The Dragon Factory (17 page)

“Now that’s something you don’t see every day,” Hu said as the video feed of him filled the screen once more. He looked at me and what he saw on my face wiped the smile from his.

“What is this? Some kind of sick game?” I demanded. “That animal—”

“We studied this file a hundred times,” interrupted Hu. “If this is makeup effects, then it’s the best I’ve ever seen.”

“But it’s impossible,” I said. “It can’t be real.”

“It looked pretty real to me,” Hu said.

“But it
can’t
be. That animal . . . It was a . . . a . . .”

Hu nodded.

“It was a unicorn,” he said, and the smile crept back onto his face.

Chihuahua, Mexico

Sixteen weeks ago

He had a mind like an insect. Cold, efficient, uncluttered by personal attachment, unpolluted by emotion. It made him a superb killer.

If there had been even a spark of humanity in him, he might have been famous, or even infamous, but he never once sought glory and he viewed the desire for personal recognition as a foolish mistake. An amateur’s risk.

Conrad Veder never made mistakes, foolish or otherwise.

He accepted assignments based entirely on gain, and even that was measured. He was not a greedy man. Greed creates vulnerability, a rudder by which he could be steered. Veder could not be steered. To him the acquisition of money meant that he could afford certain physical comforts and that he would have the capital necessary for the kind of investments that would allow him to retire at a young enough age to genuinely enjoy retirement. He’d once seen a Florida bumper sticker that read: “Retirement is wasted on the old,” and he couldn’t agree more. He was forty-six and his various portfolios and holdings—maintained under a dozen aliases—could already be cashed out to yield 11 million euros. It was a comfortable amount, but it needed more cushion to buffer against the uncertainties of the world’s fluctuating currencies.

At his current rate of 1 million per hit and a reliable employment of two to three hits per year, he figured that he could retire at fifty with enough in the bank to generate a nice interest-income cash flow. Properly managed, that money would grow faster than he would spend it and see him into his nineties, no matter how much of a beating the dollar took on the global market. Besides, he had a man working on currency exchanges and the switch to Canadian dollars in late 2007 had already yielded a nice windfall.

This current job would be Veder’s third this year and it was only the middle of May. There might even be a fourth and fifth contract before
Christmas, which would give him his second $6 million year in a row. It was a nice way to end his thirtieth year as a paid killer.

Veder’s first murder had been a five-hundred-dollar hit he’d taken while he was still in tenth grade. He hadn’t felt a single flicker of emotion when he murdered the wife of his social studies teacher. It had been quick; it had been clean. And Veder had been paid. He remembered it now for mental records-keeping purposes only. Veder never formed an emotional attachment to his targets. That was also a fool’s game and it crossed the line from professional to psychotic, and Veder was calmly certain that he was as sane as the next man. Kings and presidents and generals were often far more emotionally involved in the deaths they ordered, even with the legal mandates their positions provided. Veder was a problem solver, no different in his calculating mind than the operators in Delta Force or Mossad or any of the other clandestine groups of paid killers. He needed as little proof of guilt or justification of the kill order as they did. The only real differences were that they had backup and Veder seldom used or required any and that he got paid a lot more.

The closest he ever came to idealism was a brief stint with a cadre of shooters working for a group of international businessmen who were working toward one of those grand causes, one of those “betterment of the species” things, but though Veder was content to take their money and listen to the occasional geopolitical or ethnic tirade, he was never a convert to their cause. He had agreed to join a team of four elite assassins—sadly labeled with the ludicrous nickname of the Brotherhood of the Scythe—and had done some quality work there. When their program had collapsed he was sorry to see the steady stream of income end, but in truth he really enjoyed the freedom and simplicity of the life of a solitary operator. Fewer complications, no tirades.

Now he sat in a cantina in the shadow of Chihuahua City’s city hall, which sat like a Gothic cathedral on the Plaza de Armas. He was drinking lukewarm mineral water and waiting for his contact to arrive. The man was late—a passive-aggressive maneuver he often used—but Veder didn’t care. He never let things like that provoke him. He sipped
his water, nibbled a corn tamale, and let his insect mind process the data of everything that touched his senses.

He spent much of the morning strolling along the short blocks to the north side of Plaza Hidalgo to view political murals by Aarón Piña Mora on the walls of the government palace. Veder had a passing interest in art. Enough to like looking at it but not enough to invest money in it. But it passed the time and as he sat waiting for his contact he reconstructed the faces of the Mora murals in his mind. It was a useful exercise: remembering the shapes of ears, the cut of cheekbones, the fullness of lips, the angle of noses. If any of the men from those murals, Benito Juárez, Simón Bolívar, or Miguel Hidalgo, had still been alive Veder would have been able to pick them out of a crowd at twilight.

When his contact, a sweaty Portuguese man named DaCosta, finally showed, Veder didn’t complain, didn’t comment. He waited until DaCosta sat down and ordered a beer. When the beer arrived and the waiter had gone, DaCosta opened the conversation.

“You had a pleasant trip?”

Veder said nothing.

From experience he knew that DaCosta would jabber on for several minutes, complaining about the heat or the inconvenience of travel, bragging about golf scores or women, expounding on the peso and the dollar. Veder let him ramble. To engage him on even the smallest point would invite a conversational tangent that would drag this out even further. When DaCosta finally wound down, the fat little man shifted from chatty tourist to businessman. He looked around to make sure there was no one in easy listening distance of their table and then reached into an inner pocket of his white tropical suit to produce an envelope from which he removed several four-by-six-inch color prints. He placed them one by one on the table as if he was casting a fortune. There were seven faces. Five men, two women, each of them middle-aged or older.

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.

There is no flag large enough to cover
the shame of killing innocent people.

—
HOWARD ZINN

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.”