“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

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.”