without showing any interest and looked at DaCosta, cold, waiting.

  “The job is all of them,” said DaCosta.

  “One location or separate?”

  DaCosta licked his lips. “At least five locations, though there may be one chance of getting at four of them in the same room at the same time. A funeral always draws a crowd, yes?”

  Veder sipped his water. “Seven targets mean seven paychecks.”

  “You agreed to do this job.”

  “No, I agreed to meet you and hear about the job.”

  “You always do the job. . . .”

  “Only when I agree to it,” Veder said calmly. “I haven’t agreed to this yet.”

  “It’s not too big for you, is it?” DaCosta was grinning as he said it.

  Veder said nothing.

  DaCosta drank some of his beer. Veder waited him out, certain that DaCosta was authorized to pay full price for all seven hits but equally sure that the man was trying to work out some way to skim the fee.

  “Who are the targets?” Veder asked, trying to move this along while making sure not to betray his interest.

  DaCosta went through them one at a time, giving him the names and a brief history. He laid the photos out like a hand of seven-card stud.

  “That’s only six,” Veder said. He nodded toward the last picture in the row and made sure that his voice betrayed nothing of what he felt. “Who’s that one?”

  “Ah,” said DaCosta as he raised his eyebrows and lowered his voice, “that’s a much more challenging target.”

  “Challenges can be expensive.”

  DaCosta made a face, clearly sorry that he’d used that phrasing.

  “What’s this man’s name?” Veder said, looking at the picture. The man had a stern face with hard lines and an uncompromising stare. Veder had an excellent memory and he knew this face from a long time ago. He’d seen it once, only briefly, in the crosshairs of his scope; but there had been too many people in the crowd and his shot was not guaranteed, so he hadn’t taken it. It was one of only three kills he had been unable to complete, all during the same series of assignments. Then things had changed and that assignment came to an abrupt and bloody end, his employers dead or scattered.

  DaCosta hesitated. “That’s where it gets complicated.” He winced at having to use that word. “This man is a big shot in a new government agency put together by the Americans. Like Homeland, but smaller, more aggressive. This man is the head of it and his group has a history of interfering with my client’s projects. His death will stop any further involvement . . . or at least slow it down to a manageable pace.”

  “His name,” Veder prompted.

  “He has a dozen names depending on who you ask. When my client first met him he was known by the code name ‘Priest.’ ”

  “Does he have a real name?”

  DaCosta shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but lately he’s been calling himself ‘Mr. Church.’ ”

  Veder studied the picture. Yes, this was a face he knew. His employers had feared this man above all others. Veder thought it interesting that Fate or chance had cycled this target—and the two others whom he recognized—back into view after all these years. It felt very clean, very tidy.

  “Seven kills, seven fees,” he said flatly, his tone carrying a terminal finality to it that even DaCosta was sensible of.

  “Sure, sure,” DaCosta said with just a hint of reluctance. “No problem.”

  Veder looked at the photos for a while, particularly the American with the many names, and finally picked them up.

  “No problem,” he agreed.

  Part Two

  Killers

  There is no flag large enough to cover

  the shame of killing innocent people.

  —HOWARD ZINN

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  In flight

  Saturday, August 28, 11:09 A.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 96 hours, 51 minutes E.S.T.

  “A fucking unicorn?” I said. “What kind of bullshit is this?”

  “It’s not bullshit,” said Hu. “At least Mr. Church is taking this very seriously. He—,” but his words were cut off by the theme music for Darth Vader. Hu looked at his cell phone. “Speak of the devil.”

  “That’s your ring tone?” I asked.

  “Just for Mr. Church,” explained Hu as he flipped open the phone. “Yes? . . . Sure. Okay, I’m keying you in now.”

  The image split to include Mr. Church seated in his office. “This conference call is scrambled so everyone can talk openly,” he said.

  “What’s with this video crap—?” I began, but he held up a finger.

  “First things first. You’ll be happy to know that Sergeant Faraday’s condition has been upgraded to critical but stable. He has lost his spleen, but the doctors are optimistic about the rest.”

  “Thank God . . . that’s the first good news today.”

  “Unfortunately it’s all of the good news I have to share,” Church said. “The NSA is still trying to storm the gates and the President has not yet revived sufficiently to take back control of the office. So, we’re all still fugitives.”

  “Peachy. Have any of our guys been taken?”

  “Unknown. Ninety-three percent of the staff are accounted for. The remaining seven percent includes a few agents who have likely gone to ground. And all of Jigsaw Team.”

  “Shit.” I chewed on that for a moment. There was no way the NSA had bagged Hack Peterson’s entire team.

  “What’s your opinion of the hunt video?” Church asked.

  “It’s horseshit,” I said. “They can do anything with CGI.”

  Hu shook his head vigorously. “It’s not computer animation. We had three guys here from Industrial Light and Magic—you know, George Lucas’s special effects guys?—and they—”

  “How the hell’d you get them?” I interrupted.

  Church said, “I have a friend in the industry.”

  I suppressed a smile. Church always seemed to have a friend in “the industry,” no matter which industry was in question.

  “Can you get the Ark of the Covenant?” I asked dryly.

  “The real one or the one from the movies?” Church asked with a straight face.

  “Point is,” Hu said, taking back the conversation, “these ILM guys watched the video on every kind of monitor and through all sorts of filters and meters. We even did the algebra on the shadows on its mane hair based on movement and angle of the sun. Bottom line, it was real.”

  I snorted. “Then it was a horse with a strap-on.”

  “That’s an unfortunate image,” said Church.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Again,” interjected Hu, “we studied the video and that horn doesn’t wobble. There’s no evidence that the animal was wearing a headdress or a strap. The horn appears to be approximately eighteen inches long and relatively slender at the base. That creates a lot of leverage that would definitely cause a wobble if it was just held in place by straps. The creature tossed its head and then fell over, and the horn didn’t move in any way consistent with it being anchored to the skull by artificial means.”

  “Then I got nothing,” I said. “I must have been out the day we covered mythical beasts at the police academy.”

  Church took a Nilla wafer and bit off a section.

  “We can rule out natural mutation,” ventured Hu. “The horn was perfectly placed in the center of the forehead and there are no other apparent signs of deformation, which you’d probably get if this was a freak of some kind.”

  “What about surgical alteration?” I asked.

  “Possible,” said Hu, “but unlikely, ’cause you’d also be talking about a lot of cosmetic work to hide the surgery and we don’t see any signs of that. Even good cosmetic work leaves some kind of mark. Let’s leave it on the table, though, because it’s the most reasonable suggestion. I mean,
unless this animal is a surviving example of a species that until now was only believed to be part of mythology.”

  I said, “I thought the unicorn myth grew out of early reports of travelers seeing a rhinoceros for the first time.”

  “Probably did,” Hu admitted. “And from sightings of narwhales, which are cetaceans that have a single tooth that looks almost exactly like the horn on the animal in the video. Back in the eighteen-hundreds people would sell narwhale horns claiming that they were taken from unicorns.”

  “Any other suggestions?” asked Church. His face was hard to read, but my guess was that he wasn’t buying the cryptid theory any more than I was.

  “There’s always genetics,” suggested Hu. He saw my expression and added, “No, I’m not talking about reclaiming the DNA of an extinct species; no Jurassic Park stuff. I’m talking about radical genetic engineering. Transgenics—the transfer of genes from one species to another.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly, “but what the hell would you mate a horse with to get a unicorn, because I don’t see horses and narwhales doing the dirty boogie.”

  Even Church smiled at that.

  “Not crossbreeding,” Hu said. “That’s too problematic and it’s also becoming old-fashioned. Transgenics is genetic manipulation during the embryonic phase. Someone may have taken genes from either a rhinoceros or a narwhale and introduced it to the DNA of a horse to produce what we saw on that tape.”

  “Can we do that?” I asked.

  “If we set the Wayback Machine to last month I’d say no. But hey . . .” He clicked the remote, and the picture of the dead animal popped onto the screen. “Check it out. Transgenic science is growing exponentially. They have goats that can produce spider silk in their milk. They were given genes from the orb weaver spider. There’s a whole farm of them in Canada.”

  “Jesus . . . that’s disturbing,” I said.

  Hu seemed excited by it and was warming to his topic. “Actually, there are two really good ways of doing this. Either you transform embryonic stem cells growing in tissue culture with the desired DNA, or you inject the desired gene into the pronucleus of a fertilized animal egg. We’ve been doing it for a long time with mouse eggs. Very easy to work with.”

  “I’ll bet you were an extremely creepy child,” I murmured. Hu shot me a malicious look. “Okay, okay . . . so we got someone out there making weirdo animals. Hooray for insanity. Why would someone send us this video and why do we give a shit? Seems like we have bigger fish to fry.”

  Church said, “Before I get to that, speculate for me. If such an animal existed, or was created, who would want to hunt it? And why?”

  “A hunt for something genuinely unique? That’s easy.”

  “How so?”

  “When I was in college I had a roommate whose father was a big-game hunter,” I said. “You know the type—a businessman by day whose hunter-gatherer gene isn’t as recessive as it should be. Point is, he paid for information on cats, and if there was a report of a particularly large one he and his friends would book a flight to some part of the U.S. or Mexico, or to some remote spot in a jungle somewhere. They went all over the world. Each man in his group would bring a small-caliber rifle with only three bullets. It was a challenge. The small caliber and the short ammunition increased the risk, especially against a big animal. When I went with my roommate to his dad’s house for Christmas there were five cat heads on the wall . . . all from enormous cats. Record-sized cats. His dream was to eventually go to Asia, but then tiger hunting became illegal.” I paused. “In our senior year his dad went away to a ‘conference,’ supposedly in Japan. He was gone for a couple of weeks. Five months after he returned a ‘friend’ gifted him with a mounted tiger head. My roommate told me about it. I never asked him if his father had somehow managed to find a way to hunt a tiger. My roommate was pissed because he didn’t believe—any more than I did—that his dad would have hung someone else’s trophy.”

  Church nodded. “I take your point.”

  Hu frowned. “I don’t. Are you saying that someone’s genetically designing unicorns just for trophy hunters?”

  “Why not?” I said. “If this footage is as real as you say it is, then I think we were watching a private hunt. A public hunt would be all over the Net and in every paper. And considering how much my friend’s dad paid to hunt his large trophy cats . . . I can only imagine how much someone would pay to hunt a truly unique animal.”

  “Yes,” Church said slowly. “The superrich would pay through the nose. Millions. Excellent assessment, Captain, and that ties in neatly with the men in that video. We ran facial recognition and voice pattern software on each of them and we think we’ve ID’d three of the five so far. One of them is Harold S. Sunderland, brother of Senator J. P. Sunderland of Texas. Harold is basically a rich layabout who lives off of family money. His brother, J.P., is the brains, and he’s one of the strongest proponents of biotech legislation. He’s pushing for earmarks for genetic research for agriculture. MindReader hasn’t found a direct financial connection between Sunderland and biotech profits, but in light of this video I’ll be very surprised if we don’t dig some up.”

  “Again . . . so what?”

  “J. P. Sunderland is a very close friend of Vice President William Collins.”

  “Yikes,” I said. “That puts a weird topspin on this.”

  “It does and we’re still sorting out how Sunderland’s interest in advanced genetics ties to the Vice President’s crusade against the DMS.”

  “It might be a coincidence,” said Hu, but we both ignored him.

  “Who’s the other guy in the video?”

  “Ah,” said Church, “that’s the real issue. The man leading the hunt . . . what did you notice about him?”

  I shrugged. “He’s a German guy trying to fake a South African accent. Or maybe a German who has been living in South Africa long enough for the accents to overlap. Who is he?”

  “If he’s who he appears to be—and the recognition software came back with a high probability—then he’s the reason this video is more than a scientific curiosity, and it moves us into some very dangerous territory. We believe his name is Gunnar Haeckel. You won’t have heard of him, but once upon a time he belonged to a group of assassins known as the Brotherhood of the Scythe. Despite the rather melodramatic name, these were very heavy hitters. Also very isolated—the four members never met each other so they wouldn’t be able to identify one another if captured. Each of the assassins had a code name: Haeckel was North; the others were East, West, and South. These codes do not appear to relate to their homelands and may have no significance at all except to hide their actual names. They operated for a few years during the latter part of the Cold War. We know for certain that three of the Brotherhood were terminated.”

  “But Haeckel got away?” I asked.

  “No. Gunnar Haeckel is supposed to be dead.”

  “Please don’t tell me he’s a zombie,” I said.

  Church ignored that. “Haeckel and the Brotherhood were players in some bad business that was concluded during the last years of the Cold War. They were the muscle for a group with an equally cryptic name—the Cabal—which was made up of expatriated Germans, many of whom were Nazis who had escaped the postwar trials. Haeckel was the son of a Nazi scientist, and though he was born after the war he was a ruthless killer with a lot of notches on his gun. Until now we believed that he was permanently taken off the board.”

  “ ‘Taken off the board’?” Hu asked.

  “Killed,” I said. To Church, “How good’s your intel on the hit on Haeckel?”

  His eyes glittered behind his tinted lenses. “Personal knowledge.”

  That hung in the air and we all looked at it for what it was.

  “There are three possibilities,” I said. “Four, if Haeckel has an identical twin.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  “A son?”

  “His only known child was a girl who died at age two in a car accident
in which Haeckel’s wife died. Haeckel was a suspect in the deaths. The man in the video looks to be about fifty. If Haeckel is alive, then he would be fifty-one next April. Has to be the same man.”

  “Okay, then either the recognition software is wrong, but from what you’ve told me that’s unlikely, so that means the hit wasn’t as successful as you thought it was. You say you have personal knowledge . . . could you be wrong?”

  “I have a copy of his autopsy report. It includes detailed photos of the entire postmortem. As soon as the NSA is off our backs I’ll forward a diplomatic request to South Africa for an exhumation of Haeckel’s grave. Ditto on a request for any tissue samples that might still be stored in the hospital in Cape Town where the autopsy was performed.” Church sat back in his chair. “I can’t account for why he appears to be alive and well in this video. At least one of the men in the hunting party was carrying a late-model weapon, so we know this isn’t old footage. Until we know more we’re going to go on the assumption that somehow Haeckel survived. Our real concern is what he represented. The Cabal posed a very grave threat to humanity. The list of crimes attributed to them is considerable, though most of their atrocities were perpetrated at three or even four removes by using terrorist organizations funded by layers of dummy companies.”

  “What were they after?”

  “Ethnic cleansing for a start, and their fingerprints are all over some of the most violent racial conflicts of the last half of the twentieth century. They had vast resources and privately funded insurgents, rebels, coups . . . they even sent covert ops teams in to deliberately pollute water sources throughout Africa and Israel. They’re suspected of having helped the spread of diseases that target third world cultures. There were several cases where they funded both sides of a genocidal conflict because it served their goals to rack up bodies of anyone who was not ‘pure.’ ”