“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.’ ”