by Hugo Navikov
I pressed the fingerprint pad (which also measured body temperature, in case some villain cut off an operative’s hand to get him through that bit of security, as if he or she would ever make it that far) and the door clicked to allow me ingress.
The Boss was, as usual, at his desk, smoking a cigarette. This was one of the things I loved about his office: I immediately took a fresh match from my back pocket, striking it against the chin of one of his hunting trophies, then lit a fresh cheroot from my front pocket, loving every molecule of the acrid smoke. He motioned to one of the comfortable chairs across from his desk and I sat, sinking a little into the luxury. The chair was upholstered with leather, a strange choice (as were mounted hunting trophies) for an organization seeking to end poaching, but one that made sense in the context of the Boss’s office.
“H————,” he said with a smile. “Excellent work, as always, on the Yemisch down there.”
“Thank you, sir.” I grinned because I didn’t have to remind him that it was an endangered Black Caiman we relocated, not the villagers’ bogeyman cryptid. He had my report and was skeptical of chimerical creatures, although he enjoyed regaling me with stories about them.
“You know, H————, you are our number-one operative in the field.”
“Thanks, but aren’t I the only operative in the field?”
His smile was tight, but it was impossible for me to read. This may have been because the Boss had absolutely no hair on his head or anywhere else his skin was visible. His lack of eyebrows kept me from detecting irony or anything else expressible through his smooth forehead. No eyelashes gave him a reptilian look, and his utterly bare head added to the effect. He also wore contact lenses—at least that’s what I think they were—that made the color of his iris the same as the whites of his eyes. When we first met, I thought maybe he was an albino who was trying to hide it; my other hypothesis was that he was undergoing chemotherapy. But that was twelve years ago and to me, except for slight crow’s feet and the usual bodymorphic changes of a face over 12 years, he looked exactly the same. I could only figure he kept himself in this state so he could disguise his identity extremely easily, something important when very rich and angry people would give their all to see you dead.
Finally he said, “You know I can’t answer that. Let’s say, ‘as far as you know.’ However, no one else in The Organization has brought down as many bad guys as you have. Let that be a comfort to you in your ignorance of our personnel details.”
“It’s good to hear, sir. Even though you’re a bit of a son of a bitch.”
He barked a real laugh at that. He wanted a tough guy when he recruited me from Army Special Ops, and so that’s the face I showed him. “Very good,” he said, still chuckling. “So I know all about your latest hunt. Do you want to hear about mine?”
I answered as I always did, and it was sincere: “Hell yes, sir.”
His expressions may well have been nigh impossible to read, but there was no mistaking the joy and pride he exuded when showing off his latest kill. He stood from his chair and I got up as well to follow him into the “trophy room” adjoining his office, feeling a little thrill of excitement and anxiety about what he had added to his collection.
The lights in the trophy room were motion-detecting, and so the soothing Edison-bulb lighting brought the dozens of heads attached to fine mahogany mounts into clear view. Also taxidermied animals—none of them endangered, of course—stood in fierce poses, so lifelike it wouldn’t have completely surprised me if they moved.
The Boss led me to the back of the room and flicked on a special LED that illuminated the newest piece in his menagerie: mounted on a beautiful and no-doubt rare wood was the head of a Caucasian man with blue eyes (which, like all taxidermied creatures, were glass), an insouciant moustache curled at the ends, and an cheap-looking pipe clenched between his teeth. His skin was tan and his bushy eyebrows fixed him with an expression of eternal brutality.
“Do you like?”
It was not ass-kissing that made me say, “I do, indeed. Do I know who this is?”
“I don’t know, H————. Do you?”
Something about the man’s face made me think Australian. And the Boss collected only the most valuable and difficult specimens. Who hadn’t been showing up on my searches as actively poaching in recent weeks? My mind went round and round for a moment and then I saw the man’s face on dossiers and his own bragging Facebook page, where he had most recently posed with his Snow Leopard kill.
“Shit—excuse me, Boss—but is this Rupert C———?”
My Boss actually clapped his hands. “Indeed! Brilliant, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know if I’d call the son of a whore ‘brilliant,’ but—”
“No, silly boy, my taxidermist! In life, Rupert smoked the most rare and expensive tobacco pipes in the world, even as he hunted in Nepal. So when he was stretching the skin over the frame, he called and told me he was considering making him smoke a seven-dollar pipe from Wal-Mart in perpetuity! My god, the irony, the insult—I love it.” And then he spit in the face of Rupert C———, a millionaire in life and now, in death, a custom and illegal taxidermy job that cost one hundred thousand dollars if it cost a penny.
I enjoyed the Boss’s trophy room. It was stocked well with the heads of infamous poachers that he had killed himself, or at least said he killed himself, Caucasian and darker faces in equal proportion, and I had no reason to doubt him. My favorites were the full-body specimens, which must have been a complete bitch to get through customs without the sender—certainly not the Boss himself, but someone he hired, perhaps an operative like me—identifying himself. He sent the poor men and women back in coffins, “hunting accident” victims who were going home to their families in the United States. And then he had them stuffed.
Did I mention that The Organization is hardcore? It’s not in my job description (I mean, if I had one) to know how we are funded, although they don’t always pay me directly, my money coming mostly from the poaching assholes. But there were also jobs in which we wouldn’t be seeking any poachers, just trying to keep people who lived near the endangered predator threatening their homes from taking things into their own hands, definitely getting themselves killed and possibly the beast in question as well.
We returned to his office and retook our seats. Down to business.
“Tell me: have you ever heard of Kasai Rex?”
The question startled me, seeing as how I was just reminiscing at my boy’s dinosaur drawings. But the name didn’t ring a bell. “Eh … it must have been a larger predator, judging by the ‘Rex’ in its classification … so I’d say it was a cousin of T. Rex,” I said, sadly smiling on the inside that my son would have been able to list facts about the damned thing until my Boss begged for mercy.
He laughed and said, “Good guess!” He grabbed a pen out of the pencil cup on his desk, something that was startling no matter how many times I saw it: a hollowed-out and preserved human foot and ankle, done in the style of those elephant feet hunters hollow out for umbrella stands. It didn’t take me long to figure out what the soft and sumptuous beige leather of the comfortable chairs was made from, either.
No wonder it was so impossible to get into the Boss’s office without his permission—he must have had repurposed parts from 60 different poachers in here. The irony was exquisite, but the authorities might not have found it so amusing. I knew—because he told me, anything I knew about The Organization was from what he told me—that he had the entire office wired to incinerate everything inside should he ever need to rid himself of his trophies in a hurry. (Say, between the time a police detective or FBI agent could get through to the elevator and take it up to the Boss’s sanctum sanctorum.) He had it set so that it would burn itself out quickly and not endanger anyone else in the building, but only after it reduced to ashes everything within those office walls.
“This is what witnesses have described as coming to eat their children and lay
waste to their huts and tents,” he said, and showed me what he had been scribbling at: a lizard that looked like a cross between a Tyrannosaurus and a salamander, its arms bigger than a T. Rex and its jaws narrowing at the front. He had also sketched the silhouette of a human next to it for scale.
The human looked quite small.
“So it’s another crocodile,” I said, a little bored, “reacting to the encroachment on its territory.”
“Maybe. Probably C. porosus, a saltwater croc that’s traveled far from home. But whatever it is, we have reason to believe it is rare and saving and relocating it might be the key to keeping its species alive.”
“Obviously, it’s not really a dinosaur, so who’s calling it Kasai Rex?”
He pressed a couple of buttons and a screen descended from the ceiling. Since there were no windows in his bunker/office, there was no natural light to worry about, and when he turned on the computer projector I was instantly treated to a map of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Boss used a laser pointer to indicate different areas on the map; he was not the kind to stand and make a full dog-and-pony show out of it. Which I appreciated, actually.
“The people calling it Kasai Rex are the people working in the Congo diamond mines right next to the Kasai river. Mutterings about the cryptid couldn’t stay contained to the poor bastards digging for diamonds with their bare hands in the soft dirt near the river. They told the story to drivers taking the diamonds out—about the children and animals gone, about finding their tents destroyed and food taken.”
“Tents? I thought mud-and-grass huts were more the thing out that way.”
The Boss smiled at my naïveté. “This isn’t a village, H————. The tents are planted there as living quarters for the diamond miners by Vermeulen Corp. These poor shits are hundreds of miles from home in the DRC—”
“I hate calling it that. It’s not democratic or a repub—”
“Do not interrupt me, if you please.”
Oh, I pleased, all right. I could feel a bead of sweat form on my forehead. I’d rather have a crossbow pointed at my eye than have the Boss fix me with that annoyed glare.
“Call it ‘Congo’ if you like. As I was saying, the miners themselves, the ones who dig through the red clay and such with shovels and their bare hands, they are hundreds of miles from the villages or cities they call home. Vermeulen Corp. supplies them with tents—and I’m not talking about North Face or Columbia Sportswear here. I mean ridge tents, tarps thrown over rope fastened to a pole on each end.”
Whatever the opposite of “sagely” is, that’s the way I nodded. It was always a humbling experience in the Boss’s office. Not humiliating—I wasn’t scolded as a schoolboy not knowing his lesson—but humbling. Out in the field, I always have everything completely under control down to the last detail. Even if the mission creeps into something else based on changing circumstances (poachers with cold feet, late-arriving cavalry, my local partner turning on me in the face of his hunter countrymen), I always have a Plan B, C, and D. For the record, I have never had to use a Plan D.
“Are you listening, H————?” he asked, uncannily able to detect my level of distraction.
“Yes, sir. Sorry. So these workers are put up in tent cities next to the mine, which are next to the river?”
He nodded now, apparently satisfied at my renewed attention. “These are the people of the Kasai basin who were raised on tales of the Kasai Rex as a way of keeping them from lingering near the river. Even without a ginormous man-eating cryptid running around, Congolese parents have good reason for their children to avoid the banks of the Kasai and the Congo River itself: crocodiles, of course, but also snakes, poisonous lizards, and hippopotami, the last of which kills more people annually than all other predators combined …”
I knew all of this, of course, but there was no way I was interrupting the Boss again. He went on for a bit about how slavers—and you bet your ass they are alive and well in Africa between the southern edge of the Sahara to the northernmost city of South Africa—also stalked the shores in boats, ready to leap into the water near the edge and grab a young boy or girl for a lifetime working in chains. When it sounded like he was done with his info dump, I asked, “So how many poachers do I need to recruit for this one?”
“Actually, not a one. We are much more concerned about the safety of the diamond miners and want to prevent them from killing what could be a slender-snouted crocodile. Their entire tent city has been leveled several times by what is reported to be a very large amphibious lizard.”
“Slender-snouted crocs aren’t very big, sir. Or actually amphibious. Crocs are classified as reptiles, not amphibians.”
“Right, but no matter its classification, the Kasai Rex was humongous. Man-eating crocodile size.” He took a long drag on his cigarette while he waited for me to understand what he was getting at.
I took a stab: “So it could be one of the region’s big crocs—or a wandering saltwater croc, protected in Australia but not in Africa?”
“Bingo, old sport.”
“Thank you, Mr. Gatsby,” I said with a smile that he shared. “So that’s why we don’t need poachers, since they wouldn’t be breaking any laws in the Congo, so we can’t have them prosecuted.”
“Again, right on the money.”
I thought for a moment and then said, “If they’re not endangered, why is The Organization involved? That’s a bit out of our wheelhouse, isn’t it?”
“Technically, you’re correct. But two things: One, something is eating the impoverished Vermeulen mine workers on the Kasai, so they will be considered our endangered species. And number two …”
I waited a few seconds, allowing him his dramatic pause. “And number two … ?”
The Boss shuffled some papers on his desk, not looking directly at me. Finally, he gathered his courage (What the hell could this be? I thought) and said, as matter-of-factly as imaginable, “I believe it might actually be Kasai Rex.”
You could have knocked me over with a Velociraptor feather.
“The Congo’s the deepest river in the world. Because of all the internal conflict there and the general lack of welcome for the White man after King Leopold and his enslavement of almost everyone in the Belgian Congo to cultivate the rubber-tree, most of the life in that river and its tributaries has never been catalogued. Kasai Rex was amphibious, and certainly large and vicious enough to eat a dozen people while destroying a tent city placed too near its territory.”
“Sir, I would never contradict you—”
“Of course not.”
“— but isn’t a surviving dinosaur rather … unlikely?”
“It is,” he said, lighting another cigarette with the end of his dying one, “and that would make it very endangered indeed, would it not?”
I could do nothing but nod.
“Besides, since we have you—our most effective and valuable operative—The Organization has a solemn obligation to protect the poor bastards working in the diamond mines from whatever this creature may be. Cryptid, living fossil, rare and endangered crocodile, common croc, or anything else. There have been hundreds of deaths at this one mine, but employment of any kind is so rare that new workers are hired immediately to keep the Vermeulen operation going.”
I heard everything he said, but my mind stayed stuck on “most effective and valuable operative.” That meant there were others. I reeled at the revelation.
“That said, it is becoming tougher for even Vermeulen to attract new workers with a supposed Kasai Rex killing dozens of people. The company is secretive as hell about its operations in Congo, but they do allow journalists in from time to time to show how they are providing for the poor Congolese with these jobs. We’re going to send you in undercover as part of a documentary team, allowing you fairly free access to the camp and the river. Vermeulen knows every member of the Cryptids Alive! program will be armed for self-defense—against humans as much as any animal predators. It’s a perfect opportuni
ty for us to save the people, save and relocate the animal, and do it without fear of some whack-job poachers.”
I had a question, but I couldn’t just blurt it out. I had let my cheroot go out, so to buy time I slowly removed a match from my back pocket and struck it against my own forehead for entertainment, then made an elaborate show of relighting the cigar. I puffed a few times to get it going again before I asked, “Excuse my boldness, sir, but what the hell is Cryptids Alive?”
“It’s a huge hit on the History Channel. They have ancient aliens building the pyramids, Bigfoot, supposed cover-ups at Area 51, ghost hunting, the truth about 9/11, all sorts of programming that is technically considered ‘history’ because its subjects happened in the past.” He laughed. “Like anything one could research hasn’t happened in the past. But Cryptids Alive! goes into areas of folklore and religion, trying to suss out the ‘true story’ of the mystery monster in question.”
“So my face will be on camera? Haven’t we spent millions to keep my identity a secret?”
“No, silly boy. Your cover is you’re a boom-mike operator, a nobody with the production. And the History Channel is allowing The Organization (in one of its front incarnations, of course) complete access to the show before it is aired. By agreement, we can have deleted any footage even showing the back of your head as you fall into the river and are eaten by piranhas.”
“Great, thanks.”
The Boss glanced at the clock on the wall, one whose hands were the bones of a human pinky and forefinger. “This has been fun, H————. Your bags have already been packed for you, your go-to weapons included, so please go now and meet your Cryptids Alive! contact on top of our building. Their helicopter will take you all to the airport. As usual, you’ll find your passage has already been booked and your security clearance set high enough to let you all zip right through security. Now go. Save something. Catch somebody evil. You know the drill.”
